[JackSpratts]

A Noncontroversial Prince, Just the Way the N.F.L. Likes Him
Kelefa Sanneh

A brief concert in the middle of the Super Bowl, on a temporary stage, designed to thrill a captive audience with nothing in common except a love of sport or spectacle, or both. How could that ever be a good idea? Then, just when it seemed time to give up on that quaint ritual known as the halftime show, along comes Prince.

His performance last night at Super Bowl XLI will surely go down as one of the most thrilling halftime shows ever; certainly the most unpredictable, and perhaps the best. “Dearly beloved,” he whispered, intoning the famous first words of “Let’s Go Crazy.”

What followed was a dizzying demonstration. He navigated a smooth course through a jumbled-up set built from bits and pieces, hits and covers. “Let’s Go Crazy” ended with an ad-libbed call-and-response, after which Prince was joined by a marching band.

Soon came “Proud Mary” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. That gave way to a piece of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” which melted into “Best of You,” the 2005 hit by the Foo Fighters. He ended the medley by modifying a favorite line from the Foo Fighters’ song: “I’ve got another confession, my friend/I ain’t no fool.”

Somehow, it all made sense, or maybe it made something better than sense. The heavy rain made the smoke and lights seem mysterious, instead of merely ridiculous. And there was a sneaky thrill in watching Prince steal the field from guys three times his size, if only for a few moments.

At one Super Bowl gathering, at least, Prince’s extravagant guitar solos, seductive facial expressions and strutting stage manner made boozy viewers whoop and wonder in equal measure. Who knew a Super Bowl halftime show could be this delirious?

No doubt National Football League officials were pretty pleased, too. They know that the halftime show is still haunted by the specter of 2004, when Justin Timberlake enlivened an otherwise unmemorable show by baring Janet Jackson’s breast. Somehow, Timberlake’s role has been largely forgotten, but Jackson’s career has still not recovered. And compared with the controversial Jackson, Prince must seem like a pretty safe bet.

Would that last statement have made any sense at all 20 years ago? In 1987, Jackson was best known as Michael’s effervescent younger sister, and Prince was perhaps the most polarizing pop star in the country; the sexually frank lyrics of his “Darling Nikki” had helped spark a national debate about explicit lyrics.

Yesterday’s command performance was yet more proof that Prince has made that familiar journey from pariah to American treasure. He has a catalog of hits that everybody seems to love (even the players, who normally take little interest in the halftime show, were quoted praising Prince), and he sings and plays and moves as well as he ever did.

Best of all, he does not carry himself as a pop-star emeritus. Did you see his face during the first verse of “Purple Rain,” when he tossed his bandana into the crowd? He looked as if he were getting away with something.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/sp...l?ref=football





Not so fast

Controversy Raised Over Prince Performance

In the sensitive post-wardrobe malfunction world, some are questioning whether a guitar was just a guitar during Prince's Super Bowl halftime show.

BlogJam...
Bloggers and late night talk show hosts are saying Prince's halftime show got a bit too phallic there at the end. The evidence is pictured below ... what do you think?

Prince's acclaimed performance included a guitar solo during the "Purple Rain" segment of his medley in which his shadow was projected onto a large, flowing beige sheet. As the 48-year-old rock star let rip, the silhouette cast by his figure and his guitar (shaped like the singer's symbol) had phallic connotations for some.

A number of bloggers have decried "Malfunction!" — including Sam Anderson at New York magazine's Daily Intelligencer. Daily News television critic David Bianculli called it "a rude-looking shadow show" that "looked embarrassingly rude, crude and unfortunately placed."

CBS spokesman Dana McClintock said Tuesday that the network has received "very few" complaints on Prince's performance. CBS last aired the Super Bowl in 2004 when Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake's "wardrobe malfunction" sparked criticism and a subsequent crackdown on broadcast decency from the Federal Communications Commission.

But this time, it was the NFL that produced the halftime show (MTV had in 2004). Spokesman Greg Aiello said the league has received no complaints.

"We respect other opinions, but it takes quite a leap of the imagination to make a controversy of his performance," Aiello said. "It's a guitar."

The majority of the reaction to Prince's performance has been laudatory, including positive reviews from The Associated Press, the New York Times and USA Today — all of which noted the lack of controversy in this year's halftime show. AP Entertainment Writer Douglas J. Rowe wrote: "He delivered one of the best Super Bowl halftime shows — ever."

For decades, the electric guitar, by nature, has been considered phallic. From Jimi Hendrix's sensual 6-string swagger to Eddie Van Halen's masturbatory soloing, the guitar has often been thought an extension of a male player's sexuality.

Was Prince's pose phallic?

"The short answer is, of course it is," says Rolling Stone magazine contributing editor Gavin Edwards, who points out that on Prince's "Purple Rain" tour in the mid '80s, he performed with a guitar that would ejaculate, squirting water out of its end during the climax of "Let's Go Crazy."

"All that said, it didn't seem like a sniggering little puppet show," adds Edwards. "I think it was one of those things because a guitar at waist level does look like an enormous phallus."

The late-night shows have taken notice. On CBS's "The Late Late Show" on Sunday night, host Craig Ferguson said of Prince: "He was obviously very happy to be there, wasn't he?"

Stephen Colbert reacted with mock outrage on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" Monday night: "They knew that they were dealing with a lustful, pansexual rock 'n' roll deviant," said Colbert, who joked that the sheet hid (not enhanced) Prince's "demonic guitar phallus."

In recent years, Prince has scaled down his performances, which were once renown for their gymnastics. His mini-concert at the Colts-Bears game in Miami included parts of "Purple Rain," "Let's Go Crazy," "Baby I'm a Star," Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower," the Foo Fighter's "Best of You" and Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Proud Mary."

The Minnesota native has attracted controversy before. Tipper Gore launched a campaign to place a warning sticker on his 1984 album "Purple Rain" because of the lyrics to the song "Darling Nikki." Though his musical style has been expansive, he's best known for funky, sexually charged songs like "I Wanna Be Your Lover" and "Get Off."

Prince's previously most talked-about performance came at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards, where he donned yellow, butt-baring pants, (a stunt later spoofed by Howard Stern). Always eccentric, he famously changed his name to The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, then to simply a symbol and finally back to Prince. He also became a Jehovah's Witness in the mid-'90s.

But Prince's halftime performance, though celebrated, came in a much different cultural environment, where even the fleeting outline of a man and his guitar could, for some, suggest shaded depravity.

"If people want to be hypersensitive, they can be hypersensitive," says Rolling Stone's Edwards. "Those trombones are phallic, too. What are you going to do?"
http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/6447016





Super Bowl Ads of Cartoonish Violence, Perhaps Reflecting Toll of War
Stuart Elliott

No commercial that appeared last night during Super Bowl XLI directly addressed Iraq, unlike a patriotic spot for Budweiser beer that ran during the game two years ago. But the ongoing war seemed to linger just below the surface of many of this year’s commercials.

More than a dozen spots celebrated violence in an exaggerated, cartoonlike vein that was intended to be humorous, but often came across as cruel or callous.

For instance, in a commercial for Bud Light beer, sold by Anheuser-Busch, one man beat the other at a game of rock, paper, scissors by throwing a rock at his opponent’s head.

In another Bud Light spot, face-slapping replaced fist-bumping as the cool way for people to show affection for one another. In a FedEx commercial, set on the moon, an astronaut was wiped out by a meteor. In a spot for Snickers candy, sold by Mars, two co-workers sought to prove their masculinity by tearing off patches of chest hair.

There was also a bank robbery (E*Trade Financial), fierce battles among office workers trapped in a jungle (CareerBuilder), menacing hitchhikers (Bud Light again) and a clash between a monster and a superhero reminiscent of a horror movie (Garmin).

It was as if Madison Avenue were channeling Doc in “West Side Story,” the gentle owner of the candy store in the neighborhood that the two street gangs, the Jets and Sharks, fight over. “Why do you kids live like there’s a war on?” Doc asks plaintively. (Well, Doc, this time, there is.)

During other wars, Madison Avenue has appealed to a yearning for peace. That was expressed in several Super Bowl spots evocative of “Hilltop,” the classic Coca-Cola commercial from 1971, when the Vietnam War divided a world that needed to be taught to sing in perfect harmony.

Coca-Cola borrowed pages from its own playbook with two whimsical spots for Coca-Cola Classic, “Happiness Factory” and “Video Game,” that were as sweet as they were upbeat. The commercials, by Wieden & Kennedy, provided a welcome counterpoint to the martial tone of the evening.

Those who wish the last four years of history had never happened could find solace in several commercials that used the device of ending an awful tale by revealing it was only a dream.

The best of the batch was a commercial for General Motors by Deutsch, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, in which a factory robot “obsessed about quality” imagined the dire outcome of making a mistake.

The same gag, turned inside out, accounted for one of the funniest spots, a Nationwide Financial commercial by TM Advertising, also owned by Interpublic. The spot began with the singer Kevin Federline as the prosperous star of an elaborate rap video clip. But viewers learned at the end it was only the dream of a forlorn fry cook at a fast-food joint.

Then, too, there was the unfortunate homonym at the heart of a commercial from Prudential Financial, titled “What Can a Rock Do?”

The problem with the spot, created internally at Prudential, was that whenever the announcer said, “a rock” — invoking the Prudential logo, the rock of Gibraltar — it sounded as if he were saying, yes, “Iraq.”

To be sure, sometimes “a rock” is just “a rock,” and someone who has watched the Super Bowl XIX years in a row only for the commercials may be inferring things that Madison Avenue never meant to imply.

Take for instance a spot by Grey Worldwide, part of the WPP Group, for Flomax, a drug sold by Boehringer Ingelheim to help men treat enlarged prostates.

“Here’s to men,” the announcer intoned, “to guys who want to spend more time having fun and less time in the men’s room.”

It was not difficult to imagine guests at noisy Super Bowl parties asking one another, “Did he just say, ‘guys who want to spend more time having fun in the men’s room?’ ”

Another off-putting moment was provided by a stereotyped character in a commercial by Endeavor for a hair dye, Revlon Colorist. He was described as the stylist for the singer Sheryl Crow, and he was clearly miffed about her using the product.

“Revlon? Color?” he asked, pouting and rolling his eyes. “I am the colorist.”

What follows is an assessment of some of the other high and low points among the commercials shown nationally during the game on CBS. The spots are among 36 provided to a reporter before the game, out of the total of about 56 that were scheduled to run.

ANHEUSER-BUSCH Each year, Anheuser-Busch manages to offset the typically coarse commercials for Bud Light with a charmer or two for its Budweiser brand. Last night, the brewer went two-for-two with a pair of spots about animals. One commercial tugged at the heartstrings with a bedraggled mutt whose wish to jump on the Bud band wagon — literally and figuratively — came true. The other, sillier spot presented a beachful of anthropomorphic crabs starting a Bud-centric version of a cargo cult. Agency: DDB Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group.

CADBURY SCHWEPPES A wry, low-key commercial showed an ardent fan of Snapple Green Tea, sold by Cadbury Schweppes, traveling all the way to China to learn the secret of its appeal. The punch line, that the answer was closer than he imagined, was not unexpected. Still, it was delivered deftly. Agency: Cliff Freeman & Partners, part of MDC Partners.

DIAMOND FOODS Mr. Federline was not the only celebrity to poke fun at his public persona. A wacky spot for the Emerald line of nuts sold by Diamond Foods presented the crooner Robert Goulet as a nefarious evil-doer. Perhaps he was auditioning for a role in the next Austin Powers movie — or to replace William Shatner in the Priceline campaign. Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, owned by Omnicom.

GODADDY Another Super Bowl, another cheesy commercial for GoDaddy, the Web site registrar operated by the GoDaddy Group. This time, there was a wild party in the office of the GoDaddy marketing department. “Everybody wants to work in marketing,” a character says with a smirk. Hey, GoDaddy, go get Mommy — maybe she knows how to make a halfway decent Super Bowl spot. Agency: created internally.

PEPSICO Two spots for Sierra Mist, sold by the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo, were not as funny as those from the game last year. A third commercial, for Sierra Mist Free, hit the jackpot with a punch line that, well, came up short, as in the abbreviated shorts worn by the comedian Jim Gaffigan. Agency: BBDO Worldwide, part of Omnicom.

SPRINT NEXTEL By now, even the most spoof-loving consumer is probably tired of commercials that mock commercials for prescription drugs. But a spot from Sprint Nextel managed to elicit laughs. The parody was dead-on, down to the hushed-voice announcer promising that Sprint Mobile Broadband would help those who “can’t take care of business the way others do” by curing their “connectile dysfunction.” Agency: Publicis & Hal Riney, part of the Publicis Groupe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/bu...a/05adcol.html





TiVo Sees if You Skip Those Ads
David Lazarus

TiVo revealed the other day that it's offering TV networks and ad agencies a chance to receive second-by- second data about which programs the company's 4.5 million subscribers are watching and, more importantly, which commercials people are skipping.

This raises a pair of troubling questions: Is TiVo, which revolutionized TV viewing with its digital video recording technology, now watching what people watch? And is it selling that sensitive info to advertisers and others?

The answers, apparently, are no and no.

"I promise with my hand on a Bible that your data is not being archived and sold," said Todd Juenger, TiVo's vice president and general manager of audience research and measurement.

"We don't know what any particular person is watching," he said. "We only know what a random, anonymous sampling of our user base is watching."

Still, privacy advocates say TiVo's new data service -- dubbed StopWatch -- reflects the growing ease with which companies could, if they so choose, collect and exploit vast amounts of information about consumers' everyday habits.

"It's a constant struggle to maintain your privacy in the modern era," said Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have entered an era in which more and more information about you is being collected and maintained."

He added: "In the past, you had a lot of privacy protection because information about you was too difficult to collect and sort. Now that protection is gone because computers can do it."

TiVo's potential to monitor (and embarrass) millions of people was made clear in 2004 after Janet Jackson's right breast made a surprise appearance during the Super Bowl halftime show.

TiVo reported that this fleeting glimpse of celebrity flesh "drew the biggest spike in audience reaction TiVo has ever measured ... as hundreds of thousands of households used TiVo's unique capabilities to pause and replay live television to view the incident again and again."

More than a few subscribers probably thought later that this wasn't the sort of thing they wanted stored in some corporate database.

"That initial reaction of concern is understandable," said Ray Everett-Church, a Silicon Valley privacy consultant and longtime TiVo user. "It's hard to know for a fact that they don't keep that information."

But he said he's prepared to take TiVo at its word that sensitive data about users' viewing habits aren't being stored or shared with others.

"If they're careful about how they anonymize and aggregate the information, I don't see huge problems," Everett-Church said.

(TiVo said last week that once again it will be closely monitoring audience behavior during today's Super Bowl to see how often users pause and rewind "unscripted moments and entertainment.")

TiVo's Juenger said the Alviso company downloads usage data from a random sampling of about 20,000 set-top boxes each night. That data, he said, is stripped of any personally identifiable information before being mixed with other users' data for research and marketing purposes.

"All we know is that we have an anonymous box out there with certain viewing behaviors," he said.

Juenger recalled how the Justice Department issued subpoenas last year to Google and other Internet companies for access to data on people's online searches. (Google fought the subpoena and forced the Justice Department to significantly scale back its data request.)

"If we were subpoenaed by the Justice Department, we would be literally incapable of saying what an individual user was watching," Juenger said. "It would be impossible."

Not for much longer, though. Juenger said TiVo is gearing up for a Nielsen-style rating service in which a select group of subscribers will volunteer to have their viewing tracked. In this case, participants' personal data will be part of the mix.

"It's absolutely something we're looking at," Juenger said. "Our clients have told us it's something they want."

The hack is back: Speaking of TiVo, I'm always getting requests to repeat the code discovered by hackers for programming TiVo remotes to skip ahead through recorded commercials at 30-second intervals.

Here it is: Select Play Select 30 Select.

The trick is to do the hack while a recorded program is playing. Point your remote at the TiVo box and press, in sequence, the Select button, the Play button, the Select button again, the 3 button, the 0 button and then Select one last time.

If you do it correctly, you'll hear three dings from your box. Now the Advance button (the one with a Play arrow and a vertical line at the right edge) can be used to jump ahead by 30 seconds, thus zipping past commercials more easily than fast forwarding.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...UGJ8NTRT91.DTL





A Long-Delayed Ad System Has Yahoo Crossing Its Fingers
Miguel Helft

Starting around 3 p.m. Pacific time on Monday, a group of Yahoo executives will begin shuttling among three “war rooms” at the company’s search marketing unit here.

They will be scrutinizing an array of moving charts and graphs projected on walls and checking with a team of 30 to 40 engineers for any signs of trouble as Yahoo flips the switch on a new search advertising system.

“It’ll be a good event if it is a nonevent,” said Brian Acton, senior director of engineering at Yahoo Search Marketing.

Yahoo’s investors and advertisers, on the other hand, will be looking for something eventful to start happening, if not on Monday, then in the weeks and months after.

The much-delayed ad system, known as Project Panama, is Yahoo’s effort to close the wide gap with Google in the race for search advertising dollars, a fast-growing and incredibly lucrative business that Google dominates. As such, Panama is the most important new product for Yahoo in years.

“You are talking about something that could potentially affect the single largest and most profitable business segment that Yahoo has,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup.

Among those who will be keeping close tabs on Panama is Yahoo’s chief executive, Terry S. Semel.

“I think we will be watching this closely for many Mondays,” he said. “It has been and continues to be our No. 1 company priority.”

That is no surprise. Some analysts who follow Yahoo say the delay of Panama is the biggest reason Yahoo shares dropped from a high of more than $35 early last year to just over $22 in October. They have since regained some ground, closing Friday at $28.77.

In its simplest terms, Panama is Yahoo’s attempt to place ads in front of users that are more likely to be clicked on. Until now, Yahoo gave top billing to the advertisers who were willing to bid the most to have their ads listed alongside a particular search result.

Google has a different formula, which Yahoo is trying to emulate. It ranks ads on a mix of bid prices and relevancy to the user. That leads users to click on ads more frequently, and since advertisers pay only when a user clicks on their ad, Google, on average, makes more money on every search than Yahoo does.

And since Google is better at matching ads with users, the system is more efficient for advertisers, too, creating a sort of virtuous circle that gives Google a powerful edge.

“I spend a majority of my dollars on Google,” said Amy Wong, global online marketing manager for the software security firm Trend Micro. “I’m glad to see that Yahoo is trying to get their act together.” Ms. Wong said she would like to distribute her ad dollars more evenly among Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, the third major player in search advertising.

Mr. Mahaney estimated that in 2006, Google made 4.5 cents to 5 cents on every search, while Yahoo generated only 2.5 cents to 3 cents a search. The difference adds up to billions every year.

As critical as the success of Panama is for Yahoo, it is not the only challenge facing the company. As Google’s share of all searches has grown steadily over the last year, Yahoo’s has remained largely flat. The company also faces increasing competition in its display advertising business.

In addition, while Yahoo is going through a reorganization aimed at making it more nimble and more accountable, crucial posts remain unfilled, and some investors are waiting for the company to lay out a clear strategy.

“Panama is very important to Yahoo, but it is not the only thing they need to focus on,” said Ellen Siminoff, a former Yahoo executive who is now chief executive at Efficient Frontier, a search marketing firm.

For now, however, all eyes are on Panama.

Mr. Semel acknowledges that Yahoo was late in starting the project. He said that happened partly because Yahoo’s search advertising system, which the company acquired through its takeover of Overture Services for $1.6 billion in 2003, was performing well, and it took time for executives to realize just how much better Google’s system was.

But once Yahoo assembled the Panama team in mid-2005, “things did come together quite quickly,” Mr. Semel said.

Those who worked on the project described the effort as a huge undertaking. They compared it to rebuilding an airplane in midflight, as engineers had to keep the old advertising system running while they put the new one together.

The first phase of the project, which went into operation in mid-October, two months later than planned, includes a completely new system for advertisers.

It provides them with a digital dashboard where they can manage their marketing campaigns, aim ads geographically and test their effectiveness. It includes interactive tools that suggest to advertisers what to bid based on their budget and the number of users they want to attract. Most of those features are already available from Google and Microsoft.

Yahoo engineers say Panama has some unique features, like a “quality index” that gives advertisers a sense of how the system will rank an ad, and sophisticated analytical tools that give advertisers insights on why certain campaigns are effective.

Yahoo says the system can be upgraded without disrupting it. It is intended to be flexible enough eventually to handle video and audio ads and to distribute ads to mobile devices. And while Yahoo gives few specifics, it says Panama will some day play a role beyond search advertising.

“Panama is a foundation for us to start sewing together all our advertising assets,” said Tim Cadogan, vice president of Yahoo Search Marketing.

Yahoo has been moving advertisers to the new system gradually and expects to complete the task in the United States in March. And while some advertisers have run into problems, the new system has generally been well received.

“In terms of ease of use, Google is still the leader, but Yahoo and Microsoft have made great strides in coming up to par,” said Matthew Greitzer, director of search marketing at Avenue A Razorfish, an online ad agency.

But the part that matters most to Yahoo’s bottom line will come Monday, when the new ad-ranking algorithm begins its work.

Last Thursday, the company ran a test in which searches originating on the West Coast ran the new ad ranking system. The team started at 3 a.m., and by lunchtime, the engineers gathered in the war rooms, many with bags under their eyes, and appeared satisfied things were running smoothly.

“Our tests today went beautifully,” said Mark Morrissey, vice president for product at Yahoo Search Marketing.

Just about everyone inside and outside Yahoo expects the system to generate more revenue for the company, but no one knows exactly how much more. Last month, Yahoo cautioned investors not to expect the financial impact of Panama to show up until the second half of the year.

That is in part because as the system is introduced, some advertisers will end up paying less and some more for each click, as ads vary in how likely they are to attract a click from a searcher. Search marketing experts say that in general, the well-known brands will get better placement for their ads at lower bids, because people are more likely to click on them. The reverse will be true for lesser-known brands.

But those dynamics may vary depending on keywords and how carefully advertisers aim their pitches. Yahoo says a customer service team has been working with advertisers to help them understand how to make ads more relevant.

Regardless, it will take time for the marketplace to adapt to the new system and for Yahoo to fine-tune it.

Whatever Yahoo’s gains turn out to be, they will not necessarily come at the expense of Google.

“If this is successful, advertisers will not shift from Google or MSN, but rather from other mediums, such as e-mail, display advertising and offline budgets,” said Stuart Larkins, vice president for search at Performics, a division of online advertising firm Doubleclick.

No matter how good Panama may be, it is unlikely to catch up with Google’s system in the near term. Google has been perfecting its ad-ranking software for years. And on Wednesday, Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said the company was placing fewer ads in front of users, yet receiving more clicks. That means not only that the ads are more relevant, but also that the experience of users is better.

Even Yahoo executives acknowledged that the version of Panama they are introducing on Monday is only a first step.

“I don’t think it gets us ahead,” Mr. Cadogan said. “It gets us to a place where we can compete more effectively.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/te...y/05yahoo.html





Judge Blocks DirecTV from Airing Ads in Time Warner Markets
Larry Neumeister

A judge on Monday blocked DirecTV from airing advertisements in which Jessica Simpson and William Shatner say its high-definition television service provides better pictures than Time Warner Cable's high-definition service.

"It's broadcast in 1080i," Simpson says in her DirecTV ad. "I totally don't know what that means, but I want it."

DirecTV Group Inc. can still use comparative advertising stating that its overall picture quality is superior to Time Warner Cable Inc.'s because evidence has not established that DirecTV's all-digital service as a whole is not superior to cable's mix of digital and analog, the judge said.

U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain said Time Warner Cable was entitled to a preliminary ruling blocking the ads from being shown while a lawsuit proceeds through the Manhattan federal court.

In a statement, DirecTV spokesman Jon Gieselman said the ruling meant that two ads that had completed their runs two months ago cannot be shown in markets where Time Warner exists.

"However, we will continue to aggressively market our better overall picture quality, which is permitted by the court's opinion," DirecTV said. "It's obvious their strategy is to fight with us in the courts since they can't compete with our superior product in the marketplace. We are confident we will prevail on both fronts."

The judge rejected Time Warner Cable's request that DirecTV be required to show corrective advertising, saying such extraordinary relief was not warranted in this case.

But she said Time Warner had shown it was likely to succeed on its claim that the commercials and Internet ads were false when they said DirecTV's high-definition programming is superior to that of Time Warner Cable.

In the Simpson ad, the singer-actress plays the character Daisy Duke from "The Dukes of Hazzard" movie when she kicks down a restaurant patron who slapped her and tells him: "Hey, 253 straight days at the gym to get this body and you're not going to watch me on DirecTV HD? You're just not going to get the best picture out of some fancy big screen TV without DirecTV. It's broadcast in 1080i. I totally don't know what that means, but I want it."

Time Warner Cable filed its lawsuit in December, accusing DirecTV of deceptive trade practices.

The lawsuit claimed DirecTV lied about the accessibility of NFL broadcasts in an attempt to pry customers from Time Warner Cable.

The suit sought unspecified damages and a court order to stop DirecTV from saying in advertising that Time Warner Cable subscribers cannot watch their local NFL teams play games when DirecTV is showing games on the NFL Network.

Among other claims, Time Warner Cable accused DirecTV of using advertising featuring Simpson and Shatner to say its high-definition television service provides a picture quality that is superior to Time Warner Cable's.

Time Warner Cable said those ads were false because the companies provide the same screen resolution. At best, the lawsuit said, DirecTV's picture quality is "merely equivalent."

In the Shatner ad, the actor plays Capt. James T. Kirk from the "Star Trek" television series when he says: "I wish he'd just relax and enjoy the amazing picture clarity of the DirecTV HD we just hooked up. With what Starfleet just ponied up for this big screen TV, settling for cable would be illogical."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





A New Boss at NBC, and Even Newer Issues
Bill Carter

When Jeff Zucker is named the new chief executive of NBC Universal today, succeeding Bob Wright, he will be completing one of the most spectacular ascents of any recent media executive: from part-time sports researcher in 1986 to corporate C.E.O two decades later.

And now for the hard part.

According to NBC executives, Hollywood producers and agents, and many of the financial analysts who follow NBC, Mr. Zucker, 41, faces many pressing issues. Foremost among them: how he will deal with the rapid technological and financial changes that are throwing many traditional media businesses into upheaval. He will also have to choose a team of executives to back his efforts as he sets a new direction for the company.

Mr. Zucker will answer questions about his supporting cast today shortly after he is formally named C.E.O., a senior NBC executive said yesterday.

Mr. Zucker is leaving the job he currently holds, president of the NBC Universal Television Group, but no one will be named to fill that job, the NBC executive said.

But Mr. Zucker is expected to elevate three other senior NBC executives, effectively dividing many of his current responsibilities among them.

Marc Graboff, who is now president of NBC Universal Television West Coast, will be given added supervisory duties over NBC’s entertainment division in California. Beth Comstock, who is president of NBC’s digital and marketing division, and Jeff Gaspin, who heads up the company’s cable operations, will also take on new responsibilities.

Another important NBC West Coast executive, Kevin Reilly, is in talks to extend his contract as president of NBC’s entertainment division.

The most urgent questions facing Mr. Zucker relate to the digital revolution now roiling the media marketplace.

Bill Simon, senior client partner for the global entertainment division of Korn/Ferry International, an executive search firm, said the arrival of digital outlets for television programs had made what was formerly a simple equation for NBC much harder.

“It comes down to this,” Mr. Simon said. “He has to figure out how to grab an audience, how to hold an audience and how to monetize an audience.”

All three jobs will be harder with the advent of Internet sites like YouTube that offer television programming, including shows from NBC, with little financial gain for the networks.

Nicholas P. Heymann, an analyst at Prudential Securities who follows General Electric, NBC’s parent company, said that Mr. Zucker’s task is threefold: he has to continue to create successful programming while also cutting costs in the TV business and elsewhere.

At the same time, Mr. Zucker is charged with trying to figure out what the next disruptive digital media outlet like YouTube will be, and how the company can capitalize on it.

Given the complexity of the task, Mr. Heymann said it made sense for Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chairman of G.E., to select as Mr. Wright’s successor someone who was brought up in the G.E. management ranks. Mr. Zucker has some blemishes on his track record — NBC’s slide in prime time among them — but he has shown recent success.

Compared with hiring an executive from the outside, Mr. Heymann described Mr. Zucker’s hiring as having “the potential to be the lowest-risk alternative with the most potential for upside and success.”

In the near term, Mr. Heymann said, G.E.’s challenge is to return NBC Universal’s earnings to the peak levels they achieved in 2003.

The media company recently reported an increase in earnings for the quarter ended Dec. 31 to $841 million, from $801 million the previous year. It was the first year-over-year profit increase for NBC Universal in five quarters.

The challenges facing Mr. Zucker have little to do with the current state of NBC, which, some detractors notwithstanding, is mainly solid across almost all of its divisions.

Under Mr. Wright, the company has expanded with great success in recent years, adding the Universal movie studio and highly profitable cable channels like USA and Bravo. Until the last couple of years, NBC under Mr. Wright was among the most profitable divisions of G.E.

NBC has been the network leader in news and late-night programs, but trails the other networks in prime time.

One of the downturns for the company occurred on Mr. Zucker’s watch when he ran the network’s entertainment division in California. NBC fell from first place to last in prime time in 2004, just after Mr. Zucker finished his run as president of NBC Entertainment.

Some of collapse of the network’s prime-time fortunes had to do with NBC’s long-term failure to develop new programs. Mr. Zucker was credited with maintaining NBC’s success much longer than might have been expected, given the dearth of hits, because of his ability to manage NBC’s remaining assets, like the comedy “Friends.”

Twice he managed to keep that show on the air (in high-cost negotiations) when it was expected to finish production.

But competitors in Hollywood — and some critics in the press — have pointed to those struggles and asked why Mr. Zucker was not held more responsible for them. Mr. Zucker mainly put his head down, focused on NBC’s more successful cable channels and tried to change the momentum at the network.

Now, thanks to new hits like “The Office” and “Heroes,” NBC’s prime-time lineup has begun to show some improvement.

Longer term, NBC will have to show that it can continue to create hit entertainment content, its chief source of profit. Recent signs have been favorable in that area, according to some of NBC’s most prominent producers, and Mr. Zucker’s relationship with the Hollywood community, once thought to be strained, has been shored up.

Dick Wolf, who has been NBC Universal’s most important producer for a generation because of his “Law & Order” dramas, said in a telephone interview, “I think Jeff will get a very strong endorsement from the community.”

He said misperceptions of NBC had been rife in recent years. “You would think from reading some accounts that this was a company literally going down the tubes,” Mr. Wolf said. “For a company going out of business, it seems to me NBC is generating a lot of cash.”

He said he favored the selection of Mr. Zucker not just because of their friendship but also because “he’s just a really smart guy, and people know I like really smart guys.”

That view was echoed by Ben Silverman, who has become one of NBC’s biggest suppliers of programs, with shows like “The Office” and “The Biggest Loser.” Yesterday NBC announced it had signed a new deal with Mr. Silverman that will give the company first access to all the programs his company develops.

Mr. Silverman noted that Mr. Zucker took pains to make sure the deal was announced as his personal decision, to underscore his Hollywood credentials.

“The guy makes decisions,” Mr. Silverman said. “Sometimes that ruffles feathers in an industry that likes to be coddled, but as a producer I like that kind of transparency.”

Richard Siklos contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/bu...dia/06nbc.html





BrewTube
Lorne Manly

For the past 26 years, Jim Schumacker has toiled for the marketing machine that is the Anheuser-Busch Companies, doing his part to stoke Americans’ cravings for a cool Bud, or a Michelob, or a Bud Light. Eight of those years were spent overseeing the beer maker’s creation of 30-second commercials, those gently mocking vignettes whose characters and catch-phrases often burrowed their ways into the nation’s consciousness.

But lately, the man everyone calls Schu has been working on a different sort of content, programming for a new online entertainment network called Bud.TV. The network, which will make its debut on Monday at www.bud.tv, is the most ambitious and costly effort to date of a marketer creating Web content tailored to its own specifications. And Schumacker, a 54-year-old avuncular sort partial to earth-tone suede sandals and with a soul patch that sets off his thatch of wavy salt-and-pepper hair, is the project’s creative shepherd.

One of the first shows that will appear on Bud.TV is called “Finish Our Film,” a mash-up of reality show and making-of-a-film documentary that will be produced by LivePlanet, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s production company, best known for “Project Greenlight.” LivePlanet will shoot the first and last minutes of a short film and ask hopeful auteurs to plot out the middle. The person with the best treatment will be invited to Los Angeles, and every last moment of the moviemaking process (or ordeal) will be captured on digital tape.

The concept as concocted by the writers, who have done their time at the likes of “The Howard Stern Show,” “The Man Show” and “Da Ali G Show,” would at first glance be perfectly suited for a beer commercial. The film opens in a strip club during a raucous bachelor party, where a groom-to-be named Steve suffers through a lap dance. But the party-hearty tone swiftly changes when the flirtatious dancer turns deadly serious, urgently warning her abashed customer that if he desires to live past the night, he’d better grab the note nestled in her cleavage. Steve does as he’s told, and when the film resumes, he is seen beaten, blindfolded and bound to a chair, a firing squad taking aim.

Strippers notwithstanding, much of the pitch for “Finish Our Film” subverts the expectations of a beer company — it’s closer to the mind games of the David Fincher movie “The Game” than the bacchanal of “Bachelor Party.” And Schumacker, whose official title is vice president of digital marketing and branded entertainment, and other executives at Anheuser-Busch want the rest of Bud.TV to do the same. Yes, the site will carry the high-concept comedy of “Replaced by a Chimp,” in which a great ape tries to do the job of its evolutionary betters, including dentist, car mechanic and ad executive. But Bud.TV is striving to be more than a repository for Budweiser ads and lighthearted, slightly mocking beer-commercial humor; Schumacker and his team are aiming to redefine what an online entertainment network and marketer-created content can mean in a short-attention-span world.

Performers and writers from “Saturday Night Live” have signed on to create and star in recurring series. Kevin Spacey’s production company, Trigger Street Films, has agreed to supply short movies. Satirical shows about celebrity entitlement and the news are on the schedule. The sports announcer Joe Buck may do a talk show from the back of a New York cab. And Schumacker has acquired a slickly produced science-fiction series, made in conjunction with the leading video-game maker Electronic Arts. Most of the shows will run from one to eight minutes, but some will be as long as a half-hour.

Bud.TV may be a marketing venture at heart, but it is marketing sotto voce. The shows’ plots won’t revolve around the quest for the perfect beer and a beautiful woman to share it with. Characters won’t declaim the virtues of Budweiser’s freshness at every opportunity. The site won’t be cluttered with banner ads. Anheuser-Busch executives are banking on a more subtle connection. Attach a brand name to something cool, something entertaining, and that elusive young man (and to a lesser extent, young woman) may check out Bud.TV’s offerings again and again, send them along to friends, even take a stab at creating his own minifilm for the site. Cultivate that warm, fuzzy feeling about Budweiser, and the company may cement the loyalty of the existing customer, or better, woo the uncommitted or hard-to-reach drinker to a Bud Light or a Michelob or a Peels malt-liquor beverage.

Bud.TV represents Anheuser-Busch’s search for a toehold in a world where the traditional advertising model revolving around 30-second ads has been sideswiped by technological change and the proliferation of entertainment choices. The company, like almost every big marketer, is also trying to seize on the video-sharing democratization of YouTube, albeit on its own controlling terms.

It’s an expensive undertaking — it’s expected to cost more than $30 million in its first year — and one that could be mistaken for creative hubris. Anheuser-Busch has created some of the more memorable 30-second ads, like the wisecracking lizards Frank and Louie, the “I Love You, Man” Man, the “Whassup?” guys and Ted Ferguson, the Bud Light daredevil who attempts feats of amazing inconsequentiality. But full-fledged original programming is something else entirely. Ultimately, Anheuser-Busch executives told me, they believe they have no choice but to take this leap of faith. “If we don’t start playing in this digital game now,” said Tony Ponturo, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president of global media and sports marketing and Schumacker’s boss, “we’re going to be playing catch-up for a long time. And this is an industry that can’t afford catch-up.”

On the Tuesday before Christmas, Anheuser-Busch’s digital adventure took Schumacker and his colleagues to the Venice Center for Peace With Justice and the Arts, a squat, faded yellow building bordering a skateboard park a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. During the day, the community center holds programs for special-needs kids. It also contains, on the second floor, the achingly hip office of Matt Piedmont.

Piedmont has never worked for an advertiser before. A former writer for “Saturday Night Live” and a consulting producer for David Spade’s “Showbiz Show” on Comedy Central, he spends most of his days creating TV pilots and movie projects, like the film with Spade and Ice Cube, tentatively titled “Someone Stole My Weed.” But Anheuser-Busch has brought him aboard to serve as executive producer over what will be one of Bud.TV’s signature shows, “Happy Hour.”

Each weekday, at 4:55, “Happy Hour” will feature a new one- to four-minute episode of a rotating group of comic series. That week in December, Piedmont wrote eight episodes for most of the series, with help from Matt Murray, a current “Saturday Night Live” writer who gave up a chunk of his holiday hiatus to work on “Happy Hour.”

Describing the tone and image he was shooting for in these shows, Piedmont tossed out admiring references to the Coen brothers’ “Big Lebowski” and the absurdist oeuvre of Wes Anderson (“Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums”). He plans for the silly/smart mix to have plenty of deadpan and observational humor, and he hopes to inject a visual sense a cut above typical Web programming, thanks to the use of two high-definition cameras (one a Steadicam) and high-end post-production. But these shows are still being done quick and on the cheap; the budget for all six of the “Happy Hour” shows comes in well under $1 million.

As “The Beat Goes On” by the Young-Holt Unlimited played on the turntable, Piedmont ran through the concepts. “Ice Vision and Chef” follows in mockumentary style the comeback attempt of a defrocked superhero, Ice Vision, whose special powers went to his head and got him booted out of the Elite League. In “Futureman,” a technician at the Institute for Science and Research Institutional Institute makes contact with a man from the future who’d like to benefit today’s world with his knowledge, only to display an appalling ignorance of anything important.

Piedmont’s comedy connections have paid off in casting. During his six years on “Saturday Night Live,” he wrote often for and with Tim Meadows, and the actor has agreed to play Ice Vision. “I can relate to the character,” Meadows said with a laugh when he dropped by the office for a meeting later that day. “He once had it all and lost it.” Chris Parnell and Kevin Farley, brother of the late Chris Farley, have filmed their “Futureman” episodes.

Comic short-form videos are a staple of the Web these days, particularly at sites like Heavy.com, which cater to young men, and the rest of Bud.TV’s lineup will be filled with such offerings, some with the requisite audience participation. “Blow Stuff Up” (although the actual title uses a more profane noun) allows the public to submit videos showing the objects they detest most and why they’d like to see those objects destroyed. And just as John Candy and Joe Flaherty did on SCTV’s “Farm Film Report,” the show’s professional pyrotechnicians will blow up those hated possessions “real good.”

Bud.TV’s parody of reality competition shows, “Fool’s Gold,” follows 12 contestants on a search for buried treasure in Death Valley, Calif. They’ll quickly find millions of dollars in gold nuggets, but the bonanza comes with a catch: they can keep only what they can carry out of the desert, and they have to survive the physical and mental challenges set to them by a crusty old miner named Pick Ax Pete. “Every day is a wacky death march,” said Alex Keledjian of Omelet, the Los-Angeles-based agency that came up with the idea.

But Schumacker insists that he doesn’t want Bud.TV to be pigeonholed, and if one program demonstrates his ambitions for Bud.TV, it’s the science-fiction series “Afterworld.” The series tracks an advertising executive on a business trip who wakes up in a country where hundreds of millions of people have suddenly gone missing; he then tries to make his way home to see if his wife and child are still alive. The mix of live action and animation (from Electronic Arts) runs 130 episodes; a new one will be doled out each weekday.

“People aren’t expecting that from Bud.TV,” Schumacker said. “Which I think also is a benefit for us, long-term, to balance out that whole ‘Oh, those guys are going to give us the comedy act’ to ‘Wow, they’re going to have a broad range of programming.’ ”

The idea for Bud.TV came to Schumacker about two years ago, when he confronted at least 300 commissioned scripts for commercials piled on his office conference table. “This is insane what we’re doing,” he told his colleagues. Only a handful would make it on to television. And some of these scripts, he saw, could be better if the characters were developed and the story lines were extended, perhaps on the Web, which a younger generation was increasingly turning to not only for information or blabbing with friends but also as an entertainment option.

“And I said, ‘Let’s start Bud.TV,’ ” he recalled. “We all laughed about it. And then I got up and went and got a soda, and when I came back I said, ‘I’m serious.’ ” His colleagues were skeptical. “They’re like, ‘Good luck selling that,’ ” he said.

But Schumacker, who at the time was the head of creative development for the company, was not the only executive there thinking along those lines. Tim Murphy, the senior director of digital marketing, was hatching his own idea for an online network. And persuading their bosses was surprisingly easy. What drove Anheuser-Busch to build a site that will dwarf every corporate foray into digital entertainment that has come before was a combination of changing drinking and media habits. Not only is beer losing ground to wine and liquor, Anheuser-Busch’s market share has slipped, and its flagship brand, Budweiser, saw its dollar sales tumble 7.5 percent in the 52 weeks ending Dec. 3, 2006, according to Information Resources Inc., which tracks supermarkets, drugstores and mass merchandise outlets (excluding Wal-Mart.) No turnaround will be possible without capturing the impressionable taste buds of people entering their prime drinking years. But that potential Bud lover is a particularly devilish person to reach and a difficult one to talk to, particularly these days, and particularly through traditional 30-second commercials. The TiVo generation revels in its newfound power to control the television-viewing experience, dictating the terms of how and when to watch their favorites in ways unfathomable only a decade ago. And increasingly, that means skipping right past the ads that marketers spend billions on every year to produce and put on the air.

Anheuser-Busch’s 30-second spots still work better than many, largely because of their crowd-pleasing humor. (Last year, in the three days after the Super Bowl, the beer maker’s ads were viewed more than 21 million times on the Web.) But no advertiser is immune to the shifting media landscape, and connecting with tomorrow’s beer drinker will become only tougher in the years ahead. Already Anheuser-Busch has slashed the percentage of its advertising budget devoted to network television, from 53.5 percent ($292.8 million of the total $547.1 million) in 2004 to 47.3 percent ($287.2 of $606.7 million) in 2005, according to TNS Media Intelligence, which tracks advertising spending. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The company told investors in November that 2007 will see network television play an even smaller part in the beer maker’s marketing. But shoving those ads to the Web, where the multitasking, short-attention-span crowd spends hours and hours, won’t suffice.

Even though Anheuser-Busch has no track record in the dicey world of content creation, TV networks in the past expressed interest in making some of the company’s most popular characters — Leon, the me-first athlete; the “I Love You, Man” Man, who would do and promise anything for a Bud Light; the talking lizards — into sitcom stars. And while none of those flirtations with prime time led to anything, “All those things start to click in your head,” Ponturo, Schumacker’s boss, told me. “I guess we’re sort of hoping that we catch a little bit of that magic with the stuff we’re doing on Bud.TV.”

Anheuser-Busch’s desire to call the creative shots evokes the early days of television and radio. Marketers did not pay merely to have their products plugged relentlessly on the likes of “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show,” during which Gracie would extol Carnation condensed milk while pouring herself a cup of coffee. They often owned the shows themselves and directed their ad agencies to produce them. Colgate had its “Comedy Hour” and Texaco its “Star Theater” (and a cross-dressing Milton Berle). But a burgeoning star structure and a unionizing industry jacked up production costs, and companies began souring on the joys of ownership. The quiz-show scandals of the late 1950s extinguished any lingering infatuation, with the exception of soap operas and a straggler or two. It was more economical for advertisers to buy time for their messages, and it proved to be a great business for the networks too.

But those once-clear-cut divisions between network and marketer, between creator and financial backer, have begun to blur. As digital video recorders become a staple of the home-entertainment center, advertisers are embracing product placement to a degree they never did before, working their products into reality shows and, more recently, into the scripts of dramas and comedies. Every self-respecting advertising agency has started a division devoted to what is euphemistically called “brand integration,” the better to display their clients’ wares and buff their images in projects they can exert more control over or own outright. And studios, like the television group at Warner Brothers, have begun divisions to develop Web, wireless and other programming with advertisers.

Office Max created a reality show about preteens preparing for high school that was shown on ABC Family. Unilever turned its Axe body spray into a special for MTV called “Game Killers.” PepsiCo financed “First Descent,” a documentary about snowboarders (produced by LivePlanet), convinced that Mountain Dew embodies the live-life-to-the-fullest ethos of the featured snowboarders. And the Crispin, Porter & Bogusky ad agency is shopping a movie treatment based on the big-headed King mascot it created for Burger King, the one that pops up in the most unsettling places (like someone’s bed) to serve a piping-hot sandwich.

Anheuser-Busch has plastered its products into shows like “Entourage” and developed elaborate marketing tie-ins with movies like “Wedding Crashers.” Like most marketers, however, it has so far refrained from jumping into the television- or movie-production business (except for its sports-production unit, which televises events like St. Louis Cardinals baseball games), dissuaded by the cost and the craziness of Hollywood.

Web content, however, is not as expensive to assemble as television shows or movies, making it an attractive place to experiment. And viewers’ acceptance of the rawness of Web video, in contrast to expectations of perfectly executed television programming, gives Bud.TV executives room to tinker that network executives don’t enjoy. The promise of control, a concept woven into the company’s culture, was also deeply appealing and is something Anheuser-Busch would not have if it followed the more traditional route of running its online programs on third-party Web sites or working its products into someone else’s creation.

“It’s their own sandbox,” says Joseph Jaffe, the author of “Life After the 30-Second Spot.” “And because it’s their own sandbox, they can make their own rules.”

In an Anheuser-Busch conference room in St. Louis at the end of last November, Ponturo placed a DVD into the player, and the first episode of “Truly Famous” began to unfold. The show, a satirical look at celebrity culture, tags along reality-style with its faux Spanish star, dubbed Crisanto, who comes complete with agent, publicist, personal assistant and bodyguard. The entourage sweeps into Los Angeles establishments catering to the rich and pampered and proceeds to see how much swag and sycophantic behavior they can attract. Hilarity, and crowds, ensue. “We actually had real paparazzi chasing the fake paparazzi,” said Todd Brandes, a DDB Chicago executive who has worked with Anheuser-Busch for nearly a decade.

In this episode, Crisanto and company arrive at a hair salon on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. The staff scurries to pay homage to the celebrity among them, even though they’re clueless about who he is. Crisanto receives not only a free haircut (worth hundreds of dollars), but his posse gets lunch ($28 tuna-fish sandwiches) and wine on the house.

“Would it be too crass to have them ask for Bud or Bud Light?” Ponturo asked.

Schumacker pondered the question. “In Beverly Hills, that probably wouldn’t work.” He added, “We have to be careful we’re not promoting other alcoholic drinks.” Perhaps a request for Peels, the fruit-flavored malt beverage aimed at a more upscale audience, would make creative sense.

“Is that going to hurt us?” asked David Rolfe, the lead DDB Chicago executive on the Bud.TV account, before answering the question himself. “As long as the entertainment value is there, customers won’t mind.”

The philosophical argument continued, as the same team members often took both sides of the debate as they struggled to make policy. “We want to make sure we’re not forcing the product,” Schumacker said.

“But the same time not be scared to promote it,” Rolfe added.

Ponturo then issued his edict. “Shoot the blatant but well-done product shot,” he said. “But if it doesn’t work, leave it on the cutting-room floor.”

Both Ponturo and Schumacker understand that pounding Anheuser-Busch products into programming could make Bud.TV seem like nothing more than a propaganda machine. Traditional media is the place for obvious commercialization. “On the entertainment side, you’re better to err on the side of subtlety,” Ponturo said. As it turns out, the first four episodes of “Truly Famous” will carry no product placement.

A similar restrained philosophy also holds for the style of humor — there may be bleeped-out cursing, but no insulting, gratuitous or “Jackass”-style humor will be tolerated. “We want to be edgy, we want to be fun and interesting, but I really want some class to it,” Ponturo said. “At the end of the day,” he added, “we’re a public company whose ultimate mission is to sell a whole lot of beer. So we don’t want to put ourselves at risk for the wrong reasons.”

Anheuser-Busch’s very entry into online entertainment, however, invites confrontations, and some obvious adversaries have already made their displeasure known. In October, 60 health, safety and child-protection organizations urged the celebrities associated with Bud.TV — Affleck, Damon, Spacey, Vince Vaughn, whose “Wild West Comedy Tour” will be featured — to insist that Anheuser-Busch install stringent age-verification measures. But that demand seemed almost beside the point, as it was coupled with a plea for the stars to reconsider their participation altogether.

Any utopian dreams for an Internet free of commercialization may have been dashed years ago, but efforts by beer, wine and liquor companies still touch a raw nerve. “It’s not as if Colgate-Palmolive is undertaking the initiative,” says David Jernigan, the executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Georgetown University. “We’re not talking dish soap. We’re talking about the No. 1 drug problem of kids.”

The Internet, with no government oversight and leaky parental controls, only compounds the problems. Self-imposed age-verification measures are almost laughable in their naïveté. Most ask visitors if they are of age, or ratcheting up the level of difficulty, request people to punch in their dates of birth to ensure they meet the qualifications. All that’s needed to get around that more advanced system are some basic math skills and a desire to sneak past the virtual bouncer. Anheuser-Busch, to its credit, will have one of the smarter gatekeepers keeping watch over Bud.TV. It has bought an identity-verification system used by casinos and banks, Aristotle’s Integrity, which checks the names and Zip codes against driver’s licenses and other public records.

Yet once vetted, there’s nothing to stop Bud.TV viewers from sharing the goodies with under-age friends, relatives or complete strangers on YouTube. Anheuser-Busch executives understand this viral loophole. With its inherent pass-it-on nature, Web video demands to be shared. Not only does it provide street cred; it’s also an inexpensive way to get the word out. And the Bud.TV logo will be emblazoned on every shared video.

But the YouTube model has it limits as far as Bud.TV executives are concerned. When it comes to the buzz phrase of the media moment — “user-generated content” — they think they have crafted a strategy to rein in some of the overexuberance that has frustrated and even embarrassed several advertisers. Last spring, Chevrolet invited people to create their own video spots for its Tahoe sport-utility vehicle. Thirty thousand people submitted entries during the four-week contest, but the few ads that subverted Chevrolet’s intention by linking the Tahoe to global warming and sexual inadequacy garnered the bulk of the headlines. Marketing experts argue that it’s a small price to pay for connecting with today’s more skeptical, harder-to-reach consumers, and they urge companies to relinquish control and learn to love it. Anheuser-Busch executives do not agree. “I think YouTube does what it does just fine,” Schumacker said, adding, “I don’t want to be YouTube.”

So Anheuser-Busch will lend a guiding hand, offering freedom with a catch. For its “Real Men of Genius” contest, which it is working on with JibJab, an online video site lauded for its singing wrap-ups of the year in politics, Bud.TV will provide plenty of components for people to build their ads around, including audio tracks and filmed openings and endings. The ads, parodies of 1980s advertising and power ballads (à la Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian”), mock-salute the shlubs of America, like Mr. Underwear Inspector No. 12 and Mr. Really Bad Toupee Wearer. The creator of the best ad will get to make an actual Bud Light commercial.

“If 2006 was the year of user-generated content, in 2007 you’ll see elevated production levels,” said Gregg Spiridellis, co-founder of JibJab. “We call it the coloring book versus the canvas.”

Bud.TV still represents just a tiny fraction of Anheuser-Busch’s billion-dollar-plus annual marketing budget, more than $600 million of which will be spent on traditional advertising in 2007, but it’s likely to cost a lot more than anticipated, and its benefits will be difficult to assess. Officially, Anheuser-Busch has budgeted more than $30 million for the start-up costs and the first year of operations of the site, but Ponturo told me that figure is likely to pass $40 million by the time 2007 comes to a close.

The Web site’s technological demands have proved costlier than planned, and Bud.TV’s voracious appetite for new content — at least 15 new segments will be posted each week — has eaten through expectations and forced Schumacker and his team to decide as they go just how much they are willing to spend on programming. The development and production tally for the first three shows Bud.TV commissioned (“Truly Famous,” “Replaced by a Chimp” and a makeover show for clueless Casanovas called “What Girls Want”) came in around $2 million, averaging between $20,000 and $25,000 a minute. At that rate, Ponturo told me, the annual budget would be sapped in a matter of months. “You can let the ball of yarn get away from you very fast,” Ponturo said. The later shows, he added, are costing a more affordable $6,000 a minute.

Beyond keeping a lid on programming costs, Bud.TV executives will also deal with some of the pit-of-the-stomach dread that comes with the job description of any network executive: the tyranny of ratings. If after a year, between two million and three million people between the ages of 21 and 34 are visiting each month, “It would put us in high cotton,” Ponturo said. (An audience of that size would tower over what sites like Heavy.com and Break.com see.) But if that traffic figure is stalled in the mid-six-figures, “then I would think that we’ve missed the mark,” he said.

A middling performance, however, and the question of failure or success becomes a tougher call. Some positive publicity and a smattering of blog buzz may be all that’s needed to keep Anheuser-Busch pouring tens of millions of dollars a year into Bud.TV. Because ultimately, proving that an online entertainment network helps the company sell more beer falls into the realm of the subjective.

“It’s tough to build a business plan,” Ponturo said with exquisite understatement. “Marketers don’t always have to prove two plus two equals four. You have to go sometimes with your instincts and your gut judgment and your years of experience.”

And there’s even the hope that Bud.TV could create revenue streams of its own. Ponturo, Schumacker and their colleagues talk about Bud.TV serving as an incubator for television, DVD or perhaps film. While much won’t translate, “Afterworld” and some of the “Happy Hour” shows just might make the jump. And if the shows end up having a life outside of Bud.TV, whether on Comedy Central, Spike TV or as DVD originals, Anheuser-Busch, playing the role of producer, will get a cut of the back end.

In this topsy-turvy world of media and entertainment, where marketers play programmer, studios play ad agency and viewers play possum when traditional ads come on television, one other twist is in the offing. If Bud.TV becomes a virtual hangout for young men, Anheuser-Busch may well start selling advertising to other companies who crave pushing their marketing messages in front of this fickle audience. That debate is already taking place within Anheuser-Busch. At first, Schumacker itched to market Bud.TV. But on further reflection, he realized that that would negate the streamlined, almost minimalist design of the site. After all, Schumacker told me, he didn’t want Bud.TV to look like it was selling out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/ma...04BudTV.t.html





The Director Lines Up a Shot
Laura M. Holson

In December, Brad Grey, the chairman of Paramount Pictures, stood up and greeted the celebrity-packed crowds at the premiere of “Dreamgirls” in Los Angeles and New York. It seemed like an innocent gesture, but executives from DreamWorks SKG, which was brought under Paramount’s control last year and which produced the movie, cried foul.

Before the premiere, those involved with the film specifically asked that no introduction be made, according to DreamWorks executives who attended the events. More troubling, it was one of a series of perceived gaffes by Paramount, including having publicists who promoted the film refer to it as a Paramount movie.

On paper, 2007 is shaping up to be one of DreamWorks’ most promising years. The 12-year-old studio, co-founded by the director Steven Spielberg, has readied a diverse slate of eight films for the year, including July’s action adventure, “Transformers” and “The Kite Runner,” a drama set in Afghanistan. More than 50 projects are actively in development. Still, on the first anniversary of its $1.6 billion sale to Paramount, a unit of Viacom, DreamWorks is stinging from a series of slights delivered by their newfound corporate overseers.

In particular, Mr. Spielberg, who rarely speaks out about such corporate matters, is concerned that the studio he built with the music impresario David Geffen and the movie executive Jeffrey Katzenberg is losing its identity, something he has furiously fought to protect.

“I’m certain that had I decided not to go along with the sale of DreamWorks, we probably would have gotten less money from either bidder,” Mr. Spielberg said in an interview two weeks ago, alluding to the studio’s two suitors for the acquisition, Viacom and General Electric. “I wasn’t compelled to renew my contract. I could have just, sort of, taken the money and run, and I didn’t. I chose to stay with the studio I co-founded.”

“At the same time, I have some bargaining power,” Mr. Spielberg continued. “I insisted, contractually, on autonomy for DreamWorks if I was going to continue under the Paramount and Viacom funding arrangement. So I take exception when the press is contacted by our friends and partners at Paramount, who refer to every DreamWorks picture as a Paramount picture. It is not the case.”

When asked about the kerfuffle over the “Dreamgirls” premieres, Mr. Grey said in an interview last week, “I don’t know who is suggesting that anyone is unhappy about that.” Indeed, he said, he feels “zero tension” with his partners at DreamWorks who he said were now part of the fabric of a newly invigorated Paramount.

“I’m more enthusiastic today then when we acquired it,” said Mr. Grey, who brokered the deal to buy DreamWorks. “They have earned the deal we’ve made with them.”

Mr. Spielberg’s comments, from anyone other than the most successful film director in Hollywood, might sound like sour grapes. But there is something larger at play at DreamWorks than getting credit. Increasingly, moviemakers are being bankrolled by corporate financiers or media conglomerates whose executives are beholden to the vagaries of Wall Street. As a result, the question becomes how much freedom can someone even as powerful and respected as Mr. Spielberg command once they become part of a larger company.

For some, the transition looks easy. In 2002 Universal Studios, now owned by General Electric, acquired the executive team behind Focus Features, who have successfully backed a string of modestly budgeted Oscar favorites, including “Brokeback Mountain” and “Lost in Translation.” Other relationships, though, have not fared as well. In 2005, Harvey and Bob Weinstein were forced out of Miramax Films, the studio they sold to the Walt Disney Company in 1993, after years of feuding over power and money.

DreamWorks is different. “We are still in the honeymoon period, and we are still sorting all of this out,” Mr. Spielberg said.

He said he was happy to be part of the Paramount family and pleased with the deal he and his partners made. But DreamWorks has an established pedigree he wants to preserve. Since the debut of “The Peacemaker” in 1997, the studio has produced or co-financed 77 films with worldwide box office receipts of $12.08 billion. Those movies have received 117 Academy Award nominations, winning 28 Oscars, including three for best picture.

That said, what DreamWorks gave up in the sale is the right to call its movies its own. And that has taken a psychological toll that, at times, has made things tense.

“The moment that there was no longer a weekly DreamWorks entry in the box-office charts and it was Paramount, it was a tough pill to swallow,” said Walter Parkes, a former top DreamWorks executive who is now producing movies for them. “It is important to protect the name of DreamWorks and the films it creates.”

Within Paramount, DreamWorks is allowed a wide creative berth. The studio is expected to produce six to eight movies a year. It has an annual operating movie budget no less than $300 million — more than its corporate siblings, Paramount Vantage and MTV Film/Nickelodeon Movies. Mr. Spielberg and Stacey Snider, the former Universal Pictures studio chairman who joined DreamWorks last year as chief executive, have sole authority to greenlight films that cost $85 million or less. (If Mr. Spielberg directs, that rises to $100 million.)

Paramount even allowed Mr. Spielberg to stay in his Southwestern- style offices on the Universal lot, which the director referred to as his “ancestral home.”

“Culturally speaking, the company feels more like DreamWorks than ever before,” said Adam Goodman, the studio’s president of production, who joined it as an assistant 11 years ago. Indeed, several DreamWorks executives said it is bustling like it did in its early days, when it reigned with audience favorites like “Saving Private Ryan,” “American Beauty” and “Gladiator.”

One reason is that with Paramount’s money, its future is more secure. And with Ms. Snider, DreamWorks is better managed. One of those who has worked with her is Ben Stiller, the comedy actor who recently starred in “Night at the Museum” and who became a DreamWorks producer three years ago.

“In the best possible way, it feels small,” Mr. Stiller said of the studio in an interview last week. “When Stacey came on, it focused things. Before that, due to the nature of the setup, there wasn’t any guiding force.”

Now, Mr. Stiller is producing two films for DreamWorks, “Blades of Glory” and “The Ruins,” and directing another, “Tropic Thunder.” “In terms of movies getting green-lit,” he said, “it kicked us into a gear that we hadn’t been in before.”

Mr. Spielberg, too, has embraced the change. “We weren’t ambitious in the same way Stacey is,” he said of the studio’s recent years. “We were ambitious to the small brood of films we were incubating year to year. I was part of it, I had limited ambitions. We prided ourselves that we weren’t like Universal doing 35 movies a year.”

Mr. Grey suggested that the dust-up over credits that arose among publicists occurred, in part, because Paramount markets DreamWorks’ films. “When you are working hand in glove, it has a capacity to be confused,” he said. “Steven, I, David and Stacey can do a better job of making everyone understand.”

But there have been other management missteps. Recently, Mr. Grey got into a shouting match with Ms. Snider over a press release that explained that Paramount was reorganizing its movie operations into separate but equal labels. (Paramount Vantage, MTV Films, DreamWorks, among others.) It also stated, however carefully, that Mr. Grey was Ms. Snider’s boss, not Mr. Spielberg.

Technically, Ms. Snider does report to Mr. Grey. But she has considerably more experience and stature as a movie executive than her colleagues. (Mr. Grey, too, is new to the studio ranks.) Ms. Snider said she was concerned that the wording diminished both her status and the perception of DreamWorks as an independent home for filmmakers.

“There is no doubt when the press release went out, I was upset by it,” she said. And while the perceived slights over “Dreamgirls” and the attendant publicity may seem petty, when viewed in light of the studio’s identity concerns, they become “more meaningful,” she said.

Mr. Grey declined to discuss the dust-up with Ms. Snider, saying, “Any gossip about any of that is not worth a lot of chatter.” But Mr. Spielberg said he, too, has had conversations with Mr. Grey about how DreamWorks should be viewed. “He agrees we need to be looked at not just as another label,” Mr. Spielberg said.

Mr. Grey has a vested interest in making DreamWorks happy. It has been a tough two years for the former talent manager-turned-studio executive, who has battled a series of management crises, including the firing of Tom Freston, the chief executive of Viacom who hired him, as well as the friction caused by widespread layoffs and the recent departure of Paramount’s president, Gail Berman, the executive Mr. Grey hired to help him turn around the studio.

“Steven and I talk regularly,” Mr. Grey said. “David and I talk regularly,” he said of Mr. Geffen. In fact, Mr. Geffen had called him from his yacht in the Caribbean that morning. “He didn’t sound worse for wear,” Mr. Grey joked.

Indeed, Mr. Spielberg likened the relationship with Paramount to a marriage of sorts.

“The best marriage is when the husband and wife are always open to compromise, and the most important thing is dialogue,” said Mr. Spielberg, who has himself been married 15 years. “I think this marriage is going to be dependent on a healthy amount of dialogue.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/bu...spielberg.html





Missing in Action: The Perplexing Decline in Film Productivity
Sharon Waxman

For fans of Kimberly Peirce 2007 may be a banner year. More than seven years have passed since this 39-year-old writer and director gave the world a movie. Her first effort in 1999, "Boys Don't Cry," was indelible. It won a best-actress Oscar for the unknown Hilary Swank and catapulted Peirce to a spot among the major filmmaking talents of her generation.

But time has been passing, with no second movie. In spring Paramount will finally release her new film, "Stop-Loss," about an Iraq war veteran who returns home to Texas and is called back to duty through the military's so-called stop-loss procedure.

Seven years amounts to a yawning stretch in the prime of any filmmaker's creative life. And what happens if the new film fails?

But it would be unfair to pick on Peirce or any one filmmaker for spending years between projects. She is only one of numerous filmmakers among her generation who have taken long hiatuses before stepping back up to the plate; others include breakthrough directors of the 1990s like Darren Aronofsky, David O. Russell and Spike Jonze.

Is it a sign of timidity, or laziness, or some unexpected lack of drive? Is it a lack of interesting material? Is it the fault of the studio system and its emphasis on high-paying, mind-numbing commercial fare?

Aronofsky, the director of "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream," released his latest film, "The Fountain," in November after working on it for seven years. It quickly sank from sight. Russell, admired for his original mix of comedy and seriousness in "Flirting With Disaster" and "Three Kings," has dropped from view since his disastrous "I Heart Huckabees" in 2004. The absurdist Jonze, of "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" fame, has spent several years making music videos and finally settled on a feature film based on the Maurice Sendak book "Where the Wild Things Are," planned for release in 2008.

It's not zero productivity, perhaps, but it is a far cry from the deluge of creative output from young directors in the 1970s, when Hal Ashby fired off seven movies in nine years, including "Shampoo" in 1975, "Bound for Glory" in 1976 and "Coming Home" in 1978. Robert Altman made six films in five years, including "MASH" and "Brewster McCloud" in 1970 and "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" in 1971. And Francis Ford Coppola had a similarly fertile run, with "The Godfather" in 1972, along with "The Conversation" and "The Godfather: Part II" in 1974.

The current lack of productivity among promising filmmakers in their 30s and 40s has become a cause for quiet consternation among producers and agents, not to mention film lovers. It is felt in the paucity of movies creating excitement around the Oscars, and at the Sundance Film Festival.

And it's not just these filmmakers. Other major directors have spent years tiptoeing around different projects, often ambitious ones, only to back away and ultimately choose something more familiar. David Fincher, who after "Seven" and "Fight Club" in the '90s was considered a top filmmaker, has become notorious for spending months considering projects, then walking away. His latest film, "Zodiac," a police thriller, is finally due from Paramount; picking up the pace, he has been shooting an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Curious Case of Benjamin Button," about a man who ages in reverse.

In the space between all the conversations in Hollywood about star salaries, box-office winnings and Oscar possibilities lurks a larger question: Where are the missing movies?

"I say it to these guys all the time, and some of them are my friends: 'I feel like I want to see more movies from you,'" said Lorenzo di Bonaventura, a producer in charge of production in the '90s at Warner Brothers.

Di Bonaventura suggested that this diminished output had something to do with the extreme scrutiny the filmmakers' every step receives. "The biggest problem in the business is you're torn apart for failure now," he said. "By the critics, by the audience, by the studios — everybody."

Some mentioned money in discussing the drought: successful writer-directors can make huge fees rewriting other people's scripts, as Roger Avary has since winning an Oscar as one of the writers of "Pulp Fiction" in 1994, or by directing blockbuster-type movies.

But it is possible that the self-indulgent American culture that shaped these filmmakers and made them so successful in the 1990s has left them ill equipped to take on the weightier questions facing society in the new millennium.

Hollywood itself has a responsibility too, said Jeremy Barber, a leading agent for writer-directors like Noah Baumbach. "There's no one pushing back," he said. "It takes an oppositional force" to bring out the best in an artist, like a strong-minded studio executive or producer. "We have an indulgent system," he added. "The industry celebrates them prematurely, and we don't enter into a dialectical relationship with them."

More than any other factor, though, Hollywood veterans cite the absence of the kind of creative ferment that coursed through Hollywood in the 1970s, the challenge one cinematic triumph posed to other artists.

At least that's what Cameron Crowe, the writer and director of "Jerry Maguire," "Almost Famous" and the more recent critical disaster "Elizabethtown" suggested, as he was leaving a recent tribute to his hero, Billy Wilder. "There's no community," he said. "We need to encourage one another."

There is powerful evidence of that dynamic in three ambitious, critically hailed movies in 2006 that were, in no small way, the fruit of mutual challenge and frank criticism. The films — Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel," Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" and Alfonso Cuarón's "Children of Men" — were constantly reviewed and critiqued among the three directors, who are all Mexican.

"These films are like triplets, they are sisters," Cuarón said in a telephone interview from Mexico.

"We are very good friends," he continued. "We are big fans of one another, we respect each other so much. If Alejandro says, 'That stinks,' I know he is not trying to hurt me, he's trying to help me."

All three films — which last month received a total of 16 Oscar nominations among them (including writing nominations for all three) — take on serious subjects in contemporary society.

When González Iñárritu ran out of steam in the editing room, del Toro trimmed several minutes from his film; González Iñárritu returned the favor on "Pan's Labyrinth." After months of research in London, Cuarón showed an early draft of the screenplay for "Children of Men" to González Iñárritu.

A mutual prodding has been going on for years, del Toro said at a Los Angeles theater where he was introducing "Pan's Labyrinth" to a local audience.

"All you can dream of is a system of truth, and support," he went on. True to his creed — and in conspicuous contrast to his American counterparts — he is already at work on a new film, a sequel to "Hellboy."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/02/news/waxman.php





Looking Beyond the Runway for Answers on Underweight Models
Guy Trebay

While a vast majority of Americans spent Sunday on a sofa watching men shaped like large appliances move a football up and down a 360-foot field, 15,000 New Yorkers, who probably wouldn’t know a pump fake from a wishbone formation, spent the day ogling women shaped more or less like coat racks move dresses up and down 400 feet of runways in Bryant Park.

You don’t often hear Super Bowl and Fashion Week mentioned in the same sentence, but there is a link between the two, and it involves body image. Skinny models became a hot-button topic when the global news media got hold of the public relations mess the industry stumbled into after two models in South America died of anorexia nervosa last year. Suddenly trade groups around the world started wringing their hands about eating disorders.

The Spanish banned underweight models. The Italians decided that in the future (meaning probably not until 2008) models would have to be over age 16, have a license and a body mass index above 18.5 percent to gain employment. The French, maintaining they already had strong rules on the subject, predictably dismissed the issue.

In this country, where polls drive most things, the industry response gained impetus from a Nielsen Company survey of 25,000 people in 45 countries, which found that 81 percent disapproved of “extreme thinness.” In short order, the modeling agencies that manage the most notoriously underweight women abruptly benched them.

All of a sudden some of the most in-demand models — the Eastern European blonde giantess, the knock-kneed Russian beauty with the far-off expression, the multiply pierced beauty with the Olive Oyl limbs — disappeared. Just as suddenly, the picture every agency photographer was assigned to grab backstage at the shows was of a model sitting with a plate of food.

Commendably, the Council of Fashion Designers of America convened a symposium on Monday morning to ventilate the issue and to put forward some recommendations for addressing the customs of a business that, far from showing much historical concern with the health and well-being of models, views them as commodities. No one who has spent any time around fashion is a stranger to the notion that models, like milk, have “use by” dates. No one has failed to hear tales of scouts who discover some beauty working in a doughnut shop, who dangle promises of wealth, fame and escape from the family pig farm (true story) and then hand her strict instructions to shed the excess cruller pounds.

Curiously, the evidence of model shrinkage was there all along, easy to track. “In 1986, the standard size was 4 to 6,” Ivan Bart, the creative director of IMG models and arguably the most powerful agent in the business, said on Sunday at the Diane Von Furstenberg show, referring to standard sample sizes. “Then it was a solid 4. Then 2 to 4. Then zero.”

Ms. Von Furstenberg, who is the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, also brought up dress size. “Models have always been skinny and tall, and that’s fine as long as they’re healthy,” she said. Scanning a room where 50 rangy but apparently well-nourished women hired for her show were lounging, she posed a question.

“What size do you think my dresses are? A 6.”

Perhaps that is so. But is the point that models in general have been encouraged to conform to unnatural shapes or that everyone has?

“What about Hollywood?” asked the Canadian model Irina Lazareanu at the Luella Bartley show on Sunday. “What about ballet schools? What about gymnastics camps?”

What about cheerleading clubs or racetracks, where jockeys have blithely been destroying their health for decades by abusing with laxatives and diuretics and emetics in the effort to make weight? What about gyms, and not just the steroid temples of extreme bodybuilding?

“We shouldn’t look only at an industry that happens to be in the headlines during Fashion Week,” said Dr. Evelyn Attia, a director of the Eating Disorders Clinic at Columbia University Medical Center. This is far from the first time that models have been singled out, and not coincidentally moralized about, as potentially unhealthy and somehow inherently bad. Healthy or ill, their images are always reliably good for improving ratings and newsstand sales.

“It’s hard, with obesity being so urgent a health issue for such a large population, not to encourage thinness,” Dr. Attia said. “But with it comes a vulnerability, probably for a small group, but an important group, with a mortality rate as high as that of any psychiatric disorder.”

To the surprise of some, the most articulate speaker at the Council of Fashion Designers symposium was the model Natalia Vodianova, who talked about what food meant to her growing up poor in Russia and what it meant once she became one of the world’s most sought after models, had a child and gained 15 pounds.

It happened that I visited a French Vogue shoot in Paris months after Ms. Vodianova gave birth to her first child and was as impressed as anyone else at how quickly she regained her gamin figure. At the time, I thought she must be genetically blessed. But of course she was starving herself because designers had complained that she no longer fitted the clothes.

“You have to look at this as a cluster, with models as just one part,” said Dr. Cynthia M. Bulik, a professor of eating disorders at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a former president of the Academy for Eating Disorders, after Monday’s meeting, which she termed an anemic response to a major problem.

“A number of industries are now making people reach weights in order to be effective in their jobs,” Dr. Bulik said. “The N.F.L. is beefing people up to unhealthy proportions. Modeling is chiseling people down.”

Designers like Donna Karan blame agents for sending them underweight models. Agents blame the designers for demanding skinny girls. The people who run fashion wring their hands and express a sincere although not altogether focused concern. Fashion Week comes to an end on Friday. Will the issue disappear when the caravan moves on?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/fa...html?ref=shows





If Leonardo Had Made Toys
Michel Marriott

LEONARDO DA VINCI’S 15th-century vision of mechanical flight apparently never included fixed wings assisted by propellers or jet engines. His chief inspiration was birds, reflected in drawings of a flying machine fashioned to stay aloft by flapping its wings.

More than 500 years later, WowWee, a robotics and entertainment products company, shares that vision. Next month, it plans to release a mass-produced, functional ornithopter, a device that flies in birdlike fashion — in this case, a radio-controlled toy that mechanically flaps its Mylar wings.

The inspiration — besides Leonardo’s work — is an insect, said Sean Frawley, the 22-year-old inventor of the toy, the FlyTech Dragonfly.

“People have been experimenting all around the world with these kinds of things,” Mr. Frawley, an aerospace engineering graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., and project manager for WowWee, said in a telephone interview from the company’s office in Hong Kong.

During demonstration flights of the Dragonfly last month at the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual technology showcase in Las Vegas, the fluttering, footlong bug was an enormous hit. Throngs of onlookers clamored for a chance to buy the $50 toy on the spot. At the time, none were for sale.

The robotic Dragonfly will take flight again at the American International Toy Fair, the largest toy trade show in the Western Hemisphere, which begins Sunday in New York. But it will hardly be alone there in its use of technologies that are giving a new generation of toys extraordinary capabilities to fly, float, walk and roll — almost always inexpensively — in ways unimaginable just a few years ago.

“Is there a revolution?” asked Gene Khasminsky, the design director for Interactive Toy Concepts, the Canadian maker of the Micro Mosquito, a palm-size, radio-controlled helicopter that was in demand among holiday shoppers at about $70.

“I think, right now, that there is a push back from our industry to get kids off the couch where they’re playing video games,” Mr. Khasminsky said in a telephone interview from his office in Toronto. “We’re moving into an age where toys are becoming more high-tech to stay competitive with gaming.”

He suggested that navigating well-designed vehicles in the physical world — like the company’s inventory of remote-controlled helicopters, planes and helium blimps — is vastly more compelling than steering a virtual vehicle in a computer-generated universe.

Executives at Mattel, which owns Tyco, are placing their bets on a new kind of radio-controlled three-wheeled vehicle it is calling the Tyco R/C Terrainiac. Scheduled to go on sale in the summer for about $80, the Terrainiac is a futuristic-looking vehicle powered by a single rear wheel that is a complex treaded ball, referred to by its makers as a “sphere drive.”

The body of the vehicle has been engineered with a controllable joint that allows the Terrainiac to pivot or twist like a human torso. The results are radical turns at high speeds as its high-torque electric motor drives the vehicle over practically any sort of terrain; thus its name.

But George Benz, director of marketing for Tyco Radio Control, said the toy will not be limited to solid surfaces. The sphere drive is hollow, helping to provide buoyancy as well as locomotion when the Terrainiac takes to the water.

“The tricky part of development is making these toys have tremendous performance on land and really deliver when it gets wet,” he said.

WowWee, whose previous creations include the robotic toy Robosapien, is also working on a radio-controlled vehicle for release this year that walks on four spidery, multijointed legs. It is called Roboquad and is expected to cost $100.

And Wild Planet Entertainment, which makes a line of “spy toys for any mission” under the rubric Spy Gear, had added a surveillance wrinkle to a rather conventional remote-controlled vehicle. Its Spy Video Car, which sells for $140, has a front-mounted camera that wirelessly transmits a live video image that can be viewed in an eyepiece.

“A separate transmitter in the car transmits the video over a 2.4 megahertz frequency like a wireless phone uses,” said Shannon Bruzelius, the product integrity engineer at Wild Planet, which operates research and development centers in San Francisco and Hong Kong.

He said the company plans to add a $15 Mobile Spy Ear vehicle (not remotely controlled) equipped with a microphone and an amplifier that can wirelessly beam sounds up to 75 feet to an earbud the user wears.

But of all the innovations brimming in toy vehicles these days, the most startling have been reserved for those that achieve flight.

Late last year, Jakks Pacific, a toymaker in Malibu, Calif., released a lightweight radio-controlled flying wing called the XPV, or Xtreme Performance Vehicle, which sells for $60. Once its onboard battery is fully charged, the twin-propeller craft can soar as high as a 20-story building.

“As technology progresses, the performance of the electronics improves so much that, in a sense, you get more horsepower,” Michael Bernstein, vice president for boys marketing at Jakks Pacific, said in a telephone interview this week.

That “horsepower,” Mr. Bernstein said, is getting cheaper, freeing designers to reach higher and enabling toymakers to deliver more affordable mass-market products — more RadioShack than Sharper Image. The company plans to unveil more high-performance vehicles under the XPV banner at the toy fair.

Radio-controlled flight was long the expensive purview of hobbyists and model-making enthusiasts, Mr. Khasminsky of Interactive Toy Concepts said. But microelectric motors have become plentiful and relatively inexpensive.

Economies of scale are making once-exotic materials like sturdy and lightweight carbon-fiber cheaper, and newer materials, like EPP foam (expanded polypropylene, which looks and feels like a more resilient Styrofoam) are available, helping achieve sustained flight.

HobbyTron.com, based in Orem, Utah, makes a 6-inch-long, $40 infrared-controlled helicopter, the Picco Z, in which its entire body is made from EPP foam.

At the same time, microprocessors continue to integrate more functions onto single chips, increasing their overall computing power while the chips become lighter and cheaper, toymakers say.

Caleb Chung, the inventor of the 1990s toy hit Furby and a co-founder of Ugobe, a builder of lifelike robotic creatures, said: “The price of processing power has dropped to the floor. I can buy the equivalent of an Apple II processor for a dime.”

At such prices, Mr. Chung said he can use cheaper motors in his Pleo baby dinosaur because he is confident that the $300 robotic reptile’s processors will help regulate those motors to ensure smooth, organic and even “emotive” movements when it is released this summer.

But one of the greatest boons to flight has been new battery technology, said Mr. Frawley, the Dragonfly creator. He said lithium-polymer batteries, the same malleable lightweight rechargeable power source in Apple’s iPod Nano, had freed flying toys from heavy, bulky batteries and their metal cases.

Mr. Frawley said the lithium-polymer battery in his Dragonfly weighs no more than a penny and can deliver up to 10 minutes of flight after about a 20-minute charge.

Yet he noted that the Dragonfly’s predecessor, a kit he designed and sold as a teenager along with a friend, was more energy-efficient.

It was powered by rubber bands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/08/te...gy/08toys.html





Personality Secrets in Your Mp3 Player
Jeremy Dean

Once past saying 'hello' and 'how are you?' to someone you've just met, what is next? How do we make friends and get to know other people? Psychologists have talked about the importance of body language, physical appearance and clothing but they've not been so keen on what we actually talk about. A recent study put participants in same-sex and opposite-sex pairings and told them to get to know each other over 6 weeks (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2006). Analysing the results, they found the most popular topic of conversation was music. What is it about music that's so useful when we first meet someone and what kind of information can we extract from the music another person likes?

"how good is music as a measure of personality?"
The number of people who talked about music was surprisingly high. In the first week on average 58% of the pairs discussed music compared to 37% of all the other categories of conversation combined. Other categories included books, movies, TV, football and clothes.

Why then do we use music as a first port of call in getting to know another person? We probably think that music is indirectly telling us something about the other person's personality. For this reason, the second question this study tried to answer was: how good is music as a measure of personality?

Top 10 personalities
To measure this, participants were asked to judge people's "...a person's openness to experience was best communicated by their top 10 list of songs."
personality solely on their top 10 list of songs."...a person's openness to experience was best communicated by their top 10 list of songs."This was compared
to participants results on a standard type of personality test measuring the big five personality traits: openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability. Overall the results showed that music preferences were reasonably accurate in conveying aspects of personality. Of the five traits, it was a person's openness to experience that was best communicated by their top 10 list of songs, followed by extraversion and emotional stability. On the other hand, music preferences didn't say much about whether a person was conscientious or not.

What some music preferences mean for personality:
Likes vocals: extraverted
Likes country: emotionally stable. On the face of it, this is bizarre really because country music is all about heartache. Either the emotionally stable are attracted to country music or it has a calming effect on the unstable!
Likes jazz: intellectual
This raises the question of why people listen to particular types of music. One theory is that people simply find some music more pleasant for aesthetic or cognitive reasons. Another is that people use music to regulate their mood: I want to get hyper for a night out so I put on some dance music. Another is that music is related to identity; people listen to music that expresses they way they see themselves. It seems likely that a combination of all these theories is probably true.

"...this finding might not hold in different age-groups."
One really important caveat for this study was that the average age of the participants was around 18 so this finding might not hold in different age-groups. My experience is young people talk about music much more than older people. This raises the question of what, for example, might be the most common topic of conversations for other age-groups getting acquainted. Any suggestions?

Despite this limitation it seems that talking about music might be a very powerful way to make a connection with another person.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/02/per...mp3-player.php





Study Finds Security Flaws on Web Sites of Major Banks
Brad Stone

Internet security experts have long known that simple passwords do not fully defend online bank accounts from determined fraud artists. Now a study suggests that a popular secondary security measure provides little additional protection.

The study, produced jointly by researchers at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looked at a technology called site-authentication images. In the system, currently used by financial institutions like Bank of America, ING Direct and Vanguard, online banking customers are asked to select an image, like a dog or chess piece, that they will see every time they log in to their account.

The idea is that if customers do not see their image, they could be at a fraudulent Web site, dummied up to look like their bank’s, and should not enter their passwords.

The Harvard and M.I.T. researchers tested that hypothesis. In October, they brought 67 Bank of America customers in the Boston area into a controlled environment and asked them to conduct routine online banking activities, like looking up account balances. But the researchers had secretly withdrawn the images.

Of 60 participants who got that far into the study and whose results could be verified, 58 entered passwords anyway. Only two chose not to log on, citing security concerns.

“The premise is that site-authentication images increase security because customers will not enter their passwords if they do not see the correct image,” said Stuart Schechter, a computer scientist at the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory. “From the study we learned that the premise is right less than 10 percent of the time.”

He added: “If a bank were to ask me if they should deploy it, I would say no, wait for something better,” he said.

The system has some high-power supporters in the financial services world, many trying to comply with new online banking regulations. In 2005, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, an interagency body of federal banking regulators, determined that passwords alone did not effectively thwart intruders like identity thieves.

It issued new guidelines, asking financial Web sites to find better ways for banks and customers to identify each other online. January 2007 was set as the compliance date, though the council has yet to begin enforcing the mandate.

Banks immediately knew what they did not want to do: ask customers to download new security software, or carry around hardware devices that feed them PIN codes they can use to authenticate their identities. Both solutions would add an extra layer of security but, the banks believed, detract from the convenience of online banking.

The image system, introduced in 2004 by a Silicon Valley firm called PassMark Security, offered banks a pain-free addition to their security arsenals. Bank of America was among the first to adopt it, in June 2005, under the brand name SiteKey, asking its 21 million Web site users to select an image from thousands of possible choices and to choose a unique phrase they would see every time they logged in.

SiteKey “gives our customers a fairly easy way of authenticating the Bank of America Web site,” said Sanjay Gupta, an e-commerce executive at the bank. “It was very well received.”

The Harvard and M.I.T. researchers, however, found that most online banking customers did not notice when the SiteKey images were absent. When respondents logged in during the study, they saw a site maintenance message on the screen where their image and phrases should have been pictured. The error message also had a conspicuous spelling mistake, further suggesting something fishy,.

Mr. Gupta of Bank of America said he was not troubled by the results of the survey, and stressed that SiteKey had made the bank’s Web site more secure. He also said that the system was only a single part of a larger security blanket. “It’s not like we’re betting the bank on SiteKey,” he said.

Most financial institutions, like Bank of America, have other ways to tell if a customer is legitimate. The banks often drop a small software program, called a cookie, onto a user’s PC to associate the computer with the customer. If the customer logs in from another machine, he may be asked personal questions, like his mother’s maiden name.

Rachna Dhamija, the Harvard researcher who conducted the study, points out that swindlers can use their dummy Web sites to ask customers those personal questions. She said that the study demonstrated that site-authentication images are fundamentally flawed and, worse, might actually detract from security by giving users a false sense of confidence.

RSA Security, the company that bought PassMark last year, “has a lot of great data on how SiteKey instills trust and confidence and good feelings in their customers,” Ms. Dhamija said. “Ultimately that might be why they adopted it. Sometimes the appearance of security is more important than security itself.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/te.../05secure.html





MySpace Worm Creator Sentenced
Aidan Steele

"Remember Samy? The creator of the infamous worm was unfortunate enough to be the the target in MySpace's latest litigation. As was said in the earlier story, the script was "written for fun" and caused no damage. The source and technical explanation for the "attack" was not even released until after MySpace had patched the vulnerability. Apparently this was enough to get the 20 year old (19 at the time of writing the worm) three years of probation, three months of community service, pay restitution to MySpace and is also banned from the Internet. Clearly, disclosing security vulnerabilities doesn't pay."
http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/02/04/1439222.shtml





“Scientology Fugitive” Arrested
RU Sirius

On Friday, Arizona police arrested a 64-year-old man — a fugitive since 2001 in a bizarre war that mixes free speech, copyright law, and the Church of Scientology.

Keith Henson’s journey began seven years ago while innocuously watching another critic mock the group on an internet newsgroup. In a gonzo discussion about procuring a “Tom Cruise missile,” they’d joked about working with “Secret Agent 99, wearing a stunning black leather biker outfit.” Other posters joined in the internet discussion, asking whether Tom Cruise missiles are affected by wind.”No way,” Keith joked. “Modern weapons are accurate to a matter of a few tens of yards.”

The police were informed of his “threatening” posts, and Henson was arrested.

The police tipsters were the Scientologists themselves, who had already been the targets of an annoying picketing campaign by Henson over the death of a woman near their complex. Besides Henson’s inability to acquire long-range missiles, his wife notes bitterly that it would be impossible for any church members in the complex to feel threatened by the internet posts, since they aren’t even allowed to access the internet. Scientology officials have also claimed Henson followed their employees home — though Henson counters that “the same people who claimed to have been ‘terrorized’ by the picketers offered to take them to lunch on June 25, 2000, evidently to distract them from the death scene being cleaned up.”

Though Henson was found innocent of long-range missile terrorism, for his activities he was convicted of interfering with a church — a California hate crime for which he received a six-month misdemeanor prison sentence. But Henson said he feared his life would be in danger from Scientologists if he were imprisoned - and he fled to Canada in 2001.

He was already bankrupt from an earlier ruling that he’d infringed on Scientology copyrights. But Henson continued picketing Scientologists in Toronto, and they apparently retaliated by informing Canadian police of his presence. (Henson believes the Scientologists told police he was a terrorist and bomb maker.) L.A. Weekly reported two unmarked vans pulled up and “a handful of emergency-services task-force officers — Canada’s version of a police SWAT team — spilled out, wearing body armor and carrying submachine guns.” Describing the event, the EFF reported Henson was “arrested in a shopping mall parking lot, by a heavily armed paramilitary unit.”

EFF Executive Director Shari Steele argued that Free speech was at stake in his case: “This trial seems intended to punish Mr. Henson for his opposition to a powerful organization using the barest thread of legal justification to do so.”

His wife added in an interview with a Canadian newsweekly that “It’s horrifying to me and to his friends how they’ve managed to twist his words.”

Henson was ultimately released from a Canadian jail after filing an application for political asylum — reportedly the first ever accepted for review by the Canadian government, and for the next three years he lived as an expatriate in Canada, awaiting their decision.

When asked to describe life in Canada, he replied “colder.” As the years rolled by, Henson explained his picketing strategy evolved out of a desire to have a real impact. In a 2005 interview he argued that heavy-handed legal tactics intimidated police from acting against the organization, and “Starving Scientology of new members is perhaps the best we can do.”

But when Canadian officials reached a decision in 2005, Henson was suddenly filled with concern. The hearing could result in his deportation back to the prison where he feared for his life. He reportedly said, “I’m not going to be shoved across the border into the hands of Scientologists,” Henson slipped out of Canada, returning to fugitive status, and joked that he was hiding in the Mortmain Mountains — the treachorous range in Lemony Snicket books.

For 17 months he lived on the lam. Yesterday, in the small town of Prescott, Arizona — the law finally caught up with him. Henson had been driving his wife’s car, and when stopped by police, was soon informed of the outstanding warrant for his arrest. He was taken into custody, and faces extradition back to the California prison he’s feared for the last six years. Saturday morning Henson’s wife, identifying herself as a “soon to be widow,” issued a plea asking the public for legal help, publicity — “anything but the usual Scientology private eyes who have harassed her for years.”

Henson has a long history of activity within tech culture. He was one of the founders and leaders of the L5 Space Colony movement in the 1970s. (California’s new Attorney General, Jerry Brown, was also in the L5 orbit when he was Governor of that state.) He was a close associate of K. Eric Drexler while Drexler was conceiving nanotechnology. He has also been active in the digital encryption movement, and has been associated with the Transhumanist movement — particularly Extropy Institute.

Former Extropy Institute members and other well wishers have already created a legal defense fund. There is also now a “Free Keith Henson” blog where people can keep track of new developments. Henson has many friends and late Friday night one supporter even called the jail, according to a Usenet post, and spoke to a prison staffer.

“I asked if he’d tell Keith that Tory sent her love. And I asked him to please watch after Keith.”
http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/02/...tive-arrested/





Keith Henson and the Great Miscarriage of Justice
xenubarb

Last Friday, Scientology critic, engineer and writer Keith Henson was arrested in Prescott Arizona, after fleeing California following a one year sentence for picketing Scientology's secret armed compound north of Hemet, California.

The sentence wasn't just, it wasn't fair, and the court wasn't honest.

Now, it appears he will be extradited back to corrupt Riverside County, where a jail sentence might well be a death sentence for him, if threats made to him by Scientologists are genuine.
xenubarb's diary :: ::

I first met Keith Henson back in 2000, when a small group of Scientology critics met in Los Angeles to picket the Y2K Cult Extravaganza. I was impressed by his intelligence, his kindness and his sense of fun.

I was later to learn that Keith was mentioned in the intriguingly titled book, "The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition."

A whacky look at strange science, Keith is described as a fellow who enjoyed blowing things up out in the desert. This isn't unusual, guys are out there blowing up stuff or riddling it with automatic weapons, rocket launchers, and other weapons of destruction that go 'boom.' There are whole clubs devoted to that pursuit. That doesn't make them terrorists.

Mr. Henson has written or been quoted in a number of publicationsrelated to cutting edge science. He has been interviewed by many other writers, including RU Serious. Genetics, cryonics, nanotechnology and the viral spread of memes are some of his interests.

This guy has hobbies other people work to get doctorates in! And yet, he's always been patient and willing to explain things in terms those of us with mere average brains can comprehend, without losing his patience or becoming insulting.

He is a very kind man, and concerned about others.

Which is why, in 2000, he took to the highway that bisects Scientology's "secret" armed compound north of Hemet, California, following the deaths of two innocent people at the hands of the cult.

It started with the death of Ashlee Shaner, who was returning home after a bible class with her sister, on the dark stretch of Highway 79 which cuts through Scientology's 'Gold Base' compound. Ashlee was decapitated when her car slammed into some earthmoving equipment without warning lights, which was partially blocking the road. The contractor later stated that he was ordered to ignore safety procedures by the cult, which wanted a job completed.

Keith began picketing Gold Base to draw the public's attention to Scientology's negligence.

One day, he had to be in San Jose, so a friend of mine, Shydavid, and I went to Hemet to continue the picket. While we were there, that very day, a woman named Stacy Moxon was dying in a transformer vault on the base. Stacy was the daughter of Kendrick Moxon, a high profile attorney for the "church" of Scientology. Initial reports from the compound reported a car accident. No, a car fire. No, a death in one of their transformer vaults. We have never gotten the straight story of how this slightly built woman was able to pry the heavy cover off the vault by herself, or why she went down there. The cult said she was looking for a pet squirrel. No, she was looking for wild ground squirrels. No, they knew nothing about it at all. The fact is, the Scientologists at Gold Base's lives are micromanaged to the point that Stacy would not have gone down there unless ordered to.

Weirdly, we were picketing at the very moment Stacy's life was being fried away. The cult sent out a couple of bigwigs to "handle" us. One guy, the head of OSA, came out and invited us to breakfast in town, "to discuss our differences." That man, Ken Hoden, has since been disappeared, with rumors of him being held in the Rehabilitation Project Force, Scientology's prison camp for recalcitrant culties.

The next person to emerge was Muriel Dufresne, his Number Two person. She invited us to enjoy brunch at the cult's dining hall on the property, and claimed to smell delicious food cooking. We smelled nothing, not even a whiff of roast Scientologist. We declined these invitations, but had no idea of the drama going on behind the razor wired fences.

Following Keith's response to a post on alt.religion.scientology concerning "Tom Cruise Missiles," the cult had him arrested. Following a parody of a trial, he was sentenced to a year in the Riverside jail for "interfering with a religion."

The cult shopped judges until they found a retired one they liked. Judge Wallerstein has since retired from the bench due to death.

Scientology, the key reason Keith was picketing, was not permitted to be mentioned in court.

Ken Hoden trotted out a number of residents of the base, each of whom related the terrible fear they had of this one man with a picket sign.

Hoden also committed perjury with impunity, relating the tale of a shooting in Portland Oregon by a man who walked into the org with a gun, shooting a pregnant woman and killing her unborn child.

What he did not mention was the fact that Godeka, the shooter, was mentally unbalanced and wanted the $60,000 the cult had extracted from him back. The baby lived, by the way. It was all a fabrication to make picketers look dangerous.

One "witness" later boasted that she could turn on the tears at will after weeping on the stand.

Some Scientology witnesses didn't even know their own residential address.

All of Keith's witnesses were dismissed. We never got an opportunity to testify.
Indeed, during this time, people on Keith's witness list were harassed, followed and monitored, until I called ADA Schwarz to complain.

The court dismissed one of Keith's witnesses, a man named Frank Oliver, who used to be high up in the cult and part of its Department of Dirty Tricks, the Office of Special Affairs. They dismissed his testimony because it was a few decades old. Yet, they allowed passages from Mambo Chicken, which was even older!

Like the Boston's Attorney General insisting that the Mooninite advertisements are a terroristic hoax, the Riverside ADA insisted that Keith was a danger to the cult.

Curiously, not one person who sat on that jury can be found. Not one.
[correction: several people did call around until they found a couple of people from the jury pool. What mysteriously disappeared was the actual jury list from the defense attorney's office, so they were forced to use the 50 name list from the entire jury pool. Still. Two jurors, and a PI who was working to find others abruptly quit out of fear. Even better.]

Keith's lawyer's mailbox was filled with dirt. Stupid cult tricks were perpetrated on attorney Jim Harr, witnesses Ida Camburn, David Rice, myself and others, until my call to the Riverside ADA handling the case.

Interestingly enough, ADA Schwarz abruptly vanished after this case, resurfacing someplace in the midwest and still unwilling or afraid to discuss it at all.

When he was convicted of this MISDEMEANOR and sentenced to a year in jail, Keith received death threats from Scientologists. The cult has several programs in prisons; Criminon, Second Chance and Narconon, to name a few. It wouldn't be that difficult to "get" Keith in Riverside County. Keith fled to Canada, and later returned to the United States in hiding.

Keith was picked up by the police last Friday in Prescott Arizona. He will probably be extradited to Riverside this Monday.

This entire case is an example of Scientology and its influence with the court system, not only in Riverside, but also Clearwater, Florida and Los Angeles County.

It is astonishing that a simple online joke about 'Tom Cruise Missiles' and a few pickets have resulted in this parody of justice! Keith could not afford an appeal, as the cult has driven him into bankruptcy proceedings.

Anyone who believes that the justice system is fair should look at the facts in this case. We are deeply concerned for Mr. Henson's future safety, particularly in light of the death threats he has received.

Yes, he compounded his problem by fleeing the jurisdiction. But who wouldn't, given the cult's reputation? This case needs to be reviewed, and now!
Lawyers who have looked at the information available on http://www.operatingthetan.com agree that it never should have gotten this far. Perjury, witness tampering and intimidation are only three elements which should have been addressed. Instead, they were swept aside, leaving Keith sentenced to serve a year in jail for a misdemeanor. Anyone concerned about real justice should be watchful as this continues to unfold!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/4/13026/70551





Gorbachev Wades Into Piracy Row

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has urged Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to intercede in a computer piracy case against a Russian headteacher.

The plea came in an open letter published on Mr Gorbachev's website.

Microsoft representatives in Russia brought the case against Alexander Ponosov, accused of running pirated software on school computers.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has also criticised the prosecution of Mr Ponosov, in Perm, east of Moscow.

Mr Gorbachev's letter, on the website run by his charitable foundation, said "many people in Russia regard this scandalous case as trumped-up, launched on the initiative of Microsoft corporation to set a precedent".

'Show mercy'

"We have great respect for the work of Microsoft's programmers... and are in no way casting doubt on the principle of punishment for intellectual property violations.

"However, in this case we ask you to show mercy and withdraw your complaint against Alexander Ponosov," the letter read.

Mr Gorbachev said that under Russian criminal law the teacher could face "imprisonment in Siberian camps".

The Perm region lies in the Ural Mountains, between Moscow and Siberia.

Microsoft accuses the teacher of knowingly using pirated Windows software in the school and causing the company losses put at 266,000 roubles ($10,000; £5,000).

Mr Ponosov says he is innocent, that the software had been pre-installed and he did not know it was unlicensed when he obtained the computers.

At his news conference on 1 February, President Putin said investigators should "go after the distributors, not the users".

"It's ridiculous to just arrest a chap for using computers," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...pe/6332441.stm





Russian Schools Abandon Windows After Piracy Scare

Linux is the winner
Nick Farrell

LINUX IS THE clear winner out of a dispute between the Russian legal authorities and schools over who should carry the can over the use of pirated Windows software.

Rather than attacking mobsters who peddle pirated copies of Windows directly to companies, the Russian coppers decided to lock up a Sepich headmaster who bought hot Windows software which came from Perm region’s Capital Construction Administration.

Microsoft says that the incident has nothing to do with them, but it appears that Russian schools in the area are so scared about being shipped off to a Siberian Gulag, that they are buying Linux gear instead.

Schools in the Perm region will soon quit buying software from commercial companies, said the region’s Education Minister Nikolay Karpushin. The announcement was made in line with the report on ensuring 'license purity' in the region’s schools.

According to Karpushin, schools would start using freely distributed software like the Linux OS, Russky office and Open office desktop apps, Ekho Moskvi reports.

The flavour of Linux being used will be one of the cheap localised Russian Linux distributives in Russia.

Teachers are not that happy about it. Apparently not many of them know much about Linux and there are no specialists around to teach them. Of course if they go on bulletin boards to ask questions they will be dubbed 'stupid noobs' by Linux boffins.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37460





Blackboard Makes Peace Offering to Open Source Community with Patent Pledge
AP

Facing sharp criticism from academic computing experts, Blackboard Inc. announced Thursday what it calls a legally binding promise that it won't pursue patent lawsuits against users of open-source online classroom technology.

An open-source group said it welcomed the move but noted a key caveat: It covers a number of named open-source projects, but technically leaves open the possibility future open-source initiatives that bundle proprietary software could be vulnerable.

The announcement is the latest development in a case that has been closely followed in the information technology and education communities.

A year ago, Washington, D.C.-based Blackboard, which has about 60 percent of the market for so-called ``e-learning'' systems, was awarded a patent that covers some of the basic features of the software used by colleges and universities to run courses over the Internet.

The patents prompted an angry backlash from some members of the academic computing community, who called it an attempt to own the very idea of online learning.

Many universities mix and match e-learning software, both proprietary and open source, to develop their own distinctive systems. Blackboard's patent, they argued, went against the spirit of academic cooperation and would stifle innovation. Some said they feared lawsuits.

Blackboard denied it would sue academic users but will now make that commitment more formal, with a worldwide agreement that the company's chief legal officer, Matthew Small, said could be used in court against the company if it ever pursued such an action.

However, Blackboard isn't giving up its right to pursue patent infringement lawsuits against proprietary software companies that it believes are infringing its patents. The company's lawsuit continues against rival Desire2Learn of Waterloo, Ontario.

Blackboard's announcement includes a statement of support from the Sakai Foundation, a leading open-source group that has criticized the patent, and EDUCAUSE, a national group promoting information technology on campus. But Sakai Chairman John Norman, of the University of Cambridge, said his organization remains concerned bundled code is not included in the pledge and continues to believe the patent should never have been issued.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/16599848.htm





'Electric Slide' on Slippery DMCA Slope
Daniel Terdiman

The inventor of the "Electric Slide," an iconic dance created in 1976, is fighting back against what he believes are copyright violations and, more importantly, examples of bad dancing.

Kyle Machulis, an engineer at San Francisco's Linden Lab, said he received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice about a video he had shot at a recent convention showing three people doing the Electric Slide.

"The creator of the Electric Slide claims to hold a copyright on the dance and is DMCAing every single video on YouTube" that references the dance, Machulis said. He's also sent licensing demands to The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Machulis added.

Indeed, Richard Silver, who filed the copyright for the Electric Slide in 2004, said on one of his Web pages that the DeGeneres Show had been putting up a legal fight as he tried to get compensation for a segment that aired in February 2006 in which actress Teri Hatcher and other dancers performed the popular wedding shuffle.

The 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act governs copyright infringement as well as technology whose purpose is to circumvent measures intended to protect copyrights. Under the DMCA, rights-holders can complain to services like YouTube that content uploaded by users infringes their copyrights.

Silver did not respond to an e-mail sent Friday asking for comment and did not answer several phone calls to his Groton, Conn., home. A representative for the DeGeneres Show declined to comment.

But on the YouTube page Silver himself posted showing the Electric Slide, he wrote, "Any video that shows my choreography being done incorrectly is being removed. I don't want future generations having to learn it wrong and then relearn it as I am being faced with now because of certain sites and (people) that have been teaching it incorrectly and without my permission. That's the reason I (copyrighted) it in the first place."

YouTube has been dealing with a slew of DMCA takedown claims recently. Viacom on Friday demanded the service remove a hundred thousand videos it claimed infringed its copyrights.

Some may find it odd that a dance could be copyrightable, of course. But according to Jason Schultz, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, dance moves can definitely be protected under copyright law.

"You can copyright the choreography for dances," said Schultz, "and then enforce the copyright against anyone who publicly performs the dance."

Does that mean that everyone who giggles their way through the Electric Slide with the wedding videographer shooting away is violating copyright? No, but the videographer could be at risk. But Schultz said he believes Silver's claims against Machulis and others who have posted videos on YouTube may be questionable.

"Someone who performs it noncommercially or adds their own artistic flair to the dance has a pretty good fair-use argument that their performance is noninfringing," Schultz said.

Because there are only about 20 seconds of actual footage of people doing the Electric Slide out of Machulis' nearly five-minute video, Silver's claim may be on shaky ground, Schultz said.

"Here, it's such a small piece of the video, and such a small piece of the dance (that) I think if (Silver brought) a copyright lawsuit, he would lose," he said.

Joe Pesci, Electric Slide master
Machulis, who has reposted his video on another online site, said he is considering a counterclaim on the theory that Silver's copyright applies only to a videotape of his original tutorial of the dance. But Schultz said the format isn't a concern in this case.

A blogger named Rob Lathan also recently said he got a DMCA takedown notice from YouTube.

Lathan had posted a video of himself dancing the Electric Slide on stilts on NBC's Today Show. Now, he said on his blog, his video had been removed by YouTube after a complaint by Silver. But Lathan seemed nonplussed by Silver's complaint.

"I'm gonna fight him with everything I've got," he wrote. "And you know what that is, right? My trusty pair of shiny red stilts."

It appears Silver has for several years aggressively defended his copyright on the dance. In 2004, Silver apparently wrote an e-mail to Donna Woolard, an associate professor of exercise science at North Carolina's Campbell University, demanding she remove a video of the dance from a Web site. He complained the dance wasn't being done correctly on the video, and Woolard took down the video.

Silver wrote, according to e-mail correspondence posted by Woolard, that he had sued two Hollywood production companies for using the dance in several films and that he was now adding her as a co-defendant. It's unclear what happened to the suit.

Interestingly, he also complained that actors in those movies also didn't do the dance right. In fact, of several movies mentioned, surprisingly, Silver said only Joe Pesci, best known for his Oscar-winning role in the gangster classic Goodfellas, performed the dance correctly in the decidedly lesser-known film, The Super.

"I realize that this incorrect version of my choreography has been around for some 27 years," Silver wrote, "and it seems pointless to try and correct it at this time but because of the legal ramifications, my lawyers have suggested that I take this approach."

So does doing the Electric Slide badly protect you from charges of copyright violation? To Schultz, an incorrect version of the dance may still be covered under copyright law as a derivative of the original, but it depends on the context. In the case of Machulis' video, the missteps of the dance probably mean a loss of Silver's rights.

"Slight variations (of the original) are arguably derivative," said Schultz, "but something else, like doing (a dance) out of sequence, you're probably not even getting close to his copyright."
http://news.com.com/Electric+Slide+o...3-6156021.html





Keith Urban Sues Keith Urban Over Domain Name

Australian country singer Keith Urban has filed a lawsuit against a US painter of the same name, claiming that the lesser known Keith Urban’s website KeithUrban.com infringes trademark and cyber-squatting laws.

The Australian singer’s own website is located at KeithUrban.net. He wants the other website to be shut down and its domain name transferred to his ownership. He also seeks unspecified monetary damages.

Keith Urban the painter uses his website to sell oil paintings, but the singer, who married Nicole Kidman last year and who is a former alcohol addict and cocaine abuser, says in the lawsuit that the website is being used “in a manner likely to deceive the public into believing that the website has a connection to Plaintiff that does not exist.”

So let’s see. Keith Urban the painter doesn’t claim that he is a singer. He doesn’t claim that he is married to Nicole Kidman. He doesn’t talk about alcohol abuse nor about “crawling around on my hands and knees, looking for these little rocks at five in the morning”.

In fact, nothing at his website indicates that he is even aware of the singer’s existence. And while his talent as an artist might be debatable, that applies even more so to his Australian counterpart.

The Daily Domainer can think of just one possible explanation for this hilarious and scatterbrained lawsuit: Keith Urban must be drinking again.
http://www.dailydomainer.com/200759-...main-name.html





Apple, Beatles Settle Trademark Suit

IPod maker Apple and the manager of The Beatles' Apple Corps resolved their long-simmering dispute on Monday about who has the right to the Apple trademark.

The settlement offered greater hope to fans of George, Paul, John and Ringo that the two sides could now focus on permitting downloads of the band's music through the iPod maker's iTunes online music service. The catalog of all Beatles songs, including "Let it Be," "Get Back" and "She Loves You," is the largest holdout from iTunes and other online music services.

The new settlement replaces the companies' 1991 agreement and gives Apple Inc. ownership of all the trademarks related to "Apple," meaning it will continue using its name and logos on iTunes. In addition, Apple Inc. will license certain of those trademarks back to Apple Corps for their continued use.

This settlement ends the ongoing trademark lawsuit between the companies, with each paying its own legal costs. Further terms weren't disclosed.

"We love the Beatles, and it has been painful being at odds with them over these trademarks," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "It feels great to resolve this in a positive manner, and in a way that should remove the potential of further disagreements in the future."

Neil Aspinall, manager of Apple Corps, said the company was glad to resolve the dispute.

"The years ahead are going to be very exciting times for us. We wish Apple Inc. every success and look forward to many years of peaceful co-operation with them," he said.

The joint announcement from Apple Inc. and Apple Corps, however, was silent on the prospects of Beatles downloads.
http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/enter...=entertainment





Time Extended in Cisco-Apple iPhone Suit
AP

Apple Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. agreed to extend the time Apple has to respond to Cisco's lawsuit surrounding the iPhone, in order to discuss trademark rights and interoperability, the companies said late Wednesday.

San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco, which makes routers and switches to link networks and power the Internet, sued Apple over alleged trademark infringement for calling its new cell phone-iPod device iPhone.

During a conference call with analysts earlier this month, Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook called the Cisco lawsuit "silly," and said Cisco's trademark registration was "tenuous at best."

"If Cisco wants to challenge us," Cook said, "we're confident we'll prevail."

Cisco claims Apple's new device is "deceptively and confusingly similar" to its own line of cordless Web-enabled phones from the company's Linksys division. Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple says it's entitled to use the name iPhone because its device operates over a cellular network, unlike Cisco's phones.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/16596493.htm





A Look at iPhone (it's Not an Apple)

The tech world has been all atwitter for months about the elusive iPhone, a cellphone-and- iPod combo that Apple may or may not release soon. Last week, it was revealed that the iPhone actually exists — but Apple isn't making it.

It turns out that Cisco Systems, through its unit Linksys, has held the iPhone trademark since 2000, giving it the exclusive right to sell something called an iPhone. Linksys announced several new iPhone products last week, including the WIP320, a small wireless phone that lets you make calls over WiFi networks using the Skype service.

Calls to other Skype users are free, and international calls start at about 2 cents a minute.
Today in Technology & Media

The WIP320, available in the United States for $200, connects to any wireless access point and displays your Skype contact list on its color screen. The phone weighs about 4 ounces, or 113 grams, and has a range of about 240 feet, or 73 meters.

Now Apple fans are trying to figure out what the Apple phone will really be called. The iHype, perhaps?
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/...ptgadget28.php





Law Would Ban IPods When Crossing Street
Michael Virtanen

Walk, jog or bicycle across a New York street with an iPod plugged in your ears and you could get slapped with a $100 ticket under a new law proposed by a legislator from Brooklyn.

State Sen. Carl Kruger's bill would also outlaw the use of cell phones, Blackberries, video games or other electronic devices when crossing the street.

He cited the death of a 21-year-old man who was listening to music when he stepped off a curb and was hit by a bus in Brooklyn in September, and the death of a 23-year-old iPod listener last month.

"If you're so involved in your electronic device that you can't see or hear a car coming, this is indicative of a larger problem that requires some sort of enforcement beyond the application of common sense," Kruger said.

Jason Koppel, Kruger's chief of staff, said listeners would merely have to pull the earphones out for the few seconds it takes to cross the street.

Kruger said the legislation would be introduced this week.

Charlotte Troisgros, 16, a Manhattan student talking on her cell phone in a crosswalk near City Hall on Wednesday, laughed and said the law may not be such a bad idea.

"You really don't pay attention. You might get hit by a car," she said.

E. Christopher Murray, a civil liberties attorney, said the proposal is excessive.

"With our schools failing, health costs out of control, and crushing property taxes, the legislature would rather play mother by legislating how we cross the street," he said. "What's next? Do you get fined if you don't look both ways?"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020701476.html





Thoughts on Music
Steve Jobs

With the stunning global success of Apple’s iPod music player and iTunes online music store, some have called for Apple to “open” the digital rights management (DRM) system that Apple uses to protect its music against theft, so that music purchased from iTunes can be played on digital devices purchased from other companies, and protected music purchased from other online music stores can play on iPods. Let’s examine the current situation and how we got here, then look at three possible alternatives for the future.

To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC. iPod users can and do acquire their music from many sources, including CDs they own. Music on CDs can be easily imported into the freely-downloadable iTunes jukebox software which runs on both Macs and Windows PCs, and is automatically encoded into the open AAC or MP3 formats without any DRM. This music can be played on iPods or any other music players that play these open formats.

The rub comes from the music Apple sells on its online iTunes Store. Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices.

Apple was able to negotiate landmark usage rights at the time, which include allowing users to play their DRM protected music on up to 5 computers and on an unlimited number of iPods. Obtaining such rights from the music companies was unprecedented at the time, and even today is unmatched by most other digital music services. However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.

To prevent illegal copies, DRM systems must allow only authorized devices to play the protected music. If a copy of a DRM protected song is posted on the Internet, it should not be able to play on a downloader’s computer or portable music device. To achieve this, a DRM system employs secrets. There is no theory of protecting content other than keeping secrets. In other words, even if one uses the most sophisticated cryptographic locks to protect the actual music, one must still “hide” the keys which unlock the music on the user’s computer or portable music player. No one has ever implemented a DRM system that does not depend on such secrets for its operation.

The problem, of course, is that there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free (and stolen) music. They are often successful in doing just that, so any company trying to protect content using a DRM must frequently update it with new and harder to discover secrets. It is a cat-and-mouse game. Apple’s DRM system is called FairPlay. While we have had a few breaches in FairPlay, we have been able to successfully repair them through updating the iTunes store software, the iTunes jukebox software and software in the iPods themselves. So far we have met our commitments to the music companies to protect their music, and we have given users the most liberal usage rights available in the industry for legally downloaded music.

With this background, let’s now explore three different alternatives for the future.

The first alternative is to continue on the current course, with each manufacturer competing freely with their own “top to bottom” proprietary systems for selling, playing and protecting music. It is a very competitive market, with major global companies making large investments to develop new music players and online music stores. Apple, Microsoft and Sony all compete with proprietary systems. Music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony’s Connect store will only play on Sony’s players; and music purchased from Apple’s iTunes store will only play on iPods. This is the current state of affairs in the industry, and customers are being well served with a continuing stream of innovative products and a wide variety of choices.

Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s music store. Is this true? Let’s look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store – they are the industry’s most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

The second alternative is for Apple to license its FairPlay DRM technology to current and future competitors with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company’s players and music stores. On the surface, this seems like a good idea since it might offer customers increased choice now and in the future. And Apple might benefit by charging a small licensing fee for its FairPlay DRM. However, when we look a bit deeper, problems begin to emerge. The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak. The Internet has made such leaks far more damaging, since a single leak can be spread worldwide in less than a minute. Such leaks can rapidly result in software programs available as free downloads on the Internet which will disable the DRM protection so that formerly protected songs can be played on unauthorized players.

An equally serious problem is how to quickly repair the damage caused by such a leak. A successful repair will likely involve enhancing the music store software, the music jukebox software, and the software in the players with new secrets, then transferring this updated software into the tens (or hundreds) of millions of Macs, Windows PCs and players already in use. This must all be done quickly and in a very coordinated way. Such an undertaking is very difficult when just one company controls all of the pieces. It is near impossible if multiple companies control separate pieces of the puzzle, and all of them must quickly act in concert to repair the damage from a leak.

Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an “open” model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed” model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/





A Letter From Steve Jobs on DRM: Let's Get Rid of it
Ryan Block

iTunes, as we well know, is the world's largest online music distribution system; the iPod, of course, is the best selling line of portable audio players; and the pair are at the center of a very heated conversation, one finding numerous European nations sizing up laws to abolish practices that put DRM at the center of Apple's digital media business model. So Steve did what any good citizen would do: he wrote a letter. In it he reviews the three possible roads ahead for DRM: what we're doing now (using it), what happens if Apple licenses FairPlay (not much good), and what happens if DRM vanishes entirely ("clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat."). It's pretty easy to tell where Steve stands on the matter:

"Why would the big four music companies [ever] agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. ... Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. ... Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly."

Well, that's nice to know -- but is it enough for the head of Apple, possibly the single most important company in digital media right now, to just decry DRM and point the finger when under legal pressure from Europe? Steve, listen, we're glad someone such as yourself has come out and said what needed to be said, written the anti-DRM manifesto, as it were. But don't just leave it to the consumer to pressure the record industry, you need to lead the way -- that's why we wrote Microsoft that open letter. You and Bill have more power over this ecosystem than any two people in the world, and the big four knows it. Perhaps The Mac and The PC need to rally the troops (i.e. us) and lead this charge together.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/06/a...get-rid-of-it/





The Economist, DVD Jon On Apple's DRM Stand
kdawson

We have two followups this morning to Tuesday's story on Steve Jobs's call to do away with DRM for music. The first is an editorial in The Economist sent in by reader redelm, who notes that as "arguably the world's leading business newspaper/magazine" that publication is in a position to influence legal and political decision-makers who may never have heard of DRM. The Economist says: "Mr Jobs's argument, in short, is transparently self-serving. It also happens to be right."

Next, Whiney Mac Fanboy sends pointers to two blog entries by "DVD Jon" Johansen. In the first Johansen questions Jobs's misuse of statistics in attempting to prove that consumers aren't tied to iPods through ITMS: "Many iPod owners have never bought anything from the iTunes Store. Some have bought hundreds of songs. Some have bought thousands. At the 2004 Macworld Expo, Steve revealed that one customer had bought $29,500 worth of music."

Johansen's second post questions Jobs's "DRM-free in a heartbeat" claim: "There are... many Indie artists who would love to sell DRM-free music on iTunes, but Apple will not allow them... It should not take Apple's iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users."
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/07/02/08/1324229.shtml





MR's Response To Steve Jobs' Call For MP3
Michael Robertson

Dear Steve,

First let me say that your iTunes/iPod success is unprecedented and awe inspiring to me. Your impact on digital music is astounding. I read your open letter to the music industry and wanted to respond. It's great seeing the #1 DRM vendor in the world acknowledging that DRM is an issue. I've been talking about this since I founded MP3.com so it's nice to finally have someone with your prominence raising awareness on this topic (read You Own Nothing - the highest rated blog post I've ever written).

I want to challenge you to take actions to bolster your words to insure you are genuine and your letter wasn't simply a deflection shield to escape government scrutiny. In your letter you stated that currently "customers are being well served with a continuing stream of innovative products and a wide variety of choices." The incompatible chaos of digital music today is not serving customers or the music industry particularly well. I think you know this too which is why you posted your letter calling for change. I agree with your suggestion that the industry is already selling non-DRM files on CDs so it's not a big leap to selling them online (of course, as you know, non-DRM files are available online from many unlicensed sources so now it's just a question of whether the industry is going to put a price tag and make some money on this behavior). You mentioned that licensing your FairPlay DRM technology is problematic. Microsoft widely licenses its similar DRM technology and it doesn't seem to be any more or less secure than yours, so I'm not sure I agree with you. But instead of focusing on political posturing I want to focus on real solutions that can change the industry.

My vision is that customers should be able to mix and match the type of computer, music software, retail option and music devices they want to use. No single company is the best in every product category so consumer choice ensures the best music experience. Here are some immediate actions Apple could take to help push the industry in that direction.

1) Start selling some content in MP3 format in the iTunes store.

It's my understanding that Apple has a license from certain content providers that allow tracks to be sold in the MP3 format, like the CDBaby catalog. While the major labels might be insisting on DRM files, that isn't the case with many indie labels and other music providers. Making those songs available for purchase in the consumer friendly MP3 format would mean that some songs from the iTunes store would be compatible on every MP3 player. The big criticism of the iTunes store, which has spurned possible government action, is the fact that purchases only play on iPods. By selling MP3s in the iTunes store, files become interoperable with any player. It will be a minority of files, but according to your letter, major labels control only 70% of music distributed. Therefore, if a significant percentage of the remainder are made available in MP3 format, this would have an impact.

2) Publish the database format for iPods so other music software can be used.

Files stored on iPods are done so in a proprietary database structure that Apple does not reveal. The only software that can reliably move files to/from the iPod is iTunes. Thus, iPod owners are forced to use iTunes software exclusively. There are many good media managers available that I'm sure people would like to have work with their iPods. By publishing the database structure for iPods these music managers to interact with iPods. This would not mean licensing the DRM that wraps each music file, so it should not affect security in any way.

3) Open the doors for iTunes software to work seamlessly with other stores.

Today the iTunes software is tied solely to your iTunes store. These two platforms converse over the net with a secret language. It's not complicated, but it's also not public. So iTunes customers are tied only to your store and iPods only work seamlessly with that store. There is a growing list of great online music stores which sell MP3 tracks such as eClassical, Magnatune, Broadjam and Wippit. By revealing the language or API that your store uses, other stores could use that same technology. Meaning, they could sell songs that load directly into iTunes software and from there sync to iPods.

4) Make iTunes software for Linux.

I talked to you a few years ago about making iTunes work on Linux. Apple made the leap to Microsoft Windows by releasing iTunes for that platform. Porting iTunes to Linux would be a relatively easy job and give people more flexibility in their choice of operating system. A Linux company I founded called Linspire would even do the engineering for free if engineering resources were an issue.

I hope you'll consider taking these actions - none of which require approval of the music industry, nor require you to license your Fairplay DRM technology that you see as problematic. All of these actions will demonstrate that you want a world where consumers have options as to where they buy and play their music; not to mention, you'll be putting Apple's leadership where your pen is.

-- MR

http://www.michaelrobertson.com/arch...?minute_id=231





Music Industry Group Fires Back at Apple
Alex Veiga

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs challenged major record labels to strip copying restrictions from music sold online, but their trade group fired back Wednesday, suggesting the company should open up its anti-piracy technology to rivals instead.

Doing so, argued Mitch Bainwol, chairman and chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, would eliminate technology hurdles that prevent music fans from buying songs at Apple's iTunes Music Store and playing them on devices other than the iPod.

''We have no doubt that a technology company as sophisticated and smart as Apple could work with the music community to make that happen,'' Bainwol said in a statement.

In an essay posted on the Cupertino-based company's Web site Tuesday, Jobs called on record labels to abandon their requirement for online music to be wrapped in Digital Rights Management, or DRM, technology that prevents unauthorized copying.

The DRM protections prevent the iPod from playing music bought from many other competing online stores. Jobs said eliminating such restrictions would open up the online music marketplace.

The major record labels, Universal Music Group, EMI Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group control some 70 percent of the music market and have maintained that DRM safeguards are needed to stave off rampant piracy.

Calls to Apple were not returned Wednesday. In his letter, Jobs said Apple is against licensing its own DRM technology, known as ''FairPlay,'' as an alternative method for making iTunes accessible to all portable players.

Those same DRM protections also prevent the iPod from playing music bought from many other competing online stores. Several analysts on Wednesday suggested the record companies should follow Jobs' suggestion.

''Clearly, DRM is not working,'' said Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research. ''It sends a message to the customer that 'we don't trust you.''' Phil Leigh, senior analyst at Inside Digital Media, suggested removing copy restraints would give the labels' music more exposure.

''Digital music has entered the mainstream,'' Leigh said. ''The restrictions (the labels) require Apple and others to carry are preventing the market from developing to its full potential _ it's retarding the growth.'' Still, not everyone agreed dumping DRM is the best strategy for the record labels.

''Eliminating online DRM appears to us to be an overly risky move that eliminates the potential for a future digital-only distribution model free of piracy,'' Deutsche Bank analyst Doug Mitchelson wrote in research note Wednesday.

''As easily as Mr. Jobs lectured the music industry on their DRM policies, he could have lectured the software industry (which includes Apple) for its complete unwillingness to pursue an industrywide DRM standard or make any effort to help music companies in their fight against digital piracy by working to make their media players recognize and not play pirated songs,'' Mitchelson wrote.

Copy protection is necessary to make other business models, such as the all-you-want music subscription plans offered on services such as Napster, URGE and Rhapsody, or the limited song-sharing features in Microsoft Corp.'s Zune player, said David Card, music and media analyst for Jupiter Research.

''All these music services wouldn't work without DRM,'' Card said, adding that the labels do have a right to worry about abandoning DRM.

''They're very nervous about distributing content that is unprotected,'' Card said of the major music labels. ''They think that everybody will share music and there's evidence that a lot of people will.'' Other analysts pointed to the success of eMusic, an online service that sells music in the MP3 format, which is free of anti-piracy restrictions.

The service, owned by New York-based Dimensional Associates Inc., offers downloads from a catalog of more than 2 million tracks by independent artists through a subscription plan.

Britain's EMI Music has begun experimenting with releasing music in the DRM-free MP3. In the last few months, the company has released tracks by Norah Jones, Lily Allen and the band Relient K.

''The results have been really positive. The feedback from fans (has) been very enthusiastic,'' said EMI spokeswoman Jeanne Meyer.

Whether EMI expands its offerings or other major labels follow suit remains to be seen. Leigh said he believes it will experiment further. ''I think the labels will release selected back-catalog stuff, to see what happens,'' Leigh said
http://www.tech2.com/india/news/gene...t-apple/4136/0





Is Interoperable DRM Inherently Less Secure? The Case of FairPlay Versus Windows Media
Ken Fisher

It's been said before: security systems that rely on secrecy are only as secure as their secrets. This was one of the more interesting assertions echoed in Steve Jobs' now famous open letter on DRM, wherein the Apple CEO portrayed the decision to go with a closed DRM ecosystem as the secure thing to do. Jobs argues that "most serious problem" with licensing DRM to third-parties is that it "involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak." Jobs said that this effectively rules out Apple considering any interoperable DRM solution:

"Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an 'open' model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed” model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players," Jobs wrote.

The argument here is clear: interoperable DRM schemes are a bad idea. Jobs even suggests that Microsoft has realized this by moving to the Zune, but that suggestion ignores the fact that Microsoft continues to license DRM, and even Wal-Mart's brand new video store uses Microsoft's interoperable DRM.

Let me be clear: what we are skeptical about is the claim that closed—or non-interoperable—systems are inherently more secure than licensed systems. Regardless of who is making the argument, we think this is an important issue to investigate. If DRM never passes away, we may see this argument deployed against interoperability moves, and generally speaking we're in favor of interoperable DRM in any environment where DRM must be used. It's the lesser of two evils.

When it comes to DRM, what history actually teaches us is that one approach is no more secure than the other in practice, as they relate to the keeping of secrets. Windows Media DRM has had fewer security breaches than Apple's FairPlay, yet WM DRM is licensed out the wazoo: there are more than a dozen companies with WM DRM licenses. The way things came to be this way are complex and numerous, but none of them have to do with the sharing of secrets. They have everything to do with the fact that people simply hate DRM.
Apple leads in sales and hackss

If what the anti-interoperability folks say is true, shouldn't Microsoft (the licenser extraordinaire) have suffered as many problems as Apple (just say no to licensing!) in the same timeframe, if not more? Shouldn't Microsoft have suffered at least one crack as a the result of spilled secrets? Reality is otherwise: Apple has suffered the most attacks on its DRM, and Microsoft has not suffered a single attack stemming from a secret leak. Let's revisit Nate's excellent report on DRM hacking from last year:

By the middle of 2004, the [Apple FairPlay] encryption scheme had been cracked more times than a toppled Humpty Dumpty. Jon Johansen, the Norwegian hacker partly responsible for cracking the encryption on DVDs (see below), released the primitive QTFairUse, which attempted to bypass (rather than break) the FairPlay encryption. [snip] Another approach was provided by playfair, a little program capable of stripping the DRM from iTunes files. Instead of grabbing the unencrypted data, playfair relied on grabbing the key FairPlay encryption uses. [snip] A third approach came from PyMusique, software originally written so that Linux users could access the iTunes Music Store. The software took advantage of the fact that iTMS transmits DRM-free songs to its customers and relies on iTunes to add that gooey layer of DRM goodness at the client end.

In the timeframe that FairPlay was comprised or circumvented at least four times (RealNetwork's hack is the fourth), Windows Media DRM was verifiably cracked once that I'm aware of, last August. Microsoft patched the August hack in a few days' time, and had the patch out to licensees in that same timeframe. The game of cat and mouse with that crack carries on, much like the client-side cracks do with respects to FairPlay.

Another WM DRM "crack" could purportedly strip DRM from videos that you already purchased (the so-called Japanese hack), but it was never fully verified, and Microsoft released a general Windows Media update that appeared to stop discussion of the matter. For simplicity's sake, we'll call it two real cracks for Microsoft. Please note: I've left out all manner of obvious circumvention techniques such as burning to CD or recording an audio stream, since those are not true cracks.

Both systems have seen their fair share of cracks, and in neither case have the cracks been significant enough that a music studio pulled their catalog.
Obscurity not the issue with secrets

Does Microsoft's track record in this department amount to squat because their services aren't popular? It may certainly account for the comparative number of cracks. Apple's service is significantly more popular, and certainly gets more attention. However, as Jon Johansen points out, the obscurity angle is "not a valid argument in this context since Steve was claiming that sharing DRM secrets with lots of licensees will inevitably lead to one of those licensees leaking secrets. As far as I know, none of the MS DRM breaches have been due to industry insiders leaking secrets."

And that's one thing that I think everyone can agree on: none of the hacks to date on FairPlay or Microsoft's DRM stem from secrets being leaked. The same is true for the majority of DRM hacks out there, including the most recent hacks on AACS. The entertainment industry seems to have little concern over the creation and licensing of these interoperable DRM systems.

In closing, we can say with some certainty that in Microsoft's case, the licensed DRM model has indeed proven to be as secure as Apple's closed model, if not more so. Obscurity certainly played a role in this, but with regards to the model itself, there's a more significant observation. We can dismiss the argument that secrecy leaks are more likely in a licensed system than in a closed system; it's just not happening. And that's all that matters with regards to this argument. There simply is no credible evidence that secret-leaking is a more dire threat to licensed-DRM than closed-DRM. If anything, the biggest threat to DRM is DRM itself, namely that people hate it, and will gladly hack away at it, licensed or not. Could there be a leak someday? You bet. Is that the biggest problem facing DRM? Apparently it's not even close.

Jobs couldn't be any more right when he says that DRM is bad for business. However, if DRM's proponents survive this latest broadside, we'd prefer that interoperability efforts be not so quickly tossed out the window via claims of inherent insecurity.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070208-8799.html





Social Music Overview
Ryan Stewart

Keeping with the theme of Mike’s Online Photo Editing Overview, I wanted to cover some of the entrants into social music. Music was probably the first type of rich media to really go “Web 2.0″ and it’s become a pretty popular place for startups. As a result, there are some great Rich Internet Applications built around social music. Anyone who makes music a part of their daily lives has no shortage of options when it comes to finding new music and sharing with friends.

FineTune

Finetune is a relatively new application written in Flash. It’s my favorite out of the bunch and I covered it on my ZDNet blog. What makes Finetune stand out is that in addition to the standard “artist radio”, it allows users to build playlists of specific songs. The minimum playlist is 45 songs and you can have up to three songs per artist. With custom playlists, you can make sure you’re only listening to songs you want. Finetune also gets points because in addition to the web version, it runs on the Wii and there is an Apollo-based desktop client.

Pandora

Pandora is the granddaddy of the bunch and it’s one of the Web 2.0 applications that Mike can’t live without. It is built using OpenLaszlo and provides the cleanest experience out of all the applications on the list. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to generate a stream of songs that you’ll like based on how you rate previous tracks. You create stations around artists, songs or albums and you can provide feedback (thumbs up or thumbs down) on the songs Pandora chooses.

Last.Fm

last.fm is another Web 2.0 veteran and is more socially-slanted than the others. Tagging is a big part of the last.fm experience and you can tag any song that comes along in addition to being able to listen to “user tag radio” which is based on tracks that users have tagged with a specific genera. last.fm has a separate desktop application that “scrobbles” the songs you listen to and generates a music profile that you can share with friends.

MOG

MOG is all about a music community. It’s very blog-centric and revolves around user pages, or “Mogs”. You build your Mog around songs you’re listening too and artists you like. That builds something like a profile for you that users can browse to and comment on. It also uses this profile to suggest other people or music that you might like.

RadioBlogClub

radio.blog.club is another music service that builds playlists based on an artist or song you specify. I’ve heard the least about it, but the interface is good. When you browse to the site and type in an artist or song, it builds a playlist of 10 songs for you. In my experience the recommendation system for radio.blog.club wasn’t the best, but they do allow you to embed their player on your blog. This seems to be the least robust of the applications but still worth a mention.

MyStrands

MyStrands started off as MusicStrands and is a downloaded desktop application that works with your current music players to build recommendations based on what you’re listening to. In many ways it’s similar to last.fm’s “Scrobbling” but MyStrands ties in with your mobile device and seems to provide a more social recommendation system. By tying in with music on mobile phones, MyStrands is a bit ahead of the others and it helps tie all of your music collections together. Tech

iLike

iLike is an iTunes plug-in that makes your music library more social. It tracks what you’re listening too and recommends songs and people with similar tastes. It hooks in nicely with the iTunes interface and recommends music as you’re playing songs. I listen to some pretty obscure stuff and the recommendations were good. They also have a widget for MySpace that is formatted to sit nicely in the “Music” section of the profile.

iJigg

iJigg is a digg-esque music discovery service that I had a lot of fun playing with. Users vote on individual songs and the most popular rise to the top of the front page. You can’t do any “related artists” with iJigg, but you can browse by genre so that you can target your music discovery. The iJigg player can also be embedded on other sites so you can share it with friends. As this service gets more popular, I think it will be a great way for bands to get discovered.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/05...usic-overview/





Warner Music Signs On With Last.fm
FMQB

Warner Music Group and social music networking site Last.fm announced a wide-ranging content agreement today. WMG's catalog will be made available over multiple services offered by Last.fm in the U.S. and Europe. This is the Web site's first ever content agreement with a major media company.

As per the new agreement, Last.fm users will have access to the WMG catalog via the site's free, ad-supported radio service and upcoming premium, subscription-based interactive radio service.

Alex Zubillaga, WMG EVP of Digital Strategy and Business Development said in a statement, "This agreement reflects WMG's dedication to fostering the growth of community-driven music discovery services. We want to enable fans to experience exciting ways to uncover new Warner Music artists, and to enjoy innovative approaches to customizing their digital music experience."

Martin Stiksel, co-founder/chief content officer of Last.fm, said, "We are very excited to have reached this agreement with WMG. This constitutes a major development for our social music network. Our innovative approach to music discovery and online radio now gives our users access to some of the greatest music ever recorded."
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=346545





The Who Sees Live Music as the Future of Rock
Robert Woodward

Call them old fashioned, but the founding members of The Who don't think the Internet is the future of rock, are unhappy about radio's narrow musical focus, and convinced live music is what it is all about.

Announcing their 2007 European Tour on Thursday, including a headlining slot at Britain's Glastonbury festival in June, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend said playing big venues remained the best way of showcasing their music to the world.

"The Internet promises a lot of things - some it delivers, some it doesn't," Townshend, 61, told a news conference, adding one thing it does offer is the ability to sell tickets.

"It is probably the most powerful informational, promotional tool today. It's a very effective, focused machine for promotion. I look forward to using it for live events, there's a big scope for live music and live events."

But Townshend said live music is what it is all about today, with the British rock band that dates back to the 1960s embarking on a 29-date tour starting on May 16 in Lisbon.

"Festivals are really important, I'm not really into the Internet," Daltrey, 62, told a news conference which was live webcast on www.thewhotour.com.

The Who's role in rock history, assured by songs such as "My Generation," made them into one of the great live bands during the 1960s and 1970s before the death of drummer Keith Moon. Bassist John Entwistle died five years ago.

Last year the two remaining members -- Townshend and Daltrey -- began their first world tour for more than 20 years and released an album "Endless Wire" which, they complained on Thursday, got little airplay.

Daltrey accused radio stations of preferring personality to musical knowledge among its presenters.

"It's a fact that it's very hard for bands in our position to get airplay. It's a fact for every band," he said.

"There are really few DJs who love music. The music is selected by computer. There are very few music fans running radio shows."

Townshend was the group's main source of songs and he remains the more opinionated of the pair. Daltrey spent much of the conference listening to his younger friend expound.

For Daltrey the music is what drives him. For Townshend, it is the audience.

Their often rocky relationship is now on an even keel, according to Daltrey -- and on the up, according to Townshend -- as age eats away at their ability to wind each other up.

"We weren't a gang band. We weren't brought together by a love of common music. What drew us together, I think, was a love of show business," said Townshend.

"We've known each other since school years and, after losing (Moon and Entwistle) we know we have each other. It's great to have that friendship, that relationship. To have friends who go back 45 years - it's very cool."

Article





CD Bonus Explosion and Piracy
Marc

Bob Lefsetz reader Michael Brandvold writes about the multiplicity of CD packaging with bonus tracks and downloads. He says it's a plot to extract more money from music fans.

I don't agree. I applaud the packaging. The music industry has been slow to take the cue from the motion picture biz that packaging additional content is a win for everyone. Customers get more goodies and the content provider sells more units.

I do agree with him about the unintended effect on unauthorized downloading. Bonus features often are cited as a piracy deterrent. But when there are several different CD packages they actually encourage rather than deter it. Fans are only going to buy one CD. They are going to turn to P2P for the bonuses they didn't buy. And once there, they may not stop with the bonuses.

His letter:

Michael Brandvold:

Bob,

I love your frank and honest commentary.

I met you at the Doors party at the Whiskey. I was there with Lonn Friend, I worked for KISS mananging their website. Anyway I just wanted to throw you my $.02.

This isn't an attack on John Mellencamp, it's an attack of the music industry. I have alot of respect for John. The music industry has gone to hell.

It used to be that when a new album came out by your favorite artist you went to the record store and bought a copy, any record store since they all had the same release. Then I am guessing sometime around the 80's or early 90's releases in Japan began to appear with the bonus tracks. This was an attempt by the Japanese music industry to get their local consumers to purchase the Japanese release since often the import from the US would be less expensive.

Then a few years ago things began to get out of control in the US. It started with Target and Walmart doing something to get you to purchase a new release from them. But this is what it has turned into. Just look at all of the different releases that are now available for John Mellencamp's new release Freedom's Road. This information came directly from his official website.

Freedom's Road is to be released in a number of promotional configurations that will vary from the standard 10 track CD. Here is a breakdown of what various versions are available:

Best Buy
Package includes second bonus CD including acoustic versions of "Ghost Towns Along The Highway," "Someday," "Rural Route" and a rough mix of "The Americans."

Wal-Mart and Walmart.com
Special Two-Pack edition that features the CD and a DVD for one low price. DVD includes performances from MTV Unplugged of "Love and Happiness" and "Jackie Brown", performances from VH1 Storytellers of "Eden Is Burning" and "Pink Houses" along with the video for "Our Country."

Walmart.com
If purchased online, a free download of the country version of "The Americans" is included.

Circuit City
Inside the CD is a slip with a code for a free digital download of a rough mix of "Someday."

iTunes
Bundled with download purchase of the full record is the video for "Our Country" and rough mixes of "Ghost Towns Along The Highway" and "Forgiveness."

Target
Tour Edition: Inside the CD package is a digital code that will allow access for you to purchase up to four pre-sale tickets for John's upcoming tour.

Independent Music Stores
Freedom's Road bookmark given at time of purchase. Click HERE for a list of stores offering the bookmark.

Mellencamp.com
Special bundled discount on the purchase of the CD and "Our Country" T-Shirt.

That is eight different purchase opportunities, for the SAME damn release! What the hell is that all about?! Does the music industry think that fans are made of money and will purchase all the versions? One fan could end up with eight copies of the same album just so they can get the various bonus tracks. Puts more money into the pockets of the record label. You know what I think really happens, the fans buy one copy and then download illegally all of the other bonus tracks. You know what is funny about that, the labels are doing all of these special bonus' to combat downloading. They feel you will buy the new releases if you get more than just the album, stuff you can't find anywhere else. Oh, and the retailers think you will buy from them because they have something nobody else has. BS! It's just another way for the music industry to rape their customers, while at the same time blaming those customers for the collapse of the music industry.

Stop raping our pocket books and start treating us like customers, listen to us. I have spent 10s of thousands of dollars on music in my life, and have the cds and vinyl to prove it. I also have no problem paying $.99 to download a song. This crap with eight different versions has got to stop! You're not making more money, you're making more pirates!


"Bob Lefsetz is the author of "The Lefsetz Letter." Famous for being beholden to no one and speaking the truth, Lefsetz addresses the issues that are at the core of the music business: downloading, copy protection, pricing and the music itself. His intense brilliance captivates readers from Steven Tyler to Rick Nielsen to Bryan Adams to Quincy Jones to EVERYBODY who's in the music business. Never boring, always entertaining, Bob's insights are fueled by his stint as an entertainment business attorney, majordomo of Sanctuary Music's American division and consultancies to major labels."

That's what Bob says about himself. I find him genuine, accurate, and fun to read. I adore his viewpoint and writing style, and occasionally run his ramblings. You may directly subscribe to his newsletter here.

Leftsetz occasionally publishes letters from his readers. Their deep experience provides authenticity and detail on the record biz. We occasionally publish them as well.
http://www.p2p-weblog.com/50226711/c...and_piracy.php





Shame and Scandal in the Family
Mad Mix

The Recording Industry Association of America may finallly have hit upon a deterrent to stop illegal downloads. In the past, they focused on hitting alleged downloaders with massive fines, and tried to shake them down into settlements that were still pretty onerous. But that hasn’t put a dent in illegal file-sharing.

But if you read between the lines in this new lawsuit, it looks like the RIAA is taking a different tack:

Scott Hinds, 23, is a defendant in one of a number of lawsuits by Recording Industry of America affiliates seeking to halt illegal sharing of copyrighted songs — a once-widespread practice some maintain was “fair use,” encouraged by certain computer software. [. . .]

Monday, he wondered: “Why choose me?”

“Every single person has done this,” he said, saying he doesn’t listen to music online presently.

The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, alleges Hinds illegally downloaded:

“Automobile” by NWA, Priority Records, LLC;

“All Over You” by Live, UMG Recordings Inc.;

“Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman, Elektra Entertainment Group;

“Don’t Know Why” by Norah Jones, Capitol Records Inc.; and

“What Would You Say” by Dave Matthews Band, BMG Music.

The allegation is that Hinds used an “online media distribution system” to download tunes, then distributed the copyrighted material to others.

The fine is evidently “only” $750 per song, but it’s clear that this case signals a new phase in file-sharing lawsuits: the RIAA now plans to shame alleged music-thieves by revealing their shitty taste in music. This guy must have lost any and all standing among his friends, when that list of songs was made public.

I bet that the RIAA is searching right now for people who are downloading the new Katharine McPhee record. . .

(Which raises the question: What’s the most embarrassing song you ever downloaded?)
http://www.chimeraobscura.com/mm/sha...in-the-family/





Despite Being Leaked Three Months Earlier, Shins Album Sets Sales Record

Plenty of content businesses like to point the finger at piracy when their sales don't meet expectations, but very rarely do they own up to the idea that file sharing can help their businesses. The latest case in point is indie band The Shins, whose latest album was released towards the end of January, and sold 118,000 copies in its first week, which put it second on the Billboard chart. The album's release even created enough fanfare to revive the midnight record-store opening, which had fallen out of favor with indie retailers, since file-sharing and online sales meant people no longer needed to be in a store at midnight to get the earliest access to new music. What makes these points notable is that The Shins' album has been widely available on file-sharing networks -- since October. The way the record labels tell it, you'd have imagined everybody that wanted the record would have downloaded it by now. But it would appear something else happened, something terrible enough to help the band shift more records in a single week than ever before.
http://www.personalbee.com/261/9739488





Cap’n Gown

Ctrax Store Offers Alternative to Music Piracy
Lowell Torres

Since fall semester, ISU has had an exclusive program available online that would allow users to drop the eye patch, wooden leg and stuffed parrot and say goodbye to piracy forever.

Ctrax, available through the company Cdigix, is an online service that provides a way for students, faculty and staff to legally download music from the Internet and onto their computer.

All one needs is their ISU portal e-mail to register for Ctrax. In order to access downloadable music, a media player must also be downloaded and installed.
Many campuses and universities are going with this model of offering free and legal music downloading services to their students, said Yancy Phillips, director of user services for the information technology department.

The Ctrax Media Player works much like any other media player such as the Windows Media Player or Real Player. There is an option in the player to access the Ctrax store, which one can then search for songs to download.

Kylie Suddarth, a sophomore interior design major, said she uses Ares, a peer-to-peer open source file sharing program that allows users to download media straight from another users hard drive. She said she'd never heard of Ctrax, but would be willing to give it a try.

"I don't have an iPod," Suddarth said. "I usually just listen to music on my computer, so this seems safer. It lessens the risk of getting in trouble."

Ctrax offers more than two million songs online. The songs cannot leave the computer they are downloaded to due to what is called a "tethered download," which means the file has been encoded to ensure it's not distributed any further. Users can purchase any music they wish to burn onto a CD or transfer to their portable player.

"No money goes out of ISU to pay for this," Phillips said, which was due to a contract that ISU set up. There is no addition to the technology fee for students.

Meghan Bryant, a senior business administration major, said she recalled hearing one of her professors bring up Ctrax in a class last semester, but forgot about it.
"I have iTunes," Bryant said. "But I might decide to use it because I still listen to music on my computer."

Students should take advantage of this offer for a couple reasons, Phillips said. "This is a legal download, which allows students to listen to music without doing it illegally," Phillips said. "Which means it keeps them out of trouble with the RIAA."

In 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America made a controversial decision to prosecute students who download music illegally, after album sales continued to drop. On one day in 2004, the RIAA issued 89 John Doe suits to 21 universities in 12 states. The use of "John Doe" means they did not know the names of offenders but were intending to find out.

According to its Web site, http://ctraxmusic.com, Cdigix "provides colleges and universities with a leading, internet based solution for digital music, user generated content, educational materials and more."
Phillips said, "It's a completely free service. If you ask me, it's worth the price."
http://www.indianastatesman.com/news...-2703252.shtml





Captain Copyright Killed by Controversy
Nate Anderson

Captain Copyright is dead, killed by the sinister forces of Dr. Controversy. You might remember the Captain from our previous coverage, in which we took a look at this new educational project from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Authority and found it wanting. So did plenty of others, and the CCLA has decided to finally knock off the caped crusader of copyright.

In a notice on the Captain Copyright web site, the CCLA acknowledged the "criticisms the site had received." It turns out that the general public was skeptical that the best way for a child to spend school time was with an accurate but unbalanced curriculum written and promoted by a private industry group. As we noted in the original writeup on the Captain, the material looked generally correct, but it lacked any meaningful discussion of "fair dealing," the public domain, and other consumer rights.

Responding to those criticisms, the CCLA took the site offline last August and "commissioned someone with expertise on the creation of educational materials to prepare new lessons on the Creative Commons, fair dealing and the public domain." They then took the material to an advisory panel of teachers and experts for review, then prepared them for in-class testing by teachers.

This actually sounds like a great start, and it would have been quite interesting to see what such a process produced. The CCLA finally decided just to pull the plug on the whole project after determining that "the current climate around copyright issues will not allow a project like this one to be successful."

Apparently, creating the Captain was simple enough when only the CCLA was involved and their superhero was pushing the industry line. Once the group started incorporating other legitimate perspectives on copyright, it found out quickly that plenty of organizations did not agree with the CCLA about a lot of basic things. These groups were never going to be satisfied with material produced by the CCLA, no matter how independent the consultant they hired.

The CCLA acknowledged this in its statement, saying, "It is difficult for organizations to reach agreement on copyright issues at this time and we know that, in the face of continuing opposition, the materials will not be used in the classroom. Under these circumstances there is no point in our continuing to work on this project." They lament the fact that groups cannot come together to produce an "unbiased teaching tool," which makes it sound like the problem is with the other, unreasonable groups. The reality is that if you want legitimacy and you want to push your program in schools, you had better be prepared to work as equal partners with a broad coalition of groups. So long as one, industry-friendly group has the final say, people are going to remain suspicious of what they're hiding under the cape —and rightly so.

So Captain Copyright has entered that darkest of nights with no one to mourn his going. Will the MPAA's Boy Scout copyright patch be next?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070206-8774.html


While the late, unlamented Captain may have finally walked the plank, the end is not yet nigh for make-believe copyright cops, salty or otherwise. At least one American university has launched a fictional flack to cross cartoon swords with its students. Unfortunately, these pro-media company harangues are paid for by treasure plundered from the students themselves, whether they are pirately-inclined or not.

Called Tad, he can be found in last weeks WiR. - Jack.




Caught in the Network
Paul Cesarini

At 9:15 one Thursday morning, there came a polite knock on my mostly closed office door. I was expecting the knock. A student was coming to talk to me about getting into one of my courses, which he needed to graduate.

So when I heard the knock, I said, "C'mon in, Kyle." Someone said, "Hello?" and came in, along with two smartly dressed men extending business cards to me.

I recognized the speaker as a network-security technician in my university's office of information-technology services. The other men were not familiar, but a quick glance at their cards told me they were detectives on our campus police force. They closed my office door behind them, sat down, took out notepads and pens, and asked if I had a few minutes to speak with them about Tor.

Tor — an acronym for The Onion Router — is a freely available, open-source program developed by the U.S. Navy about a decade ago. A browser plug-in, it thwarts online traffic analysis and related forms of Internet surveillance by sending your data packets through different routers around the world. As each packet moves from one router to the next, it is encoded with encrypted routing information, and the previous layer of such information is peeled away — hence the "onion" in the name.

Basically, Tor is a way to surf the Internet anonymously. Someone looking up potentially sensitive information might prefer to use it — like a person who is worried about potential exposure to a sexually transmitted disease and shares a computer with roommates. Abuse survivors might not want anyone else knowing they have visited Web sites for support groups related to rape or incest. Journalists in repressive regimes with state-controlled media use Tor to reach foreign online news sites, chat rooms, blogs, and related venues for information.

Tor can also be useful in e-commerce. For example, Amazon.com knows more about my shopping habits and tastes than my wife does. I appreciate Amazon's ability to make recommendations based on my previous purchases. But in 2000, Amazon admitted experimenting with so-called dynamic pricing, charging different people different prices for the same MP3 player; the prices were presumably based on estimates of what each user would be willing to pay, considering prior purchases. Online merchants could all do that, thanks to traffic analysis. They know who I am when I log on — unless I delete their cookies or use Tor.

Of course, anonymous Web surfing can be used to conceal fraud and other forms of electronic malfeasance. That was why the police had come to see me. They told me that only two people on our campus were using Tor: me and someone they suspected of engaging in an online scam. The detectives wanted to know whether the other user was a former student of mine, and why I was using Tor.

Widespread use of Tor could be a huge headache for network-security administrators, particularly in higher education. My university alone has more than 21,000 students. Imagine what would happen if even a tenth of them and a similar percentage of faculty and staff members started using Tor regularly. With all the spam scams, phishing scams, identity theft, and related criminal enterprises going on around the world — many of which involve remotely hijacking university-owned computers — we could approach technological anarchy on the campus.

My reason for downloading and installing the Tor plug-in was actually simple: I'd read about it for some time, was planning to discuss it in two courses I teach, and figured I should have some experience using it before I described it to my students. The courses in question both deal with controlling technology, diffusing it throughout society, and freedom and censorship online.

When I cover online censorship in countries with no free press, I focus on how those countries rely on hardware, software, and phalanxes of people to make sure citizens can reach only government-approved media. Crackdowns on independent journalists, bloggers, and related dissidents all too often result in their being beaten, incarcerated, or worse. Technologies like Tor represent a beacon of freedom to people in those countries, and I would be doing my students a disservice if I didn't mention it.

The detectives and network-security technician listened patiently to me, wearing their best poker faces. They then gave me a copy of the university's responsible-use policy, which employees must agree to abide by when we first sign up for our e-mail accounts. They pointed out that my actions violated at least three provisions of that policy.

I wasn't particularly impressed. I had helped edit and revise that policy when I worked for the information-technology office before I earned my Ph.D., and I knew that neither Tor nor any similar program had existed when the policy was first written. I also knew that the provisions in question were vague.

My visitors next produced page after page of logs detailing my apparent use of Tor. While I couldn't dispute most of the details in the logs, they seemed inaccurate. For example, the technician said I had been using Tor earlier that morning. In fact, I had been at Wal-Mart that morning looking for a good deal on an HDTV; I had reached my office only about five minutes earlier.

More important, the logs did not prove any wrongdoing on my part. All they demonstrated was that I, like thousands of others around the world, had installed and infrequently used Tor. In my case, of course, there was no wrongdoing.

Nonetheless, my visitors made two requests: that I stop using Tor, and that I avoid covering it in class.

Having been on the administrative end of academic technology, I appreciate the difficulties facing the information-technology staff. No one pats you on the back if nothing goes wrong, but if something does — if a virus or worm sweeps through the campus's network infrastructure, or someone hijacks some computers to churn out spam — you are off everyone's Christmas-card list. The last thing my former colleagues needed was some smarmy faculty member spouting off about academic freedom and threatening to demonstrate Tor to 100-plus students each semester.

Their job is to protect the network that allows me to do my job: to teach classes that are mostly or entirely online, and to conduct research. If they weren't here as the first or even only line of defense against the unscrupulous elements of our technological society, my university would cease to function. It's as simple as that.

Furthermore, I do not rely heavily on Tor, or even think much about it outside the context of my courses. I find all that routing makes it slow to use, even with the superfast connection I have at work.

But it is being used all around the world, by people in countries that restrict their access to information, by corporate whistle-blowers, and by digital-rights activists. It's even being used by average people like me, as a way to keep innocuous and personal online activities private.

So in the head-on collision between my appreciation of the role IT staff members play on my campus and my understanding of the role I have to play for my students, my need for academic freedom won. I found myself lecturing my three visitors into near catatonia about the uses of Tor.

Finally, they shook my hand, thanked me for talking with them, reminded me that I was probably violating the responsible-use policy, and left. They had bigger game to catch: the other Tor user on the campus.

A moment later, I heard another knock on my door. One of the detectives had come back to ask if I would reconsider my position. I told him that while I would think about giving up Tor, I honestly felt that this was a clear case of academic freedom, and I could not bow to external pressure. I reminded him that Tor is a perfectly legal, open-source program that serves a wide variety of legitimate needs around the world.

He nodded and left. Feeling an odd mixture of righteous indignation, patriotism, and dread, I closed the door.

Almost immediately, I heard still another knock. In perhaps an overly dramatic fashion, I raised my voice and bravely said, as I opened the door, "I'm sorry, but it's about academic freedom!"

There was Kyle, add/drop slip in one hand, pen in the other, grooving to his iPod, looking at me blankly.
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php...wWPjxhFwqxyfVX





All links on site. – Jack

They Couldn't Win in Court so they Smear a Teen in the Press. The Matt Bandy Case Returns.
CLS

I have posted extensively on the attack by the Maricopa County Attorney’s office on teenager Matt Bandy. You can read our posts here, here and here. If you know nothing about the case you will need to read these before this makes sense.

Our report was picked up by Wendy McElroy on Foxnews.com. She ran a very critical article on the case of her own. ABC News ran some very critical material including a rambling interview with Country Attorney Andrew Thomas where he bumbled his way through with nary a coherent sentence. All the bad publicity is hurting his political ambitions so he sent out one of his lackeys to defend his reputation.

Rachel Alexander is the deputy county attorney In Maricopa, which is basically Phoenix, Arizona. That means she works for Thomas, who is basing his political ambitions on a reputation of being a hard ass. Well, he’s half right at least!

Alexander has written a long, deceitful attack on those who question the actions of Thomas and his department (her department too). This is no longer a legal matter. The case is over and Thomas didn’t get what he wanted. Matt Bandy is not in jail. Matt Bandy is not a register sex offender. Thomas lost! He got a token admission that the boy showed a copy of Playboy to some friends. Stop the world! That’s worse than the ovens of Auschwitz!

Since this is not a legal case anymore what is Ms. Alexander doing here? She is not doing the work she is paid to do. She is doing Public Relations work for Mr. Thomas.

And who is paying for that? Where was she when she wrote her “rebuttal”? Was she at work? Was it on county payroll time? Did she run it past the ambitious Thomas in his office for his approval? Was he on county time when that was done?

All interesting questions. Don’t expect them to answer any of them. But I would hazard a guess that there is a very strong likelihood that Mr. Thomas and Ms. Alexander both were involved in this PR campaign and both were on being paid by the taxpayers at the time. That really would amount to theft in my view. But then thinking of Mr. Thomas merely as a thief would raise him several notches in my estimation.

Let us look at what Ms. Alexander wrote. She says this whole incident is “the result of the juvenile defendant’s parents denial of the evidence of their son’s guilt and unfortunate initiation (sic) of a media disinformation campaign.” Oh. A media conspiracy, maybe even a “liberal media” conspiracy.

Matt’s parents believe him innocent. So do I. In fact Matt is legally innocent. That is what Thomas and Alexander don’t want to acknowledge. In the end they couldn’t convict him on the charges they wanted to use. They had their chance in court and they failed!

Even the judge was appalled at how they were acting. Oh, wait, that must be one of those “activist judges” in cahoots with the “media” to defame the hard ass county attorney. No doubt they even scrambled the interview with him so as to falsely make him appear incoherent, illogical and stupid.

Now most of Alexander’s tiresome rebuttal is a repetition of what Thomas’ team claimed in court. They didn’t win in court. So I don’t see how repeating the claims clarify things. In public Alexander doesn’t have to prove her case just sound plausible. In court she would have to prove her case. And it was in court that her office lost and in court where the judge very openly slapped them down for their actions.

Alexander lies in her rebuttal. She says that the experts who write on the Bandy site “were not given the specific facts of Bandy’s situation; they were simply asked broad questions about viruses hijacking a computer.” That is a lie! I mean a lie, a outright, total, intentional lie.

Who is the expert that is quoted on the Bandy web site? It is Tami Loehr. Alexander claims the experts quoted were only asked broad questions. Loehr was not just asked some broad questions. After the Bandy’s fought for access to the computer, which Country Attorney Thomas was trying to deny them, Loehr actually inspected the computer. It was not merely some broad questions but a forensic on-hands examination of the actual evidence. Why did Alexander lie about this?

Ms. Alexander is not under oath in the court of public opinion. So she is free to invent lies to make her ambitious boss look better in light of the fiasco of the Bandy case. In court she would not be allowed to make this statement. You can read Loehr’s detailed report regarding the computer. (PDF) This proves Ms. Alexander is a liar. You will also read in this report how the office of Thomas and Alexander kept trying to delay Loehr so she couldn’t examine the evidence.

Alexander says that her, and Thomas’, office had “overwhelming evidence” that Matt was guilty. So overwhelming that they were unable to secure a conviction! Evidence so “overwhelming” that they tried to make the case go away by pleading the matter down to him showing a copy of Playboy to some friends.

She is clever with her wording, clever in the way attorney’s can be so as to say one thing but make it appear something else was said instead. Matt “admitted to detectives that he visited pornographic web sites as well as an online group known for sharing pornographic images of children.” The first part is irrelevant. The second claim is not. But what is she actually saying? More importantly what is she not saying? Aware of libel laws she is being very careful. She doesn’t want to actually accuse Matt of downloading child porn but she wants to make it sound as if she has. She is planting an impression with the reader.

She says he visited a web group. She says that somewhere someone on this group traded child porn. She does not say Matt knew it was being done or involved in doing it. Let us take another example. You walk into a restaurant in “Little Italy” for some lunch. Some men in dark suits who look rather threatening are eating across the room. You don’t really notice them. You finish and head off back to work. The next day some petty bureaucrat says “you ate lunch at a known Mafia hangout”. The implication is that you are a criminal. The actual wording only says you ate at the restaurant. It is devoid of any importance nor does it say anything. And neither does Alexander’s statement that Matt visited a Yahoo group where child porn is alleged to have been traded.

Be aware that almost any group used for file sharing could be used to exchange pornography -- legal and forbidden. And thousands of people may be using this group. It may be “known” to someone that a few of those people traded erotic images. That doesn’t mean you knew it or that you traded them. A lot of people were in Dallas when John F. Kennedy was shot. That doesn’t mean they were involved. A lot of people go to file sharing groups that doesn’t mean they share every file that someone may put there or exchange there.

The Bandy’s had a CD in their computer. Some images appeared on that CD. Alexander contends “that a virus could not have burned those images to a CD” and the “fact that child pornography was found on the CD at his home cannot be ignored.” Sounds strong. So why no conviction on those charges?

First, she is correct to say a virus couldn’t do this. But no one every claimed it could. Again she is intentionally dropping context in her PR campaign. A virus didn’t do it. But “zombie” software could do it. In other words other problems with the computer could have done it.

Alexander has sent us on a wild goose hunt after a virus knowing the virus was never the object of interest. She conveniently ignores the ways in which it could have happened to concentrate on a way it couldn’t have happened. She’s not interested in facts just the reputation of her boss and her department.

It is quite possible that a trojan could do put the images there. I’m not expert but I’ve had numerous experts explain it to me several times. Surely Ms. Alexander has access to the same information -- even if she would rather ignore it.

As I understand it if a trojan gives a remote person control of your computer and they can write files to various drives. One place that might appear as a drive is a CDRom. This person may write his files to that drive thus placing them on the CD. And if the CD spends most its time in the computer he could come back and use the computer to send those images to others. One day you might come along and take the CD out. Unless you open the CD and inspect everything on it you wouldn’t even know his file was there. So again I think Alexander is being dishonest.

She intentionally focuses on a claim not made and ignores the actual claims that were made. She did not do this unknowingly. I think that is Lie #2.

She claims that the police detective who conducted the investigation for the County Attorney “is certified by the International Association of Computer Investigative Specialists.” Who are they? Some prestigious association of computer experts perhaps? Nope.

According to the Association itself the IACIS is “composed of law enforcement professionals dedicated to education of police officers”, that is people working for the prosecution. And they are so dedicated to their work that their next conference is being held at Disney World! Just in case they might want to skip a few sessions to spend time with Mickey Mouse. But then if you work with Andrew Thomas time with Mickey Mouse would be a bit redundant.

Let us be clear here. This is a group fo cops who certify other cops as experts. They are not independent experts at all. Alexander doesn’t mention that fact does she? She gets more absurd by attacking the expert the Bandy’s hired because her “resume does not indicate she is certified with IACIS”. Now since one must be a “law enforcement professional” (apparently with a passion for Disney World) then it is obvious that the Bandy expert would not be a member. In fact it would be almost impossible for the Bandy’s to hire a member of the IACIS since they are cops working for police departments and prosecutors.

To attack Tami Loehr for not being a member of the IACIS would be like attacking Matt’s defense attorney for not being a county prosecutor.

Again Alexander is being deceptive. I think it is an intentional deception since the IACIS is a group of cops. She couldn’t say this and be taken seriously: “The Bandy expert is not a police officer therefore she doesn’t have credentials.” That statement would be ludicrous on the face of it. Instead she made the same statement in a roundabout way. I think that is another lie on her part. Lie #3.

Now remember that viruses can do nasty things to your computer but the problem with placing images on the machine would also be related to having trojans on the computer -- software that allows others to control your computer. We have covered this in our earlier posts on this topic.

Alexander says that Bandy is guilty because the courts “upheld the child pornography conviction of a defendant who blamed a virus for placing child pornography on his computer. In that case, the prosecutions’ forensic analysis of his computer indicated there were viruses on his computer, but they were not capable of downloading child pornography.”

Now how is this relevant to the Bandy case? it isn’t. Again it is Alexander blowing smoke as part of her PR campaign. First, not all viruses are alike. Your computer could have 50 viruses and mine could have 50 viruses and we might not have the same viruses at all. So it is possible to have a virus on your computer that does one thing while I have a virus that does something entirely different. It is irrelevant what viruses were on this other computer. Again she is ignoring the trojans. Interesting how she forgets them so much in her rebuttal.

Alexander is practically weeping crocodile tears by the end of her PR piece. She implores people to understand that her office didn’t plea bargain down so far because “we did not have a strong case. This too is not accurate.” No, not at all. They did it because they had a strong case. Okay the Bandy’s didn’t think so. And neither has anyone in the media who has looked at the case. Oh, and the judge wasn’t very impressed either. But really they had a strong case -- they are just old softies. See Thomas isn’t a hard ass but a soft ass.

And Alexander informs everyone: “Our office never intended to ask for a sentence of 90 years in prison, as has been so greatly exaggerated.” Yes and no. She’s not be totally honest here -- again. The law says that if they file these charges then Matt will be sentenced to 10 years in prison per image consecutively if found guilty. When the prosecutor files these charges he does so knowing these are the only penalties that can be incurred.

Thomas and crew filed charges that would have put Matt Bandy in prison for life! They knew that would happen if he was convicted. For Alexander to say that the County Attorney never intended to ask for the sentence is more deceptive smoke. You decide whether she is being deceptive enough here for it to be classified as a lie. I think it is.

Then she goes into political rhetoric with lots of smoke and lots of bull. “The victim in this case is not Matt Bandy. The victims are the children who are exploited and made virtual sex slaves.” Excuse me but the only child in this case was Matt Bandy. These children were not in the case. They were not participants, witnesses or involved in any way. And Matt Bandy had nothing to do what may happened to these children somewhere else. He did not make any children into “sex slaves” as Alexander drags up. The most she claimed was that he downloaded those images and even that charge didn’t stick up when it went to court. Now she makes it sound as if he was out enslaving small children to gratify his sexual desires. Shameful.

She is trying to divert attention away from the victim in the case. Matt Bandy was a child abused by her department. She and Thomas are, in that sense, child abusers. Since Matt did not take those photographs and did not enslave any child she is muddying the waters with emotive rhetoric to distract attention from the questionable actions of her own department. Shame on her.

She says “This case is not about pornography, it is about child pornography.” Well, sort of. But let us not forget that they were running into real problems when they made that claim in court. Those problems were sufficient enough that they dropped the charges of child pornography against Matt. Now if you drop the charges of child porn andinstead convict him for showing a copy of Playboy, well, then it is about pornography not child pornography. At the very least she is being deceptive -- yet again.

She says: “Our office did what it thought was right in this situation...” No doubt they did. That’s what is so scary. The worst tyranny is always done in the name of a greater good.

Alexander laments that a “media disinformation campaign cannot change the overwhelming evidence of Bandy’s guilt.” Again that “overwhelming evidence” which failed in the end. Matt Bandy was not convicted of the crime for which she claims “overwhelming evidence”. And that means that he is “innocent until proven guilty”. They haven’t repealed that yet, have they? So Matt Bandy IS innocent in every legal, and I think actual, sense of the word. For Alexander to say he is guilty is once again deceptive.

She then whines that “the court removed the sex offender registration terms from Bandy’s guilty plea so he will not receive the treatment he needs to avoid this happening again.” Why would the court do that? Oh, yes, they thought the prosecution was full of crap! Apparently they were unconvinced by the “overwhelming evidence”. And what is needed to make sure this doesn’t happen again is for Thomas, and I dare say Alexander, to both lose their positions. Thomas should go work as a rodeo clown. The outfit fits and he’s used to working with lots of bull. And Alexander could sweep up the bullshit after the show. Much as she is doing now.

One final word as to why I am so disgusted with Alexander’s PR tactics for her clownish boss. She once again smears Matt Bandy as a “sex offender” in need of psychiatric help. She implies that if he doesn’t get that “help” he will attack children. She is smearing a teenager who has not been convicted of a crime remotely similar to that of attacking children.

This is a vile, libelous attack on his character. Her department could not win the case in court where facts count. Instead she mounts her own “media disinformation campaign” to publicly smear Matt Bandy in the worst way possible. That is a disgusting thing to do to a teenager. It is unprofessional and inhumane. Rachel Alexander is not fit to hold the public trust. In fact she isn’t fit for most things. What she has done is disgusting to the hilt. I would be tempted to give her our Moron of the Week award. But this is far lower than being a moron. There literally are no words that adequately describe the moral character of someone who would do this. No words at all.

Now for some facts on Ms. Alexander. She is a Right-wing partisan. A Right-wing web site she runs says: “Rachel Alexander and her brother Andrew are co-Editors of Intellectual Conservative.” (Talk about a contradiction in terms.) She is identified on the site as a “Deputy County Attorney with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.” No wonder the expose of her office’s antics on Fox News so unrattled her. It was Fox News after all. That had to hurt.

We also get some insight into possible reasons they were so anxious to prosecute Matt, in the end, for showing Playboy to some friends. Rachel has something of a passionate hatred for the magazine based on her religious beliefs. (Anyone want to lay odds on whether or not she is a fundamentalist, or at least a Mormon?). I suspect the former more than the latter myself.

Rachel wrote an essay as to why men shouldn’t look at Playboy. She knows men don't buy it because they read the articles, she says that. She uses herself to explain why. She notes that she likes men. Oh, good! I can sleep better knowing that. And she doesn’t look at male bodies “for three very simple, obvious, important reasons: 1) it is immoral from a Biblical perspective, 2) the men I date do not approve of it, and 3) it has been proven to destroy relationships and become an addiction transforming the brains neurons.” Rachel Alexander lives in The Twilight Zone. She then mentions an additional reason, I guess that is reason 3A, it would be embarrassing “if anyone found out.”

She does what every authoritarian I’ve ever met in the Republican Party does (and she is a Republican--but you guessed that didn’t you?). She plays up how she is “fairly libertarian” followed by a real explanation of why she isn’t remotely libertarian at all. She says “naked pictures” are not speech and not protected by the First Amendment. Now strictly speaking she could be right on that (she isn’t) but she is no libertarian even if she is right. She clearly wants the images banned and that disqualifies her from the libertarian label. Ms.Alexander, I have known libertarians all my life. I am an libertarian. And you are no libertarian. Not even “fairly libertarian”. To be precise you are socialist of the soul, a collectivist when it comes to one's private life, an advocate of big government and the Nanny state. You just want Nanny to do different things than your comrades on the Left.

Of course right after saying she is libertarian she begins attacking libertarians. She says that erotica is: “Trying to show through pictures that some people are stupid enough enough to allow themselves to be exploited so others can feel superior to them is not something the founders intended to protect.” Now you don’t have to like erotica. But that has to be the lamest psychologizing I’ve ever seen concerning why erotica is produced.

She mentions that she had “dated a man 12 years ago who had” who read Playboy and she didn’t like it one bit. Now I wonder how much of a role Rachel Alexander had in the Bandy case. We might have an explanation for why he was banned, even when he turned 18 years of age, from looking at any erotica as part of his probation (for the crime of showing Playboy to friends.) I said at the time that it was clear that the probation requirements were part of a campaign against adult erotica. And if Rachel Alexander was part of the case we may now know why. It is immoral according to the Bible and she doesn’t like it.

Ms. Alexander, according to one Right-wing group does “pro bono” work for a Religious Right outfit called Alliance Defense Fund. You can find the outfit here. They promote a video interview with a teen who is claiming his religious faith was under attack because of a “religious” T-shirt he was wearing. The video never tells anyone that the t-shirt was an attack on gay students. His “faith” was wearing a t-shirt which attacked other students for being gay. What would happen if teens wore t-shirts to school attacking people for being black, Jewish, Catholic or such? Of course the school would forbid it as it is really an attempt to pick a fight by flinging insults. The Fund is a major group promoting a theocratic Religious Right viewpoint. One of their law suits is to try to force the Michigan Family Independence Agency to place abused children with “Teen Ranch a Christian-based facility.”

The state agency asked Teen Ranch to stop attempts to religiously indoctrinate children placed there by the state with state funds. The group refused to comply and the state stopped placing children there. Apparently Teen Ranch could only survive on state funds and without access to children and funding from the state it closed down. Rachel Alexander, the “fairly libertarian” attorney gives “pro bono” work to the group that is fighting this case. Seems she got the definition of libertarian wrong again.

Photo: The photo is the "intellectual conservative" Rachel Alexander herself.
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/200...hey-smear.html





Big Media DMCA Notices: Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Ben Maurer

It's no secret that media companies have started to hire companies such as BayTSP to automatically find file sharers and send letters to their ISPs. The goal of this is to use fear to persuade people to use legal methods of getting digital content.

Many ISP's, especially universities, trust the good faith of these companies and will automatically deactivate the Internet connection of those who they get notifications for. As a personal project, and with the help of Carnegie Mellon's Information Security Office (which employs me to work on various computing security tasks), I decided to investigate the reliability of notices from companies such as BayTSP. The answer: the companies do not actually gather the data they claim to. Their standards for sending DMCA notices are very low.

In order to understand the issues, it's first necessary to have a basic understanding of BitTorrent. In order to download something via BitTorrent you download a ".torrent" file from any number of sites that index the content. This file contains a fingerprint for every piece of the file that you are attempting to download. It also contains a reference to a tracker. This tracker is the way that peers (the people downloading the content) find each other. After contacting the tracker, you contact each of the potential peers that the tracker shares with you (and other peers may contact you). The client then begins swapping parts of the file with each of the peers. What the media companies object to is that in the process of downloading the file, your client will offer parts of their copyrighted content to other users -- a violation of copyright law. In order to catch these violations, BayTSP advertises fake clients to the Bittorrent tracker and uses the list of peers which it gets back to find violations

For my investigation, I wrote a very simple BitTorrent client. My client sent a request to the tracker, and generally acted like a normal Bittorrent client up to sharing files. The client refused to accept downloads of, or upload copyrighted content. It obeyed the law.

I placed this client on a number of torrent files that I suspected were monitored by BayTSP (For my own protection I don't want to identify the torrents used for this research. I used the fact that NBC is a client of BayTSP to find trackers. If you want to check if BayTSP is monitoring a torrent, look for IPs coming from ranges in test.blocklist.org). Because the university's information security office is very diligent about processing DMCA notices, I would be able to tell if the BayTSP folks sent notices based on this. With just this, completely legal, BitTorrent client, I was able to get notices from BayTSP.

To put this in to perspective, if BayTSP were trying to bust me for doing drugs, it'd be like getting arrested because I was hanging out with some dealers, but they never saw me using, buying, or selling any drugs.

The fact that BayTSP does not confirm that the client it is accusing actually uploads illegal content could cause false identification of innocent users. BitTorrent trackers work via a standard HTTP request request, for example:

GET /announce?info_hash=579CC43E4D66D35AE22312985EA04275939AB477& peer_id=asdfasdfadfasdf&port=12434&compact=1

One easy way to make somebody look likea bittorrenter would be to get them to go to a website with the code <img src="http://tracker.com:12345/announce?info_hash=579CC43E4D66D35AE22312985EA04275939AB477& peer_id=asdfasdfadfasdf&amp;amp;amp;port=12434&compact=1" />. They'd be on the tracker, and BayTSP would see their IP address, and might send them an infringement notice. BayTSP might check that they are listening on the port they advertise (maybe even check for a BitTorrent handshake). If the user is using bittorrent for legal usages, you could just advertise a port they were listening on. More investigation is needed into exactly what triggers the notice.

One even easier trick you can use: the BitTorrent clients BayTSP uses support Peer Exchange. You can give them the name of another peer for them to rat out to the ISP.

At the end of the day, BayTSP (and probably other similar companies) are sending DMCA notices which claim that they detected a user uploading and downloading copyrighted files. This is a lie. They didn't catch the user in the act of downloading. A lying tracker, a peer using peer exchange, hostile web page, or buggy BitTorrent client could all result in a false DMCA notice.

If your ISP forwards a DMCA notice from these guys, point them here. This research suggests that they have no evidence of wrong-doing. If ISPs learn that the folks sending them DMCA notices are not being completely honest, they may be willing to reconsider their position about how they respond to the notices. The people I work with at Carnegie Mellon seemed willing to reevaluate their policies given this evidence. I believe that ISPs should require that any peer-to-peer related DMCA notice include a statement regarding exactly what evidence of sharing was found. Ideally, the notice should contain evidence that could be corroborated with log files (for example, "we found that the client at 123.1.2.3 uploaded 1 MB of file X to 4.3.2.1". The ISP may be able to check that there was 1 MB of traffic between these two clients).

A piece of good news for anybody who has gotten a bittorrent related notice from BayTSP: it doesn't seem like a studio could do much in terms of court action with the evidence BayTSP gives them.

For the technically minded, I though I'd share some observations of the behavior of BayTSP's clients

· BayTSP's clients don't don't accept incoming connections, only send outgoing ones. I wonder what exactly this is for.
· Some of the BayTSP clients claim to be using Azureus (and support Azureus extensions), while others run libtorrent. I'm not sure why they are doing this
· When BayTSP's clients connect to a BT user, they claim to not have downloaded any of the file, but refuse uploads. Not only does this behavior not make any sense for an actual user, but it seems like BayTSP would want to accept data, which might provide proof of infringement.
· Some of the IP ranges I noticed coming from BayTSP were: 154.37.66.xx, 63.216.76.xx, 216.133.221.xx. Sometimes, they make themselves really obvious on the tracker. For example, 154.37.66.xx and 63.216.76.xx will send 10 clients to the same tracker all claiming to listen on port 12320. Maybe trackers should block these folks


http://bmaurer.blogspot.com/2007/02/...lty-until.html





Working Past Internet File-Sharing Frustration
Les Ottolenghi

Once media-hungry consumers get a taste of free music, video and games through file sharing, there's no turning back. File sharing offers consumers the complete package: rich media delivered directly to their computers, phones and e-mail addresses at no charge. Why would anyone want to return to a linear distribution system that requires more effort, more money and more limitations? The millions of people now sharing music and video via computers, cell phones and e-mail represent an unprecedented distribution force. This viral super-distribution model is fast and efficient, and consumers love it. The proliferation of file sharing has produced a market that is now flooded with "free" media. While media consumers revel in their bonanza of digital goodies, the entertainment industry struggles with the question of what to do about file sharing.

The entertainment industry is all about change and is usually pretty agile when it comes to adapting to new developments, but file sharing has been an endless source of frustration. Reeling from the initial shock of seeing profits drop, the entertainment industry's first response was reactionary. Even a novice marketer should have known that lawsuits were not only an unsustainable strategy, they would alienate the fan base--never a good idea. Seeking new ways to promote and protect old mechanisms such as CDs hasn't worked, either.

Apple rallied with iTunes, a solution dependent on sharing content through one vehicle, the iPod. File-sharers thought it was cute, for about a minute. Today, consumers want access to all portals (Web, cell phone, MP3 players) and all media. They refuse to be locked down to one platform. While iTunes continues to be the best-known site for downloads, its popularity may have peaked.

According to analysis by Forrester Research, iTunes experienced a collapse in sales revenues in 2006. From January to December, monthly revenue plummeted 65 percent, and the average transaction size reportedly dropped 17 percent. If consumers are not turning to services like iTunes for their music, where are they going? The store? Hardly. CD sales have fallen 20 per cent over the past five years.

The good news for the industry is that a huge fan base with a potential for extraordinary profit has emerged. Opportunities for profit lie within the P2P distribution model, including an inexpensive path to market for lesser-known groups and new music.

Entertainment companies need to start where any good business model begins--with the consumer. To find profit in the realm of super-distribution, media providers have to follow the one thing that crosses all media and all portals, and that is the file itself.

As music and video files travel from Web sites to social networks, and from phones to file-sharing services, there are means to track it every step of the way. Like an electronic E.T., a digital media file can phone home at each new location, providing a data portrait of the types of consumers who have an interest in that particular medium. The information captured creates a clear picture of a market and allows companies to develop campaigns to reach specific target audiences. Advertisers, for instance, will pay big bucks for a well-defined market like that.

Here's an example. Let's say a college student downloads a music file by 50 Cent to his cell phone. At the beginning of the file, a screen pops up that offers some other value-added media that might appeal to a 50 Cent fan. This could be a preview of an album by Jay-Z or a review of Dreamgirls. The names of the movie and the other artists will at least be glimpsed by the consumer. This is focused and in-your-face advertising to the extreme.

Unlike lawsuits and decoy files, ad-supported downloading is just one of the many promising ways to bridge the digital divide. The super-distribution model carries content from one consumer directly to more similar consumers. This opens the door to a new breed of advertising, promotions and even targeted selling. Advertisers won't have to conduct surveys to determine where they should send a piece of direct mail or in which cities to purchase airtime.

The Internet continues to be a very good place to do business. The top five global online market leaders (Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Yahoo Japan, and eBay) have a 46 percent higher market value than they reported in 2000. The peer-to-peer (P2P) market, however, has barely been tapped. If P2P is the next big thing, investing in a new advertising and distribution channel at the beginning of its growth curve could be more profitable than the entertainment providers have yet imagined.

Entertainment companies looking for a way to monetize their content need to stop chasing the consumer dollar. That ship has sailed. As consumers become more comfortable morally and technologically about file sharing, they will be less and less willing to part with their cash for content. However, market opportunity abounds for those who adapt and embrace two criticl strategies: First, embrace file sharing and adopt creative new business models, unlocking adjunct revenue from sources with deep pockets. Second, be willing to pay for an innovative inroad into increasingly well-defined markets.

The future of music is peer-to-peer file sharing. Consumers have opted out of the old system, which they found cumbersome, slow and expensive. They will never return.
http://news.com.com/Working+past+Int...3-6157343.html





Ogg Vorbis Gaining Industry Support
kdawson

An anonymous reader writes
"While Ogg Vorbis format has not gained much adoption in music sales and portable players, it is not an unsupported format in the industry. Toy manufacturers (e.g. speaking dolls), voice warning systems, and reactive audio devices exploit Ogg Vorbis for its good quality at small bit-rates. As a sign of this, VLSI Solution Oy has just announced VS1000, the first 16 bits DSP device for playing Ogg Vorbis on low-power and high-volume products. Earlier Ogg Vorbis chips use 32 bits for decoding, which consumes more energy than a 16-bit device does. See the Xiph wiki page for a list of Ogg Vorbis chips."
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardwar.../1931244.shtml





FAA Attempts to Loosen Grip on Abandoned Vintage Aircraft Data

EAA, VAA efforts lead to potential relief for owners and restorers

EAA and the Vintage Aircraft Association have been working for years to unlock the regulatory vault that holds the orphaned aircraft data necessary to maintain vintage aircraft, and it appears those efforts could soon begin to pay off.

In its proposed reauthorization bill to Congress the FAA has proposed legislation that would allow the release of abandoned type certificate (TC) or supplemental type certificate data (including blueprints) to individuals upon request, so they can maintain the airworthiness of their vintage aircraft. This would remedy the current “Catch-22” surrounding orphaned TCs, where owners are legally required to maintain and modify their aircraft using approved data, even though the data is unavailable because the owner of the type certificate cannot be found or is no longer in existence.

The legislation would provide authority to the Administrator to release engineering data possessed by the FAA related to an abandoned type certificate or supplemental type certificate for an aircraft, engine, propeller, or appliance to a person seeking to maintain the airworthiness of such a product. The legislation would also allow the release of any associated supplier-approved data for that product. This is a direct result of EAA and VAA’s ongoing dialogue with the senior FAA management team and has been the topic of considerable examination in recent years at the annual EAA/FAA Winter Recreational Aviation Summit held in Oshkosh..

EAA and VAA are pleased to see some progress after years of work on this complicated issue. “We appreciate the FAA’s willingness to work with EAA and EAA’s Vintage Aircraft Association as we improve the safe and cost effective maintenance of vintage aircraft,” said H.G. Frautschy, the executive director of EAA’s Vintage Aircraft Association. “In response to long-standing requests from EAA, the FAA had attempted to develop a legal process that would allow them to release data from type certificates that were obviously abandoned. But existing laws restricted FAA’s ability to release such data because it was deemed to be intellectual property even though the owner of record had long since ceased to exist. This proposed legislation will go a long way toward helping owners and mechanics gather the information they need to maintain these historic aircraft.”

Data could be released provided the following circumstances are met: The certificate containing the requested data is inactive for at least three years; the TC owner of record, or the owner of record’s heir, cannot not be located; and the designation of such data as public data will enhance aviation safety.

“Clearly, we do not want to impinge on the legitimate and legal right of a TC or STC owner to maintain their data as proprietary information and profit from that data provided they continue to support the product,” Frautschy explained. “We in no way want to harm any individual or company economically through this proposal. However, for those corporate entities that have been defunct for what is often decades, and are no longer providing support to the owners of their products, it falls squarely on the vintage aircraft owner to maintain their aircraft in accordance with that original engineering data. If it is not available for legal reasons, the owner is genuinely caught between a rock and a hard place and indeed safety is ultimately compromised.

“This proposal is an excellent start, but is by no means the complete solution to the data availability problem for older aircraft,” Frautschy continued. Specifically, when known type certificate holders are unwilling to release maintenance-related data, vintage aircraft owners receive no Continued Operational Safety (COS) support of the Type Certificate, as required by FAR 23.1529 and Appendix G to Part 23.

“EAA and it’s Vintage Aircraft Association will continue to work with the FAA and Congress on this issue as they have recognized the difficulty mechanics, restorers and owners have encountered while diligently attempting to maintain vintage aircraft to their Type Certificate requirements.”

EAA and VAA will inform their members of the legislation’s specifics when the Bush Administration’s budget request to Congress is made public in the coming weeks. Members from both organizations will be encouraged to help support this legislation by contacting their congressional representatives when bill numbers and specific legislation become available.

Article





For Want of a File, the Net was Lost

Regular columnist Bill Thompson wonders if the net will be robust enough to cope with all the calls we will make on it in the future.

One of the net's more persistent founding myths is that it was designed to survive nuclear war and to ensure that even after the bombs had fallen there would still be communications between surviving US military bases.

It isn't true, of course. The early days of the Arpanet, the research network that predated today's internet, were dominated by the desire of computer scientists to find ways to share time on expensive mainframe computers rather than visions of Armageddon.

Yet the story endures, and lies behind a generally accepted belief that the network can survive extensive damage and still carry on working.

This belief extends to content as well as connectivity. In 1993 John Gilmore, cyberactivist and founder of the campaigning group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, famously said that "the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", implying that it can find a way around any damaged area.

This may be true, but if the area that gets routed around includes large chunks of mainland China then it is slightly less useful than it first appears.

Sadly, this is what happened at the end of last year after a magnitude 7.1 earthquake centred on the seabed south of Taiwan damaged seven undersea fibre-optic cables.

The loss of so many cables at once had a catastrophic effect on internet access in the region, significantly curtailing connectivity between Asia and the rest of the global internet and limiting access to websites, instant messaging and e-mail as well as ordinary telephone service.

Full service may not be restored until the end of January since repairs involve locating the cables on the ocean floor and then using grappling hooks to bring them to the surface so they can be worked on.

The damage has highlighted just how vulnerable the network is to the loss of key high-speed connections, and should worry anyone who thought that the internet could just keep on working whatever happens.

File mangler

This large-scale loss of network access is a clear example of how bottlenecks can cause widespread problems, but there are smaller examples that should also make us worry.

At the start of the year the editors of the popular DeviceForge news website started getting complaints from readers that its RSS feed had stopped working.

RSS, or "Really Simple Syndication", is a way for websites to send new or changed content directly to user's browsers or special news readers. More and more people rely on it as a way to manage their online reading.

The editors at DeviceForge found that the reason its feed was broken was that the particular version of RSS it was using, RSS 0.91, depended on the contents of a particular file hosted on the server at www.netscape.com.

It looks as if someone, probably a systems administrator doing some clearing up, deleted what seemed to be an unneeded old file and as a result a lot of news readers stopped working.

Having what is supposed to be a network-wide standard dependent on a single file hosted on a specific server may be an extreme case, but it is just one example of a deeply-buried dependency within the network architecture, and there must be others.

This is going to get worse. The architecture of the internet used to resemble a richly-connected graph, with lots of interconnections between the many different levels of network that work together to give us global coverage, but this is no longer the case.

The major service providers run networks which have few interconnections with each other, and as a result there are more points at which a single failure can seriously affect network services.

Future proof

There may even be other places where deleting a single file could adversely affect network services.

If we are to avoid these sorts of problems then we need good engineers and good engineering practice.

We have been fortunate over the years because those designing, building and managing the network have cared more for its effective operation than they have for their personal interests, and by and large they have built the network around standards which are robust, scalable and well-tested.

But we need to carry on doing this and make things even better if we are going to offer network access to the next five billion users, and this is getting harder and harder to do.

In the early days the politics was small-scale, and neither legislators nor businesses really took much notice, but this is no longer the case as we see in the ongoing battles over internet governance, net neutrality, content regulation, online censorship and technical standards.

Bodies like the Internet Society, the International Electrotechnical Commission and the Internet Engineering Task Force still do a great job setting the standards, but they, like the US-government appointed Icann, are subject to many different pressures from groups with their own agendas.

And setting technical standards is not enough to guard against network bottlenecks like the cables running in the sea off Taiwan, since decisions on where to route cables or how the large backbone networks are connected to each other are largely made by the market.

The only body that could reasonably exert some influence is the International Telecommunications Union, part of the UN. Unfortunately its new Secretary-General, Hamadoun Toure, says that he does not want the ITU to have direct control of the internet.

Speaking recently at a press conference he said: "It is not my intention to take over the governance of internet. I don't think it is in the mandate of ITU". Instead he will focus on reducing the digital divide and on cyber-security.

These are worthy goals, but they leave the network at the mercy of market forces and subject to the machinations of one particular government, the United States. If we are going to build on the successes of today's internet and make the network more robust for tomorrow we may need a broader vision.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6263501.stm





Techie’s Cyber Odyssey: Magic in Bits and Bolts
Edward Rothstein

I know what Microsoft wants. I know because I have been exploring its new operating system, Vista, which was released last week after five years of false starts, persistent bugs and great expectations. I also know because after spending three weeks building a computer from scratch to test out Vista, piecing the PC together from parts bought online, I want the same thing. What we want is to eliminate the PC altogether, to dismantle that box of green circuit boards and crammed-in wires, to break through even the most glorious flat-screen monitor and open up a new ... vista.

That’s why the operating system has its name, of course, and why the screen images it includes show exotic landscapes with skies lit by sunset or sunrise or aurora borealis displays. These are not glimpses of hackers’ paradises or techie wonderlands. They are the opposite, showing landscapes beyond technology’s reach, offering not the streaming green cryptograms of “The Matrix” but wilderness vistas free of civilization, promising not ones and zeros but pristine water and sky. Windows was once thought of as a virtual “desktop”; now it opens onto untrammeled nature. Escape from technology through technology. That, at least, is the fantasy.

Such imagery is important here. Microsoft became a cultural as well as a technological force because of that kind of imagination. It began with the dullest and most arcane aspect of computer management: the operating system, which is little more than a monitoring program in charge of helping other programs get their work done, guiding them to devices they need, helping them interact, overseeing the traffic. Microsoft then took the old, serviceable monochrome PC of the 1980s that could handle only one task at a time, and that seemed immune from the frivolity of fonts and pictures (which were in Apple’s domain).

And Microsoft began, over years of crashes and controversies, to fashion something else out of this software and hardware until it could leave those technological origins behind. Microsoft has been aspiring to transcendence. Its ambition is to destroy the PC.

That is a noble goal, I think, particularly after my experience of building a computer: a hobbyist’s nightmare, it might have seemed from the piles of boxes and bubble wrap, the colored cables and seemingly interchangeable pieces of industrial circuitry, the Medusa-headed power supply with its score of snakelike wires, the motherboard with its delicate protrusions and fine screws.

I must not be alone in this fascination with handiwork as the origins of technology, though I completed the project too soon to benefit from the careful pointers in the newest edition of “Building the Perfect PC,” by Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson (O’Reilly, 2006). But it didn’t matter: for a while, amid the mess of the material world, I was a human incarnation of an operating system, selecting the pieces that mattered, binding them together, determining their placement, testing each one, sending out error messages (and complaints) to companies that sent faulty parts. I threaded wires through small holes, carefully fitted miniature plugs onto minuscule prongs, worried over heat produced by the computer’s churning calculations yet to come.

I like the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Here, sufficiently crude technology seemed indistinguishable from carpentry — or plumbing. The chip and board designers — Intel and Nvidia — were the real creative forces, determining the logic of this construction. But at a certain point, when I tried to remove a tiny piece of plastic that fit over two prongs and move it to another two while squeezing my fingers between two intertwined cables, the computer’s primitiveness became overwhelmingly clear.

Three decades ago, one less powerful would have filled a room, so I didn’t lack appreciation for the technological marvel, but the crudity of the operations made it seem as if I were striking flint to run an M.R.I. The contemporary PC, for all its abilities, is like a hand-cranked Model T of what might yet come.

Techne, that’s what it was: the Greek activity of craft, of making things. Hence, technology. But one aspect of contemporary technology is that it almost eliminates any sense of techne. A half-century ago, hot-rodders could take apart a car engine and see how it worked, how spark plugs ignited vaporized gasoline and pushed pistons.

With circuit boards there’s no clue. No wonder computers like the one I’ve made (and now write with) allow users to play with the voltages and speeds of components so they can jack up the processing or memory, “overclock” the PC and feel that they have indeed added something to the construction.

But most users dread turning a crank or pulling a spark plug. The real problem with contemporary technology is not when it hides techne, but when it fails to, when it forces its users to apply axle grease or dig around in the muck of detail. That is partly what an operating system is supposed to prevent. It hides the boggling bookkeeping that is required for each step the computer takes.

How much more astonishing, then, is what Microsoft has accomplished. Apple had it easy: it kept its PC box closed, maintaining control over the hardware so it would perfectly suit its software. But Microsoft faced hundreds of thousands of boards, drives and chips like those I had spread out before me a few weeks ago, all of differing technological vintages, made by hundreds of companies with wildly different goals. Microsoft has taken these objects, along with the many thousands of PC programs now sold, and tried to create a system that would overlook their dizzying differences, bind them to a coherent vision and force them, in all their variety, to leave techne behind for the uncharted possibilities of magic.

No need to point out that in Vista, the ambition is necessarily unfulfilled. (I’ve already found problems some techne-minded team at Microsoft should address, and not every product advertising its Vista-readiness is really ready.) But the progress is unmistakable, which is why Vista can get away with its evocation of immateriality; it almost becomes plausible.

Windows don’t simply minimize; they sort of glide away as they shrink. The screen’s once staid borders and buttons are given a three-dimensional glossiness; hints of transparency and glints of reflections make controls and icons glimmer with light. Microsoft calls the effect Aero, and it manages to be both ethereal and busy, like much else in this operating system, which — if the equipment is powerful enough — slips rather than snaps into place. Commands are turned into gesture.

Half magic, let us say, because I’ve had my problems amid the pleasures. But in the meantime, under the pressure, the PC too seems to be dissolving around the edges. Seven years ago, during the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Microsoft, the judicial “findings of fact” casually suggested that PCs are not necessarily used for Internet access; now it is difficult to find a PC that is not. In fact, the most intrusive aspects of Vista involve its persistent attempts to protect the computer from intrusion, to prevent violation from that risky expanse beyond its boundaries.

Internally, borders of the computer have changed as well, making many other pronouncements in the findings seem naïve. The PC is now audio system, television, video player and game machine, a shape-shifting object that the operating system must manage and manipulate. It is just as well that we don’t often become aware of how primitive the computer behind the curtain really is, or we might start to believe that its achievements really are a form of magic and not the product of laborious and meticulous techne.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/ar...gn/07conn.html





Open Source Is Democratising Knowledge
Nandu Pradhan

In September 1991, when Linux Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, released 10,000 lines of code on the Internet, nobody could have believed that it would spark off a revolution.

In the 15 years since then, Linux has grown into an enormously capable operating system that contains more than 100 million lines of code that runs on tiny embedded computers to supercomputers and everything in-between. This has been made possible through the contribution of thousands of volunteers across the world working together over the Internet, in what is perhaps the largest collaborative projects in the history of mankind.

Linux is the leading example of the open source movement that is democratizing knowledge and the tools with which we access knowledge. The open source principles of community, collaboration and the shared ownership of knowledge have lead to a transformation in the way knowledge is created and distributed. This has profound implications for India and other developing countries.

Linux was released under the General Public License created by the Free Software Foundation which gives users four freedoms: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose; the freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs, the freedom to redistribute copies and share it with others and the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. A precondition to these four freedoms is that the source code for the software is freely available.

For millions of software developers across the world, this access to source code and the ability to improve it to meet their needs has been enormously empowering. In the area of supercomputing, scientists have coupled together commodity hardware and open source software to build complex systems that have drastically reduced the cost per teraflop for supercomputers.

For millions of users across the world, the ability to freely copy the operating system has meant that they can try it out on their computers for free and pay for value added services like support, customization and training, as and when they are ready.

Across the world, governments like China, Brazil, Venezuela and others have been embracing open source because it reduces their dependence on monopolistic vendors and their monopoly pricing structures and restrictive licensing practices. In India, Kerala, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu have declared their intention to use open source software to make IT more widely accessible to their citizens.

Enterprises across India have also been quick to realise the benefits of open source despite the enourmous amounts of FUD (fear, uncertainity and doubt) that proprietary vendors have sought to create. Today, enterprises like LIC, IDBI, IRCTC, IndiaBulls, UTI Bank, Canara Bank, CESC and others use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other open source software to run their mission critical applications. The SMS voting backbone for highly popular TV shows like Kaun Banega Crorepati and Indian Idol also run on Red Hat Enteprise Linux.

Linux is now well established as a reliable, stable and secure operating system on servers. According to IDC, Linux server sales grew from 4.3 billion in 2004 to 5.3 billion in 2005 as customers deployed it in a wider range of technical and commercial workloads. Over the last few years, Linux has also emerged as a capable desktop operating system with slick desktop user interfaces and an excellent, free office productivity suite in Open Office. Those who have used the Linux desktop have been pleasantly surprised by its capabilities. The Kerala government has decided to move around 12,500 schools to Linux after finding proprietary software to be unaffordable.

It is no surprise that Linux and open source software have caught on rapidly in India. Our traditions of knowledge like yoga and ayurveda have always been free and open to all. We have successfuly built commercial models have been built on top of free knowledge as can be seen from the proliferation of Ayurvedic spas and the fact that yoga is a $30 billion industry in the US.

Open source proves that the age old adage that we all grow richer by sharing knowledge still holds true in the Internet era. For decision makers who are implementing IT, it is time to take a long hard look at the long term benefits of open source and evaluate the value it provides on servers and desktops.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...ow/1559308.cms





Are Women Allowed to be Funny?

Comedy mirrors culture, but observers say that many men and women find attractive, aggressively funny women threatening.
Gloria Goodale

Thursday night, "The Sarah Silverman Program" debuted on Comedy Central. If it had aired on regular broadcast TV many punch lines and entire story lines would probably have been "bleeped" or cut. The comedian who has been called a "delightful potty mouth" certainly has a devoted fan base who has followed her from stand-up to the silver screen and now, to the home screen.

Cable television has long pioneered new frontiers in what's funny, allowing comedians to tackle taboo subjects with reckless abandon. That is, if they were male. The fact that Ms. Sliverman – considered one of comedy's rising stars with her engaging smile and bawdy humor – has been given room to run proves just how far women have come on the stand-up stage.

Yet, for every step forward, say many comics and cultural observers, when it comes to being funny, women still face many societal prejudices. Nice girls just don't act like that, says comedy veteran Rusty Warren, who recalls male audience members storming out of her shows. Not much has changed today, say observers who suggest that many people, men and women, find attractive, aggressively funny women like Silverman threatening.

Witness the recent column in Vanity Fair which declared "Women Aren't Funny" (written by Christopher Hitchens). And despite the fact that his ABC comedy employed numerous funny women, comic Drew Carey says the prejudices are real. It's not so much that women aren't funny, he explains, as that men don't want them to be funny. "Comedy is about aggression and confrontation and power," says the stand-up comic. "As a culture we just don't allow women to do all that stuff."

Certain roles have been acceptable for women since the rise of mass media: the sexy vamp (think Mae West) or the ditzy klutz (everyone from Carole Lombard to Lucille Ball and Debra Messing). "These roles aren't threatening to men," says actress Jennifer Coolidge who has made a career of crafting cunning but klutzy airheaded females. She adds, "they play into men's stereotypes of women as sexpots or stupid." Indeed, a pregnant Joan Rivers once worried if such a protruding reference to her sexuality, her belly, might hurt her career.

Comedy definitely mirrors the culture, says comedian Kelley Lynn, who is also an adjunct professor and teaches a comedy class at Adelphi University, in Garden City, N.Y. She says she is amazed at the differences between her male and female students. "The boys just seem to come in with all this confidence, whether their material is funny or not," says Ms. Lynn, "whereas the girls come in and say, 'Is this funny?' " Almost always, she adds, the material is just as funny, if not more so, but the girls lack the confidence to deliver it with conviction. "There will continue to be progress for women in the world of comedy as the world changes," Lynn says, "but it may take generations."

The rise of sketch comedy has helped women comics. The collaborative form entered mainstream culture in the '70s with groups such as Monty Python and TV shows such as "Saturday Night Live" (SNL), which has since turned it into a household term. The form has helped nurture generations of successful women comics such as Jane Curtin and Tina Fey. (Fey now has her own show on NBC, "30 Rock," based loosely on her experiences at SNL.)

"We've been incredibly friendly to women over the years," says SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels, who has shepherded the show from its inception.

Sketch comedy is well-suited to encourage women, says Cherie Kerr, one of the founders of the seminal comedy troupe from the '70s, The Groundlings. "Suddenly, comedy wasn't so much about the solo stand-up anymore," she says. "It was about a whole group onstage, working together to make the skit work." While she says with a laugh that SNL is certainly a competitive place, the cooperation and working together is much more a woman's style than the confrontational style of stand-up comedy.

Silverman represents a generation of young comics who've come of age in an era of few restrictions. "I don't think anything is off limits, if it's funny enough," says Silverman. "If it's more funny than offensive to us, then it's fine, no matter what it is."

Nonetheless, says comic Paul Rodriguez, Silverman still faces yet another stubborn stereotype: Pretty women aren't funny, especially when spouting vulgarities. Men still put women on a pedestal where they expect them to behave, well, nicely – like a mother, says Mr. Rodriguez. "If an unattractive woman tells jokes, it's OK, we'll cut her a break," he says. "It's just a man's world, comedy is full of prejudices, whether we like it or not, it's true."

But good comedy is based on truthful observation, even if it's the painful reality that not much has changed when it comes right down to it, says Diane Salvatore, editor in chief of the Ladies' Home Journal. "People still tend to think of comedy as a job for men, sort of like the presidency," she adds with a rueful laugh.

For the past three years, the magazine has run an annual spotlight on "Funny Ladies We Love." The next one runs in March. Just like politics, good comedy takes courage, says Ms. Salvatore. "We want to do our part to support that."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0202/p11s02-algn.html





The Unseen and Unexplained, Inching Closer to the Truth
Alessandra Stanley

Anyone who thinks it’s a good sign that “Lost” is back has not spent enough time at the Web site of James Randi, a skeptical scholar of the pseudoscientific and the supernatural.

A fan recently posed this question online at randi.org: “Is a fascination and increased belief in the supernatural a sign of social decline?”

The answer came as categorically as the words under the Magic 8-Ball: “Yes. Absolutely.”

By itself, “Lost” may not be a harbinger of the decline of Western civilization. But alongside “Heroes,” as well as “Medium,” “Ghost Whisperer” and “Raines,” a new NBC drama that begins in March and stars Jeff Goldblum as a detective who solves murders by appearing to commune with dead victims, the collapse looks pretty darn nigh.

“Lost,” on ABC tonight, is the most intriguing of all the series that traffic in the supernatural, mostly because it defies its own illogical reasoning. As the third season resumes after a three-month hiatus, nothing about the fate of the plane wreck survivors marooned on a paranormal island (or is it an archipelago?) makes much sense. But the real mystery of “Lost” is not the Dharma Initiative, the Others or why some characters are named after British philosophers (John Locke, Edmund Burke). It’s whether the writers actually have a cohesive story line that ties together all the unexplained subplots.

“Lost” is at heart a science-fiction thriller, while “Heroes” is more of a comic book, but both genres have a similar appeal: they provide an alternative society for those who don’t fit comfortably into their own. (That is to say, smart, socially awkward adults and all 12-year-old boys.)

No matter how far-fetched and complicated that imaginary world may be, it is bound by its own intricate set of rules and customs, be it Quidditch regulations at Hogwarts; etiquette on Superman’s native planet, Krypton; or military rank in “Battlestar Galactica.”

On NBC’s “Heroes” there is still very little information about the unseen force or forces that have left a group of seemingly ordinary people with supernatural powers, yet the show’s own conventions are rigidly upheld. A clef-shaped symbol (a combination of two Japanese characters and/or a reference to the genetic code) appears regularly to mark renewed evidence of unnatural powers.

“Heroes,” which, like “Lost,” has a large cast and plotlines that zigzag and splinter, is intentionally ZOWIE! and KAPOW! Isaac even paints his premonitory visions in the style of graphic novels. But the story unfolds at a more direct, almost methodical pace. On Monday viewers learned the identity of the biological father of Claire, the Texas cheerleader with a bizarre ability to heal instantly from any wound. Every episode appears to inch closer to an overarching explanation; the show’s creator, Tim Kring, has hinted that he has no precise ending in sight.

“Lost” has an even more improvisational feel, fitting for a show that was dreamed up as a fictional version of “Survivor” by Lloyd Braun, a top ABC executive while on vacation in Hawaii. (Disney fired Mr. Braun but kept the script.)

Many of the characters and plot twists are serendipitous add-ons. At the moment, the season is focused on Henry Gale/Benjamin Linus, the sinister and enigmatic leader of the Others, who seems to be conducting strange scientific experiments on a nearby island. The actor who plays Henry/Ben, Michael Emerson, was originally hired for three episodes, but was apparently held over by popular demand. Tonight’s episode begins with Jack poised to remove a tumor from Henry/Ben’s spine — to stave off the execution of Kate and Sawyer.

The fans of these kinds of serialized thrillers are unusually passionate and devoted, carrying a clout not unlike that of anti-abortion activists — their intensity is in some ways more powerful than their numbers. The writers of “Lost” say they pay close attention to Web sites and blogs devoted to the show, and sometimes adapt the script accordingly.

A reference to “Our Mutual Friend” surfaced at the end of the second season, a hint that the show’s executive producers identify with Charles Dickens. Yet “Lost” seems less like a sprawling, serialized 19th-century novel than like “American Idol”: the show’s writers and producers are so responsive to public reaction that viewers may as well be voting characters on and off the island by phone and text message.

(“Heroes,” on the other hand, seems most responsive to the demands of NBC’s promotional department. Every new phase in the story comes with a coy slogan, from “Save the Cheerleader” and “Are You on the List?” to the latest, “Who’s Claire’s Daddy?”)

Both serialized dramas appeal to younger audiences, but “Heroes” is especially popular with school-age children who enjoy the series’s comic-book sensibility. (Unlike “Lost,” in which the only youngster, Walt, was kidnapped and is still missing, “Heroes” has one main character who is still in high school.) But its contemporary settings in New York, Mumbai, Texas and California allow for more real-world references. Nowadays, many dramas obliquely echo the public’s disenchantment with their government after Abu Ghraib and the quagmire in Iraq.

So does “Heroes.” In a recent episode two Los Angeles police officers sought to interview a suspect whose supernatural power consisted of emitting deadly radiation from his pores. “He’s got one hour before Homeland Security sends him down the rabbit hole as a suspected terrorist,” one officer says.

The other tartly replies, “We both know he’s not a terrorist.”

“Lost,” set mostly on a hot, tropical island, has less opportunity to reflect contemporary political issues — unless, of course, the errant polar bear stalking the castaways serves as a symbol of global warming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/ar...on/07watc.html





A Princeton Lab on ESP Plans to Close Its Doors
Benedict Carey

Over almost three decades, a small laboratory at Princeton University managed to embarrass university administrators, outrage Nobel laureates, entice the support of philanthropists and make headlines around the world with its efforts to prove that thoughts can alter the course of events.

But at the end of the month, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, or PEAR, will close, not because of controversy but because, its founder says, it is time.

The laboratory has conducted studies on extrasensory perception and telekinesis from its cramped quarters in the basement of the university’s engineering building since 1979. Its equipment is aging, its finances dwindling.

“For 28 years, we’ve done what we wanted to do, and there’s no reason to stay and generate more of the same data,” said the laboratory’s founder, Robert G. Jahn, 76, former dean of Princeton’s engineering school and an emeritus professor. “If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will.”

Princeton made no official comment.

The closing will end one of the strangest tales in modern science, or science fiction, depending on one’s point of view. The laboratory has long had a strained relationship with the university. Many scientists have been openly dismissive of it.

“It’s been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton,” said Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist who is the author of “Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud.” “Science has a substantial amount of credibility, but this is the kind of thing that squanders it.”

PEAR has been an anomaly from the start, a ghost in the machine room of physical science that was never acknowledged as substantial and yet never entirely banished. Its longevity illustrates the strength and limitations of scientific peer review, the process by which researchers appraise one another’s work.

“We know people have ideas beyond the mainstream,” said the sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, author of “Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States” and senior vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ”but if they want funds for research they have to go through peer review, and the system is going to be very skeptical of ideas that are inconsistent with what is already known.”

Dr. Jahn, one of the world’s foremost experts on jet propulsion, defied the system. He relied not on university or government money but on private donations — more than $10 million over the years, he estimated. The first and most generous donor was his friend James S. McDonnell, a founder of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation.

Those gifts paid for a small staff and a gallery of random-motion machines, including a pendulum with a lighted crystal at the end; a giant, wall-mounted pachinko-like machine with a cascade of bouncing balls; and a variety of electronic boxes with digital number displays.

In one of PEAR’s standard experiments, the study participant would sit in front of an electronic box the size of a toaster oven, which flashed a random series of numbers just above and just below 100. Staff members instructed the person to simply “think high” or “think low” and watch the display. After thousands of repetitions — the equivalent of coin flips — the researchers looked for differences between the machine’s output and random chance.

Analyzing data from such trials, the PEAR team concluded that people could alter the behavior of these machines very slightly, changing about 2 or 3 flips out of 10,000. If the human mind could alter the behavior of such a machine, Dr. Jahn argued, then thought could bring about changes in many other areas of life — helping to heal disease, for instance, in oneself and others.

This kind of talk fascinated the public and attracted the curiosity of dozens of students, at Princeton and elsewhere. But it left most scientists cold. A physics Ph.D. and an electrical engineer joined Dr. Jahn’s project, but none of the university’s 700 or so professors did. Prominent research journals declined to accept papers from PEAR. One editor famously told Dr. Jahn that he would consider a paper “if you can telepathically communicate it to me.”

Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist, has managed the laboratory since it opened and has been a co-author of many of its study papers. “We submitted our data for review to very good journals,” Ms. Dunne said, “but no one would review it. We have been very open with our data. But how do you get peer review when you don’t have peers?”

Several expert panels examined PEAR’s methods over the years, looking for irregularities, but did not find sufficient reasons to interrupt the work. In the 1980s and 1990s, PEAR published more than 60 research reports, most appearing in the journal of the Society for Scientific Exploration, a group devoted to the study of topics outside the scientific mainstream. Dr. Jahn and Ms. Dunne are officers in the society.

News of the Princeton group’s experiments spread quickly worldwide, among people interested in paranormal phenomena, including telekinesis and what people call extrasensory perception. Notable figures from Europe and Asia stopped by. . Keith Jarrett, the jazz pianist, paid a visit. For a time, the philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller visited regularly and donated money for research.

And many people, in and out of science, joined what Ms. Dunne called the PEAR Tree, a kind of secret society of people interested in the paranormal, she said. Many PEAR Tree members who are science faculty members will not reveal themselves publicly, Ms. Dunne said.

The culture of science, at its purest, is one of freedom in which any idea can be tested regardless of how far-fetched it might seem.

“I don’t believe in anything Bob is doing, but I support his right to do it,” said Will Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton.

Other top-flight scientists have taken chances. At the end of his career, Linus Pauling, the Nobel laureate, came to believe that vitamin C supplements could prevent and treat cancer, heart disease and other ailments. Dr. Pauling had some outside financing, too, and conducted research and had plenty of media coverage. But in the end he did not sway many of his colleagues, Dr. Zuckerman said.

At the PEAR offices this week, the staff worked amid boxes, piles of paper and a roll of bubble wrap as big as an oil drum. The random-event machines are headed for storage.

The study of telekinesis and related phenomena, Dr. Jahn said, will carry on.

“It’s time for a new era,” he said, “for someone to figure out what the implications of our results are for human culture, for future study, and — if the findings are correct — what they say about our basic scientific attitude.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/sc...rtner=homepage


















Until next week,

- js.



















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