Since 2002
"The future of file sharing is bright." – Don Reisinger
"We met with members of the House and Senate judiciary committees this week, and while they all were supportive of small Webcasters, time after time we heard the IREA was not going to pass." – Rusty Hodge
"It's about vital civil liberties that are a foundation of a democratic society that need to be eroded or abolished in order to maintain a crumbling monopoly." – Rick Falkvinge
"Don’t misunderstand: I still get a kick out of 'Bonnie and Clyde,' but it’s accompanied by a twinge of unease, by the suspicion that, in some ways that matter and that have become too easy to dismiss, Bosley Crowther was right." – A. O. Scott
August 11th, 2007
Judge Allows RIAA to Serve Subpoena on Defendant's Former Employer
Ray Beckerman
In Atlantic v. Shutovsky, pending in Manhattan, the Judge has issued an order ruling on a number of discovery issues. No written opinion was issued. Among the Court's rulings were the following:
-The plaintiffs were permitted to serve a subpoena on Mr. Shutovsky's former employer;
-The plaintiffs were permitted to take depositions of Mr. Shutovsky's wife and his brother;
-The court stayed defendant's discovery in support of his counterclaims for copyright misuse and declaratory judgment.
-Plaintiffs were required to produce all non-privileged documents or materials relating to any investigation and any sound files on their computer, and to produce a privilege log as to any claimed to be privileged.
-Plaintiffs did not have to turn over documents relating to their employees of 'online media distribution systems'.
-Defendant was required to provide the name and address of each person who used his computer during the three (3) years prior to commencement of the lawsuit.
-Defendant was required to produce all hard drives in his possession and control.
-Plaintiffs were required to furnish copies of copyright registrations for every song they assert was unlawfully downloaded.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...bpoena-on.html
Oklahoma State Students Attack RIAA's Expert Witness
Eric Bangeman
For the most part, the RIAA's legal campaign against suspected file-sharers has gone along with a minimum of hassle from its perspective. For every case that makes it to the front page of Ars, there are likely hundreds that escape our notice—often due to the fact that most of them end up being settled.
The RIAA's relatively brief experiences with lawsuits against college students indicates that things are not going so smoothly with the music industry's attempts to sue this population. The latest bit of news from that front comes courtesy of Ray Beckerman and Oklahoma State University, where 11 "John Doe" students are attempting to quash the subpoena issued to OSU, requesting that it hand over the names of those using IP addresses fingered for file-sharing by Media Sentry, the RIAA's investigators.
The students make the usual arguments that the ex parte discovery (i.e., discovery taken against the subjects of a lawsuit without their knowledge) is improper, but they also attacked the RIAA's expert witness, Carlos Linares. An expert witness hired by the students has gone over (PDF) Linares' declaration supporting the case, taking issue with many of his statements. Jayson Street, the defendants' expert witness, is the chief information security officer for Strategem 1 Solutions. He lists his qualifications as having years of experience with network security and several certifications.
According to Linares, "users of P2P networks can be identified by their IP addresses because each computer or network device (such as a router) that connects to a P2P network must have a unique IP address within the Internet to deliver files from one computer or network device to another."
Street takes issue with that assertion, noting that a person "cannot be uniquely identified by an IP address." He goes on: "An IP address must be unique on a given network. However, networks of networks can have many duplicate addresses. A common technology called Network Address Translation is used to present a single IP address from one network as the only address for all computers behind the control point (such as a router)."
Street notes eight other errors or "facts without any supporting evidence" in Linares' declaration, concluding that the RIAA's claim that an IP address "uniquely identifies" a person is "an oversimplification" that demonstrates the record labels' attempt "to use technical terms to assign blame without evidence sufficient to identify the alleged file sharer."
After a federal judge ordered a P2P defendant to cough up the names of everyone who had used his computer over the past few years, I pointed out the difficulties inherent in trying to sue an IP address, which is essentially what the RIAA does. Although this case involves 11 college students instead of a single Verizon subscriber, the same principle holds true: the person whom the ISP or college identifies as being responsible for a given IP address at a particular point in time is not necessarily the person fingered by Media Sentry for sharing music on KaZaA.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...t-witness.html
Judge Overturns $1.5 Bln Ruling Against Microsoft
A U.S. judge reversed on Monday a jury's ruling that Microsoft Corp. had infringed patents held by Alcatel-Lucent and threw out a record $1.5 billion verdict against the world's largest software maker.
U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster said in a 43-page order that the jury's damages could not stand because Microsoft had not violated one of the two patents related to MP3 music files at the heart of the case.
The judge also called into question the second patent claim in the case and said a new trial may be needed to determine the ownership of that patent.
Microsoft has claimed that it had already licensed the MP3 technology in question from German research organization Fraunhofer Gesellschaft for $16 million.
Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent are locked in a number of patent disputes including a suit over the video-decoding technology in Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game console.
Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman Mary Ward said the reversal was "shocking and disturbing" and the company planned to appeal the latest decision. Microsoft said it plans to issue a statement shortly about the decision.
(Reporting by Ritsuko Ando and Daisuke Wakabayashi)
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv...44894920070806
More Parties Join Google Copyright Lawsuit
English soccer's Premier League Ltd and music publisher Bourne & Co said on Monday that eight more parties have joined their lawsuit charging Google Inc and its YouTube online service with deliberately encouraging copyright infringement.
The new parties include the National Music Publishers' Association, which is the largest U.S. music publishing trade association, the Rugby Football League, the Finnish Football League Association and author Daniel Quinn.
Video programming owners have teamed up against YouTube, charging the top online video service with encouraging copyright infringement to generate public attention and boost traffic to its site.
Google has said it is abiding by existing law that protect Internet services from being liable for what is on their networks so long as they respond promptly to complaints.
MTV Networks owner Viacom Inc sued Google and YouTube in May for $1 billion for copyright infringement and demanded the removal of hundreds of thousands of Viacom video clips that were uploaded without permission by users.
"The clear and growing message to YouTube and Google is simple: their callous and opportunistic business model is contrary to right, contrary to law, and must and will be stopped," Premier League spokesman Dan Johnson said in a statement.
Robert Tur, the broadcast journalist who filmed the attack on Reginald Denny during the 1992 L.A. Riots, plans to withdraw his earlier suit against YouTube and join the proposed class action suit as a plaintiff.
The proposed class action complaint was originally filed in New York on May 4, 2007 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Responding to the original suit in May, Google said: "These suits simply misunderstand the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which balances the rights of copyright holders against the need to protect Internet communications and content."
Google did not have immediate comment on the new parties joining the suit.
(Reporting by Kenneth Li)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...41084820070806
Copyright Filtering A Technology Doomed To Failure, Some Critics Say
AT&T and NBC Universal have both recently advocated the use of Internet filtering technology to help weed out pirated content -- movies, TV shows, songs, music videos and more -- accessed for free by Web surfers without permission of the copyright owners.
Repeated attempts by movie and music industry representatives to halt the practice aren't working. They've filed thousands of lawsuits against alleged pirates, to little avail. Piracy is growing, and the entertainment industry says it's costing them billions of dollars a year.
That's why entertainment execs applauded when Internet service provider AT&T revealed that it would work with them to devise a filtering strategy.
Critics of filtering technology had a different reaction.
"The odds are long that this can be done," said Eric Garland, founder of the research firm Big Champagne.
Napster And Kazaa
He points to when the music file-sharing firm Napster was forced to shut down by court order in 2001 after two years of operation.
"People thought it would dramatically cut back on the (illegal) sharing of music," Garland said. "But what happened is (illegal sharing) grew even more, just taking a different form."
With the collapse of Napster, which enabled the exchange of music files through a centralized computer system, programmers developed peer-to-peer file-sharing systems such as Kazaa. With P2P, the content resides on the computers of millions of individuals who download the software that lets them share files across the Web.
Developers will surely try to subvert any filtering system. But the bigger problem, analysts say, is that trying to weed out pirated content could inadvertently zap the files of perfectly legal content.
According to advocacy group Public Knowledge, there are two types of filtration technology: content inspection and traffic analysis.
Content inspection looks inside the packet of data that is being transferred to determine if it's infringing copyright laws, Public Knowledge said in a recent report to the Federal Communications Commission.
That means Internet service providers could eavesdrop on all Web surfers, a troublesome idea to watchdogs of civil liberties.
Privacy A Concern
"Innocent people will have their privacy violated," said Fred Von Lohmann, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet watchdog group.
The other method is called traffic analysis. Instead of looking inside data packets, it studies the nature of data traffic -- where the traffic is coming from and the application being used to send it. If it appears to be of a type a network operator wants to block, then the transfer is cut off.
Critics contend that both methods have flaws. If an Internet service provider, using traffic analysis methods, intends to block certain P2P-carried files, it likely will also block files that are perfectly legal.
The system blocks "all traffic transmitted in certain ways -- authorized and unauthorized copyright content, public domain works, fair uses and infringing material," Public Knowledge said.
And with the content inspection approach, pirates could subvert the system by encrypting their files so that filters can't identify them.
Most P2P technologies today don't encrypt their signal, but all of them could. And even if content inspection technology could be modified to decrypt those files, that would be a big concern for such fields as the financial industry and the military, which rely heavily on encryption.
"People are wasting their time thinking they might invent an effective filtering technology," said Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge. "It's a difficult and complex task."
It's not that EFF, Public Knowledge and others support the pirates. They want rights-holders and content creators to be paid for their work. But it can be done without drastically changing the nature of the Internet, they say. Among other things, they say ISPs should focus on providing Web users with a service that's more compelling than what the pirates offer.
"You can compete with free," Von Lohmann said. "Just look at the bottled water business, or Apple's iTunes business. You do that by offering customers a better value proposition."
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/...1-18705807.htm
Police Arrest French Teen Over Potter Translation
Police arrested a teenager suspected of posting his own translation of the latest Harry Potter novel on the Internet weeks before the official French release, the book's publishers said on Wednesday.
The 16-year-old schoolboy, from the Aix-en-Provence region in southern France, was taken into custody by a police anti-counterfeiting unit and later released, said a spokeswoman for the Gallimard publishing house, which handles the French editions of the novels.
"Concerned that such acts of counterfeiting are threats to basic authors' and creators' rights, (author J.K. Rowling and Gallimard) immediately agreed to support the investigation as it was launched," spokeswoman Marie Leroy-Lena said in a statement.
"It is not a young person or a fan we are talking about here -- these are organized networks that use young people," she told Reuters by telephone.
"For the moment there is an ongoing investigation, and neither Gallimard nor Ms. Rowling has filed an independent lawsuit."
The newspaper Le Parisien reported earlier that the book's first three chapters appeared on the Web just days after the English-language edition of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" went on sale in late July. The paper said boy was arrested on Monday.
Police were not available for comment.
The official French language version of the book is scheduled for publication on Oct 26.
The seventh volume of the Harry Potter saga is the fastest selling book in history, publishers say, with about 11 million English-language copies sold in the first 24 hours.
Many French stores are selling the English-language version.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...08150920070808
Chec please
Distributors Worry Over “Big Doh!” Following Simpsons Cinema Piracy
Marcel Bodnár
For the first time ever, a pirated blockbuster movie illicitly recorded in a Czech cinema on the day of its premiere has turned up on the black market. The copy of “The Simpsons Movie,” with Czech dubbing, recorded with a videocamera in a theater, appeared on the Internet just hours after its official release.
The Simpsons incident is not the only case that’s disturbed the Czech cinema industry this year. During the spring, a copy of director Jan Svžrík’s movie “Empties” (Vratné lahve) was leaked from the Ministry of Culture. Svžrík reported the case to the police, but it remains unsolved. These cases demonstrate growing trends in Internet copyright violations.
Movie copyright violations basically come in two varieties. First, of course, an existing DVD can be copied, with the resulting pirate DVDs then sold at marketplaces for a lower price than what the original DVD was purchased for. Second, a digital copy of a film can be downloaded from the Internet. While the first approach means the fraudster has to await the release of the movie on some kind of medium, like a DVD, the second approach is easier and speeds things up.
It’s recently become common practice for people with fast Internet connections to download a new movie in reasonable quality from the Web, rather than go and see it at a cinema or buy or rent it on DVD. Due to internationally staggered release dates, new movies are often available on the Internet before they are officially released in the Czech Republic. “It depends on the attractiveness of the movie. The more attractive the title, the sooner an illegal copy of it is on the Web,” said Ladislav Hrabž, CEO of film distributor Bontonfilm, the official Czech distributor of “The Simpsons Movie.” The usual way of unlawfully getting a movie onto the Internet typically involves either somebody recording the movie in a cinema with a handheld camera or stealing a copy of the film from the producer. The cinema approach, refered to by the name CAM, sometimes means less than perfect quality.
“As for quality, [“The Simpsons Movie”] is a typical CAM version. [Although some] people who have already seen this copy are saying that sound quality is satisfying for a sound version,” read a comment posted on peer-to-peer (P2P) and digital news site
www.p2pnet.net after the Czech-dubbed Simpsons film arrived on the Internet so some people familiar with the black market obviously prefer to wait for the DVD release, after which computer pirates run off illegal digital copies. DivX or MPEG are the most common file formats for compressed films. Subsequently, these copies are placed on an Internet file hosting server, from which people can download them, or are shared via peer-to-peer (P2p) software. The avalanche is then unstoppable.
Little awareness of chain reaction
The damaging effects of each instance of illegal downloading spreads right down the line. Few people realize how their actions financially hit filmmakers, distributors, actors, directors and so on, quite apart from the fact that they are a violation of a legally founded copyright. “Piracy has recently been the biggest menace to our industry, and it can have fatal consequences,” Hrabž said. In 2006, film piracy overall cost the filmmaking industry around $6.1 billion (Kč 125 billion/€ 4.5 billion) worldwide, according to nonprofit organization Czech Anti-Piracy Union (ČPU). Follow-through effects would thus certainly have been felt in terms of reduced job opportunities, a lower amount of movies produced and lower-quality movies, it said.
“Illegal downloading is a trend that is rising on a yearly basis,” said Lenka Hekov, public relations manager for the ČPU. While in 2004, the illegal side of the Czech movie market was estimated by the ‰PU at approximately 28 percent, this year it extended to more than 40 percent. “Last year, the estimated financial damage caused to movie distributors [in this country] was more than K‹ 1 billion,” He‹kov‡ said.
How is it done?
Illegal Internet downloads are nowadays mostly carried out through P2P networks. When it originated, P2P was designed for the direct sending of files like documents and pictures between two users, so another central server to store the files was not needed. The technology helped to utilize network capacities better, a primary aim that nobody could argue with, but hackers soon discovered that P2P networks can also be deployed in sharing illegal material such copied movies, music and software. Subsequently, they created software for such uses. DC++, BearShare and BitTorrent are all externally presented as software for sharing legal digital material, but most of the traffic they make possible is actually illegal.
The second most widespread way of sharing illegal materials is through file hosting servers, such as the popular
www.rapidshare.de. To make it feasible, there must be a third party server, with one user copying his material and publishing it for other users to download. These servers too were designed for legal materials, and illegal contents are constantly deletedŃbut with the amount of material placed on them measuring into the tens of terabytes, it is hard, if not utterly impossible, to locate everything that should be removed.
‘We try hard, but it’s not enough’
Although Czech courts are empowered to punish a copyright violation with as much as two years in prison or a K‹ 5 million penalty, it is usual that a convicted person receives a fine of just tens of thousands of crowns and, very rarely, just a suspended sentence. “It is unusual to send people to prison for these kinds of crime,” He‹kov‡ said.
Nevertheless, the number of copyright prosecutions is growing, though slowly. He‹kov‡ said about 500 cases were referred to the police last year compared to around 200 in 2002 and less than 400 in 2003. The referrals in 2006 led to 350 adjudications. Internet-based crimes made up quite a small proportion of the overall caseload, at less than 10 percent, the reason being that prosecuting a DVD-based case is that much easier. In a DVD-based case, hard evidence is provided by illegal copies found at a marketplace, but in an Internet-based case solid evidence can prove elusive. “We try hard, but [our efforts] are still not enough to reduce Internet piracy,” He‹kov‡ said.
The ČPU would like to see some legislative changes to make its task easier. “It would be very helpful if, for example, providers of Internet services were obliged to give us data about their clients in an incidence where illegal material is found on their server. Although providers often cooperate, this obligation is still not in place here,” Hekov said.
Music’s peak was back in ’98
As with the Czech film, software and games sectors, the domestic music industry also has plenty of players wincing at the pain caused by Internet piracy. “It was in 1998 that the music industry reached its peak. Today our sales have fallen to about one-third of the amount achieved in that year,“ said Tomä Filip, CEO of music publisher Universal Music. “Along with the financial losses caused, the possibilities for reinvesting finances into new prospective talents are limited. This eventually has an influence on the broadness of the musical spectrum,” said Petra ëikovsk from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
The growth in both pirated music CDs and digital music files disturbs Filip. “With CDs, the Czech market rate of legal to illegal copies is nowadays about 50:50, but where digital music is concerned the illegal rate is close to 100 percent,” he said. Some product protection efforts made by music producers and distributors have foundered on technical problems. “About five years ago, we tried to protect our CDs, but it ended up counterproductive because not all players were able to play them back,” Filip said.
The newest trend in the protection area is digital rights management (DRM), implemented with all kinds of music formats, but mainly MP3s. However, as with everything, DRM has its drawbacks. Not all MP3 players are able to replay music with DRM. “This is not a problem in Western countries, where iTunes and iPods are widespread. When somebody buys protected music through iTunes in these countries, they can simply play it on their iPod, which is fully compatible with DRM,” Filip said, adding that DRM has only been introduced to the Czech market relatively recently, meaning hardware compatibility problems are still evident.
Prevention better than cure
With faster and faster Internet connections penetrating more and more of the market, most filmmaking and music industry experts agree that most headway against copyright violation can be made by following the path of prevention. “We give lots of lectures at schools and film festivals,” Hekov from the ČPU said. “You have to explain to young people that downloading an illegal copy of a movie from the Internet is the same as, for example, stealing groceries, something which most of them will never do in their life.” More severe legislation and publicizing precautionary tales could also discourage people from entering into piracy. ëikovsk also talked of a third way of fulfilling a customer’s needs. “I think that a cure for some piracy would be well-working Internet stores with competitive prices and additional services, such as concert information [regarding the music they are purchasing],” she said.
But whether that proves to be the case or not, those leading the fight against piracy are all too conscious of two uncomfortable truths: The pirate never sleeps and, as long as something is free, it will always be cheaper than everything else.
http://www.cbw.cz/phprs/2007080625.html
'Simpsons Movie' Hits Snag in India
Nyay Bhushan
Another mega overseas weekend for "The Simpsons Movie" got little help from India as a number of the nation's leading multiplex chains refused to screen the film after a breakdown in negotiations with its distributor, Mumbai-based Warner Bros. India, which also handles 20th Century Fox product here.
A failure to agree on the number of showings for the film is at the heart of the issue according to exhibitors. Warner Bros. India declined comment.
Thanks to a previous agreement with New Delhi-based multiplex chains PVR Cinemas, Wave Cinemas and Satyam Cinemas, "The Simpsons Movie" opened Aug. 3 on a handful of screens in the city. But Mumbai-based chains Fame, Inox, Adlabs, Fun Republic, Cinemax, Movietime and Citypride boycotted the film nationwide.
"Warners was demanding that we book at least five or six shows but that was impossible considering we had major Indian films opening as well such as 'Gandhi My Father' and 'Cash,' " Vishal Anand, marketing manager for 50-screen chain Fun Republic, said in an interview Monday. "We decided to boycott the film altogether."
"Simpsons" was expected to be released in India on about 40 prints and industry estimates reckon that the boycott could amount to lost opening weekend revenue of about $75,000 (3 million rupees).
Moreover, the "Simpsons" boycott also led to the multiplex chains pulling Warners' "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," which was in its third week of a successful run.
But Anand confirmed that a deal was reached Monday following negotiations with 20th Century Fox Australia. "We are now opening the film from Tuesday with about three shows," he said.
The weekend snafu is being seen as an opportunity for Sony Pictures Releasing, which opened the animated film "Surf's Up" on Friday.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...9251e5d3?imw=Y
Can Hollywood Make a Bollywood Movie?
Anand Giridharadas
MUMBAI: An Indian woman in a flowing, beaded gown glides through a pond. As the drumbeats of the Indian countryside patter, a dancing phalanx of tunic-clad women twirls. A mosquito net brushes over the woman's lover. A silver anklet splashes into a pond.
These are scenes from the trailer of a forthcoming movie, "Saawariya." The film, whose Hindi title means beloved, has an Indian director and cast. It is melodramatic. Its characters speak Hindi and burst into eight song-and-dance routines. It is, in other words, vintage Bollywood - but for one thing.
It is brought to you by Hollywood.
The studio behind "Saawariya," Sony Pictures, is the first in what will become a wave of American studios to produce their own kaleidoscopic, song-and-dance Bollywood films. The American studios are keen to make money in India, but in a nation where $19 of every $20 spent at the box office goes to domestic films, the studios are deciding to join Bollywood, not try to beat it.
"The importing of American films into India is not filling a gap," Gareth Wigan, vice chairman of Columbia TriStar, the Sony division that produced the film, said by telephone from Los Angeles. "You're not bringing a dish to a bare table. You're bringing a dish to a table where you have to move a lot of other dishes to fit in, and that's not true in a lot of other countries."
And so begins a strange competition to make the best Bollywood film, pitting Hollywood, the world's most profitable industry, against India's own studios, the reigning masters of the genre, which make more movies and sell more tickets than any film industry in the world.
With movie audiences shrinking in America and swelling here, Hollywood wants to tap into India's market. But Indian-made films captured 95 percent of the country's box-office sales in 2006, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Domestic films are just as dominant in the United States, but they account for just 35 percent of the box office in France, 33 percent in Japan and 12 percent in Britain, according to 2005 data published by two scholars, David Waterman and Sang-Woo Lee.
"There is no country on the planet, other than India and the United States, that approaches that level of domestic business," Andrew Cripps, the president of Paramount Pictures International, said by telephone from Los Angeles. And so Paramount, too, is contemplating Indian productions.
Walt Disney has partnered with an Indian studio, Yash Raj Films, to make animated movies for Indians. The first film, "Roadside Romeo," due next summer, is a parable of Indian inequality, featuring a dog abandoned by rich owners in Mumbai and forced to brave its hungry streets.
And Warner Brothers is developing two Bollywood projects, including one song-and-dance smorgasbord, according to Richard Fox, the head of its international division. In a telephone interview, he said Warner would seek to earn a majority of its Indian sales from Bollywood productions. The studio plans three to six movies a year in the coming years, all with Indian talent.
"We're not coming to change anything," Fox said.
That is Hollywood's Indian mantra. Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the director of "Saawariya," was at first wary that Hollywood would trample him, and was surprised when Sony left him alone. At most, he said, Wigan would offer gentle, helpful suggestions for the script, which is based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's short story "White Nights."
"There was no compromise asked of the film," Bhansali said, staring out at the Arabian Sea from his stylish north Mumbai apartment.
On Saturday, the International Herald Tribune was permitted to view the movie trailer, which had yet to be shown even to Sony executives.
Hollywood is now Bollywood's competitor, but local filmmakers say Hollywood is wise in attempting to mimic it, not supplant it.
"They're doing the right thing," Yash Chopra, one of Bollywood's most revered filmmakers, said in an interview. "To come to a country to make a film is either to understand the culture or break the culture."
Others doubt that U.S. executives grasp the nuances that entice Indian audiences. Tyler Cowen, the author of "Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures," said it was unusual for Hollywood "to try to copy the native style so exactly."
"That is unusual for a reason," he said. "It usually doesn't work."
"Bollywood," whose name amalgamates Hollywood and Bombay, the former name for Mumbai, refers to Hindi-language movies made in Mumbai, which account for roughly one-fifth of India's 1,000 or so annual productions.
Cinema is booming in India as the middle class mushrooms and builders erect air-conditioned multiplexes in cities. PricewaterhouseCoopers expects India's film industry to expand to $4.4 billion a year in 2011 from $2.1 billion in 2006.
Hollywood wants more of that pie, whether through imported or locally made content, and this year it had surprising success with imports. Among other triumphs, "Spider-Man 3" made $17 million in India, becoming the most successful Hollywood film in the country's history.
Behind these successes is a trend toward dubbing films not just into Hindi, but also into regional languages like Bhojpuri and Telegu.
But dubbing cannot woo a billion Indians. Uday Singh, Sony's India chief, estimates that a Hollywood movie in English can attract five million viewers. Dubbing expands the upper limit to 30 million, still a mere fragment of India's population.
Now, with "Saawariya," Singh said his Los Angeles colleagues have accepted that only Bollywood fills the seats. He believes Sony will earn 90 percent of its Indian keep from Bollywood-style films.
Hollywood has gone native elsewhere, in France, Germany, Hong Kong and beyond - but never against a domestic industry with so vast and impassioned a following.
For millions of Indians without television sets, movies are the primary entertainment form - as they were for all Indians through the 1980s, when there was just one television channel. For big Indian families with diverging tastes that watch movies together, Bollywood packages romance, comedy, drama and action into a single serving.
Bollywood is interactive. Bhansali recalled taking his maid to one of his movies. During a musical number, she leaped from her seat and began dancing. "You sit down, you're embarrassing me," Bhansali recalled telling her. "I'm the director. People are looking at me."
She retorted that if he didn't want the movie enjoyed as it should be, he shouldn't have invited her.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle for Hollywood is that Bollywood is everywhere here. Actors' images are ubiquitous. Bollywood show tunes engross Indians. There is what might be called a music-industrial complex in India, hooking consumers to the songs on a soundtrack before the film is released.
Nightclub D.J.s play the songs. Phone companies release matching ringtones. MTV plays them incessantly. By the time the movie comes out, its songs are stuck in millions of heads, and watching it is the only path to closure.
"If you take all the pieces of Bollywood out of our lives - the celebrities on the billboards, the songs in the nightclubs, the stars on Page 3 - Indians would find their lives to be completely empty," said Shuchi Pandya, a jewelry merchandiser in Mumbai. "It's subconscious. Even if you don't enjoy Bollywood movies, it becomes a part of your life."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/.../bollywood.php
Hungary's New Tax Breaks, Facilities are Key Draws
Nick Holdsworth
Sweeping fields of sunflowers dotted here and there with the smaller enclosures of Chardonnay-producing vineyards roll away from a sun-baked hilltop that sits above this small village 16 miles northwest of Budapest.
The chalky soil is good for the grapes -- the white wines of Eytek are among the best in Hungary -- and the panoramic vista from the hilltop offers uninterrupted views of green below and blue above stretching to the Buda hills far on the horizon.
Once home to Soviet ballistic missile silos, today the hillside has been cleared of its Cold War contamination of bunkers, machine oils and munitions and a new world is taking shape.
On an 84-acre site that broke ground last September and is still under construction, Central Europe's latest new film studios are open for business, with Universal's "Hellboy 2: The Golden Army" shooting in its four complete soundstages (totaling a combined 69,000 square feet) and outdoors on its back lot since early June.
The studios are the brainchild of locally born property magnate Sandor Demjan, who owns the hillside and much of the land around it. Investors in the $127 million Korda Studios include Demjan, Hungarian-born Hollywood producer Andrew Vajna, financier Nathaniel Rothschild and Canadian businessman Peter Munk.
The studios are named after Hungarian-born filmmaker Alexander Korda, who built England's Denham Studios in the 1930s and is credited with reviving Britain's depressed pre-World War II film industry (he was knighted by Britain's King George VI in 1942 for his services to the film industry). When completed next year, the new studios at Eytek will boast the world's largest indoor water tank, with graduated depths of up to 20 feet and a clear height of 65 feet.
Dubbed the "superstage," today the 69,000-square-foot filming facility is just a shallow depression in the sun-baked clay and chalk construction site that surrounds the completed soundstages, props and facilities buildings where "Hellboy" -- starring Ron Perlman as the eponymous anti-hero -- will be filming until the autumn.
The developers brought forward the opening of the studios by three months to accommodate the Universal production, employing an army of 500 laborers on triple 24-hour shifts to finish in time.
"Hellboy's" backers are more than happy. "We had dates to hit and Korda was able to do that, which was fantastic, as otherwise we would be shooting in warehouses," executive producer Chris Symes says.
The decision to shoot at Korda was driven in part by Hungary's much-publicized new 20% tax break on production, Symes adds.
"We all know that studios are bottom-line businesses and costs are paramount," he says. "Hungary has a great advantage over other places because it is a very simple tax credit and that makes all the difference."
Laszlo Krisan, managing director and CEO of Korda Studios, says Demjan is already eyeing new opportunities -- in Russia.
"Mr. Demjan is in talks to participate in building new studios in Moscow. Although there are many studios in Russia, they are mainly for the domestic market. Mr. Demjan sees opportunities for studios aimed at the international market."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...0dadb378b33e3d
Brits Making it Big In Tinsel Town
James MacGregor
The number of Britons working in the American film industry has surged by 20% in the past five years. More than 30,000 actors, directors, writers and moneymen are living in Los Angeles alone, according to their unions. Flooded by applications, the LA office of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts has all but closed its doors to new members.
According to the Sunday Times, these Brits are not flying to LA for the sunshine, but to make movies and money - and are succeeding. Reel Britannia, The Sunday Times survey of British talent in the US film business, as judged by Hollywood insiders, shows a new generation has been making itself at home in Hollywood over the past three years, following the trail pioneered by the brothers Scott, Ridley and Tony, who according to their peers are the most powerful Britons in Hollywood today.
They achieved that position by creating a business empire on the back of blockbuster successes like Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and Man on Fire. Widening into television programmes and a studio business, took them through the leaner years between the big screen hits.
Some of their $500m (Ł250m) Hollywood box office success has been reinvested back home, allowing the Scotts to refurbish the Pinewood and Shepperton studios they own in Britain, winning back from Prague the filming of the next movie in the Bond franchise.
Australian actors and Mexican directors are generating headlines, but behind the camera are British directors and moneymen, designers and writers. The UK Film Council confirms that British directors made 19 of the 200 biggest films in the last six years, with more than half of the top 200 featuring British acting talent. The writers behind two of the three most successful Holly-wood-financed franchises in history - Star Wars, James Bond and Harry Potter - are Brits.
Batman producer Peter Guber puts it down to the internet. "The Brits were early adopters of the net, which has made their product and skills more available in niche markets than ever before," he said. "The buzz about the original version of The Office came through the net even before it was shown on the cable channel BBC America, prompting NBC to buy the format for its own version before it got stale - which is what killed earlier British sitcoms."
Other studios realised from The Office success that there was money in embarrassment. Enter Sacha Baron Cohen, whose Borat cost $18m to shoot and grossed $260m at the box office - and that was before DVD and television sales.
Eddie Izzard, now a leading man, followed, so did Simon Pegg and Steve Coogan who are being seen as "formatters" of comedies and comedy is becoming a leading British export.
HOW THEY WERE JUDGED
The UK Film Council produced a ‘long list' of 100 British actors, directors and other specialists principally employed in the American film industry, from which the Sunday Times jury considered 40 leading talents and split them into ‘above the line' (actors) and ‘below the line' (everyone else).
The jury voted on five criteria: past contribution, current status, talent, future prospects and liability (how easy they are to work with).
REEL BRITANNIA
Behind the camera
1 Ridley Scott, 69, and Scott Free Productions Tony Scott, 63
2 Peter Rice, 39 President, Fox Searchlight
3 Colin Callender, 55 President, HBO Films
4 Simon Fuller, 47 Chief executive, 19 Entertainment
5 Graham King, 45 Chief executive Initial Entertainment Group
6 Mark Burnett, 47 Chief executive, MBP production company
7 Sir Howard Stringer, 64 Chief executive, Sony Corporation
8 Nick Reed, 44 Literary/fi lm agent Bridget Jones, the Bourne Identity
9 Paul Greengrass, 51 Director United 93, The Bourne Supremacy
10 Guy Hendrix Dyas, 38 Designer Superman Returns, The Matrix
IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA
1. Kate Winslet, 31 five Oscar nominations since Titanic
2. Sacha Baron Cohen, 35 a cultural phenomenon
3. Christian Bale, 33 the modern Batman
4. Dame Helen Mirren, 62 Thespian royalty
5. Hugh Grant, 46 still the classic leading man
6. Jude Law, 34 overexposed, but respected
7. Rachel Weisz, 36 Looking for a second Oscar
8. Keira Knightley, 22 English beauty beloved by Pirates
9 Ralph Fiennes, 44 the constant actor and Oscar nominee
10. Daniel Craig, 39 Bonding with Hollywood
SUCCEEDING FROM HOME
1. J K Rowling, 42 author - Edinburgh
2. Tim Bevan, 50 and Eric Fellner, 47 Working Title - London
3. Richard Curtis, 50 writer-director - London
4. Catherine Zeta-Jones, 37 Oscar-winning actress - Bermuda
5. Dame Judi Dench, 72 Oscar-winning actress - Surrey
LEADING PLAYERS
Ridley and Tony Scott; producer Peter Rice of Fox Searchlight; Colin Callender, the most influential Briton in American television: Graham King who turned British TV series Traffic into an Oscar-winning movie; Paul Greengrass, who directed United 93, an account of the September 11 hijackings.
http://www.netribution.co.uk/2/content/view/1244/182/
Bloodthirsty New Book Incites a Bidding War
Robert Ito
The item up for bidding was, at first blush, unremarkable. It was an unfinished manuscript, 397 pages long, less than half of the planned book, as well as an outline detailing story arcs and plot points to come. The writer? Someone named Jordan Ainsley, whom no one had ever heard of — not readers, not book editors, certainly not anyone in Hollywood. Yet the biggest movie studios were being asked to pony up seven figures for the privilege of committing the book, sight half-unseen, to film.
And the studios promptly, and exuberantly, threw themselves into a bidding war.
For five days Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox battled over the film rights to Mr. Ainsley’s novel “The Passage,” the first book of a planned trilogy about vampires born not of bat bites, but of medical experiments gone awry. The winning bid, made last month by Fox 2000 and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions, was $1.75 million.
The auction is just the latest indicator of the lengths that studios will go to in search of their next franchise, at a time when it seems that all the biggest projects have already been done or spoken for.
“Fantasy has always been popular in Hollywood,” said Elizabeth Gabler, president of Fox 2000 Pictures. “And between the ‘Lord of the Rings’ films and the upcoming end of the Harry Potter series, everybody’s looking for what the next version of those movies will be.”
Recent fantasy book-to-film projects include “Stardust,” the years-in-the-offing Paramount release based on a Neil Gaiman mini-series for DC Comics, which opened yesterday, and “The Golden Compass,” a $150 million New Line film based on the first novel in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, which opens in December.
While Fox’s bid was high for an unestablished, unpublished entity, it was hardly out of line, given other recent purchases. In May Warner Brothers — Harry Potter’s home studio — reportedly paid more than $1 million for the film rights to “Skulduggery Pleasant,” a children’s book about a skeleton who is a detective. Two years ago the Walt Disney Company and Jerry Bruckheimer Films spent $1.5 million for an unpublished fantasy novel by Ahmet Zappa.
All of this makes you downright nostalgic for 1998, when J. K. Rowling sold the film rights to both of the then-existing Potter books — the movies have since grossed more than $3.5 billion internationally — for a sum in the low seven figures.
Of course, banking on a fantasy franchise is not without its risks; the roster of bombs is enough to chill even the bravest of producer’s hearts. For every “Lord of the Rings” there’s a “Treasure Planet” — an animated Disney film that cost an estimated $140 million and sold less than $40 million of tickets domestically — with the potential losses magnified by often hyper-inflated budgets for special effects.
“The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” Terry Gilliam’s 1988 comedy-adventure movie about a world-traveling aristocrat, brought in just $8 million domestically. And 2001’s “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” based on the video game about an alien invasion, made back less than a quarter of its $137 million budget in the United States, and $85 million over all.
The frenzy for the “Passage” film rights was unleashed even before the first pitch went out to the studios. Two weeks before the studio deal, Ellen Levine, a literary agent at Trident Media Group, had taken the manuscript to the country’s biggest publishing houses, including Random House and the Penguin Group. Ms. Levine chose to send out the book under the pseudonym Jordan Ainsley because the author, Justin Cronin, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for his 2001 short-story collection, “Mary and O’Neil,” was known more for midsize family dramas than for Stephen King-size thrillers.
“We weren’t trying to hide who he was, but I didn’t want him to be typecast as one kind of author, and I thought this had vast commercial potential,” Ms. Levine said.
The story, a futuristic fable about death row inmates transformed into vampires by a government-spawned virus, hit a nerve with publishers. A number tried to block their competitors with pre-emptive offers, some in the millions. The offers were summarily rejected, and the manuscript was put on the block at a “best bids” auction between four houses on July 3.
The winner for the United States rights to the trilogy was Ballantine Books, which New York magazine reported had paid $3.75 million, a figure that Mark Tavani, the book’s editor, said was “not correct, but in the ballpark.”
When the author’s identity was revealed to Libby McGuire, Ballantine’s publisher, she said that the company would publish the book under Mr. Cronin’s name. The first novel in the trilogy is to be released in the summer of 2009, with the others to be published in 2011 and 2013.
By the time Ms. Levine began shopping the manuscript to the studios two weeks later, much of Hollywood had already seen it. Scouts working for the studios, as is their wont with all similarly talked-about books, had gotten copies of Mr. Cronin’s work into the hands of producers at most of the major studios.
The auction for film rights was a shock for Mr. Cronin. “I’ve written several novels, never once thinking they could or should be movies,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Which doesn’t mean it isn’t nice, now that it’s happened.”
As the studios and their partners (Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment, with Universal; Scott Rudin and Sam Raimi with Sony; and the screenwriter Akiva Goldsman with Warner Brothers) found out about the competition for the material, prices climbed.
Unlike the three-book deal signed by Ballantine, the fee paid by Fox is only for the first book of the planned trilogy. “There were reports that there was a certain amount of money, and that was for three books, but that is not true,” said Ms. Levine, who is currently shopping the trilogy to foreign publishers. (She said she had already sealed deals in seven other countries.)
Yet paying nearly $2 million for an unfinished book that nobody will see for another couple of years is not all that odd, at least not in Hollywood. For the studios, big payouts for properties based on outlines and concepts rather than on finished books or fully formed screenplays is not uncommon; many of the superhero movies of late have been sold on little more than a few comic books and the broadest of plot ideas.
And if the movie bombs?
“I’m sure in some year-end meetings, someone has to account for them, and someone loses a job,” said Amy Schiffman, vice president of books and literary properties at the Gersh Agency. “But every year the studios keep clamoring for more, now more than ever. There are a lot of Harry Potter wannabes in development, trying to get to be movies. The conventional wisdom of the studios now is, you risk more, you make more.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/11/movies/11vamp.html
I Have No Appetite for Shows with a Short Shelf-Life
Anthony Lilley
I used to quite like the BBC iPlayer. I dimly remember playing around with it and thinking that it had a nice feel, let me find programmes reasonably easily and had the suggestion that an archive of some depth might eventually be lurking in the background. That was about it, though. And this was, of course, a long time ago; before the public value test, the market impact assessment and the launch of more online video-on-demand services, like Joost, than you can shake a stick at.
Now I'm all for the BBC making available as much of its catalogue as possible in a way which makes sense for both the licence fee payer and the producer. But, as the iPlayer semi-launches I'm worried about what it is getting itself into.
Mark Thompson, the BBC's director general, said "the iPlayer is at least as big a redefinition of what TV can be . . . as colour television was 40 years ago." I'm afraid I don't agree. The statement confuses the general with the particular. The availability of full, high quality, on-demand access to content - including masses of archive from the BBC, when I want it, not limited by TV schedules reaching out from beyond the grave to determine how long I can watch something for - would, I agree, be a ground-shaking event. But that's not what has just happened, not at all.
What has just taken place is the slow release - some have called it a "shuffle out" - of a particular bit of software which, mainly, lets you watch last week's TV. I already have something for this task, it's called a PVR. Said software runs only on Windows, on a particular version of Internet Explorer and with, wait for it, Microsoft Media Player. Now, I'm no iconoclastic Linux moonbat, but I think this is symptomatic of faulty logic and a short-sighted approach.
At root is the question of motivation. What drives the iPlayer, content or technology? Obviously it's both, as it should be, but the balance is all-important and iPlayer is off-beam and falls short of succeeding at either. The superstitious might see this as a symbol of a wider confusion in the media sector.
In order to get the iPlayer launched, the BBC has had to assure rights holders that their precious IP would be safe from piracy and that other revenue streams would be unaffected. This is what video-on-demand blokes always say, regardless of the fact that it's basically not true and never can be. The problem is that content providers behave as if they genuinely believe it and set up services which are defined by restrictions. This is why we must suffer a "seven day catch-up service". So, courtesy of DRM, we now have TV programmes with use-by dates, like yoghurt. And, let's be honest, no amount of animated BBC graphics saying things like "three days left" is going to turn this particular bug into a feature.
And does the BBC really need its own platform to achieve this impossibly protective dream? What will the total cost of ownership be? To keep the iPlayer anywhere near the level of functionality of similar commercial offerings as they rapidly develop is going to cost millions of pounds every year and at some point demand more public value tests. Is this a good use of scarce licence-fees in the long run? If the iPlayer is a start, what's the endgame?
Nonetheless, praise where it is due to the BBC for aiming to broaden access to its often wonderful content - the current furore about truth and accuracy notwithstanding - but questions remain about how it has chosen to go about it.
If the BBC was minded to drive innovation in the market for video-on-demand software, assuming time hasn't eroded the innovation, it would now be open-sourcing as much of the code behind the iPlayer as possible - as it effectively did with Nicam audio. If its primary aim was to get content out as widely as possible, it would be spending at least as much cash on its open and creative archive projects and on syndication as it has put into the iPlayer, where the rights bill will be pretty significant.
Still, at least there is time to sort this out - not many people are using these broadcast catch-up services on their PCs yet - and remember, if they really want high quality content, some people get it from peer-to-peer or YouTube; seven day catch-up of Flog It anyone?
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/sto...142180,00.html
Blockbuster to Buy Movielink Web Service
Gary Gentile
Video rental chain Blockbuster Inc. said Wednesday it is buying the digital movie download service Movielink, giving it the online foothold it has long sought to compete with rival Netflix Inc.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Blockbuster, based in Dallas, said it will continue to operate Movielink as a stand-alone service and eventually make elements of the service available through Blockbuster.com.
Movielink was launched by five studios in 2002, marking the first time that a large supply of recent, popular films was available for rental on the Internet.
A call to Santa Monica-based Movielink was not immediately returned.
The privately held service has struggled to gain popularity, even as it allowed the purchase of films and signed licensing agreements with all major studios and a large number of independent film companies.
"Our acquisition of Movielink, with its associated digital content, is the next logical step in our planned transformation of Blockbuster," chairman and chief executive Jim Keyes said in a statement.
"Now, in addition to the entertainment content we provide through our stores and by mail, we have taken an important step toward being able to make movie downloading conveniently available to computers, portable devices and ultimately to the television at home," he said.
Blockbuster's Total Access service, which allows customers to receive DVD rentals through the mail, has about 3.6 million subscribers. Netflix has 6.7 million subscribers and also lets them download about 3,000 movie and TV titles directly to a personal computer.
Movielink was launched by the studios to stave off enormous losses coming from people downloading illegal copies of movies over the Internet. The company is owned equally by Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros.
http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=111&sid=1213493
Hackers Discover How to Download Streaming Movies from Netflix
Brad Linder
Earlier this year Netflix announced a new service that would allow you to watch a limited number of videos online instead of waiting for the DVDs to come in the mail. The service is free with your regular subscription. If you pay $17/month for access to 3 DVDs at a time, you can watch 17 hours of video per month. If you pay $5 per month for access to 2 DVDs per month, you can watch 5 hours of video online.
There's just one problem. You have to watch on Netflix's terms. The video player is browser based, and the movies are encoded using Windows Media DRM. If you want to begin a movie now and finish it later, you're out of luck. Or if you want to copy it to a portable device for viewing during your morning commute (on the train, not while driving, of course!), no soup for you.
Well, the smart folks over at the Rorta forums seem to have cracked the code, using Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player 11, FairUse4WM, and Notepad. The solution involves finding the URL of the video file, downloading it, acquiring the license key and then stripping the DRM. It's a bit involved, and will probably take longer than just sitting down and watching the movie. But hey, it's the principle of the thing, right?
Keep in mind, this hack will not let you download more than 17 hours of video per month, so it's not exactly going to be a great trick for starting your online video piracy empire.
Update: As several people have pointed out in the comments, you can indeed stop a Netflix "watch now" movie and start it again later, or fast forward to any point in a film to begin watching. Thanks!
http://www.tvsquad.com/2007/08/06/ha...-from-netflix/
Video Company TO Stream Movies, TV Shows for Free, But Legal, Technical Issues Pose Major Challenges
Troy Wolverton
BitTorrent is rolling out a service that could usher in a whole new era of television.
Beginning next month, the San Francisco video and media distribution company will offer some of its library of television and feature films - which include titles such as "Letters from Iwo Jima" and "24" - for free as streaming videos, supported by advertising.
While it's too early to know how consumers will respond to the new service, it and similar offerings on the way from BitTorrent rivals point to a potential revolution in how consumers access television and movies.
That's because the services are a lot closer to traditional television than previous Internet video offerings, making it more likely they'll be adopted by viewers.
Instead of having to pay for shows and wait 30 minutes or even hours to download them - like they might have to do with videos from iTunes, say - users will be able to watch them right away at no cost.
Internet-delivered video services such as BitTorrent's have largely been viewed as complementary to existing cable and satellite television services, supplementing them and reaching consumers who don't subscribe to these services.
But some analysts say offerings such as BitTorrent's could eventually replace cable or satellite television.
"It's inevitable that the traditional broadcasting infrastructure will be replaced by (Internet) infrastructure that's on-demand," said Aram Sinnreich, managing partner of Radar Research, a consulting firm that works with media and technology companies.
For all its revolutionary potential, BitTorrent's service will begin rather modestly. The company plans to quietly roll out the service starting with its top 10 titles.
The company doesn't plan to officially launch it until sometime in the third quarter, but eventually it plans to offer all of the 10,000 videos in its library as streams.
Meanwhile, BitTorrent will be experimenting with how to incorporate advertising into the videos, which will be embedded in Flash windows inside Web pages. In addition to ads offering consumers the option to buy a download of the video, the company plans to test watermark logos, as well as showing commercials before, after and during the videos.
BitTorrent's streaming service is only the latest development in the fast-moving world of digital video. Start-up Joost is already testing a similar streaming service with video from CBS, Sony pictures television and other providers.
Netflix got into the game earlier this year with a service that allows subscribers to watch streams of movies on their PCs rather than having a DVD sent to their house. Santa Clara-based Vudu is testing a service that would bypass PCs and stream rented or purchased movies from the Internet directly to a proprietary set-top box.
And that's not to mention the Web sites of major networks such as ABC and NBC, which stream recent episodes of many of their current television shows through their Web sites.
Those streaming services follow the older video download services offered by BitTorrent, Apple's iTunes, Akimbo and others. The big difference: A streaming video plays almost immediately; downloaded video does not start playing until a sizable portion of the file is stored on a viewer's machine.
The promise of such Internet-based video services is to offer something the cable and satellite networks don't: a universe of content available instantly at the touch of a button.
But don't cancel your cable service just yet. The promise is far from being realized.
One of the biggest challenges is to get the video off the PC-based Internet and onto consumers' big-screen TVs. Apple TV and similar products are attempting to bridge that gap. But home networking technology to tie such devices to PCs is still difficult to set up and often doesn't have enough bandwidth to ensure high-quality, high-resolution video.
Another challenge has to do with the licensing of content. Although digital distribution has the potential of offering viewers every video ever produced whenever they want it, today the reality is far from that. BitTorrent, for instance, lacks content from Sony and Walt Disney.
And such companies are going to have to contend with the sometimes arcane rules governing video distribution that determine when and where particular movies and television shows can be shown.
"A lot" of whether Internet-delivered video reaches its promise "is going to come down to licensing and pricing," said Mike McGuire, a media industry analyst for research firm Gartner.
Comcast doesn't see much of a threat from Internet-delivered video, said Andrew Johnson, a spokesman. Cable companies already provide most broadband connections to consumers' homes, he noted, so cable companies are poised to continue to be important players even if consumers get rid of their cable boxes.
And that seems unlikely, because people are going to continue to turn to traditional television for things like the Super Bowl, he said.
"Most folks are going turn on their flat-screen TV and look for (that programming) there," Johnson said. "That's definitely where the consumer seems to be right now."
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_6514263
Google Is Closing Its Video Retailing Operation
After buying the video-sharing site YouTube nine months ago for $1.65 billion, Google plans to stop selling television shows on its homegrown video site.
The company will stop offering download-to-own and download-to-rent programs on Wednesday, according to an e-mail message sent to customers yesterday. Google started selling shows like ”Survivor” in January 2006.
Google’s decision to close the retail part of its video site indicates the company had less success selling content than attracting advertising spending, which accounts for 99 percent of revenue. The purchase of YouTube, where the videos are all free, catapulted Google from seventh to first among video-sharing providers on the Web.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/11/te.../11google.html
The Internet's Next Big Thing: File Sharing
Don Reisinger
No, believe it or not, you're not reading that headline in a time traveling device, I actually said that the Internet's next big thing will be file sharing. And why will file sharing be so popular in the next few years even though organizations are doing everything possible to stop the spread of such "egregious" activities? Because organizations are doing everything possible to stop the spread of such "egregious" activities.
Sometimes I wonder if government officials and the RIAA cronies ever had mothers that taught them how to handle with things they didn't like. For example, when you were in school and kids ridiculed you for your looks or your taste in music, did calling the teacher over or telling mommy and daddy do you any good? Now what if you ignored those people? Did that work? I'll bet it did.
In an effort to eradicate those evil, awful, disgusting file sharing criminals, governments and organizations from around the world are united in the ideal that all-out brute-force tactics will take the day. And while it may have stopped Napster and LimeWire (to a small degree), has it stopped AllofMP3 who just moved to another domain? Did it stop the defendants in a recent German trial who were accused of "criminal damage" until the judge called the offense "petty"? Hate to break it to you so harshly, but trying to scare people into stopping file sharing isn't going to work. And the more you do it, the worse it'll get.
As I've mentioned before, I don't understand the urgency to eradicate file sharing. Independent artists allow for free downloads of their music and find a dedicated audience in the process. And before the self-righteous RIAA breaks into a song and dance claiming file sharing only hurts the artists, I'd like to ask them how much money artists get from a $.99 download of their music. Most studies estimate a nickel at best. Is that somehow more fair?
The future of file sharing is bright and has no bounds. It's as simple as that.
As the RIAA gains more funding and backing from its goons in Washington, it'll be given the proverbial ticket to go after little Johnny the ten-year old and Aunt Ethel the 80-year old because well, who will stop it? But what the RIAA and government officials don't realize is this plan will backfire.
People naturally gather around the underdog -- the group that stands up to the big bad guy and does so without reservation. AllofMP3 was just a start -- there will be a bunch more where that came from.
If the RIAA and governments from around the world took a step back and realized that the practices it currently employs are only leading to an ever-increasing instance of file sharing, it would quickly change tactics. There's a war on drugs and poverty. If you go downtown in almost any city in the world and hang out on a corner, I guarantee you will see both in a matter of minutes. Does that mean we should turn a blind eye? Of course not. But what it does mean is a so-called "war" on an issue in society doesn't work as well as planned and it certainly won't work against something that people feel is fine.
Ask anyone you know if they would rather pay $.99 for a song or have the same exact song for free and I think you know what the answer will be. Does that make them bad people? Not at all. Does that make them dislike the artist any less? Of course not. Will it make them go to a concert the next time that band is in town? You better believe it. The RIAA and governments are fighting the wrong enemy. It's not John and Jane Doe downloading the occasional song here and there who should be targeted, it's the music industry.
If you want to look at a business that is actually robbing artists of a living, look no further than the big record labels. As I mentioned earlier, artists barely make anything off of an iTunes download, while the record label laughs all the way to the bank. And yet, some people actually believe the propaganda when the RIAA comes out and claims we are taking money away from the artists who threw their blood, sweat and tears into a song. The record industry is upset because IT doesn't walk away with the money. Trust me, there's no other reason.
The future of file sharing is bright. And whether the record industry and government officials want to believe it or not, the tactics currently being employed will only make it worse. Believe what you will, but the RIAA is in for a rude awakening.
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13506_1-9...TheDigitalHome
Education 2.0: The College Student's Guide to File Sharing
Sean Hollister
College: You finally made it. But now that you're here, how should you spend your first few weeks at school?
Filling up the hard drive of your brand-new Toshiba R500 with loads of music and video files, that's how -- harnessing the full file-sharing power of a high-speed university-class network?
But how? Is it safe? Legal? Faster than asking your parents to burn a few DVDs and put them into their monthly care package?
Excellent questions -- the mark of a true student. Welcome to File Sharing 101.
How to Get What You Want
Assuming you've got your machine connected to the internet and cleaned of viruses and spyware, it's time to choose a network. Heard of Napster or BitTorrent? Both are peer-to-peer networks through which your computer, equipped with the proper software, can find files to download. The actual file transfers happen between your computer and other computers using protocols that distribute the file-sharing load among all the computers, or "peers," on the network.
There are several networks, and for each one, a wide variety of clients (the software that runs on your computer) that will let you connect and share files. Network choice is important because it determines how much privacy you have and how much you have to share in return for obtaining access. We recommend two: BitTorrent and Direct Connect, plus a third option -- one-click hosting services -- for the truly paranoid.
BitTorrent
As a true P2P network without a central server to be sued, raided by police or otherwise confiscated, there's little chance of BitTorrent ever being shut down. The protocol's great popularity means there's no shortage of juicy intellectual property to fill every last perpendicularly stored bit your hard drive has to offer.
Be prepared to Google for your content: Before you can start downloading, you'll need to find trackers (which list files that are available through BitTorrent), and most trackers are hosted on websites that are just as likely to be shut down as their centralized P2P counterparts. (One possible exception: The Pirate Bay, which is based in copy-friendly Sweden, has so far resisted legal efforts aimed at its destruction and has recently announced that it will revive Suprnova, an now-defunct search engine for torrent trackers.)
WIRED The more popular a file, the faster the download. Lots of legal content is available as well.
TIRED No anonymity -- anyone downloading the same file can see your IP address. No incentive to share content means niche files may never finish downloading. Ads (some for explicit content) plague many tracker sites. Many colleges block BitTorrent traffic.
Recommended clients: uTorrent (Windows) or Transmission (Mac)
How to get your content: Search the BitTorrent Download Guide, The Pirate Bay, TorrentBox, Torrentspy and TorrentReactor, or use Google searches with your search term plus the phrase filetype:torrent to locate files you can download.
Direct Connect
Relying on central hubs for indexing purposes, Direct Connect is somewhat risky business for college students who seek large quantities of internet content. Every new public hub you visit is one more that might reveal your queries and the files you're sharing. However, over a high-speed local area network (like the one running through the walls of your dorm) Direct Connect's weakness becomes its greatest strength. Set up a private hub with university-limited IP ranges and password protection, and you have yourself a bona fide darknet capable of transfer speeds that put BitTorrent to shame.
WIRED Serious darknet potential allows for speedy sharing and privacy -- outsiders need to be on the same LAN and have the password to snoop effectively. Simple search feature finds what you want fast, assuming it's there. You can browse through each user's shares individually. Get to know your dorm mates better using integrated chat.
TIRED Cut off from the outside, darknet content quickly gets stale. There's also the inherent dilemma of whom to invite: More users mean more shared files, but also a greater chance that the password will leak to the wrong individual. Direct Connect is slow and unsafe over the public internet.
Recommended clients: DC++ (Windows), Valknut (multiple platforms)
How to get your content: Set up your own hub and invite your friends to join, or bribe the existing nerd ringleaders with your HD DVD collection.
One-Click Hosting
When privacy is at a premium and download speed doesn't matter, it's hard to beat one-click hosting services like Megaupload, RapidShare and Sendspace. Upload your file to the server, send a friend the URL and you're done. Pick a hosting solution outside the United States, and you may even be able to evade the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
WIRED Simple sharing has maximum privacy.
TIRED Registration is often required. Maximum file-size limits are common. It's often faster to carry a flash drive to your on-campus friends.
How to get your content: Reach out and IM someone you know.
Legal Risks
Legal interpretations may vary about what constitutes legitimate sharing of copyrighted content, and we're not lawyers. Sharing a few music clips with your friends may not violate copyright law, but distributing the latest Hollywood blockbuster to 30,000 other fans almost certainly does. So give some thought to your file sharing before you start. While one-click hosting is fairly private at the moment and darknets keep content away from prying eyes, it's all for naught if your university actively monitors traffic and is determined to shut down peer-to-peer activity.
We recommend you check your college's "acceptable use policy" and similar documents to determine their position on file sharing before engaging in potentially illegal activity, or at least make sure you save three grand, the going rate, in case you get caught.
For the legal perspective, go right to the source: the United States Copyright Office FAQ.
You may also want to read online piracy statements from the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's handy guide,
How To Not Get Sued for File Sharing.
http://www.wired.com/print/software/...08/filesharing
GigaTribe Encrypted Private File Sharing Network Adds "Peer-to-Web" Feature
Eliot Van Buskirk
Sure, you could use YouSendIt to share large files with your friends, and BitTorrent to download stuff from strangers, but if you'd rather set up a private, encrypted file sharing ring with your friends and family (for the purposes of sharing home movies, image zips, and personally-composed-and-recorded music, of course), you might give Shalsoft GigaTribe a try.
This Windows-only application allows you to share the contents of individual folders on your PC with friends in your personal network using Blowfish encryption. John Carricaburu of Shalsoft claims that "since you're only sharing with people you know, there's hardly any risk of getting infected or fake files" (assuming, of course, that your friends aren't downloading and sharing them).
Gigatribe, which appears to be free of spyware, adware and viruses, is free to use, although a premium version ($4/month or $25 for a "lifetime subscription") allows you to download more than one file at a time, downloads from multiple sources when possible, and permits you to assign friends varied levels of access to your folders. The new "Peer-to-Web" feature allows you to access folders on your computer from any other PC.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/08/...ibe-encry.html
SpiralFrog Aims for End of Year Launch
Alex Veiga
SpiralFrog.com, an ad-supported Web site that allows visitors to download music and videos free of charge, has begun testing its service with plans to launch by the end of the year.
The New York-based company recently began allowing an unspecified number of users in North America to try out the site, which has about 700,000 tracks available for downloading, said SpiralFrog founder and Chairman Joe Mohen. QUIZ
The company plans to expand its "beta" test in the coming weeks and will launch the service in the United States and Canada after receiving feedback from users, advertisers and recording labels.
"We're really testing the user experience to make sure it satisfies the needs of demanding young consumers," Mohen said.
SpiralFrog lets users download audio tracks and music videos for free, but requires that they register and log on at least once a month to continue to play the content. Though free, the audio and video files carry copy protections like those found on tracks available for sale at Apple's iTunes Store and elsewhere.
It takes 90 seconds to download a track _ more for a video. During that time users are enticed to browse the site and, its advertisers hope, become exposed to more ads.
"The consumer is paying for the music with some time," Mohen said.
Downloads cannot be burned to a CD, but can be transferred to dozens of digital music players. The content, however, is not compatible with Apple's Macintosh computers or its market-leading iPod.
SpiralFrog aroused interest last fall after it announced licensing deals with Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, the world's largest recording company, and performing right organization Broadcast Music Inc. But the company missed its early 2007 launch and instead underwent an executive shuffle that ended with the ouster of then-CEO Robin Kent.
Mohen blamed the launch delay on the time-consuming process of obtaining rights from music publishers, who will be getting 10 percent of ad revenues, and the need to expand its data storage and bandwidth capabilities.
"With SpiralFrog we have an entirely new business model," Mohen said. "In most cases we have to clear the publishing rights ourselves, and that takes a long time."
Mohen said SpiralFrog continues to hold licensing talks with other labels and hopes to have a catalog of around 1.5 million tracks at launch.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...080801884.html
Peer to Peer Media Trading
Ken Drachnik
In this day of internet sharing, there remains quite a bit of "offline" content in the form of books and DVDs that we can't really share. However, two promising internet sites have developed online marketplaces that allow individuals to share / trade these old media bits using the internet. We have use 2 in my household and they seem to work quite well.
DVD Trading
The first one is
peeflix.com which has developed a trading site for people to swap DVDs. They have created a marketplace that assigns a value to DVDs and then tracks who has them to trade and who wants them. Because they assign a value to each DVD you can also create a money account and buy the ones you want if you don't have any to trade. The nice thing about this is anyone can join and get a DVD at a good price. For example, my favorite movie "The 5th Element" is available used for $6! What a great deal. One of the many clever things they did is figure how to develop an envelope that you print from your computer that contains the receiver's address AND electronic postage. You just print out the two pages, fold them around your DVD ( you don't send the artwork), tape it and put it in the mail. It works like a charm. Oh, and I did I mention they are powered by GlassFish?
Book Trading
First there was Half.com which enabled the used book market to flourish - but that site quickly got overwhelmed by used book sellers ( who sell some nearly new books at quite steep discounts). We love Half.com but recently we found
BookMooch.com. BookMooch is a similar peer to peer trading site that matches those who have books with those that want them. The big difference is that BookMooch does not establish a market or price for books - they are simply a matching service that assigns you points for each book you trade. There is no neat "print your own mailer feature" and you have to pay for postage and you get the same number of points for a 1st edition book as you would for the latest Spiderman comic book. Bookmooch doesn't charge anything for the trades so they must be supported by advertising. I"ll have to look more closely at their biz model. Hey, its a neat idea and when we posted 10 books, 9 were in immediate demand so now we can go get more books (at least the total mass of books in our book obsessed household might stay somewhat constant now!).
http://blogs.sun.com/draks/entry/pee..._media_trading
DOT Looks to Avoid Further P2P Leaks
Jaikumar Vijayan
The U.S. Department of Transportation is taking several steps to prevent further exposure of internal information, after more than 90 agency documents were exposed on a peer-to-peer network.
The documents were inadvertently exposed on a file-sharing network after the teenage daughter of a telecommuting DOT worker installed a P2P client on an agency PC containing the information.
Daniel Mintz, the department’s CIO, said the incident prompted the agency to quickly initiate several programs to mitigate the chances of a repeat occurrence involving more-sensitive data.
“P2P software poses a significant risk to departmental systems and networks as well as home computers,” Mintz said. “In many ways, this incident and the nature of the people involved illustrate the challenges” of dealing with P2P.
Steps taken by the department include the following:
• An increased emphasis on moving DOT employees from desktop configurations to secure laptops that feature encryption technologies compatible with Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2.
• Prioritizing the order in which telecommuting employees replace desktop systems with secure laptops.
• Conducting more awareness training programs outlining to new employees and telecommuting workers the risks of downloading and using P2P software.
• The creation of home desktop configuration guides to help telecommuters protect home PCs against inadvertent file-sharing.
• Installation of new centrally managed network security software that can better monitor the use of permitted software and detect the use of prohibited products such as P2P software.
• A review of security policies by the DOT CIO’s office and inspector general to identify other problems that need to be addressed to avoid P2P problems.
http://computerworld.com/action/arti...&intsrc=kc_top
Can Anyone Police File Sharing?
Andy Guess
Campus file sharing briefly hit prominence in Congress last week as colleges lobbied against a proposed amendment in the Senate to the Higher Education Act reauthorization that would have required universities to use “technology-based” systems to try to block illegal downloading activity. While the amendment was withdrawn, it may be revived in the House — and certainly the entertainment industry has no intention of letting the issue go away.
But as lobbyists for colleges and the recording industry worked furiously last week, the debate was over how to best police students, not whether they could be policed. Many regular downloaders today learned their habits long before college and will continue to share copyrighted works after they graduate. Interviews with students at a cross-section of colleges suggest that they view deterrents to file sharing as temporary nuisances, which in time they will figure out a way to get around. So who’s to say that lawmakers on the Hill or record labels in Los Angeles or administrators have any sway over whether students’ cravings for fresh music, readily available movies and the latest TV episodes can ever be stemmed?
“The response has not been to dampen students’ enthusiasm for downloading music,” said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that is critical of lawsuits targeting online music downloaders.
A 2006 survey by Illinois State University’s Digital Citizen Project found that peer-to-peer networks were used by up to 39 percent of rising college freshmen at Illinois State, and that they started downloading as early as the sixth grade. In college, just over a third of students say they download music illegally from peer-to-peer networks, and two-thirds of the downloaders don’t concern themselves over whether the music is copyrighted.
A common belief among downloaders is that sharing files can actually help artists by promoting their work and that there is nothing wrong with it. And this belief is held by today’s students, who have heard the lectures and seen (and ignored) the movie previews on the value of copyright. Alejandro Aguiluz, a student at Evangel University whose stated interests on Facebook include “File Sharing,” compared the practice with checking out books from a library.
The primary weapon wielded by university IT administrators is software that blocks certain types of file downloads on the campus network. One prominent example, CopySense by Audible Magic, has had some demonstrated success. The company’s CEO, Vance Ikezoye, testified to a House of Representatives panel last month that at one campus, peer-to-peer file sharing traffic dropped from 20 gigabytes per day to nearly zero in less than a week after installing the software — leading to a 71-percent drop in the number of users operating peer-to-peer network clients.
But some critics say that this approach — purchasing software that can stem the flow of copyrighted material over campus networks today while ignoring the potential effects on students’ downloading tactics tomorrow — will lead only to a tug-of-war between computer users and IT administrators, a virtual “arms race” that could cost universities millions of dollars while leading only to more sophisticated downloaders.
“I do think that efforts to stop music sharing on campus are futile and are almost certain to remain so,” von Lohmann said. “Some people have pointed to technologies that may be able to intercept file sharing using today’s technology, but as anyone knows who’s been following this, that will almost immediately result in changes and improvements by file-sharing vendors to make their applications ... less vulnerable to that kind of monitoring.”
As an example, von Lohmann said that a hypothetical university employing blocking software might see immediate drops in illegal activity, but it would only be a matter of time before peer-to-peer software clients began encrypting their transmissions in the same way a bank website might protect its users’ identities from theft online. If IT administrators tried to take the next step — banning encrypted network traffic — plenty of legitimate activities could also be curbed, he said.
“You can’t just legislate in a vacuum and assume that we’ll solve the problem today and not worry about what’s going to happen next week,” he said.
Von Lohmann advocates a system in which universities pay blanket licensing fees directly to record labels to cover their students’ existing download habits. Citing the relative failure of trial runs at college campuses by services such as Napster and Ruckus, von Lohmann said the concept could work because students wouldn’t have to worry about compatibility issues with their iPods or their files becoming unusable after graduation. Already, some surveys indicate that more students pay to download music legally than through unauthorized peer-to-peer networks, one likely side effect of the popularity of services such as Apple’s iTunes.
“Part of file sharing’s appeal was the kind of a-la-carte method of consuming music, and that’s what these online music services [like iTunes] now offered. That’s what they caught on about file sharing,” said Matthew Marco, a Web designer for the House of Representatives who graduated from the University of California at Irvine in 2004.
But lacking a concrete solution that could please both record labels and universities, students would continue to invent new ways to circumvent technological barriers as well as the law, von Lohmann suggested. Already, anyone wanting to find free music, movies, TV episodes or video games online doesn’t have to look far. The BitTorrent client offers quick downloads and access to troves of files at various online repositories; popular clients such as LimeWire and DC++ facilitate peer-to-peer connections between students sharing files and those looking to expand their collections. Piracy isn’t limited to the Internet at large, either: private “darknets” hosted by students on the local campus network — not accessible to outside users — have surged in popularity as well.
To cite one example of an evolving file-sharing protocol, DC++ — an open-source client for the peer-to-peer Direct Connect network — could be moving toward more encryption, according to one of the program’s developers. “The new protocol will have the capability to be wrapped in SSL/TLS (I’m unsure of which), but as of yet, we haven’t implemented that in the client. Mostly the encryption is to allow secure exchange of passwords and chat, but its effect upon traffic categorization is a nice benefit,” said Todd Pederzani, referring to a method of singling out and blocking peer-to-peer file traffic in computer networks, in an e-mail message. The implication is that one popular file-sharing client is moving toward potentially adopting measures — as von Lohmann predicted — that could be used to evade universities’ tactics for sniffing out unauthorized download traffic.
But von Lohmann doesn’t think the only possibility for students who share music will be an increasing technological sophistication. Students can easily swap files via shared hard drives or burned DVDs, and those methods are much harder to track. (Plus, it should be noted, YouTube has opened a new front in the pirating war, as millions of Internet users have found that their favorite songs and videos are often readily available for instant streaming in just a few clicks.)
Michael Carey, a student at Ohio University who used to operate a DC++ hub on campus, said a combination of the institution’s press coverage — as the recipient of the most notices from the Recording Industry Association of America — and the resulting well-publicized crackdown on peer-to-peer file sharing has successfully stemmed downloading activity to some extent. But, he added, “I think eventually it will pick back up when there’s a new way that’s harder to track.”
Still, the response at one campus likely hasn’t affected students’ overall willingness to download and share copyrighted music and other files. “I would say probably 50 percent of people I know use it on at least a semi-regular basis and probably 10-15 percent are very heavy into it,” said Brenton Wildes, who will be a sophomore at the University of Florida. Wildes said he used to download a large volume of files but that he now sticks only to legal services.
A File-Sharing Culture?
Why haven’t students and others who share files online responded to the legal and technical roadblocks designed to restrict their downloading to legal venues? Marco said he believes there is a social component to consider beyond the mere habit.
“You had people actually pushing music they liked,” he said; people could connect online, discover new music through each other’s online libraries and form communities that were highly specialized — similar to “early adopters” of new technologies.
His implication was that the music industry, in particular, would have to adapt to a “paradigmatic change” in how it assesses the value of artists, one that began with the rise of broadband Internet access and the success of Napster’s first incarnation. “It’s going to be the performance, the marketing, the licensing of the artist’s personality,” Marco said. As for various attempts to stem the flow of digital copyright infringement, he said, “I think it’s a waste of money because I think the paradigm has already shifted ... they show a kind of denial.”
Wildes agrees that the status quo is hardly desirable.
“The system we have now is not the ideal system,” he said. “First and foremost, it’s not legal, obviously, so they can come down on people for using it, and I think that a better way would be if the people behind these file-sharing programs and the people at the RIAA … got together and worked something out.”
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2...03/filesharing
Schoolboards: Net Dangers Over-Rated; Bring Social Networks to School
David Cassel
The internet isn't as dangerous as people think, and teachers should let students use social networks at school.
That's the surprising new recommendation from the National School Boards Association — a not-for-profit organization representing 95,000 school board members — in a new study funded by Microsoft, News Corporation, and Verizon.
It warns that many fears about the internet are just overblown. "School district leaders seem to believe that negative experiences with social networking are more common than students and parents report," the study reports. For example, more than half the districts think sharing personal information has been "a significant problem" in their schools — "yet only 3% of students say they've ever given out their email addresses, instant messaging screen names or other personal information to strangers."
In fact, the Association and resesearchers at Grunwald Associates LLC surveyed 1,277 students online (between the ages of 9 and 17) — along with 1,039 parents, and 250 school district leaders "who make decisions on internet policy." And the students reported big differences from the adults' concerns. Only 20% said they'd seen "inappropriate" pictures on social networking sites in the last 3 months. (And only 11% of parents concur, even for the last 6 months.) Only 18% of the students said they'd seen "inappropriate" language, and just 7% reported they'd been "cyberbullied," or asked about their personal identity on a social networking site.
Furthermore, the numbers got even smaller when the students were asked about more worrisome situations. Only 4% of the students said they'd ever had an online conversation that made them uncomfortable, and only 2% said an online stranger tried to meet them in person. In fact, after surveying 1,277 students, the researchers found exactly one who reported they'd actually met a person from the internet without their parents' permission — and described this as "0.08 percent of all students."
"Only a minority of students has had any kind of negative experience with social networking in the last three months," the study concludes. "Even fewer parents report that their children have had a negative experience over a longer 6-month period."
The researchers concluded that the vast majority of students "seem to be living by the online safety behaviors they learn at home and at school." Many students even reported that they were using the social networks to discuss their schoolwork or other education-related topics.
Yet fear of safety for children continues to haunt policy — both at school boards and the national level. (In May, a Senate resolution was co-sponsored by Barack Obama and Joe Lieberman highlighting how dangerous they thought the internet could be.) The National School Boards Association found strict controls had taken hold at most schools over student internet access.
84% of school districts have rules against online chatting in school
81% have rules against instant messaging in school
62% prohibit blogging or participating in online discussion boards at school.
60% prohibit sending and receiving email in school
52% prohibit any social networking sites in school
"Students and parents report fewer recent or current problems, such as cyberstalking, cyberbullying and unwelcome personal encounters than school fears and policies seem to imply," the study notes.
In light of these findings, they're recommending that school districts may want to "explore ways in which they could use social networking for educational purposes" — and reconsider some of their fears. It won't be the first time educators have feared a new technology, the study warns. "Many schools initially banned or restricted Internet use, only to ease up when the educational value of the Internet became clear. The same is likely to be the case with social networking.
"Safety policies remain important, as does teaching students about online safety and responsible online expression — but student may learn these lesson better while they're actually using social networking tools."
Social networking may be advantageous to students — and there could already be a double standard at work? 37% of districts say at least 90% of their staff are participating in online communites of their own — related to education — and 59% of districts said that at least half were participating. "These findings indicate that educators find value in social networking," the study notes, "and suggest that many already are comfortable and knowledgeable enough to use social networking for educational purposes with their students."
In fact, 76% of parents expect social networking will improve their children's reading and writing skills, or help them express themselves more clearly, according to the study, and parents and communities "expect schools to take advantage of potentially powerful educational tools, including new technology."
"Clearly both district leaders and parents are open to believing that social networking could be such a tool — as long as there are reasonable parameters of use in place. Moreover, social networking is increasingly used as a communications and collaboration tool of choice in business and higher education. As such, it would be wise for schools, whose responsibility it is to prepare students to transition to adult life with the skills they need to succeed in both arenas, to reckon with it."Ultimately what's holding them back is a fear of the unknown, the report suggests. It urges school board members to explore social networks, for one simple reason.
"Many adults, including school board members, are like fish out of water when it comes to this new online lifestyle."
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...rks-to-school/
Why Are People Accused Of Copyright Infringement?
Brian Scott
When you hear about people caught of copyright infringement, many different things can happen to them. First, copyright infringement is both a civil and criminal crime, so people caught of copyright infringement are likely to get both sued and tried in criminal court. Because of the nature of copyright laws, if and when people are caught of copyright infringement, it’s likely they will get repercussions from far and wide.
People are always looking for others violating copyright laws. Copyright owners and/or agents surf the Internet, so they may find the violations themselves. Usually, if someone finds a person violating their copyright rights, they’ll notify the person or entities involved and ask they permanently remove the content, if it’s available on the Internet. They do this by either asking the person directly to take it down, or demanding the website server to take it down (which they will, immediately, and probably suspend the account). If the person or entity hosting the violation doesn’t take it down, more serious actions will be taken, such as a lawsuit or criminal charge.
People caught for copyright infringement do not automatically go to jail, although some entities like major television, music, movie publishers and distribution channels may lead you to believe otherwise. For example, many people are caught for copyright infringement at YouTube.com, but they only need to take down the material. In many cases, YouTube.com will take the material down before the poster (the person who put the copyrighted information on the site to begin with) has a chance to see the warning.
Other times, a work will be present on a peer to peer file sharing service, such as Kazaa or Napster, and the host of said service will blame the end user (you!). So, even if you found a file on a file sharing service, such as Kazaa, doesn’t mean the copyright is open for you to take it. Many people caught of copyright infringement have been found through these peer to peer networks, and it has been found that the user who downloads the material gets charged and not the file sharing service. Be careful, if you are ever to use a peer to peer service such as Kazaa (or bit torrent, which is the code/program for another type of peer to peer file distribution tool) that you’re only downloading, and sharing, items that aren’t copyrighted works -- or you could be punished severely.
Sometimes, people are caught of file sharing from their IP addresses -- because they download something from a secure site, their servers can track your IP address (your unique location on the Internet, four sets of numbers, separated by periods, with at most three numbers in each set -- i.e. 216.239.51.100 which is the IP address of Google.com). So even if you think you’ve bypassed the copyright law, you can still be found years later by tracing that IP address.
There are many ways to find people caught of copyright infringement. You can search through Google.com or look through newspaper databases. One thing, however, remains the same in all these cases -- people are downloading, sharing, or in some other way using copyrighted materials. The problem is, especially in the Internet age, is that even if you’re using something anonymously, you can still be tracked -- and prosecuted -- for the infringement. Be careful, in all you download or use, have the rights to use the item --sometimes it’s as simple as asking permission that will keep you from getting sued or sent to jail.
http://www.arabia.com/article.cfm/id/175769
Johnson & Johnson Sues Red Cross Over Use of Red Cross
Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical company that uses a red cross as its trademark, sued the American Red Cross yesterday, demanding that it stop using the red cross symbol on products it sells to the public.
Johnson & Johnson said it has had exclusive rights to use the trademark on certain commercial products for more than 100 years. It said that the Red Cross is supposed to use the symbol only in connection with nonprofit relief services.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, marked the breakdown of months of behind-the-scenes negotiations.
http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Sa...=1037645509161
Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars?
Shutting down Napster was a huge blunder for the record companies, leading to the collapse of the entire industry. Now, movies and TV studios are looking to repeat the failure by going after YouTube, says columnist Cory Doctorow.
Hollywood loves sequels -- they're a safe bet if the franchise is already successful. But you'd have to be nuts to shoot a sequel to a disastrous flop.
The Napster debacle was the entertainment industry's biggest-ever flop. That disaster took place six years ago, when the record industry succeeded in shutting down the pioneering file-sharing service. Record companies show no signs of recovery.
The disastrous thing about Napster wasn't that it it existed, but rather that the record industry managed to kill it.
Napster had an industry-friendly business-model: raise venture capital, start charging for access to the service, and then pay billions of dollars to the record companies in exchange for licenses to their works. Yes, Napster kicked this plan off without getting permission from the record companies, but that's not so unusual. The record companies followed the same business plan a hundred years ago, when they started recording sheet music without permission, raising capital and garnering profits, and then working out a deal to pay the composers for the works they'd built their fortunes on.
Napster's plan was plausible. They had the fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world, garnering 52,000,000 users in 18 months -- more than had voted for either candidate in the preceding U.S. presidential election! -- and discovering, via surveys, that a sizable portion would happily pay between $10 and $15 a month for the service. What's more, Napster's architecture included a gatekeeper that could be used to lock out nonpaying users.
The record industry refused to deal. Instead, it sued, bringing Napster to its knees. Bertelsmann bought Napster out of the ensuing bankruptcy. Later, Universal followed the same patttern when it killed MP3.com in the courts, then brought home the corpse on the cheap, running it as an internal project.
After that, the record companies had a field day: practically every venture-funded P2P company went down, and the record companies made millions of dollars.
But the record companies weren't ready to replace these services with equally compelling alternatives. Instead, they fielded inferior replacements like PressPlay, with limited catalog, high prices, and anti-copying technology (digital rights management, or DRM) that alienated users by the millions by treating them like crooks instead of customers. These half-baked ventures did untold damage to the record companies and their parent firms.
Just look at Sony: It should have been at the top of the heap. It produces some of the world's finest, best-designed electronics. It owns one of the largest record labels in the world. The synergy should have been incredible.
Instead, Sony's portable players -- the MusicClip and others -- were so crippled by anti-copying technology that they couldn't even play MP3s, and the music selection at Sony services like PressPlay was anemic, expensive, and equally hobbled. Sony isn't even a name in the portable audio market anymore -- today's Walkman is an iPod.
Of course, Sony still has a record label -- for now. But sales are falling, and the company is reeling from the 2005 "rootkit" debacle, where it deliberately infected eight million music CDs with a hacker tool called a rootkit, compromising more than 500,000 U.S. computer networks, including military and government networks, all in a (failed) bid to stop copying of its CDs.
The public wasn't willing to wait for Sony and the rest to wake up and offer a service that was as compelling, exciting, and versatile as Napster. Instead, they flocked to a new generation of services like Kazaa and the various Gnutella networks. Kazaa's business model was to set up offshore, on the tiny Polynesian island of Vanuatu. Kazaa bundled spyware with its software, making its profits off fees from spyware crooks. Kazaa didn't want to pay billions for record industry licenses -- it used the international legal and finance system to hopelessly snarl the RIAA's members through half a decade of wild profitability. The company was eventually brought to ground, but the founders walked away and started Skype and then Joost.
Meantime, dozens of other services had sprung up to fill Kazaa's niche -- AllofMP3, the notorious Russian site, was eventually killed through intervention of the U.S. Trade Representative and the WTO, and was reborn practically the next day under a new name.
It's been eight years since Sean Fanning created Napster in his college dorm room. Eight years later, there isn't a single authorized music service that can compete with the original Napster. Record sales are down every year, and digital music sales aren't filling in the crater. The record industry has contracted to four companies, and it may soon be three if EMI can get regulatory permission to put itself on the block.
The sue-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out plan was a flop in the box office, a flop in home video, and a flop overseas. So why is Hollywood shooting a remake?
Napster: The Sequel
YouTube, 2007, bears some passing similarity to Napster, 2001. Founded by a couple guys in a garage, rocketed to popular success, heavily capitalized by a deep-pocketed giant. Its business model? Turn popularity into dollars and offer a share to the rightsholders whose works they're using. This is a historically sound plan: cable operators got rich by retransmitting broadcasts without permission, and once they were commercial successes, they sat down to negotiate to pay for those copyrights (just as the record companies negotiated with composers after they'd gotten rich selling records bearing those compositions).
YouTube '07 has another similarity to Napster '01: it is being sued by entertainment companies.
Only this time, it's not (just) the record industry. Broadcasters, movie studios, anyone who makes video or audio is getting in on the act. I recently met an NBC employee who told me that he thought that a severe, punishing legal judgment would send a message to the tech industry not to field this kind of service anymore.
Let's hope he's wrong. Google -- YouTube's owner -- is a grown-up company, unusual in a tech industry populated by corporate adolescents. Google has lots of money and a sober interest in keeping it. It wants to sit down with A/V rightsholders and do a deal. Six years after the Napster verdict, that kind of willingness is in short supply.
Most of the tech organizations with an interest in commercializing Internet audio and video have no interest in sitting down with the studios:
Some are nebulous open source projects like mythtv, a free hyper-TiVo that skips commercials, downloads and shares videos, and is wide open to anyone who wants to modify and improve it
Some are politically motivated anarchists like ThePirateBay, a Swedish BitTorrent tracker site that has mirrors in three countries with noninteroperable legal systems, where they respond to legal notices by writing sarcastic and profane letters and putting them online
Or out-and-out crooks like the bootleggers who use P2P to seed their DVD counterfeiting operations.
It's not just YouTube. TiVo, which pioneered the personal video recorder, is feeling the squeeze, being systematically locked out of the digital cable and satellite market. Their efforts to add a managed TiVoToGo service were attacked by the rightsholders who fought at the FCC to block them. Cable/satellite operators and the studios would much prefer the public to transition to "bundled" PVRs that come with your TV service.
These boxes are owned by the cable/satellite companies, who have absolute control over them. Time Warner has been known to remotely delete stored episodes of shows just before the DVD ships, and many operators have started using "flags" that tell recorders not to allow fast-forwarding, or to prevent recording altogether.
The reason that YouTube and TiVo are more popular than ThePirateBay and mythtv is that they're the easiest way for the public to get what it wants -- the video we want, the way we want it. We use these services because they're like the original Napster: easy, well-designed, functional.
But if the entertainment industry squeezes these players out, ThePirateBay and mythtv are right there, waiting to welcome us in with open arms. ThePirateBay already has announced that it is launching a YouTube competitor with no-plugin, in-browser viewing. Plenty of entrepreneurs are looking at easing the pain and cost of setting up your own mythtv box. The only reason that the barriers to widespread adoption of BitTorrent and mythtv exist is that it hasn't been worth anyone's while to capitalize projects to bring those barriers down. But once the legit competitors of these services are killed, look out.
The thing is, the public doesn't want managed services with limited rights. We don't want to be stuck using approved devices in approved ways. We never have -- we are the spiritual descendants of the customers for "illegal" record albums and "illegal" cable TV. The demand signal won't go away.
There's no good excuse for going into production on a sequel to The Napster Wars. We saw that movie. We know how it turns out. Every Christmas, we get articles about how this was the worst Christmas ever for CDs. You know what? CD sales are never going to improve. CDs have been rendered obsolete by Internet distribution -- and the record industry has locked itself out of the only profitable, popular music distribution systems yet invented.
Companies like Google/YouTube and TiVo are rarities: tech companies that want to do deals. They need to be cherished by entertainment companies, not sued.
(Thanks to Bruce Nash and The-Numbers.com for research assistance with this article)
http://www.informationweek.com/story...leID=201400131
Video-Sharing Site Based in S.D. Sues Universal
Veoh Networks, a San Diego video-sharing site, has filed a lawsuit in federal court against Universal Music Group after receiving threats of legal action for copyright violations.
Veoh is not seeking damages but is seeking a declaration that it has not infringed on any Universal Music Group copyrights under the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Veoh has created a video-sharing site using peer-to-peer technology. The company has music videos posted on its site – some of which presumably contain music from Universal artists.
The company, which counts among its investors ex-Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner, said it was notified in July by Universal that the music label was considering suing Veoh because it was “massively infringing” on its copyrights.
The lawsuit claims Universal did not provide any details about the alleged infringement that would allow the company to investigate.
“It is unfortunate that UMG prefers to take actions that are designed to stifle innovation, shut down new markets and maintain the status quo instead of working to change and evolve models for today and the future,” said Steve Mitgang, CEO of Veoh.
Universal had previously threatened to sue the video-sharing site YouTube, which is owned by Google, but the two sides struck a licensing deal before any legal action was taken.
“Universal Music Group is enthusiastic about using technology to build communities, as evidenced by our deal with YouTube,” the company said yesterday.
“But that's not what Veoh is all about. Rather, its about trying to build a business on the backs of our artists and songwriters without fairly compensating them for the use of their works,” Universal said.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/b...-1b10veoh.html
Universal Threatens To Sue Retailers for Selling Amy Winehouse Import
Eliot Van Buskirk
You've been able to buy imported music at record stores for as long as I can remember. But Universal, in an attempt to sell as many copies of Amy Winehouse's latest album as possible, has put the kibosh on U.S. sales of CDs of her earlier album, Frank, which is only currently available here as an EU import (Universal will release a US version on November 7th), sending a letter to music retailers indicating that it would sue store owners who continued selling imports of the album.
The familiar irony here is that this strategy will send interested parties -- the ones who are still in the habit of buying CDs, no less -- to peer-to-peer networks or their friend's CD burner. By the time the album goes on sale in the US, much of Winehouse's U.S. fanbase will have obtained the album in some other way. One merchandiser quoted in the article acknowledged that probability:
"We are selling physical product that the customers want, and they are trying to stop us... In the meantime, it is flowing freely throughout the world over the Internet through the (peer-to-peer) sites."
It's pretty hard to manufacturer music scarcity these days, but Universal seems determined to try.
As for people who don't use P2P or have friends with CD burners, the label seems more interested in getting them to buy one Amy Winehouse album than in striking while the iron is hot, and allowing them to become even bigger fans by discovering her earlier stuff.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/08/...sal-threa.html
Universal Music Will Sell Songs Without Copy Protection
Jeff Leeds
Signaling another departure from the music industry’s tenuous belief in its longtime antipiracy strategy, the Universal Music Group plans to sell a significant portion of its catalog without the customary copy protection software for at least the next few months, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
Universal, the world’s biggest music conglomerate, is set to announce that it will offer albums and songs without the software, known as digital rights management, through existing digital music retail services like RealNetworks and Wal-Mart, nascent services from Amazon.com and Google, and some artists’ web Wites, these people said.
But the music is not expected to be offered D.R.M.-free through Apple’s iTunes, the leading music service, they said.
The use of copy protection software has become a major bone of contention in the digital music business, where iTunes accounts for the vast majority of download sales. The record labels generally have required that retailers place electronic locks to limit copying of music files.
But Apple’s proprietary D.R.M. does not work with most rivals’ devices or software — meaning that music sold by competing services cannot play on Apple’s popular iPod. Some record executives say they believe the stalemate has capped the growth of digital music sales, which the industry is relying on more heavily as sales of plastic CDs slide.
The offer of Universal’s music under the new terms is being framed as a test, to run into January, allowing executives to study consumer demand and any effect on online piracy. If Universal decides to adopt the practice permanently, it will probably pressure other record companies to follow suit. That could stoke a wider debate about how to treat intellectual property in the digital era. Universal’s artists include the Black Eyed Peas and 50 Cent.
The effort is likely to be seen as part of the industry’s wider push to increase competition to iTunes and shift leverage away from Apple, which wields enormous clout in determining prices and other terms in digital music. A month ago, Universal notified Apple that it would not agree to a new long-term contract to sell music through iTunes.
Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, made his position on copy protection software clear in February, when he posted a statement on the company’s Web site calling on the record companies’ to abandon their insistence on D.R.M., which he argued had largely failed to resolve the industry’s piracy woes.
So far, only one of the four major music companies, the EMI Group, embraced a wholesale shift away from the usual D.R.M.. EMI, which releases music by artists like Norah Jones and Coldplay, first struck a deal with iTunes, in which songs without copy protection (and with better audio quality) would be sold at a higher price — $1.29 instead of the usual 99 cents for the restricted songs.
EMI has said the results so far have been promising. Under Universal’s arrangements with digital retailers, at least some of its new music will be sold in unprotected form for 99 cents, executives briefed on the plan said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/business/10music.html
Research Targets the Holy Trinity of Audio Streaming: Quality, Security, and DRM
John Timmer
As the movie and music industries cope with rampant piracy on the Internet, they've resorted to means ranging from sophisticated digital watermarks to armies of bored workers to detect copies of their material online. Researchers at the University of Ottawa are publishing a paper in the International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication in which they describe a system that can serve live audio streams while performing resampling, live embedding of watermarks, data authentication, and quality of service validation. We take a look at whether this will change the face of streaming media, or simply provide more of the same DRM.
Although transcoding has already been solved, the paper provides a good introduction of past work on the remaining three problems: watermarking, QOS, and data integrity checks. It describes efforts that have addressed each of these issues but suggests that the earlier work fell short by viewing them in isolation. They also note that many of the watermarking efforts, while looking good on paper, have never been tested in the real world because they were not accompanied by actual implementations. With the review done, they announce that they plan to correct these shortcomings.
The system they propose is a three-layer watermark based on private keys and integrated into the processes of transcoding and downsampling that normally take place on the server end of audio streams. They worked with ITU-T G7.11 coded audio, a standard that's used for VoIP, although they promise to turn their attention to MP3s next. The system is buffer-based: a fixed amount of raw audio data is read into a single memory buffer and then processed before being sent out to recipients. The first layer of watermarking occurs once the audio is transcoded. A private key is used to select individual units of audio data within the buffer; the least-significant bit of that unit is replaced by a bit from the watermark to create the first layer.
With that process completed, the software excludes a predetermined set of bits from the data. The private key is tacked on to the end of what's left, and a hash value is calculated for this data. The excluded bits are then replaced by the data from this hash value. Low-information content bits are used here in order to avoid interfering with the audio. As this second layer of watermarking is dependent upon the audio data itself, it serves as a security measure, allowing recipients to determine if any of the streamed data has been changed en route.
The final layer of watermarking allows for the quality of the stream to be registered. To accomplish this, the authors embed a small, simple watermark (a black square) into the larger watermark image used in layer one. This allows each buffer to have a QOS value assigned to it, and helps discriminate between cases of dropped packets and instances of intentional data modification. As a bonus, this step can be performed once, and the results cached for use in all further operations.
To check how well this works, the authors tested both the quality of the resulting audio and the performance of the system in terms of both audio quality and speed. Across a number of different output settings, the typical decrease in audio quality was only four percent. The authors ascribe this to the fact that most of the bits being replaced were the least significant, and all of the replacements had even odds of matching the audio information they were replacing.
The researchers implemented the watermarking in Java and ran it without hotspot optimizations, reasoning that this left significant headroom for performance improvements if needed. Tests were run on 3.4GHz Pentium4's. On the server side, the performance was impressive, with most steps taking a fraction of a millisecond; only the hash value computation added more than 10 milliseconds to the process. Extracting the data on the client end and comparing it to the watermarks was a bit more expensive but still clocked in at under 200 milliseconds, a figure the authors term "soft realtime."
Although all of the results look good and represent an interesting approach to a series of related problems, it's unlikely that these methods will be appearing in a device near you in the near future. Any computer, PDA, or audio player on the receiving end of these streams will have to be provided with both a private key and a copy of the watermark data in order to perform these validation steps. In other words, there's no significant difference between this and any of the other (currently incompatible) forms of DRM already out there.
It doesn't seem to help the content providers significantly, either, as this watermark is no more likely to survive any further transcoding on the user's end than any other, meaning only a subset of pirated material might be easier to identify. More importantly, in the absence of universal DRM, nothing will prevent users from playing watermarked material on existing devices. In the end, this technique appears most suited to specialized applications in secure communications.
(International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication, Volume 1:4. p. 386.)
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...y-and-drm.html
Senators to SoundExchange: Don't Use Negotiations to Demand DRM
Nate Anderson
The two senators who introduced the Internet Radio Equality Act have strong words for SoundExchange as it embarks on negotiations with webcasters over royalty rates: don't use the proceedings as a means of mandating DRM.
Senators Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) issued a statement late last week applauding the fact that SoundExchange decided not to enforce the controversial new royalty rates on July 15. But they warned that the group's negotiations with Internet broadcasters need to remain limited in scope.
"While we strongly support a negotiated solution," said the senators, "we will not allow the minimum fee issue to be used to force an agreement that mandates DRM technology and fails to respect the established principles of fair use and consumer rights."
As we've reported earlier, SoundExchange is pushing for DRM on audio streams to combat streamripping. In return, it is holding out the promise of concessions to small webcasters (though not to large ones, who will apparently still be required to pay the new per-stream rates).
The point of the senators' statement was to put pressure on SoundExchange by threatening to push hard for the Internet Radio Equality Act if SoundExchange doesn't drop the DRM request. This may be a threat with little muscle behind it, though, as Wired is now reporting that the Act has almost no chance of clearing the House, effectively rendering it dead.
Wired also wonders if SoundExchange is exceeding its legal mandate to spend the funds it receives only on administration of royalties, settling financial disputes, and licensing rights. The organization is also involved in lobbying, but it's certainly not trying to hide the fact. SoundExchange is the first listed sponsor of the MusicFIRST coalition, which sent Judy Collins to testify before Congress last week.
SoundExchange even went so far as to tout its involvement with the group on a conference call announcing the formation of MusicFIRST. If it's operating outside the lines of its Congressionally-sanctioned mandate, it certainly doesn't seem bothered by that fact.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...emand-drm.html
Webcast Royalty Bill Talks Lose Steam
FMQB
The proposed federal bill that would reset music royalty rates to a more affordable price for Internet radio broadcasters is losing steam in the House of Representatives. The negotiations are still happening, but chances of the Internet Radio Equality Act (IREA) being approved are fading, according to Wired. It looks like instead of lowering the Internet royalty rate, Congress may prefer to let the royalty-distributing group SoundExchange negotiate individual deals with Webcasters.
"We met with members of the House and Senate judiciary committees this week, and while they all were supportive of small Webcasters, time after time we heard the IREA was not going to pass," Rusty Hodge, founder of Webcaster SomaFM, told Wired.
On the bright side, SoundExchange has proposed changes that could relieve small and custom-streaming sites from royalties they could not possibly afford, at least for now. A small Webcaster deal could be done by early September when Congress goes back into session. But the deal on the table hasn't changed since SoundExchange made an offer in May to charge them 10 percent of gross revenue under $250,000, or 12 percent of gross revenues over $250,000, with a revenue cap at $1.25 million. Webcasters are apprehensive about the deal because of a provision that would shift Webcasters from the percentage rate to the higher per-stream rate once they exceed certain usage caps, notes Wired.
"That's the sticking point," said Hodge. "In our optimistic projections, SomaFM won't hit the revenue cap for a couple years, (but) when we hit it, our royalties would go from $150,000 a year to over $2 million a year."
Meanwhile, last week, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sam Brownback (R-KS) said they were "troubled by the lack of negotiating progress being reported" and promised to take action to push the IREA bill forward if agreements are not made by September 3. "The fact is online radio services do not have enough revenue to support what will amount to unprecedented royalties," they said in a statement. "The $500 per channel minimum fee alone will deliver an over $1 billion annual windfall to record companies, a windfall that is not justified by any business or equity considerations. We feel the Senate must take action, and we will make every effort move the Internet Radio Equality Act to the floor."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=452483
Webcast Royalty Bill, Negotiations Hit Impasse
Eliot Van Buskirk
A federal bill that would reset music royalties at a more affordable rate for thousands of internet radio stations is losing steam in the House of Representatives, raising new fears for the future of webcasting.
First-time webcasting fees proposed by recording industry royalty-administration group SoundExchange took effect last month, setting off a wave of protests and last-minute negotiations aimed at reducing the hit for smaller webcasters and capping rates for sites that support hundreds of customized stations.
Negotiations are ongoing, but chances of broad legislative relief in the form of the Internet Radio Equality Act, or IREA, are fading fast, according to several people familiar with the effort. Rather, Congress appears resolved to let SoundExchange and the various strata of webcasters negotiate individual settlements.
"We met with members of the House and Senate judiciary committees this week, and while they all were supportive of small webcasters, time after time we heard the IREA was not going to pass," said Rusty Hodge, founder of webcaster SomaFM.
A legislative setback could make it harder to dislodge the new fees, which took effect last month after a federal appeals court refused to postpone the payment deadline. With the threat of congressional backlash fading, SoundExchange could find little incentive to budge from its current position.
The importance of legislative pressure in the negotiation process was underscored late Thursday. In a joint statement, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) said they were "troubled by the lack of negotiating progress" and promised to take action to push the IREA bill forward if agreements are not made by Sept. 3. Given the lack of support in the House, however, the chances of the bill becoming law currently look remote.
SoundExchange has already proposed changes that could relieve small and custom-streaming sites from charges they could not possibly afford to pay, at least in the short term. Many expect a small-webcaster deal to be done by early September, when Congress goes back into session. But the deal on the table hasn't changed since SoundExchange extended an offer in May to charge them 10 percent of gross revenue under $250,000, or 12 percent of gross revenues over $250,000, with a revenue cap at $1.25 million.
Webcasters say they are wary of the deal because of a provision that would shift webcasters from the percentage rate to the higher per-stream rate once they exceed certain usage caps.
"That's the sticking point," said SomaFM's Hodge. "In our optimistic projections, SomaFM won't hit the revenue cap for a couple years, (but) when we hit it, our royalties would go from $150,000 a year to over $2 million a year. "
For larger webcasters, such as custom-streaming site Pandora, coming to terms could take longer. Talks are ongoing over a proposal to cap per-station fees, but Tim Westergren, co-founder of Pandora, said there has been "no material change -- we're in a slow negotiation process now."
Reaching a settlement with SoundExchange could take even longer for the largest webcasters, which have been given no hint of a deal beyond the current Copyright Royalty Board rates. In the absence of any alternative, they will likely seek to strike deals directly with the major labels rather than accepting SoundExchange's mandatory license.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/m...EA_faces_music
SoundExchange, Caught Lobbying, Says Lobbying Bar Does Not Apply
Eliot Van Buskirk
SoundExchange, the music industry's digital-royalty collection agency, has been on a roll.
A federal appeals court recently rejected a plea from webcasters to postpone the deadline for a new royalty scheme that sets the stage for SoundExchange to begin levying billions of dollars from internet radio stations in the coming decades. It already collects a tidy sum from satellite radio and now it has set its sights on U.S. terrestrial radio stations, which currently pay no broadcast performance royalties. If it wins there, its power could grow exponentially.
This reflects a well-known law of any bureaucracy: Once authority is created, it works inevitably to expand its sphere of influence, grabbing for more power and bigger budgets. With each success, its appetite only grows.
Knowing well the dangers, legislators sought to restrict SoundExchange's ability to spend the money it collects on behalf of artists and labels. Section 114(g)(3) of the Copyright Act explicitly limits how the nonprofit can spend the money it collects, approving just three carefully circumscribed activities:
"(A) the administration of the collection, distribution, and calculation of the royalties;
"(B) the settlement of disputes relating to the collection and calculation of the royalties; and
"(C) the licensing and enforcement of rights with respect to the making of ephemeral recordings and performances subject to licensing under section 112 and this section, including those incurred in participating in negotiations or arbitration proceedings under section 112 and this section, except that all costs incurred relating to the section 112 ephemeral recordings right may only be deducted from the royalties received pursuant to section 112."
So it came as quite a surprise when a source familiar with SoundExchange told me on condition of anonymity that the group is engaged in lobbying and public relations activities, in apparent violation of the law cited above.
A little fact-checking showed that SoundExchange registered the MusicFirstCoalition.org domain on May 9, 2007; that it is a member of the organization; and that SoundExchange supports musicFIRST financially, although it has not disclosed the extent of its spending. (When asked about it, SoundExchange spokesperson Richard Ades called that information "proprietary.")
Here's what's not proprietary: The musicFIRST Coalition (Fairness In Radio Starting Today) is a public relations group that launched on June 14, 2007 with the sole mission of implementing a sound recording performance royalty on terrestrial radio stations. It is comprised of labels, managers and artists, including Hall & Oates, Jay-Z, Celine Dion and various artists' and labels' organizations, including the RIAA. SoundExchange is listed as a sponsor on the homepage of the organization's web site.
Asked about the legality of the lobbying expenditures, SoundExchange Executive Director John Simson dodged the question. "Clearly the Broadcasters (CQ) will do or say anything so as not to pay artists for their work," he wrote in an e-mail. "We welcome a full and open debate before Congress on ending the unfair free ride given over-the-air radio and the granting to artists the long overdue right to be paid for their recordings when they are played."
Michael Huppe, general counsel for SoundExchange, was more helpful on the legal question. He said the funding was a legitimate use of its members' money. "Funding provided by SoundExchange to musicFIRST is authorized by copyright owners and performers who have chosen to become members of SoundExchange. These contributions come only from our members and not from non-member royalties, and were unanimously approved by the SoundExchange board," Huppe replied when asked about its support of musicFIRST.
In the end, however, SoundExchange could not point to a specific statute that allows them to contribute to musicFIRST.
Jessica Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, could not point to any legal grounds for SoundExchange's move, saying, "I'm not aware of any statute that authorizes the contribution."
Shoshana Zisk, a music attorney in San Francisco, said, "Upon reading Copyright Act Section 114(g)(3), it would appear that funding a lobbying or PR organization (such as musicFIRST) is a violation of this provision."
Whether or not SoundExchange's lobbying efforts prove to be illegal, its presence as an advocate in this debate undercuts its role as neutral administrator of royalty fees set and approved by the Copyright Royalty Board.
Artists and labels well deserve compensation for radio performance broadcasts. The United States is one of the few countries that exempts radio from these fees (music authors and publishers alone get paid), a tribute to the power and political muscle of the industry. That power is now fading, in part due to the rise of the internet, and so radio giants like Clear Channel seem vulnerable for the first time in decades.
Yet SoundExchange's interest in the outcome is as clear as the interest of the artists and labels it represents. If new fees are approved for terrestrial radio and SoundExchange is appointed to administer those fees, it will instantly become a much bigger player in the music industry. Given that it already has expertise in collecting similar fees for satellite and internet play, SoundExchange stands a good chance of winning this appointment.
With more power would come greater status and bigger paychecks for its officers and directors. Even if the agency were only acting in the interests of artists and labels, it would appear to have a direct stake in the fight. And that creates the appearance of a conflict of interest, whether or not there is in fact a conflict.
That's why Congress intended to keep SoundExchange out of the lobbying business. In keeping with the spirit of the law, SoundExchange should immediately sever its ties to musicFirst and any other lobbying group it funds or assists, and fulfill its role as a neutral administrator of fees.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/m...?currentPage=1
Cox's Robert Neil Talks Radio Royalties
FMQB
Robert Neil, President/CEO of Cox Radio, recently spoke to Fox News about his view of the proposed new royalty rates for radio, in which stations would have to pay artists for playing their music. "The reality is that if radio doesn't play their music, they're not gonna sell their recordings," said Neil. "And if we have to pay tons of money to do that, then what you're going to see is fewer and fewer music stations because nobody is willing to pay it. It would be absolutely deadly to small radio stations. It's just silly. It's absolutely silly. There's no other word to describe it."
Neil also told Fox's Roger Friedman that the symbiotic relationship between radio stations and record companies was built on the structure of free airplay in exchange for free music. "The songwriters may make a million dollars over a lifetime on their royalties," he said. "But the performers made a hundred million dollars up front on record sales and concerts. Now they’re coming back and telling us to pay them. We won’t."
On Tuesday this week, a House subcommittee hearing was held on the matter, with Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) vowing to begin fighting for the royalty. "I will come right out and indicate my bias -- I have supported the expansion of the performance right for over 20 years, with two caveats," he said. "One is that by extending this right it does not diminish the rights and revenues of the creators of musical works and second, that terrestrial broadcasters, large and small, remain a viable source of music."
The NAB has vehemently opposed the royalty, which it has labelled a "performance tax." Speaking on its behalf at the hearing was Radio Board Second Vice Chair Chester Warfield Jr., President/COO of ICBC Broadcast Holdings. Warfield said, "There is no justification for changing a system that has worked for the music industry as a whole for so many years. The United States has the most prolific and successful music industry that is the envy of all the world. Upsetting the careful balance that Congress struck by imposing a performance tax on local radio broadcasters would be a shift of seismic proportions. For over 80 years, Congress has not seen fit to alter this mutually beneficial policy, and there is no reason to do so now."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=451596
Diebold Voting Machines Vulnerable to Virus Attack
An analysis of Diebold's source code shows that a hacker with access to a single voting machine could use a virus to affect an election.
Sumner Lemon
Diebold Election Systems Inc. voting machines are not secure enough to guarantee a trustworthy election, and an attacker with access to a single machine could disrupt or change the outcome of an election using viruses, according to a review of Diebold's source code.
"The software contains serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes," read the University of California at Berkeley report, commissioned by the California Secretary of State as part of a two-month "top-to-bottom" review of electronic voting systems certified for use in California.
The assessment of Diebold's source code revealed an attacker needs only limited access to compromise an election.
"An attack could plausibly be accomplished by a single skilled individual with temporary access to a single voting machine. The damage could be extensive -- malicious code could spread to every voting machine in polling places and to county election servers," it said.
The report, titled "Source Code Review of the Diebold Voting System," was apparently released Thursday, just one day before California Secretary of State Debra Bowen is to decide which machines are certified for use in California's 2008 presidential primary elections.
The source-code review identified four main weaknesses in Diebold's software, including: vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to install malware on the machines, a failure to guarantee the secrecy of ballots, a lack of controls to prevent election workers from tampering with ballots and results, and susceptibility to viruses that could allow attackers to an influence an election.
"A virus could allow an attacker who only had access to a few machines or memory cards, or possibly to only one, to spread malicious software to most, if not all, of a county's voting machines," the report said. "Thus, large-scale election fraud in the Diebold system does not necessarily require physical access to a large number of voting machines."
The report warned that a paper trail of votes cast is not sufficient to guarantee the integrity of an election using the machines. "Malicious code might be able to subtly influence close elections, and it could disrupt elections by causing widespread equipment failure on election day," it said.
The source-code review went on to warn that commercial antivirus scanners do not offer adequate protection for the voting machines. "They are not designed to detect virally propagating malicious code that targets voting equipment and voting software," it said.
In conclusion, the report said Diebold's voting machines had not been designed with security as a priority. "For this reason, the safest way to repair the Diebold system is to reengineer it so that it is secure by design," it said.
The Diebold source-code review and several other documents, including a review of source code used in other voting systems, had earlier been withheld from release by the Secretary of State, even as other reports related to the review of voting machines were released on July 27.
An explanation posted on the Secretary of State's Web site on July 27 noted the source-code review and other reports had been submitted on time. "Their reports will be posted as soon as the Secretary of State ensures the reports do not inadvertently disclose security-sensitive information," the Web site said.
The delayed release of the source-code review meant that David Wagner, an associate professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley and an author of the report, was not able to present his findings at a public hearing held on July 30 to discuss the results of the voting system review.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135461/article.html
It's Not Over for Coulter
Jose Lambiet
When it comes to GOP twig Ann Coulter and her Palm Beach voting snafu, the fat lady has yet to sing.
While most expected the conservative pundit to be off the hook for good when the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office punted a voting fraud probe in April, the Florida Elections Commission now is investigating.
Coulter, a constitutional lawyer, voted in the wrong precinct in a Palm Beach town election in February 2006 after registering at an address that wasn't hers.
The Coulter voting saga is now known as FEC Case No. 07-211. The investigator assigned, Tallahassee's Margie Wade, wouldn't confirm she caught the case; FEC complaints are supposed to be confidential.
Still, Page Two is told Coulter already has been notified she's under investigation.
Who filed? WPB campaign consultant Richard Giorgio, whose stable of candidates includes mostly Democrats. His two-pronged complaint against the prolific boob-tube pontificator accuses her of false swearing and fraud.
"I actually saw her vote at St. Edward's (Church), and she looked in a hurry,"?Giorgio said. The church is reserved for voters from the north side of the island, while Coulter lives south near Worth Avenue.
"I didn't realize that she had tried to vote somewhere else and was turned back. This was willful. Anyone else would have been prosecuted."
But Coulter hasn't been, even after Palm Beach cops, the PBC supervisor of elections and sheriff's office looked into it. Coulter hired Republican 2000 election recount lawyer Marcos Jimenez to rep her and refused to talk.
He did not return calls.
According to FEC rules, Wade has subpoena powers and could force Coulter to sing.
So, what does best-selling author Coulter risk? The FEC could impose $2,000 in fines. And it could refer the case to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement or the state attorney's office for criminal prosecution.
The decision is left to the commission, whose seven members all were appointed by former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localne...jose_0801.html
Vote-Swapping Web Sites are Legal, Appeals Court (Finally) Says
Declan McCullagh
It took seven years, but a federal appeals court has finally vindicated the creators of vote-swapping Web sites that let Al Gore and Ralph Nader fans support their chosen candidates in the 2000 presidential election.
The purpose of the sites, which included the now-defunct voteswap2000.com and votexchange2000.com, was to let a Nader supporter in a state where George Bush might win "swap" his vote with a Gore supporter in a state like Texas where Republican victory was practically assured.
There was no actual way to enforce the swap. But the killjoys who inhabit government bureaucracies were nevertheless unamused and came up with the bizarre claim that operating a vote-swap site was a criminal act. California Secretary of State Bill Jones even threatened to prosecute voteswap2000.com and votexchange2000.com (which immediately shut their virtual doors in response).
Fortunately, the site operators--Alan Porter, Patrick Kerr, Steven Lewis, and William Cody--had the means to force the issue and take the state of California to court. They met with little luck before a federal district judge.
But on Monday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (PDF) that "the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutionally protected" and California's spurious threats violated the First Amendment. The 9th Circuit also said did not decide whether the threats violated the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause.
Here's the key graf: "Both the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms and the communication and vote swaps that they enabled were...constitutionally protected. At their core, they amounted to efforts by politically engaged people to support their preferred candidates and to avoid election results that they feared would contravene the preferences of a majority of voters in closely contested states. Whether or not one agrees with these voters' tactics, such efforts, when conducted honestly and without money changing hands, are at the heart of the liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment."
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9755958-7.html
One small bit for a man, one gigabyte for mankind
Digitized Apollo Flight Films Available Online
Arizona State University partners with NASA to digitize original films
Press Release
Nearly 40 years after man first walked on the Moon, the complete lunar photographic record from the Apollo project will be accessible to both researchers and the general public on the Internet. A new digital archive - created through a collaboration between Arizona State University and NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston - is making available high-resolution scans of original Apollo flight films. They are available to browse or download at:
http://apollo.sese.asu.edu.
The digital scans are detailed enough to reveal photographic grain. Created from original flight films transported back to Earth from the Moon, the archive includes photos taken from lunar orbit as well as from the lunar surface. This is the first project to make digital scans of all the original lunar photographs from NASA's Apollo missions.
"This project fulfills a long-held wish of mine. It'll give everyone a chance to see this unique collection of images as clearly as when they were taken," says Mark Robinson, professor of geological sciences in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Robinson leads the ASU side of the Apollo image digitizing project. Separately, he is the principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC (
http://lroc.sese.asu.edu) - a suite of three separate, high-resolution imagers on board NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, due for launch in October 2008.
The reason the original Apollo images have been so seldom accessed is that they are literally irreplaceable. Between 1968 and 1972, NASA made sets of duplicate images after each Moon mission came back to Earth, placing the duplicate sets in various scientific libraries and research facilities around the world.
As a result, these second-generation copies (and subsequent copies of copies) are what scientists and the public have seen. The copied images are unsharp and over-contrasty compared to the originals, which have remained in deep-freeze storage at the Johnson Space Center. Even many lunar scientists have not seen or worked with them.
The Apollo digitizing project goes back to the original flight films and scans them in high-resolution detail to reveal their subtleties.
Robinson explains, "We worked with the scanner's manufacturer - Leica Geosystems - to improve the brightness range that the scans record." In technical terms, a normal 12-bit scan was increased to 14-bit, resulting in digital images that record more than 16,000 shades of gray.
"Similarly," says Robinson, "to get all the details captured by the film, we are scanning at a scale of 200 pixels per millimeter." This means, he says, the grain of the original film is visible when scans are fully enlarged. The most detailed images from lunar orbit show rocks and other surface features about 40 inches (1 meter) wide.
Combining high resolution and wide brightness range produces very large raw image files, notes Robinson. For example, in raw form, the scans of the Apollo mapping (metric) camera frames, each 4.7 inches square, are 1.3 gigabytes in size.
"That's bigger than most people want to look at with a browser," says Robinson, "even if their browser and internet connection are up to the job." So the Web site uses a Flash-based application called Zoomify, which lets users dive deep into a giant image by loading only the portion being examined. Links are available at the site for downloading images in several sizes, up to the full raw scan.
The project will take about three years to complete and will scan some 36,000 images. These include about 600 frames in 35 mm, roughly 20,000 Hasselblad 60 mm frames (color, and black and white), more than 10,000 mapping camera frames, and about 4,600 panoramic camera frames.
"These photos have great scientific value, despite being taken decades ago," says Robinson.
He adds, "I think they also give everybody a beautiful look at this small, ancient world next door to us."
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=23141
Circuit City Subpoenas CheapAssGamer
The latest CAGcast brings word that electronics retailer Circuit City has served CAG Productions with a subpoena. CAG Productions is responsible for popular video game shopping community CheapAssGamer.com, which has 100,000 registered members. The retail giant wants CAG to turn over all personal information about registered forum member Speedy1961, who has been posting weekly CC ads prior to their release on the site. Speedy has also posted them on DVDtalk.com, and that site appears to have received legal action as well. The subpoena mentions one CheapAssGamer thread in particular, which prior to E3, revealed that the PS3 would get a price drop. That same thread also included pricing for games at Circuit City as well as game prices at Target and Best Buy. From the thread:
* GAMERS / MOVIE AFFICIANADOS: Please note $100 Price Break on Playstation 3 Game System which brings the price down to $499.99 // Remember that you can get 5 free Blu-Ray DVDs with purchase of any Blu-Ray Player / Game system by going here:
http://www.bluraysavings.com/
This was wedged in between details about the Wii and other details. As mentioned aboved, information about Best Buy and Target was also noted. CAG Productions CEO David Abrams (AKA "CheapyD") has hired a lawyer. "The CAG community's trust and respect is very important to me, so I've hired legal representation to deal with the situation," Abrams tells Kotaku.
http://kotaku.com/gaming/not-cheap/c...mer-288081.php
US Bloggers Set for Journalistic Shield
OUT-LAW
A US bill that would shield journalists, including bloggers, from revealing their sources has cleared the House Judiciary Committee, an important stage in becoming law. There is already legislation in the UK which protects journalists and bloggers.
The US Free Flow of Information Act protects journalistic sources generally, but does include several exceptions regarding terrorism, national security, imminent death and trade secret leaks.
The US case has been championed by Republican Rich Boucher in the wake of several recent high profile federal court cases in which journalists were threatened with or actually forced to serve time in jail if they did not overturn confidential sources.
More than 30 US states already have shield laws on the statute books, and the new bill is an attempt to provide the same protection at the federal level.
There were concerns that the initial version of the bill would apply to all bloggers – but now the definition of a journalist has been narrowed.
The modified bill which passed the committee on 2nd August included a provision that limits its protections to those who make "financial gain or livelihood" from their journalism.
This essentially means that most individual bloggers, who may make a small income from Google adverts, seem unlikely to get protection – though this will depend on how broadly the courts interpret "financial gain".
The US Society of Professional Journalists pushed to keep the definition as broad as possible. A spokesman said: "While it's important to distinguish responsible journalists from casual bloggers, the more narrow the language defining who is a journalist, the less impact the bill will have."
Boucher told the committee that "the best information about corruption in government or misdeeds in a private organisation will come from someone on the inside who feels a responsibility to bring that information to light." He argued that such whistle-blowers will not come forward unless they know their confidentiality will be respected.
More than 40 US media companies and journalism bodies agreed. In supporting the bill, the Newspaper Association of America, said: "The journalist is becoming the first stop, rather than the last resort, for civil litigants and prosecutors attempting to obtain the identity of confidential sources."
The Bill will need approval from the House of Representatives and Senate before it becomes law.
In the UK, the Contempt of Court Act 1981 protects journalists and uses language that is likely to extend this protection to bloggers. It states: "No court may require a person to disclose, nor is any person guilty of contempt of court for refusing to disclose, the source of information contained in a publication for which he is responsible, unless it be established to the satisfaction of the court that disclosure is necessary in the interests of justice or national security or for the prevention of disorder or crime."
One of the highest profile UK cases under this Act was in 1983 when the Guardian newspaper was forced to reveal Sarah Tisdall as the source of leaked documents detailing when American cruise missile nuclear weapons were due to arrive on British soil. The Guardian's argument that it was protected by the Act was rejected.
Journalists are also expected to comply with the National Union of Journalists' Code of Conduct which states that journalists must "[Protect] the identity of sources who supply information in confidence and material gathered in the course of [their] work".
See: The US bill (
http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlc110/h2102_ih.xml)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08...eld/print.html
Five Journalists Honored with Yankee Quill Award
QUINCY, Mass. (AP) -- Five New England journalists, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and a TV reporter at the center of the national debate over confidential sources, are the recipients of the 2007 Yankee Quill Award for their contributions to improving journalism in the region.
The award is presented annually by the Academy of New England Journalists through the auspices of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors. It is considered the highest individual honor awarded by fellow journalists in the region.
This year's recipients are:
- Eileen McNamara, a Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist at The Boston Globe and currently a professor of journalism at Brandeis University;
- James Taricani, an investigative reporter for WJAR-TV, Providence, R.I., who was punished by the courts for refusing to disclose a secret news source;
- Larry McDermott, publisher of The Republican, Springfield, Mass., and president of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association;
- Barbara Walsh, an award-winning reporter at The Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence, Mass., and the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram;
- Michael Donoghue, a sportswriter at The Burlington, Vt., Free Press and executive director of the Vermont Press Association.
They will receive the Yankee Quill award on Oct. 25 during the joint conference of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors and the New England Newspaper Association at the Quincy Marriott.
McNamara will be honored as an advocate for the highest standards of ethics in the newsroom, with a passion to correct social injustice and provide a voice to the voiceless. She served 20 years as a reporter with United Press International and The Boston Globe before becoming a Globe columnist in 1996. One year later, she won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary "for her many-sided columns on Massachusetts people and issues." McNamara, who retired from the Globe earlier this year, is now a full-time professor at Brandeis University.
Taricani has won numerous awards for his aggressive reporting in Rhode Island, including Emmy awards and the Edward R. Murrow award. He will be honored for his role as an advocate for journalists' rights and a defender of the First Amendment. In 2004, Taricani was sentenced to six months of house confinement for refusing to divulge the source of an FBI videotape showing a politician's aide taking a bribe. The judge said he did not send Taricani to jail based on his fragile health - a heart transplant in 1996 and pacemaker in 2001. Since then, he has been a tireless advocate for a federal shield law.
McDermott will be honored for his extraordinary work on public-access issues in Massachusetts. Before being named CEO and publisher of the Springfield papers, he was executive editor, editor and associate publisher of the newspaper. Since 1998, McDermott has served as co-chair of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's Judiciary-Media Committee, which was established to improve relations between the judiciary and the media. As editor and publisher in Springfield, he has insisted on excellence in reporting and has pushed the public's right-to-know in a series of precedent-setting court cases.
Walsh, now a freelance writer, was a major contributor to the Pulitzer Prize won by The Eagle-Tribune in 1988 for a series of stories on convicted murderer Willie Horton and Massachusetts' flawed prison furlough system. While at the Portland papers, her work was honored with numerous awards, from the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism to the Anna Quindlen Award for Excellence in Journalism. Walsh will be honored as a feisty project reporter who writes about important public matters and issues and whose works has changed society for the better.
Donoghue, a staff writer for 37 years who moved to sports in 1998, is also an adjunct journalism professor at St. Michael's College and president of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. Donoghue is being honored for his leadership role on right-to-know and free press issues in Vermont as a practicing journalist and as head of that state's press association. Donoghue is a member of the New England Press Association Hall of Fame.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-10-14-51-19
US Public Sees News Media as Biased, Inaccurate, Uncaring: Poll
More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don't care about the people they report on, a poll published Thursday showed.
And poll respondents who use the Internet as their main source of news -- roughly one quarter of all Americans -- were even harsher with their criticism, the poll conducted by the Pew Research Center said.
More than two-thirds of the Internet users said they felt that news organizations don't care about the people they report on; 59 percent said their reporting was inaccurate; and 64 percent they were politically biased.
More than half -- 53 percent -- of Internet users also faulted the news organizations for "failing to stand up for America".
Among those who get their news from newspapers and television, criticism of the news organizations was up to 20 percentage points lower than among Internet news audiences, who tend to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole, according to Pew.
The poll indicates an across the board fall in the public's opinion on the news media since 1985, when a similar survey was conducted by Times Mirror, Pew Research said.
"Two decades ago, public attitudes about how news organizations do their job were less negative. Most people believed that news organizations stood up for America... a majority believed that news organizations got the facts straight," Pew said in a report.
The Washington-based Pew Research Center describes itself as a nonpartisan "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/US_publ..._08092007.html
'Ring of Steel' Coming to New York
Manav Tanneeru
In 2005, about two weeks after 52 people in London were killed in bombings targeting the English city's mass transit system, terrorists decided to strike again.
A police CCTV camera observes people walking in central London.
Similar to the July 7 attacks, they chose the city's transit system -- three subway trains and a double-decker bus -- as the targets. But this time, four homemade bombs stuffed into backpacks did not fully explode. One person was injured.
About a day later, photographs of four suspects were broadcast on television. Their images had been captured on surveillance cameras near the sites of the attempted attacks.
The remarkable speed of that investigation was repeated in June this year when terrorists attempted to detonate two car bombs in London.
Aided by surveillance cameras, British investigators began unraveling the plot later that day and tracked the suspects to Glasgow, Scotland. Several suspects were soon arrested.
Police officials credited the "Ring of Steel" -- a network of thousands of surveillance cameras that line London's intersections and neighborhoods -- for providing license plate numbers, suspects' image and other important clues in investigations.
New York City, specifically lower Manhattan, the site of two terror attacks, will have a similar system in place by the decade's end if it gets the needed funding.
Police officials say the surveillance cameras can help combat crime and terrorism, perhaps even deter it. Civil liberties advocates say such systems are a threat to privacy rights and another step for a society creeping toward a constant state of surveillance.
The implementation of the plan, called the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, will require about $90 million, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said. It will cost about $8 million a year to maintain.
The city so far has raised about $25 million. Part of it has come from the Homeland Security Department and the rest from city coffers.
Kelly said the money being spent on the system is well worth it. "The 1.7 square miles of lower Manhattan are arguably one of the most valuable and sensitive pieces of real estate in the world," he said during a telephone interview.
The area includes the New York Stock Exchange, the Mercantile Stock Exchange, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the site where the World Trade Center once stood and where the Freedom Tower is being built.
The system has four components: license plate readers, surveillance cameras, a coordination center and roadblocks that can swing into action when needed. The primary purpose of the system is deterrence, and then an investigative tool, Kelly said.
The license plate readers will be in place by the end of the year. The rest of the plan is scheduled to be completed during the next two years.
New York City already has many cameras located in its airports, banks, department stores and corporate buildings. The city's law enforcement uses them when needed as part of a public-private partnership, Kelly said.
Such partnerships can be found in many cities across the United States, including Washington D.C.; Atlanta, Georgia; Baltimore, Maryland; and Chicago, Illinois.
Baltimore police officials told CNN the city had 500 cameras and crime was reduced by 17 percent in neighborhoods where they are located.
"The feedback from the community has been fantastic, and in fact, most people want cameras in their neighborhoods," said Maj. Dave Engel of the Baltimore Police Department.
Atlanta Police Deputy Chief Peter Andresen said the city had applied for federal funding to implement a surveillance camera system of its own. Atlanta has a public-private partnership in several of its neighborhoods that gives police access to cameras, he said.
He recalled a drug deal being busted because someone monitoring a camera grew suspicious of two cars idling in a parking lot with their hoods up for a long time.
"We feel that [the cameras] go a long way toward preventing crime," he said.
But Steve Swain, who served for years with the London Metropolitan Police and its counter-terror operations, doubts the power of cameras to deter crime.
"I don't know of a single incident where CCTV has actually been used to spot, apprehend or detain offenders in the act," he said, referring to the London system. Swain now works for Control Risk, an international security firm.
Asked about their role in possibly stopping acts of terror, he said pointedly: "The presence of CCTV is irrelevant for those who want to sacrifice their lives to carry out a terrorist act."
Kelly disagreed, pointing out that it is practically impossible to know what has been deterred. "We don't know acts that may have been planned that -- because of the surveillance and deterrence systems that are in place -- did not go forward."
Swain does believe the cameras have great value in investigation work. He also said they are necessary to reassure the public that law enforcement is being aggressive.
"You need to do this piece of theater so that if the terrorists are looking at you, they can see that you've got some measures in place," he said.
Privacy advocates said they are concerned about the possible abuse of surveillance power.
Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said she was alarmed by the prospect of government and law enforcement officials having records of a person's daily activities.
"It wasn't that long ago that J. Edgar Hoover was up to his dirty tricks using government spying to interfere with lawful dissent, undermine critics and pursue an unlawful agenda," she said.
However, police officials repeatedly note there is no expectation of privacy in a public area and it is not a constitutional right.
A majority of Americans said they approved of the use of surveillance cameras by nearly a 3 to 1 margin in a recently published ABC News/Washington Post poll.
Jeffery Rosen, a professor at George Washington University and the author of two books on privacy issues, said the poll reflected the fact that "the arguments against the cameras tend to be abstract, whereas people's desire for security is understandable and immediate."
"But I think many people can understand life would be different in a world where, literally, government authorities could click on pictures of you at any point in the day and retrace your movements 24/7," he said.
Lieberman said privacy is not a quaint notion despite a rapidly changing world.
"Technology is an unstoppable train," she said. "The question is whether we can maximize the benefits and minimize the harms."
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/08/01/n...nce/index.html
Congress Approves Sweeping Survellance Powers
Timothy B. Lee
The House, in a rush to get out of town and fearful of being branded as soft on terrorism, approved legislation on Saturday that gives the Bush administration new authority to engage in warrantless surveillance. The Senate approved the legislation on Friday.
The White House began a full-court press for the legislation last week after the secret court charged with reviewing foreign surveillance reportedly limited eavesdropping on communications between two foreign parties that pass through the United States. The White House and House Minority Leader John Boehner charged that Congress would be putting Americans in danger if it didn't pass legislation overruling the decision before the August recess.
But the hastily-enacted legislation, dubbed the Protect America Act, does more than permit the interception of foreign-to-foreign communications. It permits warrantless surveillance "directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States." There is no language specifically restricting surveillance activities to communications originating outside of the United States.
No meaningful oversight
Nor will the process have meaningful judicial oversight. Before undertaking surveillance activities, intelligence officials would need to obtain a certification from the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence—both subordinates of the president—that there were "reasonable procedures" in place for ensuring that the eavesdropping "concerns" persons located outside the United States, and that the foreign intelligence is a "significant purpose" of the surveillance activities. That certification would only be reviewed after the fact, and only to determine if the procedures were, in fact, "reasonable." A single certification could approve a broad surveillance program covering numerous individuals, and no judge would review the list of individual targets.
Moreover, the requirement that surveillance "concern" non-U.S. persons could plausibly permit spying on the relatives, friends, and business associates of a foreign target. Indeed, the administration might argue that the only way to obtain all information regarding foreign targets is to conduct dragnet surveillance of American communications and sift through them to find relevant information.
The legislation empowers the administration to "direct" individuals to "provide the government with all information, facilities, and assistance necessary" to carry out foreign surveillance. These quasi-subpoenas would not be subject to judicial review before they were issued. The targets of such orders—who will typically be telecom company executives, not terrorism suspects—have the option of appealing the order to the FISA court, but given the broad scope of surveillance activities authorized by the legislation, it seems unlikely that such challenges would succeed. Moreover, the legislation offers legal immunity to those who comply with such orders, so telecom providers will have little incentive to resist them.
A couple of small bright spots
The legislation has two bright spots from a civil liberties perspective. First, as the president noted in his statement on the legislation, it does not provide "meaningful liability protection to those who are alleged to have assisted our Nation following the attacks of September 11, 2001"—in plain English, it doesn't give telecommunications carriers a free pass for any laws they might have broken over the last six years. That means that the legislation is unlikely to block lawsuits now in progress against telecom companies for violating their customers' privacy.
Second, the provisions sunset after six months, giving Congress the opportunity to reconsider the legislation later in the year. Yet even the sunset provision comes with a loophole: foreign surveillance that had been approved before the sunset date would remain in effect until expiration, which could be as long as a year. With less than 18 months remaining in his term, President Bush will have the opportunity to put in place surveillance programs that will remain in effect until the day he leaves office.
The legislation was opposed by a majority of Democrats, and Speaker Pelosi has vowed to revisit the legislation when Congress reconvenes in September. We hope the Democrats will show more backbone the second time around, but you'll forgive us if we don't hold our breaths.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ce-powers.html
Court Secretly Struck Down Bush Spying: Report
A U.S. intelligence court earlier this year secretly struck down a key element of President George W. Bush's warrantless spying program, The Washington Post reported in its Friday edition.
The decision is one reason Congress is trying to give legal authorization to the spying program in fevered negotiations with the Bush administration this week, the Post reported.
The intelligence-court judge, who remains anonymous, concluded that the government had overstepped its authority by monitoring overseas communications that pass through the United States, the Post said, citing anonymous government and congressional sources.
The Bush administration expanded its surveillance efforts after the September 11, 2001, hijacking attacks, without court oversight. The court was allowed to review the program in January.
The surveillance court judge's ruling has prevented the National Security Agency from monitoring foreign telephone calls and e-mails that travel through the United States, the Post reported.
House Minority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, mentioned the court setback on Fox News on Tuesday, drawing a rebuke from House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emmanuel.
A Boehner spokesman said he did not reveal classified information.
The Democratic-led Congress hopes to reach a deal with the White House in the next few days that would expand the government's power to eavesdrop on telephone calls and e-mail from abroad.
The effort would modernize the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court approval to monitor communications with people inside the United States.
The White House wants to bypass the court when spying on overseas foreigners, whether they are communicating with a U.S. citizen or not. Democrats object.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...20721820070803
Govt. Looks for Leaker on Warrantless Wiretaps
The controversy over President Bush's warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last week when a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets. The agents seized Tamm's desktop computer, two of his children's laptops and a cache of personal files. Tamm and his lawyer, Paul Kemp, declined any comment. So did the FBI. But two legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case told NEWSWEEK the raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media. The raid appears to be the first significant development in the probe since The New York Times reported in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without court warrants. (At the time, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said of the leak: "This is really hurting national security; this has really hurt our country.")
A veteran federal prosecutor who left DOJ last year, Tamm worked at OIPR during a critical period in 2004 when senior Justice officials first strongly objected to the surveillance program. Those protests led to a crisis that March when, according to recent Senate testimony, then A.G. John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and others threatened to resign, prompting Bush to scale the program back. Tamm, said one of the legal sources, had shared concerns about he program's legality, but it was unclear whether he actively participated in the internal DOJ protest.
The FBI raid on Tamm's home comes when Gonzales himself is facing criticism for allegedly misleading Congress by denying there had been "serious disagreement" within Justice about the surveillance program. The A.G. last week apologized for "creating confusion," but Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy said he is weighing asking Justice's inspector general to review Gonzales's testimony.
The raid also came while the White House and Congress were battling over expanding NSA wiretapping authority in order to plug purported "surveillance gaps." James X. Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology said the raid was "amazing" and shows the administration's misplaced priorities: using FBI agents to track down leakers instead of processing intel warrants to close the gaps. A Justice spokesman declined to comment.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20121795/site/newsweek/
America Under Surveillance
Granted new power to spy inside the U.S., the Bush administration may be doing more than eavesdropping on phone calls -- it could be watching suspects' every move.
Tim Shorrock
In the pre-dawn hours of Sept. 1, 2005, a U-2 surveillance aircraft known as the Dragon Lady lifted off the runway at Beale Air Force Base in California, the home of the U.S. Air Force 9th Reconnaissance Wing and one of the most important outposts in the U.S. intelligence world. Originally built in secret by Lockheed Corp. for the Central Intelligence Agency, the U-2 has provided some of the most sensitive intelligence available to the U.S. government, including thousands of photographs of Soviet and Chinese military bases, North Korean nuclear sites, and war zones from Afghanistan to Iraq.
But the aircraft that took off that September morning wasn't headed overseas to spy on America's enemies. Instead, for the next six hours it flew directly over the U.S. Gulf Coast, capturing hundreds of high-resolution images as Hurricane Katrina, one of the largest storms of the past century, slammed into New Orleans and the surrounding region.
The U-2 photos were matched against satellite imagery captured during and after the disaster by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Relatively unknown to the public, the NGA was first organized in 1996 from the imagery and mapping divisions of the CIA, the Department of Defense and the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that builds and maintains the nation's fleet of spy satellites. In 2003, the NGA was formally inaugurated as a combat support agency of the Pentagon. It is responsible for supplying overhead imagery and mapping tools to the military, the CIA and other intelligence agencies -- including the National Security Agency, whose wide-reaching, extrajudicial spying inside the United States under the Bush administration has been a heated political issue since first coming to light in the media nearly two years ago.
The NGA's role in Hurricane Katrina has received little attention outside of a few military and space industry publications. But the agency's close working relationship with the NSA -- whose powers to spy domestically were just expanded with new legislation from Congress -- raises the distinct possibility that the U.S. government could be doing far more than secretly listening in on phone calls as it targets and tracks individuals inside the United States. With the additional capabilities of the NGA and the use of other cutting-edge technologies, the government could also conceivably be following the movements of those individuals minute by minute, watching a person depart from a mosque in, say, Lodi, Calif., or drive a car from Chicago to Detroit.
Prior to Katrina, the NGA had been used sporadically during domestic crises. Its first baptism of fire came after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the agency collected imagery to help in the recovery efforts at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the storm of 2005 triggered NGA activity on a scale never before seen inside the borders of the United States. "Hurricane Katrina changed everything with what we do with disasters," John Goolgasian, the director of the NGA's Office of Americas, told Salon. In New York after 9/11, the NGA had only a handful of people on the ground, but "with Katrina, we put a lot of people down in the theater," he said, using a term usually reserved for overseas military battlegrounds. The agency now deploys its staff on a regular basis to hurricane zones and also provides assistance to law enforcement agencies during events such as the Super Bowl, the baseball All-Star Game and political conventions.
On one level, the engagement of the NGA and the U-2 flights over the Gulf Coast during Katrina were commendable efforts to use America's vast surveillance powers for the safety and support of its citizens. But at the same time, the incident apparently marked the first time in history that U.S. intelligence agencies created to spy on foreign countries were deployed to collect extensive information on the U.S. "homeland." Their role during Katrina is just one aspect of an enormous domestic surveillance infrastructure put in place by the Bush administration ever since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks sparked a radical restructuring and expansion of America's intelligence system. Although the full scope of domestic surveillance under Bush remains elusive, we now know from press accounts, lawsuits, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other top Bush officials' descriptions and denials that the NSA has been involved in multiple domestic surveillance programs -- in apparent violation of federal law -- including spying on Americans' telecommunications and Internet traffic, as well as data mining.
In December 2004, the NSA and the NGA announced the signing of an agreement to share resources and staff and to link their "sources, data holdings, information infrastructure, and exploitation techniques." The document spelling out the agreement itself is classified. But in a press release the NGA explained that the pact allows "horizontal integration" between the two agencies, defined as "working together from start to finish, using NGA's 'eyes' and NSA 'ears.'"
The collaboration makes it possible for the agencies to create hybrid intelligence tools that enhance the ability of U.S. forces in combat. By combining intercepts of cellphone calls with overhead imagery gathered by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), for example, intelligence analysts can track suspected terrorists or insurgents in Iraq in real time. Last November, NGA director Robert B. Murrett disclosed that it was through such technology that the U.S. military was able to locate and bomb the safe house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, was staying in June 2006. "Eventually, it all comes down to physical location," he told reporters. When NSA and NGA data are combined, he added, "the multiplier effect is dramatic."
Nine months prior, during Hurricane Katrina, the NGA's sophisticated surveillance tools, which can create three-dimensional maps, helped first responders identify hospitals, schools and areas where hazardous materials were stored in the Gulf Coast region. And in an unprecedented move, the NGA distributed thousands of unclassified images of stricken areas, via the Internet, to the public. "People could actually see their houses," said retired Air Force Gen. James R. Clapper, the NGA director at the time of Katrina. In an interview with Salon before his appointment in April as undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Clapper said that the NGA's work during the hurricane was "the most graphic example in my 40 years of intelligence of coming to the direct aid of people in extreme circumstances."
The purpose and utility of such intelligence tools in a disaster area, or in a war zone, are clear. But given the Bush administration's highly secretive, aggressive policies in the war on terror, what's to stop the NGA and the NSA from collaborating on other types of real-time surveillance at home?
This past Saturday, Congress approved legislation expanding the ability of the National Security Agency to eavesdrop, without warrants, on telephone calls, e-mail and faxes passing through telecommunications hubs in the United States when the government suspects terrorists may be involved. The legislation, which expands the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was negotiated between the White House and lawmakers in response to a federal court ruling this summer determining that the NSA's past eavesdropping had violated the law. Mike McConnell, the retired Navy admiral who was appointed last January as the nation's second director of national intelligence, told Congress that the ruling drastically reduced the ability of the NSA to track terrorists, while Bush warned that, because of the ruling, the government was "missing a significant amount of foreign intelligence that we should be collecting to protect our country."
The fear of Democratic leaders that their party might be further accused of being soft on terrorism apparently prompted them to vote for the new FISA legislation -- handing new unilateral surveillance powers to the executive branch while significantly diminishing judicial oversight. Civil liberties groups and lawmakers opposed to the legislation believe the changes will make it easier for the government to spy on U.S. citizens, because the more loosely defined FISA statute now allows warrantless surveillance of people communicating with others who are "reasonably believed to be outside the United States." During the House debate last Saturday night, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., described the bill as an enormous loophole that will grant the attorney general the ability to "wiretap anybody, any place, any time without court review, without any checks and balances."
President Bush signed the measure into law on Sunday.
The NGA, which has a staff of 14,000 and an estimated budget of about $2.5 billion (the actual amount is classified), buys most of its imagery from commercial satellite vendors, but it also relies on highly classified overhead photography captured by the National Reconnaissance Office's fleet of military satellites. According to David H. Burpee, the NGA's director of public affairs, the agency operates under strict oversight rules that ban it from collecting imagery over the United States without a formal request from a "lead" domestic agency coordinating efforts during a disaster. In the case of Katrina, the NGA's assistance was requested by the Federal Emergency Management Administration. In a statement to Salon, Burpee said that the NGA collects intelligence "in accordance with Constitutional law, federal law, and executive policies such as Executive Order 12333." (That order, signed in 1981 by President Reagan, includes a mandate for federal agencies to cooperate with the CIA and other intelligence agencies.) Any questions involving domestic operations would have to be directed to the lead agency requesting NGA support, Burpee added.
It is unclear how the latest changes to FISA might affect other intelligence agencies besides the NSA. But the zeal with which McConnell and Bush pursued the new legislation unbridling the NSA -- which could presumably tap the NGA for assistance with operations at home, just as it does in the war zones -- raises stark questions about the administration's intentions with domestic intelligence.
A close look at the NSA programs suggests that the Bush administration is casting the widest net possible. To date, President Bush and administration officials have acknowledged only a narrow aspect of domestic spying -- referred to as the Terrorist Surveillance Program -- which they admitted, in the wake of media reports, included the warrantless wiretapping of phone calls. But in May 2006, USA Today reported on a program that involved the NSA's gaining access to huge customer databases maintained by AT&T and other telecommunications providers. In another alleged program, discovered by AT&T technician Mark Klein and disclosed in a lawsuit against the telecom provider filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the NSA attached what amounts to an electronic hose to AT&T Internet data lines in San Francisco and other cities and diverted global Internet traffic and phone calls to a special room, where calls and messages were analyzed with powerful computers to find clues to terrorist cells. A Salon report in June 2006 uncovered what appeared to be a nexus for such activity in a secret room at an AT&T facility in St. Louis.
Then, last month, the New York Times disclosed that a dispute in 2003 between the White House and the Justice Department over NSA operations involved a potential fourth program using "computer searches through massive electronic databases" that contained the records of tens of thousands of domestic phone calls and e-mails. McConnell acknowledged multiple programs, albeit without specifics, in a July 31 letter to Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "A number of these intelligence activities were authorized in one order" by Bush shortly after 9/11, McConnell wrote. With regard to the administration's Terrorist Surveillance Program, he added: "This is the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed publicly, because it is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has been officially acknowledged." Many FISA experts, such as James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology, have concluded that the NSA was running at least three domestic surveillance programs, including data mining. "I think the TSP was an after-the-fact name given to an activity, or a set of activities, or a whole subset of activities" by the NSA, Dempsey said.
After 9/11, the paradigm for domestic law enforcement shifted radically, by making it the duty of the government to use its intelligence resources to help law enforcement agencies preempt attacks before they happened, beyond the traditional practice of gathering evidence to prove that a crime had already occurred. The idea that the U.S. homeland was now a battleground (or a "theater") first took hold in 2002, when the Pentagon established the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado to provide command and control of military efforts within U.S. borders. Northcom was given two primary responsibilities: providing military security during national emergencies, including terrorist attacks and natural disasters; and protecting important U.S. military bases in the 50 states. As part of the Pentagon's domestic security mission, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) in 2002. But CIFA soon became a weapon against anyone suspected of harboring ill-will against the Bush administration and its policies. CIFA was caught spying on antiwar groups, Quakers and other organizations. Even though Clapper and his boss, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, have expressed concerns about CIFA's reach, the agency remains an integral part of the Pentagon's counterterrorism efforts.
The link between Pentagon-driven intelligence operations and the homeland was underscored during the Katrina crisis by the NGA's deployment to New Orleans of a special vehicle called a Mobile Integrated Geospatial-Intelligence System, or MIGS, which is loaded with equipment that allows NGA analysts to download intelligence from U-2s and U.S. military satellites. The vehicles were first deployed by the NGA in Iraq and Afghanistan, and later to the Gulf Coast. "They're pretty much the NGA in a Humvee -- very military," said Goolgasian, the NGA official. "But it kind of sticks out like a sore thumb if you're driving into an urban area" in the United States. As a result, the NGA has painted its domestic vehicles blue and renamed them Domestic MIGS, or DMIGS.
Military, intelligence agency and police work is also coming together in numerous "fusion centers" around the country in a joint program run by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security that has received little public attention. At present, there are 43 current and planned fusion centers in the United States where information from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases and anonymous tipsters is combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts. DHS hopes to create a wide network of such centers that would be tied into the agency's day-to-day activities, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The project, according to EPIC, "inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers and evokes comparisons with the publicly condemned domestic surveillance program of COINTELPRO," the 1960s program by the FBI aimed at destroying groups on the American political left.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how powerful technologies, when combined with secretive, growing interagency collaboration, could be misused in a domestic context. In recent years many U.S. cities have deployed sophisticated video cameras throughout their downtown areas that track activity 24 hours a day. And U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies now have at their disposal facial recognition software that can identify one person among thousands in a large crowd. Combine that with the awesome eavesdropping power of the NSA and the ability of the NGA to capture live imagery from satellites and UAVs, and the result could be an ability to track any individual, in real time, as he or she moves around.
John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, said the NGA is unlikely to be called upon for surveillance of an individual inside the United States. "NGA imagery is not what you would use to track people," he said. But as the intelligence infrastructure, including the kinds of local camera-surveillance systems that proved so useful in identifying the perpetrators of the London subway bombings, expands in the United States, it raises the specter of a nationwide surveillance web. "These networks are going to get denser and going to cover more area over time," Pike said. "At some point in time somebody's going to drop in an automated face-print recognizer, and then they're off to the races. Anybody who is currently wanted by the authorities, well, there's just going to be parts of the country where such a person could not enter."
The expanding role of U.S. intelligence agencies on the home front raises serious issues, according to Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré, the commanding general on the scene in the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina. Last fall, during a national conference on geospatial intelligence, he said, "Most of our capability [in the military] is kept on the classified side because that's the best way to fight the enemy." But the situation in the Gulf Coast, as the lines blurred, was complicated by conflicting policy directives. There were some people in government saying, "You're not going to use the intel stuff on us," Honoré recalled, while others were saying just the opposite: "Why aren't you using that intel stuff to tell us what's going on down there?" And then, there were people sitting back, saying, "They can't do that inside the United States," he said, adding, "This is one of the things government has to work out."
In light of the mounting revelations about the Bush administration's domestic spying, civil libertarians no doubt strongly agree.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...urce=whitelist
Reported Drop in Surveillance Spurred a Law
Eric Lichtblau, James Risen and Mark Mazzetti
At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.
Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a dangerous situation.
Some lawmakers were alarmed. Others, jaded by past intelligence warnings, were skeptical.
The report helped set off a furious legislative rush last week that, improbably, broadened the administration’s authority to wiretap terrorism suspects without court oversight.
It was a surprising victory for the politically weakened White House on an issue that had plodded along in Congress for months without a clear sign of urgency or resolution. A flurry of talk in the last three weeks on intelligence gaps, heightened concern over terrorist attacks, burdensome court rulings and Congress’s recess helped turn the debate from a slow boil to a fever pitch.
For months, Democrats had refused to give the administration new wiretapping powers until the White House agreed to turn over documents about the National Security Agency program to eavesdrop on some Americans’ international communications without warrants.
The White House refused to back down, even after Congressional subpoenas were issued. The administration ultimately attracted the support it needed to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from moderate Democrats who felt pressed to act before the recess.
For the White House and its Republican allies, the decision by the Democratic-controlled Congress to act quickly was critical to safeguarding the country this summer as intelligence officials spoke of increasing “chatter” among Qaeda suspects.
To many Democrats who opposed the action, it was a reflection of fear mongering by the White House, and political capitulation by some fellow Democrats.
“There was an intentional manipulation of the facts to get this legislation through,” said Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee who voted against the plan.
The White House, Mr. Feingold said Friday in an interview, “has identified the one major remaining weakness in the Democratic Party, and that’s its unwillingness to stand up to the administration when it’s making a power grab regarding terrorism and national security.”
“They have figured out that all they have to do is start talking about an imminent terrorist threat, back it up against a Congressional recess, and they know the Democrats will cave,” he added.
Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California, said the White House “very skillfully played the fear card.”
“With the chatter up in August,” Ms. Harman said, “the issue of FISA reform got traction. Then they ran out the clock.”
A White House official said the push was driven by genuine concerns by Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, for the government’s ability to conduct terrorist surveillance.
“There was no real argument on the need for a fix” between Democrats and Republicans, the White House official said. “He’s a straight shooter.”
The prelude to approval of the plan occurred in January, when the administration agreed to put the wiretapping program under the oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court is charged with guarding against governmental spying abuses. Officials say one judge issued a ruling in January that allowed the administration to continue the program under the court’s supervision.
A ruling a month or two later — the judge who made it and its exact timing are not clear — restricted the government’s ability to intercept foreign-to-foreign communications passing through telecommunication “switches” on American soil.
The security agency was newly required to seek warrants to monitor at least some of those phone calls and e-mail messages. As a result, the ability to intercept foreign-based communications “kept getting ratcheted down,” said a senior intelligence official who insisted on anonymity because the account involved classified material. “ We were to a point where we were not effectively operating.”
Mr. McConnell, lead negotiator for the administration in lobbying for the bill, said in an interview that the court’s restrictions had made his job much more difficult.
“It was crazy, because I’m sitting here signing out warrants on known Al Qaeda operatives that are killing Americans, doing foreign communications,” he said. “And the only reason I’m signing that warrant is because it touches the U.S. communications infrastructure. That’s what we fixed.”
In April, Mr. McConnell began talking with lawmakers in classified meetings about that “intelligence gap” and alluded to it publicly, too. At the time, the administration proposed sweeping measures to “modernize” the foreign surveillance law, a much broader proposal in some respects than what Congress approved.
The proposal was considered dead on arrival by some Democrats, who argued that the administration was overreaching and asking Congress to legislate blindly without access to documents on the legal history and operations of the program.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’ s political problems, including questions about truthfulness in testimony on the eavesdropping, helped stall any action, in part because the administration wanted him to have oversight of the broadened wiretapping authorities.
When the administration proposed its revisions in April, “everyone kind of laughed at us,” said a Justice Department official who insisted on anonymity. “We got bludgeoned. People just said: ‘Are you kidding? We’re not even going to consider it.’ ”
The administration’s classified briefings on the “intelligence gap” grew more urgent. In May, members of the Intelligence Committees began hearing about specific cases in which eavesdroppers could not intercept certain communications, said Representative Heather A. Wilson, Republican of New Mexico.
By June and early July, Ms. Wilson said Friday in an interview, the scope of what intelligence officials were missing had grown “frighteningly large.”
“I begged my colleagues to act,” she said. “They did nothing for six weeks. They weren’t going to act unless they were forced to. So we started raising the pressure.”
Some Democrats reacted skeptically to the closed-door briefings by Mr. McConnell and other intelligence officials. Intelligence Committee members acknowledged that they learned in May that the secret court ruling had caused some problems, but it was not until last month that the administration reported the gaps.
“They changed that story,” a Democratic Congressional aide said, amid talk about a backlog in warrant applications.
By mid-July, Mr. McConnell’s briefings, coupled with the release of a new National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism, set the tone for a series of talks between the White House and Mr. McConnell’s office and Democratic Congressional leaders.
After learning of the intelligence problems, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, contacted the White House to discuss repairing them. On July 12, the White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, discussed the problem with the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, a senior White House official said.
At first, some Democratic leaders favored amending the surveillance law in September. Mr. McConnell pressed for an immediate repair.
Two weeks later, the administration lowered its sights, slimming its original 66-page proposal to 11 pages and eliminating some of the controversial plans like broad immunity from lawsuits for telecommunications companies that aided eavesdropping.
Congressional Democrats effectively agreed to try to forge a narrow bill to address the foreign problem that Mr. McConnell identified. But they were at odds over a critical detail, the court oversight.
Democratic leaders did not demand that the security agency seek individual court warrants for eavesdropping. But they did want the court to review and approve the agency procedures soon after surveillance began.
The administration, however, wanted the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to approve the surveillance, with the court weighing in just to certify that no abuses occurred, and only long after the surveillance had been conducted.
The talks intensified in the days before the recess last weekend, highlighted by proposals and counterproposals in calls between Mr. McConnell and the Democratic leadership.
By Aug. 2, the two sides seemed relatively close to a deal. Mr. McConnell had agreed to some increased role for the secret court, a step that the administration considered a major concession, the White House and Congressional leaders said.
But that night, the talks broke down. With time running out, the Senate approved a Republican bill that omitted the stronger court oversight. The next day, the House passed the bill.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/11/wa.../11nsa.html?hp
Gingrich Calls War on Terror "Phony"
ABC News' Joe Kildea Reports: Newt Gingrich, former Republican House Speaker, called the war on terror "phony" in a speech to a group of young conservatives in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
The potential GOP presidential candidate told attendees of the National Conservative Student Conference that "We’re about to enter the seventh year of this phony war…and we’re losing."
Gingrich added, "None of you should believe we are winning this war. There is no evidence that we are winning this war."
Instead of the current strategy to fight terrorism, Gingrich said we should focus on energy independence. "We have to have a national energy strategy, which basically says to the Saudis, 'We’re not going to rely on you.'"
Gingrich also attacked the current administration and former Republican Congressional leadership in saying "We were in charge for six years…I don’t think you can look and say that was a great success."
In a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, Gingrich received 7 percent support for the Republican presidential nomination, putting him fifth, just behind former Massachusetts Governor, Mitt Romney. While speaking to the Aspen Institute on Friday, Gingrich did not rule out an '08 White House run.
"If at some point down the road there is so much pressure for me to run, I will run. But I have zero interest in being one of 12 people given 30 seconds to answer non-questions," he said.
The National Conservative Student Conference is an annual event for college students sponsored by the Young America's Foundation held at Washington's George Washington University.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalra...ch-calls-.html
Court Rules Against FBI for Raiding Jefferson's Congressional Office; Lawyer Promises to Clear Indicted Rep.'s Name
Michael Roston
A district court ruled that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's 2006 raid of the Congressional office of embattled Louisiana Democratic Representative William Jefferson was unconstitutional. The court will also require the FBI to return all privileged materials seized to Jefferson.
"The review of the Congressman's paper files when the search was executed exposed legislative material to the Executive," according to the ruling from the US Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit, reports AP's Matt Apuzzo.
Jefferson was indicted in June on 16 counts stemming from a public corruption investigation. He pleaded not guilty on all charges, and his trial is set for January 2008.
The FBI referred all questions to the Justice Department, which had not yet replied at press time.
Jefferson's attorney expressed his satisfaction with the ruling in a statement released to RAW STORY.
"We are pleased with the DC Circuit’s ruling that the unprecedented search conducted by the FBI violated Congressman Jefferson’s rights under the Speech or Debate clause of the United States Constitution," Trout stated. "[T]he court ruled that the Congressman had an absolute right to review his records first and shield privileged legislative material from review by the executive branch."
Trout went on to take a shot at the Justice Department, implying that it had broken the law.
"Today’s opinion underscores the fact that the Department of Justice is required to follow the law, and that it is bound to abide by the Constitution," he said.
And, he made it clear that Jefferson had no plan to back down, stating that, "We are confident that as this case moves forward, and when all of the facts are known, we will prevail again and clear Congressman Jefferson’s name."
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Court_...ding_0803.html
Citing Four-Day Old Surveillance Law, Bush Seeks Dismissal of Lawsuit Challenging NSA Spying
David Kravets
Four days after President Bush signed controversial legislation legalizing some warrantless surveillance of Americans, the administration is citing the law in a surprise motion today urging a federal judge to dismisss a lawsuit challenging the NSA spy program.
The lawsuit was brought by lawyers defending Guantanamo Bay prisoners. The lawyers and others alleged the threat of surveillance is chilling their First Amendment rights of speech, and their clients' right to legal representation.
Justice Department lawyers are asking (.pdf) U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker to toss the case, citing the new law -- which says warrantless surveillance can continue for up to a year so long as one person in the intercepted communications is reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States.
The motion is set to be heard in federal court in San Francisco this afternoon. THREAT LEVEL will be there.
The government said the new Protect America Act of 2007 requires the government to notify the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court "as soon as practicable" when somebody is being spied upon, but does not require its immediate authorization.
The government has maintained all along that electronic eavesdropping was legal, and said the newest legislation provides "an additional basis for dismissal."
The Center for Constitutional Rights, the plaintif in the lawsuit, is expected to argue today that the new law violates the Fourth Amendment's requirement that judges approve warrants for surveillance.
"Congress has ceded further power to an administration that has done nothing but abuse its power and betray the trust of the American people, center attorney Shayana Kadidal said. "Congress has given the president and attorney general virtually uncheckmed power to spy on international calls of Americans without any oversight or accountability from the courts."
Cindy Cohn, director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the latest legislation does not apply to another eavesdropping case in which her group accuses AT&T of cooperating with the National Security Agency to make all communications on AT&T networks available to the spy agency without warrants. That case will be argued before the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday.
"This new law does not apply to this dragnet style of eavesdropping, and if it did, it's not retroactive," Cohn said.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...-four-day.html
Scan This Guy's E-Passport and Watch Your System Crash
Kim Zetter
A German security researcher who demonstrated last year that he could clone the computer chip in an electronic passport has revealed additional vulnerabilities in the design of the new documents and the inspection systems used to read them.
Lukas Grunwald, an RFID expert who has served as an e-passport consultant to the German parliament, says the security flaws allow someone to seize and clone the fingerprint image stored on the biometric e-passport, and to create a specially coded chip that attacks e-passport readers that attempt to scan it.
Grunwald says he's succeeded in sabotaging two passport readers made by different vendors by cloning a passport chip, then modifying the JPEG2000 image file containing the passport photo. Reading the modified image crashed the readers, which suggests they could be vulnerable to a code-injection exploit that might, for example, reprogram a reader to approve expired or forged passports.
"If you're able to crash something you are most likely able to exploit it," says Grunwald, who's scheduled to discuss the vulnerabilities this weekend at the annual DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas.
E-passports contain radio frequency ID, or RFID, chips that are supposed to help thwart document forgery and speed processing of travelers at U.S. entry points. The United States led the charge for global e-passports because authorities said the chip, which is digitally signed by each issuing country, would help distinguish official documents from forged ones.
But Grunwald demonstrated last year at the BlackHat security conference how he could extract the data on a passport chip, which is read-only, and clone it to a read-write chip that appears the same to an e-passport reader. Now Grunwald says he was able to add data to the cloned chip that would allow someone to attack the passport reader.
He conducted the attack by embedding a buffer-overrun exploit inside the JPEG2000 file on the cloned chip that contains the passport photo. Grunwald says he tested his exploit on two passport readers that were on display at a security conference he attended.
Buffer-overrun vulnerabilities occur when coding errors in software allow an attacker to overflow a section of memory dedicated to storing a fixed amount of data. Carefully exploited, they often permit the hacker to execute his own instructions on the vulnerable computer, essentially taking over the device -- though Grunwald has not attempted that level of compromise on e-passport readers.
If a reader could be compromised using Grunwald's technique, it might be reprogrammed to misreport an expired passport as a valid one, or even -- theoretically -- to attempt a compromise of the Windows-based border-screening computer to which it is connected.
He won't name the vendors that make the readers he crashed, but says the readers are currently in use at some airport entry points. He says there's no reason to believe that readers made by other vendors would be any more secure.
"I predict that most of the vendors are using off-the-shelf (software) libraries for decoding the JPEG2000 images (on passports)," which means they would all be vulnerable to exploit in a similar manner.
A second vulnerability in the design of the passport chip would allow someone to access and clone a passport holder's fingerprint.
The International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations body that developed the standards for e-passports, opted to store travelers' fingerprints as a digital photo, no different than if you were to press the tabs of your fingers against a flatbed scanner. As a result, it's possible to seize the image and use it to impersonate a passport holder by essentially hijacking their fingerprints. Japanese researchers several years ago demonstrated the ability to make false fingerprints using gelatin material that could be placed over a finger.
To access any data on the passport, the attacker would need to unlock it using a machine-readable code printed on the passport's face. Additionally, the International Civil Aviation Organization recommends that issuing countries protect biometric data on the e-passport with an optional feature known as Extended Access Control, which protects the biometric data on the chip by making readers obtain a digital certificate from the country that issued the passport before the equipment can access the information.
That certificate is only valid for a short period of time, but the chips contain no onboard clock to handle the digital certificate's expiration, which makes them vulnerable as well, says Grunwald. "It's a basic mistake," he says.
The U.S. State Department had no immediate comment Tuesday. Grunwald's DefCon talk, "First We Break Your Tag, Then We Break Your Systems," is scheduled for Friday.
http://www.wired.com/politics/securi...7/08/epassport
Microchips in Humans: High-Tech Helpers or Big Brother Surveillance?
AP
CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted little notice itself -- until a year ago, when two of its employees had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas embedded in their forearms.
Sean Darks, the chief executive of Citywatcher.com, points to the VeriChip implant he has in his arm.
The "chipping" of two workers with RFIDs -- radio frequency identification tags as long as two grains of rice, as thick as a toothpick -- was merely a way of restricting access to vaults that held sensitive data and images for police departments, a layer of security beyond key cards and clearance codes, the company said.
"To protect high-end secure data, you use more sophisticated techniques," Sean Darks, chief executive of the Cincinnati-based company, said. He compared chip implants to retina scans or fingerprinting. "There's a reader outside the door; you walk up to the reader, put your arm under it, and it opens the door."
Innocuous? Maybe.
But the news that Americans had, for the first time, been injected with electronic identifiers to perform their jobs fired up a debate over the proliferation of ever-more-precise tracking technologies and their ability to erode privacy in the digital age.
To some, the microchip was a wondrous invention -- a high-tech helper that could increase security at nuclear plants and military bases, help authorities identify wandering Alzheimer's patients, allow consumers to buy their groceries, literally, with the wave of a chipped hand.
To others, the notion of tagging people was Orwellian, a departure from centuries of history and tradition in which people had the right to go and do as they pleased without being tracked, unless they were harming someone else.
Chipping, these critics said, might start with Alzheimer's patients or Army Rangers, but would eventually be suggested for convicts, then parolees, then sex offenders, then illegal aliens -- until one day, a majority of Americans, falling into one category or another, would find themselves electronically tagged.
Thirty years ago, the first electronic tags were fixed to the ears of cattle, to permit ranchers to track a herd's reproductive and eating habits. In the 1990s, millions of chips were implanted in livestock, fish, pets, even racehorses.
Microchips are now fixed to car windshields as toll-paying devices, on "contactless" payment cards (Chase's "Blink," or MasterCard's "PayPass"). They're embedded in Michelin tires, library books, passports and, unbeknownst to many consumers, on a host of individual items at Wal-Mart and Best Buy.
But CityWatcher.com employees weren't appliances or pets: They were people, made scannable.
"It was scary that a government contractor that specialized in putting surveillance cameras on city streets was the first to incorporate this technology in the workplace," says Liz McIntyre, co-author of "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID."
Darks, the CityWatcher.com executive, said his employees volunteered to be chipped. "You would think that we were going around putting chips in people by force," he told a reporter, "and that's not the case at all."
Implants in humans spark outrage
Yet, within days of the company's announcement, civil libertarians and Christian conservatives joined to excoriate the microchip's implantation in people.
"Ultimately," says Katherine Albrecht, a privacy advocate who specializes in consumer education and RFID technology, "the fear is that the government or your employer might someday say, 'Take a chip or starve."'
Some critics saw the implants as the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy that describes an age of evil in which humans are forced to take the "Mark of the Beast" on their bodies, to buy or sell anything. Others saw it as a big step toward the creation of a Big-Brother society.
"We're really on the verge of creating a surveillance society in America, where every movement, every action -- some would even claim, our very thoughts -- will be tracked, monitored, recorded and correlated," says Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington D.C.
In design, the tag is simple: A medical-grade glass capsule holds a silicon computer chip, a copper antenna and a "capacitor" that transmits data stored on the chip when prompted by an electromagnetic reader.
Implantations are quick, relatively simple procedures. After a local anesthetic is administered, a large-gauge, hypodermic needle injects the chip under the skin on the back of the arm, midway between the elbow and the shoulder.
John Halamka, an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, got chipped two years ago, "so that if I was ever in an accident, and arrived unconscious or incoherent at an emergency ward, doctors could identify me and access my medical history quickly." (A chipped person's medical profile can be continuously updated, since the information is stored on a database accessed via the Internet.)
Hazards and benefits
But it's also clear to Halamka that there are consequences to having an implanted identifier. "My friends have commented to me that I'm 'marked' for life, that I've lost my anonymity. And to be honest, I think they're right."
Indeed, as microchip proponents and detractors readily agree, Americans' mistrust of microchips and technologies like RFID runs deep. Many wonder:
Do the current chips have global positioning transceivers that would allow the government to pinpoint a person's exact location, 24-7? (No; the technology doesn't yet exist.)
But could a tech-savvy stalker rig scanners to video cameras and film somebody each time they entered or left the house? (Quite easily, though not cheaply. Currently, readers cost $300 and up.)
What's the average lifespan of a microchip? (About 10-15 years.) What if you get tired of it before then -- can it be easily, painlessly removed? (Short answer: No.)
How about thieves? Could they make their own readers, aim them at unsuspecting individuals, and surreptitiously pluck people's IDs out of their arms? (Yes. There's even a name for it -- "spoofing.")
The company that makes implantable microchips for humans, VeriChip Corp., of Delray Beach, Florida, concedes that's a problem -- even as it markets its radio tag and its portal scanner as imperatives for high-security buildings, such as nuclear power plants.
"To grab information from radio frequency products with a scanning device is not hard to do," Scott Silverman, the company's chief executive, says. However, "the chip itself only contains a unique, 16-digit identification number. The relevant information is stored on a database."
VeriChip Corp., whose parent company has been selling radio tags for animals for more than a decade, has sold 7,000 microchips worldwide, of which about 2,000 have been implanted in humans.
The company's present push: tagging of "high-risk" patients -- diabetics and people with heart conditions or Alzheimer's disease.
In an emergency, hospital staff could wave a reader over a patient's arm, get an ID number, and then, via the Internet, enter a company database and pull up the person's identity and medical history.
To doctors, a "starter kit" -- complete with 10 hypodermic syringes, 10 VeriChips and a reader -- costs $1,400. To patients, a microchip implant means a $200, out-of-pocket expense to their physician. Presently, chip implants aren't covered by insurance companies, Medicare or Medicaid.
For almost two years, the company has been offering hospitals free scanners, but acceptance has been limited. According to the company, 515 hospitals have pledged to take part in the VeriMed network, yet only 100 have actually been equipped and trained to use the system.
Some wonder why they should abandon noninvasive tags such as MedicAlert, a low-tech bracelet that warns paramedics if patients have serious allergies or a chronic medical condition.
"Having these things under your skin instead of in your back pocket -- it's just not clear to me why it's worth the inconvenience," says Westhues.
Silverman responds that an implanted chip is "guaranteed to be with you. It's not a medical arm bracelet that you can take off if you don't like the way it looks..."
In fact, microchips can be removed from the body -- but it's not like removing a splinter.
The capsules can migrate around the body or bury themselves deep in the arm. When that happens, a sensor X-ray and monitors are needed to locate the chip, and a plastic surgeon must cut away scar tissue that forms around the chip.
The relative permanence is a big reason why Marc Rotenberg, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, is suspicious about the motives of the company, which charges $20 a year for customers to keep one its database a record of blood type, allergies, medications, driver's license data and living-will directives. For $80 a year, it will keep an individual's full medical history.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science....ap/index.html
Congressman Slams Yahoo's "Despicable Practice" in China, Vows to Investigate
Nate Anderson
This can't be good news for Yahoo: the head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is now calling the company's actions in China "despicable" and promises that his staffers will investigate whether a senior vice president from the company misled Congress in testimony last year.
In a strongly-worded statement, Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) condemned Yahoo's decision to turn over the e-mails of journalist Shi Tao to Chinese authorities, but he was even more upset about a recent news story indicating that Yahoo did in fact have some knowledge about the focus of the investigation. Yahoo senior vice president and general counsel Michael Callahan told Congress last year that the company "has no information about the nature of the investigation."
The human rights group Dui Hui revealed that Yahoo did know the case was about "providing state secrets to foreign entities," a charge that they claim is routinely brought against dissidents and democracy advocates. Partially as a result of the e-mails turned over by Yahoo, Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He has now joined a US lawsuit against Yahoo over the issue.
"Covering up such a despicable practice when Congress seeks an explanation is a serious offense," said Lantos. "For a firm engaged in the information industry, Yahoo sure has a lot of secrecy to answer for. We expect to learn the truth, and to hold the company to account."
Reporters Without Borders praised Lantos' statement, saying, "Yahoo's confused statements must finally be clarified. It is time the US corporation recognized its mistakes and accepted the consequences." According to Dui Hua, Yahoo has been identified as playing a verified role in at least four cases in China. In each case, the government obtained a conviction.
Lantos promised to put his committee staff to work investigating the issue but stopped short of saying that he would hold additional hearings or would call Yahoo executives back to testify.
Yahoo is conceding no ground in the war of words, though. Jim Cullinan, a company spokesman, tells Ars that Yahoo's testimony was truthful and that it will work with Lantos' investigation into the matter. "Yahoo! has been candid about the challenges of doing business in markets like China, including where local subsidiaries of U.S. companies must comply with local laws," Cullinan said. "We believe deeply in human rights, and our senior executives have condemned punishment of any activity internationally recognized as free expression, whether in China or anywhere else in the world."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...vestigate.html
Inspector General Finds Lax Computer Security by IRS Employees
Jim Abrams
IRS employees ignored security rules and turned over sensitive computer information to a caller posing as a technical support person, according to a government study.
Sixty-one of the 102 people who got the test calls, including managers and a contractor, complied with a request that the employee provide his or her user name and temporarily change his or her password to one the caller suggested, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, an office that does oversight of Internal Revenue Service.
The caller asked for assistance to correct a computer problem.
The report said that by failing to question the identity of the caller the employees were putting the IRS at risk of providing unauthorized people access to taxpayer data that could be used for identity theft and other fraudulent schemes.
“This is especially disturbing because the IRS has taken many steps to raise employee awareness of the importance of protecting their computers and passwords,” said Inspector General J. Russell George.
Only eight of the 102 employees contacted either the inspector general's office or IRS security offices to validate the legitimacy of the caller.
The report said the IRS took measures to improve security after two similar test telephone calls in 2001 and 2004. “However, the corrective actions have not been effective,” it said.
The IRS agreed with recommendations from the inspector general that it should take steps to make employees more aware of hacker tactics such as posing as an internal employee and to remind people to report such incidents to security officials.
The IRS has nearly 100,000 employees and contractors with access to tax return information processed on about 240 computer systems and more than 1,500 databases.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/n...rsecurity.html
Stolen Yale Computers had Thousands of Social Security Numbers
AP
Two computers stolen from Yale University last month contained the Social Security numbers of about 10,000 current and former students and about 200 faculty and staff members, university officials said Wednesday.
Yale officials said they notified those affected, but have not received any reports that the data on the stolen machines have been misused.
"As it explained in the notification letters, the university does not believe that this incident presents a significant danger of identity theft because the crime was almost certainly aimed at obtaining hardware for sale — not at exploiting the data that were on the computers," Yale said in a statement. "Moreover, both of the computers were password-protected, and one was protected by multiple password levels, which would require considerable computer savvy to bypass."
The computers and other electronic equipment were stolen July 17 from the Yale College Dean’s Office. No arrests have been made, said university spokesman Tom Conroy.
Yale reconstructed the computers’ files from backup tapes and discovered a group of files that listed the names and Social Security numbers of about 10,000 current and former students and about 200 current and former members of the faculty and staff.
Yale ceased using Social Security numbers for student identification purposes in June 2005, but the files predated that change in policy. Neither of the machines contained financial account information.
The university has set up a response team to answer questions and deal with any issues that might arise.
"Yale takes the protection of personal information very seriously and regrets any possibility that such information would be exposed," the university said. "The university is taking additional measures to ensure that residual files containing Social Security numbers, such as the files on the stolen computer, are eliminated or encrypted."
http://news.newstimes.com/news/updat...e=news_updates
Privacy Winning Search Engine War
Vidura Panditaratne
Privacy is emerging as the real winner of the Internet search engine war as companies aggressively compete with one another by offering stronger protections for user records, a report published today by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) concluded.
The report notes that until recently, most of the major Internet search engines kept detailed and potentially personally identifiable records of their customers' searches for as indefinitely.
But today the companies are trying to outdo each other in privacy protection by announcing steps to delete old user data, strip the personally identifiable information out of stored search records, and, in one case, give users the option to have all of their search records deleted.
CDT's Search Privacy Practices report details and compares the revamped privacy policies of the five largest search providers Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask.com and AOL while offering recommendations for both the industry and lawmakers for how to strengthen privacy protections even further.
"We hope this signals the emergence of a new competitive marketplace for privacy," CDT President Leslie Harris said. "By themselves, these recent changes represent only a small step toward providing users the full range of privacy protections they need and deserve, but if this competitive push continues it can only stand to benefit consumers."
The report acknowledges that there are legitimate reasons for companies to retain some search records for a limited time, but recommends that companies continue to actively seek new ways to give users greater control over their personally identifiable data.
The report also argues that industry self-regulation, while vital, is only one part of the solution.
"It's encouraging to see the nation's largest Internet companies taking search privacy seriously," said CDT Deputy Director Ari Schwartz. "Now it's time for Congress to do its part by passing a robust federal law that brings our consumer privacy protections up to the level that users expect."
http://pressesc.com/news/97208082007...rch-engine-war
Search Google Anonymously:
WebBlurb
When you make a search on Google, your ip address, the time, and what you searched for is stored in their database forever and this information can be used in a court of law against you. Google will willingly allow authorities to consult their database, they already did as you can see in the video below. When you search on Google through Googlonymous, it is Googlonymous that goes on Google and does the search for you, the only ip address that Google will see, is the ip address of the server of Googlonymous. Googlonymous does not keep any record who searched for what. So this way, it is completely impossible to retrieve your identity. You can search for whatever you want without a care in the world, 100% anonymously.
Click play on the video below to see a fascninating documentary showing the dangers of searching on Google.
http://googlonymous.com/
NEC and Hitachi Team to Water-Cool Hard Drives
Todd Haselton
Score one for water-cooling fanatics. NEC and Hitachi just announced a partnership focused on developing a liquid cooling system for hard drives. Let's take a look at how liquid cooling typically works, why it's attractive, and how Hitachi and NEC plan to liquid cool a hard drive.
In most run-of-the-mill liquid cooling kits, water is pumped across a cooling plate that's clamped on top of a CPU, much like a standard CPU fan is. The water is pumped across the plate, which is filled with mini-ridges to help dissipate the heat, and then out through another hose, also attached to the plate. From here, the now-warmed liquid travels up to a reservoir, then to a radiator with fans that cools the liquid down and sends it back across the processor again. It's a relatively simple process, and some water-cooling fanatics also choose to water-cool their video cards. But what's the allure to water-cooling?
Hitachi and NEC are developing the water-cooled hard drive systems for desktop computers mainly to reduce noise levels to 25 decibels, 5 decibels quieter than a whisper. To do this, NEC and Hitachi actually wrap the hard drive in "noise absorbing material and vibration insulation." Further, the companies have chosen to use a low-speed radiator fan to keep decibel levels down in the radiator also. Creating a quieter hard drive isn't the only focus though, as the companies also hope to keep the hard drives cooler.
According to Hitachi and NEC, the cooling cold plate they're planning to use is the most efficient plate ever used for heat conduction, which means they'll be able to cool the hard drives quicker and more efficiently. The cooling plate technology uses a series of fine ridges, similar to the ones in CPU cooling plates, that are just 0.09mm in width, and through which anti-freeze liquid will travel. Since water-cooling technology is relatively old, we imagine Hitachi and NEC set out to create a quieter hard drive, and the best way to achieve this was to wrap it in the noise-absorbing material. Since that material likely heated the drives more, the most practical option was to water-cool the drives.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...rd-drives.html
Can You Hear Me NOW?
115 Calls To Verizon, And FIOS Still Doesn't Work
Poor Jason. Eight months after ordering Verizon FIOS, he is still without decent phone, television, or internet service, though not for lack of effort on his part:
I have spoken with 115 service representatives and 44 supervisors over a period 64 hours combined on the phone with Verizon. I have been hung up on 37 times, placed on hold a total of 21 hours, and been promised callbacks, which I did not receive, a total of 18 times. It has been 8 months since I ordered the service, and I still have not been given a single resolution.
My story starts back in December of 2006, when I moved into a house with a Verizon FIOS ONT present on the back of my home. I looked up the current offerings on the FIOS website and decided to go with the three in one (Phone, 15/5 Internet, TV) one bill package. What I've gotten is not remotely what was ordered, and has cost me greatly in time, money, and patience.
I have spoken with 115 service representatives and 44 supervisors over a period 64 hours combined on the phone with Verizon. I have been hung up on 37 times, placed on hold a total of 21 hours, and been promised callbacks, which I did not receive, a total of 18 times. It has been 8 months since I ordered the service, and I still have not been given a single resolution.
I have tried to cancel my service, only to be promised a prompt resolution by another supervisor, who told me to not worry about the billing issues until I received a correct bill will all three services included on one bill. That was a month and a half ago. Yesterday I received two bills, one for my phone service, with a credit of $189.00, and an Internet / TV bill with a balance of $1,195.00. Then, as I walked in the door from checking my mail, the TV service is disconnected.
To date, I have never, not once, had the long distance service I requested, nor call waiting. It took one and a half months to get a working dial tone, which had nothing to do with the premises, it was "simply an account flag that had not been set". My HDTV channels are not the ones I ordered. My internet service is constantly up and down, requiring a daily reboot of the ActionTec wireless router supplied by Verizon.
I've gone to the Attorney General, the BBB, and now I'm going to the Consumerist. If my services are not repaired / corrected / or removed with a refund of all money paid to Verizon since December, I will be taking this matter to small claims court.
When escalating forty-four times still fails to produce results, sue. Before filing, try launching the feared Executive Email Carpet Bomb to warn the Verizon suits that their telecommunications empire is about to dance the small claims tango.
http://consumerist.com/consumer/can-...ork-287336.php
Pearl Jam Censored by AT&T, Calls for a Neutral 'Net
Nate Anderson
A bit of heavy-handed censorship of a Pearl Jam concert by AT&T this weekend led the band to fire off an open letter to fans—a letter in which Pearl Jam railed against media and ISP consolidation and called for readers to support network neutrality.
The incident happened during a Lollapalooza webcast over at AT&T's "Blue Room" media showcase. Pearl Jam's performance of their big 90's hit "Daughter" morphed into the melody from Pink Floyd's "The Wall," and Eddie Vedder served up a pair of anti-Bush lyrics to the tune. "George Bush, leave this world alone," he sang. "George Bush, find yourself another home."
Fans at the event got to hear the words in all their glory, but in the webcast, the lines were censored—AT&T made the decision to silence them, apparently believing that they would prove offensive to listeners. When Pearl Jam found out about the censorship, the band posted a strongly-worded message on its web site.
"This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media," wrote the band. "What happened to us this weekend was a wake-up call, and it's about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band."
In Pearl Jam's view, it's a wake-up call for network neutrality advocates. The same sort of censorship could take place on any Internet content, and what could be done about it an a world where the only real option is... the cable company?
The fallout
Public interest groups agree and are already chiming in on the incident. Public Knowledge points out all the ways that AT&T has gotten into the content filtering business. "AT&T is really getting into its role as content nanny in a big way. First, it starts monitoring all sorts of conversations for the National Security Agency," writes Art Brodsky. "Then it promises to work with the movie studios and NBC to come up with some super software to tag copyrighted material that flows through its network, regardless of how that content is used. Now it puts 'content monitors' on its Webcasts."
Save the Internet, a vocal proponent of network neutrality in DC, sent a statement to Ars that reads, in part, "The moral of this story is put Net Neutrality permanently into law and never trust AT&T at their word. The company acts in bad faith toward the public interest and will do whatever it can to pad it's bottom line—including sacrificing its users' freedom to choose where they go, what they watch, and whom they listen to online."
AT&T sees things a bit, well, differently. Company spokesperson Brad Mays tells Ars Technica that the company does monitor broadcasts for profanity, as Blue Room is available to all ages, but that the censorship was a "mistake by a webcast vendor and contrary to our policy. We have policies in place with respect to editing excessive profanity, but AT&T does not edit or censor performances."
The company especially objects to making this incident part of a larger rallying cry for network neutrality, and we can see their point. This wasn't the company monitoring, degrading, or censoring someone else's content flowing across its IP networks; it was an act of content censorship of AT&T's own programming. It's much like the censorship that routinely takes place on television, and "network neutrality" enters the picture only because this particular show was streamed over the 'Net.
But as the Internet becomes a vital communications pipe into the home, network neutrality and traditional concerns over media concentration are becoming intertwined. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps recently drew a parallel between media consolidation and network neutrality because both traditional media and Internet access lines are increasingly owned by a few massive corporations. Given that level of control, Copps believes that safeguards are needed to make sure that people can continue to access a wide variety of viewpoints and information.
Pearl Jam appears to feel the same way. "AT&T's actions strike at the heart of the public's concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media," they write.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...utral-net.html
Has AT&T Censored Artists Before?
Eliot Van Buskirk
Amid allegations that AT&T censored a Pearl Jam show on Sunday comes an accusation that AT&T's Blue Room series has removed artists' political statements from its webcasts in the past. The company has to delete profanity during the all ages shows, but apologized for deleting Eddie Vedder's anti-Bush sentiments: "We're upset too, and embarrassed by this mistake which is totally against our policy -- of never, ever censoring political speech."
However, an email sent this morning to Wired News, the Chicago Sun Times, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal alleges that AT&T censored the Flaming Lips and the John Butler Trio during previous webcasts:
"I read your article about this and it makes me so angry that AT&T say this is a one time mistake.
"They did the same thing on the webcasts from Bonnaroo in June during the John Butler Trio show when he was talking about the lack of response from our government during Katrina, and also during the Flaming Lips show when the lead singer was talking about how much George Bush had screwed up. I was at both of those live shows and saw the webcasts later. The sound did not cut out at any other time - only when someone was talking about George Bush or the goverment in a negative way.
"It was not a mistake, it is full out censorship."
I have calls in to management for the John Butler Trio and the Flaming Lips, and have asked AT&T for a response verbally and via email, and will hopefully be able to confirm or deny this soon (neither show is still posted on the site).
In the meantime, if you saw either show online or in person and remember the political opinions being included or not, please leave a comment.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/08/...t-censore.html
Federal Effort on Web Obscenity Shows Few Results
Neil A. Lewis
Tom Rogers, a retired Indianapolis detective, toils away most days in his suburban home office reviewing sexual Web sites and other Internet traffic to see whether they qualify as obscene material whose purveyors should be prosecuted by the Justice Department.
His work is financed by a Justice Department grant initially provided through a Congressional earmark inserted into a spending bill by Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia.
The grant, about $150,000 a year, has helped pay for Mr. Rogers and another retired law enforcement officer in Reno, Nev., to harvest and review complaints about obscene matter on the Internet that citizens register on the Justice Department Web site.
In the last few years, 67,000 citizens’ complaints have been deemed legitimate under the program and passed on to the Justice Department and federal prosecutors.
The number of prosecutions resulting from those referrals is zero.
That may help explain why no one — not Justice Department officials, not Mr. Wolf, not even the religious antipornography crusader who runs the program — seems eager to call the project a shining success.
The department Web site invites citizens to report material that they believe is obscene so it can be investigated and, perhaps, prosecuted. Clicking on the site to make a report takes the user to ObscenityCrimes.org, which is run by Morality in Media, the grant recipient.
Morality in Media is a conservative religious group that has worked since 1962 to “rid the world of pornography” and whose headquarters is, improbably, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Morality in Media has received two annual grants from Mr. Wolf’s earmarks and is hoping that Justice Department officials decide on their own to award a third, as Mr. Wolf’s ability to obtain an earmark for the program has apparently waned with the Democrats’ control of Congress.
Department officials, however, seemed less than keen to talk about ObscenityCrimes.org. Spokesmen for the criminal division said officials there had nothing to do with the program, which they had been obliged to start because of the earmark.
In the seven years of the Bush administration, the department has prosecuted about 24 obscenity cases, several centered on film producers who failed to keep proper records showing that their models were not minors.
Although the Justice Department seems not to take ObscenityCrimes.org very seriously, the Web site suggests that prosecutors scrutinize the complaints so carefully that it warns people considering filing a complaint that false statements could expose the filer to federal criminal prosecution.
Would-be complainants are also advised not to trawl for obscene Web sites, noting that “men are particularly vulnerable to pornographic addiction.” Identifying Internet smut, the site advises, is best left to professional law enforcement personnel.
The president of Morality in Media, Robert W. Peters, expressed disappointment with the department’s failure to act on any of his group’s complaints and acknowledged that he understood why some people might say the program had been of little value.
“We’d like to see some prosecutions that arose from the complaints submitted to the Web site,” Mr. Peters said in an interview. “But it’s ultimately up to the Justice Department, and I can’t tell the Justice Department what to do.”
Like the outlook of many antipornography campaigners, Mr. Peters’s combines disappointment in the government’s performance and optimism that the situation will soon change. Mr. Peters said he was confident that officials would eventually assume their responsibility and go after what he described as a prime threat to society, the growth on the Internet of sexual material involving consenting adults.
Child pornography is dealt with through separate laws that have been upheld by the courts, which have had far greater difficulty in evaluating when adult sexual material may be classified obscene and prosecutable.
Stephen G. Bates, a Harvard-trained lawyer and journalism professor, said he was appalled when he discovered that the Justice Department was outsourcing a search for obscenity.
Although sexual material may be distasteful to many, it is not necessarily obscene, which the Supreme Court defined in 1973 as material that, taken as a whole, lacks artistic merit, depicts certain conduct in a patently offensive manner and violates contemporary community standards.
Professor Bates, who teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, filed a Freedom of Information Act request that helped him discover the program by ObscenityCrimes.org.
In an op-ed article last month in The Washington Post and other newspapers, Mr. Bates said Morality in Media’s religious cast, the sensitivity of the constitutional issue of free speech and the outsourcing together made “a mockery of the First Amendment, chilling freedom of expression.”
Mr. Wolf would not comment. Over several days, his aides said he was too busy to do so.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/us/10obscene.html
Veto for Parents on Web Content
INTERNET service providers will be forced to filter web content at the request of parents, under a $189 million Federal Government crackdown on online bad language, pornography and child sex predators.
The Prime Minister, John Howard, said that the Government would increase funding for the federal police online child sex exploitation team by $40 million, helping investigators to track those who prey on children through chat rooms and sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
In a separate development, convicted sex offenders in NSW will have to register their email address with police as part of State Government efforts to stop them using the internet to prey on children.
Mr Howard will also confirm a previous announcement that the Government will pay $90 million to provide every household that wants it with software to filter internet content.
Those unable to install the software or who have concerns about their children's internet use will be able to get advice by phone, another proposal previously suggested by the Government.
The more efficient compulsory filtering of internet service providers (ISPs) was proposed in March last year by the then Labor leader, Kim Beazley. At the time, the Communications Minister, Helen Coonan, and ISPs criticised his idea as expensive.
Three months later Senator Coonan announced the Government's Net Alert policy, which promised free filtering software for every home that wanted it. She also announced an ISP filtering trial to be conducted in Tasmania. That trial was scrapped.
Today Mr Howard will hail the ISP filtering measure as a world first by any Government, and is expected to offer funding to help cover the cost. Parents will be able to request the ISP filter option when they sign up with an ISP. It will be compulsory to provide it.
The measures will come into effect by the end of this month.
The NSW Police Minister, David Campbell, will refer to cabinet the plan to force sex offenders to register their email addresses. Mr Campbell met representatives of the social networking site MySpace on Wednesday.
The Premier, Morris Iemma, is thought to favour the idea. If cabinet agrees, the requirement will be incorporated into the Child Protection (Offenders Registration) Act, which the Police Ministry is reviewing.
People on the NSW Child Sex Register already have to notify police of their address, phone number, place of work and any changes to those details.
Last month US authorities revealed more than 29,000 convicted sex offenders had profiles on MySpace, which have since been removed. Many US state attorneys-general want laws that would require children to get permission from their parents before joining such sites, and would require those sites to verify the parents' age and identity.
Rod Nockles, MySpace's Australian director of safety and security, acknowledged it would be possible for convicted sex offenders to register on MySpace using a different email address.
About 26 per cent of Australia's 3.8 million MySpace users are under 18.
MySpace has written to all state and territory governments, and the Commonwealth, asking them to create a national child-sex offender database that requires email addresses.
The NSW Government was the first to respond.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/veto-...530535350.html
Community Broadband Act Would Overturn Bans on Municipal Broadband
Eric Bangeman
A bill introduced into the House of Representatives this week will attempt to spur broadband development in the US by overturning existing state bans on municipal broadband deployments. Titled the Community Broadband Act of 2007, the bill is cosponsored by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI).
Currently, laws in Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Texas, and a handful of other states prevent cities and towns from installing and operating their own broadband networks. Most of those laws were enacted in the wake of heavy lobbying from the telecommunications industry, which doesn't want to see competition coming from local governments.
Last year's attempted rewrite of the Telecommunications Act contained a similar provision but never made it to the floor of the Senate for a vote. With the state of broadband in the US a hot topic of discussion lately, both on Capitol Hill and around the country, Reps. Boucher and Upton may be able to find allies in Congress a bit more easily this time around. The congressmen are hopeful that, should it be passed, the Act would lead to more—and better—broadband options for US citizens.
"By partnering with private industry, community broadband networks offer the promise of increased economic development and job creation, nowhere is that more important than in my home state of Michigan," said Rep. Upton in a statement. "At the end of the day, we will foster even more competition and choices for consumers across the nation."
Many of the state bans that would be overturned by the Community Broadband Act were strongly backed by the telecoms, and they have a history of digging their heels in whenever cities and towns start taking about solving their broadband woes themselves. That said, AT&T is reacting cautiously to the bill. "We look forward to reading the bill and we commend Reps. Boucher and Upton for their efforts to promote broadband services for all consumers," AT&T spokesperson Brad Mays told Ars Technica. "AT&T is currently involved in several municipal broadband projects, and we are always looking for opportunities to bring the benefits of broadband to consumers."
One example of the telecoms' resistance to municipal broadband came last summer from Qwest, the number three telecom in the US. So far, the company has shown little to no inclination to match Verizon and AT&T's fiber deployments. But when Seattle—which is smack-dab in Qwest territory—started getting serious about building its own fiber network, the telecom resisted—despite CEO Dick Notabaert's admitting that his company had no plans of its own for a fiber deployment. The story has been the same in other places, including Philadelphia and New Orleans.
The telecoms have historically argued that municipalities that own and operate—or even build and lease—broadband networks could give themselves preferential treatment. The Act anticipates that argument with a section on "competition neutrality." Public providers would be banned from giving themselves any "regulatory preference," which should create a level playing field for all broadband providers. Municipalities interested in getting into the broadband business would also have to solicit feedback from the private sector on planned deployments.
The Community Broadband Act looks like a good bill, as it attempts to eliminate barriers that currently exist to meaningful competition and better service in many parts of the country. Should the bill pass and the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auction end in a way that leads to a viable third broadband pipe, there would be reason to think US broadband policy is taking a turn for the better.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...broadband.html
US Rejects Device to Send Net Service
AP
The government gave a failing grade to a prototype device that Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., Dell Inc., and other technology companies said would beam high-speed Internet service over unused television airwaves.
In an 85-page report, the Federal Communications Commission said the devices submitted by the coalition could not reliably detect unused TV spectrum and could cause interference.
The FCC's chairman, Kevin Martin, on Tuesday said the agency still would like to find a way to transmit high-speed Internet service over the unused airwaves.
Edmond Thomas, who represents the coalition, said the companies are convinced the spectrum can be used without causing interference to TV and wireless signals.
"We intend to work with the FCC in order to identify the discrepancies in their tests with the tests we've done," Thomas, a former FCC chief engineer, said yesterday.
The coalition -- which also includes Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp., EarthLink Inc., and Philips Electronics North America Corp. -- said it will work with the FCC to resolve any questions.
The companies say the unlicensed and unused TV airwaves, known as "white spaces," would make Internet service accessible and affordable, especially in rural areas, while spurring innovation.
TV broadcasters oppose the use of white spaces because they fear interference with television programming and problems with a federally mandated transition from analog to digital signals in February 2009.
http://www.boston.com/business/techn...d_net_service/
Smarter Routers Mean Better Online Video
Elinor Mills
When Larry Roberts was overseeing the building of the ARPAnet, the precursor to today's Internet, he and his team were looking for a way for disparate university and government computers to communicate.
Forty years later, with millions of people watching YouTube videos daily, making voice calls and swapping files over peer-to-peer networks, the Internet could do with an upgrade.
On Monday, Roberts plans to launch a new company, Anagran, that sells next-generation networking equipment that will allow service providers to give the network the performance boost it needs.
"The Internet [infrastructure] has pretty much been the same technology since it was started in 1969," he said. "The Internet wasn't built for video and voice."
Back then, researchers decided the best way to send data over a network was to slice it into different chunks, or packets. That's fine for file sharing, email and even instant messaging. But voice and video, where the packets need to stream uninterrupted, are causing traffic jams on the Internet.
Videos often have interruptions or delay, causing an annoying freeze-frame effect. Conversations can sound choppy with words getting dropped, and hiccups in downloading Web pages and sending email are commonplace.
"I need much faster Internet access. When I ask for something on the Web, I want that to happen in a fraction of a second instead of 10 seconds, Roberts said. "This will let the Web operate in fractional second times."
With broadband connections growing rapidly the problem is only going to get worse.
If the Internet were like a motorway, with cars flowing like packets, the sliproads would be routers, which determine which path data should take between networks. The new Anagran FR-1000 Flow Routers add the ability to distinguish between packet and streaming data. They offer special "fast lanes" on to the motorway via metered sliproads and on to the motorway itself for time-critical data like video and voice, Roberts said.
The routers, which will typically cost between $50,000 and $100,000, have built-in "intelligence" that can reduce delay and packet loss and improve the throughput by eight times, according to Roberts. The routers are three times less expensive than existing routers of similar capability and capacity and use about 80 per cent less power, he added.
Because they can distinguish between the different types of traffic, the service providers will be able to offer tiered services at different prices, Roberts said.
The FR-1000 Flow Routers also will allow service providers to offer a sort of busy signal for video and voice so that people could be alerted if the network were too swamped.
"Today packet networks don't know how to give a busy signal the way the traditional voice network does when everyone tries to call their mother on Mother's Day; they are designed to just slow down," he said. "When you slow down video and voice it destroys it."
Improving the reliability of the Internet will mean that governments will be able to use it for emergency services like 999 calls. That could prevent communications outages during disasters, like what happened to the mobile phone network during last week's bridge collapse in Minneapolis, Roberts said. He said he has been in discussion with the federal government since Hurricane Katrina two years ago.
Mobile voice communications are moving to the Internet as well, which will only mean more traffic on the network. "People with laptops can totally destroy all the voice users," Roberts said.
In addition, the routers will help accelerate the adoption of telemedicine, remote surgery and video conferencing, he said.
There is indeed demand in the market for a solution to the voice and video problem and service providers will need to upgrade their networks soon, said David Vorhaus, a research associate at Yankee Group Research. He said, however, he wasn't sure if companies would choose to replace their existing packet routers with all new Flow Routers or if they would use a combination of new and old technology.
Because of Roberts' involvement, Anagran, which has received $28m in funding, has a legitimacy that many start-ups lack, Vorhaus said.
"The fact that it is his company and he does have such credibility out there, I think it's certainly going to generate a lot of interest and discussion," he added. "This is his baby; he's been working on it for years."
In the meantime, Roberts said he marvels at how large the Internet has grown and how it has come to permeate all aspects of society.
"The Internet is vastly bigger than I imagined it would be," he said, adding that he was somewhat shocked when he saw Web addresses start to appear on the sides of commercial trucks.
"The biggest surprise is video," he said. "We couldn't see how it was going to be workable. [The Internet] isn't well-designed for it."
http://news.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39...9292055,00.htm
Two More Republicans Join YouTube Debate
UPI
The number of Republican presidential hopefuls willing to debate on live TV and the YouTube Internet site has doubled from two to four.
Following the initial debate featuring Democrats last month, willingness to participate in the format among Republicans was thin, the Washington Post reported.
A Sept. 17 date for Republicans to answer videotaped Internet questions from voters on live television was originally set, but unidentified party sources told the Post it will now likely be in November or December.
Initially, only two of the 10 GOP presidential hopefuls agreed to participate -- Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, but former Govs. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin have also reportedly agree to appear.
Two weeks ago, several conservative bloggers launched an effort called "Save the Debate" calling for Republican contenders to better the Democrats' performance last month in an Internet statement.
"Attend the YouTube debate, and you may get a tough question or two," the statement said. "Don't attend, and millions of Americans will wonder if you were too afraid to answer questions from the Internet, just as Democrats were afraid to go on Fox News."
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_New...e_debate/9790/
Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up
Scott Gilbertson
Damn the Facebooks and the MySpaces. The last time we checked, there was this thing called the internet that had 6 billion users. It's time to take our personal data out of Mr. McGregor's little gardens and put it back where it belongs -- free and open on the open web.
Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are taking the web by storm because they make it easy to manage your personal data and keep in touch with people you know. But to get value out, you have to put something in -- photos, contacts, appointments, lists of your interests and your blog musings.
Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you're sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can't see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.
Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple's iPod.
This serves companies' business interests, but not the wider interests of consumers. AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft have their own, proprietary instant-messaging systems. They're all good, but they'd be better if they worked together. The iPhone would be better if it could also be used on Verizon's and Sprint's networks, and Facebook would be better if you could link to friends' pages on MySpace and Bebo. Social networking should be based on open standards, just like e-mail.
Some social networking companies are starting to build open platforms that allow your personal data to be exported and put to use anywhere you like.
On Monday, the contact management service Plaxo will launch a new social network called Pulse. Offering a customizable profile page, the service will allow Plaxo subscribers to manage their interpersonal relationships and show off their interests.
In many ways, Pulse will offer the same all-your-data-in-one-place approach as Facebook, but with one crucial difference: It's not walled off. Anything put into Plaxo can be retrieved and used elsewhere, and any data made public will be accessible across the wider internet: Viewers will not need a Plaxo account. The service will be rather limited initially, but it's a step in the right direction.
However, Pulse is no panacea. What the internet needs is a way to take the features of the popular social networks and make them available to the world at large.
For the last couple of weeks, Wired News tried to roll its own Facebook using free web tools and widgets.
We came close, but we ultimately failed. We were able to recreate maybe 90 percent of Facebook's functionality, but not the most important part -- a way to link people and declare the nature of the relationship.
Hey Kids, Let's Put On a Show
It's entirely possible to replicate most of the features of Facebook without getting sucked into its black hole, but the single most important element is missing.
At this point, "friend" relationships remain unique to the social networks. The web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people's identities on the internet. The absence of this secret sauce -- an underlying framework that connects "friends" and establishes trust relationships between peers -- is what gave rise to social networks in the first place. While we've largely outgrown the limitations of closed platforms (take e-mail or the web itself), no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on the internet at large.
We would like to place an open call to the web-programming community to solve this problem. We need a new framework based on open standards. Think of it as a structure that links individual sites and makes explicit social relationships, a way of defining micro social networks within the larger network of the web.
One possibility is the microformat XHTML Friends Network, or XFN, which defines relationships between linkers and linkees.
Trouble is, the data format doesn't yet offer any tools for managing friends. While a snippet of code placed in a web page can convey who you know -- and how you know them -- as yet there are no tools to put the information to good use, like automatically pulling in calendar events from of all your friends' websites.
Some developers are beginning to offer easy-to-use tools that can create XFN code (WordPress and Movable Type both offer blank templates that can be filled in), but use of XFN isn't yet widespread.
Such a "micronetwork" standard may sound daunting or even impossible, but nearly all the tools we've mentioned so far started small. Blogging grew from a few people trying to easily publish web content on a daily basis. Del.icio.us started with one person looking for a way to manage his bookmarks from any machine. Even Facebook started with a few college friends looking for a better way to plan their social lives.
Eventually, an open network will emerge. Let's make it happen sooner rather than later.
Make Your Own Facebook
With a little savvy, anyone can create a page that includes all of the fun stuff found in a Facebook profile.
Start by setting up a blog. Say what's on your mind. Unlike your blog on Facebook or MySpace, everyone will be able to read it.
From there, you can pull in your photos from Flickr or Zooomr and show off your impeccable musical taste by creating a profile at iLike or Last.fm. You can share your web bookmarks using del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia and publish a list of your most recent reads using Shelfari or LibraryThing.
All of these services have open APIs, making it easy for third-party developers to build widgets for displaying data stored there. As a result, many such tools exist.
Need to keep up-to-date with your friend's activities? Pull in a feed from their blog or from their Twitter account. The Upcoming group calendar service has a dead-simple code generator that will create a widget listing all the events you plan to attend, as well as those your friends are interested in.
Like to chat? Meebo offers an embeddable widget for instant messenger chatting, and jaxtr does the same for SMS. You can even drop in a Skype button that lets your friends call you with one click.
One of Facebook's best features is its comprehensive feeds that show what everybody's up to (called News Feeds and Mini-Feeds), but you can build such a thing yourself. Create an account with one of the many feed-mixing services like Yahoo's Pipes, FeedShake or FeedBlendr. Plug in all the feeds from the various sources you want to track and paste the resulting URL into a widget on your site. Voilŕ.
Need a site? The free blogging software from WordPress will let you embed these widgets and RSS streams. WordPress also has a thriving plug-in ecosystem, so it's likely a developer somewhere has done much of the dirty work for you.
An even easier option is to use a customizable homepage from Pageflakes or Protopage. Pageflakes in particular allows you to build a customized page that aggregates a lot of varied content just like Facebook, which you can then publish publicly (Pageflakes calls this a Pagecast). And beyond a simple user registration, Pageflakes doesn't lock in any of your personal data.
http://www.wired.com/software/webser...urrentPage=all