[JackSpratts]

In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real
Matt Richtel

The XXX industry has gotten too graphic, even for its own tastes.

Pornography has long helped drive the adoption of new technology, from the printing press to the videocassette. Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs.

They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors — from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes.

Hollywood is dealing with similar problems, but they are more pronounced for pornographers, who rely on close-ups and who, because of their quick adoption of the new format, are facing the issue more immediately than mainstream entertainment companies.

Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming.

“The biggest problem is razor burn,” said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director.

Ms. Daniels is also a skeptic. “I’m not 100 percent sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD,” she said.

The technology’s advocates counter that high definition, by making things clearer and crisper, lets viewers feel as close to the action as possible.

“It puts you in the room,” said the director known as Robby D., whose films include “Sexual Freak.”

The pornographers’ progress with HD may also be somewhat slowed by Sony, one of the main backers of the Blu-ray high-definition disc format. Sony said last week that, in keeping with a longstanding policy, it would not mass-produce pornographic videos on behalf of the movie makers.

The decision has forced pornographers to use the competing HD-DVD format or, in some cases, to find companies other than Sony that can manufacture copies of Blu-ray movies.

The movie makers assert that it is shortsighted of Sony to snub them, given how pornography helps technologies spread.

“When you’re introducing a new format, it would seem like the adult guys can help,” said Steven Hirsch, co-chief executive officer of Vivid Entertainment Group, a big player in the industry. Mr. Hirsch added that high definition, regardless of format, “is the future.”

Despite the challenges, pornographers — who distributed some 7,000 new movies on DVD last year and sold discs worth $3.6 billion in the United States — are rapidly moving to high-definition.

One major company, Digital Playground, plans to release its first four HD-DVD titles this month, and plans four new ones each month. In March, Vivid plans to release “Debbie Does Dallas ... Again,” its first feature for both HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

Vivid, like Digital Playground, has been shooting with high-definition cameras for two years to build up a catalog of high-definition movies. Both studios have released the movies in standard definition but plan to make the high-definition versions available as compatible disc players and televisions become more popular.

The studios said their experience using the technology gives them an advantage in understanding how to cope with the mixed blessing of hypercrisp images. Their techniques include using postproduction tools that let them digitally soften the actors’ skin tone.

“It takes away the blemishes and the pits and harshness and makes it look like they have baby skin,” said the director known as Joone, who made “Pirates,” one of the industry’s top-selling videos. It will be available this month in high-definition.

Joone does not use a last name, but he does use a number of techniques to keep his films blemish-free. They include giving out lifestyle tips.

“I tell the girls to work out more, cut down on the carbs, hit the treadmill,” he said.

Within the industry, the issue seems to have created a difference in perspective that cuts roughly along gender lines. Some male actors have begun using makeup to mitigate wrinkles or facial flaws, but generally they, and the male directors, are less worried about high-definition’s glare and more enamored of the technology.

Ms. Daniels said that attitude was just so typical of men.

“Men are all about outdoing each other, being up with the times, being cool, having the latest technology,” she said. “They’re willing to sacrifice our vanity and imperfections to beat each other” to high-definition, she said.

Other female actors say they generally like working with high-definition — except for the cosmetic-surgery part.

Jesse Jane, one of the industry’s biggest stars, plans to go under the knife next month to deal with one side effect of high-definition. The images are so clear that Ms. Jane’s breast implants, from an operation six years ago, can be seen bulging oddly on screen.

“I’m having my breasts redone because of HD,” she said.

The stretch marks on Ms. Jane from seven years ago when she gave birth to her son are also more apparent. But she deals with those blemishes in a simpler way: by liberal use of tanning spray.

Still, Ms. Jane likes the technology, as does her close friend Kirsten Price, 25, who appeared in “Manhunters” and “Just Like That.”

“HD is great because people want to see how people really look,” Ms. Price said. “People just want to see what’s real.”

Ms. Price is allowing them to do so, mostly. She had laser treatments to diminish tiny purple veins on her thighs that weren’t visible to viewers before.

“You can see things you cannot see with the naked eye. You see skin blemishes; you see cottage cheese,” said Robbie D. “But some cellulite is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s kind of sexy.”

The technology makes the experience more intimate, he said. “People look to adult movies for personal contact, and yet they’re still not getting it. HD lets them see a little bit more of the girl.”

That’s not necessarily good, said Savanna Samson, an actress who last December directed her first movie, “Any Way You Want Me.” During a scene in which she played a desperate housewife, she ran into a problem: the high-definition camera revealed she had a tiny ill-placed pimple.

“We kept stopping and trying to hide it. We put on makeup and powder, but there was no way,” Ms. Samson said. Finally, they tried another approach: “We just changed positions,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/bu...ia/22porn.html





Seagate CEO: I Help People "Watch Porn"
From Nov.

You think tech execs are boring? Check out a freewheeling interview with Seagate's Bill Watkins, who might be Silicon Valley's most outspoken CEO.
Jeffrey M. O'Brien

Sitting at the arm of a tech CEO during a corporate dinner is rarely as interesting as you might imagine. Usually, the CEO stays on message throughout the meal as a PR flak hovers, smiles, nods and prods the conversation along. Just keep the drinks coming, guys.

Not so with Bill Watkins, the mercurial, salty-mouthed Texan who runs the $15 billion hard-drive king Seagate Technology. At a San Francisco dinner on Tuesday evening, he was candid about his company's ultimate mission: "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."

Watkins is like that renegade uncle you heard so much about as a kid - the one that your parents were always afraid would be a bad influence. An adventure racer and sports junkie, Watkins spends $1.8 million of his company's money every year on Eco Seagate, flying 200 employees to New Zealand every year to do a modified triathlon.

It's a controversial approach to team-building - popular with participants and otherwise widely criticized as a waste of money. But it's consistent with Watkins' style. He does - and says - what he thinks is right.

At San Francisco's Town Hall restaurant Tuesday night, Watkins was game to discuss just about anything. We did go off-the-record once - a wise choice by him - but all else was fair game. Here's a peek at some of the ground we covered.

Seagate (Charts): "The biggest issues in our business are security, DRM (How can we unlock the content?), form factor and power. How can we make a low-power solution? These are the problems." As for upcoming products, "We'll have a terabyte drive out by the summer. It'll probably be about $700, but you know how it works. People will be able to get it for less."

Dell (Charts): "The 90s were all about the enterprise, and that's why Dell did so well. Now, it's all about the consumer, and that's why Dell is having problems. They don't understand the consumer. They want a competitor to the iPod and what do they do? They go with Creative."

'This business is about the consumer'

Apple (Charts): "Apple figured out a long time ago that this business is about the consumer, and the world finally caught up to them. Most companies have a technology and go looking for a problem to solve. Steve Jobs looked at what was happening - people were loading music onto their computers and wanted to take it with them - and he built a product to solve that problem."

Watkins, who has an understandable Apple-envy (after all, what is an iPod but a hard-drive with a sleek-but-simple operating system and nifty packaging?) also discussed the importance of building Seagate's brand. The company plans to introduce a number of consumer-oriented storage products at the tech trade show CES - think high-capacity drives that will be plug-and-play with any computer, so you don't have to carry a laptop - and is readying an ad campaign created by Apple's agency, TBWA Chiat/Day.

Mistakes & Management: "Let me tell you a great story. I had these guys go into Scientific Atlanta (Charts) trying to sell one of our drives for their boxes. Scientific Atlanta said 'They run too hot. We don't need that capacity and it needs to be cooler.' But our guys kept pushing our new product and talking about fans to cool them, so we lost the business. They didn't understand that with cable boxes, people don't want fans, because they don't want to hear that in their bedroom. And speed doesn't matter. So, eventually, I went in and won the business back, but it taught me a lesson. I need to teach my people how to talk to the customer better - and to listen."

The Blue-Ray/HD-DVD war: "Let them fight it out. They can have it. As far as I'm concerned, it's really a battle of electronic storage versus hardware."

'Come on guys, get over it'

The media: "People worry that newspapers are going out of business. So what? It's the content that's important. No one gives a s**t about the delivery mechanism. Think about mail. You had the pony express, truck delivery, airmail, email. You don't care how it gets to you. I read more now than I ever did, but I get it off my PC. I don't need to go down to the end of the driveway and pick up the newspaper. It's the content that's most important."

Sarbanes Oxley: "CEOs who whine about Sarbanes Oxley don't belong in their jobs. Come on guys, get over it."

The private equity boom: Seagate went private in 2000 - in a $2 billion buyout led by Silver Lake Partners - only to go public again in 2002, giving Watkins insight into the current privatization wave. "It's all about investors getting short-sighted. They've lost their patience. There's nothing these private equity firms do that Fidelity couldn't do. If you're Fidelity, and you own $40 million of my business, and you want a meeting to discuss how my business could be run more efficiently, I'll take the meeting. I'll listen. But that's not the way things work. When you go private, the only thing you think about is going public again."

The 2006 NCAA championship football game: A University of Texas alum, Watkins says going to school in Austin is a life sentence. He still can't get enough of his beloved Longhorns - and he was damned if he was going to miss the championship game. "I was at CES, in Vegas. I was supposed to take some meetings, but I said no. I went up to my room, ordered a pizza and watched one of the greatest college football games ever."

UT's 2003 loss in the NCAA basketball Final Four match to my alma mater, Syracuse University: "I lost so much money on that game."
'Never ask board members what they think'

The M&A boom: The Valley is no longer "about building a company and a culture. It's about making money for the top guys. If you look back to Intel (Charts) and Fairchild, they set out to build a company that would become massively large. Google (Charts) was another good example. They waited a long time. They wanted to build a big company. People don't think like that now." That includes, Watkins continues, YouTube. "YouTube is like eBay. The founders didn't know what they were doing. The consumers just took hold of it."

The HP pretexting scandal: When I ask if anyone really cared about this story outside of the media, Watkins shakes his head. "Wall Street certainly didn't. I saw it and thought, it's good to know there's a board of directors more dysfunctional than mine."

The secret to managing a board of directors: "You never ask board members what they think. You tell them what you're going to do."
http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/30/maga...tune/index.htm





Why ISPs Can Breathe Easier After a Porno Decision
Eric J. Sinrod

Internet service providers naturally are concerned about circumstances under which they potentially could be held liable for content posted by users. But after a recent decision by a Texas federal judge, ISPs can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

The judge dismissed an ISP as a defendant in the case of Doe v. Bates (PDF), even though the offending conduct at issue was alleged to be in violation of criminal law.

In that case, the plaintiffs alleged that the ISP knowingly hosted illegal child pornography on a particular e-group. An e-group is an Internet-based forum where users can engage in discussions and share files and the like. The e-group at issue was just one of a multitude of e-groups registered with this ISP.

While the individual defendant, by the name of Bates, had been imprisoned for his involvement as the moderator of the subject e-group, the plaintiffs claimed that the ISP had liability under a variety of legal theories, including negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, invasion of privacy and civil conspiracy. The plaintiffs also asserted that the offending Internet content violated criminal law against child pornography.
The legislative history, as summarized by the judge, supported immunity for ISPs precisely so that they could act with freedom in regulating "obscenity."

In turn, the ISP filed a motion to be dismissed from the case. The ISP argued that it was entitled to immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), with respect to content provided by another. The federal judge presiding over the case in Texas agreed. This is important, as it appears to be the first instance in which a court has confirmed that Section 230 ISP immunity applies in a private civil lawsuit, even when that suit is based on alleged criminal acts.

Specifically, the judge held that an intentional violation of criminal law is not an exception to the civil immunity provided to ISPs under the CDA. In analyzing the legislative history to Section 230, the judge found that Congress was clear in immunizing ISPs.

Indeed, according to the judge, "while the facts of a child pornography case such as this one may be highly offensive, Congress has decided that the parties to be punished and deterred are not the Internet service providers but rather those who created and posted the illegal material...such as the moderator of the...e-group."

The legislative history, as summarized by the judge, supported immunity for ISPs precisely so that they could act with freedom in regulating "obscenity." With such immunity, they can react and seek to limit improper content without fear that their regulating conduct could open them up to liability for grappling with the content in more than a passive role.

Thus, according to the judge, "Congress decided not to allow private litigants to bring civil claims based on their own beliefs that a service provider's actions violated the criminal laws."

This represents a major win for ISPs. Now they can argue that not only does Section 230 afford immunity for third-party content in the usual civil case but that immunity even extends to civil cases in which the underlying content also violates criminal laws.

Of course, this is just one decision by one federal judge, and it is not binding on other federal trial judges. It certainly is not binding on appellate courts that may consider the issue. But it still can be looked at by other courts for persuasive influence.
http://news.com.com/Why+ISPs+can+bre...3-6152830.html





Sharon Stone: Bad Movie Specialist
AP

At least someone was happy Sharon Stone reprised her notorious femme-fatale role with "Basic Instinct 2."

The box-office bomb received seven nominations Monday for the Razzie Awards that mock the bottom of Hollywood's barrel, among them worst picture and worst actress of the year.

Also receiving seven nominations was the Wayans brothers comedy "Little Man," about a thief posing as a baby, including worst picture and director for Keenen Ivory Wayans.

Shawn and Marlon Wayans shared a worst-actor nomination, while sisters Hilary and Haylie Duff shared a worst-actress nomination for "Material Girls."

"We stuck the siblings together to allow room for more dreck," said Razzies founder John Wilson.

The other worst-picture nominees were the fantasies "BloodRayne" and "Lady in the Water" and the thriller "The Wicker Man."

Winners will be announced Feb. 24, the day before the Academy Awards.

Joining Stone and the Duffs in the worst-actress category were Lindsay Lohan for "Just My Luck," Kristanna Loken for "BloodRayne" and Jessica Simpson for "Employee of the Month."

Stone previously won a Razzie as worst-actress for 1994's "The Specialist" and "Intersection."

"She's what we call a Razzie repeat offender. Perhaps even a recidivist," Wilson said.

"Basic Instinct 2" also had a nomination for worst screen couple for Stone's "lopsided breasts." Also nominated were co-star David Thewlis for worst supporting actor and the movie's director, Michael Caton-Jones.

Along with the Wayans, "Little Man" co-star Rob Schneider had a worst-actor nomination. The other nominees were Tim Allen for "The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause," "The Shaggy Dog" and "Zoom"; Nicolas Cage for "The Wicker Man"; and Larry the Cable Guy for "Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector."

The Razzies added a new category, worst excuse for family entertainment. The nominees were "Deck the Halls," "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties," "RV," "The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause" and "The Shaggy Dog."

The big surprise for Wilson was that all-time Razzies champ Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky Balboa" was not nominated. Stallone, who has 30 Razzie nominations and 10 wins, surprised many skeptics by delivering a sequel that was well received by audiences and earned better-than-expected reviews.

"At the first of the year, you could not have convinced me it wasn't going to be a Razzie contender," Wilson said. "I would like to publicly say that Stallone has made a good movie."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1029182





‘Idol’ Judge Says She’s Healthy and Sober
Edward Wyatt

Paula Abdul, the “American Idol” judge whose strange behavior in recent televised interviews has been the subject of widespread speculation, said Saturday that she was healthy and sober and had not been under the influence of drugs while working to promote the show.

At least three videos of Ms. Abdul have surfaced online in recent weeks showing her slurring words in interviews, giving nonsensical answers to questions and swaying in her seat. In one interview she appeared to fall asleep, keeping her eyes closed for about five seconds. Most of those taped segments, which had been posted on video-sharing sites like YouTube, have been removed from the Internet in recent days.

In an interview after a panel discussion with television journalists in Pasadena, Calif., on Saturday, Ms. Abdul said she had not been impaired during the interviews, on the show or at any time during her work promoting “American Idol,” Fox’s hit reality show.

“I’ve never been drunk,” she said. “I’m not under the influence of anything.” Referring to her tenure as a judge on “American Idol,” she added, “The first five years no one said anything about how I behaved or how I talked.”

Gossip about Ms. Abdul’s behavior started last year, when she seemed to make nonsensical comments on the show about some contestants. In one March broadcast, when asked about one contestant’s elimination, she said, “Simon says because one of them ate pizza and the other one ate salad.”

On the same show she also tangled her words when she tried to explain a strange proverb about a moth and a melon, prompting Randy Jackson, another “Idol” judge, to wonder aloud what she had been drinking.

On Saturday Ms. Abdul and Simon Cowell, the third “Idol” judge, said that incident started when Mr. Cowell whispered a made-up proverb about a moth and a melon in her ear just before the cameras turned to her. Confusion ensued.

This month an interview with a Seattle television station went awry when Ms. Abdul seemed to be answering questions different from those being asked. She said the problem was twofold: first, she was tired after doing three hours of interviews with stations across the country to promote the show; and second, during the Seattle interview, the audio feed into her earpiece was coming from two separate television stations. She said she believed the audio glitch was being addressed while she was off camera; instead the camera was on.

“That was a mistake I had nothing to do with,” Ms. Abdul said Saturday. “I didn’t know I had two studios in my ear. I wish it were a better story, but that’s it.”

She said it is her nature to make fun of situations that cause her stress, like appearing on live television. “I’m doing my job and having fun,” she said. “Although I might not take myself seriously, there are young girls watching me, and I know I’m a role model. I’ve been a teacher, and the fact that some of them would look up to me and want to be the next choreographer or the next singer, I would not violate that trust.”

During the session with television reporters Mr. Cowell also responded to complaints that his recent comments to contestants on the show have seemed cruel, focusing on their appearance more than on their singing ability. Last week on the show’s two-night season premiere, he mocked one contestant’s appearance, comparing him to a jungle creature, and made fun of another’s heft. One contestant Mr. Cowell mocked appeared to be mentally impaired; Mr. Cowell said Saturday that he had not been aware that the young man was a former Special Olympian.

Mr. Cowell said that he understood why his remarks were criticized but that he felt it would be wrong to censor himself.

“I take your point, which is, It’s a singing competition, and why should I call someone, I think it was a ‘bush baby,’ ” he said. “The appeal of this show is that we’ve never tried to censor this show. And there are times, trust me, when I watch it back and I just think, ‘God, I wish I hadn’t said that, and why do they put it in the show?’ But it’s something we all sign up for, good things and bad things. I feel more comfortable being on a show where we are prepared to show the warts as well as the good things.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/ar...ic/22paul.html





'Healthy Models' Initiative Precedes NYC's Fashion Week
Samantha Critchell

The American fashion industry says it wants its models to be healthy, not anorexic, not bulimic and not chain-smokers. And to help models achieve that, the Council of Fashion Designers of America on Friday released a list of recommendations as part of a new health initiative.

The panel that formulated the guidelines included CFDA President Diane von Furstenberg, nutritionist Joy Bauer, modeling agent Louis Chaban, fitness trainer David Kirsch and Dr. Susan Ice, vice president and medical director of Philadelphia's Renfrew Center, which is dedicated to eating disorders.

The guidelines were issued three weeks before designers start showcasing their fall collections during New York's Fashion Week, which starts Feb. 2.

The guidelines, which are only suggestions and not binding for the industry, include the following:

· Keep models from 16 off the runway and don't allow models under 18 to work at fittings or photo shoots past midnight.
· Educate those in the industry to identify the early warning signs of eating disorders.
· Require models identified as having an eating disorder to receive professional help and only allow those models to continue with approval from that professional.
· Develop workshops on the causes and effects of eating disorders, and raise awareness of the effects of smoking and tobacco-related disease.
· During fashion shows, provide healthy meals and snacks, while prohibiting smoking and alcohol.

What's missing from these voluntary guidelines -- aside from a means of enforcement -- is any mention of the Body Mass Index. In September, Madrid Fashion Week banned models with a body mass index of less than 18. The standard accepted by the World Health Organization is that anyone with an index under 18.5 is underweight.

Italian government officials also got involved in this too-skinny model debate, apparently prompted in part by Spain's move and by the death in November of Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston, who weighed 88 pounds when she died. In a December deal with the Italian fashion industry, designers agreed not to hire models younger than 16, and to require all models to submit medical proof that they do not suffer from eating disorders.

"The CFDA Health Initiative is about awareness and education, not policing. Therefore, the committee is not recommending that models get a doctor's physical examination to assess their health or body-mass index to be permitted to work," according to a statement from the CFDA. "Eating disorders are emotional disorders that have psychological, behavioral, social, and physical manifestations, of which body weight is only one."

Steven Kolb, executive director for the CFDA, told The Associated Press that the designers' understanding of the issue as explained to them by health specialists is that BMI is only one factor in a long list of criteria to identify eating disorders.

"A lot of the girls who work the runway are genetically thin. You go backstage and you see a lot of girls eating a lot of food and they're not gaining weight," Kolb said.
http://newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1028463





More Borat Suits Target Release Tactics
Leslie Simmons

Sacha Baron Cohen topped off his best actor acceptance speech at the Golden Globes with a thank-you to "every American who has not sued me."

The joke wasn't too far from the truth.

While Cohen's movie "Borat" has racked up accolades and $240 million in international boxoffice, two additional complaints filed quietly over the holidays have added to the three pending cases targeting the film and its distributor, 20th Century Fox.

In the recent cases, filed Dec. 22 in Alabama State Court and Dec. 26 in Los Angeles Superior Court, both plaintiffs allege they were depicted unfairly by "Borat's" producers. In Alabama, Kathie Martin, owner of the etiquette school featured in the film, claims she was subjected to sexist and anti-Semetic comments by Cohen, and says she signed the consent form with the understanding the etiquette class was being filmed for a Belarus Television documentary. Only after the filming, through research by her husband, did she learn she had been fooled.

The latest Los Angeles case was filed by a rodeo spectator identified only as John Doe 3, who attended a Salem, Va., event where Borat sang the Kazakh national anthem to the tune of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

The suit claims Cohen was invited to sing under the belief that he was a Kazakh reporter. The scene featuring the plaintiff allegedly portrays him falsely as "uneducated, racist, sexist and bigoted."

The latest complaints join pending suits in California, New York and South Carolina.

The legal barrage began Nov. 9 with a filing by fraternity members depicted making racist and sexist comments in the film who claim producers served them alcohol and lied about where the film would be shown before asking that they sign releases.

In December, Judge Joseph Biderman denied the fraternity plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction requiring Fox to delete or alter scenes in the film pending the outcome of the litigation. In response to Biderman's ruling, Fox announced March 9 as the release date for an unedited "Borat" DVD, which will include deleted and extended scenes.

The fraternity plaintiffs' attorney, Olivier Taillieu of Beverly Hills' Zuber & Taillieu, argued at the hearing that the tactics used by producers to obtain signed releases justified allowing the court to consider parol evidence of other alleged promises.

The studio's attorney, Louis Petrich of Leopold Petrich & Smith, argued the plaintiffs were not given alcohol before signing and did not suffer any diminished capacity, as alleged, when agreeing to participate.

Biderman found that Taillieu failed to meet the high standard for a preliminary injunction, but he made no finding as to the merits of the overall case. A status conference is set for Feb. 27.

Most experts agree the law is on the studio's side because a merger clause in the releases incorporates any other promises into the written agreement.

"If one accepts the legal concept of 'merger,' then it doesn't matter what promises the filmmakers made to the frat brothers," columnist Julie Hilden wrote.

But no court has fully evaluated evidence of the producers' conduct, and case law is thin on what constitutes a level of behavior offensive enough to void a signed release. Further, Fox risks encouraging more litigation if it chooses to settle the current matters. The footage on the DVD release could draw the ire of other plaintiffs.

But so far, Fox has not been damaged by the cases. In early December, the Romainian villagers who filed suit in New York were told by a U.S. District Court judge to re-file their case because the allegations were not specific. Though an amended complaint should have been filed by Dec. 18, court records show nothing has been submitted.
http://www.hollywoodreporteresq.com/..._id=1003537323





Anatomy of an Insult: ABC Is Stung by an Actor’s Anti-Gay Slurs
Edward Wyatt

Executives at ABC and its parent, Disney, are mulling the future of the actor Isaiah Washington, a star of the hit series “Grey’s Anatomy,” after Mr. Washington last week publicly used an anti-gay slur for the second time in roughly three months, a Disney executive said Friday.

The situation has potentially great implications for ABC, which is reaping millions of dollars in advertising revenues from a show that, in its third season, is among the highest rated on television.

The executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because company officials were instructed not to go beyond a prepared statement, said that Mr. Washington’s behavior could be considered grounds for dismissal under Disney’s corporate antidiscrimination policy.

ABC and Touchstone, Disney’s television studio, called Mr. Washington’s behavior “unacceptable” in a statement issued on Thursday, three days after Mr. Washington’s most recent remark, which occurred in the backstage press room at the Golden Globes ceremony last week.

Mr. Washington later apologized for the remark and said that he was seeking help for “issues I obviously need to examine within my own soul.” But the damage might be done for Mr. Washington, 43, who portrays Dr. Preston Burke on “Grey’s Anatomy,” which this season has attracted an audience of more than 18 million viewers each week, according to Nielsen Media Research. On Thursday, the first broadcast since the show won for best dramatic television series at the Golden Globes, the audience numbered nearly 22 million, according to ABC.

Mr. Washington first got into trouble for using the same slur during an off-camera dispute on the set of the show in October. The remark was aimed at T. R. Knight, who portrays Dr. George O’Malley on the series and who had not previously talked publicly about his sexuality. It followed a brief fight between Mr. Washington and a third actor on the show, Patrick Dempsey. After that incident became public, Mr. Washington apologized, and Mr. Knight publicly acknowledged that he was gay. The October fight has continued to be the subject of gossip around the show, and after the Golden Globe victory for “Grey’s Anatomy,” the show’s actors and creator gathered backstage to answer reporters’ questions. One asked about the fight and the remark.

Mr. Washington moved to the microphone and denied that he ever used the slur to describe Mr. Knight, at the same time repeating the word. Fellow cast members who were with Mr. Washington appeared shaken, quickly going from jubilant to solemn. After the awards show another “Grey’s” actor, Katherine Heigl, publicly repudiated Mr. Washington’s remarks.

Mr. Knight appeared on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Wednesday and disputed Mr. Washington’s denial of using the slur in October.

As discussion of the incidents grew, Mr. Washington remained silent until after ABC issued a statement chastising him.

“We have a longstanding policy to create and maintain respectful workplaces for all our employees,” the ABC statement said. “We dealt with the original situation in October, and thought the issue resolved. Therefore, we are greatly dismayed that Mr. Washington chose to use such inappropriate language at the Golden Globes, language that he himself deemed ‘unfortunate’ in his previous public apology. We take this situation very seriously. His actions are unacceptable and are being addressed.”

An ABC spokeswoman declined to comment on how the issue was addressed in October and what steps were being considered now.

After ABC issued its statement, Mr. Washington again apologized, after first firing his publicist. He expressed his regret to Mr. Knight, colleagues, fans “and especially the lesbian and gay community for using a word that is unacceptable in any context or circumstance.”

The statement appeared to acknowledge that Mr. Washington had used the slur before, despite his most recent denial. “By repeating the word Monday night, I marred what should have been a perfect night for everyone who works on ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ ” the statement said. “I can neither defend nor explain my behavior. I can also no longer deny to myself that there are issues I obviously need to examine within my own soul, and I’ve asked for help.

“I know the power of words, especially those that demean,” the statement continued. “I realize that by using one filled with disrespect I have hurt more than T. R. and my colleagues. With one word, I’ve hurt everyone who has struggled for the respect so many of us take for granted. I welcome the chance to meet with leaders of the gay and lesbian community to apologize in person and to talk about what I can do to heal the wounds I’ve opened.”

Mr. Washington added: “T. R.’s courage throughout this entire episode speaks to his tremendous character. I hold his talent, and T. R. as a person, in high esteem. I know a mere apology will not end this, and I intend to let my future actions prove my sincerity.”

Neil G. Giuliano, the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, told CNN on Friday that he expected to travel to Los Angeles this week to meet with ABC executives and Mr. Washington.

Kelly Mullens, Mr. Washington’s new publicist, declined to comment on Mr. Washington’s plans for a meeting or his expected future with the show.

“Grey’s Anatomy” ranks fifth overall among prime-time shows. It ranks second overall among viewers ages 18 to 49, the demographic group for which networks charge the highest advertising premium.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/ar...on/22grey.html





Fair Housing, Free Speech and Choosy Roommates
Adam Liptak

Gene Kavenoki wanted to rent out a spare bedroom in his West Hollywood apartment and he had a few requirements.

“I am not looking for freaks, geeks, prostitutes (male or female), druggies, pet cobras, drama, black Muslims or mortgage brokers,” he wrote on Roommates.com.

Other users of the Web site were more adamant about their desires. “Must be a black gay male!” one said. “Please no flakes, deadbeats or white trash!” another said.

And some were a little creepy. A 57-year-old man said he was offering “free rent for the right woman” in exchange for “quiet companionship in an intimate place.” He preferred, he wrote, “a Hispanic female roommate so she can make me fluent in Spanish or an Asian female roommate just because I love Asian females.”

Those postings are part of a lawsuit by a fair housing group against Roommates.com, a matching service that does pretty much what its name suggests. The suit says the site violated fair housing laws, which forbid publishing real estate ads that indicate preferences based on race, religion or sex.

Fair housing is important, but so is free speech and so is the right to choose who is puttering around in your living room. Congress has taken two stabs at striking the right legal balance, but what it has created is a tangle of contradictions.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 says, in what everyone calls the Mrs. Murphy exception, that discrimination is acceptable by the owner of a residence who lives there and rents to no more than three other people or families. (Mrs. Murphy was an apocryphal bigot with a boardinghouse.)

But another part of the same law takes back part of the Mrs. Murphy exception. It says it is illegal to say or publish anything about the discrimination it just made legal. It applies to people placing ads and to businesses that publish them.

Forbidding speech about lawful conduct makes no sense and is at odds with the First Amendment. But some legal scholars, notably Robert G. Schwemm of the law school at the University of Kentucky, have defended the current approach.

Minority readers who see ads containing discriminatory language may suffer emotional distress, Professor Schwemm has written. That is undoubtedly true, but the distress caused by actual and legally sanctioned face-to-face discrimination is surely worse.

To compound matters, Congress created a second kind of mischief in 1996 when it enacted the Communications Decency Act. Almost in passing, that law made online companies immune from lawsuits over information they transmit but do not create.

The effect of the law is to treat online classified advertisements differently from printed ones. If this newspaper published Mr. Kavenoki’s ad in the paper, it would violate the Fair Housing Act. If it published the same ad on its Web site, it would face no liability. The same is true, as the fair housing group has conceded, of Roommates.com, at least so long as it merely acted as a passive transmitter of Mr. Kavenoki’s speech. The group’s suit now focuses on a questionnaire on the site.

In a sense, the Mrs. Murphy exception is both too narrow (it applies only to owners) and too broad (it applies not only to roommates but also to standard-issue tenants).

But a revised version of the exception still makes sense. In choosing a real roommate — somebody who shares your bathroom and kitchen — you should be allowed to have and disclose whatever idiosyncratic ideas you have about your living arrangements, even discriminatory ones.

Roommate ads are more like personal dating ads, where discrimination is rampant and accepted, as opposed to real estate ads, where discrimination is properly forbidden.

And the distinction made in the 1996 law, which was meant to nurture a nascent Internet, is causing problems, too. Why should hard-copy and virtual publishers of the same advertising be treated differently? And why should either one be conscripted into the government’s efforts to combat speech it disfavors? If the underlying speech is unlawful, attack the speaker.

There were some odd moments at the appellate argument in the case in Pasadena last month. Judge Alex Kozinski, who is often both libertarian and contrarian, mused that users seeking only gay men could be missing out. Some women, he said, should be allowed to make a pitch.

“I may not be a gay man,” Judge Kozinski suggested such a woman might say, “but I have a lot of things in common with gay men. I’m very tidy. I have a great sense of decoration. Whatever.”

As for Mr. Kavenoki, he is a graduate student in linguistics who first heard about the lawsuit from me recently. “I had no idea my little humorous attempt to find a stable roommate in West Hollywood three years ago had achieved such objectionable notoriety,” he said in an e-mail message. He said he hoped not to be portrayed as “the Slobodan Milosevic of Roommates.com.”

“Evidently some people interpreted my ad as discriminating against blacks,” Mr. Kavenoki said. “I was doing no such thing. I was discriminating against people who don’t share my slightly warped sense of humor.”
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/us/22bar.html





Changes in Mellencamp Country
Alan Light

“People say I sold out,” John Mellencamp said, explaining his decision to license a song for a Chevrolet commercial. “No, I got sold out. Sometime during the ’90s record companies made the decision that us guys who had been around for a long time and had sold millions of records and were household names just weren’t as interesting as girls in stretch dresses.”

Mr. Mellencamp, whose 21st album, “Freedom’s Road,” arrives in stores tomorrow, had long expressed objections to the use of pop songs in advertising. But he said a turning point for him came last year, after he heard “Highway Companion,” the latest album by his contemporary Tom Petty. He liked it and thought the single “Saving Grace” would be a hit, but then never heard the song on the radio or saw it on the video channels. Fearing a similar fate for his own music, Mr. Mellencamp said he decided to accept Chevrolet’s offer to use “Our Country,” which he had been performing live for a few years and appears on the new album, as the theme for its Silverado truck.

“The bottom line is, I’m a songwriter, and I want people to hear my songs,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not suggesting it for anybody else. This is just what I did this time to reinvent myself and stay in business. Sometimes I get sad about it really. I still don’t think that people should sell their songs for advertising.”

Mr. Mellencamp has caught flak from some of his fans, and the Silverado spot, which has been in heavy rotation on sports broadcasts since it was first shown during last fall’s World Series, has spawned some controversy. The ad mixes images of the Statue of Liberty and Rosa Parks with footage from Hurricane Katrina and the Vietnam War. A columnist at Slate.com called the commercial’s blend of patriotism and tragedy, in service of selling a product, “exploitative” and “wrong.”

Chain-smoking through an interview in a sprawling suite at the Carlyle Hotel (he and his wife, the model Elaine Irwin, were upgraded because “the commode in our first room was broken”), Mr. Mellencamp maintained that the ad’s downbeat tone was his own decision. “Part of the deal I made was: O.K., I’ll do this, but I’m in charge. Make it look like a John Mellencamp video. I don’t want to see ‘Our Country’ as rah-rah flag waving. Let’s show the flood, let’s show the war, let’s show the whole thing. The fact that they rolled a truck out at the end made no difference to me.”

Bill Ludwig, chief creative officer of Chevrolet’s ad agency, Campbell-Ewald, said in a statement that he hoped the campaign would evoke “the bruises and scars that have shaped our nation."

One question now is what impact a commercial that has been running for months can have on sales of a new album. Some executives at Universal Republic, Mr. Mellencamp’s label, are concerned that the exposure peaked too soon, and that the audience has already tired of the song. Mr. Mellencamp admits that the situation has put radio programmers “in a position they’ve never been in before,” adding that he never anticipated that the ad would be played so frequently. “They sure pounded it,” he said with a chuckle. “I had no idea.”

“Our Country” illustrates one side of “Freedom’s Road,” with its swing-for-the-fences themes exemplified by titles like “The Americans.” The album’s most striking songs, though, display a more intimate depiction of the small-town life that Mr. Mellencamp, 55 and a lifelong Indiana resident, knows so well. The acoustic “Rural Route” is an account of a crystal meth-fueled murder in which the victim’s body was found at the edge of his parents’ property.

“About halfway through the record I didn’t really know what it was supposed to be about,” Mr. Mellencamp said. “I had so many political songs akin to ‘Masters of War,’ that kind of stuff. But then I recorded a song called ‘Ghost Towns Along the Highway,’ and I said that’s what this record is about.

“That’s a very personal song because it’s not really about a physical place, but about the decisions that we’ve made and the path that we’ve chosen. Corporate America has absolutely changed everything. Bloomington, where I live, has a beautiful square, there’s some restaurants, but everyone wants to go shopping someplace else. So when everything becomes the Mc-Whatever, then you lose what I always enjoyed about living where I live.”

Joan Baez, who sings on a song titled “Jim Crow,” said she had long admired the subtlety of Mr. Mellencamp’s work. “When people try to write protest songs, they get so trite and overstated,” she said in a telephone interview. “This song was completely fresh. I never heard anything like it.”

One thing Mr. Mellencamp never questioned was the sound he wanted for this album. “What I know and what I love is garage music,” he said, citing ’60s bands like the Byrds, Count Five and the Youngbloods as inspirations. “Whenever we’re messing around, that’s what the guys in the band all play.” For his previous album, “Trouble No More” (2003), he said: “I had gone so far down this folk thing, recording with Appalachian instruments. I wanted to go back to what we know how to do.”

“Freedom’s Road” was recorded over many months and many grueling sessions, in Mr. Mellencamp’s rehearsal space, literally a garage. “At the time I was totally unaware we were making a record,” he said. “But then I thought: We’re never going to be able to beat these versions. It sounds as if they just walked in and played. And for a sound like that, you’ve got to go through hell to get it.”

Though Mr. Mellencamp opted to avoid a more overtly politicized album, he couldn’t resist including “Rodeo Clown,” a harsh attack on President Bush and the Iraq war, with lines about “blood on the hands of the rich politicians” and “blood on the hands of an arrogant nation.” The song isn’t listed on the packaging and appears several minutes after the album’s last track.

“When I wrote that song two years ago,” Mr. Mellencamp said, “the truth was nowhere in sight. But as the climate changed, now that song feels right on target.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/ar...ic/22mell.html





Top 20 Concert Tours
AP

The Top 20 Concert Tours ranks artists by average box office gross per city and includes the average ticket price for shows in North America. The previous week's ranking is in parentheses. The list is based on data provided to the trade publication Pollstar by concert promoters and venue managers.

1. (1) Barbra Streisand; $6,059,662; $302.27.

2. (2) The Rolling Stones; $3,464,077; $108.16.

3. (5) Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band; $1,125,775; $60.39.

4. (3) The Who; $959,577; $97.25.

5. (4) Aerosmith / Motley Crue; $918,675; $65.48.

6. (6) Dixie Chicks; $798,542; $66.05.

7. (7) Guns N' Roses; $482.177; $59.89.

8. (8) Bob Dylan; $472,216; $58.66.

9. (9) Andre Rieu; $458,331; $53.93.

10. (10) Def Leppard / Journey; $454,462; $57.95.

11. (11) Trans-Siberian Orchestra; $376,687; $39.46.

12. (12) Blue Man Group; $346,234; $52.54.

13. (14) The Cheetah Girls; $309,604; $35.19.

14. (13) Brad Paisley; $307,255; $45.60.

15. (15) Larry The Cable Guy; $273,394; $44.66.

16. (17) Panic! At The Disco; $197,565; $28.46.

17. (19) The Killers; $187,580; $32.02.

18. (20) Barenaked Ladies; $182,097; $45.93.

19. (22) Pet Shop Boys; $161,376; $57.55.

20. (23) Music As A Weapon Tour / Disturbed; $159,866; $32.21.
http://newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1028800





Move Over Silicon Valley, Here Come European Start-Ups
John Markoff

A technology and media conference being held here this week provided ample evidence that Silicon Valley’s dominance of Internet-style technology innovation is waning.

The gathering, Digital Life Design, has become a showcase for a range of European entrepreneurs who have taken the start-up culture pioneered in Silicon Valley as a template and are successfully transplanting it here.

The star of this year’s event was Niklas Zennstrom, the Swedish co-founder of the file-sharing system Kazaa and the Internet telephony company Skype, which was sold to eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005. Mr. Zennstrom last week took the wraps off a previously secretive start-up, Joost, that intends to provide a peer-to-peer approach to distributing video online.

“We’re trying to take the good things about television and the good things about the Internet and put them together,” he said.

Like many participants here, Mr. Zennstrom voiced the opinion that Internet-based commerce would accelerate in its disruptive effect on traditional businesses. Skype, for example, now says that it carries 4.4 percent of all worldwide long-distance calling.

“We now have a pretty decent Internet infrastructure,” Mr. Zennstrom said, noting in the future that it would give rise to “many, many more disruptive industries.”

The invitation-only conference, which ended Tuesday, attracted 1,000 old- and new-media publishers this year, mixed in with Internet software and service start-ups and a smattering of American dot-com executives. It serves in part as an intelligence-gathering event for its sponsor, Hubert Burda, a German publisher trying to move his more than 250 magazines into the Internet era.

Several organizers noted that Silicon Valley’s original success as an innovation center was largely because of business and social networks developed over several decades in a community of venture capitalists and technologists.

Now, they said, with the Internet supplementing and replacing traditional face-to-face social networks, Silicon Valley might be losing its competitive advantage.

“The epicenter was Silicon Valley, but that has created a wave of innovation that has now reached the entire world,” said Yossi Vardi, an Israeli entrepreneur and investor who financed his son’s development of ICQ, an early Internet chat program later sold to America Online.

Internet start-ups in Europe received a significant boost last month with the initial public offering of Open BC/Xing, a German Web site that is a competitor of the American site LinkedIn for social networking among businesses.

One of the best examples of the diffusion of Internet-style business creation is Tariq Krim, chief executive of Netvibes. His Paris-based company was a pioneer in the design of a Web service that allows users to personalize their start page, shifting the control away from the traditional Internet portal companies.

Netvibes, which received a $15.5 million investment from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel Partners last year, now reports 10 million users. The company was an early practitioner of the so-called Web 2.0 approach, which is based on a system of hooking together Internet services provided by competing companies.

After growing up in Paris, Mr. Krim received practical business schooling in Silicon Valley, first as an intern at Sun Microsystems and then, in the late 1990s, as a reporter for a French business magazine based there.

In founding Netvibes in 2005, he said, he was inspired by the simplicity of Apple’s Macintosh and was trying to offer that same ease of use to Internet users.

“Our digital life is fragmented into a wide number of services,” he said.

Being based in Paris can sometimes be disorienting, he said, noting that when Netvibes began operating two years ago many people assumed that it was in Silicon Valley.

The company was able to use online collaboration among its users to rapidly translate the service into 80 languages, even though the firm had just four employees initially.

Netvibes recently opened a San Francisco office, and Mr. Krim acknowledged that he was fond of the Silicon Valley culture in which everyone seems to live and breathe computing and technology.

“I miss the fact you can start an interesting company just by talking to someone you meet while you are doing your laundry,” he said.

Still, he says that while there are major cultural differences in the way start-up entrepreneurs are viewed in Europe — failure is not viewed as a badge of honor, the way it is in Silicon Valley — a native community is beginning to emerge.

He noted that an early investor in Netvibes was Martin Varsavsky, the Madrid-based investor who recently founded FON, a wireless-networking service based on subsidizing the cost of Wi-Fi modems and building communities of users around the world who freely share wireless access points.

Mr. Varsavsky argues that the new European start-ups are generally more sophisticated than their American competitors.

European Web video sites like Vpod and Sevenload are technically more advanced than YouTube, he said. Sevenload combines the features of Flickr, which allows sharing of still photos, and YouTube, the video sharing site.

Other European start-up companies whose executives attended the conference included Rebtel and Truphone, which are offering low-cost Internet calls to cellphone users. Another European start-up, JaJa, is also pursuing the market.

“We have built Wi-Fi infrastructure at home and in the office and we are still using our cellphones,” said Alexander Straub, a German entrepreneur based in London who founded Truphone last year. He said the roaming charges levied by cellular companies were not sustainable. “It’s pure robbery,” he said.

A number of participants at the conference contended that with the quick spread of ideas in an Internet age, Silicon Valley companies no longer have a first-mover advantage.

Gerald Haag, a former Amazon executive who is a founder of Dropshop, a Munich-based start-up for auction sellers, cited a case in which an idea from Silicon Valley was introduced in Europe. Two weeks later, he said, “there was a German version.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/te.../24munich.html





Are DMCA Abuses a Temporary or Permanent Problem?
Bennett Haselton

"On January 16, a man named Guntram Graef who invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to ask YouTube to remove a video of giant penises attacking his wife's avatar/character in the virtual community "Second Life", retracted the claim and stated that he now believes the video was not a copyright violation. (He had sent similar notices to BoingBoing and the Sydney Morning Herald just for posting screen shots of the video.) His statements in a C-Net interview suggest that he didn't mean to alienate the anti-censorship community and was probably angry over what he saw as a sexually explicit attack on his wife. But the event sparked renewed debate over the DMCA and what constitutes abuse of it. I sympathize with Graef and I admire him for admitting an error, but I still think the incident shows why the DMCA is a bad law."

The DMCA is known mainly for its two most controversial provisions: the ban on technology to circumvent copyright restrictions, and the procedures by which ISPs must respond to "take down" notices if a third party claims that one of the ISP's users is violating their copyright. The first of these, I am opposed to in principle; the second, I am not opposed to in principle but I think is too easy to abuse in practice -- because I think incidents like the Graef case and my own limited court experience in related areas has suggested that the protections against DMCA-type abuses are very weak.

First, I'm against the anti-circumvention provision in principle because I agree with the position espoused by the EFF that computer code is protected under the First Amendment, even if some uses of that computer code may be illegal. After all, at one point a U.S. court even ruled that a manual for carrying out murders as a hit man was protected speech! That ruling was overturned on appeal, and the case was settled out of court before a final decision was ever reached, but still -- given that a handbook for killing people was considered free speech by at least one court, it's a bit of a stretch to think that a DVD-copying program should be given less protection. Just because X is illegal does not mean that tools or instructions for doing X should also be illegal.

With regard to the second provision, I'm not against requiring ISPs to take down infringing material on receipt of a notice from the copyright holder. But in practice there are two avenues for abuse here: (a) the party sending the take down notice can make statements that are not technically false, but which have the effect of persuading the ISP to take the material down, or (b) the party sending the take down notice can simply lie -- because the truth is that in too many cases, false statements made "under penalty of perjury" are not prosecuted, or even noticed, by the courts.

The EFF has already done a good job documenting abuses under the DMCA, and I'm not going to repeat all of that here. My argument is that these are not just temporary problems with a relatively new law, but rather that the abuses are the result of realities that won't change any time soon: ISPs being too busy to look closely at every complaint, and courts being too busy to go after everyone who violates court rules to get what they want. And thus it does no good to say that the DMCA would be fine if only enforcement actually got done properly instead of the ham-handed way it's been carried out so far, because that's not going to happen.

As I said, I think that if you have a bona fide case against a party, there's nothing wrong with taking action against them that would otherwise be considered a violation of their privacy and other rights. I've never sent a DMCA take down notice myself, but I've been involved in court cases in which I asked the judge to sign an order requiring a third party to turn over information about someone that was pertinent to the case. I don't consider that an abuse of the system, if the information you're after is relevant.

I realize this may separate me from some fellow privacy advocates, and some of the things I've done may make them uncomfortable. In one case, I had invited a girl to a charity luncheon where the tickets were $100 apiece, and when she showed up she had "forgotten her checkbook" and needed to borrow the money... Now, don't get ahead of me... Later, in what will not come as a huge spoiler to my fellow male Seattle residents, she apparently decided that, being a non-overweight, non-single-Mom, non-sexually-repressed girl in a city full of rich single guys, she was under no obligation to pay me back, and said, "Go ahead and sue me". Anyone who knows about my sideline taking spammers to court would tell you, it is not a terrifically smart move to say to me, "Go ahead and sue me". So, since I was going to be at the courthouse for an upcoming case against a spammer, I figured, why not, and filled out a Small Claims form with the defendant's address listed as "to be determined", since all I had was her cell phone number. Then I asked the judge to sign an order asking T-Mobile to give me the rest of her information so I could serve the papers on her. The judge signed it, I mailed it off to T-Mobile, and three weeks later T-Mobile sent me a letter containing her address, where I had the papers served. Most people don't know it's possible to do this just in a case where someone owes you $100 and all you have is a phone number, but that's just because a lawyer would never bother with such a small case, and most non-lawyers don't know the option exists -- and of course, it also depends on the judge, who may or may not sign the order.

(In that vein, people always ask me, is that sort of thing really worth the time? In this case, since I was going to be at the courthouse anyway, the extra time to write the motion, get it signed, and mail it off, was less than 30 minutes. But I was mainly curious about whether or not it could be done, and how much privacy protection there really is under the law, and knowing that was worth more to me than the $100 anyway.)

So I don't think it's unethical to request such information if you have a genuine case against a party. But while I don't think that what I did constitutes abuse of the system, I think it clearly shows how the system could be abused. Nobody checked my ID when I filed the case or asked the judge to sign the subpoena; I could have been anybody, and I could have disappeared once I had the information. (I had T-Mobile mail it to my address, but I could have just as easily had them mail it to the court, and then gone down and asked to look at the court file.) DMCA opponents should be aware that even without the DMCA, privacy protections are not as great as most people probably think they are.

As a result, I'm especially nervous about laws that enable abuse based on copyright assertions, because almost all of the legal threats we've ever received at Peacefire were based on what I considered to be bogus "copyright" claims. In 1997 we published a program that you could run on any computer with CYBERsitter blocking software installed, and it would decrypt the file that stored CYBERsitter's "secret" blocked-site list, and print it out in plain text. The CEO of CYBERsitter claimed that we were "violating every intellectual property law ever written" and sent threatening notices to our ISP demanding that they remove the program. I argued that every byte of the decryption program was our original work, so it didn't violate their copyright. In fact, it didn't even enable violations of their copyright, because it didn't make it any easier for someone to distribute illegal copies of their program, and I also said the decryption program served a worthwhile purpose by allowing customers or potential customers to see what the program really blocked. (Although to me, the enabling issue and the "worthwhile purpose" issue were secondary to the primary point, that original works of computer code should be protected by the First Amendment.) Fortunately our ISP stood their ground, but if the DMCA had existed back then, CYBERsitter could have invoked it, and possibly the extra pressure might have caused our ISP to back down. (Blocked-site-decryption programs were originally exempt from the DMCA as a result of the decision of the Copyright Office, but that exemption was revoked in 2006 because nobody had written a new decryption program in three years.)

So that was an example of how a company could intimidate an ISP into taking down material, without technically lying about the situation, but tacking on the words "copyright violation" and hoping the ISP would capitulate. What about cases where the sender of a DMCA take down notice just lies?

The Dutch activist group Bits Of Freedom conducted an experiment in 2004, in which they signed up with 10 different ISPs and posted a copy of a work that was clearly labeled with a notice that the author had died 100 years ago and the copyright had expired. Then they sent fake "complaints" to all 10 ISPs from an anonymous Hotmail address. 7 of the 10 ISPs removed the content immediately, and one even replied to give the personal details of the account holder, without being asked to do so. So completely fictitious complaints do apparently work. The DMCA does more protection than that because it requires the complainer to make a copyright claim "under penalty of perjury". But how much assurance does that really provide?

No one has yet tried to get our site shut down with a copyright claim or other accusation that was simply made up out of whole cloth. But my experiences in other areas have left me without much confidence in statements that are made "under penalty of perjury". The times I've been to court against spammers, I usually get to watch a few other Small Claims cases being tried. Probably at least once every time that I've been there, it's come to light that some party in a case said something that they almost certainly knew was not true, and I've never seen a judge do anything about it -- and court employees who have been there much longer have said they've never seen it happen either. (Judges are far more likely to get upset about people speaking out of turn. It's OK to lie, as long as you do it while the judge isn't talking!) It's true that Small Claims court is for resolving small matters, but lying under oath in Small Claims court is still a felony, punishable at least in theory by up to 10 years in jail. (And in any case, lawyers have told me that even in higher-level courtrooms, most false statements don't get anyone in big trouble. High-profile cases like Martha Stewart are the exception.) I don't think that everyone who lies under oath should go to the big house for 10 years. But I have no faith in the DMCA just because it requires accusatory statements to be made "under penalty of perjury", when judges usually let false statements under oath go completely unnoticed.

I doubt that a lawyer would risk their career and even their freedom to make up a completely fraudulent DMCA claim against us, such as claiming a page on our site was a ripoff of something originally produced by their client. But I don't think it's out of the realm if possibility that a lawyer would claim that, for example, a parody of one of their logos that appeared on our site, was a "copyright violation" -- even though the company would almost certainly be advised by their lawyer that such parodies are protected speech, which means their statement would constitute perjury, but it would probably never be punished.

The low point of my own confidence in the enforcement of anti-perjury laws, came when I sued a spammer who appeared in court and claimed that he had absolutely no knowledge of the spam being sent, and had never accepted any orders for spamming of any kind, while the judge, who appeared to hate anti-spam cases even more than most judges did, kept haranguing me for suing a clearly "innocent" person. I then played a recording of a conversation that I had with the spammer over the phone, pretending to be an interested customer (with a disclaimer played at the beginning of the call saying that it could be recorded, in order to make the taping legal), in which he said, among other things:

"I mean, we have all their information to back up any email we send them. If we have their ISP information, we can prove that they've given it out, because you can't get someone's ISP unless they've given it to somebody." [sic -- he meant "get someone's e-mail address", although the statement is still wrong]

"Do you already have your creatives and everything? So I've just got to upload what you have and just blast it out?" [note: "creatives" are copies of ads that sent out for you by advertisers and spammers]

"It's a United-States-based company but they pump everything through China and then it comes back to the United States."

The judge appeared very flustered at that point and started accusing me of "entrapment" (which was backwards -- I'd never heard of the spammer until he spammed me first, and then I called him afterwards, just to get evidence that he was in the spamming business in case he showed up in court and denied it). Since she claimed it was entrapment, I still lost and the spammer walked out home-free, without the judge ever even commenting on the questionable veracity of the statements he had made at the beginning. And that is all the protection that exists in the real world against people making false statements "under penalty of perjury".

The point is that when reading the wording of a proposed law, there's a temptation to think that the scenario described is exactly how the law will play out when it's enforced (see the "Alice, Bob and Charlie" scenario in the Wikipedia entry on the relevant section of the DMCA), and that anyone who deviates from the rules will be punished. But my narrow experience in court, in an area unrelated to the DMCA, taught me some things that several lawyers, with sad smiles, have confirmed to be true throughout the law: (a) judges will do what they want; (b) even if judges do sincerely want to follow the law, they're unlikely to agree on what it says; and (c) courts don't have the will or the time to chase down every person who violates the rules.

Don't judge a law by what it says will happen. Judge it by how it will play out if more than half of the steps in the process get screwed up. Guntram Graef apparently wasn't even trying to do anything dishonest when he got a video removed from YouTube on the basis of copyright claims that turned out not to be valid. Imagine how much abuse is possible when you're gaming the system on purpose.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/24/146229





Getting what you pay for

SecondLife: Revolutionary Virtual Market or Ponzi Scheme?
Randolph Harrison

In 2005 I began working as a venture consultant for some entrepreneurs and investors trying to develop a fairly ambitious “real-money-trading” (RMT) business idea. My work resulted in my collection of a large amount of RMT market data for most of the popular massively multiplayer games and virtual worlds. Although the new venture was never pursued due to my analysis of the true RMT market, one game caught our particular interest: SecondLife, operated by Linden Research Inc. (privately held, San Francisco CA).

Unlike the makers of nearly all other online games, the operators of SecondLife not only allow and encourage the exchange of game currency for real money, but they actually facilitate it. As early as 2005 I began noticing a rumbling in interest-focused blogs about the exploding market that was SecondLife. Touted as a pioneering future Metaverse on the industry’s most informed blog, TerraNova, an array of journalists, academics, and company executives have claimed that SecondLife boasts an economy complete with in-game banks, multiple currency exchanges, a floating currency exchange rate, and a burgeoning in-game commerce and business base.
The Virtual Economy

Although many people were introduced to the idea that commerce and trade within virtual reality worlds could represent real world money profits by BusinessWeek’s cover story on infamous SecondLife resident and self described “Land Baroness”, Anshe Chung, industry followers had long realized the potential of RMT. Shanda Entertainment (SNDA), operator of the most popular and successful games in Asia, for example, had committed to a strategy of harvesting RMT profits long before Linden Research set up shop. Nonetheless, financial publications such as The Economist and The Financial Times began catching on, running articles about RMT – often citing SecondLife as the phenomenon’s leading model. One Financial Times article, referencing a university professor who makes his career by studying “virtual economies”, suggested the size of the total RMT market was $1bn USD in 2005, and would grow to over $7bn USD by 2009.

And SecondLife was at the forefront of where money was being made. Or, so one would rationally conclude from the buzz. When BenchMark Capital backs a company like Linden Research, it’s safe to assume otherwise smart investors are expecting huge potential market payoffs.

The idea of SecondLife’s economy is simple. It’s just like a real world economy, except it takes place entirely within the company operated game servers. Customers from around the world connect with a sort of super-browser, which renders complex graphics, video, stereo music and other useful utilities not unlike a web browser. But the difference is that SecondLife is a virtual world. More like a Hollywood representation of the web than today’s mundane reality. Customers take on avatars which represent their presence in the virtual world.

As these avatars interact, commerce is conducted. One starts SecondLife with some fairly mundane clothing, for example. Upon entered the world, a new customer is immediately assaulted with a variety of clothes, jewelry, shoes, hair styles; and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. But nothing is free, not even in virtual reality. New customers are allocated a few “Lindens” or L$ (SLL being the standard trade abbreviation). Most new customers quickly blow through these starter L$ as they dress up their avatars.

New L$ are distributed to customers as they pump real money into the virtual world. Nearly all customers utilize the game’s built-in “buy money” feature, which allows them to charge their credit card or PayPal account “micropayments”. Micropayments are a popular, proven business model first established in the mobile-phone market. All SecondLife does is extend this concept to a virtual reality game world.

Multiply all these micropayments among Linden’s claim of millions of customers, tens of thousands of which are online at any given time, and SecondLife supposedly represents a very real economy generating hundreds of thousands of real dollars of commerce, daily. Linden self reports an astonishing L$314,101,463 were earned in December 2006. That’s $1,163,338 USD of value by Linden’s average “exchange rate” of SLL/USD. But more about exchange rates later.
What are People Buying?

Reading BusinessWeek, or studying Linden’s or various other SecondLife blogs, it appears that the largest business of SecondLife is land speculation. Anshe’s claim to have earned over $1m USD from SecondLife is primarily related to her virtual land brokering business.

Another important source of SecondLife commerce is people “playing dress up” with their avatars. Buying clothes, earrings, new faces, or other more private body parts represents a great deal of the readily visible commerce outside of virtual real estate brokers.

Of course, anyone lingering in the world of SecondLife for more than a passing glance quickly discovers the real engine to the SecondLife economy: sex and gambling. A healthy share of micropayments are pumped into the system as customers engage in pulling the virtual slot lever or patronize one of the myriad virtual sex workers.
But it’s Still an Economy, Right?

As opportunists and capitalists, we’re not particularly bothered by indications that SecondLife generates most of its economic “wealth” through a rampant virtual real estate bubble which makes San Francisco, Marina District condo look like a bargain. Nor are we particularly bothered that the virtual playground provides a safe harbor for what is effectively the phone-sex industry reinvented. And internet gambling, despite the US Federal Government’s recent protestations to the contrary, is inevitable. So why not profit off of it? And how better, than in a utopian Ayn Rand open market capitalistic metaverse?

Of course, it’s not all that simple. And what’s true of the real world turns out to be true of the virtual world: if it sounds too good to be true…
The Test

In order to participate in a legitimate economy, there are a few basic prerequisites. SecondLife has the appearance of a virtual “securities and exchange commission”, virtual banks, virtual currency exchanges, and even virtual venture capitalists and REITS.

In July of 2006 we took a look at two in-game banks which allowed SecondLife residents to deposit their L$, and earn interest on the balance. These are private banks, run by other players, not by the game company itself. I discovered that the interest rates being paid by these banks, when calculate by interest-rate-parity against the USD, were mispriced allowing for a whopping 2,786.32% return arbitrage opportunity. Over some months we sunk the better part of $10,000 USD into SecondLife, borrowing from banks, lending to banks, and entering into various types of virtual financial arrangements with virtual businesses.

The first problem we encountered was one of counterparty risk. Put simply, you can seldom trust those with whom you’re doing business in SecondLife. Even supposedly well established, well regarded business citizens are prone to defaulting on any obligations which prove inconvenient. Whole banks will disappear over night, along with your L$ balance. Private businesses will simply refuse to make good on financial contracts. And individuals, pretty much all of whose real world identities are carefully guarded anonymous secrets, sometimes even will openly default, without recourse.

Justifications for default and non performance are usually wrapped in pseudo-libertarian internet political rants, or SecondLife political hyperbole. The simple fact is, if you arbitrage a bank for over 2,000% return because they don’t understand financial engineering, don’t expect to be able to collect come payment time.

But, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to make L$. In fact, we were able to make quite a few L$ in a very short period of time, despite disingenuous counterparties.

Enter the second problem, the L$ exchange markets are effectively rigged. At any given time over the past year or so, the SLL/USD exchange rate has hovered between about 250 and 300. That is, for every L$300 you earned, you could expect to get $1 USD. Now recall, there are supposedly hundreds of thousands of real dollars being spent daily; over L$250,000,000. Between Linden's official exchange market and the private exchanges, all appearances suggest a large volume of L$ daily exchange trade.

The catch is, however, these headline rates only apply to small amounts. For small time buyers and sellers of L$ -- be they virtual Johns paying up for sexy avatar escorts, or small time digital jewelry makers cashing out a couple hundred real dollars – this works well. Most of these people will use Linden’s official LindeX exchange, anyway. LindeX is actually not a virtual currency exchange market so much as it is an open auction, anyway. This means LindeX is not particularly useful for big trades.

The private exchanges, however, are owned by the businesses which sit at the top of the SecondLife economic pyramid. The “Virtual Land Baroness” owns the largest such exchange. So it is not surprising that our attempts to trade our L$ for $ USD were met with confiscatory market reflectivity. Or, put simply, every time we attempted to transact more than a couple hundred dollars, the SLL/USD rate would spike to levels approaching or even greater than 500. Example: mid July 2006 SLL/USD was 293.0/279.2 bid/ask on the primary open exchange. Our attempts to trade L$650,000 resulted in settlement bids of 350-450. Interestingly, these trades tended to net returns of right around 4%, which was the prevailing dollar deposit rate.
The Ponzi Scheme Epiphany

As we scratched our heads trying to figure out if there weren’t a more clever way of disguising our trades, or perhaps creating our own in-game banks and exchanges in order to arbitrage the other direction, it suddenly dawned upon me.

This game was just a pyramid scheme.

SecondLife is not a dramatic taste of our future, in which markets are virtual, currency is free from government control, taxes are non-existent, and normal people can become real millionaires simply by clicking their mouse a few times.

SecondLife isn’t even a simple virtual economy, with legitimate buying and selling, and opportunity for those who would compete.

No, SecondLife is a classic pyramid scheme. Or, more of an Amway-like pyramid: partially legitimate, partially ponzi. Sure, there are plenty of legitimate SecondLife customers who just like to go there to get their kicks, spend a couple dollars, and be on their way.

But, the buzz isn’t that Joe Sixpack can sit at his computer and gamble a little before bed with a smashingly attractive avatar. The buzz is that Anshe and others are making real millions. And a short visit to the world of SecondLife will reveal the frighteningly large portion of residents who “know someone who makes his or her living” doing something in SecondLife. Just the other night I had an interesting conversation with someone claiming to be a single mom of three, who spends her days turning virtual tricks and arranging for E-Bay payments through SecondLife L$. She didn’t seem to have any idea why her mysterious benefactor would pay her a commission to simply arrange PayPal transfers. More cynically intelligent readers will immediately recognize these transactions for what they are.

Again, the fact that tax evasion, organized crime and money laundering exist in the virtual world doesn’t distress me all that much; these things exist in the real world, and have for a pretty long time. The distressing part is what this single mom said later; the same thing one will hear over and over from SecondLife residents: she was just doing the cybersex and E-Bay stuff to fund her virtual jewelry store. She was a jewelry designer, and had already opened a little shop in a virtual mall. And, to her amazement, she’d already made over L$50,000 after only a month (about $185 USD). I didn’t bother to point out that she hadn’t counted her expenses for renting her virtual shop or accounted for taxes, let alone the fact that she was earning less than 1/100th of what she could get just flipping burgers in the real world.
SadLife

And that’s the story of SecondLife. Like the paid promotion infomercials that run on CNBC, sadly SecondLife is a giant magnet for the desperate, uninformed, easily victimized. Its promises of wealth readily ensnare those who can least afford to lose their money or lives to such scam in exactly the same way that real estate investor seminars convince divorcees with low FICO scores to buy houses sight unseen with no money down.

Even some corporations have dedicated marketing budgets to creating a presence in SecondLife. While few will shed a tear for the frivolousness of these companies’ spending, such adds a false legitimacy to SecondLife. Interestingly, no legitimate, real world corporation has earned net profit from SecondLife activities.

That’s because there are but a very tiny handful that profit off of the SecondLife economy. A handful of casino owners, large scale virtual land flippers, and brothel owners are responsible for nearly all of the real money extracted from the game. And they continue to attract new recruits to the bottom of the pyramid.

After all, Anshe Chung herself started out as a virtual whore, so you too can become a SecondLife millionaire, right?
http://randolfe.typepad.com/randolfe...life_revo.html





Microsoft Profit Falls
Daisuke Wakabayashi

Microsoft Corp.'s quarterly net profit <MSFT.O> beat Wall Street expectations on Thursday, driven by sales of database software and its Xbox 360 game console, and the company raised its full-year profit target.

Shares of the world's largest software maker rose more than 2 percent in after-hours trade to $31.16, within 30 cents of its year high touched earlier this month.

Microsoft posted a 28 percent drop in quarterly earnings as it deferred more than $1 billion in net income related to the consumer launch of its Windows Vista operating system and Office 2007 software due next week.

Those businesses account for most of the company's earnings, and investors expect the new products to drive sales and earnings in the coming quarters.

"Microsoft had another good quarter. A lot of the new products like Xbox 360 and SQL Server contributed to strong revenue growth this quarter. More importantly, Microsoft slightly raised its revenue guidance for fiscal year 2007 and also boosted their guidance for operating income as well," Morningstar analyst Toan Tran said.

Net profit in its fiscal second quarter ended December 31 totaled $2.63 billion, or 26 cents per diluted share, compared with $3.65 billion, or 34 cents per diluted share, a year ago. Second-quarter sales rose 6 percent to $12.54 billion.

Analysts, on average, had expected Microsoft to report earnings per share of 23 cents on sales of $12.09 billion in the quarter, according to Reuters Estimates.

"There doesn't seem to be any real hiccups here. Right now it looks pretty solid across the board," said Charles Di Bona, analyst at Bernstein Research.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said it deferred $1.64 billion in revenue and accompanying profit to the March-ending quarter from the past quarter due to the way it accounts for upgrade coupons for those products.

Looking ahead to this quarter, Microsoft forecast diluted earnings per share of 45 cents to 46 cents on revenue ranging from $13.7 billion to $14 billion. Analysts polled by Reuters Estimates, on average, expect earnings of 46 cents per share on sales of $14 billion for the March quarter.

For the full year, Microsoft lifted its earnings outlook range to $1.45 to $1.47 per share from an earlier range of $1.43 to $1.46 per share. The company narrowed its full-year revenue estimate range to between $50.2 billion and $50.7 billion from between $50.0 billion and $50.9 billion.

Analysts, on average, expect full-year earnings of $1.45 per share on sales of $50.48 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.

In the past quarter, Microsoft delivered strong Xbox 360 sales. The company said this month it had shipped 10.4 million units of the game console since its November 2005 launch, exceeding a target to ship 10 million by the end of 2006.

The large installed base of Xbox 360 consoles helped to drive sales of Microsoft Studio's own "Gears of War" game.

Microsoft's server business continued to grow at a rapid clip. Earnings at the server and tools division, which accounts for more than 20 percent of Microsoft sales, got a boost from steady demand for its SQL Server database software.

Shares of Microsoft have risen 12 percent since the start of its second quarter. Prior to the earnings announcement, the stock closed down 64 cents at $30.45 in Thursday Nasdaq trade.

"The stock from a technician's standpoint looks very good as it moves up very steadily on good volume," said Jim Hardesty, chief investment officer at Hardesty Capital Management, which owns Microsoft shares.

Article





Cingular Profit Surges; Lifts AT&T Shares
Sinead Carew

Cingular Wireless, the mobile service provider with the largest U.S. customer base, said on Wednesday its fourth-quarter profit nearly quadrupled as customer growth trumped Wall Street estimates.

The news sent parent AT&T Inc.'s <T.N> shares up 3.8 percent to $36.70, their highest level in almost five years, on the New York Stock Exchange.

Analysts said Cingular likely took market share from Sprint Nextel Corp. <S.N>, the No. 3 mobile phone service provider.

"It's impressive they were able to deliver on the profit side despite growing much faster than expected," said Roe Equity Research analyst Kevin Roe.

Cingular said profit rose to $782 million from $204 million a year ago. Service revenue rose 13 percent to $8.8 billion.

Executives said during an analyst call that service revenue would grow in the low double-digit percentage range in 2007.

Cingular added 2.4 million net new customers in the fourth quarter, beating the average estimate of 1.62 million from 10 analysts contacted by Reuters. It ended the quarter with 61 million subscribers.

Chief Financial Officer Pete Ritcher attributed the strong customer growth partly to holiday shopping trends and said Cingular's revenue was boosted by data services like texting.

The company - being rebranded as AT&T, which took full control of Cingular by buying BellSouth Corp. last month - said this would be the last quarter it reports separately from its parent. AT&T is scheduled to report its results on Thursday.

Prepaid Still Worries Some

In January, Apple Inc. <AAPL.O> said it would market the hotly anticipated iPhone, which combines wireless services with iPod-like entertainment, on Cingular's network as part of a multi-year exclusive deal.

Some analysts see that helping to boost Cingular's appeal in the high-end wireless market.

Others were still concerned Cingular's future profit would be hurt by a high dependence on less profitable customers who pay for calls in advance. Prepaid customers accounted for 746,00 of its direct customer additions.

"I thought the net adds were certainly strong but there was a lot of prepaid ... the mix of subscriber additions is a little worrisome," said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King.

CFO Ritcher argued that going after the prepaid market did not hurt growth in postpaid customers, who pay monthly bills.

Cingular likely took market share from prepaid providers such as Virgin Mobile USA, a venture of Sprint and Richard Branson's Virgin <VA.UL> that targets the fast growing youth segment, Ritcher said. As postpaid growth nears saturation, young customers and prepaid are key to growth, he said.

"I'm sure we took significant market share in the prepaid area," Ritcher said in a phone interview. "We think we're very well positioned in those parts of the market that are going to grow higher than average."

Cingular's profit and revenue has trailed that of the next biggest rival, Verizon Wireless, owned by Verizon Communications Inc. <VZ.N> and Vodafone Group Plc. <VOD.L>.

Its fourth-quarter margin for operating income before depreciation and amortization was 34.4 percent, below King's expectation of 36.4 percent.

Ritcher said Cingular hoped to have the best operating profit margins in the industry next year, forecasting margins above 40 percent for 2008.

King said the 2008 industry-leading margin target would be difficult to meet as the operating margin for Verizon Wireless had already hit 45 percent in the third quarter of 2006.

Ritcher forecast 2007 margins in the high 30 percent range in 2007. Cingular had earlier aimed to lead the industry on all metrics by the end of 2007.

Cingular average revenue per user rose to $49.29 from a $48.86 a year ago and its churn, or customer cancellation rate fell to 1.8 percent from 2.1 percent a year ago.

(Additional reporting by Kenneth Li)
Article





Nokia Net Up 19%, Topping Estimates

Nokia, the maker of mobile phones, said yesterday that fourth-quarter profit rose 19 percent, beating analysts’ estimates, as a push into emerging markets drove handset sales to a record.

Net income rose to 1.27 billion euros ($1.65 billion), or 32 cents a share, from 1.07 billion euros, or 25 cents, in the period a year earlier. Revenue rose 13 percent, to 11.7 billion euros from 10.3 billion euros.

Analysts expected Nokia to earn 1.11 billion euros.

“It has been a fantastic year in volumes,” Nokia’s chief financial officer, Richard A. Simonson, said in an interview. “We are in the emerging markets and we can make a sustainable profit.”

Nokia, which is based in Espoo, Finland, shipped a record 106 million units in the quarter, up 26 percent from a year earlier and 19 percent from the third quarter. Nokia said its fourth-quarter market share was unchanged from 36 percent in the third quarter and up from 34 percent a year earlier, led by gains in all regions except North America.

Unit sales jumped 54 percent in China and 60 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, which includes India. Handset sales in Europe rose 11 percent and fell 39 percent in North America.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/te...y/26nokia.html





When cold-fusion won’t do

Battery Breakthrough?

A Texas company says it can make a new ultracapacitor power system to replace the electrochemical batteries in everything from cars to laptops.
Tyler Hamilton

A secretive Texas startup developing what some are calling a "game changing" energy-storage technology broke its silence this week. It announced that it has reached two production milestones and is on track to ship systems this year for use in electric vehicles.

EEStor's ambitious goal, according to patent documents, is to "replace the electrochemical battery" in almost every application, from hybrid-electric and pure-electric vehicles to laptop computers to utility-scale electricity storage.

The company boldly claims that its system, a kind of battery-ultracapacitor hybrid based on barium-titanate powders, will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety. Pound for pound, it will also pack 10 times the punch of lead-acid batteries at half the cost and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals, according to the company.

The implications are enormous and, for many, unbelievable. Such a breakthrough has the potential to radically transform a transportation sector already flirting with an electric renaissance, improve the performance of intermittent energy sources such as wind and sun, and increase the efficiency and stability of power grids--all while fulfilling an oil-addicted America's quest for energy security.

The breakthrough could also pose a threat to next-generation lithium-ion makers such as Watertown, MA-based A123Systems, which is working on a plug-in hybrid storage system for General Motors, and Reno, NV-based Altair Nanotechnologies, a supplier to all-electric vehicle maker Phoenix Motorcars.

"I get a little skeptical when somebody thinks they've got a silver bullet for every application, because that's just not consistent with reality," says Andrew Burke, an expert on energy systems for transportation at University of California at Davis.

That said, Burke hopes to be proved wrong. "If [the] technology turns out to be better than I think, that doesn't make me sad: it makes me happy."

Richard Weir, EEStor's cofounder and chief executive, says he would prefer to keep a low profile and let the results of his company's innovation speak for themselves. "We're well on our way to doing everything we said," Weir told Technology Review in a rare interview. He has also worked as an electrical engineer at computing giant IBM and at Michigan-based automotive-systems leader TRW.

Much like capacitors, ultracapacitors store energy in an electrical field between two closely spaced conductors, or plates. When voltage is applied, an electric charge builds up on each plate.

Ultracapacitors have many advantages over traditional electrochemical batteries. Unlike batteries, "ultracaps" can completely absorb and release a charge at high rates and in a virtually endless cycle with little degradation.

Where they're weak, however, is with energy storage. Compared with lithium-ion batteries, high-end ultracapacitors on the market today store 25 times less energy per pound.

This is why ultracapacitors, with their ability to release quick jolts of electricity and to absorb this energy just as fast, are ideal today as a complement to batteries or fuel cells in electric-drive vehicles. The power burst that ultracaps provide can assist with stop-start acceleration, and the energy is more efficiently recaptured through regenerative braking--an area in which ultracap maker Maxwell Technologies has seen significant results.

On the other hand, EEStor's system--called an Electrical Energy Storage Unit, or EESU--is based on an ultracapacitor architecture that appears to escape the traditional limitations of such devices. The company has developed a ceramic ultracapacitor with a barium-titanate dielectric, or insulator, that can achieve an exceptionally high specific energy--that is, the amount of energy in a given unit of mass.

For example, the company's system claims a specific energy of about 280 watt hours per kilogram, compared with around 120 watt hours per kilogram for lithium-ion and 32 watt hours per kilogram for lead-acid gel batteries. This leads to new possibilities for electric vehicles and other applications, including for the military.

"It's really tuned to the electronics we attach to it," explains Weir. "We can go all the way down from pacemakers to locomotives and direct-energy weapons."

The trick is to modify the composition of the barium-titanate powders to allow for a thousandfold increase in ultracapacitor voltage--in the range of 1,200 to 3,500 volts, and possibly much higher.

EEStor claims that, using an automated production line and existing power electronics, it will initially build a 15-kilowatt-hour energy-storage system for a small electric car weighing less than 100 pounds, and with a 200-mile driving range. The vehicle, the company says, will be able to recharge in less than 10 minutes.

The company announced this week that this year it plans to begin shipping such a product to Toronto-based ZENN Motor, a maker of low-speed electric vehicles that has an exclusive license to use the EESU for small- and medium-size electric vehicles.

By some estimates, it would only require $9 worth of electricity for an EESU-powered vehicle to travel 500 miles, versus $60 worth of gasoline for a combustion-engine car.

"My understanding is that the leap from powder to product isn't the big leap," says Ian Clifford, CEO of ZENN, which is also an early investor in EEStor. "We're the first application, and that's thrilling for us. We took the initial risk because we believed in what they are doing. And energy storage is the game changer."

The key challenge, however, is to ensure that the barium-titanate powders can be made on a production line without compromising purity and stability. "Purification gives you better production stability, gives you better permittivity, and gives you the high voltages you're looking for," says Weir. "We've now got the chemicals certified and purified to the point we're looking for." (Better permittivity of the insulator improves the amount of charge that can be stored without letting the current leak across the two plates.)

EEStor announced this week that the first automated production line for its powder has performed as required and that permittivity will meet or exceed expectations. It also said that it achieved 99.9994 percent purity for its barium-nitrate powder, a crucial ingredient in the dialectric. San Antonia-based Southwest Research Institute independently confirmed the results.

In a traditional ultracap, that permittivity is given a rating of 20 to 30, while EEStor's claim is 18,500 or more--a phenomenal number by most accounts. "This is a very big step for us," says Weir. "This puts me well onto the road of meeting high-volume production."

Jim Miller, vice president of advanced transportation technologies at Maxwell Technologies and an ultracap expert who spent 18 years doing engineering work at Ford Motor, isn't so convinced.

"We're skeptical, number one, because of leakage," says Miller, explaining that high-voltage ultracaps have a tendency to self-discharge quickly. "Meaning, if you leave it parked overnight it will discharge, and you'll have to charge it back up in the morning."

He also doesn't believe that the ceramic structure--brittle by nature--will be able to handle thermal stresses that are bound to cause microfractures and, ultimately, failure. Finally, EEStor claims that its system works to specification in temperatures as low as -20 °C, revised from a previous claim of -40 °C.

"Temperature of -20 degrees C is not good enough for automotive," says Miller. "You need -40 degrees." By comparison, Altair and A123Systems claim that their lithium-ion cells can operate at -30 °C.

Burke, meanwhile, says that there's a big difference between making powder in a controlled environment and making defect-free devices in a large quantity that can survive underneath the hood of a car.

"I have no doubt you can develop that kind of [ceramic] material, and the mechanism that gives you the energy storage is clear, but the first question is whether it's truly applicable to vehicle applications," Burke says, pointing out that the technology seems more appropriate for utility-scale storage and military "ray guns," for which high voltage is an advantage.

Safety is another concern. What happens if a vehicle packed with a 3,500-volt energy system crashes?

Weir says the voltage will be stepped down with a bi-directional converter, and the whole system will be secured in a grounded metal box. It won't have a problem getting an Underwriters Laboratories safety certification, he adds. "If you drive a stake through it, we have ways of fusing this thing where all the energy is sitting there but it won't arc … It will be the safest battery the world has ever seen."

Regarding concerns about temperature, leakage, and ceramic brittleness, Weir did not reply to an e-mail asking him how EEStor overcomes such issues.

Nonetheless, the company has some solid backing. Its board has attracted Morton Topfer, former vice chairman of Dell and mentor to Michael Dell.

The company is also backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture-capital powerhouse that has an impressive track record: it made early and highly successful bets on Google, Amazon.com, and Sun Microsystems, among others. Whether EEStor can translate that success to the energy sector remains to be seen.

"I'm surprised that Kleiner has put money into it," says Miller.

Weir maintains that his company will meet all of its claims, and then some. "We're not trying to hype this. This is the first time we've ever talked about it. And we will continue to meet all of the production requirements."
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/18086/





Scientists Unveil Most Dense Memory Circuit Ever Made
AFP

The most dense computer memory circuit ever fabricated -- capable of storing around 2,000 words in a unit the size of a white blood cell -- was unveiled by scientists in California.

The team of experts at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who developed the 160-kilobit memory cell say it has a bit density of 100 gigabits per square centimeter, a new record.

The cell is capable of storing a file the size of the United States' Declaration of Independence with room left over, Caltech said in a statement.

But the chances of the unit being used in a laptop any time soon is remote, said Caltech chemistry professor James Heath, who led the research.

"It's the sort of device that Intel would contemplate making in the year 2020," Heath said. "But at the moment, it furthers our goal of learning how to manufacture functional electronic circuitry at molecular dimensions."

Whether the 2020 date is viable depends on the validity of Moore's law, which states that the complexity of an integrated circuit typically will double every year, he said.

However, manufacturers currently can see no clear way of extending the miniaturization beyond the year 2013, the Caltech-UCLA team writes in an article that will appear in the journal Nature on Thursday.

"Whether it's possible to get this new memory circuit into a laptop, I don't know," said Heath. "But we have time."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070124...e_070124194553





Vista to Give HD Photo Format More Exposure
Stephen Shankland

Microsoft is looking to supplant the ubiquitous JPEG with an image format of its own--and it's hoping the debut of Windows Vista will help do the job.

In 2006, Microsoft began promoting its own image standard, formerly called Windows Media Photo but renamed HD Photo in November. The company makes no bones about its ambitions: "Our ultimate goal is that it does become the de facto standard people are using for digital photos," said Josh Weisberg, Microsoft's director of digital imaging evangelism.

"HD" doesn't actually stand for "high definition," but it's supposed to connote the better image quality that comes with HD TV. Rico Malvar, a Microsoft Research director who helped develop the format, said that compared with JPEG, HD Photo preserves more subtle details, offers richer colors and takes up half the storage space at the same image quality.

It is tough to get new image formats to catch on, much less to replace prevailing standards, but Microsoft has two strong forces on its side.

First, Microsoft built HD Photo support into Windows Vista, consumer versions of which go on sale Tuesday. That means camera manufacturers increasingly will be able to count on HD Photo support when customers upload their images to a computer, and software such as Web browsers will be able to display and save HD Photo images.

"Clearly, the goal there is to help make it pervasive. If you can use it in Windows, a large percentage of the user base already has access to it," Weisberg said.

Second, Adobe Systems, the most influential image-editing software maker by virtue of its Photoshop products, is helping support HD Photo, said Kevin Connor, Adobe's senior director of product management. Though the "timing didn't work out" to build HD Photo support into Adobe's upcoming CS3 version of Photoshop, Adobe is working with Microsoft on a plug-in with the goal that both Windows and Mac OS X Photoshop users will be able to open and save HD Photo files.

"What's good about HD Photo is that it was designed specifically for digital photography, with a good understanding of how digital photography usage is evolving," Connor said. "It will certainly take time for HD Photo to be as broadly accessible as JPEG--if it ever is quite that broad--but there can be reasons even today why a consumer might prefer to use HD Photo."

'Massive' challenge
Better image format technology doesn't necessarily ensure success. JPEG 2000, like JPEG named after the Joint Photographic Experts Group that produced it, offered better compression quality than JPEG but was a dud. Likewise, the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format fixed issues with GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), but it hasn't replaced it.

Camera makers have reason to be cautious before they build support into their products.

"JPEG is an industry standard with a variety of quality levels within its architecture," said Sally Smith Clemens, a product manager at Olympus Imaging America. "A replacement format would have to offer very broad support from many developers of both hardware and software to be practical or considered."

A further complication is that the enthusiasts dissatisfied with JPEG and most likely to appreciate HD Photo already are embracing an alternative: the raw image formats that provide detailed, unprocessed data straight off the camera's image sensor. Adobe is trying to standardize the chaotic profusion of raw formats through its Digital Negative (DNG) format.

But probably the biggest obstacle is JPEG's momentum. Even if Microsoft gets HD Photo to catch on, supplanting JPEG is another challenge altogether.

"Replacing JPEG is a massive, massive undertaking, as JPEG really works well for people. JPEG is an open standard that is supported everywhere, on every device and every browser and every workflow," Connor said.

But Eddie Tapp, author of several books on digital-image editing, believes ordinary photographers could be interested in HD Photo. Even the point-and-shoot crowd values image quality, especially when it comes to revisiting older photos, he said.

"The day will come when somebody says, 'That picture you did at Mount Whatever--I want a big copy of that,'" Tapp said. "People look back at images they've done and think, 'I wish I had a higher-resolution camera or better file.'"

Microsoft already has sunk more than six years into developing HD Photo and recognizes it has years of work still to come. "The adoption is going to take some time," Weisberg said.

Winning allies
Microsoft is also trying hard to court business partners for the format. It dropped the "Windows Media Photo" moniker not just because HD Photo is more descriptive, but also because of partners' objections

"Manufacturers of a product that might compete with something to do with Windows...didn't like putting something branded 'Windows' into some of their products," he said. "We don't really care too much for the potential backlash in the industry: 'Here goes Microsoft again with another Windows thing they want us to use.'"

Microsoft also lowered licensing barriers to try to speed adoption. "As you can tell from the license terms, this is not something where we said, 'Let's make billions of dollars off this,'" Weisberg said. The only licensing obligation is to maintain HD Photo image compatibility.

Open-source software also can support HD Photo, Weisberg said, even though Microsoft holds patents for the technology. HD Photo technology is covered by the Open Specification Promise, an agreement under which Microsoft pledges not to assert its patent rights.

"We know we don't live in a world where things don't travel outside our ecosystem. We wanted to make sure anybody who wants to consume or create HD Photo has the ability to do that without any real encumbrance," Weisberg said.

Microsoft has won some support outside the software realm, too. "There are several manufacturers that have begun shipping or who are close to shipping HD Photo-enabled silicon (chips), but that will take time," Weisberg said, a step that's necessary for built-in camera support.

But the format is still a Microsoft standard, not an industry standard governed by a neutral consortium to represent others' interests. That can be a problem--for example, Apple has said it would like Adobe's DNG better if it were an industry standard.

Weisberg, though loquacious on many HD Photo subjects, is conspicuously quiet on the matter of standardization, saying only, "It's something we're always looking at."

HD Photo sales pitch

How exactly is HD Photo better than JPEG? Malvar and Weisberg have a multitude of arguments:

• For each pixel, HD Photo stores at least 16 bits of data for each color, compared with 8 bits with JPEG. That means subtle tonal variations in shadowy or bright areas can be preserved, even through the editing and printing process. And for the cutting-edge crowd, it can store 32 bits per color, useful for combining multiple photos into a "high dynamic range" image that spans the darkest darks to the brightest brights.

• HD Photo's compression algorithm produces images that have twice the quality as JPEG at the same file size or the same quality at half the file size. The algorithm uses simple instructions that can be relatively easily built into cameras' image-processing chips.

• HD Photo builds in smaller "thumbnail" images for quick viewing of files at small sizes. In contrast, a computer operating system must generate JPEG thumbnails.

• The encoding algorithm, set to its highest standard, is "lossless," meaning that it preserves all the image data with no loss of quality. JPEG is "lossy." And although JPEG 2000 has a lossless feature, it requires a separate algorithm and therefore, in the case of camera chips, more circuitry.

• HD Photo uses Microsoft's scRGB color space, which spans a much wider gamut of possible colors than the universally supported but widely derided sRGB scheme. "HD Photo adds support for a higher range of colors, which is becoming more important," Connor said.

And although cameras and computers typically describe colors in RGB terms--varying amounts of red, green and blue--HD Photo also can use CMYK that uses cyan, magenta, yellow and black. That's useful for sending images to printers, which often use CMYK inks.

• The algorithm can decode only a selected portion of the HD Photo image that needs to be displayed, rather than the entire image, which reduces memory requirements and speeds up performance. It can also be encoded chunk by chunk without having to store the entire image in memory.

• HD Photos can be easily rotated in 90-degree increments. JPEG images must be decoded and re-encoded, degrading quality slightly with each change.

• HD Photo images can be gargantuan--262 million pixels on an edge, or 68.6 terapixels total, as long as the compressed image doesn't exceed 32GB in size.

Microsoft knows it will need a strong pitch to spread HD Photo beyond Windows and into the entire digital photo world.

"The camera manufacturers will think, 'If I produce an image, will the neighborhood drugstore print it? Otherwise I'll keep JPEG,'" Malvar said. "We would like such a transition to happen, but we are realistic that it may take some time until the whole ecosystem is in place."
http://news.com.com/Vista+to+give+HD...3-6153730.html





Wal-Mart Eyes Microsoft for Web Build-Out
Martin LaMonica

Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores is contracting with Microsoft and Novell--Microsoft's preferred Linux partner--to build out the company's Web operations, according to a Wal-Mart executive.

On Tuesday, Microsoft and Novell are expected to announce that Wal-Mart is the latest customer to purchase both Microsoft software and support certificates for Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

In an interview arranged by both companies, Wal-Mart's senior vice president and chief technology officer, Nancy Stewart, provided some details on the project involving Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Novell.

Stewart said Wal-Mart is in the midst of expanding its Web presence globally. The partnership between Microsoft and Novell, announced last November, provides "a fine support structure" for the project, she said.

Wal-Mart, currently a Red Hat Linux customer, intends to use Windows Server and Suse Linux Enterprise Server in the expansion, she said.

"That's our direction. That's where we're going, but if we hit a roadblock and we can't go forward, it's up to Microsoft and Novell to figure out what to do about it," she said.

With the partnership, Microsoft is seeking to make Novell its preferred Linux provider and to have both companies' products work well together. Microsoft offers coupons for Suse Enterprise Linux support services as well as legal indemnification for customers who use both Microsoft and Novell's Linux, which is open-source.

Wal-Mart, a global retailing giant with $315 billion in annual revenue, is already a Microsoft customer, and Stewart said the multiyear relationship has been "outstanding."

She said the intellectual property protections in the Novell deal give Wal-Mart more confidence in using Linux more broadly.

Questions over intellectual property are a "huge problem," Stewart said. The company now uses Linux in the data center of its current Web presence but had some trepidation with the idea of expanding it a much larger operation.

"To think about using it pervasively, we were very concerned about it," she said. The larger Web operation would have "significantly higher legal exposure."
http://news.com.com/Wal-Mart+eyes+Mi...3-6152247.html





Don't Fall Victim to the 'Free Wi-Fi' Scam
Preston Gralla

The next time you're at an airport looking for a wireless hot spot, and you see one called "Free Wi-Fi" or a similar name, beware -- you may end up being victimized by the latest hot-spot scam hitting airports across the country.

You could end up being the target of a "man in the middle" attack, in which a hacker is able to steal the information you send over the Internet, including usernames and passwords. And you could also have your files and identity stolen, end up with a spyware-infested PC and have your PC turned into a spam-spewing zombie. The attack could even leave your laptop open to hackers every time you turn it on, by allowing anyone to connect to it without your knowledge.

If you're a Windows Vista user, you're especially susceptible to this attack because of the difficulty in identifying it when using Vista. In this article, you'll learn how the attack works and how to keep yourself safe from it if you use Windows XP or Vista.

How the attack works

First, let's take a look at how the attack works. You go to an airport or other hot spot and fire up your PC, hoping to find a free hot spot. You see one that calls itself "Free Wi-Fi" or a similar name. You connect. Bingo -- you've been had!

The problem is that it's not really a hot spot. Instead, it's an ad hoc, peer-to-peer network, possibly set up as a trap by someone with a laptop nearby. You can use the Internet, because the attacker has set up his PC to let you browse the Internet via his connection. But because you're using his connection, all your traffic goes through his PC, so he can see everything you do online, including all the usernames and passwords you enter for financial and other Web sites.

In addition, because you've directly connected to the attack PC on a peer-to-peer basis, if you've set up your PC to allow file sharing, the attacker can have complete run of your PC, stealing files and data and planting malware on it.

You can't actually see any of this happening, so you'd be none the wiser. The hacker steals what he wants to or plants malware, such as zombie software, then leaves, and you have no way of tracking him down.

All that is bad enough, but it might not be the end of the attack. Depending on how you've connected to that ad hoc network, the next time you turn on your PC, it may automatically broadcast the new "Free Wi-Fi" network ID to the world, and anyone nearby can connect to it in ad hoc peer-to-peer mode without your knowledge -- and can do damage if you've allowed file sharing.

While some of these ad hoc networks advertising themselves as available for connection may be attributable to Windows behavior that the PC's user is unaware of, wireless ad hoc attacks may be more common that you think. Security company Authentium Inc. has found dozens of ad hoc networks in Atlanta's airport, New York's LaGuardia, the West Palm Beach, Fla., airport and Chicago's O'Hare. Internet users have reported finding them at LAX airport in Los Angeles.

Authentium did an in-depth survey of the ad hoc networks found at O'Hare, visiting on three different occasions. It found more than 20 ad hoc networks each time, with 80% of them advertising free Wi-Fi access. The company also found that many of the networks were displaying fake or misleading MAC addresses, a clear sign that they were bent on mischief.

"You connect to one of these networks at your own peril," says Corey O'Donnell, vice president of marketing at Authentium. "And you would have no way of tracking down how you were attacked, because you would have thought you were at an ordinary hot spot connection. Enterprises are also at risk, because if someone uses a corporate laptop to connect to one of these networks and gets infected, when he plugs back in to the enterprise network, the whole network is put at risk."

How to protect yourself in Windows XP

Protecting yourself against these kinds of attacks is quite easy: Never connect to an ad hoc network unless someone you know has set one up and specifically asks you to connect. So no matter where you are, if you see an ad hoc network, don't connect, no matter the name of the network.

Be aware that someone can name an ad hoc network anything they want, so they can even duplicate the name of a legitimate network. For example, if you're at an airport, and the name of the airport's free hot spot is AirNet, someone can set up an ad hoc network with that exact same name. You'd see two networks called AirNet, one being the legitimate one and the other being the scam ad hoc network.

In Windows XP, it's easy to differentiate between an ad hoc network and a normal Wi-Fi network (Microsoft calls connecting to a hot spot or access point being in "infrastructure mode"). In Windows XP, in order to connect to a wireless network, you click the wireless network icon in the system tray, and the "Choose a wireless network" connection screen appears. You'll see a list of all nearby wireless networks.

As you can see in the nearby figure, each network includes a name and a description. Look at the description. If it's an ad hoc network, it will be called a "computer-to-computer" network; normal wireless networks are simply called wireless networks. In the figure, the "Free Airport WiFi" network is an ad hoc network. You should stay away from it

Windows XP displays the details of every nearby wireless network, including whether it's an ad hoc network. In this screen, the Free Airport WiFi network is an ad hoc network.

There are other steps you can take to make sure you don't accidentally connect to an ad hoc network created by a scamster. For example, you can make sure that XP never connects to an ad hoc network. To do it:

1. Click the wireless icon in the System Tray.
2. Click "Change advanced settings."
3. Select the Wireless Networks tab.
4. Click "Advanced."
5. On the screen that appears (pictured in the nearby figure), select "Access point (infrastructure) networks only."
6. Click Close, and keep clicking OK until the dialog boxes disappear.

Note: If a wireless icon isn't displayed in your System Tray, you can get to your wireless connection by clicking on Start, going to Settings, then Control Panel and then Network Connections. Then double-click on the wireless connection icon to bring up the panel that displays the "Change advanced settings" link. An alternate path on some systems might be Start --> Control Panel --> Network and Internet Connections --> Network Connections, then double-click on the wireless network connection icon.

This screen lets you tell your PC never to connect to ad hoc networks.

When you're at the "Advanced" screen, you should also make sure the box next to "Automatically connect to non-preferred networks" is not checked. If that box is checked, your PC will connect to any nearby wireless network, without alerting you, which is a serious security risk.
It's also a good idea when you're on the Wireless Networks tab to look at all the wireless networks listed in the Preferred networks area (shown in the nearby figure). These are networks that at one time or another you've connected to. Highlight any that you are not absolutely sure are secure, then click Remove. That way, your PC won't attempt to connect to them.

Remove any unfamiliar networks from the Preferred networks list.

There's more you should do as well. You should also configure your remaining preferred networks so that you don't connect to them automatically. Why do that? Let's say your home network uses the default name it shipped with --- for example, Linksys for a Linksys network. A scamster can create an ad hoc network called Linksys, and then anyone nearby who has Linksys listed as a preferred network will automatically connect to that ad hoc network.

So in the Preferred networks area, highlight each network, select Properties, then click the connection tab, shown in the nearby figure. Uncheck the box next to "Connect when this network is within range" and keep clicking OK until the dialog boxes close.

Make sure to tell your PC not to make any automatic connections to wireless networks.
Keeping safe in Windows Vista

Microsoft spent a considerable amount of effort making Windows Vista more secure than Windows XP, but when it comes to wireless networking, you're more at risk in Windows Vista from an ad hoc attack than you were in Windows XP. That's because in Windows Vista, it's not as easy to distinguish an ad hoc network from a normal Wi-Fi network as it is in Windows XP. However, once you know the trick, it's easy to do.

In Windows Vista, you connect to a wireless network by first clicking the network icon in the System Tray, then selecting "Connect or disconnect." The "Connect to a Network" screen shows up, with a list of nearby wireless networks. You see the name of each and whether the network is encrypted or not; to get more details about any, hover your mouse over it, as shown in the nearby figure. But those details don't include whether the network is a true hot spot or an ad hoc network.

Before you connect to a new wireless network, the only way to tell the difference between an ad hoc network and one in infrastructure mode is to look at the network icon next to it on the "Connect to a Network" screen. As you can see in the nearby figure, the icon for a normal Wi-Fi network is one computer, while the icon for an ad hoc network instead is several computers. That's it; there's no other way to distinguish between the two.

The only way to distinguish between ad hoc and normal wireless hot spots is to look at the network icon on this screen. An ad hoc network's icon is made up of several PCs; a normal network is made up of one PC.

Here's another oddity: If you right-click the list of available networks, on the menu that appears, some of them have a Properties menu item and others don't. Only those networks that you've previously visited and saved to your network list will have the Properties menu item. If you choose Properties, select the Connection tab and look next to Network Type, you'll see whether it's an ad hoc network or an access point (a normal hot spot).

But if you haven't yet connected to the network (or if you have connected previously but haven't saved it), it won't have the Properties menu item. So you can't use that method of distinguishing between ad hoc and normal Wi-Fi networks when you're looking for a hot spot on the road.

Other steps you can take

There are other steps you can take to keep yourself safe, including turning off file sharing and running your company's VPN when at a hot spot. You can also pay to use a VPN such as HotSpotVPN. For details and many other tips for keeping yourself safe, see "How to protect yourself at wireless hot spots".

In addition, Authentium is working with financial institutions to create a product called VirtualATM, which will help protect you when you connect to a financial institution. It's expected to be released later this year
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...axono myId=16





Net Security

Interview with Bill Cheswick
Federico Biancuzzi

Many people have seen Internet maps on walls and in various publications over the years. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed Bill Cheswick, who started the Internet Mapping Project that grew into software to map corporate and government networks. They discussed firewalling, logging, NIDS and IPS, how to fight DDoS, and the future of BGP and DNS.

Could you introduce yourself?

Bill Cheswick: I am known for my work in Internet Security, starting with work on early firewalls and honeypots at Bell Labs in the late 80s. I coined the word "proxy" in its current usage in a paper I published in 1990. I co-authored the first full book on Internet security in 1994 with Steve Bellovin. This sold very well and arrived in time to train the first generation of network managers.

In the late 1990s Hal Burch and I did some seminal research on IP traceback, and then started the Internet Mapping Project. This grew into software to map corporate and government networks. We were two of seven people who co-founded Lumeta, a spin-off from Bell Labs, to commercialize these capabilities. You have probably seen our Internet maps on walls and in various publications over the years. I have served as Chief Scientist at Lumeta from Sept 2000 to Sept 2006.

I am an internationally-known speaker on computers, the Internet, and security.

You wrote a famous book entitled "Firewalls and Internet Security", so I'd like to ask you a couple of technical suggestions on firewalls. What type of policy do you prefer for filtered TCP ports? Returning a RST or dropping packets silently?

Bill Cheswick: I prefer the silent drops: it makes an attacker wait for a timeout, and you can't use spoofed packets to point RSTs elsewhere. Returning an RST reveals information that really doesn't need to be disclosed.

I don't think choosing one way or the other is a big deal, however.

I was thinking of the fact that if you drop TCP packets for a particular port or range or ports, an attacker could spoof your IP. In fact he would be able to send SYN packets to the victim, who will send SYN+ACK to your IP, but since your firewall will drop those packets instead of returning RST, the attacker will be able to send his ACK storm undisturbed...

Bill Cheswick: It's true, but that trick will also work with any unassigned or idle IP addresses, and there are many.

In any case, these bounced packets don't offer any amplification, so it isn't clear why they would bother. Also, I understand that with the botnets so common, a lot of attackers don't bother spoofing packets.

What type of logging would you suggest for a firewall filtering an Internet connection? If the aim of a firewall is to block undesired packets, why should we log them?

Bill Cheswick: Back in the early 90s I used to log all the probes, and often send out emails warning the owners of probing machines that they might be compromised. Over time this became as pointless as counting bugs on a windshield, and I stopped.

The information is not entirely useless, and the firewall can become a small packet telescope. Most of the information revealed is statistical: worm infection rates, etc. But you can imagine combining information about firewall probes with other information about an attack on a company that could yield some additional information about the attack.

Disk space is cheap, and these logs aren't needed for very long, nor do they typically require being backed up. I like to put such logs into a large, cheap drop-safe, and make sure that if the safe fills up, the firewall still functions.

You didn't mention NIDS when talking about analyzing data and discovering threats. What is your opinion about the core idea and current technology of Network Intrusion Detection Systems?

Bill Cheswick: It makes a lot of sense to watch your own network and interconnections to keep an eye on what's going on. The problem is that there is such volume and variety of data and protocols (a strength of the Internet) that it is really hard for a human to understand his network traffic, unless it is highly constrained. (In other words, "we only allow web traffic on this subnet...")

Not only is it hard to really monitor what's going on, subtle, slow stealth attacks and probes over, say, a period of months, are almost impossible to separate from the hue and cry of momentary traffic. Most people don't try, but that's where the real pros can eat your lunch.

NIDS are an ongoing attempt to watch the network. They all try to watch the net, summarize traffic, report anomalies, etc. They all have problems with false negatives and false positives. False positives quickly become a monotonous drumbeat, and tend to quash interest in the tool and its results. When a salesman tells you about a NIDS, or you read a paper about some new NIDS technology, always find out the details of false positive rates, and what they miss.

Another problem is the NIDS themselves may be subverted. We have seen buffer overflow attacks on the monitoring host, packets that were intended to subvert the eavesdropping software! This can turn your NIDS against you.

Deep down, network monitors have what Matt Blaze calls the "eavesdropper's dilemma." Is the eavesdropping software seeing the same data, and interpreting it the same way, as the destination hosts? This is a hard problem: perhaps packets don't make it all the way to the destination, or the end operating system can interpret overlapping data in two ways. The eavesdropper has to understand this, and state-of-the-art implementations actually understand the local network topology and actively probe endpoints to determine their operating system and version. It seems to me that this particular arms race will end badly.

This same problem exists for law enforcement and military, only on a much grander scale. They need to extract specific, small bits of data from vast torrents of data.

What do you think about reactive firewalls, also knows as IPS (Intrusion Prevention Systems)?

Bill Cheswick: Reactive security is an idea that keeps popping up. It seems logical. Why not send out a virus to cure a virus, for example? How about having an attacked host somehow stifle the attacker, or tell a firewall to block the noxious packets.

These are very tricky things to do, and the danger is always that an attacker can make you DOS yourself or someone else. As an attacker, I can make you shut down connections by making them appear to misbehave. This is often easier than launching the original attack that the reactive system was designed to suppress. (By the way, this happens a lot in biological immune systems as well. There are a number of diseases that trigger dangerous or fatal immune system responses.)

So I am skeptical about these systems. They may work out, but I want to keep an eye on the actual user experiences with these.

What is the state of research in network security? What attract funds? What is considered a promising technology?

Bill Cheswick: A lot of the easy stuff has been done, and even beaten to death commercially. I have been intrigued by new work in a few areas.
There is a lot of activity on virtual machines of various sorts, like VMware and Xen, for example. I think these have a lot of potential, especially with better hardware support. VMs are a nice sandbox for necessary but dangerous client software, like browsers and mail readers. They can be used to improve testing of operating systems, which I would like to see more of.

Google for "strider honey monkeys". This is a nice paper about a proactive project at Microsoft research to go find browser exploits on evil sites. It has found a number of day-zero and other exploits, which they fed into the developers and legal department. I understand this work has been turned over to production. A nice job.

I was excited by the SANE paper at Usenix from some crackerjack folk at Stanford. It is a rethinking of intranet design, completely replacing the end-to-end principle with centralized control. This is bad for research and new Internet technologies, but it may be exactly what a military network needs, and maybe useful for corporate deployment. There are open questions, but it is quite promising.

I am not that well connected with current funding streams to be able to answer that question well.

How will the Internet change with the increasing resources that common people have access to? For example, a blind spoofing attack could become more feasible with broadband access to the internet, and there are some countries where you can easily and cheaply get a 100Mbps connection. Same thing for DDoS via botnets, if each host got a 100Mbps...

Bill Cheswick: This has already happened some time ago. Parts of the Far East have efficient home wiring, and computers there are often used in staging attacks because they have high bandwidth. This has become such a problem that some people just drop all email from China, since it can be a major source of spam connections, and many people don't know anyone there.

Spoofing of attacks continue, but I am told that the spoofing rates are down. For DDoS, why spoof when there are tens of thousands of source addresses?

For almost all users, the computer and the network have far more potential than the average user employs almost all of the time. Common computers have cycle times six times greater than the million dollar Cray we had at Bell Labs in the early 90s. The Cray still wins in some performance areas, but in many it does not. What does an average user do with this compute power? Powerpoint and word processing don't need nearly this much power. Some multimedia and many games do use this power.

So miscreants use the computer and the network connections of average users for their own uses, being careful not to bother the owner. That's why viruses these days don't tend to do nasty things like erase hard drives, though they certainly could if they wished.

These compromised machines are very useful for making money, through spam delivery, phishing sites, DDoS extortion attacks, etc. The incentives are strong, and I expect this misuse to continue. I hope the population of susceptible machines will decline as Vista gets deployed and the early kinks get ironed out.

The big change in the Internet is going to be greatly increased multimedia delivery. An hour television show at 720p is about 5GB. People are going to want to share these with friends, and providers are grappling with new delivery mechanisms, perhaps permanently replacing broadcast TV.

What is the more promising path to fight DDoS?

Bill Cheswick: I have no definitive answer for this. I can imagine a world of robust, worm-free software. Engineering, experience, and the right economic motives can bring this about. But any public server can be abused by the public. Are the flood of queries to CNN the result of breaking news, or a focused DDoS attack? Even if it is breaking news, I could imagine that the news might be created explicitly to flood the site. How would we know?

I see no theoretical possibility of doing anything more than mitigating attacks, and ultimately throwing large amounts of computing and network capacity at the problem, which is what all the most popular targets do.

Do you think that we could use some mapping software to fight these types of attacks, just like weather people study the movement and shape of tornados with satellites?

Bill Cheswick: I don't think it's likely to be useful, because the source of DDoS attacks are widespread and generally not hidden. It doesn't help me if I know the location of 10,000 attacking hosts: I can't possibly track them down (using traceback, traffic analysis, or whatever) and shut them all down. These days I am told that the attackers often don't even bother to spoof the attacking addresses.

If there is a particular attacking stream of interest, then, yes, this technology may be helpful, combined with others. I mentioned traffic analysis: this is one area where I conjecture that the spooks may be well ahead of the public literature.

There are certainly researchers examining packet traceback, flood suppression, etc., using these tools, including my data.

It seems that Net Neutrality is under fire in the US. What is your opinion from a security standpoint? Could we see some security improvements if carriers had the right to filter the traffic on their networks?

Bill Cheswick: Short answer: some carriers do filter some traffic, and that sometimes is a benefit to their customers. As the Chinese would tell you if free to do so, it is actually quite hard to suppress all the unwanted traffic, given world-class encryption and a massive traffic flow in which to hide.

;login: The USENIX Magazine published an article [PDF] titled "Worm Propagation Strategies in an IPv6 Internet" that you co-authored. It seems that IPv6 could help us in fighting worms thanks to its huge address space. What type of other indirect security advantages could IPv6 provide?

Bill Cheswick: That paper points out that it doesn't help us that much. IPv6 is a good idea, but it shouldn't be sold as a palliative for worms.

The job of hunting for hosts on a network also has legitimate motivations. Corporate auditors are keen to find and track their assets. I think they are going to have to talk to the routers more. Hopefully the worms will be excluded from these conversations.

At present, I don't see much economic pressure for corporations to switch their intranets to IPv6. There is a lot of work involved, and I don't see the benefits.

The Internet runs on two fragile technologies: BGP connections among routers, and a bunch of root DNS servers deployed around the planet. How much longer do you think this setup could still be effective?

Bill Cheswick: For quite a while, actually, though there are obvious, well-known weaknesses with both systems. The DNS root servers appear to be 13 hosts, but are actually many more. They have been under varying, continual, low-level attacks for many years, a process that tends to toughen the defenses and make them quite robust. A few years ago there was a strong attack on the root servers, taking 9 of the 13 down at some point.

The heterogeneity of the root server management was part of the underlying robustness. For example, Paul Vixie's servers (F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) had many hosts hiding behind that single IP address. I understand they did not go down. In this case, the statelessness of the UDP protocol underlying the DNS system was a strength. (It is a weakness in other ways, allowing a variety of attacks, including some new ones recently.)

There are other root servers, of course. Anyone can run one, it is just a question of getting people to use it. I understand that China is proceeding with root servers of their own. DNSSEC is a way to get the right DNS answer, but its deployment has had problems for at least 10 years.

BGP is certainly another network issue. Where should my routers forward packets to? BGP distributes this information throughout the Internet. There are two problems here: 1) is the distribution working correctly, and 2) are the other players sending the correct information in the first place. This is usually an easy problem between an ISP and their customer. The customer is only allowed to announce certain routes, and the ISP filters these announcements to enforce the restriction. It is easy on a short list of announcements.

But at the peering point with other ISPs, this becomes hard, because there are hundreds of thousands of routes, and it isn't clear which is which. Should I forward packets for Estonia to router A or router B? We are far removed from the places where these answers are known.

There are proposals to grab ahold of all this information using cryptographic signatures. SBGP is one on-going proposal, but there are lots of problems with it, and lots of routers to change. (We identify almost 200,000 routers a day worldwide in the Internet mapping project.)

And BGP announcements are misused. Evil nets will pop up for a little while, emit bad packets, and then unannounce themselves, confounding the job of tracking them down. Other attacks can divert packets from the proper destinations. There have been many cases of this, both accidental and intentional.

For all these problems, and others in the past, I have been impressed with the response of the network community. These problems, and others like security weaknesses, security exploits, etc., usually get dealt with in a few days. For example, the SYN packet DOS attacks in 1996 quickly brought together ad hoc teams of experts, and within a week, patches with new mitigations were appearing from the vendors. You can take the Internet down, but probably not for very long.
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/429





From the guy who said YouTube would flop

BitTorrent is DOOMED!
P2PNet

The self-acclaimed guru of IPTV, Mark Cuban claims P2P and, more specifically, BitTorrent, is doomed. Apparently, “conflicting clients”, lack of knowledge, limited Internet plans, and “bandwidth premiums” are going to be jointly responsible.

Here’s Cuban’s argument: he believes from the business standpoint, BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer technologies are great. They save massive amounts of bandwidth and help efficiently distribute large media files, possibly even speeding up transfers. We agree with everything up ’til here.

But now he goes on to say although content creators can profit from BitTorrent, users are getting screwed. Why? Here are his reasons.

# Conflicting Clients
# End Users don’t understand how P2P works
# The P2P model of seeding is a HUGE problem for those […] with bandwidth constraints or per bit or per minute costs
# There is a misconception that there is bandwidth savings for the end user

On conflicting clients he says, “When multiple clients are installed on a PC, not only does that create confusion among users, its a ‘last installed, first in charge’ approach. That approach and lack of respect for other clients will lead to user configuration problems.”

Okay, Number One, if you’re referring to file associations, ie, the most recently installed app is associated with the file type, then this “problem” is not limited to BitTorrent clients. Everything from graphic editors (Photoshop, Gimp) to music management applications (iTunes, WinAmp) do this.

Secondly, if this causes confusion among users, then how do millions of people manage to get their music into iTunes and sync it to their iPods without accidentally having their mp3s added to the Windows Media Player library? This “lack of respect” isn’t so much about BitTorrent client developers trying to steal users from their competitors, as it is about how operating systems function today.

Onto Point Two. “End Users dont understand how P2P works, and once they do, they get concerned about giving up bandwidth.”

I hear BitTorrent transfers make up about one third of all traffic on the Internet these days. It seems likely that end users do, in fact, understand how P2P works. And unless their other online activities are hindered by BitTorrent or P2P, I don’t see users really having a problem with the uploads.

Most don’t even bother uploading once their file has been download, and since the majority of users download torrents from public trackers, they aren’t forced to either.

Cuban’s third point, “The P2P model of seeding is a HUGE problem for those using wireless broadband with bandwidth constraints or per bit or per minute costs. People are going to wake up and find that they owe Verizon, Sprint, whoever a lot more than they ever thought possible because they installed a client on their Laptops. That could lead to these networks blocking the protocol.”

This actually makes sense. The real problem here is miscommunication. In developing countries such as India, ISPs milk customers for money by charging them for every MB downloaded, and in some cases, for every minute spent online.

Some ISPs (Sify, for one) even lie about unlimited plans and have per-day limits (eg. 200 MB), which, if exceeded, cause the number of days the plan is valid for (usually a month) to be reduced every time the download limit is excedded. Someone I know actually ran up a bill of several hundred dollars because he thought he was on an unlimited plan, whereas in reality his ISP hadn’t processed his request to change plans. But as BitTorrent and P2P grow in popularity, users are quickly starting to demand ‘unlimited’ plans.

If you look at the trend, ISPs are more likely to cash in on the P2P phenomenon and offer unlimited plans for a premium than start blocking protocols. And although per-bit and per-minute plans are widespread in developing countries, I don’t know how much of a problem they are to European, Australian and North American users.

Cuban’s last point is, “There is a misconception that there is bandwidth savings for the end user. If you want to download a 1gb size file, 1gb of data will be delivered to your PC. There is no savings of bandwidth on the client side. In fact, the client is charged a bandwidth premium because after they have received the entire file, they are asked to particpate in the peering by delivering parts of the file to other users.”

Guess what? The end user doesn’t care if he’s uploading bits while downloading. Unlike hosting providers, users incur no cost from constantly uploading data. It doesn’t matter, as long as they can go about their other activities. And unless they're on a per-bit or per-minute plan, no “bandwidth premiums” are going to be charged. Also, no one is asking the user to “participate in the peering” (or simply, seed) once the download is complete. That is only a requirement of select private trackers.

When it comes to utilising BitTorrent in business, as part of a content store, I think Cuban’s looking at it the wrong way.

When the various BitTorrent stores (BitTorrent.com, Zudeo.com) are up and running, content creators are not going to be getting a free ride. Users are not going to pay the same price they do at conventional stores such as the iTunes Store and Amazon Unbox. Why should they? They’re acting as servers for content creators and are distributing content for no charge at all. But since money isn’t being deducted from their bank accounts, and seeding a torrent is not really affecting their web browsing, users are okay with uploading.

Keep in mind, this business model will only work if the rates at BitTorrent-powered content stores are significantly lower than conventional ones. In other words, users aren’t just going to let themselves be ripped off. If they feel they’re getting a raw deal, they’ll head straight to “illegal” torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Isohunt. In fact, that’s what users are doing right now!

I’m open to the possibility that I’m dead wrong. I don’t know, maybe Cuban is right. Maybe BitTorrent is in fact doomed, and the video streaming technologies he pioneered with Broadcast.com in the 90s will make a major comeback.

I mean, who uses BitTorrent these days? Just a bunch of pirates, soon to be exiled to metal platform in the middle of the North Sea. Right? Right.

What do you think? Are the days of P2P over? Is the the balkanisation of BitTorrent imminent?
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/11111





The Pirate Bay: Serving over 4 Million Torrents a Day
Ernesto

The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular BitTorrent sites on the Internet, posted some interesting stats. At the moment 53 .torrent files are downloaded from The Pirate Bay every second, which adds up to 4,579,200 torrents a day.

Here are some more interesting stats from The Pirate Bay Blog:

· Serving the torrents takes up 1.72 Mbyte/s
· Apart from the torrents, 308 requests are made per second
· These request take up 712 Kbyte/s
· 86 searches are made every second
· The database server handles 1150 Requests per second
· Including the tracker The Pirate Bay is good for 150-170 Mbit/s

Close to 50% of all the torrents that are listed on public trackers are tracked by The Pirate Bay.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...orrents-a-day/





Why Pirated Vista Has Microsoft Champing at the BitTorrent
Eric Lai

As Microsoft Corp. gets ready to launch Windows Vista and Office 2007 to consumers, it claims a formidable new foe it lacked at its last major consumer software launch five years ago: the popular filesharing network known as BitTorrent.

This third-generation peer-to-peer (P2P) service, already used by tens of millions of Internet users to swap digital music and movies for free, is becoming a popular mechanism for those looking to obtain pirated software.

"Any software that is commercially available is available on BitTorrent," according to Mark Ishikawa, CEO of BayTSP Inc., a Los Gatos, Calif., antipiracy consulting firm.

Piracy and prerelease
Or in the case of Vista and Office 2007, before they were commercially available. Both products were released to corporations almost two months ago, but won’t be officially launched to consumers until Jan. 29.

But as early as mid-November, "cracked" copies of both products were available via BitTorrent. As of mid-January, more than 100 individual copies of Office 2007 and more than 350 individual copies of Windows Vista were available on the service, according to BigChampagne LLC, a Los Angeles-based online media-tracking firm.

The pirates that cracked early copies of Vista all sidestepped Microsoft’s latest antipiracy technology, the Software Protection Platform. SPP is supposed to shut down any copy of Vista not registered to Microsoft over the Internet with a legitimate, paid-up license key within the first 30 days.

Microsoft has quietly admitted that it has already found three different workarounds to SPP. It says it can defeat one, dubbed the Frankenbuild because of its cobbling together of code from beta and final versions of Vista. It hasn’t yet announced success against several other cracks, including one seemingly inspired by Y2k, which allows Vista to run unactivated until the year 2099 rather than for just 30 days.

"Pirates have unlimited time and resources," BayTSP’s Ishikawa says. "You can’t build an encryption that can’t be broken."

Microsoft popular with pirates
According to BayTSP’s most recent figures from 2005, six out of the 25 most widely pirated software packages on BitTorrent and eDonkey, another P2P network, originated at Microsoft. Office 2003 was the second most-pirated software behind Adobe Systems Inc.’s Acrobat 7. Other widely pirated Microsoft software includes InfoPath 2003, FrontPage 2003, Visio 2003, Office XP and Windows XP.

Cori Hartje, director of Microsoft’s Genuine Software Initiative, remains confident that SPP, along with another effort by Microsoft to clamp down on the abuse of corporate volume license keys by pirates, can reduce the rate of piracy of Microsoft’s latest products compared to previous ones.

But the company is taking no chances, fighting back on multiple fronts. To distract downloaders who may only be seeking a sneak peek at the new software, the company's offering free online test drives of Vista and 60-day trials of Office 2007.

To reach young people, who are the most enthusiastic users of P2P, Microsoft is putting comics up on the Web, mostly in foreign languages, decrying software piracy.

And on Monday, the company released statistics purporting to show that users downloading pirated software from P2P networks are at great risk infecting themselves with viruses or spyware.

According to an October 2006 report conducted by IDC and commissioned by Microsoft, nearly 60% of key generators and crack tools downloaded from P2P networks contained malicious or unwanted software. Similarly, one quarter of Web sites offering key generators -- software that create alphanumeric strings that users can type in to activate their pirated Microsoft software -- had such hidden software.

The perils of P2P?
Hartje claims that many pirates are irresponsibly uploading malware along with their cracked goods to BitTorrent.

"They may not be running a clean shop, and don’t care if viruses are on the software," she says.

IDC researchers used popular antivirus packages from McAfee Inc. and Symantec Corp. to detect malware. However, the researchers did not differentiate between more serious viruses and spyware and less harmful unwanted code such as adware. IDC also conceded that some P2P networks deploy built-in virus scanning that "strip[s] out most of the malicious software" before it reaches users.

Some skeptics say that Microsoft’s "education" campaign is primarily an attempt to sow FUD -- fear, uncertainty and doubt -- in the minds of consumers, a tactic the company has been called out for in the past, and which could backfire.

"Warning customers about viruses and spyware in counterfeit software is a nice PR thing for Microsoft, but for the most part, I doubt that it's really effective," says Paul DeGroot, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent consulting firm in Kirkland, Wash., who applauds Microsoft’s other antipiracy efforts.

Microsoft hopes to scare consumers straight, he says, because efforts to guilt and shame consumers into not downloading, have had little success. Moreover, the company rarely targets end users of counterfeit software with lawsuits for fear of alienating customers.

"Our main concern is preventing pirates from putting counterfeits in the hands of unsuspecting customers," says Matt Lundy, a senior attorney at Microsoft.

The technology advances
P2P technology, meanwhile, has advanced greatly since Microsoft released Windows XP in late 2001. At the time, P2P networks such as Napster and Gnutella were solely used to exchange music files. Since that time, Napster has been closed and re-opened as a legitimate pay music service similar to Apple Inc.’s iTunes. The second-generation Gnutella has waned in popularity because of aging technology and partial neutering by the record companies, which have flooded Gnutella with decoy files masquerading as songs, Ishikawa says.

Enter BitTorrent, which boasts faster file transfers and more reliable downloads than other P2P networks. BitTorrent was not the first P2P network to host pirated DVDs and software, but it was the first to make the trade of such hefty files practical. Moreover, BitTorrent claims it automatically cleanses its network of both viruses as well as decoy files. The latter defeats related antipiracy efforts by the music industry.

BitTorrent’s other great advantage is its ease of use compared to "darknet" services used by more sophisticated pirates, such as Internet Relay Chat channels, private FTP sites and Usenet newsgroups. For most Internet users, darknets remain hard to find -- you can’t simply Google them -- and intimidating to use.

Microsoft’s worst nightmare would come to pass if P2P software piracy becomes as pervasive as the movie and music piracy. Already, the number of songs swapped illegally online surpasses the number sold in stores or online at sites like iTunes, says BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland, citing music industry estimates.

Victory by assimilation?
Faced with this situation, music and movie companies are starting to co-opt P2P. Record companies are using services like BigChampagne to scout music trends and sign up-and-coming bands, while movie studios such as Paramount and Fox have linked up with BitTorrent to sell movies via downloads.

The software industry lags by comparison. Microsoft is allowing consumers to download and buy Vista from its own Web site for the first time. Otherwise, Microsoft has "nothing new to announce in regards to any new distribution channels," Hartje says.

BitTorrent did not return a call and an e-mail seeking comment.

For Microsoft to ink a deal with BitTorrent to sell full software or even put up free trials would send out mixed messages, Ishikawa says.

"If you ever want to litigate, don’t send out any freeware," he says.

Still, people like BigChampagne’s Garland point out that P2P software piracy today remains a drop in the bucket compared to video piracy, which involve similarly hefty files. His reason: downloaded movies are just entertainment, but business software is used to run companies, do people’s taxes and other important things. For those, most users still prefer the security blanket of technical support, access to software fixes and updates -- even manuals -- that only buying the software can provide, Garland says.

"Forget backdoor viruses or trojans," he says. "There are some things that are worth paying for."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...pageNu mber=1





BBC to Join NBC, CBS, in YouTube Deal?
The Blog Herald

It looks like the BBC is in negotiations to sign a deal that see its content placed on YouTube, much like NBC and CBS have already done. The International Herald Tribune reports that negotiations are underway with the Google-bought company, with as yet undisclosed terms. Its unclear whether or not they would have a dedicated channel, such as NBC, or, merely syndicate different shows, like CBS has done with shows like the David Letterman show.

What’s not unclear, however, is the rationale for heading towards YouTube.

There’s no doubt that the BBC has its own plans for distributed video, but with the number of users that YouTube has, its probably viewed more as a distribution channel. And its ability to “channel” viewers is obvious.

Last fall year CBS produced data that showed increased off-line viewership after it began to syndicate a number of its television shows on YouTube. In particular, shows such as the “The Late Show, with David Letterman”, “The Late Late Show, with Craig Ferguson”, had all increased its viewership 5-7% after CBS began seeding its videos on YouTube. While the exact numbers might be indispute, it did provide some data that suggested that — shocking, I know — providing grainy poor-resolution, in-front-of-your-PC “free” shows improved the value of ad-supported higher resolution on-your-couch shows.

Look for the actual details to be disclosed this Wednesday.

Article





Become an Internet Sensation on YouTube

70 million videos are watched every day
AP

So you want to be a viral video star.

Now that web sites like YouTube have created a democratized platform for celebrity, anyone who uploads a video has a chance to become a sensation. And we've seen deals follow with TV networks and record labels.

Sounds easy, right? Except that more than 70 million videos are watched on YouTube daily. In that enormous digital wilderness, most videos fall without a sound.

To reach the pinnacle of YouTube celebrity, your video must generally rank among either the most-viewed or most-subscribed lists, which each include only 100 videos, arranged daily, weekly, monthly and by all-time.

A look at how to rise up the charts:

The Video

Nobody knows what will become a hit. The most popular videos ever posted on YouTube include a balding man dancing (39 million views), an impression of a computer bug (6 million) and a dog that seems to hate his left hind foot (7 million).

"It's really about finding out what you do best and putting it out there," says Ben Going, a 21-year-old Alabama waiter who as "boh3m3" is one of the best-known members of the YouTube community.

Then there's the consistent popularity of cute, young girls. YouTube's biggest star -- lonelygirl15 -- probably wouldn't have succeeded as a middle-aged man. In recent months, many have sought to exploit the male impulse to click on anything that has the slightest chance of showing some skin.

One of the week's most-viewed clips has a thumbnail photo of a buxom blonde and calls itself "Chicks Gone Wild!!! 2" And thus more than a million people have clicked on a video of baby chickens.

Last month, dot-com entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who frequently blogs critically on YouTube, wrote: "That's what YouTube has become. Fake porn and commercials."

One good way to make a name for yourself is to parody something that's already popular on YouTube. For example, Richard Stern -- known as "Lazydork" -- became well known after making a rap video titled "LonelyGirl: Lazydork is Better Than You."

Actor Jamie Kennedy's recent parody "How To Blow Up on YouTube" recomended mixing Mentos with Diet Coke, playing with cats, singing into the camera or pairing yourself with a teenage girl.

Capturing eyeballs

Once you've uploaded your video and tagged it with relevant subjects, your work has just begun. Some people may stumble on your video and maybe your friends will share it with others, but you've got to create your audience just as you created your video.

"One of the things that we always recommend is to build a YouTube channel and be an active part of the community," says Aaron Ferstman, a spokesman for YouTube. "It's really about producing creative content, contributing it, getting comments and just participating with other people."

Francis Stokes, a 34-year-old independent filmmaker, spent years at film festivals with his movie "Harold Buttleman, Daredevil Stuntman." Now his "God, Inc." series on YouTube has brought fame and industry notice in a matter of weeks.

The first episode of "God, Inc.," which presents heaven as an office, has received nearly one million views since being added in early December -- but it didn't happen overnight.

"I uploaded the video thinking, 'Oh, people will find it.' And then after a while, I started getting to know YouTube and getting to know who was popular, so I sent out some e-mails and made some comments," he said.

To infuse yourself into the community, you can post video responses and comments to the videos of popular YouTubers.

Damien Estreich has become a unique presence in online video with his channel, YourTube News. His videos -- sometimes hosted by a professional broadcaster -- report what's happening on YouTube and profile notable contributors. But he also had to fight to become relevant.

"I just marketed my heart out on people's pages and got social networking going," says Estreich, who lives in Australia. "I got popular members doing video responses -- got the name in there."

Going, however, is reluctant to lend his spotlight to those who approach him: "That's not what it's all about."

Occasionally, suspicion arises that a video has become artificially inflated by "gaming" the system -- repeatedly posting comments on one's own video to make it one of the "most discussed" videos, or by using multiple user names to increase subscription numbers.

YouTube spokeswoman Jennifer Nielsen notes that to make a YouTube profile, you need to have a unique e-mail address, which would make dummy accounts time-consuming to create. For security reasons, she won't discuss YouTube's anti-gaming software that prevents repeated refreshing of pages to falsely drum up view counts.

Viral infection

Some viral videos spread of their own magical volition, but many get help. One of the best boosts is to become featured on the home page of YouTube.

A video picked by the site's home page editors is virtually guaranteed to at least break 100,000 views. The YouTube blog (www.youtube.com/blog) recently profiled one of its editors with his thought process behind choosing a week's worth of videos. He showed a taste for the cute ("The Cuppycake Song"), the unusual ("World Freehand Circle Drawing Champion") and videos that interact with others in the community.

It's possible to e-mail your video to these editors and hope it catches their fancy. Going first gained a large number of subscribers after his video appeared on the front of YouTube, and it was the key to Stokes' jump in popularity.

"I woke up the next morning and we were up to 300,000 and my e-mail inbox had 50 e-mails -- people all over the world," says Stokes. "Somebody was translating it into Spanish."

Inward-looking vlogs like Estreich's YourTube News and a similar channel called UTubeUrTube can also bring attention to your video.

Estreich was one of the early YouTubers to promote a singer named Mia Rose. That got the ball rolling for the 18-year-old, who over the past month has become the most-subscribed musician ever on YouTube. Estreich is now working as one of Rose's representatives, and the young singer says she has offers from several music labels.

On YouTube, popularity breeds more popularity. Once you've made it to the most-viewed list, more and more people will click on it; growth can become exponential. The most popular YouTube clip of all-time, Judson Laipply's "Evolution of Dance," has now been seen by more than 39 million people.

Like many others at the top, Laipply has frequently been profiled by traditional media, including The Associated Press. And that media attention represents the final rung of the viral video ladder.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1029631





YouTube to Share Revenue With Users
Paul Haven

Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, said Saturday that his wildly successful site will start sharing revenue with its millions of users.

Hurley said one of the major proposed innovations is a way to allow users to be paid for content. YouTube, which was sold to Google for $1.65 billion in November, has become an Internet phenomenon since it began to catch on in late 2005. Some 70 million videos are viewed on the site each day.

"We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users," Hurley said. "So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up."

Hurley, who at 30 is one of the youngest Internet multimillionaires, gave no details of how much users might receive, or what mechanism would be used.

In October 2005, Revver _ which like YouTube offers video clips online _ announced plans to attach advertising to user-submitted videos and give their creators a cut of the profits. Revver has said it would split the ad revenue evenly with content creators.

Hurley said that when YouTube started, he and the site's other co-founders _ Steve Chen and Jawed Karim _ felt revenue-sharing would build a community of users motivated by making money, rather than their love of videos.

But that as the site has grown, the three, who continue to run the company, have come to see financial remuneration as a way of improving content.

Hurley spoke on the last full day of the World Economic Forum, which brings together the world's political, social and business leaders for a five-day gathering on the problems facing the world.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012700557.html





Fox Subpoenas YouTube After '24' Episodes Posted
Andrew Wallenstein and Carl DiOrio

20th Century Fox served YouTube with a subpoena Wednesday, demanding that the Google-owned viral-video site disclose the identity of a user who uploaded copies of entire recent episodes of "24" and "The Simpsons."

The subpoena, which first came to light on the blog Google Watch, was granted by a judge in U.S. District Court in San Francisco after being filed Jan. 18 by the News Corp.-owned studio. It is not yet known whether YouTube has complied with the request.

In addition, lesser-known video site LiveDigital was served with a similar subpoena. A spokesman for LiveDigital confirmed the company received the subpoena and intended to comply immediately.

A Fox spokesman confirmed the subpoenas were filed and served but declined further comment. A spokesman for YouTube declined comment.

The "24" episodes in question actually appeared on YouTube before their primetime Jan. 14 premiere on the Fox broadcast network, which spread four hourlong episodes of the hit drama over two consecutive nights. Fox became aware thst the episodes were on YouTube on Jan. 8, according to the subpoena.

Filed on the basis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the subpoena includes testimony of Fox Entertainment Group vp Jane Sunderland suggesting Fox has been unable to determine the users' identities on its own. The uploaded material could cause Fox "irreparable harm," Sunderland said, but it was not immediately clear if the episodes in question still were posted on the site or had been removed.

However, the subpoena identifies the YouTube subscriber by the username "ECOtotal." A search under that username on the YouTube site unearths a user by that name with a banner across the top of the subscriber's page that reads, "This user account has been suspended."

Still, identifying "ECOtotal" won't necessarily explain how unaired episodes of "24" made it onto the Internet. Before Jan. 8, there were reports that the same episodes had popped up on illegal file-sharing sites, which might have transmitted them even before they appeared on YouTube.

This is not an unprecedented request for YouTube. In May, before its $1.65 billion acquisition by Google, the site complied with a Paramount Pictures request to identify a user who shot his own unauthorized short film adapted from the screenplay of the Oliver Stone film "World Trade Center."

But Google has a history of fighting subpoenas seeking the names of those using its services.

YouTube and most other similar sites typically tell content providers they will delete copyright video when alerted by owners of the material.

Among the content companies, much of the more aggressive policing of peer-to-peer and community-based Web sites has been by Universal Music Group. UMG has sued MySpace and others over what it calls illegal postings of its artists' music videos, and it came close to legal action against YouTube before striking a licensing agreement with that site last year.

Terence Clark, a copyright attorney with the Los Angeles law firm Greenberg, Traurig, said Fox, appears to be proceeding along proscribed legal lines in the matter.

"It's the process available under the Digital Copyright Act," Clark said. "There are certain procedures you can follow to get some information (but) this also impinges on the question of the privacy issues of the users of the sites."

Some sites might need to defend strongly against actions like Fox is taking, but ultimately the studio is likely to prevail, said Tom Ferber, a copyright attorney with the Pryor Cashman law firm in New York.

"It's always a policy decision of the entity involved," Ferber said. "So if you're the hard-news press, for instance, usually money is no object if it's seen as infringing on (your) rights. And (these sites) may have business issues of concern as well. But I think ultimately the studio is going to get the names that they want."

As for the 12 "Simpsons" episodes identified by the subpoena, most of them are from Season 7 of the long-running animated Fox series. One, however, is as recent as Jan. 7, while still another dates back to 1990.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...9492015f195e99





NBC Universal Ex-Treasurer Arrested on $800,000 Theft Charge
Larry Neumeister

The former treasurer of NBC Universal was arrested Thursday on charges that he stole more than $800,000 from the media company to spend on himself, federal prosecutors announced.

Victor Jung, 34, of Manhattan, was charged with two counts of wire fraud, accused of using some of the stolen money on private flights to Miami, Antigua and the Turks and Caicos Islands, U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said in a statement.

During the flights, Jung and his travel companions enjoyed delicacies including shrimp cocktail, Veuve Clicquot champagne and Mondavi wine, the prosecutor said.

If convicted, Jung could face a maximum of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000 or twice the gain resulting from the crime.

Through his lawyer, Christopher Brennan, Jung pleaded not guilty before U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein, who freed him on $250,000 bail.

Outside court, Brennan said his client looked forward to fighting the charges.

"He plans to vigorously defend himself," Brennan said.

An indictment in U.S. District Court accuses Jung of stealing the money while he worked as the treasurer for NBC Universal in its offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in midtown Manhattan.

NBC Universal, formed in 2004, is one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies. It owns and operates a television stations group and a movie production studio and was responsible for the hit films "The Pianist" and "A Beautiful Mind," among others.

Jung, who was responsible for the company's collection efforts and for oversight of the company's bank accounts, stole the money by setting up an unauthorized company, NBCU Media Productions LLC, and transferring money into its accounts, the indictment said.

The company, which was not a part of NBCU or its parent company, General Electric Capital Corp., was set up in November 2005, along with bank accounts at a branch of Commerce Bank in Manhattan, according to the indictment.

Jung caused two wire transfers - one for about $575,000 this month and another for approximately $238,450 last April - to be deposited into the company's bank account from an account held by GE in Stamford, Conn., prosecutors said.

In a statement, NBC Universal said it was "committed to and vigilant about the enforcement of its compliance policies."

It added: "When we discovered the potential integrity breach, we promptly brought it to the appropriate authorities and are cooperating fully with the investigation. We will continue to monitor the situation to its resolution."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...01-25-17-26-46





Where is Internet Video Going?
Antony

Where is internet video heading? It’s a question I think about often (unsurprising given my job is 100% concerned with the medium) and as this the MSN Video Editor’s blog, I decided to share my thoughts here.

At the moment YouTube is the king of online video. The upload-and-share model that has become so successful has also been adapted by Google Video and Microsoft’s Soapbox (Link: request access to the beta release), and is similar to the format of other file-sharing websites such as the photo based Flickr. It’s easy to see what makes these sites so successful. They’re either free or cheap to use, they’re quick to use, and they’re less restricted than alternative video sites. These are three very important factors.

Think quality matters? It doesn’t, or at least not as much as you would expect. Video-sharing sites are awash with dull video blogs, desperate Jackass style stunts, anime clips mixed to soundtracks of cult movies (I really don’t get that phenomenon) and amateur pornography. There is quality footage to be found, and it does have to be found, but it’s only there because so much footage is uploaded. And it’s all uploaded because the systems are fast, free, and have few restrictions.

CDs didn’t replace Vinyl because the sound quality was better (arguably it’s not). It was because CDs were quicker and easier to use, and could hold more music (i.e. they were less restricted). MP3s aren’t usurping CDs because they’re better quality either. They most definitely are not. Yet again they are quick, cheap, and this time thousands can be held on one player.

So quality doesn’t matter when it comes to format, but what about content? What makes an individual video popular? The two most watched videos on MSN Video in the past ten days have been a news story about a six-legged cow and a clip of two footballers fighting. These are short and visual clips. Unlike some news items the information they contain needs to be seen rather than read. Videos that just contain newsreaders never do well. The information being delivered to you is often better suited as a text article than a video. Usability consultant Jakob Nielsen highlighted this when he wrote about an eyetracking study and concluded “Talking-Head Video is Boring Online”. What does work is small bursts of a visual performance – videos that rarely last longer than 2 minutes. Online videos that can’t be played anywhere other than the site in which they reside have trouble stepping into feature-length film territory.

Which means longer, professionally produced videos have more success offline. The other massive development in internet video is Bittorrent (full description here), another variation on file-sharing but one that enables users to download broadcast quality videos of entire feature films and TV shows. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The Bittorrent growth has largely been lead by piracy, with users placing copies of movies and shows online for sharing, and taking them offline for watching. The technology works so well that last year the BBC announced plans to offer hundreds of episodes of popular shows using the file-sharing technique (though they'll be "protected" using DRM - more about that soon).

The online/offline video swapping is also growing in the form of hardware such as the Slingbox variants. These allow users to watch their own television shows wherever they are in the world (provided they have a decent internet connection) but also watch online videos on their television. Slingbox has been around for sometime (novelist Neil Gaiman extolled the virtues of his machine nearly a year ago), but is only just being reported in the mainstream British press (link to video).

Unfortunately the use of new technologies is not expanding as much as they might. In some cases they are being forced backwards (note that I’m talking about the application of technologies rather than the creation and development of them) by various film and television companies.

It started with the understandable, though not necessarily well thought-out, requests by media companies to have their copyrighted material removed from video-sharing sites should someone have uploaded it. The material only had to be removed if the copyright owner requested it.

Then, in October 2006, YouTube gave Paramount lawyers data on one user after a subpoena was issued. That information was then used by Paramount to track down the user and sue him. (Link: “Video site helped Paramount Pictures track down and sue filmmaker”).

In December 2006, Twentieth Century Fox apparently sent out takedown notices to sites that linked to their copyrighted material on YouTube. Were they claiming that even posting a URL to their material infringed on their intellectual property rights? Think about it. If it was illegal to link to any copyrighted material on the web (i.e. all of it in one form or another) then we’d not have search engines as we know of them today. We’d barely have a World Wide Web at all.

Around this time last year, Google Video introduced the opportunity to buy videos online. On the face of it, this appears to be a reasonable service. Pay approximately $3 (the service is not available in the UK) to legally watch a decent length video. A video that would be taken down were it posted on a free site.

The problem occurs when you realise you can’t watch the videos you have paid for anywhere except on Google’s website using Google’s player. This DRM (Digital Rights Management) system is not a good service from the users’ point of view because you haven’t bought the video you want to watch, you haven’t even rented it. At best you’ve paid for a license to watch a video with massive restrictions. Imagine buying a book and being told you can only read it in Waterstones, and if anyone else wants to read the book you’ve paid for, they’ve got to pay for it too. (Link: "Google Video DRM: Why is Hollywood more important than users?")

This is not to say the system is wrong or immoral, it’s just bad business for everyone involved.

Bittorrent is a fantastic use of technology that is overrun with pirated movies largely because the film companies haven’t embraced the technology (Link: "A Torrent or a Trickle?"). When they do make a token attempt, they restrict it in as many ways as possible. They make it so a user can only watch the movie on one or two computers (got a PC and laptop? Be prepared to choose which one you want to watch your movie on) and they make it so the file can’t be copied (you paid for the movie, yet you can’t convert to a format that can be watched on your PSP). The companies make the mistake of offering the customer a worse service than they can get elsewhere, albeit illegally. It’s not like the piracy of VHS in the 80s, which was mainly about money – the same product for cheaper. Online video piracy is about customers finding an easier way to get a much better product.

So why do the media companies continue to insist that DRM be installed on various files and media players by Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc? They say it’s to combat piracy, but is it? There is a convincing argument that DRM is actually about increasing revenue streams (Link: “Privately, Hollywood admits DRM isn't about piracy”). Are media companies are trying to sell you the same product many times over? After all, if DRM was about piracy then why isn’t it working?

Three years ago novelist and blogger Cory Doctrow gave a speech to Microsoft employees in Redmond on the negative values of DRM systems. You can watch a video of his speech here or just read a transcript of it here. I recommend you watch/read it, but for now I’ll pick a few choice quotes. This is Doctrow explaining that media companies have made the copy protection mistake before:

“DRM only works if your record player becomes the property of whomever's records you're playing.

This is the worst of all the ideas embodied by DRM: that people who make record-players should be able to spec whose records you can listen to, and that people who make records should have a veto over the design of record-players.
…
It used to be illegal to plug anything that didn't come from AT&T into your phone-jack. They claimed that this was for the safety of the network, but really it was about propping up this little penny-ante racket that AT&T had in charging you a rental fee for your phone until you'd paid for it a thousand times over.

When that ban was struck down, it created the market for third-party phone equipment, from talking novelty phones to answering machines to cordless handsets to headsets – billions of dollars of economic activity that had been suppressed by the closed interface. Note that AT&T was one of the big beneficiaries of this: they *also* got into the business of making phone-kit.

DRM is the software equivalent of these closed hardware interfaces. Robert Scoble is a Softie who has an excellent blog, where he wrote an essay about the best way to protect your investment in the digital music you buy. Should you buy Apple iTunes music, or Microsoft DRM music? Scoble argued that Microsoft's music was a sounder investment, because Microsoft would have more downstream licensees for its proprietary format and therefore you'd have a richer ecosystem of devices to choose from when you were shopping for gizmos to play your virtual records on.

What a weird idea: that we should evaluate our record-purchases on the basis of which recording company will allow the greatest diversity of record-players to play its discs! That's like telling someone to buy the Betamax instead of the Edison Kinetoscope because Thomas Edison is a crank about licensing his
patents; all the while ignoring the world's relentless march to the more open VHS format.”

The article I mentioned previously also touches upon the emergence of VHS:

“In 1982, then-MPAA head Jack Valenti testified before the House of Representatives on the emerging phenomenon of VCR ownership. He famously said, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone." Valenti said this in response to a claim that the VCR would be the greatest friend the American film producer ever had. Valenti was vehement in his opposition to the idea that the VCR could be a good thing. He, and many in the industry, believed that it was fundamentally wrong to allow the public to make decisions for themselves about how to use a VCR. They even expressed worry that multiple people could watch the same movie on a VCR, but not all of them would have to pay. The idea of Joe User buying a movie for a fixed price and then inviting friends over to see it was anathema to the industry.

Yet by the late 1990s, sales of VHS movies were generating more revenue than movie ticket sales. DVD, the successor to VHS and Betamax, greatly widened the gap thanks to outstanding profit margins. The "Boston Strangler" was nowhere in sight. Of course, Hollywood lost the battle over the VCR, and its enemy became the best friend it ever had... that is, until behaviour-modifying DRM was born, and Hollywood saw another chance to take a crack at the holy grail.”

For now, DRM stumbles on. Perhaps someone will make it work someday, but it’s unlikely. What’s comforting is that the better technology always won through eventually. The media companies were forced to change what they were selling to fit with progress, instead of halting progress so they could continue to sell what they already did.

The future of internet video is Soapbox and YouTube style sites with copyrighted material available. It’s Bittorrent downloads available from Amazon or HMV. It’s watching your home television wherever you are in the world. It’s watching broadcasts from any global location in the comfort of your own home. The future of internet video is already here, they just haven’t made it all legal yet.
http://ukvideo.spaces.live.com/Blog/...E52F!175.entry





Who Wants Their IPTV -- and Why?
Johna Till Johnson

If you’re like a lot of folks, you’re probably thinking IPTV is just a tad overhyped: Service providers from AT&T to BT to India’s Reliance Infocomm have announced IPTV initiatives. Market researchers Dittberner Associates forecast an IPTV services market of $12 billion in 2013, an increase from virtually nothing in 2005 (now that’s a long-range crystal ball). And Microsoft has been investing heavily in the technology — a sure sign that the hype-fest is at its height.

And the arguments favoring it seem singularly lame. Not that I’ve got anything against TV — on the contrary, I’m addicted to it. (C’mon, with 500 channels, what are the odds that somewhere there’s a Vin Diesel movie on?). But at first blush, it’s hard to see how delivering TV over IP makes it appreciably better.

Take the argument that IPTV provides better integration: tomorrow’s kids will be able to surf the Web, play interactive games and watch TV all on the same screen. Oh, wait, they already do all that with peer-to-peer applications that let them download shows from the Web. Another purported IPTV plus is personalization: viewers will be able to download virtually any show at any time -- just as, um, TiVo owners do today.

So what exactly is the benefit of IPTV? For one thing, it gives telcos a sustainable consumer offering whose margins aren’t eroding. And by doing so, it introduces competition into the content-distribution business.

Carriers have been hammered by the one-two punch of the Internet and VoIP. Yahoo, Google and other search engines have chewed up the profits from directory services (not so long ago, the yellow pages used to be a cash cow for the telcos). Meantime, VoIP has been steadily driving voice revenues down to zero.

IPTV lets carriers reverse that trend by giving them a shot at selling something for which the market demand is demonstrably insatiable: content.

Aha, you may be saying, what about the growing trend toward free content ? The telcos appear to be jumping on the content bandwagon just as it’s headed for the ditch. Won’t peer-to-peer undercut the margins of content services the same way VoIP demolished voice margins?

It’s a logical worry, but here’s why I think it’s unfounded: People don’t pay for content itself. They pay for content to be packaged and delivered to them in a form factor that’s convenient. Take music: If free services destroyed the market for paid services, satellite radio wouldn’t be flourishing.

What IPTV gives carriers is the flexibility to experiment with content offerings until they hit on the packaging formula that consumers will pay money for (hint: I’m still waiting for that all-Vin-all-the-time channel, guys).

And that’s the second real advantage of IPTV: It’s not about making TV better; it’s about giving more players the opportunity to get creative about packaging and delivering it to consumers. Will that result in improved services? Probably, because competition usually has that effect. So bottom line: despite the hype, I’ll be watching for IPTV.
http://www.networkworld.com/columnis...7-johnson.html





V2 Music and Brilliant Technologies Announce Qtrax Global Licensing Agreement
Press Release

V2 Music UK, the leading independent record label that is home to such artists as The Stereophonics, Little Man Tate and Paul Weller, and Brilliant Technologies Corporation today announced a global agreement to make the V2 catalog available for distribution via Brilliant's Qtrax platform. Qtrax is the world's first legal, ad-supported peer-to-peer music service, offering music fans free access to high-fidelity digital music files.

Beth Appleton, Head of New Media and Business Development for V2, remarked: 'V2 acknowledges the power of P2P technology and embraces business models that legitimise sharing music, building revenues for artists and labels. The music industry cannot ignore the fact that this is how music fans naturally want to enjoy and share music and we need to work quickly to enable mass distribution of copyright material in a way that the music fan still enjoys the experience with the artist and label critically receiving a proportion of revenue earnt as a result of the value of their music. The Qtrax service will provide the V2 stable of artists with a tremendous new outlet for connecting with fans and we are excited to be working with the Qtrax team as they gear up for launch.

'I cannot stress enough the importance the independent label sector's endorsement of Qtrax. In this regard, V2 UK is a critical piece of our global licensing strategy,' stated Allan Klepfisz, Brilliant's Chairman and CEO. 'The music industry is in an undeniable shift in focus from traditional commercial exploitation models to business models that promise dynamic new income streams. From the start, V2 has demonstrated forward thinking and a keen ability to recognize innovative new business models like Qtrax. We are truly heartened by the encouragement and support of the independent label and music publishing communities and we welcome V2 as one of its prominent members.

Qtrax is the recognized leader in the ad-supported digital music arena and, in addition to V2, boasts music from major record labels and music publishers including EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Sony/ATV Publishing and Universal Music Publishing, as well as independents including TVT and the hundreds of labels represented by The Orchard.
http://top40-charts.com/news.php?nid=29941





A Powerful New Free Application Enables the First True Peer-to-Peer Photo and Image Sharing
Press Release

A free, downloadable application that enables users to automate photo sharing and organize digital photos, was introduced today by PowerSnap Inc.

The free application, PowerSnap 2.0, may be downloaded from http://www.powersnap.com/.

"Until now, photographers -- including folks taking pictures on their cell phones -- had to juggle numerous different environments and passwords just to send, receive and manage their photos," says Santosh Jayaram, founder and CEO of PowerSnap. "There's no easy way to manage and share the mountains of unorganized photographs buried in people's computers.

"Now, for the first time, PowerSnap puts the user's entire photo experience all in one place. It creates the first communities based on images, rather than words."

PowerSnap 2.0 lets users automate photo sharing and enables digital photo organization so users can find all their pictures within a single easy-to-use application. For the first time users can manage all their photographs, automatically sending and receiving pictures in near real-time, and synchronize their uploaded albums with their desktop instead of struggling with multiple sites and applications.

PowerSnap not only creates the first true peer-to-peer network for photo sharing, but also offers a seamless, intuitive experience, comparable to sending email amongst different email providers -- an experience that until now was not possible with digital photographs.

Sample Applications

1. A new mom doesn't have the time to answer every request for pictures
of the new baby. She sends everyone free subscriptions to her
PowerSnap photos within the album "Molly". Now, every time she takes
a new picture of Molly, she loads it onto her computer and it's
automatically sent out to every subscriber.

2. A teenager sits in the back of her mom's SUV, dreading another endless
shopping trip. She makes a face and takes a picture of herself on her
cellphone, tagged "Ivana," and "shopping stinks" and emails it to
Flickr. All her friends, who have subscribed to her pictures tagged
"Ivana" instantly get the photo in their PowerSnap in-box.

Key Features

1. Real-time notification to subscribers when new photos are uploaded
2. Mass tagging, captioning and commenting.
3. Sophisticated filtering to set and determine permissions on photos.
4. Automated timeline organization and viewing of all photographs on file.
5. Open platform for other photosites, besides Flickr, to allow automated
photo sharing.

About PowerSnap

PowerSnap Inc. was founded in 2006 by Santosh Jayaram, former founder/CEO of Mietus, Inc. and a recent honors graduate of Oxford University's Said Graduate School of Business; Ayush Gupta, a technologist who has worked for Cisco, Qualcomm, Sun Microsystems, Autodesk and Xerox; and Supreet Singh, a user interface pioneer who has worked on product design for Ford, IBM, HP, ESPN Star, SAP Labs, MTV Europe and British Telecom.
Website: http://www.powersnap.com/
http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-e...3012007-1.html





Dreaded 'F' Word Haunts Music Industry

With global music sales down for a seventh straight year, the talk at an annual industry meeting in Cannes, France, has become heated over how to develop digital sales against competition from the dreaded F word - free.

Global sales are expected to be down again for 2006 despite digital sales almost doubling to $US2 billion and the popularity of music being as strong as ever.

Critics of the major players in the industry argue that they have been distracted by the fight against piracy and in doing so, hindered the growth of the legal business.

In response, the accused argue that they had little choice.

"Many people around the world tell me that we've handled our problems in an incorrect manner but no one tells me what we should have done," John Kennedy, the head of the industry's trade body IFPI, told Reuters in an interview.

"Free is just impossible to compete with".

Much of the debate at the gathering on the French coast has centred around the concept of digital rights management or DRM which can restrict the use of music bought online and was introduced in a bid to contain piracy.

Its supporters say DRM also offers alternative methods such as subscription or advertising-supported services as the music cannot then be offered onto peer-to-peer networks.

But one result of DRM is that tracks bought legally from websites such as Rhapsody cannot be used on the market-leading iPod as they are not compatible, potentially restricting the growth of legal sales.

"DRM is like polonium to some people," Kennedy said. "Digital rights management is exactly that, it's the management of digital rights and if we weren't managing it the headlines would be 'irresponsible music industry ... creates anarchy."'

But not everyone agrees.

David Pakman is chief executive of eMusic, the second biggest service after iTunes in the U.S. market, and an ardent critic of DRM.

His service is the only one on a large scale delivering tracks in the MP3 format, meaning they can be played on any portable music player, including the iPod.

That stance however has resulted in none of the four major labels, who are responsible for around two thirds of the world's music, supplying to the service.

"It's the same model that was used for the CD and DVD, universal compatibility, and we think it's the principal thing holding back the growth of digital today," he told Reuters.

Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine, argues that some form of piracy should simply be accepted.

"You cannot have zero piracy and if you try to get to zero piracy you will make the experience of consuming music so painful you'll have zero industry."

Among the many music executives discussing the alternatives at Cannes was Terry McBride, the chief executive of Canada's Nettwerk Music Group which manages such acts as Avril Lavigne.

Among McBride's many ideas was the plan to tap into the peer to peer market where fans could recommend a track, and receive a small percentage of the sales if the track was purchased.

"We are now entering the era where the socialisation of the internet is happening," he told Reuters. "Why not truly harness the power of peer to peer."

But despite the many issues created by digital, the industry is united and excited by its potential.

Barney Wragg, the head of digital for EMI Music, told Reuters that digital was revolutionising the way they work.

"I was just talking to (British singer) Joss Stone who is very excited about the opportunities this offers," he said. "We're not constrained to the plastic CD box any more. It offers the possibility to do things that could never be done before."

Warner is also looking at new ways to develop.

"As an industry we really need to innovate, and bring new products and services to the market," head of digital strategy Alex Zubillaga told reporters in London last week.

"We at Warner have put out a series of premium products and ... we immediately doubled the amount of digital albums that we were selling by just attaching a video, attaching some special lyrics or a photo gallery.

"We weren't selling twice as many by selling them for less. We were selling twice as many by selling them for significantly more money.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/digita...e#contentSwap1





The Ethics Of Peer-to-Peer Networks
Peter Nisbet

There is nothing illegal about peer-to-peer networks, and nothing illegal with using them to distribute files. What is illegal is to use these networks and associated software to download material which is protected by copyright.

It is not always obvious what is still copyright protected, though you can be fairly certain that anything recent, such as recent chart hits or new computer games, cannot be legally copied using P2P software. Blockbuster films will also be copyright protected, but there are many films which have been specifically made for free distribution.

There are lots of new artists who use peer to peer networks to get themselves known. There are many computer games which are released on P2P networks to have them tried out prior to fixing the bugs and releasing them for general sale. This is the one aspect of the use of P2P services that makes me think of the morality of such networks rather than the legality.

The reasons for observing copyright restrictions are well known. Copyright is a protection of an artist's work from plagiarism and unauthorized copying. If everyone copied every piece of music or every film from a free online service such as peer-to peer networks, then the originators and the artists would make no money from them. This would result in the breakdown of the entertainment industry, and I can understand that line of reasoning.

So don't get me wrong. I am not proposing that people should be allowed to break the law, and I firmly agree that copyright violation should be illegal and should be punished. My argument is against the movie and music industry and their false morality in campaigning for such high fines for copyright violation by young kids while condoning, and in some cases positively encouraging, lawbreaking, obscene and improper behaviour and illegal drug taking by so called artists who are making them money.

What sickens me is the way many pop stars complain and bleat about us breaking the law, then have another snort on their line. Once they stick to the law they may be qualified to complain about others who do not. Many forget where they came from and how they got to be famous.

Have you ever heard something online that you found interesting? Have you heard a track by an unknown artist that inspired or stimulated you to find out more about the artist? I have. I downloaded something by a young girl called Amy Winehouse about three years ago. It was quite illegal, but I liked it and it prompted me to go out and find more of her work. I found she had an album called ‘Frank', so I bought it – bought it please note, not downloaded it!

The point I am making is that had I not heard her on a peer-to-peer network and downloaded the track, I would not have bought the album and all her work since. OK, she seems a bit of an alkie and perhaps into drugs, but she is a great singer. P2P helped her to get a fan and some sales so why should she want me arrested? Perhaps too many of these egotistical superstars forget who ultimately pays them and who helped them when they were unknowns! Lot's of people have downloaded a track or two then bought a ticket to see the act live.

Who is doing most harm: the superstar junkie keeping the pushers in a job or the school kid downloading a track from his favourite band that he can't find in his local music store? Even if he can find it, he probably can't afford it due the obscene prices being charged in order that the artists can afford their drugs or drinks or whatever.

This is where morality becomes an issue with me. Would the large recording companies not be better cleaning up their own act, and those of the superstars they employ, than targeting kids who are copying tracks from peer-to-peer networks? How can they bleat on about copyright infringements while they pay filthy sex and drug-ridden junkies and gun-totin' grunters to produce the rubbish that is called music nowadays?

Once they stop breaking the law themselves, and inciting others to do so in order to increase sales, I might listen to their whining and misplaced righteousness. Didn't many of these so-called stars use these internet services to advertise themselves until they became known? Why, then, give their approval to the RIAA and its tactics to prosecute school kids for using a service they themselves used to promote.

It would be understandable if the RIAA were prosecuting the big boys who are making fortunes by copying and selling thousands of movies and albums, such as are continually found on eBay or sold in practically every bar in the land. But no, these big guys are ignored. They are too hard to prosecute, so they target the kids for prosecution. Kids whose mums have to struggle to find the money to pay the fines. They can't afford to buy obscenely overpriced CDs for their kids' birthdays so where can they find the money to pay the massive fines ($30,000 - $150,000).

The morality of the movie and music industries is open to question, and we can all see the egotistical brain-dead drug-ridden examples of the people they overpay in the name of so-called entertainment on our screens every day. Once they start observing the law, acting with some decency and begin to set an example to the youth of our world – once they start displaying some morality and become proper role models for our children, then that is when I shall erase my copy of MP3 Rocket or Limewire. In any case I only use them as they should be used: to find out what is new and popular, and if I find something I like I will download it, listen to it, then go out and buy the album. That should not be illegal, yet it is.

If they want people arrested, leave the kids alone and target the consortiums that are making a lot of money by copying and marketing material downloaded from peer-to-peer networks. It's not the law I have issue with, it's the hypocrites who run RIAA and MPAA and also pay their law-breaking artists.
http://www.articledashboard.com/Arti...etworks/136781





The Public Domain

Unabomber Wages Legal Battle to Halt the Sale of Papers
Serge F. Kovaleski

Nine years after he began serving a life sentence for the Unabomber crimes, Theodore J. Kaczynski is fighting to reclaim more than 40,000 pages of his writings and correspondence so he can preserve them in their rawest form for the public to read.

Mr. Kaczynski, 64, is in a legal battle with the federal government and a group of his victims over the future of the handwritten papers, which include journals, diaries and drafts of his anti-technology manifesto.

The journals contain blunt assessments of 16 mail bombings from 1978 to 1995 that killed 3 people and injured 28, as well as his musings on the suffering of victims and their families. The government wants to auction sanitized versions of the materials on the Internet to raise money for four of Mr. Kaczynski’s victims.

But, citing the First Amendment, Mr. Kaczynski has argued in court filings that the government is not entitled to his writings and has no right to alter them. The writings were among the items taken from his remote Montana cabin after his arrest in April 1996. In a motion drafted in pen, he said he planned to argue that the government had too much discretion under a federal restitution law to confiscate writings.

The four victims pursuing restitution from Mr. Kaczynski were initially reluctant to agree to the auction, fearing it could ghoulishly generate more notoriety for him and further publicize their pain. But some were equally horrified by the prospect of Mr. Kaczynski reclaiming his writings.

One of the victims, Gary Wright, a computer-store employee seriously injured in an attack 20 years ago next month, said it was difficult for the four to reach a consensus.

“How do you take four people and try to come to an agreement when they have been wronged in different ways and are in different stages of healing with different types of losses?” said Mr. Wright, now a businessman in Salt Lake City. “I’m sure that emotions were running rampant and that people were reliving it.”

Mr. Kaczynski came to be known as the Unabomber after the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s code name for the case, Unabom, coined because the targets included universities and airlines. In his 18-year bombing campaign Mr. Kaczynski seemed bent on thwarting the advance of technology, and his victims included university professors, scientists and business executives.

One victim who is not seeking restitution, David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, said in a letter to the court that he hoped “the criminal’s property will be destroyed, or (if need be) sealed for a century at least and then made available at no charge to scholars of depravity.”

A federal judge in Sacramento approved the government’s auction proposal last August as a way for the group seeking restitution to collect some of the $15 million it is owed by court order. But the judge ordered that any references to Mr. Kaczynski’s victims be deleted.

Mr. Kaczynski challenged the deletions, asserting that they would violate his right to freedom of expression, and that his writings should remain intact.

A lawyer for Mr. Kaczynski, John P. Balazs, said his client wanted to donate the originals to a library.

The Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, which houses materials on anarchism and other protest movements, already has a sizable collection of Mr. Kaczynski’s more recent writings and of correspondence since his arrest. Kelly Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the university, said that if Mr. Kaczynski offered to turn over additional writings, the university would examine them to determine whether they were suitable for the collection.

Among the documents that would be auctioned are letters that Mr. Kaczynski received over 25 years at his Montana cabin from his brother, David, and his mother, Wanda.

It was David Kaczynski who led the F.B.I. to his older sibling. And while he expressed support for the victims, he said he was distressed that private family correspondence might fall into the hands of strangers and that the government had not asked him if he wanted the letters.

“I’m in favor of anything that would help the victims,” David Kaczynski said in an interview. “But in a personal sense, having these letters treated as murderabilia is appalling to us. How do you balance the need for human decency and dignity with doing the best thing?”

David Kaczynski said this would not be the first time that he had felt crossed by the federal government. The F.B.I. had promised to keep his role in the case a secret and to give the family at least one day’s warning before they arrested his brother. They did neither.

“I feel our family has a stake in preserving our privacy and dignity,” he said, “but certainly our dignity is compromised by having our letters to Ted transformed into letters of curiosity for some collector of celebrity murder cases.”

In the latest twist in a three-year legal battle over the writings, Theodore Kaczynski is adopting a new strategy that could, one of the prosecutors said, mire the case in the federal courts for at least another year or two.

Also known as Inmate 04475-046 at the federal maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo., Mr. Kaczynski has asked an appeals court to assign him a new lawyer who is an expert in First Amendment litigation. Otherwise, he has told the court, he wants to represent himself in an appeal of the ruling that authorized auctioning the papers.

In approving the auction, Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. rejected Mr. Kaczynski’s argument that the sale and altering of the original writings would violate the First Amendment.

Because of the pending appeal of Judge Burrell’s ruling, the four victims cannot receive, for the time being, the $7,025 the government collected towards restitution from the sale of Mr. Kaczynski’s interest in his Montana land, according to Ana Maria Martel, an assistant United States attorney.

Susan Mosser, whose husband, Thomas J. Mosser, was killed 12 years ago after opening a package containing a bomb that had been sent to their North Caldwell, N.J., home by Mr. Kaczynski, expressed indignation.

“Did he worry about the rights of Hugh Scrutton, Tom Mosser or Gil Murray, from whom he took the right to live?” she wrote in an e-mail message sent through her lawyer.

“Or the rights of the other fathers, sons, brothers, sisters or husbands who were recipients of his bombs, and who suffered real, painful and genuine irreparable harm? Or the rights of those who loved them?” asked Ms. Mosser, who is one of the parties seeking restitution.

Mr. Kaczynski wrote prolifically. He was the author of a 35,000-word manifesto that was published in The Washington Post seven months before his capture. The New York Times jointly financed publication of the tract. Soon after his arrest, Mr. Kaczynski appealed unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court, arguing that his prosecution had been so tainted by news reports that the government had forfeited its right to prosecute him. In January 1998, he pleaded guilty to the federal charges against him.

In addition to Mr. Kaczynski’s writings, the government’s auction inventory includes an assortment of more than 250 books from his cabin. The titles include “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Roman Political Ideas and Practices” and “Fundamentals of Analytical Chemistry.” Among the other items cataloged for auction are bowstrings and arrows in a quiver, two axes, a scabbard and a Montana driver’s license.

In a July 2005 opinion that led the prosecution to propose an auction, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the government’s original plan for the sale of Mr. Kaczynski’s possessions “plainly fails to serve the victims and their families.”

“Though the government purported to represent these individuals, we see nowhere in the record their viewpoints and desires regarding the enforcement of the restitution order,” the opinion said.

The court said its understanding of the restitution plan was that the government would assign a value to Mr. Kaczynski’s items, deposit that amount of taxpayer money into an account for the victims and keep the property indefinitely. The ruling sent the matter back to the district court and stipulated that if the government did not produce a reasonable plan to maximize the monetary return to the victims, Mr. Kaczynski would get his property back.

Ms. Martel, the assistant United States attorney, said the group of four victims pressing for restitution initially had been unequivocal about not wanting any of Mr. Kaczynski’s possessions sold.

“Every time there was a discussion about what we should do with the goods, it was like opening a scab for them,” Ms. Martel said. “They were very anguished that Kaczynski would receive more publicity, and that someone was going to be buying his writings about taking pleasure in their suffering. But it was clear that if they didn’t agree to an auction, it would all go back to Kaczynski.”

The prospect of an auction also did not sit well with Mr. Gelernter, the Yale professor who was severely injured by one of the mail bombs in 1993. He filed a letter with the court in late 2005 in which he asked that the proposed sale not happen.

“My wife and I are outraged that the court has decided to turn the sale of this criminal’s property into a circus — or (more accurately) into a P.R. bonanza, starring the criminal himself,” Mr. Gelernter wrote. “Why have you decided to help vicious misfits with cash to burn lionize this evil murderer?”

In a recent e-mail message to The New York Times, Mr. Gelernter said he had nothing but pity and contempt for anyone who would bid on Mr. Kaczynski’s items unless “they’re acting for a police agency or some serious research project that seeks to rid the world of (not ‘understand’) such vicious cowardly thugs.”

But he emphasized that the other victims had the right to “call their own moral shots” and that he hoped that they received everything they wanted .

“God knows they deserve it,” Mr. Gelernter said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/us...rtner=homepage





Unpaid Fee Closes State Debt Groups' Web Site

An association of debt management offices, who together manage billions of dollars of government debt, has had its Web site closed after it failed to pay the $35-a-year fee to keep the Web address registered.

The World Association of Debt Management Offices (Wadmo), a forum for treasury officials from more than 40 developing countries, ran the wadmo.net Web site, but the domain name expired on January 15.

Cecilia Mendoza, of the Wadmo secretariat in the Philippines Treasury, said Wadmo planned to renew the address but had been held up because it was cutting ties with the UN's UNCTAD agency, and transferring the body's duties to different officials.

"It's because we couldn't even withdraw money, because the (new) signatories are not yet authorized," Mendoza told Reuters by telephone from Manila.

Domain Bank, the domain name registrar, charges just $35 a year to register a ".net" internet address, or $250 a decade.

Wadmo's members span Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and South America, and include state debt management offices in Russia, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Romania, according to a cached version of Wadmo's Web site.

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