[JackSpratts]

Save the children

France Takes up Body Image Law
Devorah Lauter



The French parliament's lower house adopted a groundbreaking bill Tuesday that would make it illegal for anyone—including fashion magazines, advertisers and Web sites—to publicly incite extreme thinness.

The National Assembly approved the bill in a series of votes Tuesday, after the legislation won unanimous support from the ruling conservative UMP party. It goes to the Senate in the coming weeks.

Fashion industry experts said that, if passed, the law would be the strongest of its kind anywhere. Leaders in French couture are opposed to the idea of legal boundaries on beauty standards.

The bill was the latest and strongest of measures proposed after the 2006 anorexia-linked death of a Brazilian model prompted efforts throughout the international fashion industry to address the repercussions of using ultra-thin models.

Conservative lawmaker Valery Boyer, author of the law, argued that encouraging anorexia or severe weight loss should be punishable in court.

Doctors and psychologists treating patients with anorexia nervosa—a disorder characterized by an abnormal fear of becoming overweight—welcomed the government's efforts to fight self-inflicted starvation, but warned that its link with media images remains hazy.

French lawmakers and fashion industry members signed a nonbinding charter last week on promoting healthier body images. Spain in 2007 banned ultra-thin models from catwalks.

But Boyer said such measures did not go far enough.

Her bill has mainly brought focus to pro-anorexic Web sites that give advice on how to eat an apple a day—and nothing else.

But Boyer insisted in her speech to lawmakers Tuesday that the legislation was much broader and could, in theory, be used against many facets of the fashion industry.

It would give judges the power to imprison and fine offenders up to $47,000 if found guilty of "inciting others to deprive themselves of food" to an "excessive" degree, Boyer said in a telephone interview before the parliamentary session.

Judges could also sanction those responsible for a magazine photo of a model whose "excessive thinness ... altered her health," she said.

Boyer said she was focusing on women's health, though the bill applies to models of both sexes. The French Health Ministry says most of the 30,000 to 40,000 people with anorexia in France are women.

Didier Grumbach, president of the influential French Federation of Couture, said he was not aware how broad the proposed legislation was, and made no secret of his strong disapproval of such a sweeping measure.

"Never will we accept in our profession that a judge decides if a young girl is skinny or not skinny," he said. "That doesn't exist in the world, and it will certainly not exist in France."

Marleen S. Williams, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University in Utah who researches the media's effect on anorexic women, said it was nearly impossible to prove that the media causes eating disorders.

Williams said studies show fewer eating disorders in "cultures that value full-bodied women." Yet with the new French legal initiative, she fears, "you're putting your finger in one hole in the dike, but there are other holes, and it's much more complex than that."

———

Associated Press writer Emmanuel Georges-Picot in Paris contributed to this report.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/nati...rld/ci_8930488





When Tech Innovation Has a Social Mission
John Markoff

STEVE WOZNIAK built the original Apple I to share with his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, but it was his business partner Steve Jobs who had the insight that there might be a market for such a contraption. Indeed, for decades, Silicon Valley has been defined by the tension between the technologist’s urge to share information and the industrialist’s incentive to profit.

Now a new style of “hybrid” technology organization is emerging that is trying to define a path between the nonprofit world and traditional for-profit ventures.

They’re often referred to as “social enterprises” because they pursue social missions instead of profits. But unlike most nonprofit groups, these organizations generate a sustainable source of revenue and do not rely on philanthropy. Earnings are retained and reinvested rather than being distributed to shareholders.

The new companies, like thousands of Silicon Valley start-ups before them, typically begin as small groups of intensely motivated people dedicated to the goal of building a product or service.

The best-known examples are efforts like the Mozilla Corporation, which maintains and develops the Firefox Web browser, and TechSoup, an organization that was started two decades ago to connect technology experts with nonprofit groups. It now distributes commercial software to nonprofit groups in 14 countries. (Mozilla’s mission is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet, which it considers a social good.)

By most measures both companies, with hundreds of employees, qualify as vibrant businesses. Each has revenue in excess of $50 million annually.

Moreover, there is also a range of smaller organizations, like the Internet Archive in San Francisco, with smaller but sustainable revenue streams. Significantly, an ecosystem is emerging that involves support groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which provides legal services, and the Internet Systems Consortium, which plays the role of an independent Internet service provider for the community.

“There is a lot of discussion taking place right now about a whole new organization form around social enterprise,” said James Fruchterman, president of Benetech, a social enterprise incubator based in Palo Alto. “Many of these efforts can make money; they will just never make enough to provide venture capital rates of return.”

Brewster Kahle, who has founded a number of successful Internet companies, as well as the nonprofit Internet Archive, said: “If we do this right, I think there is momentum here. The next major operating systems company might be a nonprofit.”

The Internet Archive, which runs Web crawlers — programs that index information stored on the Internet — and offers the popular Wayback Machine, which allows surfers to find previous versions of Web sites, now has two self-sustaining projects. The first is digitizing books and the second is creating and maintaining Web repositories for national libraries.

Mr. Kahle says he is developing a set of principles that he hopes will help formalize his idea that there is a middle ground between the technologists and the capitalists. He ticks off operating guidelines like transparency, staying out of debt, giving away information and refusing to hoard.

TechSoup stumbled upon its business eight years ago after it began sending a truck around San Francisco to pick up donated commercial software to distribute to nonprofit groups. Today, the organization distributes products from 32 commercial companies, including Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Symantec, to roughly 50,000 organizations annually, for a small administrative fee.

“We were just trying to meet the needs of nonprofits,” said Rebecca Masisak, co-chief executive of TechSoup.

Nonprofits with revenue are not new or restricted to Silicon Valley, and there is a great deal of debate over whether they offer a sustainable approach.

The new stream of technology-centric and successful nonprofits, however, appears to be driven in part by a set of microelectronics technology trends that have sent shock waves through many industries, from publishing to music and movies.

“Computer technology and the Internet are lowering the cost of doing business,” said John Lilly, the chief executive of Mozilla, the Web browser developer that is being subsidized by advertising revenue from the search engine business.

That blends with the strong sense of social purpose held by a number of the best and brightest in Silicon Valley.

“We went through all these decades where we had nonprofits that thought business was evil and sustainability was irrelevant,” said Debra Dunn, an associate professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford who advises social entrepreneurs. “Now there has been an influx of business thought. People are saying, ‘I have enough money and I care.’”

STILL, most technology-oriented social entrepreneurs acknowledge that the hybrid model is by no means a one-size-fits-all approach, and there is significant debate about how far it can reach. Moreover, the approach hasn’t always worked.

For example, beginning in 2002, the Lotus Development founder Mitchell Kapor invested more than $5 million in the Open Source Applications Foundation, with the intent of finding a sustainable business. The group had a number of strategies for obtaining revenue from the distribution of free software, but it was unable to get far enough along to begin the experiment. The project never got to the point where the calendar program Chandler could be widely distributed, and Mr. Kapor has since scaled back the project.

The experience, however, has not dulled his optimism.

“You can use a lot of the methods of business, specifically entrepreneurial start-ups, in ways that are directed at having a positive social impact,” Mr. Kapor said. “Mozilla and the Archive are cases where we are harnessing powerful techniques of value creation that were originally forged in the Valley and putting them to use.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/te.../13stream.html





The Pirate Bay Launches Uncensored Blogging Service
Ernesto

In their ever continuing battle to free the Internet, The Pirate Bay has now launched an uncensored blogging service, called Baywords. The service is intended to be a safe haven for bloggers who want to be able to write whatever they want, without being afraid to get shut down by their blog host.

The Pirate Bay is known for defending people’s right to freedom of speech on the Internet, and this is exactly what motivated them to start this new blogging service.

Brokep, one of the co-founders of the site, told TorrentFreak that the idea to start a blogging service came up when the weblog of one of his friends was taken down from Wordpress recently, for linking to copyrighted material.

This, of course, goes against the “uncensored web” philosophy of The Pirate Bay team, and they didn’t hesitate to start their own blogging service, Baywords, using Wordpress as their blogging engine.

On the frontpage of the newly launched service Brokep writes: “Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it”.

In a response, Matt Mullenweg from WordPress told TorrentFreak that he supports Pirate Bay’s Baywords, but he assured us that Wordpress.com would never take down a blog for posting deviating thoughts or ideas.

“WordPress.com supports free speech and doesn’t shut people down for “uncomfortable thoughts and ideas”, in fact we’re blocked in several countries because of that. However as a US-based companies we must comply with US laws, which means if the primary purpose of a blog is distributing illegal material it’s not a good fit for WordPress.com,” Matt said.

Baywords is currently working on expanding the feature list to include support for domain redirects and improved stats. The service is ad-free for now, but Brokep told TorrentFreak that there will be ads blended into the blog design later, to cover the expenses.

This is not the first time The Pirate Bay has started a service where people can publish whatever they want, without being censored. They already created an image hosting service for this reason, and a YouTube competitor is about to follow soon.

For people who are considering moving their Wordpress or Blogger account over to Baywords, importing is pretty straightforward and compatible with all the popular blog platforms. Don’t forget to add TorrentFreak to your blogroll!

Update: Matt Mullenweg’s response was added to the article after publication
http://torrentfreak.com/baywords-pir...y-blog-080416/





U.C. Berkeley Student's Twitter Messages Alerted World to His Arrest in Egypt
Bill Brand

When Egyptian police scooped up UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck, who was photographing a noisy demonstration, and dumped him in a jail cell last week, they didn't count on Twitter.

Buck, 29, a former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED. The message went out to the cell phones and computers of a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project.

The next day, he walked out a free man with an Egyptian attorney hired by UC Berkeley at his side and the U.S. Embassy on the phone.

Twitter, the micro-blogging service for cell phone users, allows messages up to 140 characters long. Twitter users can allow anyone they wish to join their network and receive all their messages. Buck has a large network, so Twitter gave him an instant link to the outside world.

He recalls advice from his Twitter friends came in mounds of terse messages, "It was a combination of things, my Egyptian friends told me to play the "American bitch" and try to force my way out. " They also told him that it was no big deal and to just stay calm.

"They use Twitter sort of like an instant wire service," he said. "It's the way they keep in touch with each other. They go to an event and Twitter what's happening.

Meanwhile, U.S. friends on his Twitter net called the university and the American Embassy.

They also alerted the Associated Press, the International Herald Tribune and other media, which helped put the heat on the Egyptian authorities. He was released on Friday and returned home on Sunday.

Back home in Berkeley last night he said he's still worried about his interpreter and friend, Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree, who was arrested with him and is still being held incommunicado by Egyptian authorities. Unlike Buck, he didn't have the muscle of the U.S. Embassy and UC Berkeley.

Buck said that in the middle of the night, hours after his arrest, authorities told him he was free to go.

"I said, 'No' and I stayed for 12 more hours and we started a hunger strike at some point. But they grabbed him (Maree) and put him in a different holding area. Finally, they said they had transferred him to another prison," Buck said.

Then, the Egyptian lawyer hired by UC Berkeley arrived. "I just caved," he said. "I left and he's still in jail. At this point, I've formally called on the Egyptian government for his release. I believe he's totally innocent."

He said Maree, who is 23 and a veterinary medicine student, is from Mahalla El-Kobra, the industrial city in the Nile Delta where they were arrested. "A lot of other Egyptian journalists are being detained, a lot of Egyptian bloggers are in jail, many being held without charges," Buck said.

"I'm very angry and I'm frustrated. I'm an American and I got released and he didn't. It makes me feel guilty and upset and I'm not going to stop until he gets out," Buck said.

There's an online petition, http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/free-mohammed-maree. At 10 a.m. Friday, Buck and others plan a demonstration supporting Maree outside the Egyptian consulate, 3101 Pacific Ave. in San Francisco.

Hossam El-Hamalawy, an Egyptian blogger who is now a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, said the most important thing is to publicize the situation so Egypt will furnish information about where Maree and others arrested are being kept. "Egypt has a huge population of prisoners because of these security crackdowns and any information will also help their families and lawyers, who are trying to find them," he said.

Buck says he'll definitely go back to Egypt. It's a story that's far from over.

He became interested in the Middle East living in Saudi Arabia with his parents, who were teachers there when he was a child. He's from Hanover, NH and after graduation from Colgate, he took a summer job at The Dartmouth, the student newspaper at Yale, which is in Hanover.

Buck convinced the paper to send him to Iraq, where he reported on rebuilding in Kurdish Northern Iraq. His recent trip to Egypt was his third. His first was in 2006 on a U.S. State Department grant to study Arabic. "Egypt reminded me of my childhood in Saudi Arabia," he said.

When he was admitted to the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, he chose Egyptian bloggers as his project. "There's no free press there," he said. "The only freedom is on the Internet."

He went with Egyptian blogger-journalists to Mahalla where factory workers were supposed to strike about lack of wages and skyrocketing food prices. But the police had cracked down and there was no strike, he said. He left with everyone else, but returned two days later after police made many arrests.

He was taking photos at a protest, when the police grabbed him. Before he was released they also grabbed his camera memory chip. But they forgot about Twitter.
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_893441...ercurynews.com





Espionage Against Pro-Tibet Groups, Others, Spurred Microsoft Patches
Ryan Singel

Computer intruders targeting pro-Tibetan groups, U.S. defense contractors and government agencies slipped in through previously unknown security holes in Microsoft Office, prompting Microsoft to issue a flurry of patches to the popular software suite in 2006 and 2007, according to computer security experts.

These attacks, which appeared to have originated in China, began in early 2006 when the attackers started sending e-mails to victims with booby-trapped Word documents and Excel spreadsheets attached.

"We are seeing more and more spying done with Trojans, a shift that has happened in the last two years," Mikko Hyppönen, the chief research officer for software security vendor F-Secure, told RSA conference attendees Thursday morning.

The Pentagon and pro-Tibet groups have previously acknowledged the intrusions, but Hyppönen is the first to link the cyber espionage to a series of patches that Microsoft pushed out without explanation. Microsoft did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Hyppönen's colleague Patrik Runald notes that from 2005 through early 2006, Microsoft issued few patches for its Office suite. But soon after there was an explosion of patches for critical bugs that could be used to infect a computer, including a record 26 patches in October, 2006, that fixed four critical bugs in Microsoft Office applications.

Those fixes, Runald says, appeared contemporaneously with the rise of targeted attacks on defense companies, nonprofits and government agencies. "They now have an incentive to begin looking for bugs and exploiting them," Runald said. "Bad guys are finding these things fast."

The attackers relied on e-mails tempting the victim to open the attachments, in some cases by presenting them as résumés from job seekers.

But when the target opened the attachment, the application would usually crash, while the embedded code covertly installed a keylogger and data-stealing software that scooped up documents anywhere on the organization's network to which the user had access.

The malware then forwards the stolen information to services called DNS bouncers in China, such as 8800.org, that attackers can use to obfuscate and rapidly change where stolen documents or passwords are sent. Finally, the code opens up what looks to be a legitimate document, in the hopes that the target won't know his or her computer was just infected.

The espionage was highly successful, according to Hyppönen. One multi-billion-dollar defense contractor who went to F-Secure for help found that a single compromised Windows box had been secretly siphoning information to a server in mainland China for 18 months.

"Most attacks go unnoticed and targets don't know they are hit," Hyppönen said.

Hyppönen won't declare that the espionage is the work of the Chinese government or hackers loyal to it, though all the evidence points that way.

"Is it the Chinese?," Hyppönen asked. "It sure looks like it but it could be a smokescreen. We don't know."

Warnings about targeted attacks are not new, but the increase in espionage against government and nonprofit groups is alarming to experts. In the past, security researchers more often dealt with financially motivated hackers who are after insider trading information, trade secrets or even early copies of movies that could be turned into pirate DVDs before its theatrical release.

"We now have to deal with the criminal doing it for money, and the spies doing it for information," Hyppönen said.

Though Microsoft's patches have shored up security in the Office suite, the attacks continue. A more recent spate of intrusions at government agencies and pro-Tibet and Taiwanese groups have resorted to older, known vulnerabilities. The attackers are using the classic hacking technique of reverse-engineering Microsoft security updates to discover the holes they patch.

Since large organizations can take weeks or months to update all of their machines, the updates provide intruders with a window of opportunity, Runald said.

Such attacks against pro-Tibet groups spiked in recent weeks following the riots in Tibet. On March 17, attackers sent a file purporting to be a statement from the United Nations to a pro-Tibet mailing list. Once opened, the document attempted to install malware that steals PGP encryption keys, as part of an attempt to compromise tools used to keep communications secure, according to Hyppönen.

Like the 2006 and 2007 attacks, the newer intrusions appear to be the work of a single group of hackers: The attack files used on one target are sometimes used within weeks on another. "The files have the same hash," Hyppönen said. It almost a given it is the same attacker."

The cyberspies also do a lot more homework than your run-of-the-mill online criminal, who tries to steal PayPal accounts by sending out millions of e-mails, with no idea whether the recipients actually use the online payment service.

By contrast, the stealthy attackers will try to test their exploits ahead of time by calling the company to quiz a secretary on what kind of anti-virus software the organization uses, claiming, for example, that an e-mail he sent to the company keeps bouncing.

The spies also forge e-mail headers to fool a recipient into thinking a file comes from a co-worker or trusted source. They may even go so far to figure out who a C-level executive plans to meet with, in order to send a very convincing e-mail.

For protection, Hyppönen suggested that companies use F-Secure's free root-kit detection tool, called BlackLight, install security patches rapidly, employ layers of security from different vendors, and monitor internet traffic headed to "funky hosts."

Adobe's Acrobat has also been targeted, and Hyppönen recommended that people use an alternative PDF reader. He also noted that OpenOffice, an open source alternative to Microsoft Office, has not been targeted.

It is also possible for users to notice when they get infected, since exploits usually crash Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat Reader before relaunching the application with a real file. That leads to a quick screen flash, and sometimes ends up putting the name of the exploit file in Word's recovered document's pane.

While one might expect banks to be targeted with these kinds of exploits, Hyppönen says he hasn't seen a single one, calling that a clue to the motivations of these attackers.

Runald says the message is clear.

"The enemy is changing," he said. "Now we are also fighting spies."
http://www.wired.com/politics/securi...hinese_hackers





CNN Web Site Targeted

CNN was targeted Thursday by attempts to interrupt its news Web site, resulting in countermeasures that caused the service to be slow or unavailable to some users in limited areas of Asia.

CNN took preventative measures to filter traffic in response to attempts to disrupt its Web site.

"CNN took preventative measures to filter traffic in response to attempts to disrupt our Web site. A small percentage of CNN.com users in Asia are impacted," the network said in a statement.

"We do not know who is responsible, nor can we confirm where it came from," the statement continued.

A CNN spokesman said the Web site began to notice problems around midday Thursday and took measures to isolate the trouble by limiting the number of users who could access it from specific geographic areas.

As a result, he said, some users in those areas experienced temporary slowdowns or problems accessing the site.

The spokesman could not offer an estimate of how many users were affected. However, he said that the impact on daily usage was "imperceptible" and that the site "at no time" went down.

Service had returned to normal by mid-morning Friday, he said.

The attempt came as tech-oriented Web sites in Asia were reporting calls from hacker groups in China for denial-of-service attacks to be launched against the CNN Web site on Saturday over the network's coverage of unrest in Tibet.

Angry Chinese bloggers have accused CNN and several other Western news organizations of being unfair in covering recent pro-independence protests in Tibet, which is controlled by China.

In response, the network released a statement noting that "CNN's reputation is based on reporting global news accurately and impartially, while our coverage through the use of words, images or video always reflects a wide range of opinions and points of view on every story."

In a denial-of-service attack, hackers use automated programs to try to jam a site with bogus requests for service to the point that service is slowed or interrupted for legitimate users.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/...tes/index.html





Larger Prey Are Targets of Phishing
John Markoff

An e-mail scam aimed squarely at the nation’s top executives is raising new alarms about the ease with which people and companies can be deceived by online criminals.

Thousands of high-ranking executives across the country have been receiving e-mail messages this week that appear to be official subpoenas from the United States District Court in San Diego. Each message includes the executive’s name, company and phone number, and commands the recipient to appear before a grand jury in a civil case.

A link embedded in the message purports to offer a copy of the entire subpoena. But a recipient who tries to view the document unwittingly downloads and installs software that secretly records keystrokes and sends the data to a remote computer over the Internet. This lets the criminals capture passwords and other personal or corporate information.

Another piece of the software allows the computer to be controlled remotely. According to researchers who have analyzed the downloaded file, less than 40 percent of commercial antivirus programs were able to recognize and intercept the attack.

The tactic of aiming at the rich and powerful with an online scam is referred to by computer security experts as whaling. The term is a play on phishing, an approach that usually involves tricking e-mail users — in this case the big fish — into divulging personal information like credit card numbers. Phishing attacks that are directed at a particular person, rather than blasted out to millions, are also known as spear phishing.

The latest campaign has been widespread enough that two California federal courts and the administrative office of the United States Courts posted warnings about the fake messages on their Web sites. Federal officials said they stopped counting after getting hundreds of phone calls from corporations about the messages. At midday on Tuesday, one antispam company, MX Logic, said in a Web posting that its service was still seeing at least 30 of the messages an hour.

Security researchers at several firms indicated they believed there had been at least several thousand victims of the attack whose computers had been compromised.

“We have seen about 2,000 victims, more or less,” said John Bambenek, a security researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a volunteer at the Internet Storm Center, a network security organization.

Researchers were studying a list of the Internet addresses of infected computers that iDefense Labs, a research unit of VeriSign, had assembled by monitoring network traffic.

Personalized scam messages have been on the radar of security researchers and law enforcement officials for several years, but the latest variant is a fresh indication of the threat posed by such digital ruses.

“I think that it was well done in terms of something people would feel compelled to respond to,” said Steve Kirsch, the chief executive of Abaca, an antispam company based in San Jose, Calif.

Mr. Kirsch himself received a copy of the message and forwarded it to the company lawyer. “It had my name, phone number, company and correct e-mail address on it and looked pretty legitimate,” Mr. Kirsch said. “Even the U.R.L. to find out more looked legitimate at first glance.”

When the lawyer tried to download a copy of the subpoena and the computer restarted itself, they quickly realized that the file contained malicious software.

Several computer security researchers said that the attack was the work of a group that tried a similar assault in November 2007. In that case, the e-mail message appeared to come from the Justice Department and stated that a complaint had been filed against the recipient’s company.

The software used in the latest attack tries to communicate with a computer in Singapore. That system was still functioning on Tuesday evening, but security researchers said many Internet service providers had blocked access to it.

A number of clues, like misspellings, in the fake subpoena led several researchers to believe that the attackers were not familiar with the United States court system and that the group might be based in a place that used a British variant of English, such as Hong Kong.

“This is probably Chinese-based,” said Mr. Bambenek. “If all the key players are in China there is not much the F.B.I. can do.”

Several security researchers said that the real danger of the attack lay in a second level of deception, after the hidden software provided the attackers with digital credentials like passwords and electronic certificates.

“There are very subtle nuances to their attacks that are well known in the financial industry but are not well publicized,” said Matt Richard, director of the Rapid Response Team at iDefense.

Mr. Richard said the criminals were going after a particular area of the financial industry, but he would not elaborate. He said that law enforcement officials were investigating the fraudulent documents.

Calls to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for comment were not returned.

Although the software package used to deliver the eavesdropping program is well known, it was hidden in such a way that it avoided detection by commercial programs in many cases, researchers said.

“This is pretty well-known code,” said Don Jackson, a researcher at SecureWorks, a computer security firm. “The issue has to do with repacking it.”

Recipients of the e-mail messages are directed to a fraudulent Web site with a copy of the graphics from the real federal court site. They are then asked to download and install what is said to be a piece of software from Adobe that is used to view electronic documents.

“There are several layers of social engineering involved here,” said Mike Haro, a spokesman for Sophos, a company that sells software to protect against malicious software and spam.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/te...y/16whale.html





Enterprise 2.0: A Computer Security Nightmare?
Steve Lohr

In the Internet age, the corporate firewall is a leaky sieve.

That is the sobering conclusion, spelled out in technical detail, in a new report on what is actually happening on corporate computer networks.

The research was done by Palo Alto Networks, a startup in Silicon Valley, and some of the findings were presented by Nir Zuk, the company’s chief technology officer, at a panel last week at the RSA computer security conference in San Francisco.

It should be noted that Palo Alto Networks is marketing what it calls next-generation firewalls to address the problems described in the report. But the research itself looks quite solid. It is based not on surveys of people but on a study of network traffic at 20 large companies and government agencies over the last six months. Using its software, Palo Alto Networks monitored the computer behavior of more than 350,000 users. The company has pledged to update and publish the results every six months.

Many companies try to block access to peer-to-peer file-sharing services, but programs used to access these services were found at 90 percent of the companies studied. The most popular were eMule and BitTorrent, which are used to share music, movies and software.

Unauthorized proxies, or software agents that disguise applications, were found on 80 percent of the corporate networks. These can be used for corporate espionage or pilfering trade secrets.

Google applications like Google Docs and Google Desktop were used in 60 percent of the corporations studied. And, no surprise, Internet video services like YouTube were consuming large portions of network bandwidth at all the companies.

One conclusion, the report notes, is that users are routinely, and fairly easily, circumventing corporate security controls. And that is because traditional firewall technology was not meant to grapple with the diversity of Internet applications of recent years.

“We see every enterprise leaking from the inside out,” said Dave Stevens, chief executive of Palo Alto Networks.

But the answer, it seems, is not a draconian crackdown on all Internet applications, but a more fine-grained monitoring and sorting of what applications can play in corporate networks and under what ground rules. After all, many Internet applications are seen as vital tools of productivity, collaboration and innovation — the stuff of Enterprise 2.0 companies.

Take Google Desktop, Mr. Stevens noted. It is a great productivity tool for users to quickly search by topic for the nuggets of information buried in their computer files and information. But companies, he said, are deeply uneasy about the indexing feature that links desktop searches back to Google’s computer servers, and the prospect of their corporate data being indexed by Google.

“But companies don’t want to block Google Desktop, they want to use it securely,” Mr. Stevens said. In this case, he explained, the solution is to be able to turn off the link back to Google’s servers. And in general, he added, the answer is for corporations to have that sort of granular control over the new wave of Internet applications.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ity-nightmare/





Bosses' Power to Check Email
Tom Allard

COMPANIES will be able to intercept the emails and internet communications of their employees without their consent under new laws being considered by the Federal Government to protect the nation's critical infrastructure from a cyber attack.

The proposed powers, which the Government wants in place by the middle of next year and which could affect millions of workers, have been slammed as an unprecedented and unjustifiable intrusion on civil liberties.

The Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, acknowledges concerns but said the powers were a necessary bulwark against a growing threat to national security.

Mr McClelland told the Herald he had been advised that an attack to disable computer networks that sustained the financial system, stock exchange, electricity grid and transport system "would reap far greater economic damage than would be the case of a physical [terrorist] attack".

The Government is developing counter-measures, including amending the Telecommunications (Interceptions) Act to allow companies and others operating critical infrastructure to monitor emails and other internet communications without their workers' consent.

The act allows only security agencies to monitor their employees' communications without consent. That power expires at the end of June next year and Mr McClelland said he wanted the new legislation to include companies providing services critical to the economy.

"At least 90 per cent of networks exist outside government but there's no powers for corporate network supervisors to intercept such communications unless they have specific authority from the employee," he told the Herald.

"It's unquestionable that it's necessary from time to time for network supervisors to open emails addressed to people to identify viruses and the like …

"There needs to be protocols and guidelines developed so companies can protect their own networks.

"It will need new legislation."

Mr McClelland said there had already been instances of hackers infiltrating sensitive systems in Australia.

"There's no question that breaches of both government and private sector computer networks have occurred already - in some instances as a result of mischief, in some instances to obtain security-sensitive information and in some cases to obtain commercial information."

He said it was difficult to track electronic attackers.

He cited an attack by hackers in Estonia last year that, in effect, shut down its Government for almost two weeks.

They used thousands of computers controlled through viruses - known as botnets - to simultaneously access an Estonian Government website, overwhelming the server and crashing its entire network.

Mr McClelland said he would consult unions, privacy experts and civil libertarians before introducing the laws.

Dale Clapperton, the chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia, a non-profit group concerned with the rights of individual internet users, was unimpressed.

"These new powers will facilitate fishing expeditions into employees' emails and computer use rather than being used to protect critical infrastructure," Mr Clapperton said.

"I'm talking about corporate eavesdropping and witch-hunts … If an employer wanted to bone [sack] someone, they could use these powers."

Mr McClelland said Australia would send people to the US to help with a project to tackle electronic attacks. Hackers have infiltrated networks of the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.

The Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, said the problem needed an approach similar in scale to the Manhattan Project, which led to the creation of atomic weapons.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technolog...e#contentSwap1





Court Rules Employees Have Right to Electronic Privacy

An employer may not look in an employee's recycle bin either.
Noam Sharvit

The Nazareth District Labor Court has determined, in a landmark ruling, that an employer may not access his employees' e-mail boxes without their explicit consent. Overturning a previous ruling by the Tel Aviv District Labor Court, Judge Chaim Armon said that an employer could not take such action on the basis of "implied consent" by the employee. The judge also ruled that an employer did not have the right to go through his employees' recycle bins.

The right of employers to monitor their staff's email correspondence is an issue which has not been addressed directly by the Israeli legislature so far. Under the present situation, an employer wishing to access his employees' email must ensure he is not violating two laws - the Protection of Privacy Law (5741-1981), and the Wire Tapping Law (1979-5739). In a ruling in a case brought last summer, Tel Aviv district Labor Court Judge Sigal Davidow Motola Tel Aviv ruled that "the issue under consideration is whether the employee expected to be entitled to privacy in his e-mail correspondence, or whether he knew, either explicitly or by inference, that his correspondence could be viewed by management or other employees." This ruling is now being appealed in the National Labor Court.
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/glob...333413&fid=942





FBI Caused Delay in Terror Case Ahead of Senate Testimony
Ryan Singel

Counterterrorism officials in FBI headquarters slowed an investigation into a possible conspirator in the 2005 London bombings by forcing a field agent to return documents acquired from a U.S. university. Why? Because the agent received the documents through a lawful subpoena, while headquarters wanted him to demand the records under the USA Patriot Act, using a power the FBI did not have, but desperately wanted.

When a North Carolina State University lawyer correctly rejected the second records demand, the FBI obtained another subpoena. Two weeks later, the delay was cited by FBI director Robert Mueller in congressional testimony as proof that the USA Patriot Act needed to be expanded.

The strange episode is recounted in newly declassified documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents shed new light on how senior FBI officials' determination to gain independence from judicial oversight slowed its own investigation, and led the bureau's director to offer inaccurate testimony to Congress. The revelations are likely to play a key role in Capitol Hill hearings Tuesday and Wednesday on the FBI's use of so-called national security letters, or NSLs

At issue is the FBI's probe of a former chemistry graduate student at North Carolina State University who was then suspected aiding the deadly attack. The student has since been cleared of any involvement.

The agent investigating the student in the Charlotte, North Carolina field office obtained a grand jury subpoena demanding some university records on the student. But he was then advised by superiors in Washington DC to return the papers and draft an NSL demanding the documents instead.

Under the USA Patriot Act, FBI counterterrorism investigators can self-issue such letters to get phone records, portions of credit reports and bank records, simply by certifying that the records are relevant to an investigation. Unlike subpoenas, NSLs do not require probable cause, and at the time obliged the recipient to not discuss the demand with anyone, ever. In contrast, gag orders attached to grand jury subpoenas have expiration dates.

FBI agents have relied heavily on the power, issuing more than 100,000 NSLs in 2004 and 2005 combined. The first audit of the FBI's use of the power found the agents became sloppy in their use of the power and one HQ office went rogue and issued hundreds of fake emergency requests for phone records.

The problem in the bombing case: the NSL demanded the university's health records on the student. Even under the USA Patriot Act, which greatly expanded the NSL's reach, university records and health records are exempt, making the order from headquarters a sure-fire path to delay.

The FBI even has sample letters for each of the 11 kinds of records NSL can be used to obtain. To comply with the demand from Washington, the Charlotte agent had to modify a sample letter intended for internet records.

The university, which had readily turned over the records in response to a subpoena, rejected the illegal NSL. Two weeks later, Mueller, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, portrayed the university as intransigent and said the incident showed the FBI needed the power to force the turnover of all sorts of records without having to involve the court system.

"Now in my mind, we should not, in that circumstance have to show somebody that this was an emergency," Mueller testified on July 27, 2005. "We should've been able to have a document, an administrative subpoena that we took to the university and got those records immediately."

Some of the declassified documents suggest that Mueller was himself misled by underlings, and wasn't told that the records had already been turned over in response to a subpoena.

Additionally, no one reported the overreaching subpoena to the Intelligence Oversight Board until 2007, when the Inspector General started asking questions. Oversight rules require officials to report any possible violations within 14 days.

This week, the House and Senate Judiciary committees are holding new hearings on NSLs. Over the past two years, the Justice Department's Inspector General has issued two damning reports on the agency's sloppiness in using the letters. Additionally, several courts have struck down some aspects of the NSLs as unconstitutional, and reports have surfaced that intelligence and military units are using them for domestic investigations.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler(D-New York) has introduced legislation to rein in the use of national security letters, and provide penalties for abuses.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...rector-ci.html





Feds to Collect DNA from Every Person They Arrest
Eileen Sullivan

The government plans to begin collecting DNA samples from anyone arrested by a federal law enforcement agency — a move intended to prevent violent crime but which also is raising concerns about the privacy of innocent people.

Using authority granted by Congress, the government also plans to collect DNA samples from foreigners who are detained, whether they have been charged or not. The DNA would be collected through a cheek swab, Justice Department spokesman Erik Ablin said Wednesday. That would be a departure from current practice, which limits DNA collection to convicted felons.

Expanding the DNA database, known as CODIS, raises civil liberties questions about the potential for misuse of such personal information, such as family ties and genetic conditions.

Ablin said the DNA collection would be subject to the same privacy laws applied to current DNA sampling. That means none of it would be used for identifying genetic traits, diseases or disorders.

Congress gave the Justice Department the authority to expand DNA collection in two different laws passed in 2005 and 2006.

There are dozens of federal law enforcement agencies, ranging from the FBI to the Library of Congress Police. The federal government estimates it makes about 140,000 arrests each year.

Justice officials estimate the new collecting requirements would add DNA from an additional 1.2 million people to the database each year.

Those who support the expanded collection believe that DNA sampling could get violent criminals off the streets and prevent them from committing more crimes.

A Chicago study in 2005 found that 53 murders and rapes could have been prevented if a DNA sample had been collected upon arrest.

"Many innocent lives could have been saved had the government began this kind of DNA sampling in the 1990s when the technology to do so first became available," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said. Kyl sponsored the 2005 law that gave the Justice Department this authority.

Thirteen states have similar laws: Alaska, Arizona, California, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

The new regulation would mean that the federal government could store DNA samples of people who are not guilty of any crime, said Jesselyn McCurdy, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Now innocent people's DNA will be put into this huge CODIS database, and it will be very difficult for them to get it out if they are not charged or convicted of a crime," McCurdy said.

If a person is arrested but not convicted, he or she can ask the Justice Department to destroy the sample.

The Homeland Security Department — the federal agency charged with policing immigration — supports the new rule.

"DNA is a proven law-enforcement tool," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said.

The rule would not allow for DNA samples to be collected from immigrants who are legally in the United States or those being processed for admission, unless the person was arrested.

The proposed rule is being published in the Federal Register. That will be followed by a 30-day comment period.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080416/...dna_collection





DoJ Wants More Money to Scour P2P Networks for Child Porn
Jon Stokes

At a hearing yesterday before the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, anti-child porn activists urged the Senators to increase the FBI's budget for combating child porn online and to move forward with plans to create a next-generation network monitoring and database system that can ferret out child porn trafficking on P2P networks, web sites, and chat rooms. The new system would be hosted on the FBI's Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) network and would give more law enforcement agents across the country access to an existing system, based in Wyoming, that's currently being used to find and catch online child porn traffickers. Congress would also expand and better fund the current Wyoming system, called Operation FairPlay, consolidating it in a newly-created National Internet Crimes Against Children Data Network Center.

In arguing for the funding and the upgrade, Grier Weeks, executive director of the National Association to Protect Children, briefly recapped for the senators the history of the Canadian Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS), a suite of network monitoring, database, information management, and collaboration tools that Microsoft developed and funded to the tune of $7 million. In 2003, Microsoft deployed the system in Canada and offered it to the US Department of Justice, which turned it down because it was then locked in a bitter anti-trust dispute with the software maker.

US law enforcement was left to roll its own answer to CETS, and Wyoming's Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force stepped up with Operation FairPlay, a system developed by task force chief Flint Waters and housed in Wyoming's ICAC headquarters. FairPlay can monitor and map illicit file sharing activity on popular P2P networks, web sites, and chat rooms, and has become a key tool for law enforcement in the two years that it has been in use.

The FBI's six RISS divisions

Special Agent Flint Waters described parts of the system to the subcommittee, and CNet's Anne Broache was there to capture some of the details. The system appears to rely heavily on filenames for targeting users for additional levels of scrutiny, but Waters declined to give too many details of how it positively identifies specific users who are engaged in illicit activity. Waters' comments, which refer to 624,932 "unique serial numbers" that are tied to specific suspects' computers for long-term tracking, make it difficult to discern just how accurate and invasive the system is. The agent wouldn't disclose much of anything about these "serial numbers," either how they're obtained or what they represent.

Recent revelations about the FBI's honeypot scheme for catching possible child porn traders do give some cause for concern over the lack of detail on how the system works, a concern that's only likely to grow as the system itself grows. There's no doubt that child exploitation ruins lives, but so could the high number of false positives associated with computer-automated surveillance and tracking systems, especially when combined with aggressive prosecution and the overall technical ignorance of CSI-watching juries.

Weeks urged the subcommittee to pass the Combating Child Exploitation Act, which is the Senate version of the bill that would provide the new funding and other resources for combating online child porn. The bill would also consolidate control of the ICAC at the federal level with the creation of an ICAC task force within the DoJ itself, and it would call on the Attorney General to appoint a Special Counsel for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction—a sort of national child exploitation czar.

The bill's main sponsor is Senator Joe Biden (D) of Delaware. Biden praised Operation FairPlay to the subcommittee and urged the bill's passage.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...hild-porn.html





Lawmakers Want FBI Access to Data Curbed
Carrie Johnson

Bipartisan groups in Congress are pressing to place new controls on the FBI's ability to demand troves of sensitive personal information from telephone providers and credit card companies, over the opposition of agency officials who say they deserve more time to clean up past abuses.

Proposals to rein in the use of secret "national security letters" will be discussed over the next week at hearings in both chambers. The hearings stem from disclosures that the FBI had clandestinely gathered telephone, e-mail and financial records "sought for" or "relevant to" terrorism or intelligence activities without following appropriate procedures.

The Justice Department's inspector general issued reports in 2007 and earlier this year citing repeated breaches. They included shoddy FBI paperwork, improper claims about nonexistent emergencies and an insufficient link between the data requests and ongoing national security probes.

"It is clear that the NSL authority is too overbroad and operates unchecked," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), a co-sponsor of the House bill. "We must give our law enforcement the tools they need to protect us, but any such powers must be consistent with the rule of law."

The House bill, sponsored by Nadler, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), would tighten the language governing when national security letters could be used, by requiring that they clearly pertain to investigations of a foreign power or an agent instead of just being considered "relevant" to such investigations.

The House bill would also force the FBI to destroy information that had been illegally obtained -- something that existing rules do not require -- and it would allow the recipient of a letter to file a civil lawsuit if the missive is found to be illegal or without sufficient factual justification.

A Senate bill, sponsored by Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and John E. Sununu (R-N.H.), would require the FBI to track its use of the letters more carefully and would narrow the types of records that can be obtained with a letter, and therefore without judicial approval, to those that are least sensitive.

Three supporters of the legislation are slated to appear at Nadler's hearing this afternoon: David Kris, an expert in national security law who worked in the Clinton and Bush administrations; Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official in the Reagan era; and Jameel Jaffer, director of the national security project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

"It's a bipartisan issue," Fein said in an interview. "It's not trusting the goodwill or the angelic disposition of the government to preserve our rights. . . . We ought to learn from our experience since 9/11 and restore checks and balances. Congress can't just rely on the FBI to fix the problem."

Officials at the Justice Department's National Security Division and the FBI have acknowledged problems with the past use of national security letters. But they say they have stepped up training programs, instituted internal reviews, and developed new databases to improve the accuracy of internal tracking and accounting.

Valerie E. Caproni, the FBI's top lawyer, is expected to testify today that the bureau needs more time to overhaul its internal systems, according to a government source familiar with her position who was not authorized to speak in advance of the hearing.

"We are committed to using [the letters] in ways that maximize their national security value while providing the highest level of privacy and protection," FBI Assistant Director John Miller said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...041402664.html





Wikipedia Breeds 'Unwitting Trust' Says IT Professor

Students banned from citing Wikipedia in coursework.
Rodney Gedda

If you are faced with the prospect of having brain surgery who would you rather it be performed by - a surgeon trained at medical school or someone who has read Wikipedia?

That's the view of Deakin University associate professor of information systems Sharman Lichtenstein, who believes the popular free encyclopedia that anyone can edit is fostering a climate of blind trust among people seeking information.

Professor Lichtenstein says the reliance by students on Wikipedia for finding information, and acceptance of the practice by teachers and academics, was "crowding out" valuable knowledge and creating a generation unable to source "credible expert" views even if desired.

"People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading," she said. "Parents and teachers think it is [okay], but it is a light-weight model of knowledge and people don't know about the underlying model of how it operates."

Lichtenstein and her associate, Dr Craig Parker, are leading a team of researchers to determine how Wikipedia operates, and is not shy in expressing her lack of confidence in the population's appreciation of intellectuals.

"Australians are notorious in their disrespect of academics, scholars and professionals - so called elites," she said. "Yet as I say to my students, 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?"

As a result, Lichtenstein's students are not allowed to cite Wikipedia in their coursework.

"My students say Wikipedia is a good place to get a general understanding of a topic," she said. "They get a good understanding of a topic and get more specific information elsewhere. There is a need for easy-to-use information that is correct and has been produced by a rigorous process."

When asked if people should be more comfortable believing in a "web of trust" network like Wikipedia over an individual, Lichtenstein said experts have never been 100 percent correct, but are making a comeback in terms of public perception as a group of untrained people can be more misleading.

And if experts are part of Wikipedia's editing pool? Lichtenstein said the problem with that is experts expect to be paid for their work.

"If someone asked me if I would dedicate a day a week to Wikipedia I would expect to be paid," she said. "People have invested a lot in becoming an expert and they are trying to earn a living and you can't expect experts to contribute without pay."

Information in a traditional encyclopedia was built up by experts with "recognized credentials and expertise in the field", according to Lichtenstein, but Wikipedia, in contrast, "prides itself on being built by groups of lay citizens rather than traditional experts".

"While research shows there is an advantage to this it also shows they are not experts in their field and lack the experience to make judgments about what knowledge should be included and what should not."

Lichtenstein also expressed concern about the anonymity of Wikipedia's many "editors and administrators", which may also mean consumers are unable to establish the credibility, or otherwise, of an author.

According to Lichtenstein, Wikipedia topics are selected for inclusion on the basis of their notability, which is subjective and fosters discrimination and elitism, "the very things the Wikipedia is against".

"Unlike academic journals and other legitimate reference sources, the Wikipedia has created new and anonymous elite 'editors' and administrators," she said.

"An expert is held accountable if they make a mistake but no one is held accountable for the information available on Wikipedia. People miss the statistical likelihood that a doctor will give you a wrong diagnosis compared with Wikipedia. And people may never be able to tie back false information they use to Wikipedia."

Lichtenstein warns that if teachers, employers and academics continue to accept Wikipedia as a legitimate reference, the valuable knowledge of experts will become increasingly disputed and marginalized, and inferior knowledge will be learned and applied in the workplace.

"There have been many incidents when a version of a Wikipedia article can be very inaccurate, which could be innocent or the result of deliberate changing of an article," she said, adding there are certain political views, particularly conservative, that are not tolerated on Wikipedia.

Lichtenstein said as a result of growing dissatisfaction with Wikipedia's editorial process people are starting to develop niche online encyclopedias, including Google which plans to release "Knol" for user-generated content.

"Google Knol is supposed to be a competitor to Wikipedia that will involve experts, and because it's Google, search results will appear above Wikipedia entries which are quite often the first result," she said.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1828979092





Craigslist Bites Back, Answers Connecticut AG

Blumenthal has his facts wrong, craigslist argues
Truman Lewis

Craigslist is defending itself against charges by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal that solicitations for prostitution are "rampant" on its Web site and demanding that Blumenthal retract statements it says are defamatory.

"While misuse of craigslist for illegal activity is rare, it is absolutely not tolerated in any measure, and eliminating misuse of its site is craigslist's top priority," said Edward Wes, a Craigslist attorney.

Wes said that Blumenthal had not participated in calls between attorneys on his staff and Craigslist executives, in which he said Craigslist outlined the "numerous measures" the non-profit company has taken to enforce its terms of use.

"These terms absolutely prohibit the use of craigslist for any criminal activity. These tools include not only moderation by the craigslist community (through the 'flagging' tool), but also blocking and screening advertisements for illegal activity to prevent them from being posted, as well as broad and effective cooperation with law enforcement," Wes said.

Blumenthal's demand followed the arrest of a Connecticut woman on prostitution charges. She had allegedly used craigslist to troll for clients.

In spite of rules banning such content, Craigslist's "erotic services" section is rife with ads containing explicit language and images bordering on pornographic, as well as hourly rates and descriptions of services clearly sexual in nature, Blumenthal's office claimed.

Blumenthal said he sent the letter after several months of discussions with craigslist in which he claimed the site refused to take aggressive steps to curb apparent prostitution ads, a charge Wes strenuously denied.

Not true, says craigslist

"Far from 'stonewalling' your staff's requests, we assured them that further improvements to enable craigslist to enforce its terms of use were being developed and implemented constantly," he said.

In a letter to Blumenthal, Wes said Craigslist has implemented a new telephone verification procedure, which (by tying advertisements in craigslist's "erotic services" category to live telephone numbers that are verified when an account is opened) enables craigslist to effectively block new advertisements from accounts that are brought to craigslist's attention as violating its terms of use.

"This was a very major improvement, yet your staff dismissed it as inconsequential," Wes said. After telephone verification was implemented, the volume of person-to-person erotic ads dropped from almost 400 per day to about 50 per day, he said.

Many of the remaining ads were further blocked by craigslist's filters before reaching the site or were removed by the flagging system, he added.
Law-abiding

Wes said it is important not to confuse the criminals who occasionally misuse craigslist with craigslist itself.

"Craigslist is a law-abiding company that is trying very hard to do the right thing, while also providing a very valuable free public service for the people of Connecticut, and the world at large," he said. "Craigslist does not have tens of thousands of employees, as do other large internet sites. The lack of this overhead is the reason that craigslist can provide its valuable public services at such low cost and without paid advertising."

"Unlike the "online" versions of weekly newspapers and numerous paid "erotic services" sites that make a profitable business out of erotic services ads, craigslist earns no revenue from that portion of its site whatsoever. In fact, craigslist incurs substantial expense in operating this section, including the costs of telephone verification and other compliance efforts that are discussed above," Wes added.

"Under the circumstances, we strongly believe that you owe craigslist a public retraction of a defamatory statement that you made to the New Haven Register to the effect that '[craigslist] continues to profit from prostitution.' This statement is patently false, and I trust that you understand the importance of accuracy in matters such as this - particularly when the statements come from a respected public servant," he said.
'Freedom trumps prudence'

"Craigslist is on absolutely solid ground and should be given an award instead of being threatened by political officeholders who are paid to know better," said ConsumerAffairs.com President James R. Hood. "Craigslist provides an invaluable public service at no cost to the vast majority of its users, which is a lot more than the State of Connecticut can say."

"Throughout the land, corporate interests and reckless politicians are trying to subvert the First Amendment rights of American citizens by stifling free expression on the Internet while the large media companies who should manning the barricades sit idly by," he said.

"Internet sites provide a means for citizens to speak freely, providing an important and Constitutionally-protected balance to the constant barrage of corporate propaganda and government hogwash," Hood said. "Those paid by the public to uphold the Constitution should do their jobs instead of putting the iron boot of the state where it doesn't belong."

"Freedom trumps prudence anyday," Hood said. "Major media companies should stop worrying about next year's Gridiron Dinner and join the struggle to preserve the First Amendment rights they are so quick to cite when their own interests are at stake."
Discrimination decision

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court held that Craigslist could not be held liable for discriminatory real-estate postings.

Civil rights attorneys in Chicago had argued that the site should be held responsible for apartment rental and home sale listings that specify racial or ethnic preferences.

But the court said the Communications Decency Act protects Web sites from liability for third-party postings. It's the latest in a series of similar rulings.

A staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Kurt Opsahl, said the ruling was "good news."

The protection provided by the law is essential to the Internet's free operation, he said.

Craigslist allows users to flag inappropriate language or material and removes postings that are identified as violating its terms of service.

The appeals court noted that while Craigslist does not actively ban discriminatory postings, it does not encourage them either.

"Nothing in the service craigslist offers induces anyone to post any particular listing or express a preference for discrimination," the court held.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news0...aigslist2.html





"Web Tripwires" Reveal 1.3% of Web Pages Altered in Transit
Nate Anderson

When you visit a web page, you might expect that the code and images from the page will make their journey through the tubes unmolested and unaltered, but according to security researchers, you would also be wrong 1.3 percent of the time.

Researchers from the University of Washington and the International Computer Science Institute wanted to see whether ISPs, enterprise firewalls, or proxy servers commonly made changes to requested HTML while it was "in-flight." Testing 50,171 unique IP addresses around the world, the researchers found that content requested by 657 IP addresses was modified during transit, but the modifications weren't always nefarious.

We've reported before on companies that sell products to ISPs to do exactly this. ISPs can use the devices to insert or replace their own advertisements into web pages (MetroFi does this to offer its free WiFi service in the US), or they can simply add notification messages to websites (Rogers in Canada began doing this late last year).

But such interventions, though worrisome, are rare. Only 1.3 percent of pages tested were modified in any way, and 70 percent of those modifications were caused by client proxies installed to deal with pop-ups or to block advertising. The researchers also note that not every alteration is problematic; some cellular operators, for example, will strip extra whitespace from pages or will provide extra compression for images to keep bandwidth usage low and browsing quick.

One caveat, however: the research tells us little about the prevalence of ad blocking in general. Browser extensions (which do much of the ad blocking) that may modify page layouts were not included in the tests, so only separate proxies that blocked ads generated positive results.

Because altering the pages in transit might not be in the publisher's interest (ad-blocking) or the user's interest (some of the alterations caused security problems), the researchers devised a method of "web tripwires" to detect any changes. The tripwire is some additional JavaScript code that is executed on the client and can check the received HTML for possible alterations.

For example, the tripwire could count the number of script tags on a page, a method that would have turned out 90 percent of the modifications found during testing. If the number of tags differs from the number hardwired into the script, it can pop a message into the browser notifying the user that the page has been modified.

The tripwire at work

For publishers who care about the integrity of their pages, the tripwire method offers a simpler and lower-overhead solution when compared to more extreme measures, such as only allowing access over an encrypted HTTPS connection.

If you want to check whether your browser is receiving web pages as they were created, the researchers have left their validation tool online for public use. A paper based on the research (PDF) will be presented at the NSDI '08 conference on network systems design this week.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...n-transit.html





Consumer Groups Urge "Do Not Track" Registry
Diane Bartz

Two consumer groups asked the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday to create a "do not track list" that would allow computer users to bar advertisers from collecting information about them.

The Consumer Federation of America and the Consumers Union also urged the FTC to bar collection of health information and other sensitive data by companies that do business on the Internet unless a consumer consents.

The call echoed those of other privacy advocates who filed statements with the FTC on Internet companies' use of "behavioral advertising." That is the practice of tracking a computer user's activities online, including Web searches and sites visited, to target advertisements to the individual consumer.

In December, the FTC approved Google's purchase of advertising rival DoubleClick over the objections of some privacy groups.

At the same time, the agency urged advertisers to let computer users bar advertisers from collecting information on them, to provide "reasonable security" for any data and to collect data on health conditions or other sensitive issues only with the consumer's express consent.

In comments to the FTC on online behavioral advertising, advertisers made clear a strong preference for self-regulation rather than government dictates on how personal data are collected, what disclosures are made to computer users and how long the information is stored.

Consumer groups said on Tuesday they were skeptical of self-regulation.

"Self-policing schemes are not enough to protect consumers' privacy and offer no enforcement against improper behavior," said Chris Murray, senior counsel for Consumers Union, in a statement.

"While companies like Google are trying to put pretty good practices in place, we don't want to rely on the good graces of the companies because they might change their minds," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Several child advocacy groups, including the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and American Academy of Pediatrics, urged the FTC to bar advertisers from collecting information on or advertising to anyone under the age of 18.

Several advertisers also questioned whether the FTC and privacy groups had established that any harm had been done by the data collected and pointed out that the advertisers subsidized the free information often sought on the Internet.

"The associations (of businesses and advertisers) strongly believe that self-regulation and leading business practices comprise the most effective framework to protect consumers and further innovation in the area of privacy and behavioral advertising," the American Advertising Federation, Association of National Advertisers and other organizations said in a statement.

"We believe that any additional principles or guidelines should be issued only after the commission specifically identifies harms and concerns so that business is in a position to consider and address them," the group said in its comments to the FTC.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...080416?sp=true





Newspapers Argue for First Amendment Right to Snoop on Readers
Saul Hansell

Usually, when people talk about the trade offs between privacy and freedom of the press, the argument is about whether the public has the right to know some fact about an individual’s personal life.

The newspaper industry is now arguing that the First Amendment protects its right to follow users around the Internet so it can charge higher prices on advertising.

This argument was made in a filing by Newspaper Association of America commenting on the Federal Trade Commission’s proposal that the companies involved in advertising that uses what is called behavioral targeting create a self-regulatory code that limits their use of sensitive information.

Many newspaper sites, including nytimes.com, participate in behavioral targeting networks such as those run by AOL’s Tacoda or Revenue Science. These sites hope that by finding out which of their readers are shopping for cars or other products, they can raise rates for sections that don’t have natural advertisers, like international news.

The association argued that this sort of advertising technology is needed to pay for the local information and other content that newspapers provide free online. That is similar to many of the other comments that challenged the commission’s ideas. But the newspaper group went further and suggested that restrictions on advertising technology are tantamount to unconstitutional censorship.

Efforts to restrict or limit what newspaper websites publish, and the basis by which editors and advertisers make decisions regarding what to publish, run directly counter to core First Amendment rights, and can amount to a form of prior restraint.

The filing did acknowledge that government can regulate the content of deceptive advertising, but it argued that behavioral targeting is hardly misleading.

While it is possible that an advertiser message accompanying the publisher’s fully protected speech might be deemed false or misleading, no connection between behavioral targeting and falsity or misleadingness has been demonstrated. Quite the reverse: the purported concern is that users may receive not only truthful advertising speech, but advertising speech that meets their interest. That is not fraud or deception — that is customer service.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...op-on-readers/





New York Times Company Posts Loss
Richard Pérez-Peña

The New York Times Company, the parent of The New York Times, posted a $335,000 loss in the first quarter — one of the worst periods the company and the newspaper industry have seen — falling far short of both analysts’ expectations and its $23.9 million profit in the quarter a year earlier.

The company did break even on a per-share basis, compared with the average analyst forecast of earnings of 14 cents, down from 17 cents in the first quarter of 2007.

The company’s main source of revenue, newspaper advertising in print and online, fell 10.6 percent, the sharpest drop in memory, as the industry suffers the twin blows of an economic downturn and the continuing long-term shift of readers and advertisers to the Internet.

In a conference call with analysts, Janet L. Robinson, president and chief executive, said it was “a challenging quarter, one that showed the effects of a weaker economy,” compounded by “a marketplace that has been reconfigured technologically, economically and geographically.”

Looking ahead, she said, “We see continued challenges for print advertising in a faltering economy.”

The company recorded an operating profit of $6.2 million on revenue of $748 million, down from $54.5 million in operating income on revenue of $786 million a year earlier. That included a noncash charge of $18.3 million for an asset write-down and one-time costs for changes that will lower costs in the long run, like closing a printing plant and employee buyouts. The company lowered operating costs by 1.1 percent, and it predicts sharper declines later in the year.Excluding the write-down, depreciation and amortization, operating profit for the company was $66.4 million for the quarter, down from $98.9 million a year earlier.

The poor showing stemmed from The Times Company’s core news media group, which includes The Times, The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune, as well as several regional newspapers.

Excluding the $18.3 million charge, depreciation and amortization, the unit reported an operating profit of $68.5 million for the quarter, down from $99.4 million in the period a year earlier.

The group’s revenue dropped 5.7 percent, driven by the 10.6 percent decline in advertising revenue. But it also recorded a 1.9 percent increase in circulation revenue, after the company raised the prices of newspapers like The Times and The Globe.

The About Group, which includes About.com, reported an operating profit of $12.6 million, a 9.5 percent rise from a year ago. Revenue at the group increased 25 percent, to $28.2 million as the unit benefited from increased ad sales and acquisitions.

The Times Company’s declining fortunes have sowed shareholder discontent, and the weak first-quarter results could intensify calls for a shift in strategy. A pair of hedge funds, Harbinger Capital Partners and Firebrand Partners, acquired a large stake in the company early this year, demanding that it sell assets and invest aggressively in Internet operations.Rather than endure a proxy fight, the hedge funds and the Times Company struck a deal, agreeing to expand the board to 15 seats from 13, with the two extra seats going to the funds. That agreement is expected to win approval at a shareholders’ meeting on April 22.

“I think there is a great deal of common ground that we already have,” Ms. Robinson said. The company will move judiciously, she said, but it is already open to the kind of buying and selling the funds advocate, “constantly evaluating the portfolio, not only for performance but also for strategic fit.”

Across the industry, newspaper ad revenue — print and online, combined — fell almost 8 percent last year, the second-worst decline in more than half a century, according to the Newspaper Association of America. The Times Company’s ad revenue dropped 4.7 percent last year, when adjusted for a change in the length of its fiscal year.

Over the last year, classified ads continued a decadelong flight to the Web, and display ads for real estate and cars fell sharply as those industries contracted.

As it wore on, 2007 grew steadily worse, meaning that as 2008 passes, some of the year-earlier comparisons will become a little easier.

Ms. Robinson said that April should be somewhat better than the first quarter, but that is partly due to timing of Easter and of one of the Times newspaper’s magazines, Key.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/bu...l?ref=business





Hollywood and Silicon Valley Try Again to Bridge Their Divide
Laura M. Holson

A story that Dan Scheinman, a senior vice president at Cisco Systems in San Jose, Calif., likes to tell illustrates the cultural divide between Hollywood and his Silicon Valley.

Last year he met with an affluent film producer who marveled at the extraordinary riches afforded Google executives. Mr. Scheinman told him that most got wealthy accepting stock options instead of million-dollar salaries. When Mr. Scheinman asked if the producer would ever accept equity instead of cash if they worked together, the moviemaker sniffed.

“I fly a G4,” he told Mr. Scheinman, referring to the Gulfstream jet he owned. “How far do you think my G4 will go on stock options? I need cash.”

Only 350 miles separate the two California business cultures, and executives are once more trying to bridge the gap between technology and entertainment. But media moguls and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs working together again has all the familiarity of a late-night rerun.

In the 1990s, venture capitalists saw a parade of celebrities make their way to Sand Hill Road seeking backing for their online ventures. Many VCs eagerly had their photographs taken with a starlet or two. But as deals cratered or never got off the ground, the relationship between the camps ended up less a marriage, than friends with benefits.

Now, with everyone clamoring to distribute short videos and other programming via the Internet or cellphone, Hollywood and Silicon Valley executives are circling each other once again, trying to figure how best to combine forces as their worlds inevitably collide. Veterans from both camps say the cultures are so different, though, that barriers remain. They are approaching each other with a new soberness — amid the hype, of course — as those who were burned in the past hope not to repeat the same mistakes.
“One of the misconceptions is there was a pot of gold out there,” said Kevin Tsujihara, president of Warner Home Entertainment who, among other things, negotiates digital rights issues with technology companies on behalf of the Time Warner unit. “For every big deal you read about, there are a million guys who tried to get a deal done who couldn’t,” he said. These days, he said, “it’s about resetting the bar on expectations.”

Even with the benefit of perspective, the gulf is stark. Mark D. Kvamme, a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital, financed the comedian Will Ferrell’s funnyordie.com last year, which has had only one runaway hit, “The Landlord” video. When Mr. Kvamme approached Mr. Ferrell and his agents at Creative Artists Agency about creating the site, he said he was struck by what he perceived as the short-term view then taken by his new Hollywood partners.

“They talked about the transaction — ‘What am I getting paid today?’ ” he said of Mr. Ferrell and his agents. “The big thing with Funny or Die was we said, ‘Let’s build a company. We are not just going to write you a check.’ ”

Those perceptions can largely be attributed to the nature of their conflicting interests. Adam McKay, who started the Web site with Mr. Ferrell, said they had to get used to the notion that they were owners, not just talent for hire. “There the security guard can make $100 million because everyone is given stock," said Mr. McKay. "but here it is a no-no. The deal is a cherished ritual."

Suggesting that talent agents do more than negotiate is something of a misguided mission; that is what they do all day. And film actors, writers, directors and crew members are hired for short bursts, then leave and work for someone else. Besides, Hollywood executives are not the only ones worrying about their paydays.

“People in Silicon Valley too want their pound of flesh,” said Sean Bailey, a Hollywood producer who joined with the actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and the producer Chris Moore in 2000 to create LivePlanet, a Silicon Valley-backed multimedia company which has had its ambitions scaled back. “The difference is they will wait five years instead of five minutes.”

Unlike the last go-round, though, content is only part of the conversation with studios, said Michael Lynton, chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment who previously served as former chief executive of AOL Europe. He said Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have talked to him lately are grappling with new ways to distribute Sony’s movies and television shows that compete with iTunes from Apple.

“I don’t know if they feel they don’t need us or are going directly to the talent,” he said. “There are always going to be huge cultural differences between us because the interests are different. On their side they are fundamentally interested in technology and, on our side, we are interested in the content.”

He makes a good point. It is with rare exception that the two camps have harmoniously co-existed. In 2004, Yahoo made a splash when it hired Lloyd Braun, the former chairman of the ABC Entertainment Group, to help make it a powerhouse in media and entertainment. The relationship soured, and Mr. Braun was chided for Hollywood extravagances like having his own parking space. Two years later, Mr. Braun left the company and much of what he created has since been dismantled.

Even Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple and a board member at the Walt Disney Company, has had a wary reception from Hollywood. While studio executives acknowledge his cleverness, they, too, dragged their feet on allowing Apple to offer movies and television shows on iTunes unless they were afforded proper copyright protection for their content. And that did little to burnish the relationship with Silicon Valley.

"We realize there is a problem, but there’s not an easy solution,” said David Siminoff, a venture capitalist at Venrock, who has an interest in both media and technology. “If there was one, we would’ve found that already."

A particularly salient difference, of course, is how each culture approaches failure. Silicon Valley, to a point, celebrates it, while entertainment creators in Southern California cannot distance themselves fast enough from anything that might be a bomb. And Hollywood talent likes a success story; but only if it is their own.

“If a successful director has a flop, his peers and colleagues question whether he has lost his touch,” Mr. Kvamme said. “By contrast, in the Valley, if you have a failure, that usually means that you have learned something. There are very few successful serial entrepreneurs. Failure is almost a rite of passage."

Which, of course, leads to the ultimate measure of might in any corporate culture and one easiest to calculate: who has the fatter wallet. The highest-ranking media chief can earn $20 million in salaries and stock options, too. But that looks like lunch money compared with what a 22-year-old Stanford graduate can earn if the right idea strikes.

Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, each have a net worth estimated at around $13 billion. The two are ferried around on a private 50-passenger Boeing 767-200 jet, which they pay $1.3 million a year to park at a military base near Google’s office.

With numbers like that, perhaps the producer who met with Mr. Scheinman should reconsider the cash.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/te...hollywood.html





Building a 5-Ton Mechanical Calculator... from 19th-Century Plans

Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 automated repetitive calculations
John Cox

Starting in May, many will have the opportunity to see for themselves how they did computing the old-fashioned way: with lots of gears, a big crank and some muscle.

The Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, Calif., will unveil a new construction, the first in the United States, of the 19th century British mathematician Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, an improved version of his earlier mechanical digital calculator.

Babbage finalized the design in the late 1840’s but it was not built during his lifetime, or for a long time afterward. Finally, in the late 1980’s, London’s Science Museum launched the first and until now only full-blown construction project, based on Babbage’s original detailed drawings, and in 1991 unveiled the completed calculator, 11 feet long, 7 feet high, with 8,000 parts in bronze, cast iron and steel, weighing about 3 tons.

In operation, it looks rather like an industrial version of a street organ.

In 2000, the museum added the calculator’s complex printer, almost as big and at 2.5 tons nearly as heavy.

The American model is the second built from Babbage’s plans. This one was commissioned and paid for by Microsoft millionaire Nathan Myhrvold, and built by the Science Museum.

Myrhvold and Guest Curator Doron Swade, an authority on Babbage and the man who led the Science Museum’s first construction effort, will speak on Babbage’s creation Thursday, May 1 at the Computer History Museum (the event is sold out). The exhibit itself opens Saturday, May 10, with demonstrations of the Difference Engine.

The Difference Engine is not the only geared calculation marvel in the world. In late 2006, an international team of scientists revealed new details of a 2,100-year-old astronomical calculator, the Antikythera Device, which used a complex system of 37 finely cut bronze gears to accurately show the changing positions of the sun and moon, with its phases, and possibly predict solar and lunar eclipses.

So what is a “difference engine?” Not being a math wizard, I’ll give this my best shot, drawing in part on the online expertise of Andrew Carol, an Apple software engineer who built a simpler difference engine, entirely of plastic LEGO pieces. You can find more details at Carol’s Web site.

Carol points out that calculating the trigonometric and logarithmic tables used for an array of navigation, engineering and scientific purposes was all done by hand, with a skilled mathematician directing the efforts of a room filled with less-skilled people, called “computers,” who could be trusted to do reliable arithmetic. Babbage was one of a number of people trying to automate this process with mechanical devices in the 19th Century.

In effect, the difference engine is a kind of shortcut to determine a series of successive mathematical values. It’s based on something called the method of differences, developed by Sir Isaac Newton. Carol gives the example of multiplying 5 by successive numbers, such as 6, 7, 8. “In simple terms, the method of differences is based on the observation that if the work has already been done to multiply 5 by 5, [then] that work can be reused to multiple 5 by 7 with the addition of another 5 into the previous total,” he writes.

Like this:
5 x 6 = 30
5 x 7 = 35 by adding 5 to the previous total
5 x 8 = 40 by adding 5 yet again to the previous total

As Carol puts it: “Successive multiplications have been reduced to an identical number of successive additions. As long as we are willing to calculate the table entries [remember this is all about tables of values] in order we can save an enormous amount of work.”

Babbage’s difference engine applies this same idea to solving polynomial equations, which are widely used in math and science. Polynomials are built from a combination of variables and constants; use only addition, subtraction and multiplication; and only exponents that are constant positive whole numbers.

Babbage later designed a more general Analytical Engine, but only part of it was completed when he died in 1871. This device was intended to evaluate any mathematical formula, but it was never successfully created. A Swedish printer, George Scheutz, in 1854 built a machine based on Babbage’s Difference Engine design, and versions were used by the British and American governments.

The Difference Engine is powered by a hand-turned crank and a complex system of gears.

The California museum will be missing a few of the more eccentric elements in the British museum’s permanent Babbage exhibit, notably one-half of the brain that created the Difference Engine. The Science Museum holds about 800 human remains, in varying quantities, including a lock of Napoleon’s hair, cut off by Dr. Barry O’Meara at St. Helena where the emperor died, “human skin from one half of a male body, probably French, 19th century” and a rather numerous collection of shrunken heads, from Ecuador’s Jivaro tribe.

The Victorian aesthetic exemplified in Babbage’s creations has fueled a literary genre called “steampunk.” It blends the hallmarks of a world running on steam power with elements of fantasy, science fiction or speculative fiction. Babbage’s work was the inspiration for “The Difference Engine,” a 1990 novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, one of the first steampunk hits. The novel creates an alternative Victorian world where a steam-powered version of Babbage’s difference engine is created, launching the “information age” in the 19th century.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...ce-engine.html





New Battery Prototype May Mean the End of Exploding Laptops
Jacqui Cheng

The Great Laptop Battery Recall of 2006 had everyone paranoid that their MacBooks or ThinkPads could catch fire and cause havoc at any moment. Although that string of incidents appears to be over, the most commonly-found batteries can still catch fire under the right conditions. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC in Germany hope to eliminate that concern, though, by developing lithium-ion batteries with no flammable materials.

"We have succeeded in replacing the inflammable organic electrolytes with a non-flammable polymer that retains its shape," ISC team leader Dr. Kai-Christian Möller said in a statement. "This considerably enhances the safety of lithium-ion batteries. What’s more, because it is a solid substance, the electrolyte cannot leak out of the battery."

According to ISC, the polymer is derived from an inorganic compound that allows organic side chains to attach to it, called Ormocer. The challenge, however, is to create a non-flammable polymer that retains its shape, but doesn't suffer when it comes to actually transmitting the energy. "Normally, the more solid a polymer is, the less conductive it becomes," said Möller. "But we had numerous parameters that we could adjust—for example, we can use coupling elements with two, three or four arms. As a result, we have more possibilities with Ormocer than with a single type of plastic."

Battery fires: soon to be a thing of the past?

The researchers already have a prototype of the new battery, but don't expect it to enter the hands of consumers for another three to five years. This is because they believe the battery could use some improvements to its storage capacity and efficiency in delivering power before introducing it to the masses. ISC says that once these improvements are made, the battery could even compete with lead batteries for cars.

The technology could make battery fires one of those things that people of the future will look back on as if it were stone age history. In 2006, big companies like Dell, Toshiba, and Apple all issued recalls over their Sony-made batteries within a few months of each other after reports began to spread about battery fires and explosions all over the world. Sony itself finally issued a global Li-ion battery recall in September of 2006 to address "recent overheating incidents." Ultimately, Sony and other computer manufacturers recalled close to 10 million units.

In addition to the fire-resistant batteries, Fraunhofer also recently announced a partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in order to further research "green" energy technologies. The two will focus on developing green energy systems for buildings and devices at the MIT-Fraunhofer Institute for Sustainable Energy Systems near MIT's campus in Massachusetts.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...g-laptops.html





Apple, Sony Agree to Pay Out Over Battery Fire Lawsuit
Jacqui Cheng

Does anybody remember the Great Laptop Battery Recall of 2006? We sure do. Big companies like Dell, Toshiba, and Apple all issued recalls over their Sony-made batteries within a few months of each other after reports began to spread about random battery fires and explosions all over the world. Sony itself finally issued a global li-ion battery recall in September of 2006. The reason was to address "recent overheating incidents" that had caused computer manufacturers to recall close to 10 million units.

Of course, the recalls didn't stop anyone from getting sued, but Apple and Sony have finally settled one suit that has been dragged out for a year. The two companies have agreed to pay out Y1.3 million to a Japanese couple over damages to their home and personal injuries, according to Japan-based Kyodo News Agency (reported by Dow Jones).

Let's back up a little bit. The couple sued Apple and Sony last year over a battery fire incident that occurred in their home in April of 2006, months before the recall mess got sorted out. The couple, who was seeking damages of about Y2 million at the time, argued that the husband suffered burns while trying to remove the flaming machine from the house. They also said that the computer fire had caused damages to parts of their home.

In a surprising twist (at least for Apple followers), the report says that Apple Japan accepted liability for the incident. Still, it wanted to settle out of court because the company felt the couple was asking for too much. However, current conversion rates put Y2 million at just under US$20,000—seemingly a paltry sum for two multinational corporations. Still, if the couple was willing to accept Y1.3 million (about US$12,900) for their medical expenses and home repairs, then more power to them. Sony, of course, still claims that a link between the battery and the fire "has not been determined."
http://arstechnica.com/journals/appl...y-fire-lawsuit





Point

Monster Cable Sues Blue Jeans Cable
Clint DeBoer

Monster Cable has issued a Cease-and-Desist order to Blue Jeans Cable (Tartan Cable) over analogue cable connectors. In particular, the design of the Tartan component, composite, coax digital and stereo audio cables supposedly violates Monster Cable's design patents. From the letter:

It appears that the design of the connector portion of the Tartan Cable component video, composite video, stereo audio cable, and coaxial digital cable infringes a variety of our client's design patents, including patent nos. D456,363, D366,863, D367,036, D376,580, and D366,862 (see Exhibits A-E enclosed herewith), along with our client's related trademark registration nos. 2,060,139 and 3,075,541, (see enclosed Exhibits F and G) and trade dress rights. Furthermore, the connector housing design of the Tartan Cable S-Video cable appears that it too may infringe the aforementioned '363 design patent.

Monster Cable is insisting that Blue Jeans Cable immediately cease and desist all sales, offerings, advertising, distribution, manufacture use and importing of the aforementioned cables. In addition, Monster is insisting a RECALL of such products and a full accounting of all units sold including profits made form the sales.

Monster is expecting an answer by the 11th of April.

While we don't speak for Blue Jeans Cable, we'd like to supply an answer on their behalf: "Mwuhahahahaha, haha, haha.. ahem. *cough...."

We thought there had been a lull in the numerous Monster Cable lawsuits which had percolated throughout the industry in the last few years. Apparently the lawyers needed more to do.

Design patents represent nothing more that that: design. There is no technological content within design patents. The net effect is that Monster cable suing Blue Jeans is like you suing someone who copied the custom paint job on your car.

What makes this even more comical is that the owner of Blue Jeans Cable is a lawyer by trade. We hope he takes this as far as it needs to go to shut down the lawsuit and end this nonsense.

For a long time, we've actually stated a general dislike for Monster Cable's connections that are mentioned in this letter and associated exhibits. They frequently tear off RCA connections as they attach themselves too tightly to the receiving end and require massive amounts of twisting in order to release them safely - something not always possible in cramped quarters and closely spaced connection blocks. If anything, Blue Jeans has improved the connector and perhaps should license the improvement to Monster Cable - of course that has more to do with a real patent than a simple design patent.
http://www.audioholics.com/news/indu...ue-jeans-cable





Counterpoint

Blue Jeans Cable Strikes Back - Response to Monster Cable
Tom Andry

Not long ago we reported that Monster Cable had issued a cease and desist letter to Blue Jeans Cable about their Tartan cables. Little did the lawyer drones over at Monster know that Kurt Denke, the president of Blue Jeans was, in a former life, a lawyer by trade. Oops! Someone pushed around the wrong "small" company! While we are no legal experts, we recognize humor when we see it. And this is funny. With Blue Jeans Cable's permission, we've included their full response to Monster's letter below. Kurt wants to keep this entire process completely open to the public and we're more than happy to oblige. Enjoy

__________

RE: Your letter, received April Fools' Day

Dear Monster Lawyers,

Let me begin by stating, without equivocation, that I have no interest whatsoever in infringing upon any intellectual property belonging to Monster Cable. Indeed, the less my customers think my products resemble Monster's, in form or in function, the better.

I am evaluating your claim that the connectors on certain Tartan brand products infringe Monster's design patents and trademarks. However, the information supplied with your letter is plainly inadequate to support a claim of infringement and so I am writing to you to ask for further information and clarification regarding your claims.

I will begin by addressing your trademark/trade dress claim. You have referred to two trademark registrations, and have attached some printouts from the USPTO system but the depiction of the marks on the drawings provided is small and indistinct, making it difficult to determine exactly what the alleged resemblance is, and I need further information from you.

First, I need legible, scale drawings of the marks, preferably with dimensions shown on the drawing. To the extent that drawings are inadequate to show the nature of materials, finishes, print legends, colors and the like, I will also need examples of each of Monster Cable's actual uses of these marks in commerce; actual physical examples would be best, but photographic reproductions might do. As you will understand, these considerations are essential to any claim arising out of trade dress, as you are alleging in essence that there is a resemblance sufficient to cause confusion over the identity or origin of the goods, and no mere line-drawing can suffice.

Second, I will need copies of the trademark applications and any correspondence between the applicant and the USPTO in support of the applications.

Third, you have not identified the Monster Cable products in question, in actual use and distribution in commerce, whose trade dress you allege has been appropriated. I have reviewed Monster Cable's online materials and have examined connectors on various Monster Cable assemblies in local retail outlets and am unable to determine which, if any, of these are thought by Monster to represent use of these particular marks. I am also unable to determine from this review whether Monster Cable actually offers any product for sale to which the Tartan connectors are alleged to be particularly similar. My own sense of it, in looking at the connectors, has been that there is no similarity between the Tartan connectors and any of the many Monster Cable connectors beyond the general functional and conventional characteristics which all or nearly all solder-cup, mechanical-assembly, barrel-style RCA-type connectors share. It may be that there is some line of products to which you have intended to refer but which I have not found in Monster Cable's marketing materials or displays; but if so, you will need to show me specifically what product it is, and you will need to call to my attention the specific aspects of the connector design which you contend constitute unique Monster Cable trade dress, what the associated secondary meaning of those aspects of the trade dress is, and in what manner and by what characteristics you allege that this trade dress has been appropriated.

Fourth, if the dimensional characteristics of the connector as used in commerce vary from the dimensions of the scale drawing of your mark, I will need a proper scale drawing, with dimensions, of each version of the actual connector as used in commerce, as well as photographs of the connectors showing actual in-use finishes. If there is more than one such connector design in actual use by Monster Cable as to which appropriation of trade dress is alleged, of course, I will require this information for each and every such design.

On the basis of what I have seen, both in the USPTO documents you have sent and the actual appearance of Monster Cable connectors which I have observed in use in commerce, it does not appear to me that Monster Cable is in a position to advance a nonfrivolous claim for infringement of these marks. There simply is not sufficient resemblance between the Tartan connectors and any mark or any example of the marks' actual use that I can find to support such a claim. But if you have further information for me on that point, you are welcome to submit it.

You have also supplied me with partial documentation on five design patents which you claim these connectors infringe. I will begin by observing, first, that the five design patents are so very much unlike one another that it is very hard to imagine that any product could actually infringe more than one of them at a time; anything close enough to one of them to be deemed an infringement would, by that fact alone, be too dissimilar from the other four. The dissimilarity of the Tartan connector from each of them is readily evident.

I should add that, for the purpose of this letter, I am assuming that these patents are valid. This is in no way a concession of the point. In fact, this is a very significant and likely inaccurate assumption, and you should expect the patentability of these designs to be under attack if you commence an action for infringement.

The fact that you have presented me with five completely distinct design patents, I have to say, gives me pause. I would go over them and detail the differences between the Tartan connectors and those shown in the patents, but if you are taking the position that it appears you are taking, there might be very little point in discussing it with you. Take, for example, the patent you mark as Exhibit B. The connector shown there is substantially different from the Tartan connectors in every respect, unless one ignores design specifics and focuses on the core attributes of the connector which are dictated by function. If your view of Exhibit B is that it is to be construed broadly enough as to encompass the Tartan connector, it is very hard to imagine that there is such a thing as a solder-assembly style RCA plug which is not similarly, in your view, encompassed by this patent. And, needless to say, it is very hard to imagine that any court would ever adopt such a view of the patent's scope; if you file on this sort of basis, you are in Rule 11 frivolous-claim territory.

I will point out, though you are no doubt already well aware, that the gross morphology of the RCA plug is pretty well dictated by function. RCA plugs intended for soldering and assembly have certain attributes in common; their diameter is constrained by the need for the shell to fit over an internal set of solder points and cable clamp, and their length by the need to provide some room for cable end prep and attachment; they are generally radially symmetrical along the anterior/posterior axis owing to the need to accommodate both a round-profile cable and the round-profile RCA socket; the connector end is constrained by the standard dimensions of the RCA socket, and by the need, as the socket provides for no bayonet or screw attachment, to provide sufficient tension on insertion to maintain good mechanical and electrical contact; the barrel, grasped by the user for the purpose of insertion and removal, requires traction which is typically provided by raised or recessed rings, plastic inserts, knurling, or the like; and transition between the connector and the cable to which it is attached requires, in one form or another, a reduction in barrel size at the connector rear. It is my assumption, since you cite design patents only and no utility patents, that Monster Cable makes no claim here for any functional aspect of any of these designs; if I am wrong, please let me know what utility patents Monster Cable does hold, and what claims, if any, Monster asserts on the basis of those utility patents.
Further, on that point: one of the design patents you attached is closely related to a utility patent applicable to the same design, and you failed to point that fact out. I need to be able to rely upon the completeness and accuracy of the information you send to me and I find this sort of omission deeply disturbing because it is clear that the effect of this nondisclosure is to obscure the real significance of the patent features. Similarly, as I note further below, you omit reference to another patent Monster has held which appears, frankly, to be fatal to your position. If you expect to persuade me, you had better start making full, open and honest disclosures; I will find out the facts sooner or later in any event, but the impact upon your credibility will not be repaired. It looks like when you sent this letter, you were operating on the premise that I am not smart enough to see through your deceptions or sophisticated enough to intelligently evaluate your claims; shame on you. You are required, as a matter of legal ethics, to display good faith and professional candor in your dealings with adverse parties, and you have fallen miserably short of your ethical responsibilities.

My sense, in looking at these five patents, is that either you are attempting to present some argument that I simply do not understand or you are arguing for untenably broad coverage of these patents which would sweep every functional aspect of the typical solder-assembly RCA connector within the scope of a handful of mere design patents. You need to clarify this, and frankly, I think you need to indicate to me which, if any, of these patents you actually contend are relevant to the present discussion. It cannot possibly be that you believe that more than one of these patents is pertinent, and if you insist that they are, we cannot have an intelligent dialogue on this subject. Once you have identified the patent which you contend is relevant, I need to see the file history and the references to prior art; I need copies of the applicant's correspondence with the USPTO; and I need a clear and cogent explanation from you as to exactly what aspects of the Tartan connector design are alleged to constitute the infringement, and how.

Additionally, if you are able to identify any of these patents as applicable, please let me know whether Monster Cable presently sells, or has at any time sold, any products bearing connectors which are in conformity with the patent drawings or which are otherwise contended to be within the coverage of the patents, and identify those products for me. Please also provide photographs and/or physical examples of these connectors as manufactured and sold.

Also, please provide me all of the information referenced above as it relates to your expired patent D323643, a copy of which I am attaching. I will need to know what products Monster now offers or at any time has offered for sale which were believed to fall within the scope of D323643, and what claims, if any, of infringement of D323643 were made against others by Monster, whether those claims of infringement took the form of correspondence only, litigation, or otherwise. Please let me know which, if any, products Monster has ever sold or offered for sale which were marked with the patent number, or other reference, to D323643. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Please also advise me whether, in your view, the Tartan connector does or does not fall within the scope of D323643, and if it is your view that it does not, please identify each and every difference between the Tartan connector and the connector represented by D323643 upon which your view is based. (On that note, let me point out to you that the "turbine cut" feature is irrelevant here as your client makes only functional, not design, claims for that feature in its marketing materials for the product.) I would assume that you would agree with me that if the Tartan connector is less dissimilar from the D323643 patent than from any of the five patents you cite in your letter, then the Tartan connector is within the coverage of the prior art and cannot, as a matter of law, infringe any of your client's current patents.

I must also point out that unless there is a good deal of background information you have not provided me which makes the case otherwise, Monster Cable cannot possibly square its patent infringement claim(s) with its own patent history. Two views of the matter might be taken; the first, which is my view, is that none of the design patents, including D323643, encompass the Tartan connector. If that is so, of course, the claim for infringement fails. But if one grants the sort of breadth to these patents that you appear to wish to do, a problem arises for Monster. D323643 is the least dissimilar to the Tartan connector of any of the patents, and stands as an obstacle to any claim of infringement of the others because it establishes prior art; if its scope, like the others, is granted the breadth you argue for, then the Tartan connector falls plainly under the prior art and cannot constitute an infringement of the later, and more dissimilar, patents. Read the patents narrowly, and Monster loses; read them broadly, and Monster loses. You are welcome to point out any error in my reasoning; but I have to say that I will be unreservedly surprised if you are successful in doing so.

Please also let me know whether Monster Cable or any related entity has brought actions to enforce any of the patents and trademarks referenced in your letter or above, and provide me with the jurisdiction, court and docket information pertaining thereto, along with copies of any decisions or judgments resulting therefrom. If any such litigation proceeded through discovery, I will need all discovery responses, including document production, issued by Monster, as well as copies of any and all depositions taken and the exhibits thereto.

Further, if any of these patents or trademarks has been licensed to any entity, please provide me with copies of the licensing agreements. I assume that Monster Cable International, Ltd., in Bermuda, listed on these patents, is an IP holding company and that Monster Cable's principal US entity pays licensing fees to the Bermuda corporation in order to shift income out of the United States and thereby avoid paying United States federal income tax on those portions of its income; my request for these licensing agreements is specifically intended to include any licensing agreements, including those with closely related or sham entities, within or without the Monster Cable "family," and without regard to whether those licensing agreements are sham transactions for tax shelter purposes only or whether they are bona fide arm's-length transactions.

Once I have received the above materials and explanations from you, I will undertake to analyze this information and let you know whether we are willing to accede to any of the demands made in your letter. If my analysis shows that there is any reasonable likelihood that we have infringed in any way any of Monster Cable's intellectual property rights, we will of course take any and all action necessary to resolve the situation. If I do not hear from you within the next fourteen days, or if I do hear from you but do not receive all of the information requested above, I will assume that you have abandoned these claims and closed your file.

As for your requests for information, or for action, directed to me: I would remind you that it is you, not I, who are making claims; and it is you, not I, who must substantiate those claims. You have not done so.

I have seen Monster Cable take untenable IP positions in various different scenarios in the past, and am generally familiar with what seems to be Monster Cable's modus operandi in these matters. I therefore think that it is important that, before closing, I make you aware of a few points.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation as a matter of principle. In plaintiffs' practice, likewise, I was always a strong advocate of standing upon principle and taking cases all the way to judgment, even when substantial offers of settlement were on the table. I am "uncompromising" in the most literal sense of the word. If Monster Cable proceeds with litigation against me I will pursue the same merits-driven approach; I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds. As for signing a licensing agreement for intellectual property which I have not infringed: that will not happen, under any circumstances, whether it makes economic sense or not.

I say this because my observation has been that Monster Cable typically operates in a hit-and-run fashion. Your client threatens litigation, expecting the victim to panic and plead for mercy; and what follows is a quickie negotiation session that ends with payment and a licensing agreement. Your client then uses this collection of licensing agreements to convince others under similar threat to accede to its demands. Let me be clear about this: there are only two ways for you to get anything out of me. You will either need to (1) convince me that I have infringed, or (2) obtain a final judgment to that effect from a court of competent jurisdiction. It may be that my inability to see the pragmatic value of settling frivolous claims is a deep character flaw, and I am sure a few of the insurance carriers for whom I have done work have seen it that way; but it is how I have done business for the last quarter-century and you are not going to change my mind. If you sue me, the case will go to judgment, and I will hold the court's attention upon the merits of your claims--or, to speak more precisely, the absence of merit from your claims--from start to finish. Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.

I will also point out to you that if you do choose to undertake litigation, your "upside" is tremendously limited. If you somehow managed, despite the formidable obstacles in your way, to obtain a finding of infringement, and if you were successful at recovering a large licensing fee--say, ten cents per connector--as the measure of damages, your recovery to date would not reach four figures. On the downside, I will advance defenses which, if successful, will substantially undermine your future efforts to use these patents and marks to threaten others with these types of actions; as you are of course aware, it is easier today for your competitors to use collateral estoppel offensively than it ever has been before. Also, there is little doubt that making baseless claims of trade dress infringement and design patent infringement is an improper business tactic, which can give rise to unfair competition claims, and for a company of Monster's size, potential antitrust violations with treble damages and attorneys' fees.

I look forward to receiving the information requested and will review it promptly as soon as it is received.

Sincerely,

Kurt Denke


http://www.audioholics.com/news/indu...s-strikes-back





EVE Online Source Code Stolen, Leaked
Earnest Cavalli

A Pirate Bay user under the handle "Zakiderex" recently uploaded a stolen copy of the full EVE Online source code to the popular peer-to-peer file sharing site.

Additionally, the user posted an IM conversation between the supposed code thief and a representative from EVE Online developer CCP, in which he taunts the company with his acquisition and derides the firm's security measures.

CCP has responded to the code leak, and reassures EVE players that the leak is not indicative of the sort of security issues that would lead to stolen credit card numbers of other personal info.

"Access to the source code for the EVE client exposes no security vulnerabilities, has no privacy protection issues, and poses no threat to our customers' billing information," said CCP.
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/04/...line-sour.html





Brazil Judge Bans Sale, Promotion of Video Game 'Bully'
AP

"Bully" has taken a beating in Brazil, where a judge suspended sales of the video game on the grounds it is too violent for young children and teenagers, a prosecutor said Thursday.

Judge Flavio Rabello prohibited the game from being imported, distributed, sold or promoted on Web sites or in stores in Latin America's largest nation, said Rio Grande do Sul state prosecutor Alcindo Bastos. Companies have 30 days to comply with the judge's order.

Bastos said the judge found the game was inappropriate for children.

"The aggravating factor is that everything in the game takes place inside a school," Bastos said. "That is not acceptable."

Made by Rockstar Games and mainly distributed in Brazil by JPF Maggazine, the game lets players act out the life of a 15-year-old student and decide how to deal with teachers and cliques at a boarding school.

A local youth support center had requested the ban.

"We have not been notified of the judge's decision," JPF Maggazine's attorney Diogo Dias Teixeira said. "When we are, we will decide if we will appeal."

He said the company advised retailers not to sell the game to anyone under the age of 18.

A spokesman for Rockstar was unaware of the ban and could not immediately comment Thursday.

Rockstar, a unit of New York-based Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., is known for "Manhunt 2," in which players fight violently to escape from a psychiatric institution, and for the popular "Grand Theft Auto" game series, in which players can hijack cars and run down pedestrians.

Bully is rated "T" for teenagers age 13 and older in the U.S., not of "M" for mature players 17 and older. It launched in October 2006 in the U.S. for Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 2 gaming console. In March, it became available for Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 and Nintendo Co.'s Wii, according to the Rockstar Web site for the game.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8880466





Experts Say YouTube, Media Companies Not to Blame for Notorious Florida Beating Video
AP

Eight Florida teenagers charged with beating another teen so they could post the "animalistic" attack on YouTube got exactly what they had wanted - worldwide exposure.

But that doesn't mean YouTube or any other media company should get the blame, legally or ethically, for the attack, media experts said Friday.

In fact, they have a duty to share the video, said Kelly McBride, the ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Fla.

"The fact that the video was shot because they were seeking publicity was secondary," McBride said. "A crime was committed in our community, and if there's a videotape of it, I want some information. That video was incredibly revealing. It told more truth about what happened than any other form of reporting could have told."

The teenagers have been arrested on charges that they beat the teen so they could make a video of the attack to post online. One of the girls struck the 16-year-old victim on the head several times and then slammed her head into a wall, knocking her unconscious, according to an arrest report.

"It's absolutely an animalistic attack," Sheriff Grady Judd said earlier this week. "They lured her into the home for the express purpose of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

On Friday, a judge set bail for each of the defendants at $30,000 during the teens' first court appearance. Prosecutors said seven of the girls will be tried as adults in the March 30 attack in Lakeland, Fla. They face charges of kidnapping, battery and witness tampering.

It's not clear who posted the video on the Internet. But the Polk County sheriff's office released a clip that has been widely circulating online and on television, including The Associated Press' video network.

Those who blame YouTube or news organizations should blame themselves first, said Steve Jones, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"The public is culpable as well because they are paying attention," he said. "There is no medium that forces them to pay attention."

CNN spokeswoman Barbara Levin said the cable news network has tried to place the video in the proper context.

"In reporting the story, we have gone to great lengths to explain that these young women face severe consequences for their actions, and in fact may be facing harsher sentencing because the videotape provides evidence of the nature of the attacks," she said in a statement.

YouTube, owned by Google Inc., declined to comment on the video, but said its general policies call for the removal of clips that show someone getting "hurt, attacked or humiliated."

From a legal standpoint, YouTube and other online service providers are largely exempt from liability because of a 1996 anti-pornography law. One provision says Internet service providers are not considered publishers simply because they retransmit information provided by their users or other sources.

Federal courts have applied that broadly to cover not just Internet access providers, but also video-sharing sites, message boards and other online services.

Even without that provision, there doesn't appear to be anything illegal about the video, said John Morris, senior counsel with the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil-liberties group in Washington, D.C.

"There is no legal reason this video cannot be shown. It is obviously distasteful, abhorrent what the teenagers did to the victim, but it doesn't really make sense (to ask), 'Should YouTube have taken it down?"' Morris said.

Even if there were a claim of illegality, he said, the courts should be the ones deciding, not YouTube.

"Many of those assertions are really very difficult, legal determinations that YouTube has no ability to make," Morris said. "Really, YouTube is not in a position to be a traffic cop."

---

Associated Press Business Writer Seth Sutel contributed to this story.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





50 Cent, Universal Sued for Pushing "Gangsta" Life
Edith Honan

Hip hop mogul 50 Cent, Universal Music Group and several of its record labels were sued on Wednesday for promoting a "gangsta lifestyle" by a 14-year-old boy who says friends of the rapper assaulted him.

The lawsuit filed by James Rosemond and his mother, Cynthia Reed, says Universal Music Group -- owned by Vivendi SA -- and its labels Interscope Records, G-Unit Records and Shady Records, bear responsibility for the assault because they encourage artists to pursue violent, criminal lifestyles.

The lawsuit also names 50 Cent -- whose real name is Curtis Jackson -- Violator Management, Violator CEO Chris Lighty, Tony Yayo, a rapper and a member of 50 Cent's G-Unit hip hop group, and Lowell Fletcher, an employee of Yayo.

All defendants declined to comment.

Rosemond says he was assaulted on a Manhattan sidewalk in March 2007 by four men including Yayo and Fletcher.

The lawsuit claims Rosemond was targeted because he was wearing a T-shirt by Czar Entertainment, a management company that represents The Game. The Game is a former G-Unit rapper who fell out with the group and had become a rival rapper.

In February, Yayo, whose real name is Marvin Bernard, pleaded guilty to harassment and was sentenced to ten days of community service. Fletcher pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of a child and was sentenced to 9 months in jail.

"The members of G-Unit, including defendants Yayo and 50 Cent, encouraged, sanctioned, approved and condoned its members threatening violence, and or engaging in violent acts in furtherance of its business," the lawsuit said.

The attack on Rosemond was intended to "promote and maintain Yayo and 50 Cent's 'gangsta' image," which was "promoted, marketed and advertised" by record labels.

(Editing by Michelle Nichols and Todd Eastham)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/entert...0080409?rpc=64





Most Adults Favor Profanity Regulations For Internet Radio
FMQB

According to the American Media Services Radio Index survey, more than three out of five American adults say the government should regulate the use of obscenities on Internet radio, just as they do with regular radio and television broadcasts. The national poll was posed to a sample of 1,004 respondents, asking, "The federal government regulates the use of obscenities and profanity on radio and television stations. Would you say you believe the government should also regulate the use of obscenities or profanity on Internet radio stations?"

While 61 percent of respondents 18 and older said the U.S. government should regulate Internet radio, the answers on this question varied greatly by age and gender. Specifically, 51 percent of men favor regulation, while 70 percent of women said they favor it. Also, 78 percent of those over the age of 65 favor regulation, while only 34 percent of those 18-24 are in favor. Neither household income nor geographic region seemed to play a role in the issue.

As for some of the other findings in the study, 43 percent of people surveyed said they listen to radio "several times a day." Half said they are listening to radio the same amount as they did five years ago, and 73 percent usually turn on the radio when they get in their cars. When asked, "How familiar, if at all, would you say that you are with something called HD radio?," 65 percent said they are "not at all familiar," while only five percent said they are very familiar.

Finally, when asked, "What would you say is your favorite way to listen to radio?," 77 percent said "regular radio." Satellite radio got 15 percent of the vote, with Internet radio at 2 percent and HD Radio at 1 percent.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=658361





Radio on Bus Fosters Quiet, but Not Peace
Winnie Hu



As Bus No. 3 rolled away from Harborside Middle School last week, “No Air,” a song by the most recent American Idol, Jordin Sparks, blared from the speakers, lulling the 15 students on board into near silence.

“It’s cool because a lot of my favorite songs come on,” said Abby Amann, a sixth grader who used to stare out the window in boredom before radios were installed on nearly all of Milford’s 60 school buses in late February. “The only thing I don’t like is when the commercials come on and there’s just talking.”

Some parents and school officials do not like the commercials, either, which is why school buses have become a battleground echoing the fight of nearly two decades ago, when Channel One began showing advertisement-laden news programs in classrooms. Milford is one of a growing number of districts that have recently added the radios in hopes of calming children on their daily bus trips, but outrage over the commercials has led some places to reject them.

BusRadio, a Massachusetts company that since 2006 has wired buses for sound in 175 school districts — including Denver, Dallas and Palm Beach, Fla., as well as Milford — is barred from New York City because of a 1990 state regulation, prompted largely by the Channel One dispute, that bans advertising on school property. At least two states, Vermont and Massachusetts, are considering similar restrictions on advertising on school grounds (but not on buses), and South Carolina, which does allow advertising on school property, is considering a ban aimed specifically at school buses.

The National Parent Teacher Association has opposed BusRadio, and 40 nonprofit consumer, religious and education groups have signed a letter urging PepsiCo, Verizon, Time Warner and other companies not to advertise on the company’s airwaves, or on Channel One’s.

“It’s an advertising scheme designed to exploit children,” said Robert Weissman, managing director of Commercial Alert, a Washington-based group founded in part by Ralph Nader, which organized the letter campaign. “It’s exactly the opposite of what schools and educational systems should be doing.”

BusRadio, based in Needham, Mass., installs radios at no cost to the districts, and then downloads hourlong musical programs every night that include an average of four minutes of paid advertising and another four minutes of public service announcements.
The districts are offered about 5 percent of the advertising revenue — or in Milford’s case, a high-tech global positioning system — and the company plans to add a service next month that alerts riders via e-mail or text message when the bus is 10 minutes from their stop.

Steven Shulman, who founded BusRadio with Michael Yanoff, said the company provided an “age-appropriate” alternative to local FM radio stations, with songs and advertising screened by an advisory committee of school administrators and psychiatrists.

In contrast, he said, his son once came home asking what Viagra was after hearing a commercial on the bus coming home from summer camp in Mashpee, Mass. BusRadio develops playlists from a library of 1,000 pop songs and will either edit out questionable content and lyrics or refrain from playing a song altogether. “It’s tough to find clean rap music, but we do,” Mr. Shulman said.

Recent advertisers on BusRadio include Answers.com, the Cartoon Network, Buena Vista Home Entertainment and the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. The company does not accept advertising for candy or soda, or for toys that Mr. Shulman considers inappropriate, like video games with violent content, and it prefers advertisements that have a message. “We don’t want them to say, ‘Go out and buy $200 sneakers,’ ” Mr. Shulman said. “We want them to say, ‘Go and exercise, and use this gear if you want.’ ”

BusRadio spends an average of $2,000 to equip each school bus, installing a compact black box over the driver’s seat that also serves as a public address system, computer, wireless modem or global positioning system. The sophisticated technology allows districts to track buses, and in case of an emergency, it enables the driver to summon help by pushing a red panic button.

But the main draw for students remains the music programs, which are automatically downloaded to the radios every night. There are three versions of a program — tailored to elementary, middle and high school students — each featuring about 15 songs, along with the commercials and public-service messages.

The hosts for the programs are Mat and Lucia, disc jockeys who dispense advice on girl-boy relationships and bullying and pass along bus safety tips (no standing in the aisles, check both mirrors when backing up, etc.).

For many districts, the radios are a salvation from the tedium and peer pressure that can lead to fights aboard buses, especially as budget cuts and consolidation have left students with long rides and little more to listen to than the roar of diesel engines.

Here in Milford, which spends $3 million a year to transport 4,500 students daily, school officials contacted BusRadio last year after hearing from other districts that the music had a calming effect. School officials have estimated that about 200 disciplinary referrals a year stem from disputes on buses.

Harvey B. Polansky, the Milford schools superintendent, said that bus safety had improved because the radios kept students in their seats, and that the global positioning system allowed the district to monitor the vehicles closely.

“I think it’s all about resources,” he said. “We have so many limited revenue strands that you want to maximize any commercial enterprise to assist the education program.”

Dr. Polansky pointed out that the district already placed advertising from local restaurants and sponsors on its high school football and baseball fields to subsidize athletic programs. District officials said they had received three complaints from parents and a student objecting to the bus advertising, as well as a few requests for different music (no more country).

Several Milford parents said that their children were already exposed to far too much commercialism without having to hear commercials on the ride to school. “I just don’t think it’s appropriate,” said Claudia Berg, whose son Sean, a fifth grader, will ride the bus to middle school next fall.

Tracy D’Anna, a computer software trainer, said she enjoyed listening to music on her own trip to work and could understand the appeal for students. But she is concerned about the overall message being heard by riders like her daughter, Olivia, a fifth grader. “If it’s music to calm the savage beast, then yes, I’m for it, but if it’s just to sell products to kids, then no,” she said, suggesting that the district should send home a list of the radio advertisers.

During a half-hour run on Tuesday afternoon, Bus No. 3 played two paid advertisements, both for Dick Blick Art Materials, as well as a public service announcement urging students to stay in school.

If there was a complaint among the riders, it was that they had no control over the dial. Rebecca Sherrick, a seventh grader, said she found the mainstream music selection — say, anything by Hannah Montana — annoying and wanted to hear more heavy metal and rock. “If they had more variety, I think more people would enjoy it,” she said.

The bus driver, Sue Riebling, kept her hand near the radio controls, ready to click off the music if the students became too loud or disorderly. “They want to hear the music, so they’ll sit and be quiet,” she said. “As soon as they do that, they know the radio goes on and we’re in business.”

After dropping off the last student, Ms. Riebling kept the radio on because she liked the music, too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/nyregion/17bus.html





A Grand (i.e., Cool) Piano
David Pogue

What do you think: In times of unemployment, rampant foreclosures and imminent recession, would it be tasteless for me to review a home entertainment component that costs $42,000?

Good. I didn’t think so, either.

It’s a piano, actually. A Yamaha grand, 5 feet, 3 inches long. (It comes in longer versions, actually, costing up to $150,000. But one step at a time.)

This instrument, the Disklavier Mark IV, is the first piano in the world with an Internet connection. And since it’s also a digital player piano, all kinds of eyebrow-raising possibilities open up.

Like previous generations of Yamaha’s self-playing pianos, the Mark IV looks like any other grand: a gleaming, polished, stately presence in the living room. The only indications you have that something unusual is going on are the power and Ethernet cords sneaking out from underneath and a two-inch-tall control panel peeking out from beneath the lower-left skirt of the instrument.

Maybe you’ve seen digital player pianos in a hotel lobby or shopping mall, playing holiday tunes all by themselves, keys and pedals madly going up and down. This is not an audio recording, mind you; the hammers strike real strings, making live acoustic music. It’s a re-creation of a real pianist’s performance, faithful to the tiniest grace note.

It’s also very freaky to watch.

In the past, the well-heeled owners of these Disklavier pianos bought floppy disks or CDs containing recorded performances by famous pianists. At $30 to $35 an album, they’re not cheap; then again, who’s going to complain after buying a piano that costs as much as a Lexus?

The Internet connection adds a twist, however: it lets you subscribe to live-piano “radio stations.” For $20 a month (or $200 a year), you can tune into channels like Classical, Broadway or Rock. Your grand piano can now play itself all day in that musical style. It seems like a natural fit for what must be the Disklavier’s core market: hotels, malls and McMansions.

You can also buy songs à la carte. The Yamaha store is something like the iTunes store, complete with a 30-second preview of each song. The difference is that in this case, the previews (and the songs) are played live by a friendly ghost on the piano right next to you.

Songs are pricey, still $30 to $35 an album. They’re tiny files; most download to the piano’s 80-gigabyte hard drive in about two seconds. (The piano can also play standard, free MIDI files, which are available by the thousands online.)

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “$42K? C’mon — even with all those features, this thing can’t be worth more than, like, 35 grand.”

But wait, there’s more. When a piano comes with a hard drive, Ethernet jack, video output, stereo speakers, audio/microphone input, CD and floppy drives, U.S.B. jacks and an open-source Linux operating system, all kinds of new tricks are possible:

Alarm clock. You can schedule particular songs to play automatically at up to 99 different times and dates.

Piano teacher. Some of Yamaha’s song files come with sheet music that appears on a computer screen or TV, if you connect one. At this point, the Disklavier helps you find the next note by physically half-pressing the key a couple of times. It’s not for the easily startled, but it works.

Accompanist. Some of those teaching songs come with a built-in orchestral accompaniment that follows you as you speed up or slow down. (The Disklavier has a built-in library of sampled instrument sounds.)

Karaoke. Lyrics appear on the screen as the piano (and its synthesized orchestra) accompanies you, and you can add plenty of reverb.

Commercial audio CD piano highlights. This one is almost impossible to describe, and almost as difficult to justify, but here goes: You can buy live piano parts that are designed to play along with existing CD albums. For example, as your own Elton John CD plays through the Disklavier’s speakers (or your stereo system), the keys come to life, playing the piano part along with the recording.

Quiet mode. At any point, you can turn the piano into a completely digital piano. (Inside, a bar actually blocks the hammers so that they don’t strike the strings.) At this point, you can put on headphones and practice in silence. Or you can make the piano sound like a trumpet, bass, drum kit, or whatever. Of course, any cheapo kiddie keyboard can do that trick — but on this piano, you get the satisfaction of playing actual, wooden, weighted keys.

Sing backup with yourself. The piano can multiply your voice as you sing into a microphone, creating virtual backup singers. How does the piano know what notes they should “sing”? It analyzes what keys you’re playing at the moment. Clever.

Record music. You can easily record your own piano performance — and then, on playback, speed it up, slow it down or change the key. A metronome is available, and you can re-record only the parts that you muffed.

I tested the free 3.0 software update, now in beta testing (and due in July), which lets you record live audio along with your piano performance. That is, you can record yourself singing as you play, or record a friend playing flute or violin while you tickle the ivories. You can then transfer the resulting mix to a PC, using a flash drive or network connection, for burning to a CD or sending by e-mail.

You manage all these stunts using a Wi-Fi wireless color touch screen remote that looks like a particularly beefy PalmPilot. The software isn’t always a masterpiece of polished perfection, but navigation isn’t difficult, thanks to the prominent Back button. The halves of the remote slide apart to reveal a thumb keyboard that you can use for naming your recordings and searching the store. (The 3.0 software will also include software that duplicates the remote’s functions on a Mac or PC.)

There is a two-second lag when you press the physical playback buttons on the remote (like Play or Stop), and Internet operations sometimes present the Wait screen for several seconds at a time. It would be nice if the remote’s battery lasted longer than an hour or so once it’s out of the charging dock. And the Wi-Fi should have been built into the remote; right now, it’s an ugly, protruding card in a slot.

For such a niche product, though, the Mark IV over all is surprisingly polished. Its biggest potential drawbacks have nothing to do with the technology, but with the concept itself.

First of all, the various playback features described above require a dizzying array of song file formats, and they go by a dizzying array of names. The karaoke, music CD playalong, piano-teaching and other files have names like PianoSoft Plus, PianoSoft Plus Audio, Smart PianoSoft and so on.

Worse, there are precious few songs available in each format. Yamaha offers only 167 albums of songs that the piano can play by itself, piano-part playalong files for only 575 songs on music CDs, and so on.

You’d have to be concerned that the novelty will wear off, too. Suppose you actually have the $42,000 to spend. After six months, are you still going to be loading up those Chopin files to show your friends when they come for dinner?

If the answer is yes, then you, the affluent owner of this amazing machine, have a lot to look forward to. Grafting the very new (Linux, Wi-Fi, Internet connection) onto the very old (classic grand, hammers hitting strings) might seem like a recipe for a Frankenstein monstrosity — but they mesh surprisingly well. The result is one of the most imaginative, unusual and expensive home-entertainment modules to come along in years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/te...h/17pogue.html





Celebrity Music Throwdown, Part 1: Peter Gabriel and the Filter
Brad Stone

A preview of The Filter, a Web site that recommends music and movies.

Today, a look at two celebrity-influenced startups trying to ride revolutionary changes in the media business. And you get to vote: Do these Internet companies have a chance of being successful?

First up: The Filter, backed and advised by the British singer and technology evangelist Peter Gabriel, who was in San Francisco last week promoting the company in advance of its relaunch today.

The year-old startup, based in Bath, England, started life as yet another music recommendation service. About 200,000 users have downloaded the software, which tracks what music they listen to and purchase online, then recommends new songs or bands they might like.

The new system, which is being reintroduced today in a private test, takes a more comprehensive approach. The service will now filter all online media habits – the music and movies people like, the Web videos they watch, and soon, the books they buy – and offer advice about all their entertainment and information options.

“In this age, where the curator is becoming just as important as the creator, the disc jockey becomes the life jockey,” Mr. Gabriel said. “You carry this around with you as a tool that is available 24 hours a day to help you make choices.”

Users must still download the Filter software to their desktop, where it spies on… er, digests various streams of Internet behavior (the music and videos they keep in iTunes, their streaming and browsing history, etc.). Users can also connect with their friends on the service and track their media-consuming behavior. UPDATE: The company says the download is optional but provides richer recommendations.

The company then threads that information through its algorithms to generate highly targeted and personalized recommendations – not only the songs, movies and Web videos users might like, but also what they might be in the mood for at a particular time. Each user will get a home page on the site where they will see their recommendations.

The Filter has lots of competition, of course. Amazon and Apple’s iTunes make similar recommendations very close to the potential point of sale. The Filter must also jockey for position with music-only recommendation services like the CBS-owned Last.fm.

But the company, say its founders, has the advantage of being more comprehensive and more open. Users can feed in their activities on other Web sites, like Netflix, Last.fm and the music site Imeem. And other companies can license the Filter’s recommendation engine and integrate it into their own sites.

Mr. Gabriel, who also backed We7.com, a British streaming music site, and Od2, one of the first music download services, now owned by Nokia, says he’s excited about the ways that the Web is taking a sledgehammer to the music business.

“All sorts of new life forms are emerging out of the corpse of the music industry,” he said. “Anything the old music business was looking at, they had to feel like there was going to be $100,000 in sales before they put their hand in their pocket. This should allow a lot of experimental projects.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...nd-the-filter/

Celebrity Music Throwdown Part 2: Will Smith and PluggedIn

A new Internet music company is looking to displace YouTube, MySpace and MTV.com as the hub for music videos on the Internet.

PluggedIn, a Santa Monica-based startup launching tomorrow, is backed by Overbrook Entertainment, the production and management company co-founded a decade ago by Will Smith.

PluggedIn wants to be the preeminent online repository for high-definition music videos on the Web and a new place for artists to plant their online flag. The site will launch with 10,000 free, high-quality music videos licensed from Universal, Sony BMG and EMI. The videos played quickly and looked sharp on a test version of the site earlier this week.

The site also offers more than a million comprehensive artist pages, using what you might call a little Internet sleight of hand. Videos, photos, biographies and blog items that are posted elsewhere on the Web are vacuumed up by PluggedIn and displayed on the artist’s page as if the material was freshly baked on site.

Users can do the usual stuff on PluggedIn: make video playlists, follow the activities of bands or friends, meet other aficionados with similar tastes and feast on targeted advertising and shopping opportunities.

The competition is everywhere, of course. Most prominently, MySpace recently announced a joint venture with three of the four major music labels to spin out MySpace Music, an effort that is sure to feature music videos and exclusive content from bands.

So where does Pluggedin fit in?

“We look at the all the changes shaping online entertainment and see massive opportunity for lots of companies to appreciate and forge really viable consumer connections,” said Jeff Somers, chief executive of PluggedIn. “We think what will separate us from what is out there today is an unbelievable high-quality viewing experience, matched with in-depth content and community tools.”

In an increasingly crowded online music environment, is that enough? Time for the readers to weigh in.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...din/index.html





Judicial Watch Calls on FEC to Investigate Elton John’s Fundraising Concert on Behalf of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign
Press release

“Sir Elton John is not a citizen of the United States and is therefore prohibited from making any contribution to Senator Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) related to a fundraising concert by musician Sir Elton John on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Elton John, a foreign national, is prohibited by federal law from making any contribution to a federal, state or local election campaign.

“Recent news reports suggest that Hillary Clinton and Hillary Clinton for President have accepted an in-kind contribution from a foreign national, Sir Elton John, in contravention of federal electon laws,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton stated in an April 14 letter to the Office of the General Counsel for the FEC. “On behalf of Judicial Watch and its supporters, I hereby request that the FEC investigate this matter.”

According to a press release issued by the Clinton campaign, the expressed intent of the concert was to raise funds for Hillary’s campaign for president. In the release, Elton John is quoted as saying, “I'm excited to support Hillary by performing at what will be a truly memorable night.”

Press reports also show that Sir Elton John, on March 17, 2008, through the Clinton campaign, sent out a mass email announcing the concert and soliciting support. The Elton John concert took place on April 9, 2008 and raised more than $2.5 million (from the sale of 5,000 tickets) for Hillary Clinton and Hillary Clinton for President.

However, according to 2 U.S.C. § 441e, “Contributions and donations by foreign nationals,” it is illegal for any foreign national to “make a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value…in connection with a Federal, State or local election.” The Washington Times reported March 27, 2008, that a “1981 FEC decision prohibited a foreign national artist from donating his services in connection with fundraising for a U.S. Senate campaign.”

“It looks as if Elton John, a foreign national, gave a valuable, in-kind contribution to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which is prohibited by law. The FEC and other authorities need to take appropriate action and investigate Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and Elton John,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

To read Judicial Watch’s FEC complaint in its entirety, please click here.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/judicia...linton-s-presi





R.E.M. Accelerate To Highest Chart Debut In 12 Years
FMQB

On the heels of great reviews and a huge media push, R.E.M.'s new album Accelerate debuts at #2 this week on the Soundscan sales chart. It is the veteran band's best chart debut since 1996's New Adventures In Hi-Fi. Accelerate moved over 115,000 copies in its first week and also debuts at #1 on the Alternative, Rock, Digital and Internet sales charts as well. The album also debuted at #1 around the world, topping the sales figures in Canada, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and the U.K., with #2 debuts in Austria, Germany, Holland and Italy.

However, R.E.M. could not overtake Country great George Strait in America, as his new album, Troubadour, debuted at #1. Rapper Trina debuted at #6 with Still Da Baddest, while Van Morrison made it into the top 10 with his new album, Keep It Simple. Other notable debuts for the week included the soundtrack to the Rolling Stones' new film, Shine A Light, at #11, Blues rockers The Black Keys at #14 with Attack & Release, veteran Rockers Sevendust at #19 with Chapter 7: Hope & Sorrow, and George Michael's new best-of set, Twenty-Five, debuting at #23.

Some other chart debuts of note include Theory Of A Deadman (#26), Moby (#27), In Flames (#28) and the live CD/DVD set HAARP from Muse (#46).

The top 10 is rounded out by NOW Vol. 27 at #3, Day 26 at #4, the Alvin & The Chipmunks soundtrack at #5, Danity Kane at #7, Counting Crows at #8 and rapper Rick Ross at #9.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=650851





Record Stores Fight to Be Long-Playing
Ben Sisario

NOW added to the endangered species list in New York City, along with independent booksellers and shoe repair: the neighborhood record store.

The hole-in-the-wall specialty shops that have long made Lower Manhattan a destination for a particular kind of shopper have never made a great deal of money. But in recent years they have been hit hard by the usual music-industry woes — piracy, downloading — as well as rising real estate prices, leading to the sad but familiar scene of the emptied store with a note taped to the door.

Some 3,100 record stores around the country have closed since 2003, according to the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, a market research firm. And that’s not just the big boxes like the 89 Tower Records outlets that closed at the end of 2006; nearly half were independent shops. In Manhattan and Brooklyn at least 80 stores have shut down in the last five years.

But the survivors aren’t giving up just yet. Saturday is Record Store Day, presented by a consortium of independent stores and trade groups, with hundreds of retailers in the United States and some overseas cranking up the volume a bit to draw back customers and to celebrate the culture of buying, selling and debating CDs and vinyl.

Among the highlights: Metallica will be greeting fans at Rasputin Music in Mountain View, Calif., and Regina Spektor is to perform at Sound Fix, a four-year-old shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that like many has learned to get creative, regularly offering free performances. At Other Music, a capital of underground music on East Fourth Street in Manhattan that faces a shuttered Tower Records, a roster of indie-rock stars will be playing D.J. all afternoon, including members of Tapes ’n Tapes, Grizzly Bear and Deerhunter.

One-day-only record releases will also be part of the event. Vinyl singles by R.E.M., Death Cab for Cutie, Vampire Weekend, Stephen Malkmus and others are being sold on Saturday, and labels big and small are contributing sampler discs and other goodies. (Schedule and information: recordstoreday.com.)

“Record stores as we know them are dying,” said Josh Madell of Other Music. “On the other hand, there is still a space in the culture for what a record store does, being a hub of the music community and a place to find out about new music.”

Some retailers are hoping that the effort is not too late. Jammyland and the Downtown Music Gallery, two East Village institutions — Jammyland, on Third Street, specializes in rare reggae, and Downtown, on the Bowery, in avant-garde jazz and new music — are facing untenable rent increases and are looking for new homes.

Jammyland is “the model of what a great record store can be,” said Vivien Goldman, the author of “The Book of Exodus: The Making and Meaning of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Album of the Century” and other books. “D.J.’s congregate there from all over and exchange ideas. It’s a crucible of music knowledge.”

For a local music shopper with a memory of even just a few years, the East Village and the Lower East Side are quickly becoming a record-store graveyard. Across from Jammyland is the former home of Dance Tracks, a premier dance and electronic outlet, which closed late last year, as did Finyl Vinyl, on Sixth Street. Stooz on Seventh Street, Sonic Groove on Avenue B, Accidental on Avenue A, Wowsville on Second Avenue and Bate, an essential Latin store on Delancey Street — all gone, to say nothing of stores in other neighborhoods, like Midnight Records in Chelsea and NYCD on the Upper West Side.

“Rent is up, and sales are down,” Malcolm Allen of Jammyland said as he sold a few Jamaican-made 45s to a customer last weekend. “Not a good combination.”

Like many longtime clerks, Mr. Allen is frighteningly knowledgeable. Testing out a random single on the store turntable, he discerned in a few seconds that it had the wrong label: it wasn’t “Good Morning Dub,” he said, but rather U-Roy’s “Music Addict,” from around 1987, itself a response to Horace Ferguson’s “Sensi Addict.” That earned him a quick sale, and later research confirmed that he was right on the money.

Casually dispensed expert knowledge like that is exactly what Record Store Day is looking to celebrate. Ms. Spektor, who started off selling homemade CDs and is now signed to a major label, Sire, said that independent stores had been the first to carry her music, and that their support helped her career take off. And though she said she now feels contrite that for years her music collection was made up mainly of items copied from friends — “I just had no money” — she is supporting the stores out of gratitude.

“I’m the record label-slash-store nightmare,” Ms. Spektor said. “Everything I had was a mixtape or a burned CD. But I don’t like the idea of all the record stores where people actually know what they’re talking about going out of business. They have their own art form.”

Every year consumers buy less of their music in stores. According to Nielsen SoundScan, retail outlets accounted for 42 percent of album sales last year, down from 68 percent in 2001.

To adapt, many stores are devoting more space to DVDs, clothes and electronics. That’s the case even with the biggest retailers, including Virgin Megastore, which has 10 outlets in the United States. (It has closed 17 since 1999.) The company reported that last year its sales were up 11.5 percent. But nonmusic purchases accounted for the jump; music sales were flat. Simon Wright, chief executive of the Virgin Entertainment Group North America, said that over the last four or five years music sales had gone from being 70 percent of the stores’ total to less than 40 percent.

“The sheer drop-off in the physical music market is going to inevitably cause the space allotted to music to come down,” Mr. Wright said. “That will obviously contribute to further decline.” He added that the future of Virgin’s Union Square location was up in the air; though profitable, he said, the store is just too big for the current market.

Whatever people buy there, the store is doing a brisk business. It buzzed with shoppers on Sunday afternoon. Some of them, like Kim Zeller, a 37-year-old clothing designer pushing a baby carriage, said that buying music on the Internet just can’t compare to the experience of browsing in a store — and getting out of the house.

“It kind of gets boring when you’re trapped inside listening to music from your computer,” said Ms. Zeller, who had bought new CDs by Erykah Badu and the Black Keys. “I still like coming to the store.”

Although many have been shuttered, more than 2,400 independent shops still exist around the country. And even in the most gentrified parts of Manhattan, some are carrying on the same as ever. A-1 Records, on East Sixth Street, which has Polaroids out front of the D.J.’s who shop there, is still a popular trove of rare vinyl, as are the Academy outlet on East 12th Street, Record Runner and Strider on Jones Street, and the venerable House of Oldies on Carmine Street. The Academy store on West 18th Street has one of the most picked-over CD inventories in the city.

Products that aren’t fundamentally made up of ones and zeros — vinyl records, for instance, which have a habit of turning casual fans into collectors — have proved a salvation for many retailers. Eric Levin, the owner of Criminal Records in Atlanta and one of the organizers of Record Store Day, said vinyl accounted for a quarter of his music sales.

“That may only be a niche as we go forward,” Mr. Levin said, “but it’ll be a giant niche you can make a lot of money on.”

For many New York shops, however, the real estate crunch is making survival difficult. The Downtown Music Gallery, which sells about $60,000 in CDs, DVDs and other items every month, has been searching for a new home for six months, said Bruce Lee Gallanter, its founder. So far it hasn’t been able to find anything affordable in its namesake area in Lower Manhattan and is considering moving to Queens, Brooklyn or Washington Heights.

“We would love to stay downtown,” Mr. Gallanter said. “That’s what we’re all about. But we have to be realistic.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/ar...ic/18reco.html





Amazon Gains Share of Shrinking Paid Music Market
Saul Hansell

If you pan back and look at how people are getting their music these days you see that the companies fighting for the people who pay for music are battling over an ever-smaller piece of the pie.

NPD’s annual survey of Internet users, which is some 80 percent of the population these days, found that 10 percent of the music they acquired last year came from paid downloads. That is a big increase from 7 percent in 2006. But since the number of physical CDs they bought plummeted, the overall share of music they paid for fell to 42 percent from 48 percent.


How people acquire music from of an annual survey of Internet users by the NPD Group

NPD’s data about how well Amazon.com’s five month old digital music store is doing made me wonder about the bigger picture of how Amazon and Apple fit into that overall music market.

The music industry has high hopes for Amazon. All four major labels are allowing it to sell their songs as MP3 files, without any protection against illegal copying. Their goal is to win over some people who may have been stealing music and also to create a counterbalance against Apple, which some in the music industry believe has too much power.

The NPD data for February show that so far Amazon has had a strong start, although it is still tiny. It now has one tenth the market share of Apple. Since Apple has largely dominated the per-track download sales, that makes Amazon the distant No.2 in the market, said Russ Crupnick, who runs NPD’s music service. That would give Amazon’s digital store an overall share of the music market of about 2 percent.

Meanwhile, the biggest source of music for people is their friends—either burning CDs or ripping files for listening on computers or iPods. And despite the record industry’s crack down, there is no reduction in the number of people of peer-to-peer file sharing service.

“The number of people who do peer to peer in 2007 versus 2006 has been stable,” he said. “The number of files taken per users has increased significantly.” This is because of the shift of many users from Limewire to BitTorrent, which makes it easier to download whole albums.

Mr. Crupnick also sent a second slide that puts into perspective how people are listening to music these days. The graph, below looks both at how many people use a given method and how often those people use it.


How people listen to music from a survey of Internet users by the NPD Group

For penetration, listening to AM/FM radio and to CDs on a CD player are still the most popular activities. People also listen to music on the radio more times per week than any other method.

But digital music is coming on strong. Listening to music on a computer has the third largest number of people, followed by listening on a portable device like an iPod. And people using portable players listen to it rather frequently. That is mixed news for the music industry because digital files on players are the easiest way to use borrowed and stolen music.

All the newer forms of digital music, many of which are less resistance to piracy, have yet to reach mass adoption. These include music on mobile phones, Internet radio and other forms of music streamed over the Internet. More worrisome for the music industry and the promoters of these new formats is that none—other than listening to music on phones—have really engaged the people who have tried them.

The music labels will look at this data and say, “If we just stick with the CD and the Apple model we are in deeper trouble,” Mr. Crupnick said.

As for Amazon, NPD found a different audience profile than iTunes users. Amazon doesn’t yet have the huge teenage audience of iTunes. Nor does it have a large female audience. But Amazon customers are more likely than those on iTunes to buy albums rather than single tracks.

That is borne out by the results of a recent promotion. February should have been an especially good month for Amazon because it is linked to a promotion that Pepsi introduced on the Super Bowl. But Mr. Crupnick said the NPD data does not show much of an impact from the Pepsi giveaway. When Apple was involved in a similar SuperBowl promotion a few years ago, Mr. Crupnick added, there was a surge in traffic.

One of the distinctive features of Amazon’s stores is that it sells tracks in MP3 format. Many tracks Apple sells still have copying restrictions known as digital rights management. But Mr. Crupnick suggested that that with Apple dominating the music market, most users simply don’t care. People who buy songs from Apple can listen to them on their computers and iPods without a problem. The restrictions only keep them from sending the songs to others or using non-Apple devices.

“DRM doesn’t make a difference for someone who lives their iPod and loves their iTunes, he said. “It’s a lot harder to get someone who isn’t interested in digital music to try it.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0.../index.html?hp





Top P2P Applications: 1.6 Million PCs Rank Them
Richard Menta

"We have a powder keg of data here" I told Digital Music News publisher Paul Resnikoff as I completed this quarter's Digital Media Desktop Report. The report, a coordinated effort between Big Champagne, PC Pitstop and Digital Music News, tracks the global installation base for leading digital music applications including P2P clients, ecommerce clients, and jukebox applications. More than 100,000 unique PCs are polled for this data each month and more than 1.5 million unique PCs are polled over a given year. Over the past 12 months we analyzed data from 1,661,688 machines





For the entities that created these applications this data is a potent tool; one that can draw needed VC money or boost the stock price of those that are publicly traded. Of course, this is a report for purchase by digital music insiders and investment analysts so the general public is mostly unaware of these figures or the dramatic trends they imply for the near future.

That's when I convinced Paul it is only good business to share with the public a piece of a past report and demonstrate a sample of what we have uncovered. Figures that offer a baseline perspective to what was occurring in the P2P space last year ending September 2007 and what it all may mean for 2008. There is a lot of change occurring, change that not only makes clear how badly once popular names have faded, but identifies the up-and-comers among a myriad of budding entrants.

Some Numbers

Before we go into a few numbers I strongly recommend that those interested read the Methodology for Data Collection and Analysis at the end of this article. I attached the same text that is found in the original reports so that it is clear to the reader the limitations and virtues offered by this data.

In our research we found that LimeWire is far and away the single most popular P2P application. In September of 2007 LimeWire was found on 17.8% of all the PCs polled that month (also referred to as the attachment rate). With regards to market share - counting only those users with at least one P2P application on their systems - LimeWire held a 36.4% share, meaning one out of three P2P users has LimeWire on their system. These numbers are up slightly from September 2006 when LimeWire held a market share of 34.1%.

µTorrent adoption boomed during this period. In September of 2006 µTorrent was found on 1.5% of all PCs polled, good for a 3.0% market share. By September 2007, µTorrent held an attachment rate of 5.6%, which gave it an 11.3% market share. In less than a year µTorrent became the king of the BitTorrent clients, surpassing former top BitTorrent client Azureus by May of 2007.

Two new applications to look out for are FrostWire and Pando. Both have made significant gains over a nine month period and so far their growth is similar to the early rise of µTorrent. It will be interesting to see if they can sustain this growth in the coming months.

The latest report was released today and extends the research to December of 2007. Those who are interested can purchase it from the Digital Music News site here. The Press can contact Paul Resnikoff at Digital Music News headquarters at 310- 928-1498 if they desire more information on this new report.

Methodology for Data Collection and Analysis

PC Pitstop performs diagnostic tests on hundreds of thousands of unique PCs each month, worldwide. The primary purpose of these tests is to eliminate viruses, adware and spyware and to identify opportunities to improve PC performance. These tests are voluntary, and aggregated data captured during these tests provide the basis for the analysis in this report.

Over a twelve-month period, 1,661,688 PCs were polled for this analysis. In September of 2006 alone, data from 174,777 systems was collected. These numbers include only the information of first-time users of PC Pitstop, so each data point is unique. The end result of such a large cross-section is a clear month-over-month history of the applications favored by PC users.

The massive survey number reveals deeper trends. For example, a smaller survey would not detect the bubbling adoption of Frostwire and Pando. PC Pitstop captured 152 unique P2P clients in its analysis, including fringe participants. Only a data set this large could accomplish this and then follow the rise and fall of each and every client.

The data has its limitations. Although the survey can detect the presence of an application on a hard drive, it cannot tell if that application is being actively used or not. We can read through the month-to-month analysis to determine the flow of adoption and rejection of a particular application. For example, the sharp and quick rise of µTorrent is unambiguous. Likewise, the dramatic collapse of Kazaa as a presence on systems is also clear, particularly since not all users actively purge old unused applications. Change is what we seek in these numbers, change that is consistent over the given period of time. It is this change that tells the story.

Another limitation comes from convergence, or situations in which applications handle multiple activities. For example, the iTunes application is required to access Apple's iTunes music store, but it is also used as a music jukebox and as a necessary file transfer application for the iPod. Can we honestly assume that all consumers use iTunes for all three? Probably not, but it is reasonable to assume that a healthy percentage do. In our analyses, we make levelheaded assumptions about an application's popularity for a specific use.

We are also witnessing some shift in the market from client-based media access tools like RealPlayer to clientless web-based applications that only require a common browser plug-in. More operations are adopting Flash and Java technologies to deliver music and video - Slacker and YouTube are two notable examples - and that trend adds to the complexity of market share measurement. The fact that Slacker takes a multifaceted approach by also offering its users a client for improved media transfers adds to the complexity.

One more issue is the rise of Mac penetration into double digit territory in the consumer market. PC Pitstop only measures Windows machines and only a subset of the applications detected operate on a Mac - Windows Media Player being the most notable application that does not. Therefore, it is likely that Apple consumer use patterns are somewhat different. This was less of an issue when Apple held only a tiny portion of the consumer PC market, but as that company's fortunes continue to blossom, its presence must be recognized.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/8002/p2p.html





BitTorrent Use Soars as MPAA Fights on Against P2P Sites
Eric Bangeman

Both the music and movie industries see file-sharing as a very real threat to their livelihood. Their approaches to the problem have differed, however, as the RIAA has targeted individual P2P users with lawsuits while the IFPI and MPAA have chosen to go after BitTorrent sites. The MPAA has scored some high-profile victories against P2P site operators and the men behind The Pirate Bay have been indicted by Swedish prosecutors, but many observers have questioned whether the motion picture industry's efforts are in fact backfiring, as traffic to popular BitTorrent sites and participation in swarms appears to be on the upswing.
Researcher maps out plan to target BitTorrent uploaders

MPAA worldwide director of antipiracy operations John Malcolm told Ars that he believes the situation is getting better. "In some ways, the situation is improving in that we've gotten the attention of law enforcement and Swedish prosecutors have taken action [against The Pirate Bay admins]," Malcolm argues. "The Scandinavian countries are considering legislation and other countries that used to be piracy havens like the Netherlands have taken steps to make them less of haven."

The downside to high-profile actions against P2P sites is that they act as free publicity. The Pirate Bay bragged that after a Danish ISP was forced to block its subscribers from accessing the Swedish site, traffic spiked. TPB attributes the increase from the publicity surrounding the ISP's action. Malcolm concedes that there may be a cause-and-effect situation at play, but says that it's unavoidable. "Look, I don't think there's any question that some of the public may not be aware of these sites and there's going to be curiosity. Some people end up staying there" he said. "The alternative is to do nothing and hope that they don't discover The Pirate Bays of the world, and that's not realistic."

24% increase in BitTorrent traffic since November

Unfortunately, people are discovering The Pirate Bay and a whole host of other sites. Even as the MPA, MPAA, IFPI, and other groups have scored legal victories over torrent sites, BitTorrent use is growing. In fact, average BitTorrent traffic for the two-month period from mid-January to mid-March was up almost 25 percent compared with the month before Christmas, according to online media measurement firm BigChampagne.


Data source: BigChampagne

"All of the P2P growth we've seen over the past several months is in the torrent community," BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland told Ars. "There's a lot of adoption and interest in the torrent clients." Some of the growth in BitTorrent may be coming from from those growing tired of LimeWire and other traditional P2P networks, but those new to P2P seem to be jumping on the BitTorrent bandwagon. "All of the growth is in the torrent community, which maybe suggests that the audience for traditional P2P is mature."

As you can see from the chart above, BitTorrent traffic spiked over the December holidays. After a peaking at almost 12.5 million downloaders on the 200 most popular files, traffic dropped at the beginning of January—about the time that school started up again. But one figure that will prove alarming to the content creation industry is that the numbers are higher now than they used to be. "The baseline has been elevated," notes Garland. "Not only did the spike happen, but the bar was raised."

Garland draws a comparison between BitTorrent and the increased activity on the iTunes Store that pushed Apple into the top US music retailer spot. "It was like that for iTunes sales. People get gift cards, and then the volume of sales would be significantly increase," Garland said. "It looks like people haven't burned through their torrent gift cards," he chuckled.

Torrented content is also evolving as more people start using the protocol. Previously, BigChampagne used to see a lot of feature films and individual TV shows. Feature films are still popular, but TV shows are increasingly being bundled into multi-episode packs. "People are migrating towards three packs, six packs, and even whole seasons," Garland said. "Click once to get 13 hours of programming instead of clicking 13 times."

Ultimately, it's impossible to say if and how the attention the media has given to The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites has impacted traffic to those sites and BitTorrent activity. One thing is for sure: the MPAA isn't about to back down. "Content providers can't afford to sit by and do nothing," Malcolm tells Ars. "We need to highlight that [copyright infringement] is not a victimless crime and take appropriate actions."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...p2p-sites.html





Secure File Sharing Available for Free Online
Press release

KeepandShare.com announces free secure file sharing with private file sharing software and secure, private online file sharing sharing

San Francisco, California - April 15, 2008 -- KeepandShare.com ( http://www.keepandshare.com ) today announced its free online secure file sharing resource center. Available immediately, KeepandShare's new secure file sharing resource center combines file sharing program and extensive web-based file sharing to make it easier than ever for users to share online file sharing securely on the web. Accounts are free, and users can be in their private file sharing software account within 30 seconds of signing up.

KeepandShare's free secure file sharing online web center is available now at:

http://www.keepandshare.com/htm/free_file_sharing.php

"Most file sharing systems are too hard to use. That's why I like KeepandShare's online file sharing - it's just so simple" said Christina Smithson of Twin Cities, Minnesota. Christina continued, "KeepandShare's online file sharing is unique in that I can upload any kind of file from my Mac or PC, and I can control sharing on a file-by-file or folder basis. So that makes the KeepandShare private file sharing software ideal for sharing my files online".

Rebekah Winograd of Los Angeles, California, a power file sharing user, said "The way KeepandShare's online file sharing combines simple file sharing with with the ability to upload any type of PC file makes it a unique solution on the web. Add the secure, private group sharing in this groundbreaking private file sharing software, and you have an ideal solution for both personal and group file sharing needs. KeepandShare should be commended on their secure file sharing.

Rebekah continued "web-based file sharing can be marked public and then published to a group's website, appearing as a seamless part of the group's native website. Anyone who needs online file sharing should take a close look at KeepandShare."

KeepandShare.com is the free website that makes group sharing easy. KeepandShare's free secure file and calendar sharing accounts can be accessed securely from any Internet connected computer. The new free secure file sharing resource center joins several other popular file sharing centers at:

http://www.keepandshare.com/htm/free...g_programs.php

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A Tech Lover's Call to Arms
Don Reisinger

For years, I've wanted to write this piece, but for one reason or another, I didn't think it was the right time to do it. But now, as I look at technology zealots like myself who have been forced to submit to the will of the vocal minority that has no idea what this industry is all about, I think it's time.

Whether it's lawmakers, the RIAA, MPAA, "family groups" or other misguided individuals, these people are taking the technology industry to task for everything it stands for and anything it does. Gone are the days of appreciation for what technology provides and here are the days of contempt.

Years ago, technology lovers were not-so-affectionately called geeks who had no idea what the real world looks like. These people were ostensibly scared of the opposite sex in high school, enjoyed tinkering with electronics on weekends and hardly ever played sports. But as those geeks created technologies that transcended industries, they suddenly gained respect and the pejorative has become a term of endearment in appreciation for the creature comforts those people created.

But now, a new group of people has emerged to confront the tech lovers all over the world and stop them from being able to do what they want with the technology they own. And while many have tried to confront them on an individual basis, it has not worked. And it's for that reason that we must all come together and fight the ridiculous impositions brought upon us.

How many times must we hear that video games cause violence before we stand up together and stop the spewing of inaccurate ideas? How many times must we listen to the RIAA tell us that college students are the root of all evil as it pertains to piracy before we tell the organization that it's wrong? How many times must we listen to public interest groups allow families to get off the hook instead of blaming them when "security concerns" are revealed to the public before we tell them the truth? How many times must we listen to people who have no knowledge of the technology industry restate the misguided ramblings of lawmakers before we vote for change?

These questions have yet to be answered. Sure, some of us have ensured that we continue to inform tech lovers from all across the globe about what's really going on in the industry, but none of us -- journalists and readers -- have stood together to confront the beast that continues to grow each day.

Everyday when I wake up, I'm constantly reminded by how limited we are in our rights with technology. Why are women forced to pay ridiculous sums of cash for stealing 20 songs? Why are ten-year old children forced into a deposition that the plaintiff hopes will yield even more cash for a misguided cause? Why are college students blamed for piracy when huge cartels overseas are allowed to run amok? Why can companies charge too much for too little and get away with it? Why am I paying for 10mbps service when I only get 2mbps?

According to GamePolitics.com, an Arizona bill that was passed in the state's House of Representatives last month "would make content producers, publishers and distributors liable for monetary damages if any written, audio, visual or digital material from which they profited was judged to have been "dangerous" or obscene and motivated someone to commit a felony or an act of terrorism."

The ambiguity of that bill is indicative of many of the laws enacted by lawmakers all over the country. Instead of forcing people to be responsible for their own actions, lawmakers have seen it fit to embrace a policy that makes those who provide technology to individuals the lawbreakers. Ironically (or maybe not), that doesn't happen in any other industry. In other, more political, industries, the companies win out, but in the technology business, we're expected to suffer.

Of course, the plight of the technology industry goes far beyond video games. Each day, we're told that what we really want to do is wrong. You want to download music? Nope, you should be paying a ridiculous premium on CDs. You plan on ripping a DVD you own onto your computer? Don't even think about it. You're paying for faster speeds than you really get? Oh well. You're forced to pay $175 to get out a cell phone contract? Tough luck.

Some have said that it'll eventually get better when the younger generation assumes positions of power and I agree with that. But who really wants to wait that long? Why has the entire technology industry rolled over in the face of lawmakers and misguided organizations for no good reason?

Enough is enough.

I think it's time that every person who truly cares about the future of the technology industry and their own well-being stands up and rights the injustices being forced upon each and every one of us. We shouldn't be forced into specific arrangements that promise more than they provide and we surely shouldn't wait in anxious anticipation of what could be.

For what it's worth, I call on all journalists, readers and companies to forego their apathy and do what they can to stand together and fight the ridiculous notion that technology should be throttled back for fear of its inability to adapt to the expectations of the Old Guard.

If nothing else, technology is the beacon of hope in these times of economic and socio-political tumult and we should do what we can to ensure that misguided individuals and lawmakers alike understand and fully appreciate the value and importance of technology.
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13506_1-9922350-17.html





A Creator of Captain America, Fighting On
George Gene Gustines

“Living legend” is how Joe Simon is categorized on the list of special guests appearing at the New York Comic Con at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center this weekend. Mr. Simon, 94, has a different take on it. “I call it the old-geezer table,” he said during a recent interview at his Midtown Manhattan apartment.

Mr. Simon will take part in the “Legends Behind the Comic Books” panel at 3 p.m. on Friday, one of numerous events planned at the convention, a three-day celebration of all things comics.

Mr. Simon earned the “legend” title with his partner Jack Kirby by creating Captain America, the superhero who arrived in December 1940, just in time to play a patriotic foil to the Axis powers. The cover of the first issue even has the good captain socking Hitler in the jaw.

For Mr. Simon and Mr. Kirby, though, the biggest blow came when they were dismissed from the series, which had been selling a million copies a month, in a dispute over royalties. The team moved to Detective Comics (today DC Comics), but Captain America stayed with Timely, the forerunner of Marvel Comics.

It’s a tale worthy of its own comic (and one of many inspirations for Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”): On the frontier of a new industry, writers and artists creating scores of characters, but publishers profiting from them.

These days creators have learned from the past by self-publishing or otherwise securing the rights to their progeny. But some of the founding fathers of American superheroes are still seeking justice. Just last month a federal judge ruled that the heirs of Jerry Siegel, a creator of Superman, were entitled to claim a share of the United States copyright of the character. Time Warner, which owns DC Comics, would retain the international rights.

“That’s great,” the bespectacled Mr. Simon said. “Jerry Siegel started it,” he added, referring to the effort by Mr. Siegel’s wife and daughter in 1997 to secure the copyright to Superman. (Under a 1976 law, heirs can recover the rights to their relatives’ creations under certain circumstances. Mr. Siegel died in 1996 without major compensation for his character.) That family’s stand inspired Mr. Simon’s own claim to Captain America in 1999.

“We always felt ‘we wuz robbed,’ as Joe Jacobs, the boxing promoter, used to say,” Mr. Simon said of his dispute over the ownership of Captain America, which he settled out of court with Marvel in 2003. He said his royalties for merchandising and licensing use of the hero now help pay his legal bills from the case.

But copyright was not on Mr. Simon’s mind when he was conceiving Captain America. He didn’t even begin with the hero. “Villains were the whole thing,” he said. And there was no better foil than Hitler. Who better to take him on than a supersoldier draped in the American flag?

The art for the series also broke the mold. “Kirby started this idea of elastic art, action and double-page spreads,” Mr. Simon said. “It was a whole new package.” But it was not to last. The pair felt that they were being cheated on royalties by their publisher, Martin Goodman. Frustrated, the team began negotiations to move to Detective Comics. When Mr. Goodman found out, Mr. Simon and Mr. Kirby were fired, but only after they had finished issue No. 10 of Captain America Comics.

At Detective, the two would create the Sandman, the Guardian, Manhunter and more. For other companies they would create the Fly and Fighting American. Of his ideas, Mr. Simon said, “One of them would fail, another would fail, and eventually you got one that was successful.”

Mr. Simon is surprised by the interest in him (including recent book offers from Rizzoli and Abrams) and the continued vitality of comic-book characters. But, he said, he has always been concerned about getting more money for the talent.

“People in comic books have a very sad history in dealing with their creative people,” he said.

Todd McFarlane, 47, who in 1992 helped found Image Comics, agreed. “I read the stories of Joe Simon,” he said. “I read the stories of Jack Kirby. I read the stories of all those guys in the ’40s, ’50s and even the ’60s. I kept coming across this repetitive story: the creative guy got the short end of the stick.”

Mr. McFarlane’s artwork on Spider-Man made him a superstar. His interpretation of the character — lankier physique; larger eyes on the mask; and a kinetic, three-dimensional feel to his webs — returned the comic to top-selling status. But Spider-Man’s newfound appeal brought editorial control and notes.

“I was sitting at the top of the charts, and all of a sudden I wasn’t good enough,” Mr. McFarlane said of the requests that he redraw panels or rethink layouts.

“If it was about money, I would’ve stayed there,” he said. “But I had to move on.”

Mr. McFarlane and six other artists formed Image Comics to take control of their own and their characters’ destinies. “All we ever wanted was a small voice in the conversations with editorial,” he said. Spawn, a hero who makes a pact with the Devil, was created when Mr. McFarlane was in high school. The character was an immediate success and went on to be featured in toys, a film and an animated series on HBO. Today Mr. McFarlane has companies that deal with toy design and manufacturing, video games, film and video productions and more.

With so much on his plate, he has not spent much time drawing comics. That’s soon to change. Haunt, a new series about a priest possessed by the ghost of his brother, a secret agent, will be introduced this summer. It is written by Robert Kirkman, owner and creator of the two series Invincible and The Walking Dead. Mr. McFarlane will illustrate the covers, oversee layouts and ink pages.

Mr. Simon may not be involved in monthly comics, but he’s still drawing. In September 2001 he recreated the cover of Captain America Comics No. 1, but substituted Osama bin Laden for Hitler. “I did it out of anger,” he said. “Adolf got his. Osama will too.”

When he heard from friends at Marvel that Captain America might be murdered in 2007, Mr. Simon grabbed his brush. The result was a “Last Supper” painting of the captain and 12 fellow champions at a table surrounded by junk food.

Mr. Simon said he was worried about the direction the hero — well, his replacement — has taken. “The new costume, with the pistol and knife, and the old shield design going down to his privates, that’s not Captain America,” he said. Mr. Simon said he feared that someone would “shoot up a campus with pistols,” claiming he was inspired by the character.

Comics may still cause Mr. Simon agitation, but they also introduced him to his wife, Harriet, who was a secretary at Harvey Comics. (She died in 1972.) “I met her when I came from the war in my military outfit,” he said. She asked him to pull up his pant legs. He dutifully agreed. “What did you want to see?” he asked.

“ ‘I won’t go out with a guy with pasty white legs,’ ” he recalled as her response. “I didn’t ask her if I passed the test, but we went out.” They were married for 25 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/books/16gust.html?hp





"Nerdic" Geek Speak is Fastest Growing Language

Tech dialect adds more words than English language
Amy-Mae Elliott

The explosion of technology has created the fastest growing language in Europe, according to research published today.

Dubbed "Nerdic", this new way of communicating via technological terminology has developed separately to English and become the shared language of Europe, allowing people to communicate without geographical boundary.

According to the research by PIXmania.com, Nerdic may be more widely spoken than any other European dialect, with everyone from tech-toddlers to Wii-playing grannies embracing the geek speak of IT enthusiasts.

The researchers analysed the terminology associated with modern gadgetry and discovered that the three core elements required to define a new language: words, phrases and pronunciation are all present in Nerdic. So much so, that Nerdic is evolving faster than the English language, at a rate of more than 100 new words per year.

From "dongle" to "Wi-Fi" 100 new words were added to the Nerdic vocabulary in the past 12 months- over three times more than the Oxford English Dictionary added to the official English language, with experts predicting that this figure will more than double in 2008.

Our very own Stuart Miles explains the importance of Nerdic: "Technology has revolutionised the way we speak. With so many words and phrases being invented all the time it's created a whole new way of communicating, especially compared with traditional languages like Welsh & Gaelic that're dying out. Everyone knows what it means "to google" something, but a foreigner turning to an English dictionary for an explanation would be baffled.

"It's incredible that I can describe an N96 with HSDPA, Wi-Fi with a 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss and GPS and be understood across Europe, although Brits may still be confused when they hear the French talking about their "wee-fee"!"

Pixmania.com has applied to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to recognise Nerdic as an official language spoken by Europe's population of over 700 million people (the same status was recently awarded to the 2,000 speakers
Cornish).

To help Brits improve their Nerdic, Stuart Miles and his team have identified the top ten Nerdic words and phrases Brits need to look out for in the next year and the ten they can forget; a full glossary of which can be found online at Pixmania.com.

PIXMANIA.COM'S TOP TEN NERDIC WORDS & PHRASES TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2008:

1. Wimax - Supersized Wi-Fi will give whole cities internet coverage, Milton Keynes already has it.
2. RickRoll - To intentionally misdirect internet users to a video of "Never Gonna Give You Up" by 80s one-hit-wonder Rick Astley
3. UGC (user generated content) - The buzz word in the internet right now. Flickr, facebook, reader reviews, YouTube all rely on the reader generating content on the sites.
4. Mashup - Take two or more really interesting elements from different websites or applications and make them into one - think Google Maps with an overlay of where you can buy clown outfits from
5. RFID - Radio-frequency identification (RFID) will allow you to track your packages around the world or let you know how your bananas have travelled to you
6. Android - Think iPhone but with a slightly different interface on phones from Samsung to HTC and with the ability for anyone to make applications for it
7. HDMI - The new Scart lead allows you to connect High-Def devices together, like your TV to your new Blu-ray player
8. Fuel-cell - Green water powered battery for everything from cars to laptops that will boost your gadget's life considerably over standard batteries
9. HSDPA - The next step up from 3G on mobile phones. Makes accessing the internet on your mobile just as fast if not faster than your broadband connection at home
10. DVB-H - Newly announced Mobile TV standard for Europe that allows you to watch TV on your mobile on the go.

PIXMANIA.COM'S TEN NERDIC WORDS TO FORGET IN 2008:

1. HD DVD - Just like Betamax, HD DVD is now the dead format against Sony's Blu-ray in the HD disc battle when it comes to High-Def movies
2. Dial-up - Broadband is the way to go if you are looking to surf the internet so throw that 56k modem out with the rubbish (or recycle them where facilities exist)
3. VHS - DVD players are so cheap and PVRs are so easy to use that the movie format that would take you 10 minutes to rewind after watching a film is dead
4. Tri-band -Replaced by Quad-band, 3G, or HSDPA to allow much better phone coverage abroad, much better for the traveller in you
5. Hits - How website popularity used to be measured before people realise that unique visitors is what's important
6. CRT - Fat TVs to you and me. Flat is the new thin so get with the times and relegate your Fat TV to the tip. You'll save extra space in the living room too
7. KB - Standing for Kilobytes and important when computer memory was a measly 64k. Look out for the new super-size Terabyte
8. Floppy disk - Replaced by USB thumb drives and CDs the idea of only being able to get 1.4MB on a disk would now seem mad to the average 10 year old
9. MiniDisc - Sony's now defunct music format that was like the CD only smaller. Overtaken by MP3 before it even got going. It didn't stand a chance
10. Super Audio CD - A higher quality CD format that never really took off. Why? Because you needed state of the art expensive kit to run it on and there aren't enough audiophiles out there that care! http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/ne...language.phtml




Exploring Fantasy Life and Finding a $4 Billion Franchise
Seth Schiesel

In the winter of 1860 Milton Bradley, a lithographer in Springfield, Mass., released a new game he had developed called the Checkered Game of Life. Its players began on a checkerboard square called Infancy and tried to make their way through various trials to the destination of Happy Old Age.

Before radio, before phonographs, at a time when cards and dice were tainted in the popular imagination by their association with gambling, that first version of Life in some ways opened the modern age of in-home games. Almost 150 years later, it still isn’t often that a new game breaks into the canon of family entertainment. The classics — the likes of Monopoly, Scrabble and Risk — are many decades old. In board games there hasn’t been a new mass phenomenon since Trivial Pursuit’s debut 26 years ago.

But over the last eight years the Sims — Life’s modern, digital descendant — has found a place in millions of homes and hearts beside all those creations of cardboard and laminate. On Wednesday Electronic Arts, the Sims’s publisher, plans to announce that the series has sold more than 100 million copies (including expansion packs) in 22 languages and 60 countries since its introduction in 2000.

All told, the franchise has generated about $4 billion in sales or an average of $500 million every year for the last eight years, placing the Sims in the rarefied financial company of other giants of popular culture like “American Idol,” “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter.”

But beyond the facts and figures, the Sims has become one of the most famous game franchises (behind perhaps only Mario) because it has heralded the evolution of video games into mainstream entertainment. Years before the Wii, before Nintendogs, before Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft and the other recent hits credited with rescuing games from the clutches of geekdom, the Sims was entrancing girls in a medium most often aimed at men. In a video game universe dominated by living room consoles, the Sims has remained a more intimate experience on office and bedroom PCs. In a world reshaped by the Internet, the Sims has remained almost entirely an offline, single-player experience.

So how did a game in which the action is as mundane as scrubbing a toilet, having a kid or flirting with a neighbor come to captivate so broadly?

If the Sims were a TV show, there would hardly be a question. Since the early 1970s, many of the most popular television shows have been set in locations no more exotic than a living room, from “All in the Family” through “The Cosby Show” and “Seinfeld,” not to mention telenovelas and daytime soap operas. As a noninteractive medium, television has often proved most powerful when it provides a clear reflection of the lives of its viewers. Because they are at once immediately recognizable but at a safe distance outside one’s self, classic television characters like Archie Bunker can provide an insightful lens on the vagaries of modern life.

Most games are different. Rather than peer in from outside, their players in some way become the protagonists and must take responsibility for their actions. That act of inhabiting another character, rather than merely watching it, creates a moral and dramatic responsibility for both the designer and the consumer.

The easy way to handle that responsibility has usually been to place video games in environments that at least appear to have little to do with reality. In a game with no human characters, that’s easy; think of Pac-Man, Tetris, Minesweeper. When human characters are introduced, that flight into the fantastic usually means a science-fiction universe, a war zone, a realm of orcs and elves or a land of cheerleaders and quarterbacks. Lately, new games have allowed people to channel their inner rock stars.

All those sorts of games are about allowing people to explore external expressions of their fantasy lives, precisely because the settings are so outlandish. After all, how many of us are really going to win the Super Bowl, pilot a spaceship or slay a dragon?

The Sims has stood out because it is perhaps the only game series that is fundamentally about exploring the inner expressions of a person’s fantasy life. There is no way to avoid it. Just as a novelist’s every character in some way reflects the writer, every Sim in some way reflects its creator. Even if that “ ‘Desperate Housewives’ meets ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’ ” household you made doesn’t appear to reflect your real life, it does reflect some aspect of you.

In that way the Sims is a very different experience from the SimCity line that began in 1989. SimCity is a traditional strategy game in that it is presented at a level of abstraction where individual people are nothing more than antlike dots; there is little emotional, as opposed to merely proprietary, connection. The Sims, by contrast, is all about managing idiosyncratically individual lives of your own concoction.

If this all sounds a lot like playing with dolls, you’re right. The core, most passionate audience for the Sims has become school-age girls. Across many years and many cultures, girls have long been the demographic group that most gravitates toward playing at “real life.” (Boys, meanwhile, with their footballs and toy soldiers, as with their video games, have usually played at inhabiting some external, aspirational identity.)

As we age, we sometimes become more reluctant to explore publicly the what-if of our lives, to admit to wondering what else we could have become. Last weekend I sat an adult friend down at the Sims and suggested she start her own virtual household. “This feels like a psychological test,” she said warily, looking up at me with suspicion.

Of course it is. And it will come as no surprise in the coming years to hear that some therapists are incorporating the Sims into their practices. Why ask, “Tell me about your family?” when you could ask, “Why don’t you create your family?”

In that vein, one of the most telling elements of the Sims’ popularity is that it has never really succeeded online. Electronic Arts once thought that people would flock to manage their digital families together in cyberspace neighborhoods, but that has not been the case. While little girls have no shame or self-consciousness about opening their virtual homes, it turns out that adults are more circumspect. For adults, playing the Sims can be like writing a diary. And that is the big difference between the Sims’ cycles of death and birth and the simulated aging in a social board game like Life.

“What we’ve discovered is that the Sims is a very private experience for a lot of people,” Rod Humble, head of the Sims studio, said in a telephone interview last week. “It’s private because it’s set in real life. Rather than on a console in the living room where everyone can see, you generally play on a handheld or on a PC in the study, where no one can look over your shoulder. You get to tap into this wonderful childhood imaginary game, which is ‘What if I could create my own little world and all the people in it and watch them go through their business and jump in and change things when I want?’ That is a pretty personal fantasy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/ar...on/16sims.html





'Simpsons' Stirs Uproar in Argentina

Upcoming episode causes controversy
Charles Newbery

An episode of "The Simpsons" is stirring a political uproar in Argentina -- even though it hasn't yet aired.

In the 10th episode of season 19, which has already screened in the U.S, Carl Carlson tells Homer that former Argentine President Juan Peron was a dictator, adding "When he disappeared you, you stayed disappeared."

"Of course, his wife was Madonna," Lenny Leonard says in reference to the singer-actress' role as Eva Peron in "Evita."

However, it wasn't the Peron regime but the 1976-83 military dictatorship that followed his rule that has been blamed for the disappearance of 30,000 citizens.

The episode isn't skedded to air until June or July on Telefe and Canal Fox in Argentina.

But the segment on YouTube had an estimated 12,000 viewings in Argentina over the weekend.

Lorenzo Pepe, a former congressman and now secretary general of the National Institute of Juan Peron, called on national broadcasting regulator Comfer to intervene.

It isn't clear what action Comfer could take. A spokesman for the regulator said censorship wasn't an option for "The Simpsons," which for years has been a top-rated import in Argentina.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR111...goryId=14&cs=1

















Until next week,

- js.



















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