[JackSpratts]

Who Needs Hackers?
John Schwartz

NOTHING was moving. International travelers flying into Los Angeles International Airport — more than 17,000 of them — were stuck on planes for hours one day in mid-August after computers for the United States Customs and Border Protection agency went down and stayed down for nine hours.

Hackers? Nope. Though it was the kind of chaos that malevolent computer intruders always seem to be creating in the movies, the problem was traced to a malfunctioning network card on a desktop computer. The flawed card slowed the network and set off a domino effect as failures rippled through the customs network at the airport, officials said.

Everybody knows hackers are the biggest threat to computer networks, except that it ain’t necessarily so.

Yes, hackers are still out there, and not just teenagers: malicious insiders, political activists, mobsters and even government agents all routinely test public and private computer networks and occasionally disrupt services. But experts say that some of the most serious, even potentially devastating, problems with networks arise from sources with no malevolent component.

Whether it’s the Los Angeles customs fiasco or the unpredictable network cascade that brought the global Skype telephone service down for two days in August, problems arising from flawed systems, increasingly complex networks and even technology headaches from corporate mergers can make computer systems less reliable. Meanwhile, society as a whole is growing ever more dependent on computers and computer networks, as automated controls become the norm for air traffic, pipelines, dams, the electrical grid and more.

“We don’t need hackers to break the systems because they’re falling apart by themselves,” said Peter G. Neumann, an expert in computing risks and principal scientist at SRI International, a research institute in Menlo Park, Calif.

Steven M. Bellovin, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, said: “Most of the problems we have day to day have nothing to do with malice. Things break. Complex systems break in complex ways.”

When the electrical grid went out in the summer of 2003 throughout the Eastern United States and Canada, “it wasn’t any one thing, it was a cascading set of things,” Mr. Bellovin noted.

That is why Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a founding partner at Nemertes Research, a technology research company in Mokena, Ill., says, “The threat is complexity itself.”

Change is the fuel of business, but it also introduces complexity, Mr. Antonopoulos said, whether by bringing together incompatible computer networks or simply by growing beyond the network’s ability to keep up.

“We have gone from fairly simple computing architectures to massively distributed, massively interconnected and interdependent networks,” he said, adding that as a result, flaws have become increasingly hard to predict or spot. Simpler systems could be understood and their behavior characterized, he said, but greater complexity brings unintended consequences.

“On the scale we do it, it’s more like forecasting weather,” he said.

Kenneth M. Ritchhart, the chief information officer for the customs and border agency, agreed that complexity was at the heart of the problem at the Los Angeles airport. “As we move from stovepipes to interdependent systems,” he said, “it becomes increasingly difficult to identify and correct problems.”

At first, the agency thought the source of the trouble was routers, not the network cards. “Many times the problems you see that you try to correct are not the root causes of the problem,” he said.

And even though his department takes the threat of hacking and malicious cyberintruders seriously, he said, “I’ve got a list of 16 things that I try to address in terms of outages — only one of them is cyber- or malicious attacks.” Others include national power failures, data corruption and physical attacks on facilities.

In the case of Skype, the company — which says it has more than 220 million users, with millions online at any time — was deluged on Aug. 16 with login attempts by computers that had restarted after downloading a security update for Microsoft’s Windows operating system. A company employee, Villu Arak, posted a note online that blamed a “massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short time frame” for the 48-hour failure, saying it had overtaxed the network. Though the company has software to “self-heal” in such situations, “this event revealed a previously unseen software bug” in the program that allocates computing resources.

As computer networks are cobbled together, said Matt Moynahan, the chief executive of Veracode, a security company, “the Law of the Weakest Link always seems to prevail.” Whatever flaw or weakness allows a problem to occur compromises the entire system, just as one weak section of a levee can inundate an entire community, he said.

This is not a new problem, of course. The first flight of the space shuttle in 1981 was delayed minutes before launching because of a previously undetected software problem.

The “bug heard round the world,” as a former NASA software engineer, John B. Garman, put it in a technical paper, came down to a failure that would emerge only if a certain sequence of events occurred — and even then only once in 64 times. He wrote: “It is complexity of design and process that got us (and Murphy’s Law!). Complexity in the sense that we, the ‘software industry,’ are still naïve and forge into large systems such as this with too little computer, budget, schedule and definition of the software code.”

In another example, the precursor to the Internet known as the Arpanet collapsed for four hours in 1980 after years of smooth functioning. According to Dr. Neumann of SRI, the collapse “resulted from an unforeseen interaction among three different causes” that included what he called “an overly lazy garbage collection algorithm” that allowed the errors to accumulate and overwhelm the fledgling network.

Where are the weaknesses most likely to have grave consequences? Every expert has a suggestion.

Aviel D. Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said that glitches could be an enormous problem in high-tech voting machines. “Maybe we have focused too much on hackers and not on the possibility of something going wrong,” he said. “Sometimes the worst problems happen by accident.”

Dr. Rubin, who is director of the Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections, a group financed by the National Science Foundation to study voting issues, noted that glitches had already shown up in many elections using the new generation of voting machines sold to states in the wake of the Florida election crisis in 2000, when the fate of the national election came down to issues like hanging chads on punch-card ballots.

Dr. Bellovin at Columbia said he also worried about what might happen with the massively complex antimissile systems that the government is developing. “It’s a system you can’t really test until the real thing happens,” he said.

There are better ways.

Making systems strong enough to recover quickly from the inevitable glitches and problems can keep disruption to a minimum. The customs service came under some of the most heated criticism for not having a backup plan that could quickly compensate for the network flameout; eventually, airport officials had to provide fuel to the planes so that the airlines could run the air-conditioning, and provided food, beverages and diapers to the trapped passengers.

Mr. Ritchhart said it was unfair to characterize his department as having no backup plan. In fact, there were two — but neither addressed the problem. The main backup plan envisions a shutdown of the national customs network, and allows local networks to function independently. Since it was the local network that was in trouble at Los Angeles, he said, that backup plan did not work.

The other fallback involves setting up customs agents with laptops that are equipped to scan the millions of names on the watchlists and to perform other functions. That system was put in place, he said, but the laptops operate at one-third the speed of the computer network, and the delays persisted. The agency is reviewing its policies to improve its response, he said, and if a similar slowdown occurs, is considering having agents call colleagues in other cities to perform searches on functioning parts of the network.

The best answer, Dr. Neumann says, is to build computers that are secure and stable from the start. A system with fewer flaws also deters hackers, he said. “If you design the thing right in the first place, you can make it reliable, secure, fault tolerant and human safe,” he said. “The technology is there to do this right if anybody wanted to take the effort.”

He was part of an effort that began in the 1960s to develop a rock-solid network-operating system known as Multics, but those efforts gave way to more commercially successful systems. Multics’ creators were so farsighted, Dr. Neumann recalled, that its designers even anticipated and prevented the “Year 2000” problem that had to be corrected in other computers. That flaw, known as Y2K, caused some machines to malfunction if they detected dates after Jan. 1, 2000. Billions of dollars were spent to prevent problems.

Dr. Neumann, who has been preaching network stability since the 1960s, said, “The message never got through.” Pressures to ship software and hardware quickly and to keep costs at a minimum, he said, have worked against more secure and robust systems.

“We throw this together, shrink wrap it and throw it out there,” he said. “There’s no incentive to do it right, and that’s pitiful.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/te.../12threat.html





Chicago Transit Vulnerabilities Leaked
UPI

Documents showing the Chicago mass transit system's vulnerability to terrorist attack have been leaked on the Internet via a peer-to-peer file-sharing network.

Thirty-five of the nation's bus and rail systems were studied to determine potential vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks. The Federal Transit Administration commissioned Virginia-based Booz-Allen Hamilton to conduct the terrorist threat assessment. The confidential documents were obtained using a P2P program called LimeWire, according to a local Fox News affiliate in Chicago. Officials say the leaked documents illustrate specific terrorist vulnerabilities to Chicago's Metra and CTA transit systems.

The FTA has asked Booz-Allen Hamilton to identify the source of the leak.

By loading P2P software, such as LimeWire, on a home or work computer, individuals can access the computers of others who have also installed a P2P program. However, if not set up properly, P2P file-sharing networks could expose computers to certain viruses, or even a user's entire hard drive could be vulnerable for unauthorized viewing, allowing documents to be uploaded.

"It's a stunning security lapse because it gives several important directions for a terrorist in how to attack the system," said Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., in a statement. "If you can download it on your home computer, then an al-Qaida operative in Germany can do it too."
http://www.upi.com/International_Sec...s_leaked/1521/





Security Expert Used Tor to Collect Government e-Mail Passwords
Ryan Paul

Last month, Swedish security specialist Dan Egerstad exposed the passwords and login information for 100 e-mail accounts on embassy and government servers. In a blog entry today, Egerstad disclosed his methodology. He collected the information by running a specialized packet sniffer on five Tor exit nodes operated by his organization, Deranged Security.

Tor is an onion routing service that facilitates anonymous Internet communication. Originally developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory and currently funded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Tor is designed to protect users from traffic analysis and other kinds of network surveillance. It works by relaying connections through a series of distributed network servers. When a Tor user visits a web site, the IP address detected and logged by that site will be the IP address of one of the Tor nodes rather than the actual user. This makes it possible for users to obscure their identity under certain circumstances.

Unfortunately, many Tor users do not realize that all of their network traffic is being exposed to Tor nodes. Tor users who do not use encryption are broadly exposing themselves to identity theft. Egerstad was originally doing a study on e-mail encryption, but during the course of the research project, he decided to create the packet sniffer and expose sensitive e-mail login data in order to increase awareness of the fact that Tor exposes sensitive information when not used with encryption.

Egerstad believed that privately disclosing his findings to the organizations whose passwords he obtained would not convince them to change their practices. He also knew that it was only a matter of time before others with malicious intent would perform the same kind of experiment, so he felt that broad public disclosure was the only way he could generate enough attention to force people to think about the problem.

"Experience tells me that even if I would contact everyone on this list most are not going to listen," Egerstad wrote when he released the login information last month. "So f*** it! Here is everything you need to read classified email and f*** up some serious International business. Hopefully this will put light on the security problems that are never talked about and get at least this fixed with a speed that you never seen your government work before. As a Swedish citizen I can't give this information to anyone without getting into trouble, so instead I'm giving it to everyone."

After publicly releasing the information, Egerstad's site was taken down at the request of US law enforcement officials. After it was brought back earlier this week, Egerstad expressed frustration and pointed out that the information was already spreading across the Internet. Taking down Egerstad's site only served to silence his message about security and did not prevent dissemination of the sensitive data. "I've seen people saying that the US would be angry now that we forced foreign countries to tighten their security so NSA or whatever can't read their secrets any longer. To me it sounds like bulls*** taken out of a bad book but after this silly little stunt I'm reconsidering. Is there any reason you DO NOT want people to secure their systems?" asked Egerstad.

According to Egerstad, the information disclosed is only a fraction of what he collected. He continues to argue that the responsibility for exposing the login information rests on the organizations that failed to use encryption and that he simply drew attention to information that was essentially already public. "ToR isn't the problem, just use it for what it's made for," Egerstad notes. "[The system administrators for the organizations whose passwords were exposed] are responsible for giving away their own countries secrets to foreigners. I can't call it a mistake, this is pure stupidity and not forgivable!"

Egerstad also points out that very little is known about the intentions and activity of other Tor exit node operators, some of whom are already known to be associated with malicious hacker groups and foreign governments.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...passwords.html





City Disables Access to Online Archive
Will Bigham

City officials Tuesday disabled public access to City Hall's online document archive, citing concerns that it may have been the source of city employee pay stubs that were posted by the Claremont Insider blog.

On Monday night, Google, which hosts the blog, removed the post that included the pay stubs. The blog later re-posted the item without including the scanned pay stubs.

"Bottom line is, if we have a problem with our system that would allow for information that shouldn't be public to be public, we need to identify if there is a problem with our system," said City Manager Jeff Parker. "So until that is solved and identified, we're going to take that action."

City officials continue to investigate how the pay stubs were released. They remain unwilling to confirm claims made by the lead author of the blog that the pay stubs were accessed through a legal search of the city's public document archive.

On Friday, the Claremont Insider posted a copy of Parker's pay stub, along with the salaries and benefits of 31 staff members identified by name.

The blog later posted the pay stub of Jeff Porter, director of human services, and the salaries and benefits of five additional staff members.

The Claremont Insider has said in blog posts that it typed something along the lines of "Jeff Parker salary" into the search function of the archive, yielding several years' worth of pay stubs.

But attempts by the city to duplicate the search yielded no pay stubs, said Mayor Peter Yao, fueling concerns that the documents may have been obtained by other means.

City Attorney Sonia Carvalho first contacted Google on Friday to request that the post be removed because, the city claims, the pay stubs contain private information about employees that should not be available to the public.

In an interview Tuesday, Carvalho would not elaborate on her communication with Google and refused to release the city's e-mail correspondence with the company, citing attorney-client privilege.

Carvalho said the city was withholding the e-mail correspondence because city litigation against Google remains a possibility if the company fails in the future to respond if the blog re-posts copies of the pay stubs.

In an e-mail response on Tuesday to the Daily Bulletin, Google spokeswoman Wendy Rozeluk said: "Blogger prohibits certain kinds of content from being hosted on its servers."

"When we are notified of the existence of content that violates our terms of service," Rozeluk added, "we act quickly to review it and determine whether it violates these policies. If we determine that it does, we remove it immediately."

According to e-mails forwarded to the Daily Bulletin from the e-mail address listed on the Claremont Insider blog, Google removed the post because the city documents were copyrighted.

The authenticity of the correspondence could not be confirmed by Google because the Internet company did not respond to interview requests on Tuesday.

"We have removed your post due to the images of the paycheck stub of the city of Claremont, which in actuality is their copyrighted material," the e-mail from Google said. "If you would like to reload the post that we removed, feel free to do so as long as you leave out the images of the paycheck."

Parker and Carvalho refused to discuss whether the city argued in its correspondence with Google that the city pay stubs were copyrighted documents.

According to one open-government expert, the documents are not copyrighted.

"It doesn't make any sense," said Terry Francke, general counsel of Californians Aware. "First of all, I doubt that it's a fact that the city copyrights the pay stubs. I don't know why it would.

"And secondly, it's not clear to me that the display of the pay stubs would violate the copyright act anyway. It's simply displaying an image of them, it's not making a copy of them."

Francke added that if the documents are indeed copyrighted, the posting by the blog of the pay stubs would qualify as a "fair use" - meaning it would pass legal muster - because there is no market value lost by the publication.

"And what possible market value does the city have in the images of its pay stubs?" Francke added.
http://origin.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_6867548





Tell-All PCs and Phones Transforming Divorce
Brad Stone

The age-old business of breaking up has taken a decidedly Orwellian turn, with digital evidence like e-mail messages, traces of Web site visits and mobile telephone records now permeating many contentious divorce cases.

Spurned lovers steal each other’s BlackBerrys. Suspicious spouses hack into each other’s e-mail accounts. They load surveillance software onto the family PC, sometimes discovering shocking infidelities.

Divorce lawyers routinely set out to find every bit of private data about their clients’ adversaries, often hiring investigators with sophisticated digital forensic tools to snoop into household computers.

“In just about every case now, to some extent, there is some electronic evidence,” said Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, who also runs seminars on gathering electronic evidence. “It has completely changed our field.”

Privacy advocates have grown increasingly worried that digital tools are giving governments and powerful corporations the ability to peek into peoples’ lives as never before. But the real snoops are often much closer to home.

“Google and Yahoo may know everything, but they don’t really care about you,” said Jacalyn F. Barnett, a Manhattan-based divorce lawyer. “No one cares more about the things you do than the person that used to be married to you.”

Most of these stories do not end amicably. This year, a technology consultant from the Philadelphia area, who did not want his name used because he has a teenage son, strongly suspected his wife was having an affair. Instead of confronting her, the husband installed a $49 program called PC Pandora on her computer, a laptop he had purchased.

The program surreptitiously took snapshots of her screen every 15 seconds and e-mailed them to him. Soon he had a comprehensive overview of the sites she visited and the instant messages she was sending. Since the program captured her passwords, the husband was also able to get access to and print all the e-mail messages his wife had received and sent over the previous year.

What he discovered ended his marriage. For 11 months, he said, she had been seeing another man — the parent of one of their son’s classmates at a private school outside Philadelphia. The husband said they were not only arranging meetings but also posting explicit photos of themselves on the Web and soliciting sex with other couples.

The husband, who like others in this article was reached through his lawyer, said the decision to invade his wife’s privacy was not an easy one. “If I were to tell you I have a pure ethical conscience over what I did, I’d be lying,” he said. But he also pointed to companies that have Internet policies giving them the right to read employee e-mail messages. “When you’re in a relationship like a marriage, which is emotional as well as, candidly, a business, I think you can look at it in the same way,” he said.

When considering invading their spouse’s privacy, husbands and wives cite an overriding desire to find out some secret. One woman described sensing last year that her husband, a Manhattan surgeon, was distant and overly obsessed with his BlackBerry.

She drew him a bubble bath on his birthday and then pounced on the device while he was in the tub. In his e-mail messages, she found evidence of an affair with a medical resident, including plans for them to meet that night.

A few weeks later, after the couple had tried to reconcile, the woman gained access to her husband’s America Online account (he had shared his password with her) and found messages from a mortgage company. It turned out he had purchased a $3 million Manhattan condominium, where he intended to continue his liaison.

“Every single time I looked at his e-mail I felt nervous,” the woman said. “But I did anyway because I wanted to know the truth.”

Being on the receiving end of electronic spying can be particularly disturbing. Jolene Barten-Bolender, a 45-year-old mother of three who lives in Dix Hills, N.Y., said that she was recently informed by AOL and Google, on the same day, that the passwords had been changed on two e-mail accounts she was using, suggesting that someone had gained access and was reading her messages. Last year, she discovered a Global Positioning System, or G.P.S., tracking device in a wheel well of the family car.

She suspects her husband of 24 years, whom she is divorcing.

“It makes me feel nauseous and totally violated,” Ms. Barten-Bolender said, speculating that he was trying to find out if she was seeing anyone. “Once anything is written down, you have to know it could be viewed by someone looking to invade or hurt you.”
Ms. Barten-Bolender’s husband and his lawyer declined to discuss her allegations.

Divorce lawyers say their files are filled with cases like these. Three-quarters of the cases of Nancy Chemtob, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, now involve some kind of electronic communications. She says she routinely asks judges for court orders to seize and copy the hard drives in the computers of her clients’ spouses, particularly if there is an opportunity to glimpse a couple’s full financial picture, or a parent’s suitability to be the custodian of the children.

Lawyers must navigate a complex legal landscape governing the admissibility of this kind of electronic evidence. Different laws define when it is illegal to get access to information stored on a computer in the home, log into someone else’s e-mail account, or listen in on phone calls.

Divorce lawyers say, however, if the computer in question is shared by the whole family, or couples have revealed their passwords to each other, reading a spouse’s e-mail messages and introducing them as evidence in a divorce case is often allowed.

Lynne Z. Gold-Bikin, a Pennsylvania divorce lawyer, describes one client, a man, who believed his wife was engaging in secret online correspondence. He found e-mail messages to a lover in Australia that she had sent from a private AOL account on the family computer. Her lawyer then challenged the use of this evidence in court. Ms. Gold-Bikin’s client won the dispute and an advantageous settlement.

Lawyers say the only communications that are consistently protected in a spouse’s private e-mail account are the messages to and from the lawyers themselves, which are covered by lawyer-client privilege.

Perhaps for this reason, divorce lawyers as a group are among the most pessimistic when it comes to assessing the overall state of privacy in the digital age.

“I do not like to put things on e-mail,” said David Levy, a Chicago divorce lawyer. “There’s no way it’s private. Nothing is fully protected once you hit the send button.”

Ms. Chemtob added, “People have an expectation of privacy that is completely unrealistic.”

James Mulvaney agrees. A private investigator, Mr. Mulvaney now devotes much of his time to poking through the computer records of divorcing spouses, on behalf of divorce lawyers. One of his specialties is retrieving files, like bank records and e-mail messages to secret lovers, that a spouse has tried to delete.

“Every keystroke on your computer is there, forever and ever,” Mr. Mulvaney said.

He had one bit of advice. “The only thing you can truly erase these things with is a specialty Smith & Wesson product,” he said. “Throw your computer into the air and play skeet with it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/bu...hp&oref=slogin





Forensic Computer Promises to Make Quick Work of Digital Crime
Layer 8

A European consortium has come up with a high-speed digital forensic computer dedicated to the task of quickly offloading and analyzing all computer records from email or picture files to database contents and file transfers.The TreCorder is a rugged forensic PC able to copy or clone up to three hard disks simultaneously, at a speed of up to 2 Gb/min. The same transfer would take 30 to 60 minutes using alternative equipment said Martin Hermann, general director of MH-services, the company that lead product development in conjunction with EUREKA. EUREKA is a pan-European venture capital firm that offers partners access to knowledge, skills, expertise and of course national public and private funds.

The PC not only provides a complete mirror image of the hard disk and system memory - including deleted and reformatted date - but also eliminates any possibility of falsification in the process, Hermann said. It uses the FireWire high-speed serial bus to connect the host computer and provides support for IDE, SATA and SCSI hard disks, Hermann said in a statement.

Ultimately the goal of the TreCorder and forensics products similar to it is to provide companies and law-enforcement agencies digital forensic tools that can gather evidence to trap the criminals that will stand up in court. A particular need is to copy and analyze vast amounts of data very quickly in a write-protected manner to uncover the crime and provide legally credible evidence, Hermann said. Legal validity requires logical methodologies, transparency and detailed reporting. In addition, using the necessary tools correctly is essential. The goal therefore was to develop a PC-based forensic system that could read all types of memory technology and provide a mirror image of the data on any type of hard disk, sector by sector, using hardware-based writing protection to avoid any possibility of falsifying data while copying, Hermann said.

The new instrument is already attracting interest from security agencies, police forces, finance and tax authorities and accountancy organizations on both sides of the Atlantic, the company claims. Indeed security has been a huge problem with computer forensic work. A recent Network World article stated : The software that police and enterprise security teams use to investigate wrongdoing on computers is not as secure as it should be, according to researchers with Isec Partners. The security company has spent the past six months investigating two forensic investigation programs, Guidance Software's EnCase, and an open-source product called The Sleuth Kit. They have discovered about a dozen bugs that could be used to crash the programs or possibly even install unauthorized software on an investigator's machine, according to Alex Stamos, a researcher and founding partner with Isec Partners.

Researchers have been hacking forensics tools for years, but have traditionally focused on techniques that intruders could use to cover their tracks and thwart forensic investigations. The Isec team has taken a different tack, however, creating hacking tools that can be used to pound the software with data, looking for flaws.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/19197





Scientists Use the "Dark Web" to Snag Extremists and Terrorists Online

Team from the University of Arizona identifies and tracks terrorists on the Web
Press release

Terrorists and extremists have set up shop on the Internet, using it to recruit new members, spread propaganda and plan attacks across the world. The size and scope of these dark corners of the Web are vast and disturbing. But in a non-descript building in Tucson, a team of computational scientists are using the cutting-edge technology and novel new approaches to track their moves online, providing an invaluable tool in the global war on terror.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies, Hsinchun Chen and his Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona have created the Dark Web project, which aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web.

This is no small undertaking. The speed, ubiquity, and potential anonymity of Internet media--email, web sites, and Internet forums--make them ideal communication channels for militant groups and terrorist organizations. As a result, terrorists groups and their followers have created a vast presence on the Internet. A recent report estimates that there are more than 5,000 Web sites created and maintained by known international terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgencies, and many home-grown terrorist cells in Europe. Many of these sites are produced in multiple languages and can be hidden within innocuous-looking Web sites.

Because of its vital role in coordinating terror activities, analyzing Web content has become increasingly important to the intelligence agencies and research communities that monitor these groups, yet the sheer amount of material to be analyzed is so great that it can quickly overwhelm traditional methods of monitoring and surveillance.

This is where the Dark Web project comes in. Using advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis, Chen and his team can find, catalogue and analyze extremist activities online. According to Chen, scenarios involving vast amounts of information and data points are ideal challenges for computational scientists, who use the power of advanced computers and applications to find patterns and connections where humans can not.

One of the tools developed by Dark Web is a technique called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating 'anonymous' content online. Writeprint can look at a posting on an online bulletin board, for example, and compare it with writings found elsewhere on the Internet. By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past. The system can then alert analysts when the same author produces new content, as well as where on the Internet the content is being copied, linked to or discussed.

Dark Web also uses complex tracking software called Web spiders to search discussion threads and other content to find the corners of the Internet where terrorist activities are taking place. But according to Chen, sometimes the terrorists fight back.

"They can put booby-traps in their Web forums," Chen explains, "and the spider can bring back viruses to our machines." This online cat-and-mouse game means Dark Web must be constantly vigilant against these and other counter-measures deployed by the terrorists.

Despite the risks, Dark Web is producing tangible results in the global war on terror. The project team recently completed a study of online stories and videos designed to help train terrorists in how to build improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Understanding what information is being spread about IED methods and where in the world it is being downloaded can improve countermeasures that are developed to thwart them.

Dark Web is also a major research testbed for understanding the propaganda, ideology, communication, fundraising, command and control, and recruitment and training of terrorist groups. The Dark Web team has used the tools at their disposal to explore the content and impact of materials relating to "virtual imams" on the Internet, as well as terrorist training and weapons manuals.

Dark Web's capabilities are also being used to study the online presence of extremist groups and other social movement organizations. Chen sees applications for this Web mining approach for other academic fields.

"What we are doing is using this to study societal change," Chen says. "Evidence of this change is appearing online, and computational science can help other disciplines better understand this change."
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.js...110040&org=NSF





China’s Cyber Army is Preparing to March on America, Says Pentagon
Tim Reid

Chinese military hackers have prepared a detailed plan to disable America’s aircraft battle carrier fleet with a devastating cyber attack, according to a Pentagon report obtained by The Times.

The blueprint for such an assault, drawn up by two hackers working for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is part of an aggressive push by Beijing to achieve “electronic dominance” over each of its global rivals by 2050, particularly the US, Britain, Russia and South Korea.

China’s ambitions extend to crippling an enemy’s financial, military and communications capabilities early in a conflict, according to military documents and generals’ speeches that are being analysed by US intelligence officials. Describing what is in effect a new arms race, a Pentagon assessment states that China’s military regards offensive computer operations as “critical to seize the initiative” in the first stage of a war.

The plan to cripple the US aircraft carrier battle groups was authored by two PLA air force officials, Sun Yiming and Yang Liping. It also emerged this week that the Chinese military hacked into the US Defence Secretary’s computer system in June; have regularly penetrated computers in at least 10 Whitehall departments, including military files, and infiltrated German government systems this year.

Cyber attacks by China have become so frequent and aggressive that President Bush, without referring directly to Beijing, said this week that “a lot of our systems are vulnerable to attack”. He indicated that he would raise the subject with Hu Jintao, the Chinese President, when they met in Sydney at the Apec summit. Mr Hu denied that China was responsible for the attack on Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary.

Larry M. Wortzel, the author of the US Army War College report, said: “The thing that should give us pause is that in many Chinese military manuals they identify the US as the country they are most likely to go to war with. They are moving very rapidly to master this new form of warfare.” The two PLA hackers produced a “virtual guidebook for electronic warfare and jamming” after studying dozens of US and Nato manuals on military tactics, according to the document.

The Pentagon logged more than 79,000 attempted intrusions in 2005. About 1,300 were successful, including the penetration of computers linked to the Army’s 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and the 4th Infantry Division. In August and September of that year Chinese hackers penetrated US State Department computers in several parts of the world. Hundreds of computers had to be replaced or taken offline for months. Chinese hackers also disrupted the US Naval War College’s network in November, forcing the college to shut down its computer systems for several weeks. The Pentagon uses more than 5 million computers on 100,000 networks in 65 countries.

Jim Melnick, a recently retired Pentagon computer network analyst, told The Times that the Chinese military holds hacking competitions to identify and recruit talented members for its cyber army.

He described a competition held two years ago in Sichuan province, southwest China. The winner now uses a cyber nom de guerre, Wicked Rose. He went on to set up a hacking business that penetrated computers at a defence contractor for US aerospace. Mr Melnick said that the PLA probably outsourced its hacking efforts to such individuals. “These guys are very good,” he said. “We don’t know for sure that Wicked Rose and people like him work for the PLA. But it seems logical. And it also allows the Chinese leadership to have plausible deniability.”

In February a massive cyber attack on Estonia by Russian hackers demonstrated how potentially catastrophic a preemptive strike could be on a developed nation. Pro-Russian hackers attacked numerous sites to protest against the controversial removal in Estonia of a Russian memorial to victims of the Second World War. The attacks brought down government websites, a major bank and telephone networks.

Linton Wells, the chief computer networks official at the Pentagon, said that the Estonia attacks “may well turn out to be a watershed in terms of widespread awareness of the vulnerability of modern society”.

After the attacks, computer security experts from Nato, the EU, US and Israel arrived in the capital, Tallinn, to study its effects.

Sami Saydjari, who has been working on cyber defence systems for the Pentagon since the 1980s, told Congress in testimony on April 25 that a mass cyber attack could leave 70 per cent of the US without electrical power for six months.

He told The Times that all major nations – including China – were scrambling to defend against, and working out ways to cause, “maximum strategic damage” by taking out banking systems, power grids and communications networks. He said that there were at least a thousand attempted attacks every hour on American computers. “China is aggressive in this,” he said.


Programmed to Attack
Michael Evans

Malware: a “Trojan horse” programme, which hides a “malicious code” behind an innocent document, can collect usernames and passwords for e-mail accounts. It can download programmes and relay attacks against other computers. An infected computer can be controlled by the attacker and directed to carry out functions normally available only to the system owner.

Hacking: increasingly a method of attack used by countries determined to use electronic means to gain access to secrets. Government computers in Britain have a network intrusion detection system, which monitors traffic and alerts officials to “misuse or anomalous behaviour”.

Botnets: compromised networks that an attacker can exploit. Deliberate programming errors in software can easily pass undetected. Attackers can exploit the errors to take control of a computer. Botnets can be used for stealing information or to collect credit card numbers by “sniffing” or logging the strokes of a victim’s keyboard.

Keystroke loggers: they record the sequence of key strokes that a user types in. Logging devices can be fitted inside the computer itself.

Denial of service attacks: overloading a computer system so that it can no longer function. This is the method allegedly used by the Russians to disrupt the Estonian government computers in May.

Phishing and spoofing: designed to trick an organisation’s customers into imparting confidential information such as passwords, personal data or banking details. Those using this method impersonate a “trusted source” such as a bank or IT helpdesk to persuade the victim to hand over confidential information.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle2409865.ece





F.B.I. Data Mining Reached Beyond Initial Targets
Eric Lichtblau

The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.

The documents indicate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on individuals it saw as targets but also details on their “community of interest” — the network of people that the target was in contact with. The bureau stopped the practice early this year in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said.

The community of interest data sought by the F.B.I. is central to a data-mining technique intelligence officials call link analysis. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, American counterterrorism officials have turned more frequently to the technique, using communications patterns and other data to identify suspects who may not have any other known links to extremists.

The concept has strong government proponents who see it as a vital tool in predicting and preventing attacks, and it is also thought to have helped the National Security Agency identify targets for its domestic eavesdropping program. But privacy advocates, civil rights leaders and even some counterterrorism officials warn that link analysis can be misused to establish tenuous links to people who have no real connection to terrorism but may be drawn into an investigation nonetheless.

Typically, community of interest data might include an analysis of which people the targets called most frequently, how long they generally talked and at what times of day, sudden fluctuations in activity, geographic regions that were called, and other data, law enforcement and industry officials said.

The F.B.I. declined to say exactly what data had been turned over. It was limited to people and phone numbers “once removed” from the actual target of the national security letters, said a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a continuing review by the Justice Department.

The bureau had declined to discuss any aspect of the community of interest requests because it said the issue was part of an investigation by the Justice Department inspector general’s office into national security letters. An initial review in March by the inspector general found widespread violations in the F.B.I.’s use of the letters, but did not mention the use of community of interest data.

On Saturday, in response to the posting of the article on the Web site of The New York Times, Mike Kortan, a spokesman for the F.B.I., said “it is important to emphasize” that community of interest data is “no longer being used pending the development of an appropriate oversight and approval policy, was used infrequently, and was never used for e-mail communications.”

The scope of the demands for information could be seen in an August 2005 letter seeking the call records for particular phone numbers under suspicion. The letter closed by saying: “Additionally, please provide a community of interest for the telephone numbers in the attached list.”

The requests for such data showed up a dozen times, using nearly identical language, in records from one six-month period in 2005 obtained by a nonprofit advocacy group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that it brought against the government. The F.B.I. recently turned over 2,500 pages of documents to the group. The boilerplate language suggests the requests may have been used in many of more than 700 emergency or “exigent” national security letters. Earlier this year, the bureau banned the use of the exigent letters because they had never been authorized by law.

The reason for the suspension is unclear, but it appears to have been set off in part by the questions raised by the inspector general’s initial review into abuses in the use of national security letters. The official said the F.B.I. itself was examining the use of the community of interest requests to get a better understanding of how and when they were used, but he added that they appeared to have been used in a relatively small percentage of the tens of thousand of the records requests each year. “In an exigent circumstance, that’s information that may be relevant to an investigation,” the official said.

A federal judge in Manhattan last week struck down parts of the USA Patriot Act that had authorized the F.B.I.’s use of the national security letters, saying that some provisions violated the First Amendment and the constitutional separation of powers guarantee. In many cases, the target of a national security letter whose records are being sought is not necessarily the actual subject of a terrorism investigation and may not be suspected at all. Under the Patriot Act, the F.B.I. must assert only that the records gathered through the letter are considered relevant to a terrorism investigation.

Some legal analysts and privacy advocates suggested that the disclosure of the F.B.I.’s collection of community of interest records offered another example of the bureau exceeding the substantial powers already granted it by Congress.

“This whole concept of tracking someone’s community of interest is not part of any established F.B.I. authority,” said Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which provided the records from its lawsuit to The New York Times. “It’s being defined by the F.B.I. And when it’s left up to the F.B.I. to decide what information is relevant to their investigations, they can vacuum up almost anything they want.”

Matt Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania and a former researcher for AT&T, said the telecommunications companies could have easily provided the F.B.I. with the type of network analysis data it was seeking because they themselves had developed it over many years, often using sophisticated software like a program called Analyst’s Notebook.

“This sort of analysis of calling patterns and who the communities of interests are is the sort of things telephone companies are doing anyway because it’s central to their businesses for marketing or optimizing the network or detecting fraud,” said Professor Blaze, who has worked with the F.B.I. on technology issues.

Such “analysis is extremely powerful and very revealing because you get these linkages between people that wouldn’t be otherwise clear, sometimes even more important than the content itself” of phone calls and e-mail messages, he said. “But it’s also very invasive. There’s always going to be a certain amount of noise,” with data collected on people who have no real links to suspicious activity, he said.

Officials at other American intelligence agencies, like the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, have explored using link analysis to trace patterns of communications sometimes two, three or four people removed from the original targets, current and former intelligence officials said. But critics assert that the further the links are taken, the less valuable the information proves to be.

Some privacy advocates said they were troubled by what they saw as the F.B.I.’s over-reliance on technology at the expense of traditional investigative techniques that rely on clearer evidence of wrongdoing.

“Getting a computer to spit out a hundred names doesn’t have any meaning if you don’t know what you’re looking for,” said Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “If they’re telling the telephone company, ‘You do the investigation and tell us what you find,’ the relevance to the investigation is being determined by someone outside the F.B.I.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/washington/09fbi.html





Police Busted after Tracking Device Found on Car
Ian Steward

A police operation to covertly follow a Central Otago man came to an abrupt halt this week when the man found tracking devices planted in his car, ripped them out and listed them for sale on Trade Me.

Ralph Williams, of Cromwell, said he found the devices last week in his daughter's car, which he uses, and in his flatmate's car after the cars were seized by police and taken away for investigation.

Police have neither confirmed nor denied they placed the devices.

Williams said a cellphone sim card in one of the devices appeared to transmit messages to the mobile phone of Detective Sergeant Derek Shaw, of the Central Otago CIB.

Williams provided The Press with emails from Shaw saying: "If you have got something of ours it would be good to get it back. You can call me and I can come meet you."

Williams said he found the devices concealed behind panels in the passenger-side footwells of the cars. They were marked with the name Trimble, an international company that produces GPS location devices.

Williams took apart one of the devices and found a sim card, which he put into a cellphone. He found the device was sending location text messages to Shaw's mobile number.

Williams placed one of the devices on Trade Me with a price of $250.

The ad read: "Used government covert surveillance tracking. No police to bid on this."

A Trade Me spokesman said the listing was removed yesterday afternoon "at the request of the New Zealand Police".

Williams said the cars were seized for investigation after an unmarked police car was torched in Alexandra in July.

The investigation produced nothing on Williams, but when the cars were returned he contacted police because the cars were not running well, and he asked if they had left something behind.

Shaw emailed: "Can't immediately think of anything we would have left ... Like what ...?????"

Williams said he and Shaw then spoke on the phone, with Shaw telling him the devices were valuable and should be returned.

Shaw then emailed repeatedly asking for "the stuff" back.

When contacted by The Press, Shaw declined to comment other than to say: "Police use a variety of legitimate investigation techniques when investigating serious crime. However, it is not the policy of the police to comment on those techniques or other operational matters."

Shaw would not say whether a warrant had been obtained for the devices. The Summary Proceedings Act, which covers tracking devices, says a warrant should be obtained for a tracking device but an officer can install one without a warrant if there is not time and the officer believes a judge would issue a warrant.

Williams said he did not know why police were interested in him. He spent two years in jail "20 years ago" for selling marijuana to an undercover policeman, but had no convictions since then.

Williams said the devices were not hard to find and he described the operation as "a bumbling attempt" by "weirdos".

New Zealand Civil Liberties Council chairman Michael Bott said the affair had "shades of (George Orwell's) Nineteen Eighty-four", as well as "shades of the Keystone Kops".
http://www.stuff.co.nz/AAMB4/aamsz=3...768a24035.html





Web Search for Bomb Recipes Should be Blocked: EU
Ingrid Melander

Internet searches for bomb-making instructions should be blocked across the European Union, the bloc's top security official said on Monday.

Internet providers should also prevent access to any site giving instructions on how to make a bomb, EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said in an interview.

"I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector ... on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism," Frattini told Reuters.

The EU executive is to make this proposal to member states early in November as part of a raft of anti-terrorism proposals.

These include the screening of private data of passengers flying into the 27-nation bloc and the creation of an early warning system to alert police forces to thefts of explosives.

Representatives of the Internet industry are meeting the EU on Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of al Qaeda's September 11 attacks on the United States, at a European Security Research and Innovation Forum.

The Internet has taken on huge importance for militant groups, enabling them to share know-how and spread propaganda to a mass audience, as well as to link cell members.

More Cooperation

Asked whether a plan to block searches for bomb instructions or for the word 'terrorism' on Web search engines could infringe on the rights to expression and information, Frattini said in the phone interview:

"Frankly speaking, instructing people to make a bomb has nothing to do with the freedom of expression, or the freedom of informing people.

"The right balance, in my view, is to give priority to the protection of absolute rights and, first of all, right to life."

Frattini said there would be no bar on opinion, analysis or historical information but operational instructions useful to terrorists should be blocked.

He said European legislation would spell out the principles of blocking access to bomb instructions. The details would be worked out by each EU country.

Disconnecting a Web site immediately was currently possible only in a minority of EU states including Italy, Frattini said.

After German police arrested three men suspected of a major bomb plot last week, politicians called for greater powers to monitor computers. Germany's top appeals court has ruled the clandestine monitoring of computers by police is illegal.

"The level of the threat (in the EU) remains very high," Frattini said. "That's why I am making appeals and appeals for stronger and closer cooperation." (additional reporting by David Brunnstrom)
http://www.reuters.com/article/inter...55133420070910





French Say 'Non' to U.S. Disclosure of Secret Satellites
Peter B. de Selding

A French space-surveillance radar has detected 20-30 satellites in low Earth orbit that do not figure in the U.S. Defense Department's published catalogue, a discovery that French officials say they will use to pressure U.S. authorities to stop publishing the whereabouts of French reconnaissance and military communications satellites.

After 16 months of operations of their Graves radar system, which can locate satellites in orbits up to 1,000 kilometers in altitude and even higher in certain cases, the French Defense Ministry says it has gathered just about enough information to negotiate an agreement with the United States.

The U.S. Defense Department's Space Surveillance Network is the world's gold standard for cataloguing satellites and debris in both low Earth orbit and the higher geostationary orbit at 36,000 kilometers in altitude, where telecommunications satellites operate.

Data from the U.S. network of ground-based sensors is regularly published and used worldwide by those tracking satellite and space-debris trajectories. The published U.S. information excludes sensitive U.S. defense satellites, but regularly publishes data on the orbits of other nations' military hardware.

In a series of presentations here at the site of the French Graves radar facility, French defense officials said they are gathering data on classified satellites in low Earth orbit as part of a future European space-surveillance program that European Space Agency governments will be asked to approve in 2008. This program, with a cost of some 300 million euros ($405 million), would feature higher-performance radars to track space debris in low orbit and in geostationary orbit.

This new space surveillance program may or may not be approved by European governments. But the Graves radar, and a complementary system operated by the German government, together already are enough to pinpoint the location, size, orbit and transmissions frequencies of satellites that the United States would prefer not be broadcast worldwide, French officials said.

"We have discussed the Graves results with our American colleagues and highlighted the discrepancies between what we have found and what is published by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network," said one French defense official responsible for the Graves operation. "They told us, 'If we have not published it in our catalogue, then it does not exist.' So I guess we have been tracking objects that do not exist. I can tell you that some of these non-existent objects have solar arrays."

Col. Yves Blin, deputy head of the space division at the French joint defense staff, said France would wait until it had acquired, with the help of the German radar, further information about the 20 to 30 secret satellites in question before beginning serious negotiations with the United States on a common approach for publishing satellite orbit information.

"Right now we do not have enough cards in our hand to begin negotiatons," Blin said here at the Graves radar transmitter site June 7. "We need more time to be sure of what we are seeing. At that point we can tell our American friends, 'We have seen some things that you might wish to keep out of the public domain. We will agree to do this if you agree to stop publishing the location of our sensitive satellites."
http://www.space.com/news/060707_graves_web.html





MI5 and MI6 to be Sued For First Time Over Torture
Vikram Dodd

A British man who was held in Guantánamo Bay has begun a civil action against MI5 and MI6 over the tactics that they use to gather intelligence.

The suit has been brought by Tarek Dergoul, 29, who claims he was repeatedly tortured while he was held by the US, and that British agents who had also questioned him were aware of the mistreatment.

He wants a high court ruling that will ban the security services from "benefiting" from the abuse of prisoners being held in detention outside the UK.

Article continues

If Mr Dergoul wins, it would mean that MI5 and MI6 could not interrogate British nationals while they are being held and tortured abroad.

A British citizen, he has been awarded legal aid for the case, and papers will be lodged at the high court today. They were drafted by the Rabinder Singh, QC, a leading human rights barrister from the Matrix Chambers.

According to court documents seen by the Guardian, Mr Dergoul alleges that agents from MI5 and MI6 repeatedly interrogated him while he was held and tortured in Afghanistan and then Guantánamo, and were thus complicit in his treatment. In the 13-page document to be lodged at court, he says he suffered beatings, sexual humiliation, insults to his religion, and was subjected to extremes of cold. He was released back to Britain in 2004 without charge.

Britain says it does not carry out or condone torture, but it stands accused of benefiting from inhumane treatment meted out by other countries.

Mr Dergoul is seeking damages for "misfeasance in public office" by the security services and the Foreign Office.

The court papers state: "The British government and its officials knew that the claimant was being subjected to mistreatment amounting to torture and inhumane and degrading treatment because he told them so...Accordingly the British government and its officials unlawfully sought to benefit from mistreatment of the claimant. It is averred that either the British officials knowingly unlawfully interrogated the claimant or they acted with reckless indifference to its illegality."

Mr Dergoul said he was picked up in Afghanistan in 2001 by local warlords who "sold" him to the US for $5,000.

He denies involvement in fighting or terrorism and says he went to the region to study Arabic. He was held for a month at the prison in Bagram then spent three months in Kandahar before being sent to Guantánamo Bay.

He says one week after his arrival at Bagram, British agents first questioned him, identifying themselves only by their first names, "Andrew" and "Matt" and was questioned in front of an armed US soldier. He says he was kept in a cage with 20 others and saw horrific acts of torture inflicted on prisoners.

"They would be severely beaten, often with baseball bats, when they collapsed from exhaustion. The claimant also observed two or three men being hung by their hands with bags over their heads. The claimant also heard gunshots and screams," the papers say.
Mr Dergoul says he was moved to Kandahar, suffering more torture and denial of medical treatment that led to a toe being amputated. Again he says he was visited and interrogated by the British. One of the officials was 'Matt' whom he had previously seen at Bagram and the other man was in his early 40s and short."

In 2002, hooded, drugged and shackled Mr Dergoul was taken to Guantánamo, where he says UK agents questioned him five times, at intervals of every four to five months. In Guantánamo the Briton says he suffered more abuse and torture, which he says he told UK officials about.

"The claimant complained that he was being beaten and was being sexually assaulted by having his genitals touched during searches. The claimant also complained that he had been repeatedly attacked..., that he had been placed in freezing conditions in isolation without access to a toilet, water or soap, that he had had his facial hair forcibly shaved."

The government is expected to fight the court action.

Last night Mr Dergoul said: "This action comes at a time when people all over the world need protection from torture and abuse by governments which say they represent and uphold human rights."

The government confirmed last night that security service agents had interviewed Mr Dergoul and other Britons held in Guantánamo "about the UK's national security" adding "it was important that we got as much information as possible. They were arrested in unusual circumstances. British officials who visited them acted with the highest degree of professionalism."

The Foreign Office said: "The UK unreservedly condemns the use of torture. The British government, including its intelligence and security agencies, never use torture for any purpose, including obtaining information, nor would we instigate actions by others to do so." It said it could not comment on ongoing legal proceedings.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/forei...rc=rss&feed=19





An Opportunity for Wall Street in China’s Surveillance Boom
Keith Bradsher

Li Runsen, the powerful technology director of China’s ministry of public security, is best known for leading Project Golden Shield, China’s intensive effort to strengthen police control over the Internet.

But last month Mr. Li took an additional title: director for China Security and Surveillance Technology, a fast-growing company that installs and sometimes operates surveillance systems for Chinese police agencies, jails and banks, among other customers. The company has just been approved for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company’s listing and Mr. Li’s membership on its board are just the latest signs of ever-closer ties among Wall Street, surveillance companies and the Chinese government’s security apparatus.

Wall Street analysts now follow the growth of companies that install surveillance systems providing Chinese police stations with 24-hour video feeds from nearby Internet cafes. Hedge fund money from the United States has paid for the development of not just better video cameras, but face-recognition software and even newer behavior-recognition software designed to spot the beginnings of a street protest and notify police.

Now, the ties between China’s surveillance sector and American capital markets are starting to draw Washington’s attention.

Rep. Tom Lantos, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he was disturbed by a recent report in The New York Times about the development of surveillance systems in China by another company, China Public Security Technology, which, like China Security and Surveillance, incorporated itself in the United States to make it easier to sell shares to Western investors.

Mr. Lantos called American involvement in the Chinese surveillance industry “an absolutely incredible phenomenon of extreme corporate irresponsibility.”

He said he planned to broaden an existing investigation into “the cooperation of American companies in the Chinese police state.”

Executives of Chinese surveillance companies say they are helping their government reduce street crime, preserve social stability and prevent terrorism. They note that London has a more sophisticated surveillance system, although the Chinese system will soon be far more extensive.

Wall Street executives also defend the industry as necessary to keep the peace at a time of rapid change in China. They point out that New York has begun experimenting with surveillance cameras in Lower Manhattan and other areas of the city, and that corporations make broad use of surveillance cameras in places like convenience stores and automated teller machines.

“Is New York a police state?” said Peter Siris, the managing director of Guerrilla Capital and Hua-Mei 21st Century, two Manhattan hedge funds that were among the earliest investors in China Security and Surveillance.

Mr. Lantos and human rights advocates contend that surveillance in China poses different issues from surveillance in the West because China is a one-party state where government officials can exercise power with few legal restraints.

Mr. Lantos is part of a Democratic Congressional majority that is increasingly eager to confront China at a time of high Chinese trade surpluses and considerable economic insecurity in the United States. He is also a longtime ally of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House and a fellow Californian, who made her reputation in Congress as a critic of China on human rights issues.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto said the White House would not comment on specific companies, adding, “It’s not appropriate to interfere in the private decisions of Americans to invest in legally incorporated firms.”

The New York Stock Exchange said that it had no comment except to confirm that China Security and Surveillance was expected to list on the exchange “later this year, subject to the usual conditions, including approval by the S.E.C.”

Because the company already has shares traded in the United States and is not selling any additional shares, Securities and Exchange Commission regulations say approval is automatic once the company fills out a notification form and the New York Stock Exchange confirms it has approved the listing.

Over the last year, American hedge funds have put more than $150 million into Chinese surveillance companies.

The Chinese government trade association for surveillance companies, which also regulates the industry, predicts that the surveillance market here will expand to more than $43.1 billion by 2010, compared with less than $500 million in 2003. Under the Safe Cities program adopted by the government last winter, 660 cities are starting work on high-tech surveillance systems.

Many Western experts, skeptical that China faces a terrorism threat, have suggested that the government may be using it as an excuse for tougher policies toward ethnic minorities in western China, notably Xinjiang Province, and toward Tibet.

Terence Yap, the vice chairman and chief financial officer of China Security and Surveillance Technology, said his company’s software made it possible for security cameras to count the number of people in crosswalks and alert the police if a crowd forms at an unusual hour, a possible sign of an unsanctioned protest.

Mr. Yap said terrorism concerns did exist. His company has outfitted rail stations and government buildings in Tibet with surveillance systems.

Mr. Yap and Lin Jiang Huai, the chairman and chief executive of China Public Security, said that their companies did not do business with the Chinese military and should not raise concerns in the United States. They also said their businesses used technology developed in China and were therefore not subject to United States export controls.

China Security and Surveillance has been aggressively raising money in the United States, including $110 million in convertible loans so far this year from the Citadel Group, a big hedge fund in Chicago. In the last 18 months, the company has used the money to acquire or make a deal to buy 10 of the 50 largest surveillance companies in China.

James Mulvenon, the director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, which does classified analyses of foreign military and intelligence programs for the Pentagon and other government agencies, said that Beijing clearly wanted the company to consolidate the industry.

“They’re really sort of the Ministry of Public Security’s national champion,” Mr. Mulvenon said of China Security and Surveillance. “In terms of the gear and building the surveillance society, they are the ones.”

After the company announced sharply higher sales and profit on Aug. 13, a succession of American hedge fund managers and investment bank analysts took turns on a conference call questioning and congratulating Mr. Yap.

Traded on the over-the-counter bulletin board market while waiting for the beginning of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the company has raised almost all of its money through the Citadel loans and private placements of stock with 17 institutional investors in the United States, including the Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund in Plano, Tex., and JLF, a hedge fund based in Del Mar, Calif.

The Pinnacle funds’ investments have risen six-fold in 17 months. The funds, which raise all their money in the United States, are also the main investors in China Public Security Technology, with a stake that has nearly tripled in value since February.

Barry Kitt, the founder and general partner of the funds, declined to comment. Citadel and JLF officials also declined to comment.

Each time China Security and Surveillance makes an acquisition, it holds an elaborate banquet, with dancers. The majority of the 500 or more people invited are municipal and provincial security officials, as well as executives of rival companies that may become acquisition targets.

“When they come, they hear central government officials endorsing us, they hear bankers endorsing us or supporting us, it gives us credibility,” Mr. Yap said. “It’s a lot of drinking, it’s like a wedding banquet.”

Lehman Brothers bankers and various Ministry of Public Security officials have spoken at such events, which have been held all over the country. One was at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where Mr. Li himself — of Project Golden Shield — addressed the crowd.

China Security and Surveillance has headquarters in Shenzhen, a high-tech manufacturing center in southeastern China, but two years ago it purchased a “shell” Delaware company with no operations but a listing on the American over-the-counter bulletin board market. It turned the Delaware company into its corporate parent.

China Public Security, also with headquarters in Shenzhen, incorporated in Florida in the same way to obtain a listing on the over-the-counter bulletin board.

China Security and Surveillance is involved in some of the most controversial areas of public security. Mr. Yap said on the conference call with Wall Street analysts and hedge fund managers in August that one of the company’s growth areas involved surveillance systems for Internet cafes; the government is trying to clamp down on users of the cafes in order to discourage pornography and prostitution.

Critics say the surveillance is aimed at catching democracy advocates, Falun Gong adherents and others the Communist Party regards as threatening, noting that rules for nightclubs are less rigorous, and do not require live feeds to police stations.

Mr. Yap said investment firms from Europe, the United States and Asia were so enthused about the surveillance market in China that he typically led a full-day tour each week to some of the company’s factories and installations.

At an aging Shenzhen police station, where the scuffed and peeling yellow walls look as though they have not been painted since the Cultural Revolution, a $100,000 bank of new video screens behind the duty officer’s desk shows scenes from nearby streets. In another neighborhood, the company has installed a $1 million system.

Many of the surveillance cameras are still assembled at a modest factory. But the company has used $20 million of the cash it raised in the United States to acquire a large industrial park with six just-completed factory buildings and six dormitories.

In Shenzhen, white poles resembling street lights now line the roads every block or two, ready to be fitted with cameras. In a nondescript building linked to nearby street cameras, a desktop computer displayed streaming video images from outside and drew a green square around each face to check it against a “blacklist.” Since China lacks national or even regional digitized databases of troublemakers’ photos, Mr. Yap said municipal or neighborhood officials compile their own blacklists.

To show off his systems, Mr. Yap strode across a nearby plaza flanked by apartment towers and a low-rise shopping area, pointing out tiny unobtrusive domes and tubes attached to various poles. “See, there’s a camera on the lamp pole, and another one over there and another one here,” he said. “Big Brother is watching you.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/bu...curity.html?hp





Report of Cancer Hurts Maker of Chip Implants
Barnaby J. Feder

Shares of Applied Digital Solutions and of its publicly traded subsidiary VeriChip, which makes an implanted microchip for identifying people, fell sharply yesterday as investors reacted to a report this weekend linking the tiny radio device to cancer.

The report, by The Associated Press, suggested that VeriChip and federal regulators had ignored or overlooked animal studies raising questions about whether the chip or the process of injecting it might cause cancer in dogs and laboratory rodents.

VeriChip said that it had not been aware of the studies cited in the report, according to the article, but both the company and federal regulators said yesterday that animal data had been considered in the review of the application to implant the chips in humans. They said that there were no controlled scientific studies linking the chips to cancer in dogs or cats and that lab rodents were more prone than humans or other animals to developing tumors from all types of injections.

“At this time there appears to be no credible cause for concern,” said Karen Riley, a spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration.

But VeriChip shares fell more than 11 percent, to close at $5. Applied Digital, which has other businesses but has called VeriChip its main engine for future growth, fell nearly 10 percent, to $1.09.

In addition to driving down the two companies’ shares, the report created concern among veterinarians and operators of animal shelters that pet owners would resist the practice, now widespread, of putting similar chips in pets to make it easier to return lost animals to their owners. Most animals who are not reclaimed by owners are euthanized.

“If there are any cancers from the chips, they are so rare that losing pets is far more serious,” said Dr. Lawrence D. McGill, a veterinary pathologist at Animal Reference Pathology, a veterinary laboratory in Salt Lake City.

The radio identification device for which VeriChip is named is a glass-encased chip the size of a grain of rice. The device, which carries an encrypted number, is injected in the upper arm. In medical applications, the chip is linked to medical records stored at hospitals or with a primary-care physician. A low-powered transmitter in the chip emits the identification number when queried at close range by a VeriChip scanner.

VeriChip has demonstrated that the same chip could also be linked to other databases. For example, nightclubs have used it to recognize regular visitors and Mexican police have used it to control access to a high-security office.

All of the potential applications have stirred strong opposition from privacy advocates, who have called implanting chips in humans an extreme abuse of radio-frequency identification (or RFID) technology. Katherine Albrecht, a longtime critic of RFID and VeriChip who contacted The Associated Press several months ago with some of the studies on which the article released this weekend was based, said in an e-mail message to supporters yesterday, “This kind of negative publicity spells the beginning of the end for VeriChip and their plans to chip us all like bar-coded packages of meat.”

In its news release disputing suggestions that the implant could be linked to cancer, VeriChip said yesterday, “We will retain independent scientists and researchers to review the content, veracity and credibility of the studies alluded to in the article.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/te...y/11micro.html





Agencies Work on DNA 'Barcodes' Database
John Heilprin

To help shoppers avoid mislabeled toxic pufferfish, and pilots steer clear of birds, federal agencies are starting to tap into an ambitious project that is gathering DNA ''barcodes'' for the Earth's 1.8 million known species.

A consortium of scientists from almost 50 nations is overseeing the building of a global database made from tiny pieces of genetic material. Called DNA barcoding, the process takes a scientist only a few hours in a lab and about $2 to identify a species from a tissue sample or other piece of genetic material.

David Schindel, a Smithsonian Institution paleontologist and executive secretary of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, said the purpose is to create a global reference library -- ''a kind of telephone directory for all species.''

''If I know that gene sequence, I can submit it as a query to a database and get back the telephone number,'' he said. ''I can get back the species name.''

The government's interest in the project stems from a variety of possible uses.

The Food and Drug Administration has begun eyeing it as a tool to ferret out hazardous fish species and to confirm a type of leech used in some surgery. In May, the FDA used it to warn that a shipment labeled monkfish from China might actually be a type of pufferfish that could contain a deadly toxin if not prepared properly.

The Federal Aviation Administration and Air Force hope it will help them identify birds prone to collide with aircraft. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sees it as a means to track commercial fish and reduce killing of unwanted species also caught by nets.

A growing collection of feathers and other remains of birds that collided with planes has provided ''operational'' information for the FAA, said Scott Miller, a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution who chairs the consortium's executive committee.

''They have an almost complete reference database for the North American bird species,'' Miller said. ''It is a routine tool that they use.''

Elsewhere, the Environmental Protection Agency is testing species barcoding to identify insects and other invertebrates that indicate how healthy rivers and streams are. The Agriculture Department is contributing genetic data it has compiled on fruit flies in an effort help farmers control pests.

Scientists call it barcodes to compare it to the supermarket scanner codes that are indecipherable except to machines. But with plants and animals, the scanners look at the specific order of the four basic building blocks of DNA to identify the species.

Users gain free access to a repository of archival genetic material run jointly by U.S., European and Japanese facilities.

About 30,000 species have been logged in the database so far, but scientists hope to reach 500,000 within five years. A two-year goal is to have sequenced 2,800 -- or about 80 percent -- of the 3,500 different species of mosquitoes.

Yvonne-Marie Linton of the Natural History Museum in London, said efforts to reduce mosquito populations blamed for up to 500 million human malaria cases and 1 million annual deaths each year are consistently hindered by misidentifying the species responsible.

Linton, who heads a project to barcode the mosquito species, said correctly identifying and controlling those carriers of malaria and other misquito-borne illnesses like dengue fever and the West Nile virus are the ''key to disease management.''

The consortium is sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History. It grew out of 2003 research paper in which geneticist Paul Hebert at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, proposed database of DNA barcodes for identifying all species.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/...ap4119783.html





Prisons Purge Books on Faith From Libraries
Laurie Goodstein

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.

Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”

But prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social problems has effectively blocked prisoners’ access to religious and spiritual materials — all in the name of preventing terrorism.

“It’s swatting a fly with a sledgehammer,” said Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian group. “There’s no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism.”

The Bureau of Prisons said it relied on experts to produce lists of up to 150 book titles and 150 multimedia resources for each of 20 religions or religious categories — everything from Bahaism to Yoruba. The lists will be expanded in October, and there will be occasional updates, Ms. Billingsley said. Prayer books and other worship materials are not affected by this process.

The lists are broad, but reveal eccentricities and omissions. There are nine titles by C. S. Lewis, for example, and none from the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles, and the influential pastor Robert H. Schuller.

The identities of the bureau’s experts have not been made public, Ms. Billingsley said, but they include chaplains and scholars in seminaries and at the American Academy of Religion. Academy staff members said their organization had met with prison chaplains in the past but was not consulted on this effort, though it is possible that scholars who are academy members were involved.

The bureau has not provided additional money to prisons to buy the books on the lists, so in some prisons, after the shelves were cleared of books not on the lists, few remained.

A chaplain who has worked more than 15 years in the prison system, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is a bureau employee, said: “At some of the penitentiaries, guys have been studying and reading for 20 years, and now they are told that this material doesn’t meet some kind of criteria. It doesn’t make sense to them. They’re asking, ‘Why are our tapes being taken, why our books being taken?’ ”

Of the lists, he said, “Many of the chaplains I’ve spoken to say these are not the things they would have picked.”

The effort is unnecessary, the chaplain said, because chaplains routinely reject any materials that incite violence or disparage, and donated materials already had to be approved by prison officials. Prisoners can buy religious books, he added, but few have much money to spend.

Religious groups that work with prisoners have privately been writing letters about their concerns to bureau officials. Would it not be simpler, they asked the bureau, to produce a list of forbidden titles? But the bureau did that last year, when it instructed the prisons to remove all materials by nine publishers — some Muslim, some Christian.

The plan to standardize the libraries first became public in May when several inmates, including a Muslim convert, at the Federal Prison Camp in Otisville, N.Y., about 75 miles northwest of Manhattan, filed a lawsuit acting as their own lawyers. Later, lawyers at the New York firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison took on the case pro bono. They refiled it on Aug. 21 in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York.

“Otisville had a very extensive library of Jewish religious books, many of them donated,” said David Zwiebel, executive vice president for government and public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group. “It was decimated. Three-quarters of the Jewish books were taken off the shelves.”

Mr. Zwiebel asked, “Since when does the government, even with the assistance of chaplains, decide which are the most basic books in terms of religious study and practice?”

The lawsuit raises serious First Amendment concerns, said Douglas Laycock, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, but he added that it was not a slam-dunk case.

“Government does have a legitimate interest to screen out things that tend to incite violence in prisons,” Mr. Laycock said. “But once they say, ‘We’re going to pick 150 good books for your religion, and that’s all you get,’ the criteria has become more than just inciting violence. They’re picking out what is accessible religious teaching for prisoners, and the government can’t do that without a compelling justification. Here the justification is, the government is too busy to look at all the books, so they’re going to make their own preferred list to save a little time, a little money.”

The lists have not been made public by the bureau, but were made available to The Times by a critic of the bureau’s project. In some cases, the lists belie their authors’ preferences. For example, more than 80 of the 120 titles on the list for Judaism are from the same Orthodox publishing house. A Catholic scholar and an evangelical Christian scholar who looked over some of the lists were baffled at the selections.

Timothy Larsen, who holds the Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, an evangelical school, looked over lists for “Other Christian” and “General Spirituality.”

“There are some well-chosen things in here,” Professor Larsen said. “I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” But he continued, “There’s a lot about it that’s weird.” The lists “show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism,” he said, and lacked materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.

The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame (who edited “The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism,” which did make the list), said the Catholic list had some glaring omissions, few spiritual classics and many authors he had never heard of.

“I would be completely sympathetic with Catholic chaplains in federal prisons if they’re complaining that this list is inhibiting,” he said, “because I know they have useful books that are not on this list.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/us/10prison.html?hp





Young Muslims Begin Dangerous Fight for the Right to Abandon Faith
David Charter

A group of young Muslim apostates launches a campaign today, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, to make it easier to renounce Islam.

The provocative move reflects a growing rift between traditionalists and a younger generation raised on a diet of Dutch tolerance.

The Committee for Ex-Muslims promises to campaign for freedom of religion but has already upset the Islamic and political Establishments for stirring tensions among the million-strong Muslim community in the Netherlands.

Ehsan Jami, the committee’s founder, who rejected Islam after the attack on the twin towers in 2001, has become the most talked-about public figure in the Netherlands. He has been forced into hiding after a series of death threats and a recent attack.

'Whoever changes religion – kill him'

The threats are taken seriously after the murder in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, an antiimmigration politician, and in 2004 of Theo Van Gogh, an antiIslam film-maker.

Speaking to The Times at a secret location before the committee’s launch today, the Labour Party councillor said that the movement would declare war on radical Islam. Similar organisations campaigning for reform of the religion have sprung up across Europe and representatives from Britain and Germany will join the launch in The Hague today.

“Sharia schools say that they will kill the ones who leave Islam. In the West people get threatened, thrown out of their family, beaten up,” Mr Jami said. “In Islam you are born Muslim. You do not even choose to be Muslim. We want that to change, so that people are free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in.”

Mr Jami, 22, who has abandoned his studies as his political career has taken off, denied that the choice of September 11 was deliberately provocative towards the Islamic Establishment. “We chose the date because we want to make a clear statement that we no longer tolerate the intolerence of Islam, the terrorist attacks,” he said.

“In 1965 the Church in Holland made a declaration that freedom of conscience is above hanging on to religion, so you can choose whether you are going to be a Christian or not. What we are seeking is the same thing for Islam.”

Mr Jami, who has compared the rise of radical Islam to the threat from Nazism in the 1930s, is receiving only lukewarm support from his party which traditionally relies upon Muslim votes. His outspoken attack on radical Islam has led to a prelaunch walk-out from fellow committee founder Loubna Berrada, who herself rejected Islam.

She said: “I don’t wish to confront Islam itself. I only want to spread the message that Muslims should be allowed to leave Islam behind without being threatened.”

There have been suggestions that Mr Jami might defect to the right-wing Freedom Party, led by Geert Wilders, the most outspoken politician in the Netherlands, who has called for the Koran to be banned. But Mr Jami said: “I have respect for Wilders but we do not have the same ideology. I am for the freedom of religion.

“Banning something is not going to help. I am the opposite – everyone should read the Koran.” Mr Jami is being compared to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali refugee who became a prominent Dutch politician campaigning for the reform of Islam but who left eventually for an academic career in the United States.

Jannie Groen, a writer for De Volksrant newspaper, said: “[Among Muslims] he is getting the same reaction as Ayaan Hirsi Ali that he is too confrontational but you are seeing other former Muslims now coming forward. So he has been able to put this issue of apostasy on the agenda, even though they do not want to be in the same room as him and he has had to pay a price.”

By the Book

— 14 passages in the Koran refer to apostasy

— According to Baidhawi’s commentary, Sura 4: 88-89 reads: “Whosoever turns back from his belief, openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever ye find him, like any other infidel. Separate yourself from him altogether. Do not accept intercession in his regard.”

— The hadith, tradition and legend about Muhammad and his followers used as a basis of Sharia, tells of some atheists who were brought to “’Ali and he burnt them. The news of this reached Ibn Abbas who said: ‘If I had been in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah’s Apostate forbade it . . . I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah’s Apostate, ‘Whoever changed his [Islamic] religion, then kill him’.”

— According to hadith, a special reward in Paradise is reserved for the killer of apostates
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle2426314.ece





Qaeda Urges Cartoonist Death, Threatens Swedish Firms

The head of an al Qaeda-led group in Iraq has offered a $100,000 reward for the killing of a Swedish cartoonist for his drawing of Islam's Prophet Mohammad and threatened to attack major Swedish companies.

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq, also offered $50,000 in an audiotape posted on an Islamist Web site on Saturday to anyone who killed the editor of the newspaper that published the drawing by Lars Vilks.

Sweden's daily Nerikes Allehanda published the drawing, part of a series which art galleries in Sweden had declined to display, last month.

"From now on we announce the call to shed the blood of the Lars who dared to insult our Prophet... and during this munificent month we announce an award worth $100,000 to the person who kills this infidel criminal," he said in the 31-minute tape.

"The award will be increased to $150,000 if he were to be slaughtered like a lamb.

"We know how to force them to withdraw and apologies, and if they don't, they can wait for our strikes on their economy and giant companies such as Ericsson, Volvo, Ikea...."

Contacted by Reuters, Edvard Unsgaard, spokesman for Sweden's prime minister, declined to comment on what he said was "police business."

The newspaper published the image, depicting the head of the Prophet on the body of a dog, in what it called a defense of free speech. Muslim countries including Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan expressed anger over the caricature.

Iran, the first country to protest against the publication of the drawing on August 27, summoned Sweden's charge d'affaires in Tehran to complain. Muslims believe images of the Prophet are forbidden and also consider dogs to be impure.

The Swedish Muslim Council, one of Sweden's largest Muslim organizations, rejected Baghdadi's threats.

"The Swedish Muslim Council definitely repudiates and at the same time condemns threats against individuals or Swedish institutions. We accept neither crimes nor ethical violations of everyone's right to live in security and to respectful treatment," it said in a statement.

Last year, Muslims around the world launched a firestorm of protest after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that were reprinted by other European newspapers.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world...ty-sweden.html





Colin Powell: Terrorists are Not Greatest Threat to Nation

In an interview with GQ magazine that's scheduled to be put online here at 11 a.m. ET, former secretary of State and one-time potential presidential candidate Colin Powell has this to say about terrorism and the threat it poses to the USA:

"What is the greatest threat facing us now? People will say it's terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?"

Powell adds, in an interview with Walter Isaacson, that to improve its image in the world, the USA should focus on welcoming newcomers. He takes on the immigration debate that has become a hot-button issue in the presidential race:

"America could not survive without immigration," he says. "Even the undocumented immigrants are contributing to our economy. That's the country my parents came to. That's the image we have to portray to the rest of the world: kind, generous, a nation of nations, touched by every nation, and we touch every nation in return. That's what people still want to believe about us. They still want to come here. We've lost a bit of the image, but we haven't lost the reality yet. And we can fix the image by reflecting a welcoming attitude -- and by not taking counsel of our fears and scaring ourselves to death that everybody coming in is going to blow up something. It ain't the case."

As for the Iraq War, Powell -- a retired general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- tells Isaacson that as he and others in the Bush administration debated strategy in the lead-up to the war, he did not think the Pentagon and then-secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had planned for what would happen after Baghdad fell.

"That was the big mistake. Don had written a list of the worst things that could happen, but we didn't do the contingency planning on what we would do about it. So we watched those buildings get burned down, and nobody told the divisions, 'Hey, go in there and declare martial law and whack a few people and it will stop.' Then the insurgency started, and we didn't acknowledge it. They said it wasn't an insurgency. They looked up the definition. They said it was a few dead-enders! And so we didn't respond in a way that might have stopped it. And then the civil war started at the beginning of last year. I call it a civil war, but some say no, it's not a civil war, it's a war against civilians. In fact, we have total civil disorder."
http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics...l-te.html#more





Wesley Clark: P2P 'New National Security Risk'

Retired US general warns of danger of file sharing
Clement James

Peer to peer technology (P2P) has been described as the “new national security risk” by a retired general at a recent Government Reform Committee hearing.

Retired General Wesley K. Clark, who is now a board member of Tiversa, a company that trawls P2P networks for sensitive information, said, "We found more than 200 classified government documents in a few hours search over P2P networks.

"We found everything from Pentagon network server secrets to other sensitive information on P2P networks that hackers dream about," he added.

At the committee hearing, Clark suggested regulation and mandatory defensive active monitoring programs, especially for sensitive government documents. "If everyone knew the scope of the risk of P2P networks, America would be outraged and demand solutions. If you wait for the lawsuit, you have waited too long," he said.

Clark revealed that many national information security leaks were fresh, complete and were often distributed on home computers over P2P networks.

In March, the United States Patent and Trademark Office released a study revealing that inadvertent file sharing continued to threaten national security. At the time, USPTO CEO Robert Boback said, "We found thousands of corporate cases from banking statements, server passwords, financial data, public company data, human resources, medical records and Fortune 500 company minutes on compliance."

Professor M. Eric Johnson, director of the Center for Digital Strategies at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, carried out an experiment to illustrate the threat of P2P file sharing. The text of an email message containing an active Visa card number and an AT&T phone card in a music directory was posted in a P2P network that was shared via LimeWire.

"It appears that two takers of the card were able to obtain funds as the activity was split into two groups," Johnson told the hearing. “One taker used Paypal, which is more US-centric, while the other used Nochex, which is UK-centric. Within another week, the calling card was also depleted. Examining the call records of the card, all the calls were made from outside the US to two US area codes – 347 (Bronx, NY) and 253 (Tacoma, WA), illustrating the P2P threat both within and outside of the US. Even more interesting, long after we stopped sharing the file, we observed the file continuing to move to new clients as some of the original takers leaked the file to others."

Committee chairman, Henry Waxman, who is investigating the P2P networks invited LimeWire and StreamCast to testify along with other interested experts on illegal filesharing before the US Houses of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

From August
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/21...lated_articles





Democrats Question Prosecution of a Governor
Adam Nossiter

House leaders are beginning an investigation this week of the prosecution of Don Siegelman, the former Democratic governor of Alabama who was imprisoned in June on federal corruption charges. The case could become the centerpiece of a Democratic effort to show that the Justice Department engaged in political prosecutions.

Republicans strongly deny the suggestion, and as Mr. Siegelman enters the fourth month of his 88-month sentence, the case is becoming a bitter flash point between Democratic officials and the Bush administration.

Jill Simpson, an Alabama lawyer who signed an affidavit saying she overheard a Republican political operative connect the prosecution of Mr. Siegelman to Karl Rove, will be questioned under oath this week by investigators for the House Judiciary Committee. The chairman of that committee, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, has asked the Justice Department to turn over its documents in the case.

The department has refused his request, saying in a letter last week to the committee that “we want to avoid any perception that the conduct of our criminal investigations and prosecutions is subject to political influence.”

On Monday, Mr. Conyers called the department’s position “unacceptable,” saying of its reasoning, “This concern should lead to precisely the opposite result.”

The case is considered unusual by many legal experts because actions like those Mr. Siegelman was accused of — exchanging a seat on the state hospital licensing board for a contribution to an education lottery campaign he was pushing — are hardly uncommon in state capitals around the country.

“It’s unusual to see a bribery prosecution where the payment wasn’t to the defendant,” said David A. Sklansky, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. “It seems to me the conduct in this case was similar to a lot of what we take as normal for politics.”

Still, some legal experts say that federal prosecutors have wide latitude in interpreting the broad bribery statutes and that Mr. Siegelman’s actions, as outlined by the government, could have crossed the line. Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University School of Law, said the defense claim that the prosecution had not proved corrupt intent does not undermine the conviction.

“I think the government reply brief demolishes Siegelman’s legal argument on the current case law,” Mr. Gillers said.

Nonetheless, Democrats are planning to conduct hearings on the case as part of a wide-ranging look at what they say may be other political prosecutions elsewhere.

Representative Artur G. Davis, like Mr. Siegelman an Alabama Democrat, said he wanted Mr. Rove, the recently departed White House deputy chief of staff, to testify about Mr. Siegelman. Mr. Davis called Mr. Rove “the most significant factual witness in this matter.”

Mr. Davis, in his third term in Congress and a former federal prosecutor himself, said it was “certainly plausible” Mr. Rove could have had a hand in the Siegelman prosecution. He cited Mr. Rove’s involvement in the state’s politics in the 1990s and Alabama’s wholesale transition, bucked by Mr. Siegelman, to Republican dominance.

Forty-four former state attorneys general, including some Republicans, from New York, California, Massachusetts and elsewhere have signed a petition urging Congress to look into Mr. Siegelman’s conviction, which his lawyers are appealing.

“There is reason to believe that the case brought against Governor Siegelman may have had sufficient irregularities as to call into question the basic fairness that is the linchpin of our system of justice,” the attorneys general wrote.

In Alabama, a small war of editorial boards has erupted since Mr. Siegelman was sentenced to seven years and four months in prison in late June. Newspapers in the state’s smaller cities have repeatedly raised questions about the former governor’s treatment.

Alabama Democrats are seething over a judge’s decision to have Mr. Siegelman immediately shackled and jailed on the day of sentencing, with no chance for him to seek bond or put his affairs in order. Republicans say the ex-governor is nothing more than a crook who ran a “pay for play” administration.

Mike Hubbard, chairman of the state’s Republican Party, called Ms. Simpson’s allegations “a bunch of hogwash” and said “the state of Alabama was for sale when Don Siegelman was governor.”

Democrats are equally passionate. “My sense is, there is a great unease with what has gone on here,” said Jack Miller, former chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party. “It’s kind of, if it could happen to him, it could happen to anybody.”

Mr. Siegelman, meanwhile, is in the federal prison in Oakdale, La. In a recent note to The Associated Press, he said his case would will eventually be seen as the “Watergate of 2008.”

The government prosecutors who sent Mr. Siegelman to prison have angrily rebutted any suggestion of politics in several detailed statements, one of them criticizing national press coverage of the case.

“My sole motivation for pushing the prosecution was a firmly held belief, supported by overwhelming evidence and the law, that former Governor Siegelman had broken the law and traded his public office for personal and political favors,” Louis V. Franklin Sr., the acting United States attorney in Montgomery, said in one statement. Mr. Franklin took over the case after demands that the sitting United States attorney, Leura G. Canary, recuse herself because her husband, William, is active in the Republican Party and has ties to Mr. Rove.

Yet questions about the Siegelman case persist, including about whether Mr. Franklin played the decisive role he says he did, and not just among the former governor’s supporters.

For one thing, the prosecution of a high official like a governor is nearly always undertaken under the watchful eye of Justice Department officials in Washington, former government lawyers say.

One of Mr. Siegelman’s former lawyers, G. Douglas Jones, former United States attorney in Birmingham, says that at a crucial moment in 2004, when the Siegelman investigation seemed to be flagging, he was told by government prosecutors in Montgomery that the “folks in Washington said, ‘Take another look at everything.’ ”

Referring to a unit of the Justice Department, Mr. Jones said, “There is no question but that the Public Integrity Section was intimately involved.”

Democrats have tried to tie the case to the continuing dispute over the firing of several federal prosecutors for what they say were political reasons.

After serving as secretary of state, attorney general and lieutenant governor, Mr. Siegelman was elected governor in 1998. He was narrowly defeated in 2002 and for most of his term his administration was under investigation, his lawyers say. “These guys doing the investigating were hell-bent on finding something Siegelman did wrong,” Mr. Jones said.

In June 2006 Mr. Siegelman was convicted by a federal jury in Montgomery of accepting $500,000 from Richard M. Scrushy, then the chief executive of the HealthSouth Corporation, in return for an appointment to the state hospital licensing board.

The money was to be used to retire a debt incurred by Mr. Siegelman’s campaign for a state lottery to fund education. Government prosecutors say Mr. Siegelman, as a co-guarantor, was personally liable for the debt; his lawyers say that Mr. Siegelman’s signature was a formality and that he would never have been expected to personally pay back the loan. Mr. Scrushy had served on the same hospital board under three previous governors.

The White House has brushed off suggestions that Mr. Rove may have been involved.

An associate of Mr. Rove’s in the state, Matthew C. McDonald, a Mobile lawyer, said Mr. Rove had maintained at least a passing interest in Alabama affairs. The interest dated back to his pivotal role as a political consultant here in the 1990s, when he helped shift the state’s supreme court to the Republicans. Mr. Rove opened an office in Montgomery, and would fly in and out regularly.

Representative Davis pointed out that the case against the governor rested almost wholly on the testimony of two cooperating witnesses, most of whose allegations were rejected by the jury.

The most important of the witnesses, a former aide to Mr. Siegelman named Nick Bailey, testified about the governor’s appointing Mr. Scrushy to the hospital board in exchange for the contribution.

But Mr. Bailey also admitted taking tens of thousands of dollars in bribes without the governor’s knowledge, said he had not been in the room when Mr. Siegelman met with Mr. Scrushy, and could offer only his recollection of a brief exchange with the governor on the matter.

In legal papers, however, the government dismissed the idea that its case was weak, saying the “evidence was more than sufficient to convict defendant.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/us/11siegelman.html





Former Law Adviser Speaks Out On Bush
Michiko Kakutani

THE TERROR PRESIDENCY

Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration

By Jack Goldsmith

256 pages. W. W. Norton. $25.95.

In October 2003 Jack Goldsmith, a legal scholar with sterling conservative credentials, was hired to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president and the attorney general about the legality of presidential actions. As he was briefed on counterterrorism measures the Bush administration had adopted in the wake of 9/11, Mr. Goldsmith says he was alarmed to discover that many of those policies “rested on severely damaged legal foundations,” that the legal opinions that supported these counterterrorism operations were, in his view, “sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the president.”

Mr. Goldsmith eventually withdrew several key department opinions — including two highly controversial “torture memos” dealing with the authority of the executive branch to conduct coercive interrogation — but only after contentious battles with administration hardliners led by David Addington, then Vice President Cheney’s legal adviser and now chief of staff.

As Mr. Goldsmith recounts in his chilling new book, “The Terror Presidency,” he and his Justice Department colleagues (in consultation with lawyers from the State Department, the Defense Department, the C.I.A. and the National Security Council) reached a consensus in 2003 that the Fourth Geneva Convention (which governs the duties of an occupying power and the treatment of civilians) affords protection to all Iraqis, including those who are terrorists. When he delivered this decision to the White House, he recalls, Mr. Addington exploded: “ ‘The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,’ he barked. ‘You cannot question his decision.’ ”

The portrait of the Bush administration that Mr. Goldsmith — who resigned from the Office of Legal Counsel in June 2004, only nine months after assuming the post — draws in this book is a devastating one. It is a portrait of a highly insular White House obsessively focused on expanding presidential power and loathe to consult with Congress, a White House that frequently made up its mind about a course of action before consulting with experts, a White House that sidelined Congress in its policymaking and willfully pursued a “go-it-alone approach” based on “minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense.”

Similar portraits, of course, have been drawn by reporters and other former administration insiders, but Mr. Goldsmith’s account stands out by virtue that he was privy to internal White House debates about explosive matters like secret surveillance, coercive interrogation and the detention and trial of enemy combatants. It is also distinguished by Mr. Goldsmith’s writing from the point of view of a conservative who shared many of the Bush White House’s objectives (and who was an ideological ally of John Yoo, one of the main architects of the administration’s legal responses to a post-9/11 world and the author of some of the very opinions Mr. Goldsmith would later call into question). But he found himself alarmed by the Bush White House’s obsession with expanding presidential power, its arrogant unilateralism and its willingness to use what he regarded as careless and overly expansive legal arguments in an effort to buttress its policies.

Mr. Goldsmith does not go into detail here about his role on that March 2004 night when Alberto Gonzales, then White House legal counsel, and the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, went to the hospital to visit an ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft to try to pressure him into approving a secret program (which was about to expire) over objections from Mr. Goldsmith and Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey. But he does provide a visceral sense of the tensions within the administration, with Mr. Ashcroft and members of the Justice Department often at odds with Mr. Gonzales and the White House, and the hard-line, hard-driving Mr. Addington, backed with the power of the vice president’s office, usually prevailing in the legal policy meetings held in Mr. Gonzales’s office.

Noting that “the president and the vice president always made clear that a central administration priority was to maintain and expand the president’s formal legal powers,” Mr. Goldsmith says that lawyers soon realized that they “could gain traction for a particular course of action — usually, going it alone — by arguing that alternative proposals would diminish the president’s power.”

Working with Congress on matters like detention and military commissions, Mr. Goldsmith says, would have helped the administration establish “a solid legal foundation” for the war on terrorism while diminishing “many complaints about legitimacy.” And yet the White House took working with Congress “off the table,” which meant that “a lot of sensible policy options” simply “were not available.”

Fear of another terrorist attack, Mr. Goldsmith contends, created pressure on administration officials “to act to the edges of the law.” He writes that Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and now director of the C.I.A., would often say that after 9/11 he was troubled if he was not using “the full authority allowed by law,” and that he was “going to live on the edge,” where “his spikes will have chalk on them.”

This attitude “permeated the executive branch after 9/11,” Mr. Goldsmith says, and he agreed that his own job was “to make sure the president could act right up to the chalk line of legality.” But he adds, “Even blurry chalk lines delineate areas that are clearly out of bounds,” and in some pivotal cases he felt compelled to stand up to the hardliners and insist that the administration’s counterterrorism policies be put on sounder legal footing.

Of the notorious Aug. 1, 2002, torture memo (which narrowly defined torture as “extreme acts” causing “severe pain” of the sort that “accompanies serious physical injury” leading to “death or organ failure,” and which asserted that “any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of battlefield detainees would violate the Constitution’s sole vesting of the commander-in-chief authority in the president”), Mr. Goldsmith writes that its concept of sweeping executive power had “no foundation” in prior Office of Legal Counsel opinions, or in judicial decisions, or in any other source of law.”

What’s more, “the conclusion’s significance sweeps far beyond the interrogation opinion or the torture statute,” he says. “It implies that many other federal laws that limit interrogation — anti-assault laws, the 1996 War Crimes Act, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice — are also unconstitutional, a conclusion that would have surprised the many prior presidents who signed or ratified those laws, or complied with them during wartime.”

Mr. Goldsmith is similarly scathing about how the Bush administration went about side-stepping the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which required the president and government agencies to obtain warrants from a special court before conducting electronic surveillance of people suspected of being terrorists or spies. Although he says he shared many of the administration’s concerns on this issue, he “deplored the way the White House went about fixing the problem.”

He quotes Mr. Addington saying of the surveillance act in court: “We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court.” And he observes that top Bush officials dealt with that act “the way they dealt with other laws they didn’t like: they blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations.”

This sort of unilateral action, Mr. Goldsmith argues, led to “legal and political errors that became very costly to the administration down the road.” In his view it was also a strategy “guaranteed not to work” and “certain to destroy trust altogether,” for “when an administration makes little attempt to work with the other institutions of our government and makes it a public priority to emphasize that its aim is to expand its power, Congress, the courts and the public listen carefully, and worry.”

Mr. Goldsmith concludes this illuminating volume with the observation that unlike Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt — two presidents who also presided over the nation at times of crisis — President Bush has relied only on “the hard power of prerogative,” ignoring “the soft factors of legitimation — consultation, deliberation, the appearance of deference, and credible expressions of public concern for constitutional and international values — in his dealing with Congress, the courts, and allies.” As a result, Mr. Goldsmith says, even if President Bush’s “accomplishments are viewed more charitably by future historians than they are viewed today,” they will “likely always be dimmed by our knowledge of his administration’s strange and unattractive views of presidential power.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/books/11kaku.html





Spy Master Admits Error

Intel czar Mike McConnell told Congress a new law helped bring down a terror plot. The facts say otherwise.
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball

In a new embarrassment for the Bush administration top spymaster, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is withdrawing an assertion he made to Congress this week that a recently passed electronic-surveillance law helped U.S. authorities foil a major terror plot in Germany.

The temporary measure, signed into law by President Bush on Aug. 5, gave the U.S. intelligence community broad new powers to eavesdrop on telephone and e-mail communications overseas without seeking warrants from the surveillance court. The law expires in six months and is expected to be the subject of intense debate in the months ahead. On Monday, McConnell—questioned by Sen. Joe Lieberman—claimed the law, intended to remedy what the White House said was an intelligence gap, had helped to “facilitate” the arrest of three suspects believed to be planning massive car bombings against American targets in Germany. Other U.S. intelligence-community officials questioned the accuracy of McConnell's testimony and urged his office to correct it. Four intelligence-community officials, who asked for anonymity discussing sensitive material, said the new law, dubbed the "Protect America Act,” played little if any role in the unraveling of the German plot. The U.S. military initially provided information that helped the Germans uncover the plot. But that exchange of information took place months before the new “Protect America” law was passed.

After questions about his testimony were raised, McConnell called Lieberman to clarify his statements to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, an official said. (A spokeswoman for Lieberman confirmed that McConnell called the senator Tuesday but could not immediately confirm what they spoke about.) Late Wednesday afternoon, McConnell issued a statement acknowleding that "information contributing to the recent arrests [in Germany] was not collected under authorities provided by the 'Protect America Act'."

The developments were cited by Democratic critics on Capitol Hill as the latest example of the Bush administration's exaggerated claims—and contradictory statements—about ultrasecret surveillance activities. In the face of such complaints, the administration has consistently resisted any public disclosure about the details of the surveillance activities—even thought McConnell himself has openly talked about some aspects of them.

The Justice Department, for example, just two weeks ago filed a brief opposing the public release of secret legal opinions about the program—even in redacted form—on the grounds that any disclosure beyond a one-sentence comment earlier this year by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would “cause serious damage to the national security of the United States.” (The existence of one of those rulings was first disclosed by NEWSWEEK this summer and publicly confirmed by McConnell in an interview with the El Paso Times in August. The ACLU last month filed an unprecedented motion with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court seeking public release of its rulings about the surveillance program.)

The flap over McConnell’s latest statements is especially sensitive because many Democrats have said they felt the White House and the director of national intelligence stampeded them into passing the new surveillance law—claiming it was needed on an “emergency” basis to protect the country against a future terror attack. Speaking Wednesday at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, Rep. Jane Harman, who was ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee until she was bumped from the committee earlier this year, charged that McConnell had politicized negotiations over the bill. He "appeared to be taking orders from the White House, negotiating for the White House," said Harman. The role he played, "whether he intended it or not, appeared to be political," she said. "Hey—Jane to Mike," she said. "Don't become a political actor."

McConnell's testimony that the new law helped in the German case was especially striking—since it seemed to contradict public statements by American and German officials about how the plot was exposed. About 10 months ago—long before the new law was put into effect—guards at a U.S. military base near Frankfurt noted a suspicious individual conducting surveillance outside the facility. U.S. military officials tipped off German authorities, who quickly identified the individual and several accomplices as militants affiliated with the Islamic Jihad Union, a violent Al Qaeda-linked group. The Germans kept the group under surveillance for months and discovered evidence that the militants—some of whom had been to an Islamic Jihad Union training camp in Pakistan—were assembling chemicals for bombing attacks on American military installations in Germany. (The U.S. Embassy in Berlin issued a public warning last April that it had received intelligence reporting about threats against U.S. personnel in that country.) One U.S. intelligence official described the law-enforcement operation as a case of “good old-fashioned police work.”

Yet when McConnell testified before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, he cited the German case as an example of how the new Protect America Act was working. The law, he started to say, "allowed us to see and understand all the connections with ..." At that point, Lieberman, the committee chair, interrupted McConnell. Lieberman expressed surprise that the law might have contributed to the German counterterror operation. "The newly adopted law facilitated that during August?" he asked.

"Yes, sir, it did,” McConnell responded. “The connections to Al Qaeda, the connections specifically to what's referred to as IJU, the Islamic Jihad Union, an affiliate of Al Qaeda. Because we could understand it, we could help our partners through a long process of monitoring and observation ... And so at the right time, when Americans and German facilities were being targeted, the German authorities decided to move."

Counterterrorism officials familiar with the background of McConnell's testimony said they did not believe the intel czar made inaccurate statements intentionally as part of any strategy by the administration to goad Congress into making the new eavesdropping law permanent. Officials said they believed McConnell gave the wrong answer because he was overwhelmed with information and merely mixed up his facts. Nonetheless, some officials said, as news of McConnell's misstatements spread, it would be in the intelligence director's best interests to correct his testimony—advice he is now heeding.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20749773/site/newsweek/





59% Say US Has Changed for the Worse Since 9/11

Ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many Americans have believed that the events of that horrible day changed the United States forever. Each year that has gone by has seen an increase in the number who believe those changes have not been good for the nation.

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Americans now believe that the events of six years ago changed America for the worse. That’s an increase from 54% a year ago. Just 21% believe that the nation has changed for the better because of that tragedy.

The current results are almost the mirror image of the immediate reaction. Six weeks after the tragedy, 57% thought the nation had changed for the better. That number actually grew to 61% by January 2002. Now, half a decade later, just 21% of American adults hold that optimistic view. Fifty-four percent (54%) say the changes have been for the worse.

A plurality of Republicans (45%) now say the nation has changed for the worse since 9/11. That view is shared by 71% of Democrats and 61% of those not affiliated with either major party.

The increasing pessimism over the past six years has caused Americans to revise their assessment of the way that President Bush responded to the terrorist attacks. Today, just 42% rate his performance following 9/11 as good or excellent. That’s unchanged from a year ago, but down from 51% two years ago and 56% three years ago.

Sixty-eight percent (68%) of Republicans now say the President did a good or excellent job following the terrorist attacks. That view is shared by just 24% of Democrats and 36% of unaffiliateds.

More than a third of all Americans, 35%, now say the President’s response following 9/11 was poor. That’s up from 32% a year ago.

Similar trends are found in other questions asked regularly since the terrorist attacks.

Four years ago, 67% of all Americans believed the world would be a better place if other countries were more like our own. Today, 54% hold that view (up from 51% a year ago). Seventy-two percent (72%) of Republicans believe the world would be better if other nations were more like the United States. Just 43% of Democrats hold that view along with 49% of unaffiliateds.

Another question that Rasmussen Reports has tracked annually is whether the United States is safer than it was before the 9/11 attacks. Early in 2002, 61% thought the country was safer. Today, just 38% hold that view (up from 36% a year ago).

Today, 39% of Americans believe that the U.S. and its allies are winning the War on Terror. Last year, that figure was 41%. Three years ago, more than 50% thought the U.S. and its allies were winning.

A separate survey found that just 20% of Americans say the United States is generally heading in the right direction. Just 17% believe that Congress is doing a good or an excellent job.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/publ...rse_since_9_11





India’s Cops Get Orwellian

I’m a huge fan of irony, and our world is full of it. Earlier this week, papers released by the National Archives in England revealed that “Special Branch police” had monitored George Orwell’s activities for a decade. In other words, Big Brother had been watching the man who would go on to write 1984. Orwell himself was presumably unaware of it – and yet, all too aware of the nature of Big Brother.

If Orwell were brought back from the dead, I presume he’d chuckle and think how little things have changed. He would certainly have been bemused by happenings in India. A few days ago, Mumbai’s police revealed their plans to install keystroke loggers in Mumbai’s cyber cafes, besides imposing licensing requirements on them.

This is done ostensibly to fight terrorism, and here are the implications for you and me. Whenever we surf from a Mumbai cyber café, everything we type will automatically be captured on record. Our email passwords, every message we type, the sites we visit, the pictures we download: everything will be stored in police records, rendering us, effectively, naked in their eyes.

If we buy stuff online, our credit card details will also get saved. Will these end up getting sold in a black market somewhere? Not unlikely. Much as we like to think of governments as benevolent entities that exist to serve us, in reality they comprise individuals with the same human weaknesses as the rest of us, responding to incentives just as we do. The Mumbai police, like all police in India, consists of underpaid people given excessive powers over others, with little accountability. So how do you expect them to behave?

Unless a policeman’s self-interest is perfectly aligned with the public interest, which is not the case in our system of government, it is inevitable that he will feel tempted to use his power for personal gain. It is equally likely that the police, like any other arm of government, will focus on expanding its power, and increasing its control over people, rather than carrying out its tasks, for which it is not accountable in practice. By insisting that cyber cafes in Mumbai need a license from the police, for example, they have opened up a new under-the-table revenue stream.

The government’s rationale (or rationalization) behind this is familiar and silly. Whenever the government wants to restrict freedom, it invokes security, and cops justify this move under the grounds of fighting terrorism. Well, firstly, at a practical level, the cops won’t have the manpower to scrutinize the massive volume of keystroke logs generated everyday, or to figure out what is terrorist code and what is teenage lingo. Secondly, at a moral level, it is simply wrong to deny people of their privacy in this manner.

Mid Day quoted an unnamed “National Vice President, People Union for Civil Liberty” as justifying these moves by saying that it was ok “[a]s long as personal computers are not being monitored. If monitoring is restricted to public computers, it is in the interest of security.” By this reasoning, why should the cops not place TV cameras in hotel rooms or record every conversation in every taxi and train? After all, terrorists use hotels and public transport. Are you okay with that?

The ultimate expression of a government’s lust for power lies in a term coined by Orwell in 1984: Thoughtcrime. Thoughtcrimes are thoughts that have been criminalised, and if the technology to detect emotions existed, it is not unlikely that the Indian government would ban hatred. Or, at least, hatred of things that it deems should not be hated. A recent Mid Day report describes how various authorities are trying to get communities on Orkut that are against Pratibha Patil removed. They include communities with names like ‘We hate Pratibha Patil’, ‘We don’t like Pratibha Patil’, ‘Pratibha Patil sucks’, and ‘Pratibha Patil — the puppet’.

I am no fan of the lady myself, and have expressed, in an earlier instalment of this column, my distaste for her views favouring compulsary sterilization of people with heriditory diseases, and her delusions about being able to converse with spirits. Columns appearing in big newspapers are harder to censor, but I fail to see why members of Orkut should be barred from expressing similar emotions.

Earlier this month, a computer engineer based in Bangalore was arrested “after he allegedly uploaded a blasphemous matter [sic] about Maratha warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji” on Orkut. Google, which owns Orkut, reportedly collaborated in the matter, providing the engineer’s IP address to the cops. (It is natural for them to go by the law of the land, according to the land they’re in, but they really should get off their “do no evil” high horse.) Technology, while it enables free expression, also provides mechanisms for its suppression. Don’t expect our government not to use it.
http://indiauncut.com/iublog/article...get-orwellian/





China's 'Eye on the Internet' a Fraud
Press release

The "Great Firewall of China," used by the government of the People's Republic of China to block users from reaching content it finds objectionable, is actually a "panopticon" that encourages self-censorship through the perception that users are being watched, rather than a true firewall, according to researchers at UC Davis and the University of New Mexico.

The researchers are developing an automated tool, called ConceptDoppler, to act as a weather report on changes in Internet censorship in China. ConceptDoppler uses mathematical techniques to cluster words by meaning and identify keywords that are likely to be blacklisted.

Many countries carry out some form of Internet censorship. Most rely on systems that block specific Web sites or Web addresses, said Earl Barr, a graduate student in computer science at UC Davis who is an author on the paper. China takes a different approach by filtering Web content for specific keywords and selectively blocking Web pages.

In 2006, a team at the University of Cambridge, England, discovered that when the Chinese system detects a banned word in data traveling across the network, it sends a series of three "reset" commands to both the source and the destination. These "resets" effectively break the connection. But they also allow researchers to test words and see which ones are censored.

Barr, along with Jed Crandall, a recent UC Davis graduate who is now an assistant professor of computer science at the School of Engineering, University of New Mexico; UC Davis graduate students Daniel Zinn and Michael Byrd; and independent researcher Rich East sent messages to Internet addresses within China containing a variety of different words that might be subject to censorship.

If China's censorship system were a true firewall, most blocking would take place at the border with the rest of the Internet, Barr said. But the researchers found that some messages passed through several routers before being blocked.

A firewall would also block all mentions of a banned word or phrase, but banned words reached their destinations on about 28 percent of the tested paths, Byrd said. Filtering was particularly erratic at times of heavy Internet use.

The words used to probe the Chinese Internet were not selected at random.

"If we simply bombarded the Great Firewall with random words, we would waste resources and time," Zinn said.

The researchers took the Chinese version of Wikipedia, extracted individual words and used a mathematical technique called latent semantic analysis to work out the relationships between different words. If one of the words was censored within China, they could look up which other closely related words are likely to be blocked as well.

Examples of words tested by the researchers and found to be banned included references to the Falun Gong movement and the protest movements of 1989; Nazi Germany and other historical events; and general concepts related to democracy and political protest.
"Imagine you want to remove the history of the Wounded Knee massacre from the Library of Congress," Crandall said. "You could remove 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' and a few other selected books, or you could remove every book in the entire library that contains the word 'massacre.'"

By analogy, Chinese Internet censorship based on keyword filtering is the equivalent of the latter -- and indeed, the keyword "massacre" (in Chinese) is on the blacklist.

Because it filters ideas rather than specific Web sites, keyword filtering stops people from using proxy servers or "mirror" Web sites to evade censorship. But because it is not completely effective all the time, it probably acts partly by encouraging self-censorship, Barr said. When users within China see that certain words, ideas and concepts are blocked most of the time, they might assume that they should avoid those topics.

The original panopticon was a prison design developed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. Bentham proposed that a central observer would be able to watch all the prisoners, while the prisoners would not know when they were being watched.

The work will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Computer and Communications Security Conference in Alexandria, Va., Oct. 29-Nov. 2, 2007.
http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/n....lasso?id=8321





Lovers in the ’60s Take a Magical Mystery Tour
Stephen Holden

From its first moments, when a solitary dreamer on a beach turns to the camera and sings, unaccompanied, the opening lines of the Beatles’ song “Girl,” Julie Taymor’s ’60s musical fantasia, “Across the Universe,” reveals its intention to use the Beatles’ catalog to tell two stories at once, one personal, the other generational. That young man, Jude (Jim Sturgess), is a cheeky Liverpool dockworker with a twinkle in his eye. He quickly emerges as a winsome vocal composite of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with a personality to match.

From here the movie only gets better. Somewhere around its midpoint, “Across the Universe” captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.

That surrender is the kind of commitment that Ms. Taymor, a true believer in the magic of art, asks of an audience. And as the movie intensifies, and she brings in a fantastic array of puppets, masks and synergistic effects, you may find yourself in a heightened emotional state, even as you realize that what you’re seeing is unadulterated white, middle-class baby boomer nostalgia.

This risky hybrid of long-form music video and movie musical with clearly drawn characters tells the story of Jude’s star-crossed love affair with Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), a girl from upper-crust East Coast suburbia. It follows the couple as they are swept up and come apart in the evolving counterculture of left-wing politics, sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

The story, briefly: Jude, visiting the United States in search of his long-lost father, meets Lucy through her brother, Max (Joe Anderson), a student at Princeton, where the father is discovered working as a janitor. Max takes Jude home to his stuffy family for Thanksgiving, during which Max shocks his parents by announcing that he is dropping out of college. He and Jude drive to New York and settle in a sprawling East Village tenement and are soon joined by Lucy.

Their landlady, Sadie (Dana Fuchs, who played Janis Joplin in the Off Broadway show “Love, Janis”), is the movie’s resident earth mother. An aspiring rock singer, she sounds like a warmer, more controlled Joplin. Her triumphal “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” announces Lucy’s arrival in New York, and later in the movie, her voice hoarsely shouting “Helter Skelter” rises above the mob during a Columbia University riot at which Jude is arrested.

Rounding out the bohemian household are Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy), a guitarist who arrives from Detroit by Greyhound after his younger brother’s death in the Detroit riots, and Prudence (T.V. Carpio), an Asian-American lesbian cheerleader who hitchhikes to New York from Dayton, Ohio, and (in a joke on a Beatles song title) crashes into the house through the bathroom window.

Jo-Jo, who suggests a softened Jimi Hendrix, becomes Sadie’s on-again-off-again boyfriend and sometime lead guitarist. Prudence, who early in the film sings “I Want to Hold Your Hand” while gazing wistfully from afar at a blond cheerleader, develops a secret crush on Sadie. While Jude embraces art, Lucy, who lost her first boyfriend in Vietnam, gravitates toward antiwar activism after Max receives his draft notice and reluctantly leaves to fight in the war.

If the young lovers are familiar ’60s archetypes, the actors’ natural performances and the easy, colloquial dialogue by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (“The Commitments”) allow the characters to transcend the generic. When Lucy, gazing at Jude, sings “If I Fell” very slowly, in a sweet, trembling voice, she is one girl worriedly fantasizing about one boy.

Most of the historical events are lightly fictionalized in a movie that maintains only the fuzziest of timelines. Its 33 Beatles songs (two without words) have been re-recorded and sung by the actors. Yet “Across the Universe” feels emotionally true both to the Beatles, whose music today seems to exist outside of time, and to the decade it remembers. Smart, uncluttered musical arrangements help reposition the songs to address the situation at hand. As a result, music that has congealed in collective memory — especially the clever, breezy early Beatles songs — emerges refreshed.

A visceral peak arrives with “Strawberry Fields Forever.” In this gorgeous production number, an artwork by Jude in which rows of bleeding strawberries are pinned to a white surface transmutes into a hallucination of strawberry bombs raining over Southeast Asia. Then the artist, in an anguished frenzy, begins smashing strawberries on the walls and floors and destroys his work.

This happens around the time that Lucy, who works for a militant antiwar organization, angrily dismisses Jude’s art as “doodles and cartoons.” He charges into her office, snarls the song “Revolution” and instigates a brawl. It is one of several moments in which “Across the Universe” grasps a central emotional duality of a culture in which rage and ecstatic idealism clashed and played into each other at the same time.

Another extraordinary scene follows Joe to a United States Army induction center at which an Uncle Sam poster comes to animated life, leans down, points a giant finger and growls, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” Inside the center a choreographed sequence finds inductees in their underwear sliding involuntarily along the floor through lines of Army officers in grim Expressionistic masks, marching in robotic formation. The new recruits are next shown, still in their underwear, lugging a giant replica of the Statue of Liberty through the Vietnamese jungle.

The dreamiest reverie, set to “Because,” begins with a tableau of nine friends blissfully lying on their backs in the grass in a mandala pattern. The circle disperses as Jude and Lucy find themselves in a watery blue sky where clouds melt into liquid, and the entwined lovers are themselves floating underwater. Most fanciful of all is a largely animated sequence in which Eddie Izzard is Mr. Kite, the ringmaster of a psychedelic circus with a dancing chorus line of “the blue people.”

Amid the phantasmagoria are several star cameos. As Max recovers from war injuries in a veterans’ hospital, he has a morphine-induced fever dream in which the beds in his ward rear up from the floor to the song “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” and he is tended by five Salma Hayeks. Bono appears as the acid guru, Dr. Robert, a Ken Kesey-Neal Cassady fusion who sings “I Am the Walrus” at an acid-drenched party and conducts Jude, Lucy and a roiling band of Merry Pranksters on a delirious bus journey through a rainbow-colored countryside.

“Across the Universe,” in the spirit of the counterculture, goes with the flow. Its scenes, songs and witty roughhouse choreography, spun off from the Beatles’ movies “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!,” dissolve into a stream of consciousness with only occasional punctuation.

Because of its oh-wow aesthetic, its refusal to adopt a critical distance from the ’60s drug culture, its tacit approval of the characters’ antiwar activism and its token attention to the decade’s racial strife, “Across the Universe” leaves itself wide open to derision, complaints and endless nitpicking. But it couldn’t have succeeded any other way. The movie is completely devoid of the protective cynicism that is now a reflexive response to the term “the ’60s.”

“Across the Universe” believes wholeheartedly in the quaint, communitarian spirit it exalts. You share the joy of its blissed-out hippies in the grass. You feel the deepening friendship between Jude and Max that is sealed in Max’s incandescent performance of “Hey, Jude.” And during the time it lasts, the intoxicating passion of Jude and Lucy, both innocents by today’s standards, convinces, for a moment, that love is all you need.

“Across the Universe” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has nudity, sexual situations, drug use, mild violence and some strong language.


ACROSS THE UNIVERSE


Opens today in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Miami and Chicago.


Directed by Julie Taymor; written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, based on a story by Ms. Taymor, Mr. Clement and Mr. La Frenais; director of photography, Bruno Delbonnel; edited by Françoise Bonnot; music score by Elliot Goldenthal, songs by the Beatles; production designer, Mark Friedberg; choreography by Daniel Ezralow; produced by Suzanne Todd, Jennifer Todd and Matthew Gross; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 131 minutes.


WITH: Evan Rachel Wood (Lucy), Jim Sturgess (Jude), Joe Anderson (Max), Dana Fuchs (Sadie), Martin Luther McCoy (Jo-Jo) and T. V. Carpio (Prudence).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/movies/14univ.html





MPAA: Pirate Party Politicians Are Illegitimate Thieves
Ernesto

Last year Pirate Parties were formed all over the world. Their main goal is to protect privacy, culture, and knowledge. The MPAA is not happy with politicians they can’t buy fund, and labels them as illegitimate thieves.

Dean Garfield, director of MPAA’s anti-piracy department, was interviewed by ZDNet recently. When he was asked whether the Pirate Party’s attempts to battle organizations like the MPAA through democratic means is legitimate, he responded: “There’s nothing about what the Pirate Bay does or what the Pirate Party does that is legitimate. There’s nothing philosophically principled about it. They steal copyright content and accept advertising dollars based on taking other people’s work. There’s nothing noble about it.”

Calling a political party illegitimate and their members thieves is a pretty bold statement for an organization who’s feeding politicians thousands of dollars to support their cause. I doubt that Garfield even read their election manifesto, if he did, he would know that the party has nothing to do with stealing copyright.

“This can only be seen as MPAA calling democracy illegitimate. We are a registered political party finishing in the top ten in a parliamentary democracy,” says Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party in a response to TorrentFreak. “That these people claim it would somehow be illegitimate to change laws through a parliamentary process shows just how corrupt to the core they are.”

Falkvinge continues: “On the other hand, I think the statement may be partly out of fear. There’s one thing that beats all their lawyers, war chests and monopolies. Just one. That one thing is votes in a democratic election, and that’s what we have and they don’t. These claims are so far out they don’t even reflect sunlight. Unfortunately, that seems to be true for most statements from the Music And Film Industry Associations of America, but we’re also seeing the oldskool politicians slowly starting to understand our counterpoints. It’s going to be an interesting couple of next years.”

It won’t be easy for the MPAA and other anti-piracy organizations to take on the Pirate Parties, especially not with such a clueless statement. Europe’s Pirate Parties are on course with their pan-European electoral assault for the 2009 European Elections. To quote Rick Falkvinge: “There is a far better than average chance that this is becoming the next global political movement, and I’m going to claim it already is the next big political movement.”

Sail on.

http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-pirate-...hieves-070912/





Hollywood's Copyright Enforcer
Greg Sandoval

In Hollywood's ongoing battle against illegal file sharing, Dean Garfield is one of the people the studios depend on to cross swords with pirates.

Garfield is executive vice president and chief strategy officer for the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade group that represents six of the nation's largest movie studios. He's charged with finding ways to limit the bootlegging of feature films and, as he says, help the film industry not end up like the music industry.

He knows all about the music industry's mostly losing battle against piracy. Prior to joining the MPAA, Garfield was vice president of legal affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America, where he helped manage the court cases against Grokster, Kazaa and MusicCity.

This kind of experience, working for both the music and film industries, has turned Garfield into the face of copyright enforcement.

But at the same time that the MPAA is pursuing a copyright complaint against TorrentSpy, a BitTorrent tracker, Garfield has been named in a lawsuit filed by TorrentSpy. He's accused of hiring a hacker to steal information from TorrentSpy's servers. The MPAA has denied the charges, and Garfield declined to comment on pending litigation.

CNET News.com recently spoke with Garfield about the MPAA's tactics and strategy for dealing with digital piracy.


Q: So is piracy growing?
Garfield: That's a good question. We're actually looking at it. In 2005, for the first time, we actually undertook that analysis, to look at the losses that are suffered by the industry from piracy, and we are in the process of revisiting and refreshing that analysis.

My thought is that it's not clear whether it's growing, although my sense is that it probably is. I do think also that it's changing very dramatically as we move forward. And we're trying to adapt and evolve to address it.
If you look at the list of movies that have broken new ground, from Star Wars to Polar Express, nobody would look at those movies and suggest that our industry is afraid of technology. The truth is quite the opposite.

Why do so many of these young people see the MPAA and RIAA as one big evil empire?
Garfield: I'm going to challenge your assumption a little bit. I do think that the people are able to distinguish between the industries. But for a lot of folks who aren't versed in our world, it's all Hollywood. So we're viewed as part of Hollywood and all that's wrong with Hollywood.

They aren't able to see the value and hard work that goes into making a movie. It's a real investment. It requires not only vision and great storytelling, but real capital investment. It costs a little over $100 million to make and market a movie.

Why hasn't the MPAA trotted out respected stars to help get your message out? Might it be more persuasive for Tom Hanks and Sean Penn to help sell the message?
Garfield: It's a good idea. We are trying to do more and more to spread the word on all that goes into the magic of moviemaking and the impact it has not only on people's lives but on our economy.

Earlier this year, we put out a report on the economic impact of the motion picture industry, and we had a symposium in Washington. The people behind that were the studios as well as the artists who are part of that industry. That is one of the events that we hope to do, to put a face to the work that goes into the movies.

I'm not of the view that we aren't doing anything. I'm also not of the view that we have a monopoly on perfection. So I think we can improve.

You guys have chosen a different tack than the music industry on fighting piracy. You aren't suing many people.
Garfield: We have sued some individuals, but we just haven't done it at the level of the music industry. Our campaign was different in that it was targeted at education and deterrents. In our testing over time, we started to see some difference. It's not where we wanted it to be.

Some members of the public didn't know what was legal. We're looking to see now whether, after this education, they will act consistent with what they know. Driving drunk was socially tolerated at one point in this country's history, but things have changed, and it's not accepted any longer. Hopefully, we'll get to that kind of understanding and change behavior.

What kind of technologies are you guys using to help prevent piracy?
Garfield: We're at the point where technology provides real opportunity, and it's not just down the road, but today. We're conducting requests for proposals in conjunction with MovieLabs around content recognition technologies. (MovieLabs is a company started by the six major studios to develop technologies that can help distribution of film.)

That testing is still ongoing, but the reports are that the technology really works. It is really effective. You can distinguish one piece of content versus another. That's real potential for monetizing and filtering out copyright content. Technology gives us real opportunities to give consumers what they want while also protecting the investment.

The big studios have just sold Movielink for pennies on the dollar. Google has gotten out of the video-on-demand business. Is it time to give up on the Internet as a distribution method for feature films?
Garfield: I don't think so. It's still too early. We're in the truly nascent stages of the Internet as a multimedia delivery mechanism. We are really just starting out. In time, I think it will be a real medium for delivering digital content.

Jack Valenti compared the Betamax to the Boston Strangler. Critics of the MPAA say his statement was an example of Hollywood's paranoia of technology. Are you guys paranoid?
Garfield: I wouldn't say that at all. The thing to keep in mind is that the development of the DVD and turning the Betamax recorder into a viable piece of technology was something done by our industry. We were behind much of the development behind DVDs.

What the studios do is tell stories, but the way they tell those stories is through the use of technology. We embrace technology and use it to tell our stories more effectively.

If you look at the list of movies that have broken new ground, from Star Wars to Polar Express, nobody would look at those movies and suggest that our industry is afraid of technology. The truth is quite the opposite.

Some have called you the MPAA's enforcer. What's your background, and how did you get to the MPAA?
Garfield: I got here from law school. I'm a lawyer by training. I was working for the recording industry for five years, and I think the impetus to work here was that I could help the motion picture industry avoid some of the pitfalls that the recording industry encountered.

That's one of the things I like about working here. People here really do want to learn. Our industry is filled with folks that are very interested in learning and listening to consumers.

What's the biggest misconception about the MPAA?
Garfield: That we are a bunch of Luddites that do not understand technology and are not interested in giving consumers what they want, or that we're only interested in saying "no."

They think that we're interested only in keeping people from getting motion picture content. The truth is that we're in the business of making motion pictures, and marketing and distributing motion pictures. We want people to have it worldwide. But we want them to have it legitimately.
Part of our challenge is to view the Pirate Party, and those who support it, as a market competitor. We have to make sure that we, as an industry, are as attuned to the marketplace as they are.

The Pirate Party in Sweden has plans to spread the anticopyright movement all over the world. Does it worry you that that some people see the issue of copyright as an attempt by Hollywood to suppress information and are painting piracy as a crusade?
Garfield: It is a concern. Part of our challenge is to view the Pirate Party, and those who support it, as a market competitor. We have to make sure that we, as an industry, are as attuned to the marketplace as they are. We have to be steadfast to respond to market wishes. We also shouldn't close our eyes to it, and we will be responsive to it.

Do you think that the Pirate Party's attempts to battle you guys at the ballot box is a legitimate way to work out these issues?
Garfield: There's nothing about what the Pirate Bay does or what the Pirate Party does that is legitimate. There's nothing philosophically principled about it. They steal copyright content and accept advertising dollars based on taking other people's work. There's nothing noble about it.

What's your technology background?
Garfield: Initially, working at a law firm, I had an interest in working with technology. What was important was that I got into this area very early, in 1998 or 1999, when a lot of these things were developing.

I knew that to understand what the best legal arguments were, I needed a deep understanding of the technology, and so I always tried to surround myself with people who understood it very well. So I'm not a technologist by training, by any stretch of the imagination, but I ask a lot of questions and sought out people who understand it.

Have you seen, among the file-sharing applications, any that could one day be a friend to Hollywood?
Garfield: It's not our role to endorse any particular technology, but I've seen a ton of stuff that could bring us great value. Already, BitTorrent has real value, because it's a really efficient way of transferring large files over the Internet. This is a big problem.

For us, BitTorrent holds real promise because our stuff is really large. It's hard to predict now where this will be 5 or 10 years down the road, but the potential is promising.

When you think that the motion picture industry, on a worldwide basis, is unique in that we are the dominant audiovisual art form in almost every country around the world--and delivering our content around the world requires real know-how--there is a real infrastructure around getting a movie that is premiering in the United States to countries around the world.

And technologies will help us do this more efficiently. For example, the rollout of digital cinema--that will help us go to places that don't necessarily have the infrastructure to get our content right now.

What about BitTorrent tracker sites, like TorrentSpy and Isohunt? A judge has ruled that TorrentSpy has to turn over information from its RAM over to the MPAA. Are you going to continue to go after these sites?
Garfield: Yes. I think our strategy has always been multifaceted. It will include litigation, but it will also include technology development (of security applications), and partnering with third parties, and creating real, legitimate alternatives to piracy. And all the studios are working very hard at this individually.

Just a year and a half ago, they invested a significant amount of money in creating MovieLabs to help them with the technological development. We will continue the legal efforts here, but it will always be supported by the efforts to give consumers a legitimate and attractive way to download movies.

From August
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6204654.html





Canadian Judge Orders Removal of Rant on YouTube
Jane Sims

Stan Hall is mad at his lawyer. And he wanted to tell the world.

So, with a video camera and an Internet connection, he ranted about his treatment by a London law firm and posted it on YouTube.

But a judge said yesterday those postings go too far.

In a decision thought to be a first in local legal circles, the London judge agreed with a motion brought by Hall's lawyer to order the YouTube posts removed.

In the clips posted last month, Hall speaks out in the reports about his dissatisfaction with lawyer Paul Ledroit.

The grainy image shows Hall, cigarette in hand, venting anger over the handling of an insurance claim after he and his wife lost everything in a fire.

The Halls had a home and a general store in Dashwood. It burned in February 2006.

Since then, Hall has been battling insurance companies for a settlement in the case.

He hired Ledroit to handle his interests, but isn't happy with the work or his bill.

Ledroit, who wants off the case, asked the court to order Hall to remove the postings.

The lawyer's motion to be taken off the case goes to court Oct. 2.

But Hall and his wife object to Ledroit's removal from the case because they say they've paid him a lot of money.

Superior Court Justice William Jenkins reviewed the computer postings.

"I find that it includes unproven allegations that Mr. Ledroit and his law firm are incompetent and dishonest," Jenkins said in his decision.

Jenkins ruled the postings would cause lawyer Paul Ledroit and his law firm "significant and irreparable damage" if left for public viewing.

Jenkins ordered the clips removed and that Hall not post anything else until the court says he can.

The law firm, Ledroit Beckett, declined comment.

Hall, a London realtor, hasn't worked in two years. He says he's been ill since the fire and takes a lot of prescription drugs.

Hall has been a failed candidate in London civic elections.

He said he's still trying to decide if he will follow the judge's order.

He said he takes the judge's order seriously, but "one has to listen to your own mind and decide if it's worth it.

"Does anyone really care about little Stan Hall -- the David versus Goliath?" he said.

"I'm the one who's going to go to jail, and I'm the one who has to suffer all the repercussions if I choose to disobey.

"If I choose to obey it, they've won," he said.
http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/Loc...78981-sun.html





The Man Who Dared to Sell AutoCAD R14 on eBay

For seven years a soft-spoken Seattle resident by the name of Timothy S. Vernor made a decent living selling stuff on eBay. Mostly he sold vintage comic books, but also whatever else he could get cheap and pass along to a waiting market.

Vernor has over 10,000 positive comments and a 99+% positive rating. Then he listed a copy of AutoCAD Release 14. That was the beginning of the nightmare for Timothy Vernor.

Autodesk filed a notice with eBay claiming Vernor violated their rights by trying to sell Autodesk software at auction. It is eBay policy to remove a listing first and ask questions later when a software company protests a listing. Vernor appealed and was relisted. He did this five times, for five different copies of R14 that came into his possession. Each time Autodesk appealed, the auction was pulled, Vernor appealed, and the auction was reinstated. After the fifth time, eBay suspended his seller account, leaving him without access to what had become his sole source of livelihood.

It took Vernor 30 days to convince eBay he was not a criminal and to have his seller account reinstated. Most people would have decided to stay far far away from anything with the word “Autodesk” on it at this point. But Timothy Vernor is not most people. He believes the law is on his side and that Autodesk is behaving badly. After studying things out on his own, Vernor walked the few blocks from his apartment to the nearest branch of the US District Court and sued Autodesk. Without a lawyer.

It took 60 days, Vernor told 3D CAD News, for the court “to decide I wasn’t a wacko” and allow Vernor’s case to move forward. Autodesk has now been sent a summons and has 60 days to respond.

Why does Mr. Vernor think he has a case against the world’s biggest CAD company? Here are his words, from a press release he wrote and sent out to various media outlets he found by doing some research:

A lawsuit has been filed in Federal Court (US District Court for the Western Washington District C07-1189 JLR) that alleges Autodesk, Inc., maker of the industry standard AutoCAD software and their attorney Andrew S. Mackay have devised an illegal scheme to have used copies of their software removed from the eBay site using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Autodesk attorney Andrew S. Mackey scours Seattle looking for Timothy Vernor.

The law passed in 1998 was designed to give intellectual property rights owners a way to have content removed from the Internet that violates copyright law. An example would be a television show uploaded to YouTube without permission from the production company. The right to sell an item that has been legally purchased is protected under copyright law. The first sale doctrine allows an individual to transfer (i.e. sell, giveaway etc.) a lawfully made copy of an item without permission once it has been obtained. The doctrine has been part of US law since the Supreme Court recognized it in 1908 and covers everything from books and DVDs to clothing and automobiles.

Autodesk is using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to have legal copies of their software removed from eBay so they can sell more new copies. The latest version of AutoCAD software is around $4,000 a copy. Autodesk's lawyer, Andrew S. Mackay states "AutoCAD software is licensed not sold and that license is not transferable." AutoCAD software is available for purchase at most major software retailers. There is no indication your purchase would be different from any other until you get it home and open the box. There is a piece of paper tucked inside that says it is a licensing agreement with the statement "by opening the sealed software packet(s), you agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this license agreement." This is called a "shrink wrap" contract. It cannot be read until you open the package which according to the contract constitutes agreement. US courts have not held a "shrink wrap" contract to be valid. Furthermore the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is only intended to enforce copyright violations, not breach of contract.

Vernor says his lawsuit is about more than simply teaching Autodesk a lesson, although that’s part of it. “These people didn’t take me seriously,” Vernor told us in an interview. “But the real reason is that this lawsuit is about eBay and intellectual property.” Vernor says Autodesk is not the only company to demand that eBay remove one of his auctions. Monster Cable, various textbook publishers and even name-brand apparel companies have done it as well. Vernor sees it all as egregious misapplications of laws regarding the ability to protect intellectual property. “It is too easy for a company to say an auction infringes on its intellectual property; anyone can file such a complaint.”

It seems Vernor is not alone in thinking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is being misused. The Electronic Freedom Foundation has a long article detailing ways it believes the DMCA is being misused, including the kind of software reselling Vernor attempted.

Faithful CAD scribe Owen Wengerd has posted access to the court documents in this case; head to http://www.adskvoda.com/NewsFeed/tab...7/Default.aspx if you want the gory details.
http://3dcadnews.blog.com/2076404/





VIACOM SITUATION UPDATE:

YouTube Has Restored My Clip

It will be two weeks ago tomorrow since YouTube notified me that it had pulled the clip I had uploaded from VH1's show Web Junk 2.0 featuring my first school board commercial. VH1's parent company Viacom had considered it an infringement of copyright and requested that YouTube to act accordingly. Later that same day I filed a counter-notification claim with YouTube, arguing that I should be entitled to use the clip because it was a derivative product built on material that I was the original creator of. The incident received quite a bit of publicity after I posted about it on this blog.

A little after 9 p.m. tonight I received the following e-mail from YouTube:

Dear Kwerky,

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we've completed processing your counter-notification dated x/xx/xx regarding your video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddyVQwpByug

This content has been restored and your account will not be penalized.

Sincerely,

Harry
The YouTube Team

And sure enough, the clip is back up.

Very special thanks to Fred von Lohmann and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for their terrific assistance in this matter! Folks, I cannot begin to describe how impressed I have become with the Electronic Frontier Foundation because of this. Theirs has been the kind of service that is so rare to witness nowadays that when you do see it, it practically comes as a shock. There's no telling how much grief and headache that Fred and his crew have prevented not just for me, but for a lot of other people also. And if you find that you are capable of doing so, I would really like to suggest making a contribution to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This is one organization that really does merit a tremendous amount of respect for the work that it does.

There is more that I'm feeling led to say about this, but that'll have to wait to be appended to this post or on a new one tomorrow. But I wanted to go ahead and let it be known that the situation is now, apparently and very thankfully, resolved.

EDIT 9:33 a.m. EST:

There is something that I feel compelled to say now that this situation is apparently resolved for good. Something that I've been yearning to scream almost since this whole thing started...

At no point have I ever seen this, or even desired to see this, as a "get Viacom" thing. And I seriously regret that some people saw this incident as an opportunity to lash out at that company for sake of spite or profit or whatever.

Doubt it not: there's been a huge amount of frustration on this end for the past two weeks. But it's been such great irony that I've had to laugh about it too.

I've got nothing against Viacom. And I wish that nobody else would have anything against Viacom, either. Life's way too short to spend even a moment of it wanting to hurt others.

Believe me, I know from firsthand experience: bitterness will only reap regret.

Big companies are made up of people, too. Yeah, I know that a lot of big companies have screwed plenty of things up. But that's only because collective might magnifies the flaws that are already in every human being on the planet. And despite that apparent strength in numbers, you have to make yourself realize that it's not some corporate leviathan that you're in disagreement with, but the people within it... and it's altogether possible that you and they are more alike than you realize.

Ya see, we've made it all too easy to hate "them". It’s a hard thing to hate an individual person. But make that person a Viacom executive, or a Democrat or Republican, or a Protestant or Catholic, or a Muslim or Jew, or whatever, by de-humanizing them and sticking them behind some mass façade... and it becomes not just easy to hate them but it's practically expected that we try to destroy them!

I don't hate Viacom, no matter what's happened in the past few weeks. And I hope that nobody else does either, for this or for any other reason. So if you do, please stop.

Man has spent six thousand years struggling with law and how to comprehend it. We still haven't got it down pat. And then things like the Internet and digital media come and muck it up even more. I sincerely believe that's what happened here: Viacom and I converged on untrotted soil, in a way that to the best of my knowledge had never happened before. Fortunately, we got out (and once again I would like to thank Fred von Lohmann and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for their assistance with this situation).

In a way, I'm sort of glad that this happened. Just as I'm glad that I ran for school board even though I didn't win a seat. This Viacom/YouTube deal is something that I learned a lot from, and came out a better person for it. It's made me much more aware of things like copyright law and the DMCA (and the myriad of problems with that legislation). I think it's safe to say that from this incident I learned quite a lot about my personal strengths and weaknesses. It was a growth event.

And along the way, I got to meet and come to know a lot of good people.

Even the bad... or just the plain crazy... things that happen to you in life, you can find something good to take from them. If you want that.

It doesn't look like this is going to wind up in any kind of litigation, and for that I am thankful. If I can die someday without having sued or been sued, then I will die happy. This ends just as I had hoped it would: with the clip back up and, I like to think, with Viacom and me getting to shake hands and move on and wishing each other well. I'll certainly harbor no hard feelings toward Viacom for the past two weeks.

And I hope that Viacom doesn't think that this means that I want them to stop using my commercial on VH1. I just want to be able to let not only my friends see it but my children and grandchildren someday, which might be after the Web Junk 2.0 site has gone defunct.

Sometime in the next few days I'm going to "collect" the various news stories that appeared online about this thing and post them here, if nothing else than for my own convenience. But also for future reference in case anybody else wants to study what happened with this issue (including arguments that were made against my case... and there were plenty). Along with some other pertinent documentation, such as the DMCA counter-notification claim that I filed, which I would welcome others to study and scrutinize and if they feel so led, to criticize (hey, it was my first one :-).
http://theknightshift.blogspot.com/2...utube-has.html





2Clix Sues Whirlpool Founder

Whirlpool founder Simon Wright is being sued by accounting software firm 2Clix Australia Pty Ltd (ACN 118 044 198) for alleged "injurious falsehood".

The Statement of Claim from the company alleges that Simon Wright allowed statements "relating to the Plaintiff and its software product that are both false and malicious" to be published on the Whirlpool forums.

2Clix is suing for at least $150,000 (plus costs), and is demanding that two forum threads be removed from the site.

Whirlpool believes the action has no merit and will defend the matter vigorously, despite being a community website with little resources.

Simon Wright, the moderators and Whirlpool's legal team ask that users respect Simon's right to a fair trial and not prejudice his case. Users should refrain from doing anything that might expose Simon to contempt of court such as making statements that prejudge the outcome of the case. Please keep any comments polite and factual.
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1753





No MSG

Microsoft Sued by Beijing Student for Privacy Infringement
Chinaview.cn

Beijing university student is suing Microsoft for infringing upon his privacy, demanding 1,350 yuan (180 U.S. dollars) in compensation and an apology printed in a national newspaper.

Peking University student Lu Feng said he installed Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage software according to prompts from the Windows XP operating system on his laptop only to find the program enabled Microsoft to gather information about his computer and himself, rather than solely checking whether or not the installed Windows XP system was genuine.

Lu argued that Microsoft had violated his legal rights by providing a formal contract which had to be accepted in order to proceed with the installation.

Lu wants the court to annul the WGA installation agreement, order Microsoft to delete all his personal information and provide a software tool that can uninstall the program.

A spokesman with Microsoft China told Xinhua, "We have only just received this filing, have not had the opportunity to review it and therefore cannot comment on the specifics of the allegations.

"What we can say is that Microsoft is fully committed to letting customers control their personal information."
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20...nt_6718045.htm





Google Calls for International Standards on Internet Privacy
Catherine Rampell

Google, a frequent target of privacy advocates, yesterday called for new international standards on the collection and use of consumer data.

Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel for Google, told a U.N. audience in Strasbourg, France, that fragmentary international privacy laws burden companies and don't protect consumers. He argued for an international body such as the United Nations to create standards that individual countries could then adopt and adapt to fit their needs.

"The ultimate goal should be to create minimum standards of privacy protection that meet the expectations and demands of consumers, businesses and governments," Fleischer said, according to a transcript of the speech provided by Google.

Google has been criticized for its privacy policies and its planned $3.1 billion merger with DoubleClick, an online advertising broker that sells banner and video ads. To target their advertising, both Google, which specializes in text ads, and DoubleClick collect information on which sites users visit. Critics argue that the merger would hurt competition in online advertising, and that it would aggregate too much consumer data in the hands of one company.

The European Union is currently investigating Google's privacy practices.

"Google, under investigation for violating global privacy standards, is calling for international privacy standards," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a critic of the DoubleClick merger. "It's somewhat like someone being caught for speeding saying there should be a public policy to regulate speeding."

Google says it has remained at the forefront of protecting consumer privacy. It was the first company to implement an expiration date for collected data. Google strips identifying information from its search logs after 18 months, the same standard that Microsoft now uses. Yahoo and AOL keep user data for 13 months, and Ask.com announced in July that it would give users an option to prevent its search engine from recording search terms and IP addresses.

"The key concept is user control," said Alissa Cooper, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocate whose funding comes from foundations, corporations and trade associations. The center is working with a group of U.S. firms, including Google, to create national privacy protection standards for the industry that it plans to submit to Congress.

Comprehensive legislation relating to privacy issues has not yet made it through the full House or Senate. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), the chairman of the Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection, submitted a bill in February intended to increase consumer privacy safeguards. In the Senate, Judiciary committee leaders Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) have also introduced a comprehensive privacy bill.

In his speech, Fleischer criticized the U.S. privacy law model as being "too complex and too much of a patchwork," because different laws apply to different industries and vary by state. He called the European Union model "too bureaucratic and inflexible."

Fleischer instead advocated something closer to the privacy framework developed by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, which Fleischer said "balances very carefully information privacy with business needs and commercial interests."

But critics say that the APEC standards are too lenient.

"The APEC guidelines are far below what Google would be expected to do in Europe or the United States," Rotenberg said. They "don't address the critical problem of limiting data collection, which is the key point in the dispute over Google's business practices."

Rotenberg said that the APEC rules put the burden on consumers, who must demonstrate that a company's privacy policy has harmed them.

Guidelines developed in 1980 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international body of developed countries, generally focus on the violation of privacy as a right rather than a demonstration of harm caused by the violation. These standards, which influenced the European Union's privacy laws, are usually preferred by privacy advocates.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews





Internet Domain Name Outlaw Faces 20 Years in Federal Prison
Layer 8

A Las Vegas man faces about 20 years in prison today after he agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud for impersonating an intellectual property lawyer and threatening lawsuits against the owners of Internet domain names.

According to the FBI, David Scali is charged with registering an e-mail account under an alias and then sending e-mails in which he claimed to be the intellectual property lawyer. In the e-mails, which were sent in late June and early July of 2006, Scali threatened to file $100,000 trademark infringement lawsuits against the owners of various Internet website names unless they gave up their domain name registrations within two days.

Published reports said Scali specialized in going after one-off or domain names with nomenclature similar to big name Web sites.

Cybersquatters who routinely snap up these typo-based domain sites looking to make a quick buck off of other people's hard work is one of the unsavory practices on the Internet.

Ron Jackson, editor and publisher of the online magazine Domain Name Journal, said in a recent interview that with a well-known trademark like a Microsoft, where so many people are trying to get on a given day, a good typo - meaning one that a lot of people would make the error of typing in - could generate thousands of dollars a month. There could be one on a lesser-known brand that has less traffic that maybe makes $10 a month, but some of these guys might hold tens of thousands of domains. If it costs them $10 a year to register a domain, and if they make $5 or $10 a month multiplied across thousands of domains, it becomes a significant amount of money, he said.

Microsoft earlier this year filed two new lawsuits against companies it accuses of registering domain names similar to certain of its trademarks. It alleged that the companies intentionally registered domain names with variations of its trademarks, a practice known as cybersquatting, or misspellings of those names, known as typosquatting. Often, domains registered in this way point to Web pages containing advertisements that, if clicked upon, generate revenue for the owner of the domain. Microsoft said the practice is deceptive and confusing for users. Microsoft will receive damages from some companies, it said.

In Scali's case the wire fraud count in the criminal information filed this morning concerns a victim who surrendered an Internet domain name very similar to citysearch.com

The wire fraud charge carries a maximum statutory sentence of 20 years in federal prison. The plea agreement contemplates a sentence ranging from probation to six months in custody, ultimately the sentencing judge will make the final decision as to what Scali's sentence will receive, the FBI says.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/19284





Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism
Harriet Rubin

One of the most influential business books ever written is a 1,200-page novel published 50 years ago, on Oct. 12, 1957. It is still drawing readers; it ranks 388th on Amazon.com’s best-seller list. (“Winning,” by John F. Welch Jr., at a breezy 384 pages, is No. 1,431.)

The book is “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s glorification of the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.

For years, Rand’s message was attacked by intellectuals whom her circle labeled “do-gooders,” who argued that individuals should also work in the service of others. Her book was dismissed as an homage to greed. Gore Vidal described its philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.”

But the book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its impact except in private. When they read the book, often as college students, they now say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.

“I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,” said John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the United States.

“It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete,” he said.

One of Rand’s most famous devotees is Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose memoir, “The Age of Turbulence,” will be officially released Monday.

Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of “The Fountainhead,” a novel about an architect true to his principles. Mr. Greenspan had married a member of Rand’s inner circle, known as the Collective, that met every Saturday night in her New York apartment. Rand did not pay much attention to Mr. Greenspan until he began praising drafts of “Atlas,” which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand’s papers. He was attracted, Mr. Britting said, to “her moral defense of capitalism.”

Rand’s free-market philosophy was hard won. She was born in 1905 in Russia. Her life changed overnight when the Bolsheviks broke into her father’s pharmacy and declared his livelihood the property of the state. She fled the Soviet Union in 1926 and arrived later that year in Hollywood, where she peered through a gate at the set where the director Cecil B. DeMille was filming a silent movie, “King of Kings.”

He offered her a ride to the set, then a job as an extra on the film and later a position as a junior screenwriter. She sold several screenplays and intermittently wrote novels that were commercial failures, until 1943, when fans of “The Fountainhead” began a word-of-mouth campaign that helped sales immensely.

Shortly after “Atlas Shrugged” was published in 1957, Mr. Greenspan wrote a letter to The New York Times to counter a critic’s comment that “the book was written out of hate.” Mr. Greenspan wrote: “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”

Rand’s magazine, The Objectivist, later published several essays by Mr. Greenspan, including one on the gold standard in 1966.

Rand called “Atlas” a mystery, “not about the murder of man’s body, but about the murder — and rebirth — of man’s spirit.” It begins in a time of recession. To save the economy, the hero, John Galt, calls for a strike against government interference. Factories, farms and shops shut down. Riots break out as food becomes scarce.

Rand said she “set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them” and to portray “what happens to a world without them.”

The book was released to terrible reviews. Critics faulted its length, its philosophy and its literary ambitions. Both conservatives and liberals were unstinting in disparaging the book; the right saw promotion of godlessness, and the left saw a message of “greed is good.” Rand is said to have cried every day as the reviews came out.

Rand had a reputation for living for her own interest. She is said to have seduced her most serious reader, Nathaniel Branden, when he was 24 or 25 and she was at least 50. Each was married to someone else. In fact, Mr. Britting confirmed, they called their spouses to a meeting at which the pair announced their intention to make the mentor-protégé relationship a sexual one.

“She wasn’t a nice person, ” said Darla Moore, vice president of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc. “But what a gift she’s given us.”

Ms. Moore, a benefactor of the University of South Carolina, spoke of her debt to Rand in 1998, when the business school at the university was named in Ms. Moore’s honor. “As a woman and a Southerner,” she said, “I thrived on Rand’s message that only quality work counted, not who you are.”

Rand’s idea of “the virtue of selfishness,” Ms. Moore said, “is a harsh phrase for the Buddhist idea that you have to take care of yourself.”

Some business leaders might be unsettled by the idea that the only thing members of the leadership class have in common is their success. James M. Kilts, who led turnarounds at Gillette, Nabisco and Kraft, said he encountered “Atlas” at “a time in college life when everybody was a nihilist, anti-establishment, and a collectivist.” He found her writing reassuring because it made success seem rational.

“Rand believed that there is right and wrong,” he said, “that excellence should be your goal.”

John P. Stack is one business executive who has taken Rand’s ideas to heart. He was chief executive of Springfield Remanufacturing Company, a retooler of tractor engines in Springfield, Mo., when its parent company, International Harvester, divested itself of the firm in the recession of 1982, the year Rand died.

Having lost his sole customer in a struggling Rust Belt city, Mr. Stack says, he took action like a hero out of “Atlas.” He created an “open book” company in which employees were transparently working in their own interest.

Mr. Stack says that he assigned every job a bottom line value and that every salary, including his own, was posted on a company ticker daily. Workplaces, he said, are notoriously undemocratic, emotionally charged and political.

Mr. Stack says his free market replaced all that with rational behavior. A machinist knew exactly what his working hour contributed to the bottom line, and therefore the cost of slacking off. This, Mr. Stack said, was a manifestation of the philosophy of objectivism in “Atlas”: people guided by reason and self-interest.

“There is something in your inner self that Rand draws out,” Mr. Stack said. “You want to be a hero, you want to be right, but by the same token you have to question yourself, though you must not listen to interference thrown at you by the distracters. The lawyers told me not to open the books and share equity.” He said he defied them. “ ‘Atlas’ helped me pursue this idiot dream that became SRC.”

Mr. Stack said he was 19 and working in a factory when a manager gave him a copy of the book. “It’s the best business book I ever read,” he said. “I didn’t do well in school because I was a big dreamer. To get something that tells you to take your dreams seriously, that’s an eye opener.”

Mr. Stack said he gave a copy to his son, Tim Stack, 25, who was so inspired that he went to work for a railroad, just like the novel’s heroine, Dagny Taggart.

Every year, 400,000 copies of Rand’s novels are offered free to Advanced Placement high school programs. They are paid for by the Ayn Rand Institute, whose director, Yaron Brook, said the mission was “to keep Rand alive.”

Last year, bookstores sold 150,000 copies of the book. It continues to hold appeal, even to a younger generation. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who was born in 1958, and John P. Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods, who was 3 when the book was published, have said they consider Rand crucial to their success.

The book’s hero, John Galt, also continues to live on. The subcontractor hired to demolish the former Deutsche Bank building, which was damaged when the World Trade Center towers fell, was the John Galt Corporation. It was removed from the job last month after a fire at the building killed two firefighters.

In Chicago, there is John Galt Solutions, a producer of software for supply chain companies like Tastykake. The founder and chief executive of the company, Annemarie Omrod, said she considered the character an inspiration.

“We were reading the book,” she said, when she and Kai Trepte were thinking of starting the company. “For us, the book symbolized the importance of growing yourself and bettering yourself without hindering other people. John Galt took all the great minds and started a new society.

“Some of our customers don’t know the name, though after they meet us, they want to read the book,” she went on. “Our sales reps have a problem, however. New clients usually ask: ‘Hey, where is John Galt? How come I’m not important enough to rate a visit from John Galt?’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/business/15atlas.html





Stories With Mysterious Worlds, Specialized Rules and Inchoate Dangers
Janet Maslin

VANILLA BRIGHT LIKE EMINEM

By Michel Faber

246 pages. Harcourt. $23.

In a short story called “Mouse,” part of Michel Faber’s poignantly eerie new collection, “Vanilla Bright Like Eminem,” he writes of a myopic video-gamer named Manny and the strange little world he inhabits. Manny is one of 60,000 guys who share an obsessive online passion for a game called “Runner” and for Lena, its hot-looking virtual heroine. Manny is hooked on watching Lena as she outruns guard dogs, secret police and sociopaths while fighting her way out of the former Soviet bloc. Players guide her past these dangers, enjoying the way each attack shreds more of her clothing. If one of them foolishly lets a tank run over Lena, it’s Game Over.

Manny is grappling with a maddening software screw-up when he hears an unfamiliar sound: the ringing of his doorbell. He opens the door to find a real, live gorgeous woman who actually needs his help. Her problem involves a mouse, and it’s not the kind that has to be pried out of the hands of video-gamers. It’s a living, breathing furry thing that is running around her apartment and scaring her.

Manny would catch and kill the mouse if he could. But it’s not that simple. The beautiful woman follows the precepts of an exotic, Minneapolis-based religious group. She believes a mouse may be a recycled soul, one that Manny should not extinguish. This woman’s rules for living are every bit as intricate as the “Runner” code, and suddenly Manny is caught up in a new kind of reality: the immediate kind. The woman’s apartment has the same floor plan as Manny’s, making his newly altered state that much trippier. By the end of “Mouse,” Manny’s computer habit seems poised to undergo ineradicable change.

This is one way of saying that when Mr. Faber, who wrote the intoxicating novel “The Crimson Petal and the White,” shoehorns the name Eminem into the title of a literary short-story collection, he isn’t overreaching. Naming his book “Vanilla Bright Like Eminem” is not an affectation. These stories blend darkly phantasmagoric elements with humorously commonplace ones, and Eminem makes a perfectly good avatar for that kind of thinking. One of the best stories in this odd and haunting book, “Beyond Pain,” describes what happens when a heavy-metal drummer gets a headache, looks around at his life, realizes he is sick of pretending to be a tough guy called Morpheus, and slides into a wholly different world. In his new realm, Blaha and Fleps are proper names, and the background music is “Loch Lomond.”

Convention dictates that a short-story collection should begin with its heaviest hitter. But this book doesn’t: It starts with “The Safehouse,” an anomalously heavy-handed tale of dislocation that shows signs of the “Twilight Zone” trickery that is this book’s least interesting element. It follows a man through a world in which lost souls’ T-shirts provide precise, coded explanations of what is wrong with them, using “fearsome strings of algebra” to describe traumas. One mathematical-looking formula turns out to signify “birthday present sent by father, withheld by mother and never mentioned.”

Eventually, the main character finds his way to the safe house of the title and withdraws into a cocoon of institutional protection. That resolution comes too easily, but “The Safehouse” is followed by a much more snarkily imaginative tale: “Andy Comes Back,” in which a long-comatose man returns from his limbo to throw a figurative monkey wrench at his wife. Once she realizes that her husband can speak again, she smiles “a grin of infinite foolishness and shock, as if she were the victim of a surprise birthday party on the wrong day.” Try as she must to be gracious, her manner is terribly revealing. “She reached across the bed and embraced him awkwardly,” Mr. Faber writes, “like a member of the Royal Family embracing a deformed child.”

Along with every one of the main characters here, Andy reaches some point of change by the end of the story. But these are not cheap epiphanies; they are genuinely odd and stirring changes of heart. In “Finesse,” a delicately balanced tale that lives up to the meaning of its title, a dying dictator summons a female doctor and demands that she perform delicate surgery on him. The dictator and doctor may not seem evenly matched in this negotiation, but they are. She holds his life in her hands; he holds her husband and children as prisoners. The dictator hints menacingly that he will enjoy reuniting this family only if it occurs “as a high point of my convalescence.”

The doctor and dictator spar through their elegant war of words, as when she warns him to beware of germs. (“A soldier’s belt buckle can kill you — and not just in the way that is usual in our country.”) And as they trade barbs, dreams of the dictator’s miraculous survival and the doctor’s happy family turn shaky “like a child’s castle of blocks between them, ready to collapse at a single clumsy step.” Mr. Faber, who remains a writer capable of invoking all manner of inchoate dangers, teases this story toward a realization that life-or-death power is beyond both of them.

The title story succinctly captures crosscurrents of love and loathing, the forces that are at war throughout this book. A family of loutish American tourists snoozes on a train ride through the Scottish Highlands (where the Dutch-born Mr. Faber now lives). The father, Don, himself dressed in ludicrous cargo pants, resents the hip-hop affectations of his 15-year-old son. And the kid has obnoxiously defended his right to mimic Eminem’s hairdo.

Yet as the oafish boy dozes, his father is suddenly enraptured by all that bottle blondness and by the way his daughter combs her brother’s hair so tenderly. Mr. Faber is both cruel and credible as he declares this moment to be the high point of the father’s life. And pity trumps contempt in Mr. Faber’s vision of where each member of this family is headed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/books/13masl.html





Reshaping the Architecture of Memory
John Markoff

The ability to cram more data into less space on a memory chip or a hard drive has been the crucial force propelling consumer electronics companies to make ever smaller devices.

It shrank the mainframe computer to fit on the desktop, shrank it again to fit on our laps and again to fit into our shirt pockets.

Now, if an idea that Stuart S. P. Parkin is kicking around in an I.B.M. lab here is on the money, electronic devices could hold 10 to 100 times the data in the same amount of space. That means the iPod that today can hold up to 200 hours of video could store every single TV program broadcast during a week on 120 channels.

The tech world, obsessed with data density, is taking notice because Mr. Parkin has done it before. An I.B.M. research fellow largely unknown outside a small fraternity of physicists, Mr. Parkin puttered for two years in a lab in the early 1990s, trying to find a way to commercialize an odd magnetic effect of quantum mechanics he had observed at supercold temperatures. With the help of a research assistant, he was able to alter the magnetic state of tiny areas of a magnetic data storage disc, making it possible to store and retrieve information in a smaller amount of space. The huge increases in digital storage made possible by giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, made consumer audio and video iPods, as well as Google-style data centers, a reality.

Mr. Parkin thinks he is poised to bring about another breakthrough that could increase the amount of data stored on a chip or a hard drive by a factor of a hundred. If he proves successful in his quest, he will create a “universal” computer memory, one that can potentially replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and flash memory chips, and even make a “disk drive on a chip” possible.

It could begin to replace flash memory in three to five years, scientists say. Not only would it allow every consumer to carry data equivalent to a college library on small portable devices, but a tenfold or hundredfold increase in memory would be disruptive enough to existing storage technologies that it would undoubtedly unleash the creativity of engineers who would develop totally new entertainment, communication and information products.

Currently the flash storage chip business is exploding. Used as storage in digital cameras, cellphones and PCs, the commercially available flash drives with multiple memory chips store up to 64 gigabytes of data. Capacity is expected to reach about 50 gigabytes on a single chip in the next half-decade.

However, flash memory has an Achilles’ heel. Although it can read data quickly, it is very slow at storing it. That has led the industry on a frantic hunt for alternative storage technologies that might unseat flash.

Mr. Parkin’s new approach, referred to as “racetrack memory,” could outpace both solid-state flash memory chips as well as computer hard disks, making it a technology that could transform not only the storage business but the entire computing industry.

“Finally, after all these years, we’re reaching fundamental physics limits,” he said. “Racetrack says we’re going to break those scaling rules by going into the third dimension.”

His idea is to stand billions of ultrafine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip — hence the name racetrack — and use electric current to slide infinitesimally small magnets up and down along each of the wires to be read and written as digital ones and zeros.

His research group is able to slide the tiny magnets along notched nanowires at speeds greater than 100 meters a second. Since the tiny magnetic domains have to travel only submolecular distances, it is possible to read and write magnetic regions with different polarization as quickly as a single nanosecond, or one billionth of a second — far faster than existing storage technologies.

If the racetrack idea can be made commercial, he will have done what has so far proved impossible — to take microelectronics completely into the third dimension and thus explode the two-dimensional limits of Moore’s Law, the 1965 observation by Gordon E. Moore, a co-founder of Intel, that decrees that the number of transistors on a silicon chip doubles roughly every 18 months.

Just as with Mr. Parkin’s earlier work in GMR, there is no shortage of skeptics at this point.

Giant storage companies like Seagate Technology are starting to turn toward flash to create a generation of hybrid storage systems that combine silicon and rotating disk technologies for speed and capacity. But Seagate is still looking in the two-dimensional realm for future advances.

“There are a lot of neat technologies, but you have to be able to make them cost-effectively,” said Bill Watkins, Seagate’s chief executive.

So far, the racetrack idea is far from the Best Buy shelves and it is very much still in Mr. Parkin’s laboratory here. His track record, however, suggests that the storage industry might do well to take notice of the implications of his novel nanowire-based storage system in the not too distant future.

“Stuart marches to a little bit of a different drummer, but that’s what it takes to have enough courage to go off the beaten path,” said James S. Harris, an electrical engineering professor at Stanford University and co-director of the I.B.M.-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center.

A visit to Mr. Parkin’s crowded office reveals him to be a 51-year-old British-American scientist for whom the term hyperactive is a modest understatement at best. During interviews he is constantly in motion. When he speaks publicly at scientific gatherings, his longtime technology assistant, Kevin Roche, is careful to see that Mr. Parkin empties the change from his pockets, lest he distract his audience with the constant jingling of coins and keys.

Today, a number of industry analysts think there are important parallels between Mr. Parkin’s earlier GMR research and his new search for racetrack materials.

“We’re on the verge of exciting new memory architectures, and his is one of the leading candidates,” said Richard Doherty, director of the Envisioneering Group, a computing and consumer electronics consulting firm based in Seaford, N.Y.

Mr. Parkin said he had recently shifted his focus and now thought that his racetracks might be competitive with other storage technologies even if they were laid horizontally on a silicon chip.

I.B.M. executives are cautious about the timing of the commercial introduction of the technology. But ultimately, the technology may have even more dramatic implications than just smaller music players or wristwatch TVs, said Mark Dean, vice president for systems at I.B.M. Research.

“Something along these lines will be very disruptive,” he said. “It will not only change the way we look at storage, but it could change the way we look at processing information. We’re moving into a world that is more data-centric than computing-centric.”

This is just a hint, but it suggests that I.B.M. may think that racetrack memory could blur the line between storage and computing, providing a key to a new way to search for data, as well as store and retrieve data.

And if it is, Mr. Parkin’s experimental physics lab will have transformed the computing world yet again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/te...11storage.html





For Google’s Founders, a Coveted Landing Strip
Miguel Helft

In the annals of perks enjoyed by America’s corporate executives, the founders of Google may have set a new standard: an uncrowded, federally managed runway for their private jet that is only a few minutes’ drive from their offices.

For $1.3 million a year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin get to park their customized wide-body Boeing 767-200, as well as two other jets used by top Google executives, on Moffett Field, an airport run by NASA that is generally closed to private aircraft.

It is a perk that is likely to turn other Silicon Valley tycoons green with envy, as no other private jets have landing rights there. But it may not sit well with a community that generally considers itself proud to have Google in its midst.

How did the two billionaires get such a coveted parking place for the jet, which is unusually large and rare by private jet standards? Officials at the Ames Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the agency signed a unique agreement last month that allows it to place scientific instruments and researchers on planes used by the Google founders. NASA gets to collect scientific data on some flights of those jets, which in addition to the Boeing 767-200 includes two Gulfstream Vs.

“It was an opportunity for us to defray some of the fixed costs we have to maintain the airfield as well as to have flights of opportunity for our science missions,” said Steven Zornetzer, associate director for institutions and research at the Ames Center. “It seemed like a win-win situation.”

NASA said it had already run one mission on one Gulfstream V, to observe the Aurigid meteor shower on Aug. 31.

Moffett Field is nearly adjacent to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., and the four-mile drive between the two locations takes just seven minutes, according to Google Maps. Other Silicon Valley executives have to fight traffic to get to their large jets parked at the San Francisco or San Jose international airports or even farther away.

Two private aviation industry executives said that parking two Gulfstream Vs at San Francisco or San Jose airports would cost $240,000 to $360,000 a year, or more, depending on the parking location and the amount of fuel purchased. As for the Boeing, one of the executives, who asked not to be identified because his wealthy clients insist on privacy, said that most private jet facilities at large airports are not equipped to take in a jet that big. “It’s like if you lived in a condo and decided to own a semi,” he said.

The agreement is raising questions from local officials and community activists, who have a long history of opposing the expansion of flights at Moffett Field, a historic airport that was once under the supervision of the United States Navy, but was transferred to NASA in 1994.

“The Google flights represent the possibility that the camel’s nose is under the tent, and that NASA is looking at opening up the use of the runways to help pay for it,” said Lenny Siegel, director of the Pacific Studies Center, a local nonprofit group that over the years has opposed proposed expansions of civilian flights at Moffett Field. “The majority of the people in the community are against that.”

Mr. Siegel said he was hoping NASA would provide clear answers about the agreement. “If they are doing science missions, that’s O.K.,” Mr. Siegel said. “If they are doing it just because they are rich and popular, it is not O.K.”

Google and Ames Research Center have agreements to collaborate on research, as well as a preliminary plan for Google to build as much as a million square feet of space at Ames. The deal for the planes, which are not owned by Google, was unrelated to the Google agreements, Mr. Zornetzer said. It was signed with H211, a limited liability corporation that counts Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, as one of its principals. The ownership of the planes is held by other affiliated companies.

Google, for its part, said that this is a personal matter involving the founders, who were not available to comment. Ken Ambrose, whom NASA identified as a representative of H211, did not return calls seeking comment.

“This is not a new issue,” said Representative Anna Eshoo, a Democrat, whose district includes Moffett Field. “You have to live with your neighbors. You are not out in the middle of the desert. You are in the heart of Silicon Valley.”

The planes’ presence at Moffett Field was first reported last week by the technology gossip blog Valleywag. Some details of the agreement were reported Wednesday in The San Francisco Chronicle and The Palo Alto Daily News.

The Google founders’ jet has been the talk of Silicon Valley since 2005, when the pair purchased the plane, which in a normal configuration can hold 180 passengers.

A year later, attention on the plane intensified after The Wall Street Journal wrote about a legal dispute between the owners and a contractor who was hired to refurbish it. In the article, the contractor described requests for modifying the plane to include California king-size beds for the founders. At one point, the founders asked whether hammocks could be hung from the ceiling. The contractor said that Mr. Schmidt had described the jet as “party airplane.”

The extravagance of the plane stands in contrast to the low-key image cut by Mr. Brin and Mr. Page, whose lifestyle is less flashy than that of other Silicon Valley billionaires. They have been intensely private about the plane as they have been about all details of their private lives. Ever since the Navy decided to close operations at Moffett Field in the early 1990s, local communities have been opposed to expanding the airport’s use. In 1992, in nonbinding votes in Mountain View and Sunnyvale, voters overwhelmingly rejected the idea of opening up Moffett Field to general aviation. A plan to open the field to air cargo companies like FedEx and U.P.S. was rejected in the late 1990s, in part because of community opposition.

Mr. Zornetzer said NASA was not expecting the deal to create a large number of new flights at Moffett. While two other private parties — a helicopter operator and Lockheed Martin — are allowed to use the airfield, none of those agreements cover flights of private jets. NASA said it had no agreements allowing private jets to land at any of its other facilities. As news of the jet’s presence at Moffett Field spread, private jet owners and operators have begun coveting the airfield.

“Everyone who operates private jets or owns them has been eyeing that gorgeous runway eager to take off from there,” said Nicholas Solinger, chief strategy officer for Xojet, a private aviation company. Mr. Solinger said Moffett was far better situated for most Silicon Valley executives than the airports at San Jose and San Francisco. “People will now redouble their efforts to get access to that airfield,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/te.../13google.html





Even in a Virtual World, ‘Stuff’ Matters
Shira Boss

IT’S payday for Janine Hawkins. Not in the real world, where she is a student at Nipissing University in Ontario, but in the online world of Second Life, where she is managing editor of the fashion magazine Second Style.

Ms. Hawkins, who in Second Life takes on the persona of Iris Ophelia, a beauty with flowing hair and flawless skin, keeps a list of things she wants to buy: the latest outfits from the virtual fashion mecca Last Call, a new hairstyle from a Japanese designer, slouchy boots. When she receives her monthly salary in Linden dollars, the currency of Second Life, she spends up to four hours shopping, clicking and buying. After a year and a half, she owns 31,540 items.

Living it up in Second Life is a break from Ms. Hawkins’s part-time job as a French translator, but she works just as hard in the virtual world.

Last month, she earned 40,000 Linden dollars ($150), for interviewing designers, arranging fashion shoots and writing about trends in Second Life, called SL by frequent users. “I usually spend what I earn,” Ms. Hawkins said. “It’s entertaining.”

It also says a lot about the real world, especially when it comes to earning and spending money.

When people are given the opportunity to create a fantasy world, they can and do defy the laws of gravity (you can fly in Second Life), but not of economics or human nature. Players in this digital, global game don’t have to work, but many do. They don’t need to change clothes, fix their hair, or buy and furnish a home, but many do. They don’t need to have drinks in their hands at the virtual bar, but they buy cocktails anyway, just to look right, to feel comfortable.

Second Life residents find ways to make money so they can spend it to do things, look impressive, and get more stuff, even if it’s made only of pixels. In a place where people should never have to clean out their closets, some end up devoting hours to organizing their things, purging, even holding yard sales.

“Why can’t we break away from a consumerist, appearance-oriented culture?” said Nick Yee, who has studied the sociology of virtual worlds and recently received a doctorate in communication from Stanford. “What does Second Life say about us, that we trade our consumerist-oriented culture for one that’s even worse?”

Second Life, a three-dimensional world built by hundreds of thousands of users over the Internet, is also being used for education, meetings, marketing and more obvious game playing. It’s a wide world with a lot going on, in multiple languages, and it can be real-life enhancing for populations who are isolated for physical, mental, or geographic reasons. But as a petri dish for examining what makes many of us tick, Second Life reveals just how deep-seated the drive is to fit in, look good and get ahead in a material world.

Many residents have lived the American dream in Second Life, and built Linden-dollar fortunes through entrepreneurship. In what could have been an ideal world, however, or one where anyone could be a Harry Potter, Second Life has an up-and-down economy, mortgage payments, risky investments, land barons, evictions, designer rip-offs, scams and squatters. Not to mention peer pressure.

“Second Life is about getting the better clothes and the bigger build and the reputation as a better builder,” said Julian Dibbell, author of “Play Money,” which chronicles his year of trying to make a living by trading virtual goods in online games. “The basic activity is still the keeping up with the Joneses, or getting ahead of the Joneses, rat race game.”

TO have a Second Life, one needs a computer, the Second Life software, and a high-speed Internet connection. You use a credit card to buy Lindens, and Lindens earned during the game can be converted back into dollars via online currency exchanges. Players start by choosing one of the standard characters, called an avatar, and can roam the world by flying or “teleporting” (click and go). Nobody can go hungry, there is no actual need for warmer clothes or shelter, and there is much to do without buying Lindens.

But walking around in a standard avatar, when there are so many ways to buy a better appearance, is like showing up for the first day of school dressed differently than all the other kids. You stick out as different, as an SL “newbie.”

“It’s hard not to fall into that,” Mr. Yee said. “There are shops everywhere, so it’s easy to say, ‘Oh, O.K., I guess I’ll get a better pair of jeans.’ ”

Second Life was started in 2003 by a Silicon Valley techie inspired by a sci-fi novel, “Snow Crash.” It is owned by a private company called Linden Lab. The original idea of the game was to unleash creativity. Residents don’t have to wear the latest fashions; they don’t have to look — or act — human at all. They can take any animal, robotic, or inanimate form they want.

And while there is a minority population of animal characters, and wearing butterfly wings is currently in vogue for humans, for the most part the population is young women bursting from their blouses and young men bulging with muscle. (Underneath the clothes are cyber genitalia, sold separately. Mark Wallace, a blogger who writes about Second Life, explained that the parts are not fashion accessories but rather “a functional appliance” for, ahem, entertainment purposes.)

While a frequent criticism of Second Life is that spaces are often empty and that there’s “nothing to do,” a crowd can be found at the mall, just as it can in suburbia. For example, the Xcite! store, which sells body parts, is “always crawling with avatars,” said Mr. Wallace, co-author of a forthcoming book, “The Second Life Herald.” Fashion is big business in Second Life, along with entertainment and land development.

Big corporations like Toyota have set up islands in Second Life for marketing. Calvin Klein came up with a virtual perfume. Kraft set up a grocery store featuring its new products. But those destinations are not popular.

“These brands that have this real-world cachet are meaningless in Second Life, so most are ignored,” said Wagner James Au, who blogs and writes books about Second Life. “Just showing up and announcing ‘We’re Calvin Klein’ isn’t going to get you anywhere.” American Apparel closed its virtual clothing shop, and Wells Fargo abandoned the island it had set up to teach about personal finance.

Second Life exclusives do exist: A magic wand was a hot item at one point, and the sex bed is currently in demand. (“If you lie on it with more than one avatar, it’s like you’re in a porn movie,” Mr. Au explained.)

But the more mundane items are what really drive the economy: clothes, gadgetry, night life, real estate. “People buy these huge McMansions in Second Life that are just as ugly as any McMansions in real life, because to them that is what’s status-y,” Mr. Wallace said. “It’s not as easy as we think to let our imaginations run wild, in Second Life or in real life.”

Mitch Ratcliffe, an entrepreneur and blogger, was an early resident of Second Life and built a house with a lake. But he was soon disillusioned with the upkeep involved with owning the property. “I don’t see why I would want my second life to be about the same striving and profit that my first is,” Mr. Ratcliffe wrote in a blog entry about his Second Life adventures. He eventually reincarnated himself as Homeless Hermes.

“People come by, see the user name and tell me how sorry they are that I don’t have a home. Why?” he wrote. “It’s very middle class, very staid in the way economic stigma is attached to a failure to get to work.” In the meantime, Homeless Hermes took up buying and selling virtual land and has pocketed the equivalent of $800.

Land is the biggest-ticket item in Second Life, with Linden Lab selling islands for $1,675, plus a $295-a-month maintenance charge.) Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, a Russian translator in New York who in Second Life is a landlord known as Prokofy Neva, got into the game three years ago and now owns hundreds of apartment buildings, houses and stores that she rents out to about 1,500 tenants who pay from $1.50 a month to $150 a month. She takes several hundred dollars a month out of the game to pay real-world bills. Prokofy Neva herself does not have a house. “If I did, I would rent it out,” she said. “Why not make money from it?”

She has, however, turned over virtual acreage for a land preserve and public use. She and an architect friend were initially entranced by the idea of creating artistic homes that could defy gravity, but they discovered that there wasn’t demand for that in Second Life.

“The average person wants a ranch house or a beach house,” she said. “They don’t want even Frank Lloyd Wright.” (She added, “These people are my customers, so I respect that.”)

Some residents do wear grunge clothing — itself a status symbol in Second Life because of the difficulty of replicating ripped and stained clothing digitally. But the largest slice of the population follows the crowd, and the crowd is not dressing up as dragons.

“The money is in the real-looking stuff: making skins with red lips and smoky eyes, and stiletto boots,” said Ms. Hawkins, the Second Life fashion writer. First comes something popular, then the knockoffs. Soon everyone has one. “People go for similar looks and similar things,” she said.

In Ms. Hawkins’s online closet are avatars that let her move around as a rubber ducky or as a fruit salad encased in gelatin. But those identities are novelty items that usually stay on the shelf. When she goes out in virtual public, Ms. Hawkins usually takes the form of Ms. Ophelia, who has more than 250 pairs of shoes.

Items are real-world cheap — an outfit usually costs $2 to $5 — but they can add up quickly. “It’s so easy to buy something, you don’t realize how much you’re spending,” said Carrie Mandel, a homemaker and mother in Chicago who spends two work days a week as well as evenings and weekends on her Second Life business, selling pets.

One coveted status symbol in Second Life is a souped-up muscle car called the Dominus Shadow. It currently costs 2,368 Linden dollars, about $9 at the current rate of 268 Linden per dollar. Many players pay that much every month for premium membership that lets them own land, and all are sitting at computers with high-speed Internet access. So why don’t more people treat themselves to the prized possession of a Dominus?

“It’s expensive in-world,” said Daniel Terdiman, author of the forthcoming book “Entrepreneur’s Guide to Second Life.” “You don’t think of how much things cost in real dollars; you think in Linden dollars. When something is expensive, even though it comes out to a few dollars, a lot of people don’t want to spend that much money.”

Although Linden dollars can be bought with a credit card, there is evidence that the in-world economy is self-sustaining, with many players compelled to earn a living in-world and live on a budget.

Surprisingly, many take on low-paying jobs. They work as nightclub bouncers, hostesses, sales clerks and exotic dancers for typical wages of 50 to 150 Linden dollars an hour, the equivalent of 19 to 56 cents. A recent classified ad stated: “I am looking for a good job in SL. I am sick of working off just tips.” This job seeker listed potential occupations as landscaper, personal assistant, actor, waitress and talent scout.

Second Life players are evidently discovering what inheritors have struggled with for generations: It’s not as much fun to spend money you haven’t earned. Apparently, despite the common lottery-winning fantasies, all play and no work is a dull game, after all.

“People don’t take jobs just for the money,” said Dan Siciliano, who teaches finance at Stanford Law School and has studied the economies of virtual worlds. “They do it to feel important and be rewarded.”

And to buy more things. “A lot of exotic dancers want to become models, so they can earn more money to buy more clothes,” Ms. Hawkins said.

It’s not just vanity that drives people to dress up in Second Life. It’s also seen as good for business. Ms. Fitzpatrick, the landlady, says she doesn’t really care about how her avatar looks. But she cares about what prospective tenants think. “I felt I had to go, finally, and buy the hair and the suit,” she said, “or my customers might think I’m too weird.”

Appearances count in Second Life’s financial world, too. Banks and stock exchanges are housed in huge, formal structures draped in marble and glass. “People in the banking industry wear shiny silver suits and are absurdly tall and have hired a couple people to walk behind them in black suits with ear bugs and shoulder holsters,” said Benjamin Duranske, a lawyer who blogs about legal issues related to the virtual world.

THE stock exchanges and banks in SL are imposing, but they are unregulated and unmonitored. Investors fed Linden dollars into savings accounts at Ginko Financial bank, hoping to earn the promised double-digit interest. Some did, but in July there was a run on the bank and panic spread as Ginko A.T.M.’s eventually stopped giving depositors their money back. The bank has since vanished. With no official law and order in Second Life, investors have little recourse.

Robert J. Bloomfield, a behavioral economist at Cornell University, studies investor behavior in the real world and recently became interested in how investors behave similarly in Second Life. “We know the little guy makes lots of dumb mistakes,” Professor Bloomfield said. “They tend to be overly impressed by the trappings of success. We see that magnified in Second Life.”

Some Second Life residents are calling for in-world regulatory agencies — the user-run Second Life Exchange Commission has just begun operating — and some expect real-world institutions to become involved as the Second Life population and economy expands. “It’s a horse race as to whether the I.R.S. or S.E.C. will start noticing first,” Mr. Duranske said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/bu.../09second.html





FCC to Cable: You Must Support Analog TVs Until 2012
Nate Anderson

Cue the scary music. According to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, "If the cable companies had their way, you, your mother and father, or your next door neighbor could go to sleep one night after watching their favorite channel and wake up the next morning to a dark fuzzy screen."

Martin's talking about the digital TV transition that will happen in February 2009. While the federal government has worked out a plan to help buy digital-to-analog converter boxes for Americans who rely on over-the-air broadcasts and still have analog TV sets, the rules for cable operators were not finalized until yesterday. The FCC voted 5-0 to require that cable operators must continue to make all local broadcasts available to their users, even those with analog televisions.

After broadcasters stop transmitting in analog, cable operators will have two signals to work with: digital standard definition (SD) and digital high definition (HD). Neither will work with analog TV sets, which the FCC estimates are still in use in 40 million American homes. After yesterday's ruling, cable operators will have two choices come February 2009. They can either convert the digital SD signal to analog SD and pipe it across their lines (which means using more bandwidth and carrying three versions of a single channel) or they can offer digital SD only and roll out converter boxes to all their subscribers (which could be expensive).

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association applauded the decision, thanking the FCC for "engaging so constructively and fairly with our industry." It did express worries about "the special circumstances of very small systems," which could face severe cost pressures by complying. The FCC will allow small operators (with a capacity of 552MHz or less) to request a waiver from the must-carry rules.

Thanks to the various FCC actions, analog TV owners are guaranteed a few more years of life out their TVs, though the new cable rules only last until 2012. At that point, the FCC will review them again and decide if they need to be renewed.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ntil-2012.html





US Online Video Popularity Keeps Climbing
Juan Carlos Perez,

People in the U.S. have steadily increased the amount of time they spend watching videos online, as Google’s YouTube remains by far their preferred video site, according to a study.

In July, almost 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched videos online, up from 71.4 percent in March, according to comScore Networks.

The monthly time spent watching videos went up to an average of 181 minutes per viewer in July from 145 minutes per viewer in March, according to comScore.

People in the U.S. are also watching more video clips. In July, the average user watched 68 clips, up from 55 clips in March.

Overall, almost 134 million U.S. Internet users watched a little over 9 billion video clips in July, up from 126.6 million people and a little over 7 billion clips in March.

In July, Google ranked as the top provider of video clips, serving up 27 percent of the total — almost 2.5 billion clips — most of them via YouTube, comScore said.

Yahoo nabbed a distant second place, serving up 4.3 percent of the clips. Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. Internet division that includes MySpace.com, came in third with 3.3 percent. Viacom (3.1 percent) and Disney (2 percent) rounded out the top five.

Google also ranked first in July in unique video viewers with almost 68 million, followed by Fox Interactive (35.8 million), Yahoo (35.3 million), Time Warner Inc. (26.6 million) and Viacom (22.6 million), comScore said.

After years of unfulfilled promises, online video has taken off in a big way in the past year and a half, rapidly accelerating its momentum across a wide variety of sites.

The revolution is widely credited to YouTube and its video-sharing format, but now companies are prominently featuring videos in portals, news sites, blogs, social networks, online stores and film and television industry sites.

YouTube’s popularity can be attributed to several factors, including its ease of use — both for viewers and uploaders —, a strong community of millions of people who submit, view and share personal videos and an abundance of commercial clips from movies and television.

It is this last component of its popularity — the commercial clips — that have put YouTube at the center of the Internet industry’s struggle with video copyright protection, because many of those videos are copied and uploaded without their owners’ permission. A landmark legal action is currently under way, as Viacom pursues a copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google over the unauthorized appearance of its clips on YouTube.

In addition to copyright, other technical and operational issues are in flux, such as the options for generating revenue from video content, the best ways to use video for online advertising and the different alternatives of delivering the clips to viewers.

Another area of interest are video search engines, as well as alternate devices for online video beyond the PC, from small ones like cell phones to large ones like living-room home entertainment centers.

For example, currently the Web seems a vehicle primarily for short video clips, as evidenced by comScore’s finding that the average video clip duration in July was 2.7 minutes.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/09/13/video/





Small New Steps Toward Fulfilling the Promise of PC-TV Links
Matt Richtel

LIVE in a Digital Home! Connect All Your Devices! Control Your Media Through a Single Appliance!

In recent years, computer and consumer electronics companies have exclaimed the imminent nirvana that would be a networked union of TV-Internet-stereo-DVD-cable box-speakers-video projector-personal computer. And only one remote control!

Here’s the reality: laboriously hook your computer to your TV; watch low-definition photos of the family vacation. (The lack of an exclamation point is deliberate.)

At no risk of hyperbole, the promise of the digital home has fallen desperately short. Hewlett-Packard, for example, says it has independent research indicating that more than half of consumers are interested in using a television to watch the digital content stored on their personal computers — and the Internet. But the consumers connecting their devices still aren’t connecting all of them, and those who do are more likely to be the same folks who have advanced engineering degrees and still like to read user manuals at dinner.

And so more modest proposals are upon us. One set of solutions revolves around boxes made by the likes of Apple and Netgear that allow you to store digital media and watch it on your televisions. There are also personal computers, called Media Center PCs, designed to be a conduit between the Internet and the television.

Enter a new set of players: the television makers themselves, like Sony and H.P., who also happen to make PCs. The latest connected-home innovations are televisions designed to pick up a signal from the Internet or personal computers to display videos and pictures.

Instead of set-top boxes, they might be called in-set boxes, or, in the case of Sony’s newest device, a set-back box.

Just rolling into stores now from Sony is its Bravia Internet Video Link, a $299 slender black box that attaches to the back of the company’s 2007 line of high-definition televisions.

The device has an Ethernet cable port for Internet access. Once plugged in, the set then lets you watch a selection of hundreds of clips from a handful of Sony’s Internet partners: Yahoo, AOL and Crackle, Sony’s YouTube challenger. It also provides access to Sony movies and music videos.

Sony says hundreds of videos are available, but among the limited selection shown on the in-store sets are short how-to cooking videos, joke-a-day segments, commentary from firefighters, random clips from overseas television and animated shows; in short, the same random assortment of snippets you would find browsing through many online video sites.

But don’t expect to get free-range access to the Internet’s wealth of user-generated content. YouTube? You won’t get it. That limits the service to a tiny fraction of Internet programming.

“This is your grandfather’s Internet,” said Richard Doherty, who analyzes consumer electronics industry trends at Envisioneering, a consulting firm. Or, he said, compared with cable or satellite programming: “It’s like the television from the ’50s and ‘60s when you only had a handful of channels.”

Sony says the severe limitations are by design, for a couple of reasons. Primarily, it asserts, it is tough to ensure picture quality and user experience if it allows its customers to download content willy-nilly. Plus, the television maker has not figured out how to create an Internet browser that is easily navigable with the television remote.

Sony says that to get ideal picture quality, a consumer should have an Internet connection that is at least 3 megabits per second, a relatively high speed in most homes, and that could be viewed as yet another drawback to the Bravia Link.

Making the experience as much as possible like television, rather than computing, is a central goal, said Edgar Tu, senior vice president for engineering and TV operations at Sony. He said the company’s research indicates consumers do not want to read on the screen or browse text-heavy sites.

“That’s the bottom line,” he said. “Television is about one thing: video.”

Sony still has a lot to learn about what it wants from a connected TV, Mr. Tu said. That is why, he said, the Bravia Link is also a research tool for Sony; the gadget will communicate through the Internet to Sony, telling the company what model of television people are attaching the device to.

Also, Sony said, its Internet partners will be able to tell it what kinds of shows people are watching, much as they do when people browse the Web.

Another plan for Internet-connected television with access to certain videos is coming from Sharp, according to Bob Scaglione, the company’s senior vice president for marketing in the United States. He said that set could be on the market next year.

“All of the L.C.D. and plasma makers are going to release these types of features,” said Jonathan Weitz, an industry analyst with IBB Consulting. He said that TV manufacturers are doing so partly to cater to consumer tastes, but partly out of fear that they need to add value to televisions to keep their prices up, along with their profit margins.

Hewlett-Packard’s desire to differentiate itself is the reason it is moving to a new generation of connected televisions, called MediaSmart TVs. The latest versions, which came out in late August, are 42-inch ($2,099) and 47-inch ($2,499) L.C.D. sets that let users connect through cables, or wirelessly, to a personal computer.

Through that connection, the television can display video or photos stored on the computer, or it can use it as a conduit to download pay-per-view movies from Cinema Now. Eventually, H.P. says, it plans to offer music and video from other content partners.

Some buyers may find it tricky to configure the MediaSmart depending on their computer. H.P. says consumers who have the Vista operating system and the latest Windows Media software should have little configuring to do, while people with less advanced systems may have to install extra software.

Perhaps as an admission that challenges remain, H.P. said it was negotiating with its retail partners to offer a free $200 in-home installation (not including mounting the TV on the wall). That deal would offset about half of the price difference between the MediaSmart TV and like-size H.P. televisions.

The installation deal also “removes any doubt that this will add any more pain than you’ll get with a regular television,” said Alex Thatcher, senior product manager for the MediaSmart TV.

If the case for why consumers should buy a connected TV now is not compelling, it is much clearer why such TVs offer a potentially lucrative business model for the TV makers.

The new sets allow manufacturers to play a bigger role in the distribution of content. That, in turn, would give them another profit stream after the sale. For instance, the television makers could demand a share of advertising or subscription revenue from content partners who are given access to the viewers of their TVs.

That concept, while still in its infancy, is potentially powerful as broadband speeds increase, allowing easier streaming of more data-dense images like HDTV movies or TV programs.

But first, Mr. Tu said, come the baby steps of building a connected home in a way that begins to meet some of the as-yet unmet promise.

“Like every other company, we are trying to figure out how we are going to attack the connected home.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/te...sics.html?8dpc





Internet Streaming: Five U.S. Television Networks Compared
Daniel Langendorf

The good news: Major U.S. television networks continue to embrace Internet technology and are putting their shows on the Web for online viewing, just like they did last year.

The bad news: Their online offerings remain sporadic; their Internet strategies feel like “we have to” rather than “we want to”; and — worst of all — they still haven’t embraced the idea that we are living in a new digital world, with different rules, participants, and expectations all around.

We’ve looked at the online offerings of the five major networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and The CW — and sadly no one is blowing the game wide open, although they’re trying. To their credit, the networks are offering some of their top-rated shows online, viewable on their own websites.

But to their discredit, the networks don’t provide streaming for all of their shows, prime time or not, and streaming schedules vary widely. While video quality continues to improve, many networks have crowded and difficult to use interfaces, which detracts from the fun of watching a favorite TV show. Sometimes it’s just not worth the effort.

Here’s our journey through the land of network streaming.

The Bigger the Better

Streaming should be integral to the networks’ new digital strategies, but the networks might be slow to coming around because of technology. For the best streaming experience it helps if you have the latest and greatest everything.

While standard definition programs will stream fine over regular broadband connections like DSL and cable, high definition programs require more bandwidth, so it’s best to use upper-end DSL, cable, or fiber optic options.

I tested streams from the networks using a last generation Mac Powerbook and a Dell laptop. In each scenario, the video was choppy and the audio track was sometimes off. When I closed out of programs I was not using, the video performance improved but I couldn’t work or surf while watching.

Like everything with computers, the more processor, the more RAM, the better video capabilities, the more you will enjoy your streaming experience.

The Schedule

Streaming is handy because if I miss a show, or I fail to record it, I can still view the program the following day on the network’s website. I may have to endure a few embedded ads, but it’s a small price to pay to keep up to date. And it’s cheaper than buying the show from iTunes or Amazon and a heck of a lot more convenient than illegally downloading it over BitTorrent, which the average viewer doesn’t mess with anyway, no matter what Hollywood and TV Land say.

So what’s available? The best way to find out is to poke around each network’s website because streaming schedules vary, just like like season premiers. To get a quick at-a-glance view of the networks’ upcoming season and which programs are available for streaming, check out our handy guide.

What’s most frustrating about the networks’ streaming schedules is inconsistency and a lack of a TV guide-like index. Some networks leave programs up indefinitely. Others take shows down after a few weeks or once the season is completed. If you plan to follow a show on the Internet, it’s best to find out the program’s streaming schedule in advance so you know when it will first appear and when it will disappear. My wife is still frustrated that episodes of CBS’ “New Adventures of Old Christine” are no longer available, even though the show is scheduled to return this season.

With that in mind, what is available from each network?

ABC

ABC offers five of its top shows for streaming — “Ugly Betty”, “Grey’s Anatomy”, “Men in Trees”, “Desperate Housewives”, and “Brothers & Sisters”. Other, older shows are also available, including “According to Jim”, “The Bronx is Burning”, “Day Break”, “Fashionista Diaries”, “Fat March”, “Knights of Prosperity”, “The Nine”, “GH Nightshift”, “October Road”, “Six Degrees”, “Voicemail”, and “What About Brian”.

ABC’s Flash-based player, is slick and by far the best of any network. It’s video quality, for full screen, big, normal and mini-mode, is very good to excellent. ABC also offers high definition streaming.

ABC, which is owned by Disney, who happens to have a board member from Apple named Steve Jobs, extends its digital presence beyond streaming by offering a fair mixture of new and older shows for purchase through the iTunes Store, a relationship that’s expected to continue.

ABC seems to be on path of traditional distribution mixed with a strong ABC.com streaming portal mixed with making certain shows available through the iTunes.

CBS

CBS’ chief Internet strategist, Quincy Smith, said the network’s video presence on the Web should be “CBS.com/nobodycomeshere.” Its player, known as Innertube, is available through the Website and is based on RealPlayer’s RealVideo technology.

CBS offers more of its top programs than any other network, including “Big Brother”, “CSI”, “CSI: Miami”, “CSI: NY”, “How I Met Your Mother”, “Jericho”, “NCIS”, “Numb3rs”, the “Power of 10”, “Rules of Engagement”, “Shark”, “Survivor”, and “The Unit”. Other shows are available, particularly soap operas such as “As the World Turns”, “The Guiding Light”, and “The Young and the Restless”.

Rather than rely solely on its website like ABC and the other networks, CBS — to its credit — is drastically revising its digital strategy through a new initiative called CBS Interactive. Its goal is to syndicate as much of its content as possible through through iTunes and sites such as AOL and Yahoo and new media venues such as YouTube, Joost, Veoh, and Brightcove.

“We can’t expect consumers to come to us,” Smith told the Wall Street Journal in May. “It’s arrogant for any media company to assume that.”

CBS seems to be mixing its traditional distribution with a strong presence on the Internet, through Innertube and the web syndication network. It’s nice to see at least one network exploring options beyond the usual distribution means and a web video portal.

NBC

NBC offers a pitiful lineup of top shows — “30 Rock” and “Friday Night Lights” — to go with an offering of mostly fringe shows or programs in need of an audience like “Andy Barker, P.I.” and “Raines”.

NBC’s player, which is based on Flash, wasn’t bad. It offers normal, large, and full screen viewing and the ability to navigate by chapter, which no other network has.

Despite its paltry streaming offerings, NBC was still considered an influential network player because of its involvement with the iTunes Store. NBC made available to iTunes some of its best shows, including “Heroes”, “My Name is Earl”, “The Office”, “Scrubs,” and the “Law & Order” franchise.

But this past month NBC and Apple got into a public spat during contract negotiations and the two split. NBC is now offering its shows through Amazon’s Unbox, which is designed to run on PCs and not Macs. The iTunes Store will no longer carry any new NBC programs.

Another part of NBC’s digital strategy is to team up with News Corp., owner of Fox, to form what they hope is a YouTube killer. The new site, known as Hulu, is in private beta and will be online in October. Hulu will partner with other destination sites including AOL, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo.

NBC’s strategy beyond its traditional network appears to be greed oriented: You like our shows, pay us to download them or buy them on DVD. It also appears that NBC is holding back streaming content so you will go to Hula.com.

FOX

The quality of Fox’s video player, also based on Flash, is good, although the interface is crowded. Its Fox on Demand website, where the player can be found, is wretched because of its clunky usability and weird graphic design.

Even so, Fox offers a fair amount of its top shows, including “24”, “Prison Break”, “The Loop”, “K-Ville”, “Bones”, “American Dad” for streaming and/or purchasing from the iTunes Store. Since Fox is a part of Hulu, it’s unknown whether the network and its shows will remain for sale on iTunes.

Like CBS, Fox seems to be moving toward an improved Internet presence for its shows through a web portal and through making some of them available on Hulu.

“It is critical that we embrace the Internet as a distributed medium that promotes engagement with users, wherever they are on the Web,” said Fox’s William Bradford, senior vice president, content strategy. “This approach reinforces the importance of involving fans to assist with marketing the show through word of mouth and discussion forums across the Internet.”

The CW

The CW doesn’t have as many programs to offer as the other networks. Yet it understands the importance of availability and building an audience. It’s streaming experience isn’t bad but isn’t great, either, although video quality is good (The CW also uses a Flash-based player).

Nearly every show is available for streaming, including “Everybody Hates Chris”, “Girlfriends”, “All of Us”, “The Game”, “Pussycat Dolls Research Next Doll”, “America’s Next Top Model”, “Beauty and the Geek”, “Supernatural”, and “One Tree Hill”. The CW also makes some current and older programs available on iTunes.

Verdict

Watching TV shows through a network’s web site, for me, is good in a pinch, but overall the experience is flat. Maybe it’s that the technology hasn’t fully evolved for a pleasant viewing experience.

Or maybe it’s that the networks continue to tip-toe. They’re dabbling in online streaming but not pushing the envelope as far as they can. They’re toying with selling their shows through the iTunes Store and Unbox. In addition, mobile operators like Verizon are offering some television content through services such as V-Cast.

But it’s not enough. I expect more from the networks. They’re the all powerful ones. They own the content. They order it. They pay for it. They distribute it. They could be out front, yet they’re not using their power to reshape an industry.
http://www.last100.com/2007/09/10/in...orks-compared/





TV Torrents: When 'Piracy' is Easier than Legal Purchase
Chris Soghoian

NBC's recent withdraw from the iTunes store leaves the millions of users of Apple iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content. Could this be the push that brings easy-to-use 'piracy' to the masses? This article discusses the issues, and then provides step-by-step instructions to setup a computer to automatically download any of hundreds of TV shows as soon as they are broadcast and put online.

With Apple's recent lovers's spat with NBC making the headlines, it seems like a good opportunity to examine the state of the online TV downloads, be they paid or 'pirated'. The end result of the dispute between the companies is that NBC's shows, which currently count for approximately one third of iTunes' TV show sales will no longer be available for sale at Apple's iTunes store. Customers wishing to purchase NBC's shows will now need to go through Amazon's Unbox service. While Unbox supports users of Windows and TiVo, Mac users, as well as those millions of iPod users are left out in the cold. Linux geeks, and those customers who have purchased divx/avi capable portable music players are also excluded, but this small subset of the market were equally ignored by Apple.

The Apple/NBC dispute, of course, only affects US based consumers. Foreigners, due to the lengthy delay between a show airing in the US in markets abroad, have already been driven to illegal file sharing. In Australia, where the broadcast of US shows is typically delayed between 22-30 months, many viewers have given up on waiting for their favorite shows to appear on the tube, and have instead turned to BitTorrent. According to a report published in 2006, "Australians are responsible for 15.6 percent of all online TV piracy, bested only by Britain, which accounts for 38.4 percent. The US lags behind in third position at 7.3 percent."

The legitimate and legal online media stores cannot compete with file sharing on price. Furthermore, as iTunes, Amazon, Walmart and the other stores all wrap their media in restrictive Digitial Rights Management (DRM), they cannot compete on freedom, flexibility and the ability to transfer purchased media to other devices. The only areas where they have the upper hand are in quality, and ease of use.

Warner Brothers' China division, in a rare act of intelligence on the part of a major media company, demonstrated significant savvy last year when they began selling cheap, legitimate, high quality DVDs of movies within days of the theatrical release. By pricing the discs at around 12 yuan (approximately US$1.50), Warner is hoping to make cost a non-issue, thus allowing them to compete in one area where they hold the upper hand: Quality. Instead of taking a chance with on a low quality, shaky-camcorder copy of a film, Chinese consumers can get a high quality copy of the movie at a reasonable price, all while enjoying the warm fuzzy feeling that you can get knowing that you've helped to pay for some small portion of a a Hollywood star's private jet.

Apple's iPod makes up more than 70 percent of the overall mobile player market. With those customers now completely cut-off from NBC's offerings, the ease-of-use advantage of legitimate purchase has been lost. While camcorder copies of films still make up a decent portion of movies on file sharing networks, the widespread availability of digital television and TV tuners in PCs means that it is trivially easy to find high-quality copies of TV shows on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay.

It's taken some time, but the 'piracy' path has finally gotten to be more user-friendly and easy to use than iTunes and the other pay-services. Miro, a multi-platform RSS and BitTorrent enabled media client is now very stable, polished and fast. Using a tool such as this, and a couple minutes of configuration to subscribe to your favorite shows, it's now possible for users worldwide to wake up to the latest episode of The Daily Show, without paying a penny, or being locked into a restrictive DRM scheme. It's still illegal of course, but that hasn't stopped the millions of file sharers who have made BitTorrent responsible for more than 25% of all Internet traffic.

It's worth noting at this point, that for people in India, the Middle East and other markets ignored by the major players, Linux users (for which iTunes, Amazon and Walmart's media stores do not work), Apple customers who wish to watch shows made by NBC or another network that won't play ball with Apple, or Windows users who are simply not willing to submit themselves to the shackles of DRM, illegal downloads are the only way to watch TV shows on their computers and portable media players. I'm not advocating illegal activity, but merely stating the facts.

If a user wishes to break the law (or they live in a country that doesn't respect US copyright law), lets see exactly how they could go about setting up their computer to auto-download their favorite TV shows. This information is, of course, for educational purposes only and I in no way encourage anyone to violate copyright laws.

Step 1: Download and install the Miro media player, which is available for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Step 2: Locate an RSS feed for a TV show you want to watch. One fantastic source of these is the website tvRSS.net

Navigate through the list of TV shows on the tvRSS website, and find a desired show.

On the web-page for the show, right click on the link to the RSS feed of that show, and copy the URL location.

Step 3: Open up Miro, and go to the Channels menu, and select Add Channel. The RSS address that was copied previously should already be displayed. If it's not, paste it.

Miro should now automatically download the latest episode of that show, which it will continue to do every time a new episode appears online.

For ease of use, a user will probably want to rename the channel to something recognizable. This can be done by going to the Channels menu and selecting Rename.

By following these three steps, its possible for a user to wake up to their favorite TV shows already downloaded to their computer, waiting to be watched and without the restrictions of DRM. Users of Apple's iPods will need to re-encode them into Apple's proprietary Quicktime format, while those users with a Linux based Nokia N800 or one of the many low-cost .avi compatible portable media players should be able to transfer the files with little to no additional work.

As I said before, this is all totally illegal under US copyright laws, and most other western countries that have agreed to adopt similar rules. In addition to the standard risks of file sharing, US based users should take special care not to download any leaked pre-broadcast episodes of TV shows, which occasionally show up online. The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act passed in 2005 makes mere possession of such media a felony. First time offenders can face up to three years in jail. Caveat emptor.
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9775271-46.html





News Corp Expects Contentious Apple Negotiations

News Corp's president and chief operating officer said on Friday he expected to have contentious negotiations with Apple over showing its television programmes on iTunes.

"We have a pretty limited relationship with Apple and we'll see how it goes," Peter Chernin told the UK's Royal Television Society convention.

"I assume it will be prickly and dicey and contentious like all negotiations are and like all negotiations should be."

Chernin said News Corp currently licensed some TV shows to be sold through iTunes but not movies. A source familiar with the matter has told Reuters that News Corp's contract with Apple is not up for renewal discussions at any time soon.

NBC Universal said in August it did not intend to renew its contract to sell television shows on iTunes although the two sides are still in talks, and analysts expect Apple to face a tougher time in filling its iTunes store with shows and movies.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/busin...orp-apple.html





Show Series to Originate on MySpace
Michael Cieply

Hollywood has been dipping its toe in original online content. Two seasoned producers are about to take a full plunge.

Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick — who have made films like “Blood Diamond” and “The Last Samurai” and whose ABC series “Thirtysomething” helped to define television drama in the 1980s — have made a deal with MySpace, the online social network owned by the News Corporation, to produce an original Web series called “Quarterlife.”

Mr. Herskovitz described “Quarterlife” as a regular television series, made by network-caliber writers, directors and production crews. Each hourlong episode — about young people struggling to find their way after college — will be broken into six shorter segments, with a new one posted on MySpace TV each Sunday and Thursday night, beginning Nov. 11.

The producers also announced plans for quarterlife.com, a related Internet site separate from MySpace, to start next month. It is intended to promote the show, while becoming a portal for viewers in their 20s who are trying to find points of entry in creative and professional worlds.

A day after their original MySpace posting, the episodes will be available on quarterlife.com. A week later, they will be generally available on the Web. And, if all goes as planned, they will eventually find their way onto conventional television screens.

Networks and studios have been scrambling to find their footing on the Web, even as artists like Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of “South Park,” are making lucrative deals to receive payment when their shows hit the Web. Filmmakers like Joel and Ethan Coen and stars like Will Ferrell, meanwhile, are feeding original material to Web-based companies like the newly formed 60Frames Entertainment or FunnyOrDie.com.

Amid the rush, the new series from Mr. Herskovitz and Mr. Zwick stands out for its willingness to spend what the principals say will be relatively large amounts of money. Mr. Herskovitz declined to provide an exact budget, but said it would be substantially more than the $50,000 or $100,000 an hour that many higher-end Web series spend. He said the goal was to make shows that based on their hourlong pilot, were comparable in tone and presentation to network shows.

“This is the single best-produced piece of serialized content for the Internet, ever,” said Jeff Berman, general manager of MySpace TV. Mr. Berman’s division, organized in June, has already offered shows like the science-fiction program “Afterworld” and “Prom Queen” from Michael D. Eisner.

The “Quarterlife” series is based on a pilot Mr. Herskovitz and Mr. Zwick created several years ago called “1/4 Life,” which was rejected by ABC. (Mr. Herskovitz rewrote it; it still was not accepted.) “In television, you are regularly humbled by your own work,” Mr. Herskovitz said.

By creating programs for the Web, Mr. Zwick and Mr. Herskovitz can take advantage of union agreements that allow actors and writers to work on terms more favorable to producers than those governing network programs.

The stars of “Quarterlife” are relative unknowns: Bitsie Tulloch (“The West Wing,” “Lonelygirl 15”) and Scott M. Foster (“Greek,” “Teenage Dirtbag”), among others. In addition to Mr. Zwick and Mr. Herskovitz, writers will include the actor Devon Gummersall, whom they worked with on the series “My So-Called Life” and “Once and Again.”

The producers will operate their site separately from MySpace, using it not only to help users build and circulate portfolios of their creative work, but also to capture thoughts about story lines, to be fully credited, or even find actors for the series.
Mr. Herskovitz said the decision to stay apart from MySpace — perhaps making it easier to value or sell later — was subject to long negotiation. Still, Chris DeWolfe, the MySpace co-founder and chief executive, said he was not concerned about seeing that element of the enterprise remain discrete.

“That’s just how MySpace works,” he said.

According to Mr. Herskovitz, who is also president of the Producers Guild of America, the series is trying to reverse a cycle by bringing shows to the online world before they reach television sets. He said that would put producers like himself back in a more powerful position.

As a group, those independent producers lost financial and creative footing in the 1990s when the big networks took advantage of a change in federal regulations to make themselves the owners of shows that once might have belonged to companies like Bedford Falls, the company owned by Mr. Zwick and Mr. Herskovitz.

Before 1995, the big networks were prevented by the federal government’s so-called financial interest and syndication rules from actually owning the programs they distributed.

Mr. Herskovitz said Creative Artists Agency helped organize his new venture and owned a stake in it. MySpace does not pay a license fee for the shows, but brings a pipeline to its 110 million viewers, and will be involved in selling advertising. According to one person involved with the project, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss its financial terms, backing will come from private investors under deals that have yet to be completed.

Mr. Zwick, 54, acknowledged that he and Mr. Herskovitz, who is 55, would be forced to learn not just a new medium, but also the attitudes of a new generation that may have more in common with the producers’ children than with themselves.

“I pick up a sense of diminished resources and opportunity and a fear that the culture has been ruled too long” by an older generation, Mr. Zwick said, speaking by phone from Lithuania, where he is directing a World War II drama called “Defiance,” with Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber.

But, Mr. Zwick said that he also recognized many of the same tensions he and others faced when young. And he is ready to get to work on the new show.

“I don’t see how I can avoid it,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/bu...arterlife.html





HBO to Track Pirated Reviewer Copies

Pay-TV Network Will Use Thomson Watermarking Technology to Embed Digital IDs Into Screeners
Todd Spangler

Hoping to prevent its original shows from making the leap to the Internet before they’re aired, HBO will use digital-watermarking technology from Paris-based Thomson to embed unique IDs into copies of screeners provided to reviewers.

Thomson’s Shield Forensic system inserts an invisible barcode identifier into every frame of a piece of video. The ID, which is associated with the intended recipient, can then be read if the video surfaces, say, on an Internet file-sharing service -- allowing HBO to trace the illicit video back to its source.

A year ago, HBO was caught off guard when the entire fourth season of crime drama The Wire was discovered being sold in East Coast nightclubs and on Internet auction sites before the 13-episode series had finished its run. DVDs of the Peabody Award-winning series, a critical success if not a ratings smash, had been widely distributed to reviewers earlier in the summer.

Watermarking technology won’t prevent copying or restrict playback as digital-rights management tools do, but it will allow HBO to track down violators.

“They want to track the misuse of this content,” said Eric Serre, product manager for content security at Thomson’s Grass Valley division. “It’s program content that has never been aired, so they’re very anxious that copies are not made before the air date.”

The Thomson system, Serre claimed, is resistant to traditional attacks like rotating, cropping or compressing video intended to circumvent identification technologies.

HBO vice president of corporate affairs Jeff Cusson said the network does not currently embed watermarks in its broadcast signals. Otherwise, he declined to comment on the project beyond information included in the press release issued with Thomson.

Other programmers have selectively used similar watermarking techniques, including NBC Universal for certain movie and TV content and FX, which used the technology in distributing prerelease copies of the new Glenn Close series Damages. Showtime Networks does not currently use watermarking but has plans to, VP of corporate public relations Stuart Zakim said.

HBO will install the Thomson system initially at three sites, including its main playout facility in Hauppauge, N.Y.

At each location, the system will include a database server to synchronize and manage each watermarking platform; DVD-marking stations with built-in DVD burners; systems to watermark high-definition and standard-definition content in real time to tape; an “investigator platform” to track down pirated content; and other components.

Watermarking technologies can also be used in cable set-top boxes to embed IDs in video streams. That way, operators and programmers can identify a specific subscriber who illegally uploads cable shows to the Internet, Serre said. Thomson currently has two set-top watermarking trials underway in different parts of the world.

“We have a solution to get the subscriber details and watermark [video] for each individual viewer,” he said.
http://www.multichannel.com/article/...dustryid=47197





Disney Backs Star After Her Apology for Nude Photo
Gina Keating and Sue Zeidler

Vanessa Hudgens, the star of the wholesome, made-for-kids TV movie hit "High School Musical," apologized Friday for a nude photo of her on the Web and Walt Disney Co. said it was sticking by the performer.

Some parents of her young fans voiced dismay over the photo, which shows Hudgens, 18, smiling and standing naked directly in front of the camera.

"I want to apologize to my fans, whose support and trust means the world to me," Hudgens said in a statement issued about a day after the photo surfaced. "I am embarrassed over this situation and regret having ever taken these photos. I am thankful for the support of my family and friends."

In a statement, Disney said it hoped Hudgens had learned a valuable lesson. "Vanessa has apologized for what was obviously a lapse in judgment."

A Disney representative said the photo would not affect its decision to cast Hudgens in the third film of the "High School Musical" franchise and that negotiations for the cast and creative team were continuing.

Earlier Friday, a representative for Hudgens confirmed the image was of Hudgens but said it "was taken privately."

"It is a personal matter and it is unfortunate that this has become public," the representative said in a statement.

Hudgens has starred in "High School Musical" and "High School Musical 2" as Gabriella, the sweet, innocent science geek whose romance with athlete Troy, played by Zac Efron, is chronicled in the two hugely popular made-for-television movies on the squeaky-clean Disney Channel.

Hudgens and Efron, who date in real life, were so chaste on screen they did not even kiss until the end of the second film, a climactic moment marked by fireworks going off behind them.

The two movies form the cornerstone of one of Disney's most lucrative franchises for preteen girls and a third is planned for release to theaters next year. The second film debuts on Disney Channels in other countries this weekend.

'Very Private Person'

In a Teen magazine interview released earlier this week, Hudgens described herself as "a very private person" with "very good morals" who enjoyed serving as a role model.

"I've been brought up with very good morals and I'm not going to go out and do something I don't want other kids to do," she said in the article.

But some parents of young fans were outraged by the photo, saying it tarnished Hudgens' image.

"She's damaged," Renee Rollins-Greenberg, a Los Angeles mother of two, told Reuters. "She's got this teeny-bop audience, young preteens and younger, who are admiring her and thinking she's this wonderful, pure innocent person. Eighteen is awfully young for this kind of display."

"I'm devastated because I have an 8-year-old for which I now have to have an explanation," said another Los Angeles-area mother, Rosie Konkel. "She's always looked at this character as a very smart and proper young lady."

"High School Musical 2" debuted on Disney Channel last month to a record audience of 17.2 million viewers to become the most-watched individual program in cable TV history.

The show's soundtrack debuted at No. 1 on national album sales charts, where it has remained for the past three weeks, selling nearly 1.2 million copies.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...05248320070910





Disney Hates Machine Head and Metal Music
pixie

Did you know the House of Blues in Anaheim, CA is on Disney's property? Neither did I. But they forced the cancellation of a Machine Head show scheduled for tonight[09/07] at the venue, due to "violent imagery, undesirable fans and inflammatory lyrics." The band, whose show had been on sale for two months before the Disney hammer went down on the show had quite the statement about the situation.

On their official site, the band wrote:

In a stunning last-minute move, Walt Disney Properties have pressured promoter Live Nation into canceling Machine Head's performance tomorrow night at the House of Blues venue in Anaheim (on their Disneyland property). Citing violent imagery, undesirable fans and inflammatory lyrics as the reason, the diversity-impaired corporation began pressuring the promoter on Saturday to cancel all upcoming heavy metal concerts, placing Machine Head under an internal "review process" that took 5 days before bothering to convey their alarming decision to the band late yesterday - less than 48 hours before their Black Tyranny Tour was to kick off at House of Blues Anaheim on Friday night.

While the enactment of this new blanket rule applies to all upcoming heavy metal shows at the House Of Blues Anaheim (with some metal bands having been banned from performing on name alone), Machine Head is the first band to actually have tickets go on sale, and remain on sale for 2 months, before intense pressure and vague threats of liability from the Corporation left the promoter with no choice but to remove the show from the venue.

As a result, Live Nation's Paul McGuigan did the honorable thing and incredibly, on one days notice, managed to salvage the tour's opening night by moving the first date of The Black Tyranny tour (featuring Machine Head, Arch Enemy, Throwdown, and Sanctity) to The Glass House in Pomona, CA (located at 200 W. Second Street). All existing tickets will be redeemable for entry at The Glass House, and all Will Call pickups will now be available for pickup at the new venue.

Any fans unable to make the 70-mile trip to The Glass House as a result of this ridiculous turn of events will be able to have their money refunded in full. Strangely, all other Black Tyranny dates at House Of Blues venues on Disney property will remain unaffected. On behalf of all four bands on the bill, Machine Head wish to extend their gratitude to promoter Paul McGuigan and Live Nation for finding an alternate venue for tomorrow night's show on such short notice.

Of course, I can't help but think "it's Disney's property, they can do whatever they want on it." But at the same time... I have to wonder -- why have a rock club on your property at all, if a band like Machine Head is too offensive for you? Why not get rid of it all together, or at least stop booking real bands there, instead sticking to the noise pollution "teen pop" they endorse so wholeheartedly?
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/...nd_Metal_Music





XM, Sirius Release Merger Report, NAB Responds
FMQB

A new study backed by Sirius and XM unsurprisingly finds "overwhelming support" for the proposed a la carte programming that could happen if the satcaster merger is approved. However, the NAB disagrees with the results, calling the study "loaded."

According to the survey results, 77 percent of respondents said that the a la carte option, where listeners would choose individual channels for $6.99/month, would be good for consumers. Also, 72 percent said a $14.99 a la carte option, where subscribers choose channels from one service plus selections from another, would also be good for consumers. Other a la carte package options were also described as "good for consumers" by the majority of respondents, including a "family friendly" option.

The survey also showed support for the satellite merger, with 57 percent agreeing that the a la carte plans show that the merger was good for consumers and the public interest.

Of course, the NAB had a bone to pick with the study's results. In a statement, EVP of Media Relations Dennis Wharton said, "Here's what XM and Sirius conveniently did not ask poll participants: Do you like monopolies? Does competition restrain a monopolist's price-gouging? Should government reward two companies that routinely violate FCC rules with a monopoly? Did you know you will have to buy a new radio that costs $200 or more to get the alleged benefits of a la carte programming? Did you know that Howard Stern and other 'talent' will cost consumers more – not less – under a la carte? Did you know that under a la carte, the per-channel price of a merged XM-Sirius will rise by 40 percent to 188 percent? Today's poll signals the lengths to which XM and Sirius will game the system in order to achieve monopoly status."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=471907





Hanson Wins Over Fans By Going Anonymous
TomZ

It's tough to win over new fans when you're forever tied to a teen-pop image. This is the case with Hanson, the former child stars known for the 1997 smash hit "MMMBop." The guys have grown up and are making new, mature music. But whatever they do, people still remember them for "MMMBop."

To combat this, one Chicago radio programmer tried something drastic. Spike, the director for Chicago alternative station Q101, has been a Hanson fan since the 90s, and wanted to get some airplay for the band's latest single, "The Great Divide." However, he knew that the group wouldn't go over well with listeners. So Spike put "The Great Divide" into Q101's rotation, but told DJ's not to reveal the artist. For weeks, the station played the record, which was introduced as "The Great Divide" by "a mystery artist."

As you've probably already guessed, the song became a hit. In fact, it became the most-requested song on the station. By the time the scheme was revealed a couple weeks ago, people were already hooked and the public reaction was positive.

"I've always liked Hanson and kept listening to them after 'MMMBop,' and after seeing them a while ago I realized they had become a different band," Spike told Billboard. "It really hit me how good they were. I told all the DJs, 'I want you to hear this song before I tell you who it is,' and when they heard the song, they all dug it. They were initially nervous to play it, but they were blown away by the positive reaction."

It just goes to show the effect that image has on music sales. Nearly everyone takes image into account when determining their musical tastes, whether intentionally or unintentionally. How many Q101 listeners would've admitted to liking a song by Hanson before this scheme? Many of them would never have given it a chance.

And how many other artists are affected by their image? If Ashlee Simpson put out the greatest album of the decade, would anyone give her credit? Or would they just dismiss it based on her image as the girl who lip-synched on "SNL" and got booed out of the Orange Bowl? What if Skee-Lo made a comeback and put out the most progressive rap album of the year? Would anyone buy it? Or would they complain that it didn't include an "I Wish" remix? The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. One of the prime examples of this idea is My Chemical Romance. Their album, The Black Parade, is as straight-up rock as you'll find these days, yet they get dismissed by many as a lame emo/teeny-bopper band because they dress in black and wear eyeliner. That's just one example; there are plenty of other artists that get screwed over (and many who are helped) by their image. Choosing image over music is something pop fans often get criticized for, but this experiment proves that rock fans can be just as bad.

Here is "The Great Divide" by Hanson.
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/...oing_Anonymous





Spears’s Awards Fiasco Stirs Speculation About Her Future
Jeff Leeds

Long before Britney Spears’s dazed performance on the MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas on Sunday, her comeback effort looked out of sync.

It started in May, when the erstwhile pop queen marked her tentative return to public performance after a long hiatus with a string of haphazard club gigs that lasted for as little as 15 minutes, during which she lip-synched old hits like “... Baby One More Time.” But no one was prepared for Sunday night’s fiasco, in which a listless Ms. Spears teetered through her dance steps and mouthed only occasional words in a wan attempt to lip-synch her new single, “Gimme More.”

Endlessly mocked in the mainstream news media and the blogosphere, it has left her fans and her handlers bewildered. The show also left raw nerves: Ms. Spears’s label, Jive Records, sent a note to MTV chastising the network over the comments of the comedian Sarah Silverman, who took the stage immediately after Ms. Spears and referred to her children as “mistakes.”

With her first studio album in four years scheduled for release on Nov. 13, the music industry is debating whether Ms. Spears’s career can recover.

“Is she going to be the next Michael Jackson?” wondered Jay Marose, a former publicist for teen-pop acts like the Backstreet Boys. “She’s been on her own for so long, calling the shots in this bubble.”

Her predicament illustrates the hazards that await pop stars who depart the spotlight and then try to return where they left off. Ms. Spears all but suspended her career three years ago when she married a backup dancer, Kevin Federline, and fired her longtime manager. More recently, she has expressed a desire to run her own career, even while devoting time to a messy divorce with Mr. Federline and a child-custody battle.

Little wonder that the question of how to breathe new life into her career was a polarizing one — particularly when MTV, where Ms. Spears had been a mainstay, extended an offer for her to perform at its annual gala.

The idea received a mostly cool reception from Ms. Spears’s principal advisers at Jive. But Ms. Spears’s entertainment lawyer, Gary Stiffelman, figured she could benefit from MTV exposure, and pressed her to sign on. Mr. Stiffelman also helped steer Ms. Spears to a new manager, Jeff Kwatinetz, about a month ago to guide her through preparations for the appearance. Mr. Stiffelman and Mr. Kwatinetz declined to comment.

Ms. Spears began a program of fitness training and choreography sessions to get ready, with executives from MTV and Jive receiving updates on her progress from her management. Shortly after the preparations began, though, Ms. Spears jolted the team by shaking up her coterie of advisers, ousting Mr. Stiffelman.

Members of Ms. Spears’s camp say that although she expressed jitters about performing on television again, she showed a semblance of sticking to her regimen. But once Ms. Spears arrived in Las Vegas for the awards show weekend, everything ran off the rails. For starters, she was photographed partying with celebrities like Diddy until the wee hours.

Roughly an hour before showtime, Ms. Spears insisted on a series of changes. She clashed with Ken Paves, the high-end hairstylist chosen to do her hair extensions. She also decided not to wear the custom-fitted corset designed for the performance, opting for a black bikini-style costume that revealed more of her body. Her physical appearance during her set also faced a barrage of criticism.

Her performance is the second recent public embarrassment for one of Mr. Kwatinetz’s clients. A few months ago he was fired by the singer Kelly Clarkson amid a public battle she was waging with her label.

For all the buzz about her televised missteps, Ms. Spears appears to be on solid footing in one sense: she has a hot song. Since “Gimme More” surfaced on the New York pop station Z100 two weeks ago, it has quickly earned a spot on the playlists of pop stations nationwide and turned into a hit on Web sites like YouTube.

“So far, in the first two weeks, the reaction has been bigger than anyone expected,” said Sharon Dastur, the program director for Z100. She said that some listeners call to make negative comments about Ms. Spears, “but then they say, ‘When are you guys going to play the song again?’ ”

Two ringtones based on the single can be bought exclusively on mtv.com; initially, demand was so heavy that the servers handling the orders crashed for several hours. And for better or worse, the performance has also prompted loose defenses of Ms. Spears online, where one fan created a Zapruder-like slow-motion replay video that laid the blame for her awkward dancing on a broken boot heel.

It is not clear how far a hit song will take Ms. Spears, however, in the absence of other marketing efforts. Her advisers may be reluctant to risk further setbacks by pushing her to do additional performances or interviews.

A spokeswoman for Jive Records said the company “is committed to releasing Britney Spears’s album on Nov. 13 and we’re excited about the new material.” Her last album, “In the Zone,” sold more than 2.9 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Ms. Spears’s team is also eager to release a music video to counter the impressions left by the MTV debacle. But that may prove tricky, too: Ms. Spears oversaw her production of a gritty, stripper-themed clip for “Gimme More” that may jolt fans who are more accustomed to the slick, tightly choreographed videos that made her an MTV staple. The video is being tweaked with input from her advisers.

Only a week before the awards show, there had been talk among Ms. Spears’s handlers of booking her to play a string of intimate theater performances to promote her new album. But after Las Vegas, all bets are off. Given Ms. Spears’s independent streak, the biggest challenge may be convincing her to commit to a supervised makeover.

“The train wreck can’t be her shtick,” said Mr. Marose. He added, “So many people are pulling for her; they want to love her and she’s making it tough.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/ar...ic/13brit.html





Music Industry Betting on 'Ringle' Format
Ed Christman

As the recording industry wakes up from its summer slumber and starts thinking about what will motivate the consumer for the holiday selling season, the major labels are getting ready to launch the "ringle," which combines the mostly defunct single format with ringtones.

Each ringle is expected to contain three songs -- one hit and maybe one remix and an older track -- and one ringtone, on a CD with a slip-sleeve cover. The idea is that if consumers in the digital age can download any tracks they want individually, why not let them buy singles in the store as well? It also enables stores to get involved in the ringtone phenomenon.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which came up with the ringle idea, and Universal Music Group are going to be the first out of the box with ringles. The former will unleash 50 titles during October and November, while UMG will have anywhere from 10 to 20 titles ready. The Recording Industry Association of America has approved the "ringle" name, and there is an industrywide logo to help brand it. But except for Sony, each major still needs to cut a deal with a digital aggregator to allow consumers to redeem the ringtone.

Meanwhile, label profit margins for the format are considered slim. The majors are gambling that the ringle can instill in consumers the mind-set to connect to the Internet via the CD.

Sources suggest the ringle will carry either a $5.98 or $6.98 list price, while the wholesale cost to retailers will be less than $4. If it's $5.98, ringles will have a 31 percent gross margin, shy of the 35 percent profit margin that CD albums carry nowadays; if it's $6.98, that would give retail a 42.7 percent gross margin, similar to the profit margin cassette and vinyl albums enjoyed back in the day.

On the plus side, big retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and Amazon have agreed to support the configuration, although all of them may not be ready to do so at launch date, sources say.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...technologyNews





How to: 8 Ways to Get Ringtones Onto Your iPhone

Purchasable iPhone Ringtones are officially here. However, with the discovery of free iPhone ringtones from inside iTunes 7.4 (and the rediscovery of them in iTunes 7.4.1), most of you won't want to pay $0.99 for the privilege of using a 30-second version of a song you've already purchased. Here are eight alternative ways to get ringtones onto your iPhone.

Options that require Jailbreak
• SSH/File Transfer: All you have to do is drop an iPhone's iPod-compatible ringtone into the /Library/Ringtones directory, meaning you can use MP3s, AACs (protected and unprotected), or M4As. Anything that your iPhone's iPod supports will work.
• iBrickr (Windows): iBrickr actually transcodes your sound files for you, so if you're looking up old WAV sound pages from 1999, iBrickr can convert them into something that the iPhone understands before syncing. [iBrickr]
• iFuntastic (Mac): Same as the SSH/File Transfer option. Just drag them into the correct /Library/Ringtones folder. [iFuntastic]
• Sendsong: Allows you to pick any song from your iPod and move it into the Ringtones section. Install this with AppTapp.

Options that don't require Jailbreak
• iTunes Music Store: You can manually place AAC files into the correct iTunes Ringtones folder as long as it has the right file extension. Works with purchased iTunes songs or songs you've converted to AAC format. [JoeMaller]
• Rogue Ameoba's MakeiPhoneRingtone (Mac): This takes advantage of the iTunes 7.4 and iTunes 7.4.1 ringtone file compatibility workaround to get the Ringtones show up in iTunes. All you have to do is drop in an AAC file, which can be one of your songs purchased from iTunes. [MakeiPhoneRingtone]
• iToner (Mac): Copies ringtones to your iPhone, bypassing iTunes, should be guaranteed to work with future iPhone updates. Costs $15. [iToner]
• iPhoneRingToneMaker (Windows): Transfers ringtones to your iPhone, but lets you edit them beforehand in its editor so you can chop down long songs to a manageable clip. [efksoft]

We recommend you use one of the free methods, since they're actually quite easy to do. Even if you don't want to jailbreak your phone, the iTunes Music Store manual method and Rogue Amoeba's MakeiPhoneRingtone can take care of this for free. But if you want to make sure your ringtones don't get deleted when a new version of iTunes or iPhone Firmware comes out, you may want to try jailbreaking and placing the songs into the ringtones folder manually.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/how...one-298649.php





iUnlock Released: The First Free, Open Source iPhone SIM Unlock Software
Ryan Block

It looks like the battle's officially over between iPhoneSIMfree and the numerous unique groups of open source hackers trying to software SIM unlock the iPhone. As we've been following in our previous post on the topic, earlier this afternoon iUnlock, the first free, open source iPhone SIM unlock app, was released to the underground just 74 days after the iPhone's release. Developed by the iPhone Dev Team, it's not (yet) for the faint of heart and it takes a little longer to do its magic than iPhoneSIMfree's method, but it works.

To pull this off you'll need iUnlock + nor + the .fls file, which is available in ZIPs all over. We've got the app here, but this package doesn't include all of the files necessary. Good list of links here, or try here, here, here, here, and here.

For the how-to, just hit up one of those guides down below. Naturally, we offer zero guarantees that any of this will work. (Read: don't whine to us if your iPhone gets bricked.) Big ups to the iphone.unlock crew, Draken, and, of course, the iPhone Dev Team. Let us know in comments if this technique works for you.

Update: We've confirmed the hack! Yes, it's fully restore-resistant, too, which is great news. We'll get you all the juicy proof in a few, but we have indeed managed to software unlock an iPhone with iUnlock. Also, HaRRo says the app should be out "very soon" to make this easier on the noobs.

Update 2: Depending on activation method, YouTube might not be working after the unlock -- ours isn't. This is, of course, expected behavior. There's a Windows script here that should hopefully fix you up (again, we don't make any guarantees), but Mac users will have to look elsewhere. Also, alongside the Mac GUI iUnlock app in the works, the iPhone Dev Team is prepping a Windows version, a simple bash script and an iPhone app -- and eventually an all-in-one app that can do everything from the Jailbreak to the unlock.

Update 3: We've posted our terminal output from using the hack after the break. Go ahead. Nerd out. Also, the graphical version isn't out quiet yet, but we've got the first image of it above. Check it out.

Update 5: Ok, the graphical unlock app still isn't yet out, but we've tested an early build, and it definitely works! Check it out here.

Read - Official unlock guide
Read - Unofficial unlock guide

Terminal session for iUnlock

-sh-3.2# cd /usr/bin
-sh-3.2# chmod +x iUnlock
-sh-3.2# chmod +x minicom
-sh-3.2# launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.CommCenter.plist
-sh-3.2# iUnlock ICE03.14.08_G.fls nor
iUnlock v42.PROPER -- Copyright 2007 The dev team


Credits: Daeken, Darkmen, guest184, gray, iZsh, pytey, roxfan, Sam, uns, Zappaz, Zf

* Leet Hax not for commercial uses
Punishment: Monkeys coming out of your ass Bruce Almighty style.

Sending Begin Secpack command
Sending Erase command
Waiting For Erase Completion...
Sending Write command
00%
05%
10%
15%
.
.
.
95%
Sending End Secpack command
Validating the write command
FW are equal!
Completed.
Enjoy!

-sh-3.2# pwd
/usr/bin
-sh-3.2# bbupdater -v
Resetting target...
pinging the baseband...
issuing +xgendata...
firmware: DEV_ICE_MODEM_03.14.08_G
eep version: EEP_VERSION:207
eep revision: EEP_REVISION:7
bootloader: BOOTLOADER_VERSION:3.9_M3S2
Done

-sh-3.2# minicom
"", line 2331, terminal 'hpansi': exit_am_mode but no enter_am_mode
"", line 2385, terminal 'iris-ansi': save_cursor but no restore_cursor
"", line 2403, terminal 'iris-ansi-ap': save_cursor but no restore_cursor
"", line 4359, terminal 'vi603': enter_insert_mode but no exit_insert_mode
"", line 8138, terminal 'dg+ccc': set_color_pair but no initialize_pair
"", line 8508, terminal 'd430c-dg-ccc': set_color_pair but no initialize_pair
"", line 9587, terminal 'hp+color': set_color_pair but no initialize_pair
"", line 9595, terminal 'hp2397a': set_color_pair but no initialize_pair


Welcome to minicom 2.2

OPTIONS:
Compiled on Jul 21 2007, 05:09:51.
Port /dev/tty.baseband

Press CTRL-A Z for help on special keys

AT S7=45 S0=0 L1 V1 X4 &c1 E1 Q0
OK
AT
OK
AT+CLCK="PN",0,"00000000"
OK
AT+CLCK="PN",2
+CLCK: 0

OK

launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.CommCenter.plist

=END=

Put in the SIM and voila!
http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/11/i...ne-sim-unlock/





Mobile System Promises Free Calls
BBC

A new way of making calls directly between phones, for free, is being trialled by a Swedish company.

It is hoping to dramatically improve communications in the developing world.

Swedish company TerraNet has developed the idea using peer-to-peer technology that enables users to speak on its handsets without the need for a mobile phone base station.

The technology is designed for remote areas of the countryside or desert where base stations are unfeasible.

Projects backed by TerraNet recently launched in Tanzania and Ecuador.

TerraNet founder Anders Carlius told the BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme that the idea for TerraNet came when he was on safari in Tanzania in 2002, and found that poor connectivity meant he could not ring friends riding in another jeep only a few metres away.

"I started thinking, 'couldn't we get phone-to-phone without needing any other equipment, and actually have real voice communication, like a telephone call, between units?'" he said.

Digital identity

The TerraNet technology works using handsets adapted to work as peers that can route data or calls for other phones in the network.

The handsets also serve as nodes between other handsets, extending the reach of the entire system. Each handset has an effective range of about one kilometre.

This collaborative routing of calls means there is no cost to talk between handsets.

When a TerraNet phone is switched on, it begins to look for other phones within range. If it finds them, it starts to connect and extend the radio network.

When a number is dialled a handset checks to see if the person being called is within range. If they are, the call goes through.

While individually the phones only have a maximum range of 1km, any phone in between two others can forward calls, allowing the distance to double. This principle applied many times creates a mini network.

However, Mr Carlius admitted that this has created big problems with having enough available frequencies.

The system can also be used to make calls to other TerraNet mesh networks via a net-connected PC fitted with an inexpensive USB dongle.

"If you look at places like Africa, South America, India, China, we're really for the first time giving people a digital identity," he added.

"People are able to talk to other people using a phone number.

"With our stuff, we are giving the low-end man or woman the chance to talk locally for free."

And TerraNet phones currently only work with a special handset - although Mr Carlius said he hopes that it will eventually be a feature available on all phones, like Bluetooth.

He said that were this to happen, it could potentially spell the end for the current Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications model. About 70% of all mobile phones use this technology.

Mr Carlius said large mobile firms did not like the idea of using a peer-to-peer model to make calls.

"One of the biggest things against us is that the big operators and technology providers are really pushing against us, saying this technology doesn't work and it doesn't have a business model," he said.

"This is fine - just join us in Lund and see how the technology works, and ask our customers how our business model works."

Mr Carlius said that mobile phone manufacturer Ericsson had invested around £3m in TerraNet, and this indicated that the business model for the network is sound.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/6987784.stm





Update: Worm Circulating Through Skype
Gregg Keizer

Skype Ltd. warned its users today that a worm targeting Windows PCs is spreading through the service's instant messenger, making the Voice over IP (VoIP)'s chat software the latest to come under the hacker gun.

Dubbed Ramex.a by Skype spokesman Villu Arak -- but pegged Pykspa.d by Symantec Corp. -- the worm takes a typical instant messenger (IM) line of attack: After hijacking contacts from an infected machine's Skype software, it sends messages to those people that include a live link. Recipients who blithely click on the URL -- which poses as a JPG image but is actually a download to a file with the .scr extension -- wind up infected.

"The chat message, of which there are several versions, is cleverly written and may appear to be a legitimate chat message, which may fool some users into clicking on the link," said Arak in an alert on the Skype site.

Arak also listed instructions for removing the worm from infected PCs, but they included changes to the Windows registry, a chore most users are hesitant to try.

Ramex.a/Pykspa.d injects code into the Explorer.exe process to force it to run the actual malware -- a file named wndrivsd32.exe -- periodically, wrote an infected user on a Skype message forum today. The worm also plugs in bogus entries in the Windows hosts file so that installed security software won't be able to retrieve updates.

It may also modify the list of programs allowed to call up Skype, according to a moderator on Skype's Windows support forum. "You may additionally need to check your approved programs that work with Skype," said the user identified as TheUberOverlord. "If you see something that looks strange REMOVE it," he added. The list of approved programs can be found under Tools/Options/Privacy/Related Tasks in Skype 3.0.

As of early today, detailed information from anti-virus vendors was scanty. Symantec, for instance, while listing Pykspa.d as a new threat, said in its write-up only that it is investigating. Several security companies, however, including Symantec, F-Secure Corp. and Kaspersky Lab Inc., have already updated their signature definitions to detect and delete the new malware.

Skype is only the latest IM client to feel the heat from hackers. Both Yahoo Messenger and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN/Live Messenger have been struck this summer. Exploit code designed to hijack Windows PCs running Yahoo Messenger appeared as early as June, and Yahoo has been forced to patch the IM client several times since. Microsoft, meanwhile, has scheduled fixes for its MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger software for tomorrow, presumably to quash a webcam bug that was disclosed late last month.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9035198





How the Porn Industry Plans to Wipe Out BitTorrent
enigmax

With all the negative reporting about BitTorrent in the mainstream media, you could be forgiven for thinking that an anti-piracy crackdown against torrent sites would be a depressing issue. On the contrary, the porn industry’s approach to dealing with BitTorrent raises more than a few smiles.

Yesterday we reported on a porn-industry meeting where they decided to take on BitTorrent and tackle the piracy menace. Today we take a look at some of the pre-meeting arrangements and discussions leading up to the ’round table’ meeting. A message on the GoFuckYourself forums (which sent this writer’s Firefox ‘suspicious site‘ plugin crazy) made by ServerGenius (an 8000+ post veteran and member since 2002) sounded quite urgent:

Plan A: Starve the Internet of Pirate Porn

ALL Major Content Producers / Studios / Big Brand names IN HERE NOW!!!!

Hit me up, I have extremely important information regarding content theft, distribution of both Interactive Online Media as well as DVD movie releases. I’m onto a major site that is one of the main sources in distributing new fresh stolen content on a daily basis on usenet but also most torrent sites grab their content from this source to add it to the torrent networks. I not only have info but also everything needed to legally deal with them and to get them permanently shutdown. I’m not joking, I’m not bullshitting I already have taken all the steps needed to get them shutdown…..but want to collect as much evidence from companies who their content is listed before getting them closed down. Doing so will ensure they’ll stay down…..I will assist every step that’s required to get this done properly I need you to confirm on the content that’s yours and your approval to include that info in the documentation to be used to whipe them out.

ServerGenius (SG) reveals the plan to stop porn piracy and starve torrent sites:

I’m after a forum which is very active releasing adult content by using usenet…..The site offers .nzb downloads for its users to download everything without having to look for it……..it’s a usenet for dummies kinda thing as well as a community for quite a few of the bigger release teams that do porn.

The forum is also used a LOT for the torrentsite owners as their main source for new releases……example: Shane’s World releases a new DVD today……it’s ripped, uploaded and added with all the info, screen shots and full dvd-rip tomorrow…..same day or day after…..same content is listed on sites like: puretna.com, empornium.us and many others.

Do I make this up? No I don’t, are you sure about that? Yes I am…… I have logs and any other info that will backup everything I claim….how did you get all this info? Believe it or not, they gave it themselves to me…….but more about that later…..

So the plan seems to revolve around taking down a single NZB site (a site which simplifies UseNet downloading) so that adult trackers immediately lose their source material, just like that. The problem with this plan is - well, everything really. 1) Taking down an NZB site doesn’t remove the content from Usenet. 2) There are lots of other NZB sites and sites which enable you to make your own NZBs. 3) Experienced Usenet users don’t need NZB sites. 4) Releasers have multiple sources, not just Usenet. 5) They’re discussing their take-down plans on the open internet. People read and report on such things.

Plan B: The Solutions to BitTorrent Sites

Ron Cadwell CEO of CCBill (processer of credit card transactions for porn sites) weighs in with some ideas of his own:

I was reading a post that Raw Alex (very smart guy) made in another tread that got me thinking on how you could stop the Torrent sites. You need to attack them like the Spam Groups did on spammers. They went after the backbone providers (Level 3, Sprint, ATT etc). If you could get 7 out of 10 of the major providers to blackhole them they are dead.

The question is how do you do that? Simple.

1. You get a group of adult webmasters to file DMCA notices by the truck load or allow you to file them on their behalf to the backbone providers. The laws are very specific on Damages and what an ISP must do if a proper DMCA notice is files. (Be Very Annoying Here)

2. You start sending them URL’s like what Raw Alex showed about Child Porn. This is a HOT topic and no backbone provider that is a PUBLIC COMPANY would want to be associated with Child Porn Traffic?

3. Each of the large adult hosting companies have a good relationship with 1 if not more major backbone providers. We can also put pressure on their Abuse Departments to blackhole them also due to the complaints?

I am not sure if it will work but if you put enough pressure on them and the fear of newspapers/major companies finding out about it they will want to distance themselves very quickly from these sites.

Bingo Problem Solved

Not even the mighty MPAA/RIAA with their gargantuan anti-piracy budgets seem to have thought of this plan, however Ron Cadwell felt that spamming DMCA notices is the way to go:

With a little programming I am sure A1R3K’s new group could put an online system that could make it very easy to send hundreds of complaints a day to each backbone provider and really put the pressure on them to black hole the sites.

Drunkspringbreakgirls sees no complications and is eager to get on with it:

We need to make a list of all the torrents, which backbone they are using and then we can all start contacting their abuse departments of the providers.

RawAlex steps in with his way to take down The PirateBay:

Swedish embassies based in the US are great places to drop off DMCA notices. Their government not wanting to take action on obvious copyright violation is a real issue, and raising this issue to this level may in fact make a difference.

…and continues:

…with due respect, 90% of the companies providing the actual connectivity are either based in the US or are owned by US companies. As such, to a greater or less extent, they can be touched by a DMCA because they have responsibilities as good corporate citizens in the US.

Example, is piratebay.org - “hosted” by p80.net, which is (shock) registered at Directnic. That would be a good place to send a DMCA.

P80.net is getting their connectivity (the route I get) from sprintlink. Spring comes up with an address in Kansas.

There are all sorts of fun places to deal with on this issue. If P80 / port80 / rix internet is not going to remove connectivity from pirate bay (and like pirate bay will try to hide behind lax swedish laws) then you get the US based companies that provide their connectivity to take the action that US law obliges them to take……

…Piratebay is hiding in Sweden because they know pretty much anywhere else they would get escorted to a cell with Bubba for recreation for the next few years. Again, shows a consciousness of guilt. If they thought they were right, they wouldn’t be hiding under the ice in Sweden.

….unless the guys from PirateBay happened to be a) Swedish and b) not hiding and c) not breaking any Swedish law.

Brokep, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay is not really impressed by these plans. He told TorrentFreak in a response: “We welcome the porn industry to contact us, we need more updates for the legal page, hasn’t been any fun legal threats for a while - and the porn industry have a good sense of humor, just look at the movie names they copy and remake.”

The porn industry certainly isn’t getting much sympathy from the guys on Digg either. Kikkomann felt that torrents provided great publicity for their stars while str3ama felt that the adult industry had some infringement issues of it’s own to deal with.

homesickalien couldn’t understand how the porn movie business could ever lose any money: “it’s not like they’re shelling out millions to some a-list actors or spending loads on CG effects” he said. “All you need is a $50 hooker, a dv camcorder and a dvdburner. the porn industry couldn’t lose money if it tried to.”

However, the industry maintains that it loses 4% of its total worldwide revenue to piracy. ButterBuddha feels they should proceed with caution:

“The fight for that 4% will ruin the industry…”

The full discussions on GFY can be found here and here.
http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-porn...orrent-070911/





Barbie Gets the Chair


Can this be the end of the comely con?

This is a science fair project that I did in middle school and completely disgusted the entire female staff of Benton Middle.

This is perhaps not the most politically correct science fair project…
http://www.instructables.com/id/E7HOISVF5R8QR1I/



















Until next week,

- js.



















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Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. Questions or comments? Call (617) 939-2340, country code U.S.. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


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