[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted. It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it." – Noël St-Hilaire


"People should have dominion over their computers. The current 'don’t ask, don't tell' in online tracking and profiling has to end." – F.T.C. commissioner Jon Leibowitz


"Even if BitTorrent encryption can be defeated somehow, there's another P2P protocol on the horizon. It's being specifically designed to dodge monitoring systems." – Chris Williams


"Today represents an important milestone in the evolution of the One Laptop per Child project. Against all the naysayers, and thanks to great partners such as Quanta, we have developed and now manufactured the world's most advanced and greenest laptop and one designed specifically to instill a passion for learning in children." –Nicholas Negroponte


"When you start a church, you don’t decide who you’re going to reach and then pick a music style. You pick a music style, and that determines who’s going to come." – Tom Mercer


"Stop making me laugh, it doesn’t look good to people who drive up. They will think we’re not serious." – Striking screenwriter


































November 10th, 2007





Demonoid: Down…and Out?

Splash page announcement:

The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.
http://demonoid.com/





More High-Profile P2P Busts: Topsite Seized as Demonoid Shuttered
Nate Anderson

The international music industry may be playing Whac-A-Mole with P2P hubs, but it has been whacking some rather large moles lately. Shutting down all illicit P2P traffic is obviously not a realistic goal, and it's not one that groups like the RIAA or the IFPI hold; instead, they just want to make it difficult enough for the average ‘Net user to snag a file that legal alternatives start to look better in comparison. Putting some fear into file sharers is also part of the plan.

Music trade groups in Canada and Poland have taken another step down this road with the apparent closure of the BitTorrent tracker Demonoid and a Polish pre-release music site operating from Wroclaw.

Demonoid is one of the largest torrent sites in the world, but demonoid.com now shows only a single line of text: "The CRIA [Canada's RIAA equivalent] threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding."

CRIA has actually been leaning on the site for weeks. In late September, Torrentfeak reported that Demonoid had banned access to all Canadian IP addresses after legal threats from CRIA. Now, it appears that the CRIA has been able to get Demonoid's hosting company to pull its support.

In Poland, police raided Wroclaw Technical University and a private home to confiscate material used to host HPN. HPN, like the now-busted OiNK in the UK, specialized in leaking albums before their official release date. Police took six servers and 37 hard drives. Two people have been arrested.

The raid came after investigations from the IFPI, music's international trade group, and ZPAV, which is its local Polish affiliate. Wroclaw police acted after both groups supplied them with information on HPN.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...shuttered.html





Prosecutor Announces Charges Against The Pirate Bay
Ernesto

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall announced that he plans to press charges against 5 people involved with The Pirate Bay before January 31, 2008. The 5 are suspected of facilitating copyright infringement.

The Pirate Bay team does not believe that Roswall will be successful in his attempt to take down The Pirate Bay. They keep repeating that they are just running a search engine and did not store any copyrighted material on their servers.

On top of that, information that leaked earlier this year showed that the Swedish police couldn’t find any usable evidence on the servers they confiscated during the raid last year.

One of the biggest surprises is that the prosecutor plans to press charges against the well-known Swedish neo-fascist Carl Lundstrom, who is only remotely related to The Pirate Bay. Tobias Andersson, one of the Pirate Bay admins, admitted that Lundstrom’s hosting company Rix Telecom offered them cheap bandwidth in the past. However, this was only because one of the Pirate Bay founders used to work for Rix Telecom, nothing more, nothing less.

It is not unlikely that Roswall decided to include Lundstrom in the list of suspects to manipulate public opinion. Lundström did confirm to IDG.se that he is under investigation, but refuses to be interrogated by the police.

At this point we only know that Peter Sunde (aka Brokep) and Carl Lundstrom are identified as suspects, but the complete list will be published here as soon as it is known.

Whatever the outcome of this case will be, The Pirate Bay have already announced that they’re here to stay. They told us that they will simply move to another country if they are outlawed in Sweden, without downtime!
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-c...ounced-071108/





MediaDefender Emails Disprove MPAA Claims
Ernesto

Last Month The Pirate Bay filed complaints against some of the key players in the entertainment industry for corrupting and sabotaging their BitTorrent tracker. The MPAA has now responded to these claims and deny that they worked with MediaDefender. Unfortunately for the MPAA, we have proof that they did.

MPAA attorney Espen Tøndel told the Norwegian newspaper Dageblatet that the companies represented by the MPAA never requested MediaDefender to do the things The Pirate Bay claims. This is a lie of course, and there is an archive of leaked emails to back this up.

To give an example, Universal Pictures - a company represented by the MPAA - contracted MediaDefender to protect movies, which basically means that they pollute BitTorrent sites with fake files to make the real files harder to find. There are several emails that prove this, and quotes such as “can you jump all over this swarm and try to kill it?” leave little room for speculation.

Universal Pictures is not the only MPAA movie studio MediaDefender worked for, the emails clearly show that they were also hired by Paramount, 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures. I would suggest Tøndel to go through these emails before making ungrounded claims like this again.

Brokep, one of the Pirate Bay founders told TorrentFreak earlier that they decided to file complaints because they want to make these big media companies aware of their own wrong doings: “I want them to take their crappy methods and stop their wrong-doing. They are going around accusing the pirate community for doing immoral stuff, when they do illegal stuff,” he said.

It will be interesting to see how this case develops. One thing is for sure, it will be hard for these media companies to deny their involvement with these emails as evidence.
http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefende...claims-071104/





OiNK’s New Piglets Proof Positive that Big Content’s Efforts Often Backfire
Ken Fisher

It took investigators two years to infiltrate and bring down UK-based OiNK, an invite-only music sharing site that was much loved by its smallish community. As we reported at the time, the IFPI and the BPI lauded the takedown as a major victory against piracy.

After the echoes of OiNK's final snort dissipated, one could hear the virtual rumbling of a new stampede: the post-OiNK explosion. The closure of OiNK has led directly or indirectly to the establishment of nearly half a dozen new file-sharing sites. Is this what the IFPI and BPI had in mind? Somehow we doubt it.

The theory is that "busts" will eventually drive such sites out of existence, as they need to go deeper and deeper "underground" to avoid being busted. What appears to actually be happening is something quite different: the free advertising for P2P that comes from these closures not only helps spread the word about the existence of such sites, but it also appears to motivate more folks to step up their involvement in setting up, running, and supporting such sites. In short, it's a call to arms.

It's also not hard to find out where the OiNK action has moved to, either. In the last three days, Ars writers have been able to gain access to nearly all of the new sites to pop up in the wake of OiNK, and the reasons why are so simple, yet utterly elusive to those who are working day and night to close these sites: it's not the supply of "P2P sites" that drives this, it's the demand from users online, across the globe.
Supply is not the same as demand

The Romans had a funny way of looking at social disorder. In general, they viewed leaders as far greater threats than those they led. This gave way to the kind of social "management" school that preferred to brutally punish or kill a leader, while letting everyone else go. The Romans, as you may know, had more than their share of uprisings, riots, and all-out revolts as a result.

The focus on shutting down popular P2P/BitTorrent tracker sites operates under the same philosophical strategy: cut off the head, and the body should die. Shut down the site, and now you have thousands of users who can't be pirates anymore. Of course, never was there such a silly—or obviously wrong—idea.

The response to the death of OiNK was not a withering of the file-sharing community. Instead, what happened was the establishment or planned launch of three major new P2P sites and at least two underground networks. The Pirate Bay did its usual thing and announced their plans to resurrect OiNK as the cleverly-named BOiNK; TorrentFreak brought news of The Pirate Bay's plans to everyone several days ago, but BOiNK is still nowhere to be seen. Given the fact that these guys brought Suprnova back, there's little reason to doubt them, though.

Meanwhile, both What.cd and Waffles.fm have stepped into the void created by OiNK's closure, as have two underground services claimed to have been started by former members. dAiMeSeL, an administrator for one of the DC++ hubs who corresponded with Ars Technica anonymously, said that plans for their hub were already under way when OiNK was shut down, but that the closure only helped feed the demand for a new site. dAiMeSeL said that the demand to admit new users was too high, and that the big worry is that "another mole could slip in."

Waffles.fm is also having growing problems. The site has had to ask its members to refrain from selling invites to the invitation-only service. The invites are in high demand, but someone could also risk the community's security by selling invites off to a mole. Then the site pulled the plug on all new registrations, as the admins found it difficult to keep up with demand. In an interview with Threat Level, a site admin said the site was also the target of a DoS attack in its earliest days, apparently from a disgruntled OiNK member who didn't get an invite.

By and large, however, the story is one of cooperation and recovery. It's not professional site admins who really make any of this possible. It's the throng of users who will, at a moment's notice, become site admins or contribute in other ways to rapidly bring up not one, but a handful of potential replacements in a time of "need." This is the reason why you can't kill the OiNKs and Suprnovas of the world, and expect change. The demand is there, and so is the technology to keep this game of cat and mouse going for a very long time.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-backfire.html





Swedish Pirates Stand Up Publicly To Stay Anonymous
Ben Jones

The Swedish Pirate Party (piratpartiet) held rallies across Sweden in an attempt to bolster support for strengthening personal privacy. The events, in Malmö and Stockholm, were aimed at raising awareness of a new bill due next week.

The bill is part of Sweden’s implementation of an EU directive aimed at reducing privacy, for the oft touted aim of ’security’ – the security of the intangible State, that is, rather than the individual securities of the citizenry.

In short, every communications network operator will have to log and store data about all of their users. Whilst the contents of the messages are not currently expected to be stored, everything from the IDs of either end of the communication, anything to identify the type of equipment used, the time and length of the call, and, perhaps most importantly, the location of cellular telephone handsets when used.

The Piratpartiet’s Rick Falkvinge stresses this last point as a large privacy concern. “We’re rapidly descending into a surveillance society. We know exactly where this road leads - we’ve seen it in Europe’s recent history. When the Berlin wall came down, we were rejoicing that the oppressed Eastern bloc would become like Western democracies. It was never supposed to be the other way around.”

What makes things even more uncertain, is that at present no-one knows how long the Swedish bill will require information to be held. The EU Directive states anywhere from 6 to 24 months. Of equal uncertainty is the legal threshold for obtaining information stored under these measures.

Speakers at the Malmö rally included Swedish IP entrepreneur Jonas Birgersson, CEO of ISP Bredband2, as well as the annonymiser Relakks, whilst Stockholm had Falkvinge, and other Pirate Party board members.

The demonstration echo’s similar protests in other European countries, such as the 15,000 that marched in Berlin in late September. More demonstrations are due in Germany on the 6th in more than 30 cities. With information like this being stored, it will potentially magnify the guilty until innocent approach already being used in file sharing trials. If the jury in the Thomas trial had been shown a record of a communication logged through such a system, they may have pressed for even higher damages per song. The major drawback with these systems, however, was pointed out in a recent court motion by the Oregon Attorney General – whilst you can identify the technological devices used, that still doesn’t identify the person using it. Furthermore, in any well planned criminal incident (which covers terrorism) it’s not unknown to use equipment which does not belong to you. Stolen credit cards, false numberplates, cloned cell phones. As with DRM, it only causes problems, without solving any.
http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-pira...nymous-071104/





Canadian Police Tolerates Piracy For Personal Use
Ernesto

The Canadian police announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use. Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers instead of the cash flow of large corporations.

Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the Canadian police made clear that Demonoid’s users don’t have to worry about getting caught, at least not in Canada.

According to the Canadian police it is impossible to track down everyone who downloads music or movies off the Internet. The police simply does not have the time nor the resources to go after filesharers.

“Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted,” Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the Canadian police, said in an interview with Le Devoir. “It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it,” he added.

St-Hilaire explained that they rather focus on crimes that actually hurt consumers such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances.

A wise decision, especially since we now know that filesharing has absolutely no impact on music sales. On the contrary, a recent study found that the more music people download on P2P-networks, the more CDs they buy.
http://torrentfreak.com/canadian-pol...piracy-071110/





PIRATE Act Dons Eye Patch, Swashbuckles Back into Senate
Nate Anderson

The PIRATE Act is back, and this time it means business.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) yesterday introduced the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act (PDF), with Leahy saying, "The PIRATE Act has passed the Senate on three separate occasions; this should be the Congress in which it becomes law."

Like previous incarnations of the PIRATE Act, this one tries to force the Department of Justice to bring suits against individual file-swappers, something that could save the recording industry plenty of money and could also displace some of the "bad guy" stigma that the labels have acquired after suing people like Jammie Thomas.

The bill would give the Department of Justice authority to bring civil (not just criminal) cases against infringers, though it does limit penalties to those that could be imposed in criminal proceedings. The Attorney General can also bring such civil suits only when the act in question constitutes a crime (such civil suits can be easier to win).

Leahy and Cornyn want Justice to start prosecuting file-sharers, which sounded like a bad idea the first time we heard it and hasn't gotten any better since. Since the No Electronic Theft Act passed in the late 1990s, the DoJ has actually had the authority to bring criminal cases against file-swappers under certain situations; to date, it has not filed a single one.

The Department would no doubt rather be busting gangsters, child molesters, and even actual counterfeiting rings, but it seems like some members of Congress are intent on pressing Justice to get involved in the P2P lawsuit game—something that Big Content would dearly love to see happen.

The bill also provides more funding to counter intellectual-property crimes involving both computers and Internet, along with more FBI agents to investigate such crimes.

"Copyright infringement silently drains America's economy and undermines the talent, creativity and initiative that are a great source of strength to our nation," said Leahy. "When we protect intellectual property from copyright infringement, we protect our economy and our ideas."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...to-senate.html





Surge in Encrypted Torrents Blindsides Record Biz
Chris Williams

The legal crackdown and publicity blitz aimed at people who share music, videos and software online may be having an unintended consequence for the troubled record industry. The number of file-sharers disguising their BitTorrent activity with encryption is skyrocketing.

Figures from a large UK ISP obtained by The Register show that the portion of BitTorrent traffic encrypted by file-sharers has risen 10-fold in the last 12 months, from four to 40 per cent.

This time last year, unencrypted torrents accounted for about 500Mbit/s of bandwidth, while files that had been scrambled by uploaders swallowed just 20Mbit/s.

The latest data shows that bandwidth used by unencrypted torrents has fallen to 350Mbit/s. Sharing of masked music, video and software has meanwhile exploded to average more than 200Mbit/s.

Matt Phillips, spokesman for UK record industry trade association the British Phonographic Institute, told The Reg: "Our internet investigations team, internet service providers and the police are well aware of encryption technology: it's been around for a long time and is commonplace in other areas of internet crime. It should come as no surprise that if people think they can hide illegal activity they will attempt to."

"When encryption is used to cloak torrent traffic it tends to be to hide something, and attracts greater attention for that reason. If certain ISPs are experiencing disproportionately high volumes of encrypted torrent traffic we expect it is partly in response to a combination of effective ISP abuse teams the enforcement efforts of the police and industry."

The last year has seen a significant escalation of the movie and music industry campaign against copyright infringement. The RIAA secured its first jury trial (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10...ng_jury_trial/) against Jammie Thomas, popular tracking site TorrentSpy was ordered to collect user data (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06...spy_on_users/), and the supposedly private UK-based OiNK network was busted (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/23/oink_raids/).

The file-sharing public's response has been revealed by analysis of data from deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, such as that made by Ellacoya and Cisco's P-Cube. Many ISPs, including BT here and Comcast in the US (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10...usting_again/), have now deployed the kit to help throttle the amount of bandwidth consumed by P2P and other greedy net applications. Some BitTorrent encryption is certainly an effort to avoid such restrictions.

While DPI is able to identify and manage encrypted file-sharing packets, it is unable to look inside those packets for copyright infringement.

The trend towards encryption means current efforts by music publishers and government to cut a deal with ISPs to create a monitoring system to boot persistent copyright infringers off the internet, which we revealed last month (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10...an_isps_music/) is likely to be rendered pointless.

Neil Armstrong, products director at BT-owned ISP PlusNet, said: "It isn't possible for us to tell if a customer is downloading a copyright file or not unless we specifically 'snoop' every packet on the customer's line.

"We would obviously only do this where we have a proper request from the relevant legal authority to do so, and even then it is unlikely we would be able to see inside encrypted payloads."

The most popular BitTorrent client, uTorrent, can be configured to use RC4 encryption (http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2250) to obscure torrent streams and header information. Armstrong said that although future DPI gear may be able to grab some header detail, the music or movie itself is likely to remain inaccessible.

So-called content filtering software from Audible Magic cannot peer inside encrypted packets, either.

The rapid acceleration in encryption isn't limited to BitTorrenters. Estimates say torrent traffic accounts for about between 50 and 60 per cent of all file-sharing. Usenet, which the RIAA recently said (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10...senet_dot_com/) is a bigger offender than Kazaa-type services, accounts for about another 25 per cent. It's set to see more scrambled files shared over it, too, as providers including Giganews now offer SSL encryption.

Paul Sanders, part of the team of music and ISP veterans behind PlayLouder, the first "Media Service Provider", which will let subscribers share music freely and legally in exchange for a small premium on the monthly broadband bill, sounded the alarm. "I think this trend is absolutely a warning to those people in the music industry who believe they can win this war," he said.

"There's got to be a commercial settlement. Both sides [ISPs and the record industry] are destroying the value in music." Sanders believes the much-debated (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06...sac_interview/) blanket licence and download services that are "better than free" are one the way out of the arms race with determined freeloaders.

Even if BitTorrent encryption can be defeated somehow, there's another P2P protocol (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11..._new_protocol/) on the horizon. It's being specifically designed to dodge monitoring systems.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11...ion_explosion/





BitTorrent Encryption Confuses the BPI, ISPs and Journalists Who Don’t Research
Ernesto

A recently published article by The Register claims that an increase in encrypted BitTorrent traffic is due to the fact that people want to hide or scramble the files they are sharing. Apparently some tech journalists, and in particular the anti-piracy organizations, have no clue what BitTorrent encryption actually does.

Encrypted BitTorrent traffic now accounts for 40% of all BitTorrent traffic in the UK according to the article. The Register claims that filesharers use encryption to scramble their data so they can protect themselves from being caught, and the comments from a music industry representative make it seem like people can indeed hide what they are sharing. Unfortunately, none of it is true

This is what Matt Phillips, of the record industry trade association the British Phonographic Institute told the Register: “Our internet investigations team, internet service providers and the police are well aware of encryption technology: it’s been around for a long time and is commonplace in other areas of internet crime. It should come as no surprise that if people think they can hide illegal activity they will attempt to.”

So if it’s not hiding anything, why do people use BitTorrent encryption then?

I’ll try to explain it once more to the BPI, IFPI and RIAA and some tech journalists, just so they don’t embarrass themselves again in the future. BitTorrent encryption has nothing to do with hiding the data you’re sharing, it only hides the fact that you’re using BitTorrent to do so.

Encryption was designed to prevent ISPs from throttling BitTorrent traffic, which they started doing approximately 2 years ago. ISPs use so called traffic shaping devices to identify and slow down BitTorrent traffic because it takes up a lot of bandwidth (read: costs a lot of money). BitTorrent encryption, which is now supported by all the popular BitTorrent clients, hides the protocol header. As a result, these devices can’t detect that someone is using BitTorrent and you can download at full speed.

So, encryption does not hide the actual data people are sharing, everyone can still connect to a BitTorrent swarm, record your IP-address, and send you an infringement notice.

Now back to the claim that 40% of the BitTorrent traffic is encrypted in the UK. My first question would be, how do they know that it’s BitTorrent traffic if it’s encrypted? Apart from that I think 40% is a little too high, unless the ISP that reported the data is throttling BitTorrent traffic of course. We’ve been tracking the number of people who actually use encryption and it is currently slightly below 10%. It could be of course that these people are responsible for 40% of the traffic, but I seriously doubt that.

Bottom line is, anti-piracy organizations should take some time to read up on what filesharing actually is before they are going to accuse people of something, but I guess that’s wishful thinking.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-e...-myths-071108/





The War Against BitTorrent: Attack of the ISPs
Ernesto

There has been a lot of fuss lately about Comcast’s efforts to throttle and interfere with BitTorrent traffic, but they are by no means the only ISP involved in such efforts. Hundreds of larger and smaller ISPs all around the world try to limit BitTorrent traffic on their networks, time to give an overview, the war is on.

The degree of traffic shaping varies a lot between different ISPs. Some only limit BitTorrent traffic during some times of the day or throttle in specific regions, others take a more aggressive approach and prevent their customers from seeding or even downloading .torrent files. The fact is, all the ISPs listed here have been caught - one way or another - messing with BitTorrent transfers.

BitTorrent throttling is not a new phenomenon, ISPs have been doing it for years. When the first ISPs started to throttle BitTorrent traffic most BitTorrent clients introduced a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption. This was the beginning of an ongoing cat and mouse game between ISPs and BitTorrent client developers.

Some people might wonder why ISPs throttle their connection. The argument most often used is that all the BitTorrent traffic on their network slows down other customers’ connections. An argument that makes sense (if it is true), but the real problem is that ISPs tend to be secretive about their throttling efforts. My advice to them, if you decide to limit BitTorrent traffic, be open about it and don’t advertise unlimited bandwidth.

So who are these ISPs? Here’s a brief overview of some of the bad guys, take a look at the Azureus wiki for an regularly updated list of throttling ISPs (worldwide).

Canada

The Canadian ISPs Shaw and Rogers were the early adopters of BitTorrent traffic shapers. The first reports date back to 2005, and earlier this year Rogers even decided to block all encrypted traffic, just to make sure that BitTorrent protocol encryption didn’t work.

Other Canadian ISPs that are known to throttle or limit BitTorrent traffic are Bell Sympatico, Cogeco, Eastlink and Explornet. Rogers and Cogeco are the only ISPs that actively prevent people from seeding files on BitTorrent, similar to Comcast.

UK

There haven’t been a lot of reports on British ISPs that mess with BitTorrent traffic, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t. Pipex, one of the largest ISPs in the UK, is notorious for it’s war against BitTorrent. They throttle BitTorrent traffic, especially during peak times, and they also throttle all encrypted traffic. Other UK ISPs that throttle BitTorrent traffic are BT Broadband, Freedom2Surf and TalkTalk. Virgin Media does not specifically target BitTorrent traffic, they simply throttle all traffic during peak times.

US

Hundreds of sites have reported on the Comcast throttling/interference issues, but Qwest and Atlantic Broadband do just the same thing. RCN/Starpower, Adelphia Cable Communications and Cablevision’s Optimum Online have found to prevent seeding, but do not throttle BitTorrent traffic.

The Solution?

As mentioned before, The developers of uTorrent, Bitcomet and Azureus added support for protocol header encryption to their clients. Encryption seemed to work for well in most cases, more details can be found here. If encryption isn’t working you might want to try one of the alternatives described in this article.
http://torrentfreak.com/war-against-...g-isps-071106/





BitTorrent Blocking Goes North: Canadian ISP Admits to Throttling P2P
Ryan Paul

In response to consumer complaints posted in the company's official forum, Canadian ISP Bell Sympatico has admitted that it uses bandwidth throttling technologies to impose limitations on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing during peak hours. This revelation is further evidence that net neutrality—the principle of equal treatment for all traffic through a network—is eroding.

"[W]e are now using a Internet Traffic Management to restrict accounts that are using a large portion of bandwidth during peak hours," a Sympatico forum administrator wrote in response to a user complaint. The forum administrator also provides a list of affected applications, which includes BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa, and other widely-used P2P applications. Readers of Broadband Reports had been suspicious for some time that the ISP was throttling traffic.

"Bell Sympatico has launched a solution to enhance the online customer experience and improve Internet performance for all our customers during peak periods of Internet usage with the introduction of Internet Traffic Management," another response says. "There continues to be phenomenal growth of consumer Internet traffic throughout the world, and Bell is using Internet Traffic Management to ensure we deliver bandwidth fairly to our customers during peak Internet usage."

The rhetoric issued by Sympatico in defense of bandwidth throttling resembles Comcast's recent defense of similar practices. The ISPs claim that bandwidth throttling leads to a better Internet experience for customers. As numerous advocacy groups have pointed out in response to such claims, bandwidth throttling and other kinds of discriminatory content filtering fundamentally change the nature of the Internet to the detriment of consumers. Selectively blocking transmission of content hardly constitutes a valid means of improving the Internet experience.

The bandwidth throttling practices used by these companies are made more egregious by the secrecy surrounding the precise nature of what gets blocked and when. In the official Sympatico forum, the company representatives who admit that bandwidth throttling is occurring are declining to respond to questions about the extent of the throttling or the conditions that Sympatico uses to determine whose connectivity to degrade. Some ISPs, like Comcast, actively punish employees for disclosing such information to the public.

P2P is thought to make up between 30 and 50 percent of all Internet traffic. Many consumers who pay more for faster Internet connectivity do so because they want faster P2P service. The increasing number of foreign and domestic Internet service providers that use bandwidth throttling is sure to provide ammunition to those who believe some sort of government intervention will be necessary to ensure that broadband subscribers have full and unfettered access to any application, any site, any time.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...tling-p2p.html





Alleged MPAA Harrassment Causes aXXo / Pirate Bay Rift
enigmax

Sometime during the last 24 hours there was a mass deletion of aXXo torrents from The Pirate Bay’s tracker. It appears that a dispute between aXXo and The Pirate Bay about how to best handle alleged MPAA torrent meddling got way out of hand - with aXXo deleting lots of his torrents and leaving The Pirate Bay.

An estimated one million people download aXXo rips every month, so although there are conflicting opinions in respect of the quality of his work, there can be no dispute that he’s very popular indeed. While some see him in an almost religious light, others have been quick to take advantage of his popularity for nefarious purposes.

Today, aXXo fans visiting his page on The Pirate Bay were in for a shock, summed up this Pirate Bay user:

C01eMaN - 2007-11-07 00:19 CET:
Whats going on with tpb, all of axxo’s vids are disappearing, any1?

One by one, all torrents released after 7th September 2006 were deleted. But why?

A message on the Pirate Bay comment section seems to sum up the situation and this version of events has been confirmed by aXXo himself, in a couple of places.

hunter1980 - 2007-11-07 12:23 CET:
**************************NOTE**************************

Since the Piratebay staff doesn’t care for their VIP uploaders, then aXXo decided not to use TPB and he deleted his own torrents.

aXXo was constantly exposed to assaults and harassments from possible members of MPAA. Their strategy was to harass aXXo by posting absurd and accusing comments on aXXo’s torrents.

The latest assault incident was especially noticed on aXXo’s last torrent ‘The Simpsons’.
Hunter1980 and aXXo were involved in direct argue with possible members from MPAA.

Unfortunately, this strategy was a success. The strategy was based on rumors and the intention was to spread rumors and all this have had a negative side effects on naive people ( downloaders ).

Since PirateBay did not take any action towards ‘Organized attacks’, aXXo decided to delete his torrent on TPB. aXXo is continuing posting his torrents on mininova or other torrent sites since they care for their VIP uploaders.

***************************END*************************

In a show of protest, Hunter1980 says that he has also deleted all of his torrents from Pirate Bay.

The aXXo world isn’t going to end with the deletion of torrents from The Pirate Bay because they can be found on a number of other torrent sites but it’s never nice to see disputes in the torrent community, especially between great ‘brand’ names.

The deletions have sparked quite a lot of debate on various forums. Some people are angry at The Pirate Bay for allegedly not giving enough support to aXXo while some are wondering if deleting lots of torrents is an appropriate response. Others feel that all uploaders should get the same treatment at The Pirate Bay and that aXXo shouldn’t get special attention. Maybe the Pirate Bay crew simply don’t have time to give anyone special treatment?

Interestingly, not many people seem to be pointing the finger at those who may have made the metaphorical bullets for others to fire - the “possible members of the MPAA” deemed to have taken the original actions which ultimately lead to this (hopefully temporary) breakdown in communication.

If the original MPAA plan was to reduce the availability of aXXo torrents by taking direct or indirect action against them at The Pirate Bay, that sadly seems to have worked, albeit via a strange turn of events. Or maybe it’s nothing to do with the MPAA after all and this is just one big misunderstanding?

Either way, hopefully this aXXo head will be re-attached to the Pirate Bay section of the BitTorrent hydra before it becomes completely severed. Undivided, unconquered.
http://torrentfreak.com/axxo-pirate-bay-rift-071107/





SUMOTorrent: The New BitTorrent Juggernaut?
Ernesto

In just a few months SUMOtorrent managed to grow from 0 to 350,000 visitors a day, which makes it one of the most widely used BitTorrent sites. Impressive statistics but how did they accomplish this, and what are their plans for the future? Let’s find out.

SUMOtorrent is currently ranked 1,052 on Alexa, which means that they are close to entering the list of 1000 most visited websites on the Internet. In addition, SUMOtorrent is running a much needed - as well as one of the biggest, BitTorrent trackers.

This is pretty exceptional if you take into account that the site only had a dozen visitors 6 months ago when it just started.

We are glad that the administrator of SUMOtorrent agreed to answer some of our questions, so we can learn a bit more about his success story.

TorrentFreak: How many visitors does SUMOTorrent have at the moment?

SUMO: SUMOTorrent is now getting about 350 000 daily unique visitors, while SUMOTracker is now tracking 2 million peers, and is probably the largest public BitTorrent tracker hosted on a single server! We recently launched a second public tracker that we hope will be used as much by BitTorrent users as the main tracker.

TorrentFreak: What did you do to grow this fast?

SUMO: I believe the reason why we grew so fast is experience, ideas and support of countless people!

TorrentFreak: So, with all the traffic you’re getting you must be driving a really expensive sports car now right?

SUMO: I don’t have a car but I advise you all to drive safely, put your safety belt on and respect speed limits.

Many webmasters do not communicate about money and torrents. Truth is that, just like any other popular site with high traffic, torrents sites make an income with 4 zeros, SUMOTorrent included. However, we’re not rich: at the end of the month, with all our expenses (hosting of 6 servers for SUMOTorrent/SUMOTracker), developers, partners, backup servers, services… we have actually just enough cash to purchase new servers next month. Our partners could tell you that we often ask them for a delay to pay them every month

We also support various sites and donate to them when we have some extra cash (Filesoup, IndianMP3 …)

TorrentFreak: Are you running the site on your own or do you have a team of moderators helping you out?

SUMO: We are running the site on our own and looking for moderators to help us removing the spam and fake torrents that get through our filters.

TorrentFreak: SUMOTorrent is one of the few BitTorrent sites that has their own tracker, do you think we need more public BitTorrent trackers?

SUMO: Of course we do need more public BitTorrent trackers! Many BitTorrent sites do not have their own tracker, and will tell you that it is to avoid legal troubles. I believe this is only an excuse. When you come to think about it, a public BitTorrent tracker generates a lot of traffic that cannot be monetized as it is not seen by anybody. SUMOTracker costs about $500 per month and we feel like this money is well spent as we are doing it for the community!

TorrentFreak: The Pirate Bay announced that they are working on a new BitTorrent protocol, what is your take on this?

SUMO: I have quite bad memories of the Suprnova/Exeem project, but I believe the SecureP2P project launched by PirateBay will be a great improvement to BitTorrent as it is based on experience of what is not working good in the current protocol and trying to improve it. They have received dozens of suggestions from users all around the world, and I wish the best to them in this enterprise.

We have contacted the head of this project and will provide them with any resources they might need to achieve it. SUMOTorrent will of course support the new protocol, promote it to our users and provide additional trackers on SUMOTracker for the new tracker protocol.

TorrentFreak: Can you tell us something about features you want to add to SUMOTorrent in the future?

SUMO: We will add more languages and buy new servers to scale site architecture with our growth. We will also work on content partnerships, and invite any filmmaker, music group or artist who is interested in sponsoring of his production and free distribution of his content through our site to contact us.

Just like PirateBay and Mininova, we would like to promote groups and help artists getting known through the power of peer-to-peer!

TorrentFreak: Do you have a message for all the anti-piracy organizations out there?

SUMO: Yes, take a look at the 100 first sites according to Alexa ranking! P2P and BitTorrent websites are here to stay, and they are the major means of online content distribution nowadays. This is a fact. Instead of trying to block the highway that leads to your customers, you should put your strategy into question. When the time will come that P2P sites will get better organized (and this time is soon, you know it) and ran by smart structures instead of simple individuals, you will understand you have missed the last opportunity you had to jump on the bandwagon of the digital revolution!

Meanwhile for all torrent users, we are happy to give you a free drive to where you want on www.sumotorrent.com

TorrentFreak: Thanks SUMO and good luck in the future!
http://torrentfreak.com/sumotorrent-...ernaut-071107/





Downloaders Confuse Ozzy Osbourne to Go on Tour
enigmax

When he isn’t biting the heads off live animals or starring in a hugely popular reality show, Ozzy Osbourne is still making music. Unfortunately, he’s had to go on tour because people keep downloading his music: “I’ve been suffering terribly” he mumbled, while counting his next million dollars.

Everyone seems to like Ozzy Osbourne, the Birmingham (UK) born ex-frontman of mega-group ‘Black Sabbath’, reality TV star and now, hugely successful solo artist. Since getting kicked out of Black Sabbath for his drink and drugs habits, Ozzy has sold a a staggering 50 million albums so it’s probably safe to say he has a few dollars hidden away. However, Ozzy is not happy.

In a great interview with Herald Sun he covers many issues but of course we’re interested in his views on file-sharing. Talking about his music, he said:

“I’ve been suffering terribly from people downloading it. If they don’t find something to stop it, people won’t be able to make records. There won’t be any new bands. How are they going to survive? I’m an old-timer, I’ve been doing it 40 years now, but new bands are going to suffer. It’s ridiculous, you could be doing it for nothing.”

Maybe bands will have to innovate with new ideas - such as that from Radiohead which appears to be catching on now that it became clear that they made a fortune. Or maybe take the Prince approach and give your music away in a newspaper? Either way, bands realize that if the fans hear their music, they’ll come to the gigs and happily spend money on the merchandising.

You can’t beat ‘live’ and Sharon Osbourne - Ozzy’s wife and business manager and creator of Ozzfest - explained this to him:

“Sharon said I’d be astounded to find out how many bands are touring because you can download a record but you can’t beat a rock show.”

Absolutely true. Every person who downloads Ozzy’s material is yet another potential fan and more likely to help in the aim of filling his live gigs, and judging by the number of shows he’s performing in ‘to make ends meet’, that assistance will be well received:

“I’ve never done in a long time as many live shows as I’m doing now. This year I’ve done 90 shows.”

Despite being heralded as a ‘God-Like Genius’ in 2004 by NME magazine, Ozzy has been known to show more human traits, such as bewilderment and confusion - and this interview is no different. Despite ’suffering terribly’ at the hands of downloaders, Ozzy isn’t ready for retirement yet and appears happy with his record sales:

“I did try that but I’ve still got life in my bones. I’m still selling lots of records.”

But what about his future prospects?

“It seems to be getting bigger and bigger” says Ozzy.

Don’t ever change Ozzy, things just wouldn’t be the same.
http://torrentfreak.com/downloaders-...n-tour-071102/





Radiohead's Web Venture Spooks Wall Street
Greg Sandoval

Wall Street is taking record labels to task for lackluster Web sales, spiraling CD revenue, and the defections of marquee acts such as Madonna and Radiohead.

Two analysts downgraded Warner Music Group last week, leading to a sharp drop in the company's stock price. One of the analysts, Richard Greenfield of Pali Research, penned a gloomy report about why he thinks the sector is headed for even greater losses.

"No matter how many people the RIAA sues, no matter how many times music executives point to the growth of digital music, we believe an increasing majority of worldwide consumers simply view recorded music as free," Greenfield wrote.

Proof of this was provided last month by Radiohead fans. The British supergroup offered the digital version of In Rainbows, the band's latest album, for whatever fans wanted to pay. According to research firm ComScore, which conducted a study of the groundbreaking promotion, 62 percent of those who downloaded the album paid nothing.

To Greenfield, what's more disturbing is that Radiohead and a growing number of top acts perceive the Internet as an attractive alternative to record labels. Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor has indicated that he plans to distribute his music online. Madonna announced last month that she was leaving Warner Music for Live Nation, a music promotion company.

"The paradigm in the music business has shifted," Madonna said in a statement announcing the switch. "For the first time in my career, the way that my music can reach my fans is unlimited."

Like Greenfield, Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Cohen downgraded Warner Music's stock from "neutral" to "sell." Both also reduced next year's earnings estimates for the company.

Following the reports, Warner Music's stock hit a 52-week low ($8.78) on Friday. The company's shares, which were trading above $27 a year ago, closed Tuesday at $9.50.

What could be unsettling to those in the music business is that Warner Music was supposed to be faring better than the other three majors--Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and EMI Group--according to Greenfield. Earlier in the year, his view on the stock was slightly rosier.

"Over the past couple of years," Greenfield wrote in his report, "(Warner Music) has done an impressive job, outperforming the industry weakness."

The main cause for concern continues to be spiraling CD sales. Download revenues are growing--but not fast enough to ease the pain. Greenfield expects CD revenue to drop 22 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007. He said retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores, Target, and Best Buy are rapidly reducing the floor space dedicated to discs.

How vulnerable is the music industry?

Consider that the sector generated revenues of $14.3 billion in 2000, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA. This year, it's expected to report revenue of $10.3 billion. Had sales growth only kept pace with the U.S. economy, it now would be worth $17 billion, Greenfield wrote.

This illustrates "how dramatically the music industry is continuing to underperform," Greenfield said in the report.

Greenfield urges music executives to embrace a new ad-supported business model, one that dramatically scales back the size of record companies and doesn't saddle songs with digital rights management. He doubts that this will happen any time soon.

The industry is "not ready to endorse such a move at this point" Greenfield wrote. "Even if it was, the...transition will be incredibly painful."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-981...?tag=nefd.blgs





Radiohead, Saul Williams and the Inevitable Rise and Liberation of the Music Industry
Matt Buchanan

While Radiohead basked in adulation for dipping its toe into the digital future with the pay-what-you-will In Rainbows pre-release, it wasn't the first major act to toy with the internet model, and certainly wasn't making a genuine move toward disruption. Had it truly boldly gone where a few have gone before, it potentially stood to lose boatloads of revenues the traditional distribution model guarantees an A-list act. On the other hand, Saul Williams, someone with a lot less to lose, took a dive into the deep end with his release of the Trent-Reznor-produced Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust.

Pearl Jam and The Doors have been offering direct DRM-free MP3 downloads of material for a while now in a mix-and-match format, though not with the highest ease of use factor; Prince just gave his last album away (though not digitally); and Public Enemy's giving away How You Sell Soul To A Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul for free on P2P networks, albeit loaded with ads. And loathe as I am to credit Phish for anything, they directly sold MP3s way back in the Stone Age of 1999.

Ultimately Radiohead was only wading around the kiddie pool wearing floaties, those being its plans to distribute the album on vanilla CDs next year, possibly through one of the Big Four in North America, ensuring their experiment held little possibility of sinking them (or their cash haul).

The release was brilliant: Fanboys latched onto the $80 superfan package, casual or sympathetic fans threw a couple bucks its way for middling but DRM-free MP3s, and the band cleaned up on positive press, only to have another shot to do it again in a couple months with a regular release riding a wave of hype.

Saul Williams proves to be an interesting test case for independent digital distribution: He's not a household name, but he is forcefully backed by someone who is. In truth, without Trent's involvement, it's doubtful many people would be writing about this at all. Regardless, the release strategy is bolder and closer to what people want out of digital distribution: no DRM, easy access, solid bitrates whether you paid or not, and choices (FLAC or MP3, free or flat, reasonable fee). And while there could be a CD release of Niggy Tardust, given Trent's stance on the major labels, it's highly doubtful it'll be through one of the Big Four.

It's been asked what's up with the hate for physical media and trumpeting of digital releases. I don't hate CDs. I buy a ton of them. The issue is choice. People can buy an album on CD, buy it DRM'd to hell and of mediocre bitrate from a number of online stores or grab it for free in whatever quality they want without DRM from an equally large number of quasi-(il)legal outlets. Trent Reznor and Saul Williams are simply recognizing that piracy is a legitimate, or at least a real consumer choice, and they are cutting out the middlemen—both the labels and the pirates.

What I'm arguing is that the future of the music industry is in offering up music in as many avenues as possible, as easily and cheaply as possible. It's not so much advice as it is inevitability—it's just where things are going. The hard reality is that people place a different value on that content now than they did before—it's absurd to me to pay for news, for instance, despite being in the industry—and no matter how many people the industry sues, that won't change.

To me, five bucks is reasonable for a digital copy of an album at a good bitrate, ten for a real CD. But it might be three bucks and six for the guy next to me on the bus. Or nothing at all, but he'll drop thirty bucks go to a concert. Maybe he just spreads the word to someone who will. The music industry fits in here by offering reasonable choices and formats to accommodate all of those situations—at prices people will pay (or not) in each of them—of which there are, actually, more of than ever.

Radiohead didn't go far enough because they didn't really believe in their online release as a genuine choice. (Witness the quote from their management, "If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn't do what we are doing.") On the flip side, Trent told people to steal his music because CD prices are too high, and will probably release his next album in much the same way Saul did.

Radiohead gives samples away to try to keep people from stealing it. Saul is giving his album away so they don't have to. In that way, Radiohead's step forward is an almost equal one back, while Saul's is one that's firmly forward, even if he ends up stumbling along the way.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/feature/r...try-320302.php





UK Music Store: DRM-Free Music Outsells Protected Tunes Four to One
Jacqui Cheng

DRM-free music sells at a much higher rate online than protected music, according to UK-based digital music store 7 Digital. In fact, customers buy it four times as often as they do DRMed music. As a result, almost 80 percent of the store's sales are of DRM-free content. 7 Digital may not sound familiar to some, but it carries over 3 million songs and has many selections from major artists in addition to independent labels.

"MP3 is the only truly interoperable format that works with the iPod, most mobile phones (including the iPhone) and all MP3 players," said 7 Digital's Ben Drury in a statement. "Consumers are a lot savvier than some people think."

The availability of DRM-free music is not only good for track sales, it's doing favors for full album sales too. 7 Digital said that customers buying unprotected music are more likely to buy albums than those buying music with DRM, with some 70 percent of MP3 sales being part of full album downloads.

This should come as good news to the music industry, which has long seen album sales suffer since the proliferation of music stores that allow customers to cherry-pick tracks (which includes pretty much every music store these days). Music labels have been trying to come up with incentives to entice customers to buy more at a time, such as offering exclusive content that only comes with an album purchase. Some artists still stand by the album format, too, at the risk of selling fewer tracks overall. Hip hop artist Jay-Z recently made a decision to withhold his most recent album, American Gangster, from the iTunes Store because he didn't want the tracks to be sold individually.

So far, EMI is the only major music label to fully embrace DRM-free music sales. EMI now sells its music without copy protection on any music store that wants to participate, which includes the iTunes Store and Amazon's music store. Universal is still experimenting with DRM-free downloads on select music stores, but otherwise Sony BMG and Warner are still slow to catch up. With news like this, though, they might be more likely to give DRM-free music a try.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...es-4-to-1.html





Sony CEO Sees 'Stalemate' in Disc Fight

The head of Sony Corp., Howard Stringer, said Thursday that the Blu-ray disc format the company has developed as the successor to the DVD is in a "stalemate" with the competing HD DVD format, chiefly backed by Toshiba Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

"It's a difficult fight," said Stringer, speaking at the 92nd Street Y cultural center in Manhattan.

Toshiba has been selling its players for as low as $200 heading into the holiday season, while Blu-ray players cost more than twice as much. The HD DVD camp also scored a significant win in August, when it induced Paramount Pictures to drop most of its support for Blu-ray and put out high-definition movies exclusively on HD DVD.

"We were trying to win on the merits, which we were doing for a while, until Paramount changed sides," Stringer said.

At the same time, he played down the importance of the battle, saying it was mostly a matter of prestige whose format wins out in the end.

"It doesn't mean as much as all that," Stringer said. He added that he believed there was an opportunity of uniting the two camps under one format before he became CEO, and he wishes he could travel back in time to make that happen.

Stringer was more upbeat about the PlayStation 3, the game console that has so far had disappointing sales compared to the rival Nintendo Wii.

The CEO said the console is the best-selling console in Europe after a price cut three weeks ago. In the U.S., a recent price cut has doubled sales.

"We are coming back up again," Stringer said. The company aims to sell 10 million PS3s by the end of its fiscal year in March. Nintendo has already sold 13.2 million Wiis.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071109/...hi_te/sony_ceo





Major League Baseball Has Stolen Your $$$ and Claims "No Refunds"

If you purchased downloads before 2006, your discs/files are now useless
Allan Wood

Just got off the phone with a customer service supervisor.

"MLB no longer supports the DDS system" that it once used and so any CDs with downloaded games on them "are no good. They will not work with the current system."

Great. Just effing great. ... As I told the supervisor, this is right in line with how wrong-headed and stupid and ass backwards MLB does everything.

I was told there is absolutely nothing MLB can do about these lost games. Plus, they said my purchases were all "one-time sales" and thus "there are no refunds".

No refunds? As Lee Elia would say: "My fucking ass!"

My info has been submitted to some other MLB department which will review things and see what they can do about either getting me the games I paid for or refunding my $280.45.

So if you have downloaded any games prior to 2006, get those discs out and try to watch them ... then call MLB at 866-800-1275 and demand they refund your money.

***

MLB continues to steal money from baseball fans who have downloaded full games through its digital download service.

I have blogged about this problem twice this year -- April 5 and April 16.

Background: Beginning in 2003, MLB offered fans the chance to download full games to their computer at $3.95 each. When you attempted to open the media file -- either on your hard drive or after it was burned to a CD -- it connected with a MLB.com webpage to obtain a license. Once the license had been verified, the game would play.

From MLB's FAQ:
2. Why is a license used for my downloaded video?

All MLB.com Downloads are encrypted with Microsoft Digital Rights Management technology. DRM security requires a valid license before viewing the material. You must have Windows Media Player (version 10.0 or higher) downloaded on your machine to view downloaded video.

3. What is DRM?

Digital Rights Management is a technology that allows for the secure management of digital media. This security protects the content provider from unauthorized distribution, viewing and use of the material.

At some point during 2006, MLB deleted that essential webpage. Since then, none of the videos that fans purchased will play.

FAQ:
7. Do I have to obtain a license every time I want to watch the downloaded video?

No. When you first try to play the video, a license will be distributed to you and stored by the player. Unless manually deleted, the license will exist forever and will be used when you try to watch the downloaded video on that machine. If you watch the video on a different machine, another license will be required.

This is a lie. Once MLB deleted the essential webpage, none of my CDs would play, even ones I had opened and watched previously.

By deleting the webpage and making it impossible for fans to watch the games they have paid for and downloaded, MLB has stolen $3.95 for every game from every fan. That must runs into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Since MLB started this download service, I have bought and downloaded 71 games -- many of them from the Red Sox's August-September 2004 hot streak -- which works out to a total cost of $280.45 (plus the price of the blank discs). Thanks to MLB, I now have nearly six dozen coasters.

When I contacted MLB in April, the people I spoke with expressed surprise at my predicament and claimed to have never heard of this problem before (naturally!). They said that MLB was overhauling its downloading system -- this was true -- and they told me to be patient because even though they had never heard of anyone with this problem, MLB was working on it.

More than six months have passed and nothing has changed. The essential webpage is still gone and my games will not play. I tried about 35 of them last night -- all with the same result.

And now MLB IS SELLING GAME DOWNLOADS AGAIN! Various 2007 playoff games -- and other games -- are available for $1.99. MLB is still using the DRM technology. Will the page fans use to watch these 2007 games be suddenly deleted in 2009?

Despite MLB's claim that I'm the only baseball fan on the face of the Earth with this problem, I know there are other fans out there who have been similarly ripped off -- because they read the April posts and either commented or emailed me.

I'm asking that if you also have discs that are now useless, call MLB at 866-800-1275 and complain.

It would also be helpful if some Boston or national sports media picked up on this.

Diehard baseball fans have paid tens of thousands of dollars to MLB to download games -- and MLB has pocketed the money and is now making it impossible for those fans to watch the games
http://joyofsox.blogspot.com/2007/11...ccessible.html





PCs Being Pushed Aside in Japan
Hiroko Tabuchi

Masaya Igarashi wants $200 headphones for his new iPod Touch, and he's torn between Nintendo Co.'s Wii and Sony's PlayStation 3 game consoles. When he has saved up again, he plans to splurge on a digital camera or flat-screen TV.

There's one conspicuous omission from the college student's shopping list: a new computer.

The PC's role in Japanese homes is diminishing, as its once-awesome monopoly on processing power is encroached by gadgets such as smart phones that act like pocket-size computers, advanced Internet-connected game consoles, and digital video recorders with terabytes of memory.

"A new PC just isn't high on my priority list right now," said Igarashi, who was shopping at a Bic Camera electronics shop in central Tokyo and said his three-year-old desktop was "good for now."

"For the cost, I'd rather buy something else," he said.

Japan's PC market is already shrinking, leading analysts to wonder whether Japan will become the first major market to see a decline in personal computer use some 25 years after it revolutionized household electronics — and whether this could be the picture of things to come in other countries.

"The household PC market is losing momentum to other electronics like flat-panel TVs and mobile phones," said Masahiro Katayama, research group head at market survey firm IDC.

Overall PC shipments in Japan have fallen for five consecutive quarters, the first ever drawn-out decline in PC sales in a key market, according to IDC. The trend shows no signs of letting up: In the second quarter of 2007, desktops fell 4.8 percent and laptops 3.1 percent.

NEC's and Sony's sales have been falling since 2006 in Japan. Hitachi Ltd. said Oct. 22 it will pull out of the household computer business entirely in an effort to refocus its sprawling operations.

"Consumers aren't impressed anymore with bigger hard drives or faster processors. That's not as exciting as a bigger TV," Katayama said. "And in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn't bright."

PC makers beg to differ, and they're aggressively marketing their products in the countries where they're seeing the most sales growth — places where residents have never had a PC. The industry is responding in two other ways: reminding detractors that computers are still essential in linking the digital universe and releasing several laptops priced below $300 this holiday shopping season.

And, though Sales in the U.S. are slowing too, booming demand in the industrializing world is expected to buoy worldwide PC shipments 11 percent to an all-time high of 286 million in 2007. And, outside Japan, Asia is a key growth area, with second-quarter sales jumping 21.9 percent this year.

Hitachi had already stopped making PCs for individual consumers since releasing this year's summer models, although the Tokyo-based manufacturer will keep making some computers for corporate clients. Personal computers already accounted for less than 1 percent of Hitachi's annual sales.

It's clear why consumers are shunning PCs.

Millions download music directly to their mobiles, and many more use their handsets for online shopping and to play games. Digital cameras connect directly to printers and high-definition TVs for viewing photos, bypassing PCs altogether. Movies now download straight to TVs.

More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The same survey found that 30 percent of people with e-mail on their phones used PC-based e-mail less, including 4 percent who said they had stopped sending e-mails from PCs completely.

The fastest growing social networking site here, Mobagay Town, is designed exclusively for cell phones. Other networking sites like mixi, Facebook and MySpace can all be accessed and updated from handsets, as can the video-sharing site YouTube.

And while a lot of the decline is in household PCs, businesses are also waiting longer to replace their computers partly because recent advances in PC technology are only incremental, analysts say.

At a consumer electronics event in Tokyo in October, the mostly unpopular stalls showcasing new PCs contrasted sharply with the crowded displays of flat-panel TVs.

"There's no denying PCs are losing their spunk in Japanese consumers' eyes," said Hiroyuki Ishii, a sales official at Japan's top PC maker, NEC Corp. "There seems to be less and less things only a PC can do," Ishii said. "The PC's value will fade unless the PC can offer some breakthrough functions."

The slide has made PC manufacturers desperate to maintain their presence in Japanese homes. Recent desktop PCs look more like audiovisual equipment — or even colorful art objects — than computers.

Sony Corp.'s desktop computers have folded up to become clocks, and its latest version even hangs on the wall. Laptops in a new Sony line are adorned with illustrations from hip designers like ZAnPon. NEC is trying to make its PCs' cooling fans quieter — to address a common complaint from customers, it says.

Still, sluggish sales weigh on manufacturers.

NEC's annual PC shipments in Japan shrank 6.2 percent to 2.72 million units in 2006, though overall earnings have been buoyed by mobile phone and networking solutions operations. The trend continued in the first quarter of fiscal 2007 then there was a 14 percent decline from a year earlier.

Sony's PC shipments for Japan shrank 10 percent in 2006 from a year earlier. But it isn't about to throw in the towel — yet.

"We feel we've reached a new stage in PC development, where consumers are looking for user-friendly machines to complement other electronics," said Hiroko Nakamura, a Sony official in Tokyo.

Sony's latest PCs, for example, come with a powerful program that can take photos and video clips and automatically edit them into a slideshow set to music.

Even Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple Inc., whose computer sales and market share are surging in the U.S., has seen Macintosh unit sales in Japan slip 5 percent year-on-year in the first nine months of 2007.

There are other reasons Japan is the first market to see PCs shrink, some analysts say.

"We think of Japanese as workaholics, but many don't take work home," said Damian Thong, a technology analyst at Macquarie Bank in Japan. "Once they leave the office, they're often content with tapping e-mails or downloading music on their phones," he said.

As Hitachi's shuttering of its household PC business demonstrates, making PCs has become less attractive. IBM Corp. also left the PC business in 2005, selling its computer unit to China's Lenovo Group Ltd.

But NEC's Ishii is persisting.

"We have to get the message out there that PCs are on top in terms of computing power," he said. "They always will be."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071104/...sF4pXbZMpk24cA





Mass Production Kicks Off for XO Laptops—Finally
Leslie Katz

Following a number of delays, the One Laptop per Child Foundation's much-awaited XO laptop for needy kids has finally gone into mass production. Early Tuesday (local time), Taiwan's Quanta Computer started producing the green-and-white computer in its new Changshu manufacturing center, two hours northwest of Shanghai.

The commencement of mass production means children in developing nations could have the rugged, open-source laptops in hand starting this month. The OLPC has already announced orders for kids in Uruguay and Mongolia. (Residents of the U.S. and Canada participating in the Give 1 Get 1 program--which donates an XO to a child in a developing nation for every machine sold online--are expected to start getting laptops in December.)

"Today represents an important milestone in the evolution of the One Laptop per Child project," MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the nonprofit One Laptop per Child, said in a statement Tuesday. "Against all the naysayers, and thanks to great partners such as Quanta, we have developed and now manufactured the world's most advanced and greenest laptop and one designed specifically to instill a passion for learning in children."

Quanta has recently increased its manufacturing capacity, and says XO production will ramp up over time.

The XO laptop, while generally heralded by many for its good intentions and potential impact, has hit its share of snags on the road to adoption. In addition to production delays, which give competing low-cost machines time to gain traction, the price point, originally set for $100, has crept up closer to $200.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9812297-7.html





Military Technology Could Protect Mobile Phones from Moisture Damage

A technology originally developed to protect soldiers from chemical attack is set to become the latest weapon of electronics companies by preventing moisture ingress from high humidity, rain or accidental immersion in water. With the rapid growth in small electronic devices such as mobile phones that are required to work both indoors and outdoors, the risk of water ingress and damage to these high value items has grown enormously.

Their small size also means that conventional means of waterproofing such as gaskets or O-rings are not viable. ion-mask, as the product is known - modifies the surface of virtually any material, applying a protective enhancement, just nanometres thick, over the entire surface of the object by means of an ionised gas or "plasma". From mobile phones to PDAs, the treatment not only coats the external surfaces but also the inside without damaging precision electronics.

Invisible to the naked eye, ion-mask causes water to bounce off treated surfaces like beads of mercury by decreasing the surface energy of the component materials, and, by applying a coating just nanometres thick, other properties such as colour, texture and feel are completely unaffected. Electrical items that would normally have moderate levels of water protection can be taken straight from the production line or even high street store and treated retrospectively - with no change to the look, feel or electronic performance of the product and the level of water protection is greatly enhanced.

Ion-mask is not a "barrier technology" that can alter the performance of delicate items such as microphones or is susceptible to pin-holes or make re-work almost impossible. Apart from increasing the protection of smaller items, ion-mask can also be used to ensure that larger, more complex items that can accommodate gaskets and o-rings are given an additional level of protection and provide further assurance of performance to high performance items.

"ion- mask is extremely effective against the problem of moisture ingress as it can be applied to the most intricate electronic objects without damaging the precious circuitry," explains P2i's Business Development Director, Ian Robins. "The process is particularly well suited to high value applications such as MP3 players, which are required to perform outdoors in all weather conditions, or other small, lightweight electronic items which may be inadvertently worn in the shower or while swimming. Having demonstrated the technology to a number of leading manufacturers, many have been amazed and are considering ion-mask enhancement to improve the performance of their products," added Dr Robins.

P2i was established in 2004 to commercialise super liquid-repellent treatments developed by the UK's Ministry of Defence.
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/27237.php





Mosh mad

Warner Stays Out of Online Store Deal
Alex Veiga

Nokia Corp.'s new Britain-based online music service launched this week with more than 2 million songs, including tracks from every major record label except one: Warner Music Group Corp., home to artists such as Green Day, Linkin Park and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

New York-based Warner refused to license its music for the service, taking issue with Nokia's operation of a file-sharing Web site called Mosh, an executive familiar with the negotiations between the two companies said Friday on condition of anonymity, citing the confidential nature of the talks.

Warner insisted that Nokia promise not to promote Mosh alongside its paid music offerings, the executive said.

Bill Plummer, Nokia's vice president of multimedia for North America, declined to comment Friday on the details of the company's negotiations with Warner, but said talks with the company were ongoing in "good faith and good spirit."

A Warner spokeswoman declined to comment.

Warner's decision to remain outside the Nokia Music Store highlights the increasingly uneasy relationships among record labels and other entertainment companies and online hubs for user-generated content.

YouTube and similar sites thrive from traffic created by computer users uploading all kinds of media files — including many copyrighted songs and videos.

Typically, media companies insist that files uploaded without permission by copyright holders be removed, and YouTube recently reached a formal agreement with major industry players on the issue.

The wrinkle this time is Mosh is entirely separate from Nokia's music portal.

Now, a major label that does have content for sale on the Nokia Music Store is prepared to pull out unless Nokia shows it can beef up its measures to keep unauthorized content off Mosh, said a different executive, who works for a music company and is familiar with the discussions with Nokia.

Nokia was to meet with several record labels as early as next week to discuss the matter, that executive said on condition of anonymity because details of the talks with Nokia were confidential.

Asked about those plans, Plummer said: "We have an ongoing dialogue with our partners."

Nokia launched a "beta" version of Mosh, which stands for "mobilize and share," in August. Computer users can upload music, video, software and other types of files geared to mobile phones on the site to be shared with anyone.

On Friday, audio clips from songs from all the major labels could be found on the site, including tracks by Green Day and Linkin Park; Universal Music Group's Rihanna and 50 Cent; Sony BMG Music Entertainment's Britney Spears; and EMI Group PLC's Robbie Williams.

The site uses technology designed to spot content that is not authorized for sharing, such as copyrighted songs. As it's often the case with such content filters, however, unauthorized content slips through and stays on the site until someone steps up and demands that it be taken down.

"With the exception of very isolated cases, we really haven't seen inappropriate content making its way through or being distributed via Mosh," Plummer said, adding the company removes most unauthorized content from Mosh within a couple of hours after it receives a takedown notice.

Representatives of Universal, EMI and Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG, declined to comment on their deals with Nokia.

Nokia, is based in Espoo, near the Finnish capital, Helsinki.

The Nokia Music Store launched on Thursday in the United Kingdom. The company plans to expand the portal to other European markets and elsewhere in coming months.
http://www.physorg.com/news113395222.html





As Citigroup Chief Totters, CNBC Reporter Is Having a Great Year
Bill Carter

The big story on CNBC all day today will undoubtedly be the fallout from the resignation of Charles O. Prince III as chairman of Citigroup — and Maria Bartiromo, one of the best-known names in business news on television, will surely be among the reporters covering it.

There may be some muted vindication in that for Ms. Bartiromo, who, after enduring accusations in the media of questionable interactions with Mr. Prince’s company, is now in the midst of what can be described as a turnaround year. She continues to score among the best ratings for CNBC, while also landing a string of interviews with major political and business figures.

It was only in January that Ms. Bartiromo’s name was tied — through leaks from Citigroup — to the company’s decision to oust its chief of global investment, Todd S. Thomson. Unidentified executives at Citigroup, which is both a CNBC advertiser and a frequent subject of its coverage, told several publications that among the reasons Mr. Thomson was fired was his decision to invite Ms. Bartiromo to speak to a group of Citigroup clients in Asia and to fly her to that event in the company jet.

During the episode, Ms. Bartiromo, who is married to Jonathan Steinberg, the son of the financier Saul Steinberg, saw her personal life and ethics battered in media commentaries, while CNBC took fire for permitting her to participate in what critics labeled an apparent conflict of interest. But unlike other media figures who have seen their careers derailed by becoming targets of that kind of criticism, Ms. Bartiromo has not only survived, she has thrived. During a recent lunch interview, she said, “My life has been taken up a notch in terms of busy-ness.”

Just a bit. Beyond “Closing Bell,” her daily two-hour live afternoon show on CNBC, Ms. Bartiromo anchors a weekly syndicated show called “The Wall Street Journal Report,” appears regularly on NBC’s “Today” and frequently on the “NBC Nightly News,” and writes a weekly question-and-answer column in BusinessWeek and a monthly column in Reader’s Digest. Last month, she had what she calls one of her career highlights, moderating (with Chris Matthews) the economic-issues Republican candidates debate.

“I really feel like I have had the year of my career,” Ms. Bartiromo, who is 40, said, “the best year of my career.”

That might not have been expected in January, when the heat from the Citigroup incident was turned up, though her bosses at CNBC defended her vigorously. Ms. Bartiromo has not commented on the Citigroup episode until now.

“I didn’t think I had to defend what I was doing,” she said.

Ten months later, she has some pointed words for members of the media who accused her of unethical behavior, and for Citigroup, including, by name, Mr. Prince. She suggested that professional rivalry might have been a motivation for the speculation and innuendo about her.

“Some reporters were upset because I kept scooping them and they felt, oh, this is perfect. This is a window. Let me, you know, bring her down,” she said.

And she said she had been unfairly caught up in a management upheaval at Citigroup. She suggested that her relationship with Mr. Thomson — which she conceded was friendly but said was a source-reporter association — was used as a diversionary tactic by Mr. Prince to cover whatever his underlying reasons were for ousting Mr. Thomson.

“Something happened between Todd Thomson and Chuck Prince, and somehow I got wrapped up in it,” Ms. Bartiromo said. “Clearly, there was another agenda going on.”

A spokeswoman for Citigroup said the company had no comment on Ms. Bartiromo’s account, referring to a statement the company released at the time of Mr. Thomson’s ouster (Ms. Bartiromo was not mentioned in the statement.)

Ms. Bartiromo does not appear to have been damaged professionally by the criticism. She still turns up daily on the stock exchange floor, to stand among the chaos, interviewing business leaders as traders run around her. Ms. Bartiromo, unfazed, only seems to talk a bit louder and maybe — though it hardly seems possible — a bit faster, in her distinctive Bay Ridge accent.

And, unlike other recent television figures buffeted by criticism, like Dan Rather and Rosie O’Donnell, Ms. Bartiromo has retained the full support of her network. “I don’t know if I could put a number on it,” said Mark Hoffman, CNBC’s president, about Ms. Bartiromo’s importance to the network, “but she’s right up there.”

She has become even more indispensable with the arrival of the Fox Business Network, a competitor for CNBC, which has dominated television business news while piling up enormous profits (estimated by analysts at about $300 million a year.)

Roger Ailes, the man who hired Ms. Bartiromo at CNBC, is now running Fox Business, aggressively hiring, among others, a host of female reporters with business credentials and, as Ms. Bartiromo put it, “beauty or whatever.” When he announced the start of the Fox channel in February, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox’s parent company, News Corporation, referring to Ms. Bartiromo’s nom de TV, pointedly said, “We have to recruit some Money Honeys.”

Ms. Bartiromo said she has never had a problem with the “Money Honey” nickname (tagged on her early in her CNBC career by Mr. Murdoch’s New York Post) — she has trademarked it for herself. She plans to use that trademark for a cartoon character called “Money Honey,” who will appear in a series of animated short pieces aimed at teaching children some basics about money.

Of the name, she said, “Let it roll off my back, and I’m flattered to have the notice.”

If Ms. Bartiromo’s striking looks and high profile in business circles have helped her draw viewers and land big interviews, they have also helped attract the kind of attention that male television figures — like, say, Larry Kudlow and Jim Cramer of CNBC — never seem to draw. Most recently, there have been items in the gossip columns about a supposed rivalry with a new CNBC star, Erin Burnett.

“You know, people love to see some kind of controversy,” Ms. Bartiromo said. “I think Erin’s terrific; she’s doing a great job. And frankly, we have, at this point, several women who are beautiful and very smart. What’s not to love?”

(For her part in the mutual admiration society, Ms. Burnett said, in an e-mailed comment, “Maria is the hardest-working person I know. She’s raised the bar in business news and it’s invigorating to work with her.")

That is not to say the women do not compete.

“Sure there’s competition,” Ms. Bartiromo said. “Don’t kid yourself. We all want the best interviews. But I think at the end of the day, we’re saying: O.K., we have a competitor out there.” She admits to ramping up her own interview schedule in anticipation of the Fox channel. “I did want to have the president on the week Fox launched,” she said. (He came on a week earlier.)

Still, she acknowledged that she was upset by the criticism she took for being too closely associated with Mr. Thomson and specifically for the trip to China to speak to Citigroup clients. She argued that she had benefited professionally by being able to meet wealthy investors in Asia “and find out what they’re doing with their money.”

John Levine, the dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, said that for him the significant issue was the promotional appearance on behalf of Citigroup, a CNBC advertiser and a frequent subject of its coverage.

"I don’t think it’s egregious," Mr. Levine said. "But the trade-off is not the best when you do a promotional appearance for a company you are then going to turn around and cover."

CNBC executives, and even Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chairman of its parent company, General Electric, rose to Ms. Bartiromo’s defense, saying she had permission to attend the event and ride on the Citigroup plane.

Other aspects of Ms. Bartiromo’s relationship with Mr. Thomson, including his decision to put $5 million into a television show she was at one time supposed to have a role in and his efforts to get her on an advisory board of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, added fuel to speculation that they were more than business associates.

In the interview, Ms. Bartiromo acknowledged that the speculation had been “definitely uncomfortable,” but said, “Everything was above board.”

She summed up her participation as: “One of our customers asked me to do a speaking engagement. I did it. We paid for it,” adding, “I don’t really have to defend it. I have my husband on one side and my company on the other supporting me.”

Officially, the Citigroup incident has not changed any policies at CNBC, nor has it changed Ms. Bartiromo’s approach to her job. CNBC says she has no limitations and still reports on Citigroup. The Citigroup spokeswoman, Leah Johnson, said the company had no issues with Ms. Bartiromo’s coverage. She conducted a prominent interview recently with the Citigroup senior vice chairman, William Rose.

Mr. Hoffman said one of the keys to Ms. Bartiromo’s success has been her relentless “source building” and he did not expect her to change at all.

Ms. Bartiromo cited her recent pursuit — through rounds of breakfasts and lunches — of Angelo R. Mozilo, the chief executive of the Countrywide Financial Corporation, which is in the middle of the national mortgage crisis. That paid off with an exclusive interview with him, she said.

“What should I be changing?” she said. “I don’t see what I need to change. I will always have relationships.”

Having weathered the Citigroup storm, Ms. Bartiromo said, she is free to pursue the thing she most loves to do: talk to business people about what is about to move the market.

“I love this thing now called sovereign funds,” she said, meaning the large pools of capital amassed by governments in Asia and the Middle East, and managed by groups like Cutter Associates, an international investment firm. “I had the head of Cutter on and he said: ‘Look, we have $60 billion we want to put to work.’ I find that kind of stuff so exciting. I find it so sexy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/bu...bartiromo.html





Cable Channel Nods to Ratings and Leans Left
Jacques Steinberg

Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.

Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.

During the nine months she spent on “The View” before departing abruptly last spring, Ms. O’Donnell raised viewership notably. She did so while lamenting the unabated casualties of the Iraq war and advocating the right to gay marriage, among other positions.

Under one option, Ms. O’Donnell would take the 9 p.m. slot each weeknight on MSNBC, pitting her against “Larry King Live” on CNN and “Hannity & Colmes” on Fox News.

But even without Ms. O’Donnell, MSNBC already presents a three-hour block of nighttime talk — Chris Matthews’s “Hardball” at 7, Mr. Olbermann at 8, and “Live With Dan Abrams” at 9 — in which the White House takes a regular beating. The one early-evening program on MSNBC that is often most sympathetic to the administration, “Tucker” with Tucker Carlson at 6 p.m., is in real danger of being canceled, said one NBC executive, who, like those who spoke of Ms. O’Donnell, would do so only on condition of anonymity.

Having a prime-time lineup that tilts ever more demonstrably to the left could be risky for General Electric, MSNBC’s parent company, which is subject to legislation and regulation far afield of the cable landscape. Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.

“It happened naturally,” Phil Griffin, a senior vice president of NBC News who is the executive in charge of MSNBC, said Friday, referring specifically to the channel’s passion and point of view from 7 to 10 p.m. “There isn’t a dogma we’re putting through. There is a ‘Go for it.’”

Fox News consistently denies any political bias in its programming. But whether by design or not, MSNBC is managing to add viewers at a moment when its hosts echo the country’s disaffection with President Bush.

The channel has done so much as Fox News did beginning in 1996, when the president was Bill Clinton, a Democrat. On some nights recently, Mr. Olbermann has even come tantalizingly close to surpassing the ratings of the host he describes as his nemesis, Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, at least among viewers ages 25 to 54, which is the demographic cable news advertisers prefer. Most of the time, though, Mr. O’Reilly outdraws Mr. Olbermann by about 1.5 million viewers over all at the same hour, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Still, as its most recognizable face, MSNBC has marshaled behind Mr. Olbermann, who on July 3, in an eight-minute “special comment” at the close of his show, addressed President Bush directly and called on him to resign. Two months later, the channel chose Mr. Olbermann to serve as the principal host of its coverage of a major prime-time address by Mr. Bush.

Mr. Olbermann’s “special comments” — more than 20 in the last 12 months, and nearly all of them first-person editorials that find some fault with the administration — have helped increase the ratings of his program by 33 percent in just the last year, to about 773,000 viewers a night, according to Nielsen. With those ratings, Mr. Olbermann’s program surpassed “Paula Zahn Now” on CNN, which was canceled last summer.

Mr. Olbermann comes on after “Hardball” with Mr. Matthews, whose longtime opposition to the war — and to what he describes as Vice President Dick Cheney’s outsize role in the administration — has become only more pointed since he took on the title of managing editor of his broadcast over the summer.

Since then, he has talked, both on the air and off, about the “criminality” of the Bush White House, as epitomized, he says, by the role of I. Lewis Libby Jr., the vice president’s former chief of staff, in the C.I.A. leak case. Mr. Matthews’s overall ratings have edged up in the process, though not on the scale of Mr. Olbermann’s.

Even Joe Scarborough, once a conservative congressman from Florida who stood behind President Bush during a campaign rally in 2004, has seemed to have a change of heart about his fellow Republicans in recent months, as is obvious to viewers of “Morning Joe,” his new morning show on MSNBC. In recent weeks, he could be heard praising Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s outreach to the military and her husband’s accomplishments as an ex-president, sentiments that, he acknowledged, had surprised even him.

In a telephone interview yesterday morning, hours before the news of the O’Donnell negotiations surfaced, Mr. Scarborough sounded more like Mr. Olbermann than vintage Newt Gingrich.

“I’m just as conservative as I was in 1994, when everyone was calling me a right-wing nut,” he said. “I think the difference is the Republican Party leaders, a lot of them, have run a bloated government, have been corrupt, and have gone a very, very long way from what we were trying to do in 1994. Also, the Republican Party has just been incompetent.”

Asked if Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews in particular provided an outlet for the opinions of viewers unhappy with the current administration, Mr. Scarborough said yes.

“While I don’t agree with a lot of the things those guys say night in and night out,” he said, “I think it’s very important that those disaffected voices have a place to go when they think somebody out there needs to be speaking truth to power.”

Which is not to say that all of the channel’s hosts speak in one voice. On that same day last month when Mr. Scarborough spoke warmly of the Clintons, for example, he also referred to Democrats generally as “stupid people” and “morons.”

In an interview Friday, Mr. Matthews, who was once an aide to Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., the former Democratic speaker of the House, recalled that his criticisms of the Clintons in the mid-to-late 1990s made him an outcast within the party, and are still echoed in his skepticism about Mrs. Clinton today.

“I really do take on people with power,” he said. “Deceit is what drives me crazy, either by Bill Clinton or the hawks in this administration.”

That said, in a separate interview last week, Mr. Olbermann acknowledged that for MSNBC’s nighttime lineup to ultimately work, viewers needed to be able to follow at least some common themes from one show to another. He likened himself and his fellow hosts, collectively, to the menu of a hamburger restaurant with several variations of the same dish.

“If you go into a burger place, and you go in there for the fish, you might want the fish occasionally but it’s probably a mistake,” he said. “Could you be utterly different politically and succeed in this format? You’d basically be throwing your audience away.”

Bill Carter contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/bu...ia/06msnb.html





Big Executive of the Tiny Screen
Laura M. Holson

When CBS Mobile introduced the Daily Delivery, a short video for cellphones highlighting fashionable shops in Los Angeles and cool gadgets, it was a disaster.

CBS Mobile, a unit of the television network’s interactive division charged with developing content for the new third screen, noticed, though, that interest spiked when celebrities were featured. So they scrapped the original concept and came back with a twice-daily show focused on celebrity gossip and off-the-wall news. It is now one of their most frequently watched original programs on the hand-held screen.

“We are constantly forced to kill our own babies,” said Cyriac Roeding, executive vice president of CBS Mobile. Those words might seem harsh if the following two facts about Mr. Roeding weren’t true. First, he was hired by CBS in 2005 to create a mobile entertainment division where researchers track within minutes whether a made-for-mobile show is a hit. Second, he is an unapologetic entrepreneur who has less in common with Hollywood big shots than with his peers in Silicon Valley, who are equally willing to dump a strategy that doesn’t work.

That puts Mr. Roeding at the vortex of Hollywood’s new media revolution. Consumer attitudes toward viewing videos on the cellphone screen are changing. The debut of the Apple iPhone showed a wider, and older, audience that cellphones can be multimedia devices. And the software behind the Google phone is expected to enable more entertainment programming.

As a result, companies including Walt Disney and NBC Universal are hungry to exploit new technology much the way they did when DVDs became popular in the 1990s. Swirling in that vortex of experimentation and deal-making is the question of how anyone makes money on the new platform.

Studios and networks are under pressure to make money however they can. Actors, directors and writers want their cut, too. So much so that this week the Writers Guild of America is to go on strike against studios and networks demanding, in part, a stake in future earnings from online and mobile phone content.

An additional factor that makes Mr. Roeding’s job particularly hard is that the 34-year-old German-born mobile advertising executive must forge partnerships with phone companies that are hard-pressed to give up their financial grip on users of their networks.

“The difficulty with Cyriac’s job is getting successful but traditional companies to go down a path they wouldn’t otherwise go down,” said Ryan Hughes, vice president for digital media at Verizon Wireless.

Mr. Roeding is responsible for the unit’s overall strategy, negotiating complicated deals with CBS Mobile’s two dozen partners like AT&T and Verizon Wireless, as well as overseeing mobile advertising and games.

Take, for example, its broadcast version of “Big Brother.” In August, a made-for-mobile version of the CBS network program ran 24 hours a day on its own channel on Qualcomm’s MediaFLO network showing on Verizon Wireless phones.

Mr. Hughes from Verizon said he first met Mr. Roeding in San Diego in the summer of 2006, when Verizon was discussing what CBS shows would be carried on MediaFLO. Mr. Roeding was expected to present CBS’s proposal, but when he walked into the meeting he explained he had not yet secured the necessary rights.

“We knew it would be difficult,” said Mr. Hughes. Six months later, though, after months of silence, Mr. Hughes got a text message from a CBS executive saying Mr. Roeding had secured the rights in time for MediaFLO’s spring introduction. “It blew me away,” Mr. Hughes said.

Mr. Roeding acknowledges that the task is tricky. But he is pragmatic, too, seeking to apply the lessons he learned as an entrepreneur to a Hollywood culture marred by political infighting, one-upmanship and corporate backstabbing.

Senior CBS executives are now required to attend his “Wireless 101” presentation. He created a news division with mobile-specific alerts and news to appeal to young viewers. And Ashley Hartman, a 22-year-old Jessica Simpson look-alike who is the face of CBS Mobile entertainment, is gaining as much notice for her stint as CBS’s “Mobile VJ” as she did for her recurring role on the Fox hit “The O.C.”

Even recruits who were first put off at the idea of working at what some consider to be a musty network were struck by Mr. Roeding’s approach. At the mention of CBS, “I thought of ‘Murder, She Wrote,’” said Randy Ahn, a director at CBS Sports Mobile, before meeting Mr. Roeding. “Cyriac, though, talked about new ideas.”

Indeed, Mr. Roeding is unorthodox in his recruiting, choosing to look beyond traditional media or wireless carriers for talent. He has brought in other entrepreneurs, including Jeff Sellinger, a founder of GoldPocket, a mobile marketing and content firm, who now oversees daily operations.

And he is wooing top CBS talent. He has monthly dinners with Anthony Zuiker, executive producer of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” to discuss mobile games, including the new “CSI: Miami” offering. (Mr. Zuiker, though, is a bit skeptical of the new medium, and so far views mobile games and other content as promotional. “It should drive people back to television,” he said. “I don’t consume television on a cellphone, but I wouldn’t want to stop anyone else either.”)

Mr. Roeding, a former McKinsey consultant who bears a striking resemblance to Cary Elwes in “The Princess Bride,” is undeterred by the challenge, instead overwhelmed by the potential to reach consumers. “It doesn’t make sense to fight over a business that isn’t there yet,” he said. “First let’s create something that consumers want to see.”

To emphasize his point, he showed a photo of a young girl at the airport in San Jose, Calif. She was wearing a T-shirt with the phrase “Me, my cell and I.”

“The relationship people have with their mobile phones is very personal,” he said. “We can’t ignore that. If we do, generations will pass us by.” Or, as Quincy Smith, Mr. Roeding’s boss and president of CBS Interactive, put it: “We need to evolve from being a content company to an audience company.”

Mr. Roeding was born in 1973 and raised in a small town outside Frankfurt, the younger of two children. He graduated from the University of Karlsruhe where he studied business and engineering.

Mr. Roeding was a founder of 12snap Inc., a mobile marketing and entertainment firm started in 1999 whose clients include Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. The firm won awards for innovative marketing, including a campaign where children sent their parents mobile messages encouraging them to buy a PlayStation 2 for Christmas.

In 2004, though, Mr. Roeding grew restless and wanted to move to either Silicon Valley or Shanghai, where the markets for mobile media were emerging. A McKinsey alumnus offered to introduce him to Nancy Tellem, who oversees entertainment at the CBS network and production studios. At their first meeting Mr. Roeding took out his cellphone and showed her his personalized wallpaper and videos Europeans were already watching.

“Mobile wasn’t even on our radar,” said Ms. Tellem, whose office is near his at CBS’s Television City. “But there was a small group of us who thought something was there.” Mr. Roeding was hired in 2005 and went about creating an autonomous unit with the same start-up feel he thrived on at 12snap.

Mr. Roeding declined to discuss the unit’s financials except to say it is profitable, making programs for a fraction of the cost their peers in TV do. “It’s the Ikea model of content production,” he said with a laugh. But industry executives say CBS Mobile, like ABC and NBC, gets a small percentage of its revenue from advertising; the rest is from deals and partnerships. That percentage is expected to shift, though, when advertising on phones becomes more accepted.

Mr. Roeding’s focus is on making the mobile shows as personalized as possible. One of Mr. Roeding’s producers developed the animated series “Danny Bonaduce: Life Coach,” a twist on self-help talk shows that starts this month. His voice gravelly from too many Marlboros and hard-partying nights, Mr. Bonaduce said he agreed to the series because it seemed like fun.

Mr. Roeding did not want viewers to have a passive experience. So, as part of the show, viewers will be able to text message Mr. Bonaduce, who will answer questions and give advice.

“Are you going to help celebrities?” asked Mr. Roeding as Mr. Bonaduce settled into a chair before taping. The actor’s face and broad shoulders were the color of rare meat. “I have absolutely no interest in helping celebrities,” said Mr. Bonaduce, laughing. “I could go all day without helping celebrities.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/bu...dia/05cbs.html





Tracking of Web Use by Marketers Gains Favor
Louise Story

It seems that the Federal Trade Commission is not slowing down the online advertising party.

Just days after a commissioner at the agency expressed concern about consumer privacy on the Internet, two large social networking sites are showcasing new ways to use information about their members to deliver specialized advertisements.

MySpace will announce today that more than 50 large advertisers, including Ford and Taco Bell, are using its so-called HyperTargeting ad program, which scours user profiles for interests and then delivers related ads. And, within the next few days, Facebook is widely expected to announce a new advertising system that will be based on data from its members’ profiles.

The MySpace announcement is unrelated to the recent F.T.C. hearings on online advertising — rather, it was timed to the start of Ad:Tech, a digital advertising conference in New York, according to Michael Barrett, chief revenue officer for Fox Interactive Media, the unit of the News Corporation that includes MySpace. MySpace is also announcing a self-service site where small and midsize advertisers can buy custom display ads on the site.

Privacy advocates said they were surprised how quickly online companies came back to the market promoting their targeting programs.

“Despite all of the assurances that the industry gave to regulators and the public, it sounds as if their business plans sort of fly in the face of the promises to operate without exploiting young people,” said Kathryn Montgomery, a professor at American University and author of the book “Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet.”

“If you are hanging out with your friends and talking about who you are, what rock stars you like, and so on, you don’t assume that someone is sitting there and taking down every word you’re saying and putting it into some kind algorithm,” she said.

MySpace was notably absent from the panels at the F.T.C.’s forum on behavioral targeting held in Washington last week. Executives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, the AOL unit of Time Warner and Facebook discussed their privacy policies, but MySpace sent representatives onkly to watch the forum, not to speak. A spokeswoman from MySpace said the company would be active in discussions about privacy.

The forum was the agency’s first public workshop on online advertising in eight years, and officials from the agency expressed concern that marketers and Internet companies might be infringing on people’s privacy in some of the way they use online data to aim their ads.

“People should have dominion over their computers,” said Jon Leibowitz, an F.T.C. commissioner. “The current ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ in online tracking and profiling has to end.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/te...05myspace.html





No Email Privacy Rights Under Constitution, Us Gov Claims
Mark Rasch

On October 8, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati granted the government's request for a full-panel hearing in United States v. Warshak case centering on the right of privacy for stored electronic communications. At issue is whether the procedure whereby the government can subpoena stored copies of your email - similar to the way they could simply subpoena any physical mail sitting on your desk - is unconstitutionally broad.

This appears to be more than a mere argument in support of the constitutionality of a Congressional email privacy and access scheme. It represents what may be the fundamental governmental position on Constitutional email and electronic privacy - that there isn't any. What is important in this case is not the ultimate resolution of that narrow issue, but the position that the United States government is taking on the entire issue of electronic privacy. That position, if accepted, may mean that the government can read anybody's email at any time without a warrant.
What is Privacy?

In a seminal case (Katz v. United States in 1963) the US Supreme Court, over the strenuous objections of the US government, upheld the right of the user of a payphone to claim a right to privacy in the contents of those communications. The Court held that the Fourth Amendment right to be secure in your "persons, house, places and effects" against unreasonable searches and seizures protected people, not just places. Thus, to determine whether you had a right against unreasonable seizure - a kind of privacy right - the court adopted a two-pronged test: did you think what you were doing was private and is society willing to accept your belief as objectively reasonable?

The method you use to communicate can effect both your subjective expectation of privacy and society's willingness to consider that expectation as "reasonable." Shouting a "private" conversation into a megaphone at Times Square would neither be subjectively nor objectively reasonable, if you wanted the conversation to be confidential. "Broadcasting" the conversation over the radio is likewise unreasonable.

But, what about "broadcasting" it over an unsecured Wi-Fi router, analog cell phone, or cordless telephone? While certain statutes may make the interception of such communications unlawful, absent such statutes is there a Constitutional prohibition on listening in? Put more narrowly, if the cops listen in on your baby monitor, do they violate your "right to privacy," or do you give up your right by knowingly putting the monitor in little Timmy's room in the first place?
Partial Waiver

Do you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in the contents of email you send and receive at work, using a work computer, over a company supplied network, where the company has a "business use only" policy, and an employee monitoring policy that states that any communications may be monitored? Think about it. Indeed, the policy will go further and says "users have no expectation of privacy." But is this true? Or, is it even a good idea?

Remember Katz? The Constitution only protects reasonable expectations of privacy. If you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your email, then the examination of the contents of your email by anyone for any purposes is not an invasion of privacy and raises no Fourth Amendment concerns.

What you really mean in your policy is that your employer (your supervisor, the IT staff, HR, legal, etc.) may examine the contents of your e-mail for legitimate reasons and if they choose to, disclose the contents to whatever third parties they deem reasonable. Fair enough. But, it also means that you can't read your bosses' email or your co-workers' email, just because you are curious. Why not? Because they have an "expectation of privacy" in their email.

Privacy is not like virginity - you either have it or you don't. You can have privacy rights with respect to some uses by some people and not with respect to other uses by other people. Right? Well, not according to the government.
No Constitutional Privacy

In arguing that the government did not necessarily need a wiretap order to obtain the contents of Mr. Warshak's email from his ISP, the government argued that the Fourth Amendment did not preclude a mere subpoena because users of ISPs don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The government argued:
... any expectation of privacy can be waived [citing case holding that a privacy disclaimer on a bulletin board "defeats claims to an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy."] Many employees are provided with e-mail and Internet services by their employers. Often, those employees are required to waive any expectation of privacy in their email each time they log on to their computers. [Court] orders directed to the email of employees who have waived any possible expectation of privacy do not violate the Fourth Amendment.

Now, we are not talking about cases where the employer reads someone's email and decides to give it to the government, or where the employer consents to the search by the FBI. Essentially, the Justice Department is arguing that when you give up your privacy rights in an e-mail policy vis-a-vis your employer, you waive any Constitutional claim to privacy if the government decides to just take it - even without the knowledge or consent of the employer. Once you give up privacy in an email policy, the game is over. Since the Fourth Amendment only protects legitimate privacy rights, and you have no privacy in email, theoretically (absent a statute that prohibits it) the government could constitutionally walk in and just take anyone's files.

Wow.

But then the government goes on: they note "some email accounts are abandoned, as when an account holder stops paying for the service and the account is cancelled." There "can be no reasonable expectation of privacy in such accounts." Oh really? So if I decide not to keep paying Comcast, then not only to I potentially lose Internet service, but the government can then read every email I ever wrote or received? Better pay the bill, then. When I terminate my service, I am terminating my right of use - not "abandoning" my privacy rights. A few years ago, when an US soldier was killed in Fallujah, Yahoo had to decide whether his parents could legally access the email in his account, an account that Yahoo's policy terminated at the soldier's death. The case was resolved with a consented to court order allowing such access, but the government's argument would be that when you die your account terminates and your email is up for grabs. In other words, don't die with email in your account and don't get any email after you die.

The government again goes on:
... hackers may obtain internet services and email accounts using stolen credit cards. Hackers maintain no reasonable expectation of privacy in such accounts.

So the privacy of your communications may be determined by the legitimacy of the method by which you pay for such communications? Bounce a check to the phone company and the government can listen in to your phone calls? Or buy a cell phone with a stolen credit card, and the government can read your text messages?

The most distressing argument the government makes in the Warshak case is that the government need not follow the Fourth Amendment in reading emails sent by or through most commercial ISPs. The terms of service (TOS) of many ISPs permit those ISPs to monitor user activities to prevent fraud, enforce the TOS, or protect the ISP or others, or to comply with legal process. If you use an ISP and the ISP may monitor what you do, then you have waived any and all constitutional privacy rights in any communications or other use of the ISP. For example, the government notes with respect to Yahoo! (which has similar TOS):
Because a customer acknowledges that Yahoo! has unlimited access to her email, and because she consents to Yahoo! disclosing her email in response to legal process, compelled disclosure of email from a Yahoo! account does not violate the Fourth Amendment.
The government relied on a Supreme Court case where a bank customer could not complain when the government subpoenaed his cancelled checks from the bank itself and where the Court noted:

The checks are not confidential communications but negotiable instruments to be used in commercial transactions. All of the documents obtained, including financial statements and deposit slips, contain only information voluntarily conveyed to the banks and exposed to their employees in the ordinary course of business.

In essence, the government is arguing that the contents of your emails have been voluntarily conveyed to your ISP and that you therefore have no privacy rights to it anymore. In a previous proceeding in Warshak, the government went even further, arguing that automated spam filters, antivirus software, and other automated processes that examine the contents of your email, establish that you cannot possibly expect your communications to be private.

What is silly about this is the fact that, at least for the government, the argument is unnecessary. The Fourth Amendment protects against "unreasonable" invasions of privacy interests. The government could effectively argue that, by obtaining a subpoena or other court order for the records which are relevant to a legitimate investigation, the search or seizure is reasonable, and therefore comports with the Fourth Amendment. All subpoenas and demands for documents infringe some privacy interest, and unless overbroad, they are generally reasonable. The statute which permits government access to stored communication pursuant to a mere subpoena may likewise be perfectly reasonable and may withstand constitutional scrutiny. But that doesn't mean that the Constitution doesn't apply.

No, the government is seeking to eliminate any Constitutional privacy interest in email. Under this standard, if the FBI walked into your employer or ISP, and simply took your email (no warrant, no court order, no probable cause, no nothing), you would have no constitutional argument about the seizure, because you had abandoned your expectation of privacy. This appears to be more than a mere argument in support of the constitutionality of a Congressional email privacy and access scheme. It represents what may be the fundamental governmental position on Constitutional email and electronic privacy - that there isn't any.

And that, frankly, scares me.

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/456





Beware! T-Mobile Owns the Color Magenta

I’m not sure I fully understand… should that have been written the color “Magenta™”? The absurdity is probably confusing to you as well. The total hue domination by T-Mobile and its bigger Deutsche Telekom (DT) has been going on for several years, but has gained more attention lately. DT not only trademarked magenta, they also have a trademark on the use of their two 2 color logo… More can be read at servicemarks.

Don’t worry trademarks only apply to the industry sector that they are registered under and since DT applied for their trademark in the tele-communications sector you just can’t use the color magenta around anything to do with phones, digital media… oh and just about anything on the internet.
http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/200...color-magenta/





O2 Removes 200MB Fair-Use Policy for UK iPhone
Nik Fletcher

There's been a fair bit of debate (and disappointment) with the O2 200 megabyte 'Fair-Use' data transfer policy that was expected to appear with the U.K. iPhone contracts this Friday. Thankfully, it seems O2 has heard us: late last night, the Telegraph newspaper revealed that O2 has now scrapped the limit on just how much data we will be able to burn through. Although the Telegraph refers to a "200 megabit" limit, as far as we know the limit actually was measured in megabytes. O2's terms and conditions page now says:

"There is no limit on the monthly network usage. However if we feel that your activities are so excessive that other customers are detrimentally affected, we may give you a written warning (by email or otherwise). In extreme circumstances, if the levels of activity do not immediately decrease after the warning, we may terminate or suspend your Services."

Surprised that O2 has come full circle? We are too, but we're also very glad to see that they're listening to their potential customers (even if using the phone as a modem is unsurprisingly against the terms of your contract). If you're wondering about the story behind the Apple / O2 partnership, there's also a fascinating insight to the deal found on the Telegraph website.

The iPhone goes on sale at 6:02pm on Friday (seriously - did O2 really need another plug?).
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/11/04/o2-re...for-uk-iphone/





Google Enters the Wireless World
Miguel Helft and John Markoff

Google took its long-awaited plunge into the wireless world today, announcing that it is leading a broad industry alliance to transform mobile phones into powerful mobile computers that could accelerate the convergence of computing and communications.

Mobile phones based on Google’s software are not expected to be available until the second half of next year. They will be manufactured by a variety of handset companies, including HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung and be available in the United States through T-Mobile and Sprint.

The phones will also be available through the world’s largest mobile operator, China Mobile, with 332 million subscribers in China, and the leading carriers in Japan, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, as well as T-Mobile in Germany, Telecom Italia in Italy and Telefónica in Spain.

The 34-member Open Handset Alliance, as the group is called, also includes many of the leading makers of mobile phone chips, like Broadcom, Intel, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, as well as SiRF Technology Holdings, Marvell Technology Group, Nvidia and Synaptics. EBay (which owns the Internet calling service Skype), Nuance Communications, NMS Communications and Wind River Systems are also members of the group.

The technology is expected to provide cellular handset manufacturers and wireless operators with capabilities that match and potentially surpass those using smartphone software made by Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Palm, Research in Motion and others. In contrast to the existing competitors, Google’s software will be offered freely under “open source” licensing terms, meaning that handset manufacturers will be able to use it at no cost and be free to add new features to differentiate their products.

As speculation about Google’s efforts trickled out over the last several months, expectations that the company would build what has been called a Google Phone or GPhone have mounted.

But for now at least, Google will not put its brand on a phone. The software running on the phones may not even display the Google logo. Instead, Google is giving the software away to others who will build the phones. The company invested heavily in the project to ensure that all of its services are available on mobile phones. Its ultimate goal is to cash in on the effort by selling advertisements to mobile phone users, just as it does on Internet-connected computers.

“We are not building a GPhone; we are enabling 1,000 people to build a GPhone,” said Andy Rubin, Google’s director of mobile platforms, who led the effort to develop the software.

Mr. Rubin said the open-source strategy would encourage rapid innovation and lower the bar to entry in the highly competitive handset market, where software accounts for an increasing share of the cost of making a phone.

Google’s long list of powerful partners illustrates the substantial inroads that the company has made in the highly competitive industry as well the challenges still facing the giant search engine firm. For example, the two largest cellular carriers in the United States, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which together account for 52 percent of the market, are not part of the alliance.

Still, alliance members, which contributed technology to the project, said they had high hopes for it.

“Just like the iPhone energized the industry, this is a different way to energize the industry,” said Sanjay Jha, chief operating officer of Qualcomm, which makes chips used in wireless phones. Mr. Jha said the Google technology would bring better Internet capabilities to moderately priced phones. He also said that innovation could accelerate, as developers would be able to enhance the software as they saw fit.

Users would have the ability to load up their phones with new features and third-party programs.

“Today the Internet experience on hand-held devices is not optimized,” said Peter Chou, chief executive of HTC, one of the largest makers of smartphones. “The whole idea is to optimize the Internet experience.” Mr. Chou, whose company makes several phones based on Microsoft’s software, which are largely aimed at business users, said the phones based on Google’s technology would probably be marketed primarily to consumers.

The alliance represents a bold move by Google and its partners that mirrors the company’s efforts in the desktop computing industry to give away software and services and gain revenue through targeted advertising. As such, the new software strategy is a potential competitive threat to Microsoft and other mobile software and hardware designers.

John O’Rourke, general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile business, said he was skeptical about the ease with which Google will be able to become a major force in the smartphone market. He pointed out that it had taken Microsoft more than half a decade to get to the stage where the company now does business with 160 mobile operators in 55 countries around the world.

“They may be delivering one component that is free,” he said. “You have to ask the question, what additional costs come with commercializing that? I can tell you that there are a bunch of phones based on Linux today, and I don’t think anyone would tell you it’s free.”

Microsoft is expected to sell about 12 million Windows Mobile phones this year, accounting for about 10 percent of the smartphone market, according to IDC. Apple, which began selling its iPhone last summer, accounts for 1.8 percent of the market.

The Google-led alliance also presents a potential conundrum to cellular operators, who have invested billions to build their networks and acquire customers. As phones become more like computers, they fear they will miss out on the potential bonanza of mobile advertising as Google and others take their share of the revenue.

Mr. Jha, of Qualcomm, said he believes that Google is working with carriers to reach common ground.

Google’s entry into the phone software business could present prickly issues for at least one other person: Eric E. Schmidt, the company’s chief executive. Mr. Schmidt sits on the board of Apple, and while Google is not making or selling phones, it will be providing a phone operating system to Apple competitors.

A brief demonstration of the Google software recently suggests that phones made using the technology will have features and design similar to the Apple iPhone. Mr. Rubin demonstrated a hand-held touch-screen device that gave an immersive view of Google Earth, the company’s three-dimensional visualization software.

Mr. Rubin, who is 44 years old and is a veteran Silicon Valley designer, said the software system that Google has designed is based on the Linux operating system and Sun Microsystems’ Java language. It is designed so programmers can easily build applications that connect to independent Web services.

As an example, Mr. Rubin said the company’s StreetView feature of Google Maps could easily be coupled — mashed up, in technology speak — with another service listing the current geographical location of friends.

Mr. Rubin also said that a program like Gmail could attach a photo to an e-mail message, regardless of whether the photo was stored in the phone’s memory or on a Web site.

A week from today, the alliance plans to make available tools for third-party programmers, called a software developers’ kit, Mr. Rubin said. But the group’s core technology itself will not be made available under an open-source license until it is commercially ready sometime next year, Mr. Rubin said.

Mr. Rubin also said that in the future, the Google technology could be used in other portable devices, including small hand-held computers and car navigation systems.

Google’s phone software is named Android. Mr. Rubin, formerly an engineer at Apple and General Magic, was involved in the design for the Sidekick cellphone while running a company called Danger. Mr. Rubin later founded a company named Android, which Google acquired in 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/te...gphone.html?hp





Checking In on Radiohead’s Experiment
Mike Nizza

Fill in the blanks on Radiohead’s Web site.

“Way to go Radiohead!” was the first of many excited comments on news last month that Radiohead was letting its customers set the price of its new album. Industry observers were just as excited, heralding a game-changing moment. But what happened afterwards?

Setting the tone early was a British music site that put sales figures at 1.2 million after 10 days. That was seen as a huge success, with the middleman being unceremoniously kicked to the curb.

But a study released today doubts that huge figure, and also initial impressions that a surprising amount of customers were choosing to pay, even when they could legally get it for free. (As for illegal downloads, Forbes estimated about a half a million took place in the same time frame.)

Based on the internet activity of 2 million people in its database, ComScore said that about 1.2 million people visited Radiohead’s Web site during the entire month of October — not just the first 10 days — and “a significant percentage of visitors ultimately” downloaded it*.

And most decided against paying, with only 2 out of 5 people paying an average of $6 for the album, “In Rainbows.” Here are the statistics, from a news release:

–Paid Downloads: 38% (worldwide) | 40% (U.S.) | 36% (Non-U.S.)
–Free Downloads: 62% (worldwide) | 60% (U.S.) | 64% (Non-U.S.)

“That’s a large group that can’t be ignored and its time to come up with new business models to serve the freeloader market,” Fred Wilson, managing director of Union Square Ventures in New York, told Canada’s Financial Post.

Another commentator talking to Bloomberg News suggested that album sales weren’t the whole story:

“You could argue that it makes economic sense for the band to open up their music to new listeners, which may open up ticket sales and merchandise sales down the road,'’ Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at ComScore, said in an interview.

Still, the music world awaits the official sales figures from Radiohead, but its business representatives at Courtyard Management have refused to confirm anything until after the holidays.

And the ways that Radiohead was selling its music grew even more innovative earlier today, when EMI — one of the major record labels that the band apparently seeks to leave in the dust — announced that it would be releasing a Radiohead box set on a USB stick for about $166. It includes 7 albums, but not the one that most people are choosing to buy for free.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200.../index.html?hp





Plugging In to Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord
Ben Ratliff

Mike Day, singer and guitarist, gathered his rock band around him.

Dressed in a faded black T-shirt, jeans and skateboard sneakers, he bent his shaved head. “God,” he said, “I hope these songs we sing will be much more than the music. I know it’s so difficult at times when we’re thinking about chords and lyrics and when to hit the right effect patch, but would you just help that to become second nature, so that we can truly worship you from our hearts?”

A few minutes later the band broke into three songs of slightly funky, distorted rock with heaving choruses, and the room sang along: 1,500 or so congregants of High Desert Church here, where Mr. Day, 33, is a worship director. This was Sunday night worship for the young-adult subset of the church’s congregation, but it was also very much a rock show, one that has helped create a vibrant social world in this otherwise quiet desert town.

There has been enormous growth in the evangelical Protestant movement in America over the last 25 years, and bands in large, modern, nondenominational churches — some would say megachurches — like this one, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, now provide one of the major ways that Americans hear live music.

The house bands that play every weekend in High Desert Church — there are a dozen or so — scavenge some of their musical style from the radio and television. They reflect popular taste, though with lyrics about the power of God, not teenage turmoil.

They are not aiming for commercial success. Church-based Christian rock — often referred to as C.C.M., for contemporary Christian music — does not exist primarily to compete in mainstream culture; it exists first to bring together a community.

“When you start a church,” said Tom Mercer, 52, the senior pastor, “you don’t decide who you’re going to reach and then pick a music style. You pick a music style, and that determines who’s going to come.”

High Desert Church has a sprawling concrete campus that includes a lavish auditorium, a gym, classrooms and office space for its 70 employees. Once a traditional Baptist church, it moved toward nondenominational and evangelical Christianity in the mid-1990s and experienced steep growth. Now more than 8,000 people attend services here at least twice a month.

A number of factors encouraged the church’s expansion, Mr. Mercer and others say. For one thing, there are more people in Victorville to receive the gospel: since the early 1990s the region has been experiencing a population surge, as city dwellers have moved north from Los Angeles County, seeking lower real estate costs.

For another, in 1993 the church hired Jeff Crandall, the drummer for a Christian punk band called the Altar Boys, as its music director.

Mr. Crandall, 46, spent more than a decade crossing the country in vans, playing in churches, nightclubs and high school gyms, fighting the battle for a more progressive and aggressive worship music. “I knew that the future, even in the early ’80s, was with bands in churches,” he said. “I liked hymns as a kid, but I just didn’t see myself waving my arms and directing them. I’ve always been one of those guys who tries to figure his own way.”

A Band for Every Age Group

What he did was to pack the church with rock ’n’ roll. He organized a rotation of bands, so the volunteering musicians — drawn from the largely commuter population of Victorville and its surrounding towns — would not exhaust themselves by playing to multiple services. And then he let them play, loudly.

High Desert Church holds three different large services over the weekend for three different age groups, with music tailored to each audience: Seven (so named for the number’s positive associations in the Bible), the 18-to-30-year-old set that made up Mr. Day’s audience; Harbor, the 30-to-55 group; and Classic, for people 55 and over. The church also maintains even more bands for services at the junior high, high school and elementary school levels. Each band carefully calibrates its sound toward the pop culture disposition of the target age group.

Young people and future generations are in fact the fixation of High Desert Church, which has already broken ground on building a children’s ministry complex called Pointe Discovery, a $20 million project financed entirely by worshiper donations. “If I ask God’s people to give me $20 million,” Mr. Mercer said during an interview in his corner office, “when I stand before God someday, I don’t want to hear him say, ‘Dude, you wasted a ton of my money.’ I want him to say, ‘You did a good job.’ My definition of a good job is that it will impact people until Christ comes back.”

‘Hey God’

Praise-rock is at the heart of that impact. The teenagers and young adults at High Desert — those who haven’t been attending services since birth — tend to say they joined the church for the teaching and the community, and stayed because of the bands. But some are clearly more enthusiastic about the music itself.

“I started out in Harbor, but I moved to Seven because I liked the music more,” said Tony Cherco, 32, a recent arrival to the church who would not have been out of place in the East Village: he wore a long beard and large rings in his earlobes. “Between Pastor Tom and the music of Seven, I was like, yes!”

To generalize, the music tailored to the Seven service is modern rock, with a modicum of wired aggressiveness. (In its sets before and after the pastor’s sermon, the band does play some adaptations of hymns, including a power-chord version of the doxology. It was arranged by the worship minister Matt Coulombe to approximate the droning, locomotive style of the secular New York rock band Secret Machines, one of his favorite groups.)

The music for Harbor, meanwhile, resembles U2 from about 1985, while the Classic crowd gets a softer and more acoustic sound, like the West Coast folk-rock of the 1970s.

For the children, in both their Sunday school classes and youth group events, the music is pop-punk. The idea is to keep their attention with high energy, then to slide gradually toward contemplation.

On a Saturday afternoon in October a group for the junior high contingent, called Power Surge, which included four guitarists and two bassists, played in the church gym, rehearsing a version of the Jason Wallis song “Hey God.” Fifteen girls performed choreographed hand motions to the music, which sounded like pious Ramones:

Hey, hey, hey, God I love you

Hey, hey, hey, God I need you

I know there’s not anything you can’t do

I know there’s nothing you won’t see me through

Hey God!

These bands don’t need to take all their cues from secular rock. Since the ’70s there have been Christian versions of all kinds of genres, from folk-rock to metal to punk. But the music heard at this church descends more directly from other Christian music.

The fountainheads are artists like Lincoln Brewster, a singer, guitarist and songwriter who began as a touring rock guitarist in the mid-’90s and later became music minister at several churches, before starting his own recording career. His highly melodic songs, as well as those by other Christian-rock artists like Chris Tomlin and Matt Redman, are performed here in nearly constant rotation.

Then there is Air One, a national FM radio network with 164 stations that serves as an index of the current Christian-rock movement and provides a playlist for many of the bands here. For the most part the groups at High Desert Church don’t write their own songs; they are high-functioning garage bands, playing cover versions. But they operate in a large, modern auditorium with top-quality sound, lights and video operated by young volunteers; there are smoke machines and overhead screens that announce the title of each song and its lyrics.

Staying Humble

Still, showmanship has its limits in praise-rock music. The musicians don’t want to distract themselves, or their audiences, from the higher purpose of serving God; in interviews they talked about not exuding rock-star charisma but instead remaining humble. “We’re not up there to have people say, ‘Wow, what an amazing band,’” Mr. Day said. His goal, he explained, was to play with excellence but to remain “transparent.”

“There’s a constant tension,” he continued, “between the audience and the people on the stage, all thinking, ‘O.K., music is a great tool, but the ultimate purpose is worship.’ And riding that tension is tough.”

The congregants also tend to respond fairly chastely. A performance at a Seven service may look like a rock show, with the audience dressed as fashionably as the band, but in some ways it represents an inversion of one.

The tall, solemn bassist Zac Foster, 15, played twice over the weekend: with the in-house high school praise band Fuel on Saturday, and with the Sunday morning junior high group as well. He has a six-string bass and a guitar strap with a large white cross on the front. And he is adamant about the idea of music as merely a means to an end.

“It’s structured, and we play well, but we’re still allowed to worship,” he said with a serious face. “Worship comes first. Music just falls into place.”

Bobby Stolp, 39, a drummer in several different bands here, agreed. “It’s all about the heart of worship,” he said. “God can enjoy a distorted guitar as well as a clean guitar. Especially when you’re playing it for him.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/ar...c/07prais.html





On the Road to Spread the Word of Good, Old-Fashioned Evil
Kelefa Sanneh

On Tuesday night, in a plush tour bus parked in this city’s scruffy downtown, a couple of Norwegians were talking about world music. They were talking about the competing musical traditions of Norway and Sweden. They were talking about Icelandic linguistics and Viking mythology. They were talking about indigenous scenes in Canada, India and lots of places in between. In other words, they were talking about heavy metal.

The Norwegians were Ivar Bjornson and Grutle Kjellson, who founded their metal band, Enslaved, 16 years ago. They were once identified with the spooky — and, for a time, hugely controversial — subgenre known as black metal, but they have sloughed off one label after another while slowly building a worldwide following.

Not a huge one: They are rock stars, more or less, in Norway, but they are decidedly underground figures in most of the rest of the world. Still, that a hundred or so fans came out to see them at the Crocodile Rock Café, a cavernous Allentown club, says something about the tenacity of the genre and the band. The members hurtled through a typically eerie, riveting set, propelled by tricky rhythms, keyboard atmospherics, mutating guitar riffs and careful but cathartic explosions of noise and screaming.

This was the fourth date of a grueling five-week tour, and the unglamorous surroundings only underscored the mixed blessing of being in a band like this one. Being a working metal band often means touring the world indefinitely.

On a chilly night at the Crocodile Rock, that might not have seemed like good news to the band members. But it should be good news to adventurous listeners around the country, including those in New York: Thursday night the band is scheduled to play the B. B. King Blues Club & Grill. And you don’t have to be an expert in Scandinavian history — or even a metal fan, really — to enjoy getting lost in the group’s epic, elegant music.

Enslaved went from being called “black metal” to being called “Viking metal” to being called “progressive metal,” though the members prefer the catch-all term “extreme metal.” And in an Internet age especially, extreme metal both transcends national boundaries and, in a fertile way, emphasizes them. “Evil” imagery exists everywhere, inspiring scenes all over the globe. And as old-fashioned Satanic imagery has given way to subtler allusions to pre-Christian culture, obsessive fans have gotten used to doing online homework to keep up with the lyric sheets. If you like Enslaved, for example, you probably know that Mr. Kjellson used to sing in Icelandic because of that language’s similarity to Old Norse, and you may even know something about ancient runes.

Now Mr. Kjellson mainly sings in English, partly in an attempt to close the language gap with non-Norwegian fans, many of whom had been following the band’s evolving interests by reading the English translations included in some albums. Mr. Bjornson said the foreignness of English was a benefit too: “That dissonance helps, getting into character, removing ourselves from our daily lives.”

On the most recent Enslaved album — a great CD from 2006 called “Ruun” (Candlelight USA) — the English-language lyrics are more suggestive than bombastic. Hints of the old black-metal misanthropy remain (“I do not pity life/I follow not pathetic order”), but the mood is more melancholy than pugnacious. The title track, one of the highlights of Tuesday’s show, is a crashing paean to the old gods, building from a prog-rock introduction to a seething climax: “Reach for them, see them turn away.”

From listening to the latest CD, you might never guess that Enslaved was once associated with one of the most reviled music scenes of all time. In the early 1990s Norwegian black metal made headlines with a series of high-profile events: one musician’s suicide, a spate of church burnings and the conviction of two prominent figures — Faust of Emperor and Varg Vikernes of Burzum — for murder.

One of Enslaved’s first releases was a split album with Emperor, and Mr. Bjornson admits that the media storm helped draw attention to Norwegian black metal. “People still regard Norway with a certain respect,” he said. “Not only because of all the scary stuff that happened — well, ‘weird’ is a better word — but because of how the scene developed, on its own.” Then, having benefited from the controversy, many bands associated with black metal had to figure out a way to live it down.

Enslaved did it by persevering and by changing: The members view “Monumension,” an excellent and mysterious-sounding album from 2001, as the beginning of a new phase. And in Norway the members of Enslaved are settling into their unlikely roles as respected veterans. Oddly enough, the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs sponsored a collaboration between members of Enslaved and the noisy electronic duo Fe-mail. The hybrid group is called Trinacria (you can hear live tracks at myspace.com/trinacria), and a full-length album is due next year. Extreme metal, which once seemed like a threat to Norway’s cultural heritage, is inevitably coming to be seen as part of it. How long before the government finances an ad campaign, inviting black-metal fans from around the world to come to the most evil country on Earth?

Certainly some sort of cultural exchange program seemed to be under way at the Crocodile Rock on Tuesday, where Mr. Kjellson kept saying, “You having a good time, Allentown?” Or, “Thank you, Allentown, Pennsylvania.” Or, “This is the last song for tonight, Allentown.”

Before long, the city name was starting to sound like a curse word, or maybe just a reminder that the life of a touring extreme-metal band is hard work. But Mr. Kjellson surely knows that the genre’s popularity in a handful of European countries is the exception, not the rule. Around the world metal endures — and, in its own subterranean way, flourishes — in nooks and crannies.

It was now early on Wednesday morning in empty downtown Allentown, and the small crowd in the big club remained. As the band prepared to play the savage title track from “Isa,” Mr. Kjellson said, “I guess most of you already know this one.” And he guessed right.

Enslaved will perform tonight at the B. B. King Blues Club & Grill, 237 West 42nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 997-4144; bbkingblues.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/ar...ic/08ensl.html





DVD Licensing Group to Vote on Closing Copying Loophole
Eric Bangeman

This week, the DVD Copy Control Association—the group responsible for CSS copy protection—is expected to vote on a Managed Copy Amendment that would close a loophole in the CSS license that allows home media server products like those made by Kaleidescape to legally rip DVDs and store encrypted copies on a hard drive.

The DVD CCA's vote is a belated response to a March ruling in which a judge ruled that Kaleidescape's home media server products do not violate the CSS license. In an opinion issued after a week-long trial, Judge Leslie C. Nichols found that the 20-page CSS spec was not actually included in the license agreement and that Kaleidescape had made good-faith efforts to ensure it was in full compliance with the license.

The centerpiece of the trial was the DVD CCA's often-confusing licensing agreement, which was birthed from a series of 100+ meetings involving entertainment industry lawyers and engineers. An amendment to the CSS license up for a vote this week would expressly prohibit licensees from selling systems that allow users to copy and store CSS-encrypted movies. A previous attempt to alter the license in June failed.

Kaleidescape CEO Michael Malcolm is threatening the DVD CCA with a lawsuit if the amendment is approved. "You should be aware before you vote on the proposed amendment that you expose yourself, your employer, and the DVD CCA to serious and substantial antitrust liability if you vote for either amendment," Malcolm wrote in a letter to the DVD CCA seen by Video Business magazine. Malcolm believes the rules are anticompetitive and targeted at his company specifically.

Attorneys from the DVD CCA say that's not the case. Instead, they argue that the license change is to protect digital content on DVDs, according to the EE Times.

Malcolm also believes that the Managed Copy Amendment is pointless. "The only mandatory feature of the current 'Managed Copy Amendment' is... the prohibition on the making of persistent copies," says the letter. "All the rest is illusory and is nothing more than another shameless attempt by certain members of the DVD-CCA to put Kaleidescape out of business."

The proposed amendment is another indication of how out of touch Big Content is with the desires of consumers, and the DVD CCA's attempts to alter the license at this stage of the game seems rather absurd, especially given the fact that the CSS DRM in question has long since been defeated. It's like trying to close the barn door after the horses have left—and been replaced by the automobile.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-loophole.html





Alibaba Shares Nearly Triple in Debut
David Barboza

Shares of Alibaba.com, China’s biggest electronic commerce company, nearly tripled today in a spectacular opening day of trading, creating an Internet giant and one of the world’s wealthiest technology companies.

The company’s public stock offering raised more than $1.5 billion in Hong Kong, nearly equaling Google’s share sale in the United States in 2004.

Shares of Alibaba ended the day with a market value of $25.7 billion, making it the second richest Internet company in Asia, after Yahoo Japan, and not far behind Amazon.com, which is valued at about $35 billion.

Alibaba.com is already widely known here as a business-to-business Web site that connects small entrepreneurs in China with buyers or sellers of goods around the world. The company now joins Baidu, Tencent, Sina and Sohu as one of the biggest players in the world’s fastest-growing Internet market.

There are already more than 160 million Internet users in China, second only to the United States, and this country’s Internet tycoons are cashing in on the explosive use of the Web here for everything from search and social networking to delivering music tones for mobile phones.

Shares of Alibaba soared more than 193 percent today, to close at about $5.09 on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The shares opened trading at the equivalent of about $1.74 but were priced in Hong Kong dollars.

The highly anticipated offering had also helped shares of Yahoo rise in recent weeks as investors bet that the company’s prospect would give its partner a lift. Alibaba’s parent company operates Yahoo China and the Chinese auction site taobao.com, which competes with eBay in China.

Alibaba’s blockbuster debut came just a day after PetroChina, one of China’s biggest oil companies, listed its stock in Shanghai in the world’s biggest offering this year, raising nearly $9 billion.

Indeed, for the last two years, China has dominated the financial markets with huge stock offerings by state-owned energy companies, bank, private real estate companies and high-flying technology companies, like Giant Interactive, the Shanghai-based gaming company that went public on the New York Stock Exchange last Thursday.

Although analysts have warned that the China’s stock markets, particularly in Shanghai and Shenzhen, may be a bubble, investors continue to pile in, particularly for initial public offerings in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Alibaba, though, was perhaps in even higher demand because only a handful of Internet companies have gone public in China in recent years, and Alibaba is one of the country’s biggest new brands.

The company was founded in 1999 in Hangzhou, about two hours from Shanghai, by a former English teacher named Jack Ma, one of this country’s best-known entrepreneurs.

Shares of the company were in heavy demand partly because Alibaba has brought a unique model to the market that appears to be a kind of proxy for this country’s hungry entrepreneurs, tracking their deals with global suppliers of every kind of product, from textiles and agriculture products to trinkets. The company has about 25 million registered members.

Like China’s other big Internet companies, Alibaba is being richly valued by investors based on the size of its prospective earnings, now selling for about 300 times this year’s earnings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/te...d-alibaba.html





Yahoo C.E.O. Defends Company in China Case
AP

Yahoo Inc.'s chief executive and top lawyer on Tuesday defended their company's involvement in the jailing of a Chinese journalist. Irate lawmakers accused them of collaborating with an oppressive communist regime.

''While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,'' House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said angrily after hearing from the two men.

Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callahan offered apologies and promises to do better but no specific commitments. Lawmakers insisted that Yahoo along with other companies must use its market strength to change China, not just comply with the government's demands in order to gain access to tens of millions of Internet users.

''I deeply regret the consequences of what the Chinese government has done to the dissidents. My heart goes out to the families,'' said Yang.

''We have to do a whole lot better and improve in the future,'' he said. ''I don't think anyone was trying to do anything wrong.''

Journalist Shi Tao was sent to jail for 10 years for engaging in pro-democracy efforts deemed subversive after Yahoo turned over information about his online activities requested by the Chinese authorities in 2004.

Lantos indignantly urged Yang and Callahan to apologize to Shi's mother, who was sitting directly behind them.

Yang and Callahan turned around from the witness table and bowed from their seats to the woman, Gao Qinsheng, who bowed in return and then began to weep.

After the hearing, the Yahoo officials met with Gao Qinsheng for the first time to hear her concerns.

Callahan was summoned before the committee to explain testimony he gave Congress last year. He said then that Yahoo had no information about the nature of China's investigation when the company handed over information that ended up being used to convict Shi.

Callahan subsequently has acknowledged that Yahoo officials had received a subpoena-like document that made reference to suspected ''illegal provision of state secrets'' -- a common charge against political dissidents.

He reiterated Tuesday that he regretted his failure to inform the committee of this new information once he learned of it months after his congressional testimony.

But Callahan continued to insist that Yahoo did not know the real nature of the Chinese investigation because the order was not specific.

''I cannot ask our local employees to resist lawful demands and put their own freedom at risk, even if, in my personal view, the local laws are overbroad,'' Callahan said.

Lantos interrupted him.

''Why do you insist on repeating the phrase 'lawful orders'? These were demands by a police state,'' Lantos said.

''It's my understanding that under Chinese law these are lawful,'' Callahan responded after some hesitation.

Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., compared Yahoo's cooperation with the Chinese government to companies that cooperated with Nazi Germany during World War II.

Lawmakers demanded to know what Yahoo would do to help Shi's family and reacted with derision when there was no concrete answer.

No one on the committee came to the company's defense.

Yang and Callahan declined to outright endorse legislation approved by the committee that would prohibit U.S. Internet businesses from providing user information to Internet-restricting countries.

Lawmakers couldn't get the pair to commit to settling a lawsuit filed in California earlier this year on behalf of Shi and another journalist jailed after Yahoo provided information to China.

Callahan also couldn't say whether there were outstanding demands for information from the Chinese government to Yahoo, or how Yahoo would react today for an information demand from Beijing.

In 2005 Yahoo bought a 40 percent stake in China's biggest online commerce firm, Alibaba.com, which has taken over running Yahoo's mainland China operations. So Callahan said Yahoo no longer controls its operations in China.

Smith dismissed that as ''plausible deniability.''

Callahan did say that in going into future markets such as Vietnam, ''I would hope to have a structure in place ... that we would be able to resist those demands.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...ess-Yahoo.html





IBM Predicts the End of Advertising as We Know It
Press release

Global Business Services unveiled its new report, "The End of Advertising as We Know It," forecasting greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous 50.

To examine the factors influencing advertising and explore future scenarios, IBM surveyed more than 2,400 consumers and 80 advertising executives globally. The IBM report shows increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked.

Traditional advertising players risk major revenue declines as budgets shift rapidly to new, interactive formats, which are expected to grow at nearly five times that of traditional advertising. To survive in this new reality, broadcasters must change their mass audience mind-set to cater to niche consumer segments, and distributors need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices. Advertising agencies must experiment creatively, become brokers of consumer insights, and guide allocation of advertising dollars amid exploding choices. All players must adapt to a world where advertising inventory is increasingly bought and sold in open exchanges vs. traditional channels.

"Digital entertainment is experiencing faster adoption than anyone had previously anticipated. The advertising community needs to dramatically re-orient its business to serve consumers who increasingly access content in non-linear formats," said Bill Battino, Communications Sector managing partner, IBM Global Business Services. "Companies must re-look at how they serve content to consumers with business models based much more on engaging consumers in a relationship."

The report observes four change drivers tipping the advertising industry balance of power: control of attention, creativity, measurement, and advertising inventories. As shown in IBM's global digital media and entertainment consumer survey released in August, consumers' attention has shifted, with personal Internet time rivaling TV time. Consumers have tired of interruption advertising, and are increasingly in control of how they interact, filter, distribute, and consume their content, and associated advertising messages. IBM's survey findings demonstrated that half of DVR owners watch 50 percent or more of programming on re-play, and that traditional video advertising doesn't translate online: 40 percent of respondents found ads during an online video segment more annoying than any other format. Amateurs and semi-professionals are increasingly creating low cost advertising content that threatens to bypass creative agencies, while publishers and broadcasters are broadening their own creative roles. Advertisers are demanding accountability and more specific individual consumer measurements across advertising platforms. Self-service advertising exchanges are attracting revenues that were once exclusively sold through proprietary channels or transactions.

Advertising Experts' Expectations in Line with Global Consumer Trends

IBM's research found that advertising experts recognize the changing nature of consumers and also anticipate dramatic changes on the horizon. More than half of ad professionals polled by IBM expect that in the next five years open advertising exchanges (currently led by companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL) will take 30 percent of current revenues now commanded by traditional broadcasters and media. Nearly half of the advertising survey respondents anticipate a significant (greater than 10%) revenue shift away from the 30-second spot within the next five years, and almost 10 percent of respondents thought there would be a dramatic (greater than 25 percent) shift. Two-thirds of advertising experts surveyed by IBM expect 20 percent of advertising revenue to move from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years.

Saul Berman, IBM Media & Entertainment Strategy and Change practice leader, said, "Advertising remains integral to pop culture and continues to fund a significant portion of entertainment around the world. But it needs to morph into new formats and offer more intrinsic value to consumers, who will have more choices. The wealth of new advertising outlets means consumer analytics will have a more prominent role than ever regardless of where you reside in the value chain. Young people in particular have grown accustomed to not paying for content. Despite greater consumer control over content and advertising, we envision a world where consumers will continue to prefer to view advertising rather than pay for content directly."

The report indicates by 2012, the landscape of the industry will change so profoundly that to survive, advertising industry players need to take aggressive steps to innovate in three key areas:

• Consumers: making micro-segmentation and personalization paramount in marketing;
• Business models: how and where advertising inventory is sold, the structure and forms of partnerships, revenue models and advertising formats;
• Business design and infrastructure: All players need to redesign organizational and operating capabilities across the advertising lifecycle to support consumer and business model innovation: consumer analytics, channel planning, buying/selling, creation, delivery and impact reporting.

IBM believes that all players will need to invest heavily in consumer analytics and automation to gain more insights about the consumer and how to reach them. For example, interactive advertising paired with consumer analytics provides compelling knowledge of who viewed and acted on an ad rather than estimates of impressions, allowing advertisers to maximize revenue and yield management. Industry players will also need to examine if they have right resources and capacity to handle increased marketing promotions and integrated advertising sales. Finally, IBM observes that the dramatic increase in both the number and variety of promotions is leading to greater investment in tools to digitally transform and reduce the cost of companies' workflows including content management, creative development, production and sign-off processes.

The complete report with detailed recommendations for broadcasters, distributors and advertising agencies can be found at: www.ibm.com/media/endofadvertising
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pr...ease/22570.wss





Facebook to Turn Users Into Endorsers
Saul Hansell

Facebook wants to turn every member into a spokesman for its advertisers. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of the superhot social network, today announced what the company calls “social ads.”

The ads expand what has been one of the most powerful features of Facebook, the news feed, where members see a list of what their friends are doing — photos from their parties, new friends, favorite bands and so on.

Facebook now will give advertisers the ability to create their own profile pages on its system that will let users identify themselves as fans of a product. Each user’s news feed will contain items like “Bobby Smith is now a fan of Toyota Prius.”

News feeds can be linked to outside Web sites as well, so users can tell friends about what they rented at Blockbuster or are auctioning on eBay.

Facebook will offer all of those features to advertisers free. What it will charge for, however, is appending an advertisement to these news items. Toyota could buy the right to put a photo and a short message under every news-feed post that links to the Prius.

In addition, Friends of Bobby, to continue this example, will see banner ads for Toyota throughout Facebook’s site. At the top of each of these ads will be a photo of Bobby and the fact that he likes the Prius.

“Nothing influences a person more than the recommendation of a trusted friend,” said Mr. Zuckerberg.

In addition, Facebook will allow advertisers to tap into the vast stores of data that its users provide. They can display ads limited to people with certain interests, location, political views, favorite media, education and relationship status.

Mr. Zuckerberg did not discuss the prices for these advertisements. But he did say that they would be enabled tonight. The company announced an initial roster of advertisers including Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Travelocity and Condé Nast.

James W. Keyes , the chief executive of Blockbuster, said his company wanted to take part in a low-key way.

“There is a fine line we walk,” he said. “We debated long and hard about whether to put the Blockbuster logo on the Facebook site. We are not trying to induce a particular behavior. If users accept us as a place to share ideas with their friends about their favorite movies, over time that will stimulate purchase behavior. “

Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook had had 50 million users in the last month. And 25 million users visit Facebook each day. The company displays 65 billion pages on which advertisements can be displayed each month.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/bu...-facebook.html





Facebook Employees Know What Profiles You Look at

"My friend got a call from her friend at Facebook, asking why she kept looking at his profile," says a privacy-conscious source at a major tech company. Turns out Facebook employees can (and do) check out anyone's profile. Not only that, but they also see which profiles a user has viewed -- a major privacy violation. If you've been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama's intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it's considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.

Facebook has a history of protecting profiles from outsiders. The site once sent cease-and-desist letters to two of Valleywag's sister blogs for publishing certain student profiles.

The site does not allow regular users to see which profiles other users have seen. While one third-party application lets users voluntarily make their profile-visiting known, no application allows one to "spy" on the activity of an unknowing user.

Checking who's viewed a profile may be how Facebook found the tipster who violated their terms of service by sending Valleywag Steve Ballmer's profile. But were they violating their own terms?

Well, Facebook's privacy policy doesn't explicitly reserve or waive employees' right to check out your profile for any reason. Of course, the practice still reeks of skunkery -- it's one thing to check profiles in the course of business, but these people are looking up records for kicks. This is a company with $150 million in projected revenues this year and a gigantic ad deal with Microsoft, not a corner video store. The privacy of millions is at stake. Google clearly promises not to crawl through mail or search records with anything but a computer program, and even AOL apologized for releasing semi-anonymous search data and violating its privacy policy.

We have no idea what else employees can see. Do they look at your messages? Your private gifts? Who knows? (Really, who knows? Email me or the tipline. Unlike some, we'll protect your identity.)
http://valleywag.com/tech/scoop/face...-at-315901.php





Facebook: More Popular Than Porn
Bill Tancer

When I wrote last week's column comparing the social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook, I included a line after my signature stating that I had only 124 friends on Facebook, and urged readers to add me as their friends. As of today I have 261 new Facebook friends, the majority of which are Generation Y college students.

I turned to Hitwise data to find out more about them. By examining which websites social-network users visit after logging into their profiles, we can gain a bit of insight into how sites like Facebook fit into their members' daily online lives. The data showed that after other social networks, the most clicked-on category of sites was search engines, with 11.6% of all downstream visits. Web-based e-mail services were next with 8.5%. Blogs came in third in popularity at 6.1%, claiming more than four times the number of visits to traditional news sites, which logged 1.5% of downstream visits.

Perhaps a more interesting — and more accurate — way to figure out where college students are going online is to assess which of the 172 web categories tracked by Hitwise get the most hits from 18- to 24-year-olds. Here's a shocker: Porn is not No. 1. I've actually been puzzled by the decrease in visits to the Adult Entertainment category over the last two years. Visits to porn sites have dropped from 16.9% of all site visits in the U.S. in October 2005 to 11.9% as of last week, a 33% decline. Currently, for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines. Not so for 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom social networks rank first, followed by search engines, then web-based e-mail — with porn sites lagging behind in fourth. If you chart the rate of visits to social-networking sites against those to adult sites over the last two years, there appears to be a strong negative correlation (i.e., visits to social networks go up as visits to adult sites go down). It's a leap to say there's a real correlation there, but if there is one, then I'd bet it has everything to do with Gen Y's changing habits: they're too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin. Imagine.

This reshaped online landscape leaves me feeling old and out of the loop. It seems that social-networking sites have not only usurped porn in popularity, but they've also gobbled up time Gen Y-ers used to spend on traditional e-mail and IM. When you can reach all of your friends through Facebook or MySpace, there's little reason to spend time in your old-school inbox. So, if social networking is becoming e-mail 2.0, then perhaps Microsoft's recent $240 million dollar payout for such a small stake in Facebook isn't that ridiculous.

The reality is that Facebook isn't just for kids. Last week — and this was a highlight — my dad, who just turned 75, added me as a friend on Facebook. I considered sending him a virtual beer to celebrate the occasion, but I didn't think either of us would see the point. Back in my day, we drank beers out of bottles and cans — we didn't have these new-fangled virtual beers. But, then again, I think that's something I probably still have in common with the younger generation, something I don't need Hitwise data to back up: the love of a good old-fashioned beer.

Let the messages roll in.
http://www.time.com/time/business/ar...678586,00.html





From last year

How Much Do Male Porn Actors Make?
Fox Salehi

Question
How much do male porn actors make, and how are they paid? I mean when you first get interviewed, do they pay by the inch, or by how attractive you are in general or by how much prior "profesional" experience you have in the industry. Do you get paid royalties for every dvd sold or every pay per view porn site visited? The reason I'm asking is that I'm just getting my feet wet in this business and thus far I've recieved a few "low-ball" offers and one offer where I could make over $1,000.00 per scene; but I have no frame of referenc to know what I should be getting for my perfomance.

Answer
James... you can make anything from $50 to $1500 per scene. You get paid per scene, and nothing more. No royalties, no inches, nothing to do with your attractiveness.

Here are some more ideas about how to get involved.

Getting into the porn industry is very very difficult if you are a man. You must be able to get it up, keep it up, and then cum within 2 or 3 minutes of being asked. That is a given. You have to be at least 7 inches and very thick, preferably over eight. You have to be in some kind of physical shape, and you have to have stamina. You have to be willing to work with any girl in any situation, and be prepared for stop-start sex.

Sending pictures will get you nowhere. You have to actually GO to the studios and introduce yourself and then they will take naked polaroids of you and get back to you. But even then, your chances are minimal.

There is always a market for porn actors, regardless of your background and personal requirements, but at the same time you have to have (a) talent, (b) luck, and (c) you must be in a good location. New York, Miami, San Fran, London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Prague, Budapest, Montreal, Toronto, Vegas, even Minneapolis all have decent porn-producing studios, but 95% of the top adult movies in the world today are produced in Porn Valley. That is the San Fernando Valley in NorthWest Los Angeles, California. If you don't live in or near that valley, your chances are automatically significantly smaller.

Once you're in the Valley, go to VCA Platinum, Elegant Angel, Metro or Wicked (in Chatsworth), Vivid (in Van Nuys) or Sin City (in Canoga Park). But as I said, your chances of getting hired as part of a walk-in are extremely low.

If you're looking for low-budget internet porn jobs, they are out there, and searching on yahoo and google and excite can be productive. Instead of looking for advertised jobs, look for actual sites which offer the kinds of porn you'd like to be involved in and think you have a chance of being involved in). Then, make sure the porn is made by and for the website itself, then contact the webmasters and owners of the site and try and strike up a negotiation for an appearance in a movie for them. Of course, you need to have your photographs and details online.

Now assuming you go to the Valley, or somewhere similar, the best advice is always to find a stunning girl who wants to be a pornstar, and go to a studio with her. The girl should specify that she wants to work with you and the - ouila - you have a job. They'll always hire a hot girl, and if she's only willing to work with you, you just received a free ticket into porn superstardom.

If you're looking to do gay porn, the girl is unneccessary and it will be ten times easier for you to get a job. Gay porn stars are always needed and if you're willing to do that, unless you're completely unattractive to most men, you will get work in LA.
The old/young/kinky/hardcore thing is vital, especially if you are not bringing a new female into the industry, as they call it. You have to be willing to do ANYTHING and they will often start you off on something gross. Naturally, you'll have to perform very well in your first few movies particularly, and then you'll also have to work for small amounts until you're well known.

If you're thinking of mainstream acting or what not, you almost certainly will be exposed by the paparazzi. Once you do porn, your ENTERTAINMENT career is permanently red-flagged. Just come up with an alias and make it clear that your identity is to be kept a secret. Many pornstars do that.

If you're looking to get into gay porn in particular, it's simple. Move to LA. Go to the gay porn studios (they're in the book, they're all over the place), and walk right in and audition. They'll know within five minutes if you're what they're looking for and they're ALWAYS hiring.

Agents and agencies are sometimes OK but usually not, be very careful. The best thing to do is to write to a few male porn stars and ask them how they got involved, and how to get involved, agency/agent/studio wise. They'll tell you. It will probably even be in their online bios.

If you have a girl with you, and she's hot, and she wants to do porn with you, I suggest you go to JIM SOUTH at World Modelling on Van Nuys Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, California. He's in the phone book.

Anyway... bottom line is... if you like the sun, go to Los Angeles. If you don't, go to Germany, the Czech Republic or Hungary. Because you're not going to find work anywhere else unless a miracle happens.
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Adult-Fil...orn-actors.htm