[JackSpratts]

Capitalism Makes Men Sick
Mira Oberman

COMMUNISM may be oppressive, but it seems as though capitalism is bad for men's health, according to a recent US study which found significant increases in mortality rates after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The life expectancy for men freed from the Iron Curtain dropped by six years between 1991 and 1994 amid social disruption, physical hardships and economic instability.

The degree to which men were affected depended upon how rough the transition to capitalism was and how much income inequality increased, the new study from the University of Michigan found.

And they were significantly more likely to be impacted by the transition than women, the study found.

"The inequalities in status and resources that can come with capitalism does lead males to behave in ways that are detrimental to men's health,'' said lead author Daniel Kruger.

Increased competition can create an environment that encourages risk-taking behaviour that results in fatal accidents, he said.

An increase in social and economic stress can manifest itself in suicide or homicide and can also cause physical strains which can lead to heart attacks.

"It seems as though there is a physiological embodiment of stress from being in a competitive environment,'' Kruger said.

Kruger compared the mortality rates of men and women in 14 post Soviet countries.

Male mortality from intentional causes - homicides and suicides - doubled in the region, although it varied significantly by country.

Poland, which had a relatively smooth transition, saw the rate increase just 15 per cent while Estonia, which was much more unstable, saw violent deaths increase 238 per cent.

More significantly, Kruger said, was that the gap between the male and female mortality rates grew an average of 9.3 per cent which showed that "this economic changed was more damaging to men than to women.''

"The impact was really for men who are in their economically prime years,'' Kruger said.

"If you were an adolescent or young adult they may have seen this as an opportunity but those who are, say, 45 and settled into a routine, they might see this as a threat.''

The countries most affected were Romania, Estonia, Latvia and Albania, which saw the gap widen by 14 to 30 per cent in the first five years after the fall of communism.

The gap grew by eight to 12 per cent in Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and East Germany. It grew a modest one to six per cent in Slovenia, Czech Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary.

The study was published in the current issue of Evolutionary Psychology.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegrap...006007,00.html





Heil Marko

Fascist Overtones From Blithely Oblivious Rock Fans
Nicholas Wood

On a hot Sunday evening in June, thousands of fans in a packed stadium here in the Croatian capital gave a Nazi salute as the rock star Marko Perkovic shouted a well-known slogan from World War II.

Some of the fans were wearing the black caps of Croatia’s infamous Nazi puppet Ustashe government, which was responsible for sending tens of thousands of Serbs, Gypsies and Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.

The exchange with the audience is a routine part of Mr. Perkovic’s act, and the gesture seemed to lack any conscious political overtones. The audience — most of whom appeared to be in their teens and early 20s — just seemed to be having a good time. But Mr. Perkovic’s recent success among a new generation — many of them apparently oblivious to the history of the Holocaust — has prompted concern and condemnation from Jewish groups abroad and minority groups in Croatia.

[Despite those objections, the concert — his biggest ever, with an estimated 40,000 fans in the soccer stadium — was shown in prime time on Sunday night on state-owned television, prompting further protests from Jewish and Serbian groups.]

“We don’t want to pay for something that strikes fear into my children, or distances them from their friends or neighbors,” said Milorad Pupovac, leader of the largest Serbian political party in Croatia, referring to the plan for the broadcast.

What has shocked those groups more, though, is that in the ensuing debate, many senior politicians and journalists have said that they see no problem with the imagery or salutes.

“They just don’t seem to get it,” said Efraim Zuroff, the Jerusalem director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who has urged President Stipe Mesic to ban future concerts and help outlaw the use of extremist symbols and slogans.

The Croatian government has been trying to improve its image so it can join the European Union, and it did issue a statement after the concert criticizing the open display of Ustashe memorabilia and slogans. But much of Croatia’s political establishment cannot understand what all the fuss is about.

“You can’t see any anti-Semitism here,” Dragan Primorac, Croatia’s education minister, said in an interview. He said he had planned to attend the concert, before rain caused it to be postponed by a day. Others who did get there, though, included a former foreign minister and two Croatian basketball stars.

“At most, you could blame four to five people,” Dr. Primorac said, for wearing Ustashe regalia, or giving the Nazi salute during the concert. He emphasized, too, that Croatia was a good friend of Israel and pointed to a photograph on his mantelpiece of himself with the Israeli elder statesman Shimon Peres as evidence.

Over the last three years the conservative prime minister, Ivo Sanader, has to some extent managed to shed the country’s image as a nationalist state that once harbored war criminals. The effort has been successful enough that Croatia is a favorite to join the European Union. What was seen for much of 1990s as a war-torn nation is now widely perceived as a prime tourist destination, with 10 million tourists a year and visitors flocking to its Adriatic coast.

Photographs and memorabilia from the Ustashe period are no longer sold openly in Zagreb’s city center. Restaurants no longer display photographs of Ustashe units on their wall. But souvenir shops do still sell key rings and baseball caps with the Ustashe U, as well as the slogan used in Mr. Perkovic’s concerts, “Za Dom: Spremni!” or, “For the Homeland: Ready!”

And many Croats still display an insensitivity to Holocaust issues. Mr. Perkovic’s public affairs manager, Albino Ursic, has a large poster that he designed in 1994 on the wall of his office with the words “final solution.” The poster shows a package of cigarettes marked with a large Swastika and labeled “Adolf Filters,” poking out of a black leather jacket. “It’s an antismoking picture,” he said.

“It won an award in Lisbon,” he added, emphasizing that he viewed himself as left of center. As for Mr. Perkovic’s performance, Mr. Ursic said, the fascist salute is made by soccer hooligans across Europe who have little understanding of it. “It is just teenage rebellion,” he said.

Mr. Perkovic’s patriotic — and sometimes violently nationalistic — songs first became popular here during the Balkan wars, when he fought in the Croatian Army. Most Croats know him better by his stage name, Thompson, given to him during the war, when he carried the British-made submachine gun of the same name. He, too, has recently sought to distance himself from the Ustashe association. In an interview, the soft-spoken singer said he had never raised his own arm to make a fascist salute. Nor, he said, did he encourage people to wear Ustashe uniforms. As for the Ustashe slogan he uses, he claims it is a traditional Croatian salute that predates World War II.

Others are unapologetic. Vedran Rudan, a columnist with the Croatian center-right daily Nacional, accused Mr. Zuroff of “extreme arrogance” for writing a letter to the president of Croatia asking the government to bar future Thompson concerts.

She also accused him of branding Croatian youths fascists while ignoring the activities of a well-known ultranationalist member of Parliament, who has close ties with Israel.

“Why do Jews forgive him everything, and the beardless youth and Thompson do not have right to mercy?” Ms. Rudan wrote.

But rights groups here say there is a fundamental problem. While Croatia is now seeking to move away from the nationalist period of the 1990s, the current generation of young people has largely been schooled to believe that the Ustashe government’s actions were no worse than those of Communist leaders in Yugoslavia during the same period.

“They want to put them on an equal footing,” said Danijel Ivin, the president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights. “The education about the recent history of Croatia is not adequate.”

Dr. Primorac said that was slowly beginning to change and pointed out that since 2004, Croatian schools had dedicated a day each year to studying the Holocaust.

Others do not think it is changing quickly enough. “It is an issue,” said Tomislav Jakic, an adviser to President Mesic. “It is far from Ustashe nostalgia that was 15 years ago, when the ghost was first let out of the bottle. But the ghost is still here and it will be for years to come.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/wo...02croatia.html





Cliff Richard Songs Scare off Yobs

IF you want to get rid of troublemaking youths, play them some Cliff Richard songs, a funfair has found.

According to bosses from Carter's Steam Fair, playing tracks by the 66-year-old pop veteran such as Living Doll on all their rides was enough to scare off some "hoodies" and other troublemakers who had descended on the fair last Saturday in north London.
"It was amazing, just like a scene from (the film) Mars Attacks when the aliens were driven away by the sounds of Slim Whitman," said the fair's Seth Carter said.

"From now on if we do have any trouble we have found the perfect deterrent and it comes in the shape of the Peter Pan of pop."

"Who needs ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders) when we've got our Cliff Richard records?"

Perhaps the fair organisers were inspired by an Australian example

Last year the southern Sydney council of Brighton Le Sands played Barry Manilow songs to discourage young hoons hanging around car parks.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegrap...rom=public_rss





Record Labels Try the Honey Strategy
Eric Benderoff

CHICAGO – When The New Pornographers’ fourth album goes on sale in August, ardent fans will have already streamed the songs on their computers and received extra tracks that won’t be on the album. And sometime in the fall, they will own a live recording from the band’s coming tour.

The band’s label, New York’s Matador Records, hopes that an extra dose of songs – some available now and some when the cool weather returns – will help stem the flow of illegal copies of the new album and drum up a bit of extra revenue.

Call it the summer of promotional love for music fans, as record labels launch campaigns to lure consumers with downloads, bonus videos, special vinyl versions and music that hasn’t been recorded yet.

“The people who go out to the record stores on the first day of a release deserve something extra,” said Paul Cardillo, who handles sales for North Carolina-based Merge Records, whose top-selling artists include the Arcade Fire and Spoon. “And for those people who may be interested in a record, you want to give them a reason not to download it illegally.”

It’s no secret music sales are in a funk. Year-over-year sales for the first quarter of 2007 are down 20 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

To slow the slide, record labels are adopting programs that offer additional content to those who buy the CDs.

On June 19, Warner Bros. released multiple formats of the White Stripes’ latest album, “Icky Thump.” The CD is priced at $15, vinyl at $30. Two special-edition USB thumb drives are offered for $57.50 each. One thumb drive looks like singer-guitarist Jack White, the other like drummer Meg White.

Earlier, before the release, the label used an application on social networking Web site Facebook. com that allowed people to stream singles.

“You could hear their new song, then when the video was available, we streamed that,” said Robin Bechtel, head of new media at Warner Bros. On the release date, the “entire album was available through the app.”

The extras for The New Pornographers’ release are considerable.

“We are being very aggressive,” said Patrick Amory, Matador’s general manager. “It seems we have to reinvent our business plan every six months, maybe even with every new release.”

The Buy Early, Get Now promotion is offered for $5 on top of the album’s retail price if buyers prepay for the “Challengers” album. The “executive edition” includes a streamed version available now, two months before the Aug. 21 release, and a box set of bonus material: B-sides, alternate mixes, videos, photos and a concert CD titled “Live from the Future.”

In addition to trying to halt piracy, the label is doing the promotion in an effort to take advantage of the publicity a band gets before an album is released.

“At the time we are promoting the record, when the biggest buzz is going on about the record, people can’t buy it,” Amory said. “But they can often download it for free” from file-sharing sites.

Review copies of highly anticipated albums are shipped three months before release to help magazines meet deadlines.

At the same time, singles are released to radio stations to add to the buzz.

But this early exposure can come at a steep price: New albums start popping up on illegal file-sharing sites shortly after review copies are distributed.

Touch and Go, which will release a new album from punk favorites the Mekons in August, is preparing “a lot of cool footage,” Sinkovich said, “as part of the bonus material we will be offering to online retailers.”
http://www.thenewstribune.com/busine...ry/100338.html





Classical Music Imperiled: Can You Hear the Shrug?
Edward Rothstein

The sounds of a dying tradition are painful, particularly if the tradition’s value is still so apparent, at least to the mourners, and still so vibrant to a wide number of sympathizers. Those melancholic strains can sometimes be sensed only on the edge of awareness, sounding like faint drones, heard only in moments of silence. But they are all the more distressing if the imminent demise seems a result of previous carelessness or willful neglect.

That is how I often think of the Western art-music tradition — the classical tradition — these days, and though I once tended to whine about its problems with cranky optimism, now even a stunning performance seems like a spray of flowers at a funeral.

O.K., this is a bit too melodramatic. There is no need after all to act like an extra in “A Song to Remember,” or any other cinematic biopic from an era when names like Chopin or Beethoven could still command box-office attention, an era when émigré film-score composers imported the symphonic tradition into Hollywood.

I also don’t idealize the idolatry that once enshrined the long 19th century of music (roughly 1785-1915) that forms the heart of the Western art-music tradition. But it is astonishing how little is now sensed about what might well be lost with it. And traditions do come to an end. The reading of ancient Greek and Latin — once the center of an educated person’s life — now seems as rarefied as the cultivation of exotic orchids.

The title of Lawrence Kramer’s new book, in fact, is exactly right: “Why Classical Music Still Matters” (University of California). It is the kind of title that would not have been used a generation ago, when debates about the musical scene might have involved titles more like “Why Contemporary Composers Don’t Matter” or “Why Audiences Are Stuck in the Past.”

What has changed is not how much the tradition means to its devotees, but how little it means to everyone else. From being the center of cultural aspiration, art music has become almost quaintly marginal; from being the hallmark of bourgeois accomplishment (“Someday you’ll thank me”), music lessons have become optional attempts at self-expression; from appearing on newsmagazine covers, maestros now barely rate boldface in gossip columns.

Prescriptions have been plentiful, but so many years have gone by without significant music education in the schools and musical commitment in the homes, and so many ears have gotten used to different sounds and minds to different frames of references, that the question has changed from “What can be done?” to “Why should anything be done at all?”

Why, in other words, should we care? After decades of arguments asserting that different cultures just have different ways of expressing themselves, that distinctions and assertions of value are tendentious, and that Western art music deserves no pride of place in a multicultural American society, it may be that even the problem is no longer clearly seen. The premises have shifted.

Unfortunately I don’t think the answers Mr. Kramer gives will make the difference, if any answers even can. Mr. Kramer — who teaches English literature and music at Fordham University and whose lyrical and suggestive studies of music and 19th-century culture have been fascinating contributions to recent musicology — sees the problem clearly enough. But in trying to explain the value of this repertory and its unique status he writes more like an introverted lover than an extroverted judge, more like someone gazing at its marvels from within than someone determined to articulate its virtues to a skeptical outside world.

“No other music tells us the things that this music does,” Mr. Kramer writes, but those things don’t entirely become clear in his retelling. This is not his weakness alone. When proselytizing for a nonverbal tradition, something is always lost in translation, and Mr. Kramer is sometimes too precious and allusive, given the magnitude of the task.

Nevertheless it is worth giving him close attention, and getting acquainted with his modes of expression (“Classical music allows us to grasp passing time as if it were an object or even a body”), because of the strength of his insights. He sees the ways melody (a “treasured, numinous object”) and its troubled fate become the focus of attention in so much of this music, the ways dramas of loss and recovery seem to be played out again and again, and the ways music and film reveal each other’s preoccupations.

He suggests, for example, why Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto plays so central a role in the film “Brief Encounter.” (It portrays “a deep subjectivity immune from manipulation or constraint by external forces,” he says, expressing the yearning of the narrator who recalls her star-crossed love affair.)

In Mr. Kramer’s explorations, though, one thing becomes clear: how many kinds of narratives can be extracted from the classical repertory. Theodor W. Adorno’s criticism serves as a model, examining music as an emotional, intellectual and political drama in sound. A Beethoven symphony becomes an account of attitudes toward political authority and war, or an exploration of subjective feeling in a threatening world. “An American in Paris” by Gershwin has an “undertone of dissatisfied reflection” underneath the “prevailing high spirits,” suggesting the fading spirit of the Jazz Age. The music Mr. Kramer calls classical becomes a kind of philosophical program music, recounting complex interactions between ideas and feelings.

The music’s ability to sustain these kinds of readings — and be illuminated by them — is a more profound achievement than it might seem. Music of this period is shaped in the form of a narrative. Even technically — in terms of harmonic movement or (as Mr. Kramer suggests) melodic processes — a 19th-century composition is literally a story in sound, telling the picaresque adventures of a theme. But it is a story so abstract that it can attract extraordinarily different metaphorical retellings. It reaches so widely because of this openness; it reaches so deeply because of its taut construction.

The stories this music tells — which involve, as Mr. Kramer notes, tales of fate and circumstance, loss and confrontation — are dramas in which listeners have found their personal experiences and sentiments echoed in sound. Many compositions are public demonstrations, displaying all the grand scale and force of communal ritual, and were written for the newly developing concert halls.

There, for the first time, the bourgeois audiences could hear something of their own lives enacted in symphonic splendor — the dramas of desirous, independent citizens, yearning, struggling, loving, brooding, recognizing, regretting, learning — ultimately bound into a single society by the more abstract society of intertwined sounds reaching their ears. Those musical stories are still our own, although in the tradition’s waning years we may, unfortunately, no longer feel compelled to listen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/ar...ic/02conn.html





China Unicom Tests Music Service with Songs from 23 Companies

China Unicom Ltd., the country's No. 2 mobile phone carrier, said Tuesday it has started testing a music download service offering subscribers songs from 23 record companies.

The move comes as music and telecommunications firms try to raise sales and curb piracy by providing convenient channels for consumers to buy legitimate music.

The trial service, called Xuan Qu in Chinese, allows subscribers to download songs to mobile phones for 3-5 Chinese yuan (US$0.39-US$0.66; euro0.29-euro0.49) each, said Tong Xiaoyu, China Unicom's general manager for value-added services.

The service protects copyrights by preventing users from transferring the music to other mobile phones or computers, he said.

Record companies offering songs on the download service include EMI Group PLC, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Corp. and Universal Music Group, Tong said.

The trial started June 28 and will continue until the end of September. China Unicom will then review and refine the service for a second trial, which will likely start in October, said Tong.

China's telecom firms _ like telecom companies elsewhere in the world _ have been exploring ways to increase revenue from data services, such as music downloads or mobile phone Internet access, as charges for phone calls have fallen amid intense competition among themselves and from less expensive alternatives, such as Ebay Inc.'s Internet-based calling software Skype.

China's larger mobile carrier, China Mobile Ltd., bought a 19.9 percent stake in Phoenix Satellite Television Holdings Ltd. (8002.HK) last year as part of its expansion in value-added services.
http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp...13&sec=apworld





Cut the Misogyny and We’ll Extend Musicians’ Copyright
Adam Sherwin

David Cameron yesterday offered the music industry a unique deal – cut the glorification of materialism, misogyny and guns in hits and the next Conservative government would back an extension of the copyright on sound recordings from the current 50-year period to 70 years.

The change, which must be agreed at a Europe-wide level, means that musicians and singers would be guaranteed to receive royalty payments for their work for most of their lives.

Addressing the British Phonographic Industry annual meeting, Mr Cameron said: “Most people think these are all multimillionaires living in some penthouse flat. The reality is that many of these are low-earning session musicians who will be losing a vital pension.”

Rejecting a report commissioned by Gordon Brown, which said that there was no case for extending copyright, Mr Cameron quoted research which found that the change could boost the music industry by £3.3 billion over the next 50 years.

He argued that extending the term would give an “incentive to the music industry to digitise both older and niche repertoire which more people can enjoy at no extra cost”.

Sir Cliff Richard, The Who and Sir Paul McCartney backed the campaign to extend the 50-year term, as the first rock’n’roll era recordings begin to fall out of copyright.

But in return for the commitment, and a promise that a Tory government would crack down on illegal file-sharing, Mr Cameron said that the music industry must demonstrate a wider social responsibility.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle2028741.ece





A Summer Camp Where Fireworks Are the Point
John Schwartz

Camp Winnigootchee was never like this.

A group of high school students stood at the edge of a limestone quarry last month as three air horn blasts warned that something big was about to go boom. Across the quarry, with a roar and a cloud of dust and smoke, a 50-foot-high wall of rock sloughed away with a shudder and a long crashing fall, and 20,000 tons of rock was suddenly on the ground.

The campers laughed.

“That’s cool!” said Ian Dalton, a student from Camdenton, Mo.

Austin Shoemaker, a student from Macon, Mo., concurred. “It was baad!” he said. “Do it again!”

There aren’t many wholesome explosions in the news these day, but those are what Summer Explosives Camp provides. It is just a louder, and arguably more exciting, version of the kind of summer experiences designed to recruit students to the quieter academic disciplines. The University of Iowa, for example, has a summer program in microbiology; Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., offers a one-week program in robotics; Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, offers Neuroscience Camp, which includes a trip to a cadaver laboratory to see a brain and spinal cord.

But do those programs, whatever their merits, let the participants blow things up? No, they do not. This program, which does, is set up to draw students to a program at the University of Missouri-Rolla engineering school that feeds industries like mining and demolition.

Imelda Reyes of Kansas City, Mo., a 16-year-old, said she considered attending a more conventional summer program, but, she said, “Watching stuff blow up is better than summer school.”

Students with a passion for all things explosive and proof of United States citizenship pay a $450 fee that covers food, lodging and incidentals like dynamite. In the course of a week, the 22 students at this session set off a wall of fire, blasted water out of a pond, blew up a tree stump and obliterated a watermelon. They set off explosive charges in the school’s mine and finished off the week by creating their own fireworks show for their parents.

“We try to give them an absolute smorgasbord of explosives,” said Paul Worsey, a professor in the department of mining engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla, the only university in the country that offers an academic minor in explosives engineering. More than six billion pounds of explosives are used each year in this country by civilian commercial industry for things like mining and demolition.

While fun is the goal of the camp, safety is the first priority, Barbara Robertson, its administrator, said. “So far, we haven’t had anybody lose any fingers or toes,” she said, “so we’re doing fine.”

Much of the classroom and field time is devoted to explaining how explosives are used in real life. Before the quarry blast, Dr. Worsey, a stocky Briton with a puckish air, explained to the students that they would be disappointed if they expected to see a Hollywood explosion, with boulders flying and flames leaping.

“We don’t look to throw rock through the air,” Dr. Worsey said. “When you do that, you’re wasting energy.” Instead, they calculate a “shoot” to use just enough explosive to do the job. “It’s all controlled,” he said.

Dr. Worsey said he created the camp, now in its fourth year, to try to boost the ranks of the aging population of mining and explosives engineers.

Carol Raulston, a spokeswoman for the National Mining Association, said the number of graduates of engineering schools with training in explosives cannot keep up with the demand in the mining industry, the leading employer of explosives engineers, and the current population of engineers in the field is aging toward retirement.

“We’re going to see a whole class of retirees moving out soon that we’re trying hard to replace,” Ms. Raulston said.

“You need to get people in, get them properly trained before you lose a lot of the experience that’s been in the mines for years,” she added.

To say that these students are enthusiasts understates the case significantly. Kris Rolek was one of the students who really, really enjoyed making things go boom and splat. In the setup time before the quarry shoot, he excitedly discussed the comparative technologies for building potato guns with Dan Montrose, a 6-foot-8-inch military explosives specialist who volunteers as a teacher for the camp. Potato guns, which are pipe-based cannons that can fire a spud, are a favorite do-it-yourself project for the explosively inclined.

Kris, 16, who said he was on his fourth potato gun, suggested that lantern strikers, which are available in camping stores, served nicely as an igniter of the hairspray or other propellant used in the gun, though he believed that stun guns could provide more energy. He and Mr. Montrose agreed that the heavy-duty black plastic tubing sold in hardware stores was far preferable to white PVC plastic, which might shatter. Mr. Montrose advised him that a potato gun was in “a legal gray area,” and gave a no-nonsense warning, “Do not under any circumstances make your self a potato gun out of steel or aluminum,” because the metals might shatter into shrapnel.

“That will get you killed,” Mr. Montrose said.

Kris, of O’Fallon, Ill., said he came by his interest in explosives from his earliest moments — he was born on July 4. “That’s why I’m looking into this as a career,” he said.

Dr. Worsey said that he saw his role in part as helping these students avoid the troubles that a fascination with explosives can bring. Many people who have been drawn to the camp, he said, have already made things like potato guns and flamethrowers. They could be one fumble away from injury or serious trouble with the law. And the camp, Dr. Worsey said, can give a nudge in the right direction.

His fatherly message, he said, is “maybe hold off on some of this stuff until they get the opportunity to come to college and do it properly.”

To drive home the safety issues, the week starts with a demonstration of the kind of damage even small amounts of explosives can do. Dr. Worsey ties a blasting cap, which is about the size of a quarter and is used to set off high explosives, to a chicken wing, and sets it off. The resulting mess underscores the message of caution; a hand, after all, is meat and bone as well.

The course gives insight into the lifestyles of explosives mavens. Keith Henderson, a representative of Dyno Nobel, a major manufacturer of explosives and the company that performed the blast at the quarry, told the students, “There’s a lot of opportunity out there for people in the mining industry — you’ll never go hungry.”

But, he added, explosives have became a sensitive topic since the attacks of Sept. 11. He recalled being pulled out of the airport line, he said, by security officers who asked, “Sir, do you realize that we checked your baggage and it tested positive for three types of explosive?”

He recalled replying, “That doesn’t surprise me,” and showed them a card that identified him as a licensed explosives worker. After his lecture, he handed the students Dyno Nobel T-Shirts that said on the back, “I ♥ Explosives,” but suggested that they not wear them to the airport.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/sc...boom.html?8dpc





T-Rays vs. Terrorists

If you're of a certain age, you may remember those miraculous-sounding "X-ray specs" advertised in comic books. They'd let you see through walls, boxes, and--best of all, for a teenager, anyway--clothing. They were bogus, of course. But technology is finally on the verge of giving us all those capabilities, and more, albeit in a package too big to perch on the bridge of your nose.

The key advances are devices and circuitry that emit and sense radiation in the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, which extends from the upper edge of microwaves to the near infrared. The rays are reflected by metal but go through most other materials. Water soaks up the radiation, so human tissue, which is mostly water, absorbs it. But unlike X-rays, terahertz rays are thought to be harmless. Terahertz radiation ("T-rays") can't penetrate much past your skin, and it lacks the energy to ionize molecules in human tissue the way X-rays do, so it cannot cause cancers by smashing up your DNA.

T-ray technology will probably find its first big uses in security-related applications, now an enormously fast-growing business because of recent high-profile terrorist attacks, write John F. Federici, Dale Gary, Robert Barat, and Zoi-Heleni Michalopoulou in the July issue of IEEE Spectrum. In a terahertz image, a gun or a knife shines through whatever clothing it's concealed in. Even a plastic knife shows up, because of the way its sharp edges scatter the radiation.

But some terahertz images have another ability, one not even claimed by the comic-book specs: not only can they see hidden objects, but they can tell what those objects are made of, write Federici and his colleagues, who are all professors at New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark. Many explosives, including all the plastic explosives popular with terrorist groups, reflect and transmit a characteristic combination of terahertz waves that make them distinguishable from other materials, even those that might seem identical to the eye and hand. That same chemical-discriminating capability also applies to pharmaceuticals and drugs. In essence, different materials appear as different colors to the terahertz imaging system. So future screening devices should be able to tell whether that's plastique in your pocket or just Play-doh, a package of sugar or an envelope of methamphetamines.

Some short-range imagers available now can also do spectroscopy, although the imaging rate is currently too slow for use in a walk-through scanner. But as the literally hundreds of engineers and scientists working on new terahertz sources and devices push the technology's limits, the article's authors expect to see a machine within the next five years that can do both imaging and spectroscopy at 50 meters or more.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/531195/?sc=swtn





Pirate Party USA – The Second Year
Andrew Norton

On July 4th, the Pirate Party of the USA will be a year old. As with any organisation that wishes to strive and grow, there is to be some turnover of personnel, as we learn, adapt and prosper. For this reason, we the party, are holding an IRC meeting on Tuesday July 3rd at 9PM eastern (6pm pacific)

This meeting is open to all, and we will be discussing how to move on. As always volunteers are desperately sought, and all offers of help are gratefully received, so if you have any ideas, suggestions or questions, please do stop by.

The basic idea of the Pirate Party is simple - the government should encourage, rather than smother, creativity and freedom.

Copyrights are now stretching into the hundreds of years, and fair use is under constant attack by attorneys who exploit the vagueness of the law. Creativity has come to a standstill in this country for those who wish to work within, and benefit from, the confines of the law. Whereas 50 years ago there was no great uproar at creative "pirating" of works without the permission of the original artist (Mickey Mouse was made as a parody, but Disney prosecutes all similar parodies of their Mickey Mouse symbol), similar legitimate creative derivative works are now smothered by the excessive terms, restrictions and punishments of our copyright system.

But it is not just Copyrights that need reform. Patents are suppressing innovation in the digital age by making it possible to monopolize methods and practices. Hundreds of thousands of patents sit on a shelf somewhere, never to be implemented, their ideas shut out from the rest of the world. That our law not only allows this, but enables this, is a travesty and a crime against innovators everywhere.

Lastly, the routinization of privacy violations in the digital age must be halted. Never before has a Citizen faced so many opportunities to have their identity stolen, data misused, or personal information collected without their knowledge. This is done by not only identity thieves, but also the Government, and corporations. Using today's latest technologies enables these entities to act on a wholesale scale that is unheard of in past times. This alarming trend shows no sign of slowing down.

Those of us in the Pirate Party want to change that. We've chosen to adopt the Pirate name so as to pay homage to the creative artists of the past, or as they would now be known, Pirates, thieves, and copyright infringers. We do not support nor condone any unlawful distribution of copyrighted works.
http://www.pirate-party.us/main





Weekly Piracy Report
27 June-3 July 2007

The following is a summary of the daily reports broadcast by the IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre to ships in Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Ocean Regions on the SafetyNET service of Inmarsat-C from 27 June to 3 July 2007.

ALERT

Chittagong anchorage, Bangladesh
Fifty two incidents have been reported since 28.01.2006. Pirates are targeting ships preparing to anchor. Ships are advised to take extra precautions.

Suspicious crafts

• 18.04.2007: 2320 LT: Entrance Cartagena Colombia.
A container ship, while disembarking her pilot on the port side noticed, on radar, one unlit suspicious boat approaching from the stbd side at high speed. The master alerted the crew. The boat came very close to the vessel (about 10 m from the hull). On seeing the alert crew on ship's side, the boat retreated and disappeared into the darkness. The master informed the Centre to alert other vessels calling Cartagena, Colombia.

Recently reported incidents

• 21.6.2007: 2302 LT: Posn 04:15N – 05:35E, Pennington, Nigeria.
A tanker undergoing cargo operations at a SBM was attacked by armed pirates. The pirates boarded the standby tug at the stern of the vessel and contacted the ship via VHF demanding to be let on board or they would sink the ship. The crew mustered, cargo operations were stopped and the vessel disconnected from the SBM. The tug was cast off and the ship proceeded at full speed to sea. All attempts to contact the authorities and the Nigerian navy were futile.

• 25.06.2007: 1820 LT: Posn 01:51.5S – 105:02.8E Dep Tanjung Ular Port, Palembang, Indonesia.
Around eleven pirates, armed with long knives and shotguns boarded a tanker underway. On sighting the pirates, crew ran inside the accommodation and closed all doors. On taking the head count master realised one oiler was being held hostage. Master contacted the shore authorities. The pirates opened fire but there were no injuries to crew. The pirates escaped in a small speedboat. Coast guard arrived to investigate. No stores missing.

• 23.06.2007: 2145 LT: Pulau Lima, Kota Tinggi, Malaysia.
Six robbers armed with long knives and pistols boarded a product tanker while she was alongside. One of the crew was hit on the head with the machete. Another crewmember stood up to the robbers. In the struggle, he fell overboard but managed to swim to the shore and contacted the police with assistance from the local fishermen. The robbers spent around 30 minutes ransacking and robbing the crews’ personal effects, before escaping. The injured crews were sent to the hospital

Piracy prone areas and warnings

S E Asia and the Indian Sub Continent

• Bangladesh : Chittagong anchorage and approaches. The area is listed as very high risk.
• Indonesia : Belawan, Tanjong Priok (Jakarta) / generally in other areas.
• Malacca straits
• Singapore Straits

Africa and Red Sea

• Africa : Lagos (Nigeria) / generally other areas in Nigeria, Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania)
• Gulf of Aden / Red Sea : Numerous pirate attacks have been reported by ships and yachts in the Gulf of Aden. Some of the vessels were fired upon.
• Somalian waters : Eastern and North-eastern coasts are high-risk areas for attacks and hijackings. Ships not making scheduled calls to ports in Somalia should keep as far away as possible from the Somali coast, ideally, more than 200 nautical miles.

South and Central America and the Caribbean waters

• Brazil - Santos
• Peru – Callao

http://www.icc-ccs.org/prc/piracyreport.php





History of the Compact Disc
Joshua Coventry

The inventor of the compact disc, the most popular medium in the world for playing back and storing music, is often disputed as one individual did not invent every part of the compact disc. The most attributed inventor is James Russell, who in 1965 was inspired with a revolutionary idea as he sketched on paper a more ideal music recording system to replace vinyl records; Russell envisioned a system which could record and replay sounds without any physical contact between parts. By the time his invention had been refined and further developed, it was actually a merger and adaptation of many different technologies including the laser (1960), digital recording (1967) and optical disc technology (1970s). Russell struggled to attract interest from investors at first but eventually Sony and other companies realized the potential and purchased licenses of the CD-ROM technology.

Development

With support from large corporations, the technology was further improved and enhanced to ensure it was ready for the market. In 1978, Polygram, a division of Philips, decided polycarbonate as the material of choice for the CD. Many other decisions were made that year, such as the disc diameter (115m) and the type of laser to be used by CD players. It was also decided that data on a CD would start at the center and spiral outwards to the edge. In 1979, a prototype CD system was demonstrated in Europe and Japan; Sony then agreed to join into the collaboration and both Sony and Philips compromised on the standard sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, and the choice to use 16-bit audio. The disc diameter was changed from 115m to 120mm to allow for 74 minutes of playback with the sampling rate and quality chosen.

The compact disc first surfaced the public eye's scope 15 years after its invention when Philips made an announcement on May 17, 1978. The new standard was proposed by Philips and Sony in 1980 as 'Red Book', which was a set of color-bound books containing the technical specifications for all CD and CD-ROM formats. The standard is not free, and a license (known as an IEC 60908 document) must be obtained from Philips for US$210 as a PDF. In 1981, Matsushita accepted the new CD standard, but the collaboration between Sony and Philips ended as the two companies had products ready for 1982.

CDs are made from 1.2 mm thick polycarbonate plastic, weighing about 16 grams. A thin layer of aluminum is applied to the surface, making it reflective and then protected by a film of lacquer. The most common printing method for compact discs is screen-printing. The data on a CD is stored as tiny indentations encoded in a spiral track moulded into the top layer of polycarbonate. Digital data on a CD begins at the center and proceeds outwards to the edge, allowing for flexibility as many different sizes of CDs can be made; the most common being 12 cm in diameter (known as maxi singles when used for storing music). A CD is read using a semiconductor laser which focuses through the bottom of the polycarbonate layer.

Introduction

Sony introduced the CDP-101, the first CD audio player for market on October 1, 1982 at $900. As the first players surfaced the market that year, the compact disc format began to attract widespread usage and popularity in Japan and Europe. Compact discs themselves were at first extremely expensive at $30 each. CDs were manufactured at only two facilities in the entire world, each owned by Philips and Sony. The manufacturing process was tedious and required masked technicians in labs.

There were soon six factories, and the price per disc dropped to $25, and then to $20. As venture capital poured in, there were soon forty factories manufacturing discs. Hitachi also released their first CD players in 1982, selling about 6,000 units, whilst Sony sold over 20,000 CD players. In 1982, a mere 50 different music titles were available on the new format from CBS/Sony and Epic/Sony; these mostly included classical, jazz, rock, pop and karaoke. The first CD title was 52nd Street by Billy Joel. By the end of the year, 100 CD titles were available.

The new technology was introduced into the US in the Spring of 1983; when CD-ROM prototypes were shown to the public. That year, growth soared as 30,000 players and 800,000 CDs were sold in the US alone.

Portable CD players

Portable CD players were first introduced in the mid 1980s but were not popular until the 1990s when anti-skip technology was introduced. Sony's first portable CD player, the Discman D-50, was introduced in November 1984. At first, the D-50 was not profitable but as the product gained popularity, it soon became profitable and Sony began to create a portable CD market. The Discman range was later re-named to CD Walkman. Many other manufacturers soon followed in Sony's footsteps to offer portable CD players for consumers; however the major popularity in these devices came in 1997 because of Electronic Skip Protection, making them possible for heavy usage.

The CD-ROM and Computers

The sales and production of LPs began to suffer in the 1988 as CD production surpassed that of vinyl records. With the work of Sony and many others, the CD finally an industry standard format for audio data and as the 1990s emerged, it would soon deliver multimedia content to millions through personal computers. In June 1985 the CD-ROM was introduced and the CD-R in 1990, these were also developed by Sony and Phillips jointly. In September 1987, Microsoft shipped its first software on CD-ROM, the Microsoft Bookshelf. In January 1991, Commodore released the CDTV (Commodore Dynamic Total Vision) which featured a CD-ROM player and cost just $1000. Apple's first Macintosh to use a CD-ROM drive was the Macintosh IIfx in 1992.

Throughout the remainder of the 1990s, CD-ROM drives became a standard on personal computers and CD-ROMs were increasingly used for multimedia purposes for software such as atlases, dictionaries and encyclopedias. Macromedia's Director application was a large part of this as it allowed companies to easily create interactive multimedia CD-ROMs with many features. Computer magazines also moved from distributing floppy disks to CD-ROMs instead, boasting the 700MB capacity.

With the advent of music downloads in the early 2000s and the introduction of the iTunes Music Store in 2003, the CD is decreasing in popularity yearly as music downloads experience rapid growth. The convenience of music downloads in combination with digital audio players like Apple's iPod leave little reason to keep CDs and a CD player. Although CDs still control the market for music, they are no longer used as much for storing computer data since the introduction of DVDs in the early 2000s.
http://siliconuser.com/?q=node/15





Europe Steps Up Probe of New DVD Formats

Competition of Blu-ray, HD to secure studios' support arouses antitrust concerns
Merissa Marr and Sarah McBride

In a move that could be key to determining the future of home cinema, European antitrust regulators are stepping up their probe into possible anticompetitive practices in the format war over high-definition DVDs.

Hollywood's studios are racing to dig up files, emails and records of telephone conversations related to the competing Blu-ray and HD DVD formats after the European Commission sent out letters last month demanding evidence of their communications and agreements on the new generation of DVD formats.

The European Commission, the European Union's executive body, appears to be particularly interested in the activities of the Blu-ray group because of its dominance in Hollywood, according to people familiar with the situation. The commission is investigating whether improper tactics were used to suppress competition and persuade the studios to back their format.

Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for the commission, confirmed that it had sent letters to the studios in mid-June trying to establish whether they have restrictive agreements to use one or the other of the standards.

Blu-ray, which is supported by Sony Corp. and partners, is in a fierce combat with the Toshiba Corp.-led HD DVD group to set the standard for the next generation of DVD. High-definition DVDs promise sharper picture quality and better sound than traditional DVDs, but they require new players. (Neither of the new formats is compatible with traditional DVD players, but traditional DVDs can be viewed on both Blu-ray and HD DVD players.)

While the HD camp has had some success in its partnership with Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 videogame consoles and by offering lower-priced machines, the Blu-ray camp has gained the upper hand in Hollywood, with more studios backing its format. Blockbuster Inc. also recently said it would exclusively stock DVDs using the Blu-ray format.

The HD DVD camp has been lobbying the commission to draw attention to Blu-ray's tactics in the movie capital in a bid to force more studios to put their product on HD DVD, according to people familiar with the situation. One issue the Commission has raised with some studios is statements made at the Consumer Electronics Show in January in Las Vegas about the exclusivity of studios to Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.

Blu-ray is supported by every major studio except NBC Universal's Universal Pictures, which is backing HD DVD exclusively. Five studios are exclusive to Blu-ray: Sony Pictures Entertainment, Walt Disney Co., News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and MGM, which is owned by a consortium including Sony. Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. are backing both. In its formal request to at least one studio, the commission has asked for documents related to any decision to release movies on Blu-ray exclusively and not HD DVD, as well as communications on both formats with certain individuals associated with Blu-ray.

Both new formats offer old and recent titles.

The European Commission launched a broad inquiry into the competing formats a year ago. The commission said at the time that it had sent a letter to Blu-ray and HD to request information about their licensing practices. However, the commission's recent letter to the studios signals a shift in focus to the studios and possibly Blu-ray specifically.

The battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD is expected to reach a fever pitch in the fourth quarter of this year. The run-up to the Christmas period is traditionally the most important period for DVD sales. There is a lot at stake: Whichever camp wins the battle stands to make huge profits from selling both players and DVDs.

Both camps have significantly stepped up their efforts in recent weeks. Blu-ray announced a summer promotion that gives consumers five free Blu-ray movies if they purchase a new Blu-ray player by Sept. 30. Toshiba recently announced HD DVD players would sell for as little as $299, far less than comparable Blu-ray players.

The market for next-generation DVDs of either stripe is tiny so far, though. Through June, Blu-ray had sold about 1.8 million discs, compared with 1.3 million for HD DVD, according to consultancy Adams Media Research. A top title such as Warner Bros.' "The Departed," which was out in both formats, shipped 85,000 copies in Blu-ray and 60,000 in HD DVD, compared with 7.7 million for regular DVDs.

These days, Blu-ray discs are outselling HD DVDs at a rate of about two to one, says Tom Adams, president at Adams Media. But that doesn't mean HD DVDs can't reclaim the advantage if more studios start releasing movies in both formats.

Once either format hits about two million homes, it will create a large enough incentive for any studio not releasing titles in that format to reconsider, Mr. Adams says. Currently, about 105,000 homes have Blu-ray players, and about 150,000 have HD DVD players. An additional 1.5 million homes have PlayStation 3 devices, which also play Blu-ray movies, although fewer gamers are using the machines to play movies than had been hoped for. About 160,000 consumers have bought add-on devices for Xbox machines that allow them to play HD DVDs.

The studios want a new revenue stream to compensate for slowing DVD sales. When consumers switched from the VHS tape format to DVD, it created a sales bonanza as consumers replaced their old tapes with crisper DVDs. Studios are hoping for the same sort of upgrade for new format DVDs.

But many consumers say the difference in quality between the new DVDs and the old ones isn't as impressive as the difference between VHS tapes and DVDs, prompting them to drag their feet on replacing their equipment. In addition to buying new players, consumers need expensive high-definition televisions to play the new discs.

Consumer groups have slammed the studios and the electronics companies for creating another product in which two incompatible technologies battle for supremacy in the marketplace. The situation harks back to the battle between VHS and Betamax in the 1980s. VHS tapes eventually won, but not until millions of consumers bought Betamax machines, which became obsolete.

For DVDs, the studios and electronics companies worked together to avoid a similar mess. As two competing formats for next-generation DVDs emerged, the companies involved talked about merging the formats or picking one over the other, but this time compromise proved elusive.

-- Adam Cohen contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118341745768555943.html





Postal Worker Steals Thousands Of DVDs

Netflix Notified Post Office About High Number Of Missing DVDs

A federal judge in Houston has ordered a year and a-half in prison for a now-former postal clerk in a DVD-by-mail theft investigation.

Authorities accused 53-year-old Anthony Zuniga of Houston of swiping thousands of movies from the mail system.

Zuniga was convicted of two counts of mail theft by a postal employee. He also was sentenced Monday to three years probation and must pay a $4,000 fine.

Netflix last year notified the U.S. Postal Service about an unusually high number of DVDs missing from a certain post office box.

Investigators said Zuniga was stationed at that center. Prosecutors said surveillance showed Zuniga stealing 122 DVDs from the post office.

On Aug. 3, 2006, inspectors observed Zuniga dumping a tub of Netflix and Blockbuster DVDs into a plastic bag and then leaving the postal facility with the plastic bag. Zuniga's vehicle was stopped as it was exiting the parking lot and inspectors found the plastic bag containing the DVDs on the floor of the vehicle. The bag contained 122 DVDs.

After an interview with postal inspectors, Zuniga consented to a search of his home. Inside the home, inspectors found 8,177 stolen pieces of mail -- including 5,937 Netflix DVDs and 1,497 Blockbuster DVDs.

Zuniga, who had been a Postal Service employee since 1974, resigned his job after being caught stealing the DVDs.
http://www.local6.com/news/13612024/...p=irresistible





VIDEO: Consumerist Catches Geek Squad Stealing Porn From Customer's Computer

The Consumerist's 3-month sting operation snared a Geek Squad technician stealing porn from our hard drive, and we've got the work-safe video and logfiles to prove it.

UPDATE: Why We're Not Telling Geek Squad CEO Which Agent Stole The Porn

To investigate claims by current and former Geek Squad techies (see "The 10 Page Geek Squad Confession - "Stealing Customers' Nudie Pics Was An Easter Egg Hunt"), we loaded a computer with porn and rigged it to make a video of itself. We captured every cursor movement, every program opened, every file accessed. Everything that the user saw and did, we recorded.

We took it to around a dozen Best Buy Geek Squads and asked them to perform simple tasks, like installing iTunes. Most places were fine, sometimes doing the job right on the counter, sometimes even for free.

Then we caught one well-seasoned Geek Squad Agent copying personal and pornographic images and video from our computer to his company-issued thumb drive (see video above, or the logfiles).

Reached for comment, Geek Squad CEO Robert Stephens expressed desire to launch an internal investigation and said, "If this is true, it's an isolated incident and grounds for termination of the Agent involved."

This is not just an isolated incident, according to reports from Geek Squad insiders alleging that Geek Squad techs are stealing porn, images, and music from customer's computers in California, Texas, New Jersey, Virginia and elsewhere. Our sources say that some Geek Squads have a central server set up where everyone dumps their plunder to share with the other technicians.

If our techie readers were right about the Geek Squad doing this, then perhaps they're right in saying it happens at other computer repair places as well.

And by the time your computer breaks, it's too late to hide anything you wouldn't want someone to find, and steal for their own purposes. We advise encrypting sensitive files in advance with a program like TrueCrypt (WIN) or making an encrypted disk image (MAC, be sure to skip step 6). Or, you could just keep it all on an external hard drive.

Who knew that when you hand over your computer to a repair technician, you could be giving a stranger a veritable Pandora's box?

NEXT: How To Make Your Computer Catch People Stealing Your Porns

PREVIOUSLY:
Geek Squad Confession: "Stealing Customers' Nudie Pics Was An Easter Egg Hunt"
We're Always Looking For Porn On Customer's Computers, Techies Confirm
http://consumerist.com/consumer/inve...ter-271963.php





MySpace Fiend Sentenced to 20 Years
AP

A 23-year-old Vernon man was sentenced to 20 years in prison Monday after pleading no contest to sexually assaulting teenage girls he met on the MySpace.com social networking Web site.

David Leonard also must serve 15 years of probation after the prison time and register as a sex offender, under the sentence imposed by New Britain Superior Court Judge Patrick Clifford. He will be subject to random searches of his computer and will be prohibited from taking part in any Internet chats or messaging, except for school or work.

Leonard was also expected to enter pleas to several other cases Tuesday in Rockville Superior Court.

He was accused of having sexual contact with several girls between 12 and 15 years old whom he met through MySpace.com.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1058291





Websites Betrayed by Unfaithful Users

A survey has revealed the ‘promiscuity’ of many members of social networking sites and raised doubts over surging valuations
Rhys Blakely

Social networks are spawning a generation of internet tarts, research suggests: online consumers with little brand loyalty and no qualms about keeping several sites on the go at once.

Users of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are “chronically unfaithful”, a survey by Parks Associates, the analysts, has found. Half of users regularly use more than one site, most of which are free. One in six actively uses three or more.

This phenomenon of “network promiscuity” extends across web commerce. Analysts say that it is symptomatic of a new consumer scepticism over traditional branding.

Robert Jones, of Wolff Olins, the brand consultants, says: “Grand operatic brands no longer work. Think of the ultimate model ‘old brand’ – the Marlboro man, a myth selling you an item that slowly killed you. It just doesn’t work online. As people become better informed, brands become less about emotion and more about functionality.”

User infidelity in the social networking sector, made up of about 300 competing sites, is challenging once-accepted dot-com maxims, such as the importance of first-mover advantage and the strengths implicit in scale.

It also raises doubts over the surging valuations being attached to the sector’s “superbrands”, amid evidence that they will be forced to evolve constantly to retain young users determined to play the field.

Akready, warning signs have emerged: the latest figures from Nielsen//NetRatings showed that MySpace, the market leader, recently lost users in Britain.

The dip coincided with the news that News Corporation, the MySpace owner, had held early talks with Yahoo! over a possible sale of the network that could have valued MySpace at more than $10 billion (£5 billion). News Corp is the parent company of The Times.

The number of British visitors to MySpace dipped to 6.5 million in May, from 6.8 million in April. The fall, which comes as Facebook, its rival, experiences a huge surge in visitors, was the first to hit MySpace since it signed a deal with Google last summer, under which the social network stands to reap about $900 million in advertising revenues. It was only the second dip since News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million two years ago.

MySpace has achieved the traffic targets underpinning its deal with Google with ease, but, according to Nielsen, over the past six months Facebook’s audience in the UK has grown at 19 times the rate of MySpace’s, surging 523 per cent to 3.2 million.

Alex Burmaster, a Nielsen analyst, said: “MySpace is, by far, still the most popular social network. However, if last month’s growth rates were to remain consistent . . . Facebook would catch MySpace in September.”

The pattern was repeated in the United States, MySpace’s largest market, where traffic to the site fell to 56.6 million in May, from 57 million a month earlier.

MySpace has pointed out that traffic figures from different research firms differ, but admits that it will have to evolve new content and tools to remain relevant. It also takes issue with the idea that switching between free sites involves no cost to users.

“MySpace users invest huge amounts of time building up their profiles as part of our community. That means they are massively loyal,” a spokesman said.

Yet the Nielsen figures confirm that network promiscuity is a factor, showing that 444,000 Britons visited all three of the leading rivals – MySpace, Facebook and Bebo – in May.

Even the biggest internet brands – of which Google is the leader – may not be immune to the digital generation’s lack of loyalty, analysts say. The eight-year-old search engine was judged to be the fourteenth-biggest global brand last year by Interbrand, the consultants. It was the biggest riser in a top 50 of which half are more than 50 years old.

Rita Clifton, the chairman of Interbrand, said: “The internet has allowed a brand-building process that would have once taken decades to be achieved in a fraction of that. There is a downside, of course: what goes up quickly can descend just as fast.”

The dangers are illustrated by the fate of Friendster. The social network accrued more than 20 million users after its launch in 2003. Late last year that figure had fallen to less than one million as users migrated to sites with better music and video tools.

There are also suggestions that, while the internet makes the world a smaller, “flatter” place, personal online services do not suit traditional global branding campaigns.

Mr Jones said: “McDonald’s can have the same golden arches in every city, but social networking is a very personal thing and is susceptible to cultural differences. Using one of these sites does not bear comparison with eating a hamburger.” Already, Google has been forced to change its brand in China to “Gu Ge”. Despite the switch, the search engine trails local rivals by a huge margin.

Orkut, the social networking site run by Google, has gained about 50 million users, but despite its massive popularity in Brazil, it remains little known in America and Britain.

Mindful of the hurdles facing them, sites are already making moves aimed at winning and locking in users. MySpace, which has been criticised for failing to innovate, sought to reinvigorate its user base last week when it announced the launch of a new video-sharing service. MySpaceTV will compete with YouTube, owned by Google. Last month Facebook launched a new platform that allows outside developers to create free and paid-for online services that can offered to users.

Park Associates says that the mercurial behaviour of social net-workers could open opportunities for new sites and developers who build software that links different networks. User infidelity need not spell the end for social networking superbrands, it suggests.

John Barrett, who led the group’s research, said: “MySpace is a growing ecosystem and one that, ironically, now extends beyond MySpace itself.”

Social services

MySpace 6.5 million UK users, up 28 per cent in six months. Average time spent on site by user in a month: 96 minutes

Bebo 4 million UK users, up 49 per cent in six months. Average time by user in a month: 152 minutes

Facebook 3.2 million UK users, up 523 per cent in six months. Average time by user in a month: 143 minutes Source: Nielsen//NetRatings
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle2017224.ece





The Tricky Part of an E-ZPass Economy
David Leonhardt

There is a stretch of the Garden State Parkway that used to feel like the tollbooth capital of America. In a span of 100 miles — from Pascack Valley, in northern New Jersey, to Barnegat, along the coast — eight different toll plazas greeted drivers. In much of the rest of the country, you wouldn’t find any tolls on a 100-mile stretch.

I spent a good part of my childhood summers at the Jersey Shore, and the tollbooths on the parkway always seemed to be a cruel final obstacle between me and the beach. Every 15 minutes or so, our car would have to stop yet again to drop a measly quarter in a bucket.

The ride is very different today, thanks mostly to the electronic toll system known as E-ZPass. At four of the tolls along the Garden State, the system is so sophisticated that cars barely have to slow down. A little box attached to the car’s windshield sends a message to a computer reader looming over the road, and money is then deducted from an electronic account.

I imagine that some of the children being driven to the Jersey Shore today won’t even look away from their DVD players as they glide through a toll. And I’m quite certain that very, very few of them will remember, decades from now, how much the Garden State tolls cost back when they were young. As a result of E-ZPass and its ilk, even many adults don’t notice the cost of a toll.

Which raises an interesting question: If you don’t know how much you’re paying for something, will you notice when the price goes up? Or has E-ZPass, for all its benefits, also made it easier for toll collectors to take your money?

A young economist named Amy Finkelstein started thinking about these issues a few years ago when she and her fiancé were driving back and forth between Boston, where they were living, and New York, where they were going to be married. So she collected decades of toll records from around the country and found a clear pattern.

After an electronic system is put in place, tolls start rising sharply. Take two tollbooths that charge the same fee and are in a similar setting — both on highways leading into a big city, for instance. A decade after one of them gets electronic tolls, it will be about 30 percent more expensive on average than a similar tollbooth without it. There are no shortage of examples: the Golden Gate Bridge, the George Washington Bridge and the Tappan Zee Bridge, among them.

“You may be less aware you’re paying the toll,” said Ms. Finkelstein, now an associate professor at M.I.T., “but you’re paying a higher toll than you used to.”

The implications of this go well beyond highways. We increasingly live in an E-ZPass economy, in which bills are paid online, corporate cafeterias are going cashless and people take along their debit card, instead of cash, when they leave the house. Last year, 55 percent of consumer spending was done electronically, mainly with credit and debit cards, while checks accounted for less than 25 percent and cash only 20 percent, according to Visa. As recently as 2003, only 45 percent of spending was done electronically.

The E-ZPass economy is indisputably more convenient. It saves time and frustration. But the old frustrations that came with cash also brought a hidden benefit: they forced you to notice that you were spending money. With electronic money, it’s much easier to be carefree.

Marketers understand this dynamic well, which is a big reason they promote refillable gift cards and other forms of money that don’t feel like money. Part of what’s so intriguing about Ms. Finkelstein’s work is that it suggests that government officials may be coming to understand the dynamic, too.

The idea that hidden taxes — and tolls are really a kind of tax — could lead to higher taxes goes back decades. Milton Friedman famously came to regret his role in creating the withholding system for income taxes during World War II, because it eventually made people forget how much they were paying in tax. “It never occurred to me at the time,” he wrote in his autobiography, “that I was helping to develop machinery that would make possible a government that I would come to criticize severely as too large, too intrusive, too destructive of freedom.”

Even economists who don’t share Mr. Friedman’s political views agree with the larger point that how taxes are collected, and not just the underlying tax rate, matters. “We need to take seriously the possibility that people are not paying attention to the tax code,” said Raj Chetty of the University of California, Berkeley, who has been conducting some fascinating experiments on semi-hidden taxes.

Mr. Chetty argues that the complexity of today’s tax code ends up aggravating inequality. Both rich and poor families face a dizzying spectrum of tax laws, from carried-interest rules to the earned-income tax credit. But affluent families are better able to navigate the system, often by hiring an accountant. Also, the little day-to-day taxes, like highway tolls, mean a lot more to a moderate-income family.

Ms. Finkelstein obviously can’t prove that electronic tolls cause prices to rise by making drivers less aware of them. Neil Gray, the head of government affairs at the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association, disputes her argument and says setting tolls is more complicated than Ms. Finkelstein suggests.

But she makes a spirited case for her conclusion. She has considered a number of alternate explanations for the increases and says the evidence doesn’t support them. At the very least, electronic systems do seem to make it easier for toll collectors to increase prices.

There is one notable exception to the trend, though: the good old Garden State. Tolls on the parkway itself have increased only once in the last 50 years, back in 1989, when they were raised to 35 cents. (In the last few years, the price at each tollbooth has doubled, but highway officials have also removed half of the tolls, keeping the effective price unchanged.) Even after E-ZPass, the Garden State Parkway remains a relative bargain.

Of course, Ms. Finkelstein discovered that tolls don’t usually rise as soon as an electronic system arrives. The increases tend to come a number of years later, once electronic payment becomes old hat.

On the Garden State, the first E-ZPass system was installed in 1999. And guess what New Jersey’s governor, Jon S. Corzine, has recently been talking about? Raising the tolls on the parkway for the first time in almost 20 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/04/bu...nhardt.html?hp





'Contactless Payments' About to Explode, But are They Secure?
Joel Hruska

As contactless payment systems begin to gain traction across the country, questions are mounting over whether or not the security backing the RF-based technology is sufficiently advanced to prevent account fraud and the theft of personal information. With contactless payment systems about to get even more popular in the United States, there are fears that the wireless technology behind those systems is not secure enough for widespread adoption, despite assurances from Visa, MasterCard, and other major players.

Contactless payments on the rise

Concerns over the security of contactless systems were heightened last week by a Federal Reserve decision that will allow for even more casual, low-cost purchases to be made across the country. In recent years, credit card companies have waived their signature requirements for so-called "small ticket" items in order to get a slice of the action. Visa, for instance, doesn't require your signature for purchases at or below $25.

The Federal Reserve sets rules for receipts, and last week the Feds said that purchases of $15 or less don't even require a receipt now, let alone a signature. The rule change will usher in a wave of vending machines and other automated payment systems, and many of them will support wireless, contactless payments.

Security on the radar

At the moment, contactless payments account for only a fraction of account transactions, but that number is expected to grow as more companies roll out RF-compatible readers and equipment. And let's face it: those little buggers are extremely convenient. The question is: are they also worrisome?

Infoworld reports that the topic was debated at a meeting of the Boston Federal Reserve last May, with representatives from both security firms and major backers of the new payment system on hand. Security researchers independent from credit card companies are sounding alarms, while the credit card companies themselves believe that they have the right balance of security and functionality.

According to the work of security researcher and University of Massachusetts professor Kevin Fu, a number of RF cards in use today transmit credit card account numbers "in the clear" without any encryption. He suggests that the solutions could be far more robust and that it should be an open system that security researchers can examine for flaws. Closed systems cannot be evaluated properly, he says. (This PDF slide show discusses the numerous flaws in the first generation of cards.)

The credit card industry does not consider credit account numbers alone to be personally identifiable information, however. The industry says it has collectively invested in a substantial backend solution designed to dynamically validate contactless payments on the fly using card verification numbers (CVCs) that are securely generated and transmitted along with account information. How this system works exactly is not known to the public, and that makes security researchers like Fu very nervous. The credit companies say it's secure, but that's Fu's point: he shouldn't have to rely on what they say.

As things stand, card providers and security firms are in talks to improve security, but it's clear that the two sides have a different perception of risk, and the work between the two is somewhat antagonistic. Contactless payment developers have emphasized the need to keep security developments secret; they perceive many instances of fraud as stemming from careless actions by cardholders and are committed to RF as a system that fundamentally makes payments more secure.

Security researchers, on the other hand, have professed a desire to see more open evaluation of the systems and methods contactless payment developers have created, even if that means being more open about flaws within an existing system. This particular debate has played itself out in many contexts, but at least these two sides appear to be working together to implement a safer RF system, even if they differ on some of the particulars.

One thing is certain: the "small ticket item" business is worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the US alone, so it's no surprise that the credit card players have what appears to be a lower threshold for risk than do some security experts. Unless the government steps in—and it's unlikely that it will at this late date—contactless payments will continue to receive most of their security testing in the wild and in the line of fire.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ey-secure.html





SAP Admits Data Was Taken From Oracle
Kevin J. O’Brien

SAP, the world’s largest maker of business software, acknowledged today that employees at an American subsidiary made “’inappropriate” downloads from the Web site of Oracle, a competitor, but denied using the information for commercial gain.

In its response to a lawsuit filed by Oracle in the United States in March, SAP conceded that employees at its TomorrowNow unit, a Texas company that SAP bought in January 2005, downloaded Oracle data last year as Oracle had claimed in a lawsuit in March. But in a conference call from SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany, Henning Kagermann , SAP’s chief executive, said the information was not shared with or used by executives at SAP America, SAP’s United States headquarters in Newtown Square, Pa. Mr. Kagermann declined to describe the data that TomorrowNow employees had downloaded.

“’SAP did not have access to Oracle materials downloaded by TomorrowNow,” Mr. Kagermann said. “’However, some TomorrowNow activity went beyond what is appropriate and contravened our high standards and business procedures.”

Mr. Kagermann apologized for the impropriety and said he had ordered an investigation into the incident and installed a top manager to oversee compliance issues at TomorrowNow.

Mr. Kagermann said SAP and TomorrowNow had also received subpoenas from the United States Department of Justice for documents in the case. He did not say whether the subpoenas were in connection with a civil or criminal investigation.

TomorrowNow, which had 157 employees and $15.7 million in sales last year, provides maintenance for business software systems sold by Oracle and by companies Oracle has acquired, including PeopleSoft, a maker of personnel management software, and Siebel Systems, a maker of customer relations software for sales forces.

In its legal response, SAP denied it had stolen business secrets and said Oracle was trying to intimidate SAP in the increasingly competitive software maintenance business. “’This case is really about competition and a customer’s right to choose its software services providers,” SAP said in its affidavit.

Stefan Kuppen, a software analyst in London at JPMorgan, said Oracle was clearly trying to maximize public relations gains with its lawsuit against SAP, whose TomorrowNow unit has been successful at luring Oracle customers. Mr. Kuppen said the lawsuit could probably be settled out of court for a sum that could reach millions but would not materially affect the value of SAP.

“’On one hand, SAP is admitting it did something wrong,” Mr. Kuppen said. “’On the other hand, this is the latest installment from a couple of companies that are pretty good at fighting P.R. battles.”

While they did not start out as direct rivals, SAP and Oracle have increasingly gone head to head in the lucrative business of providing all-inclusive corporate software systems to large multinational companies. SAP’s comprehensive enterprise systems became the corporate standard and market leader in the 1990s.

But over the last decade, the competition has increased as Oracle, which began as a database software maker, constructed a similar top-to-bottom package after buying PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems, both leaders in their respective niches.

After detecting the downloads, Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., filed a suit against SAP in federal court in San Francisco, alleging industrial espionage.

In a legal response filed Monday evening in California, SAP cast the downloads as the actions of a few renegade employees. Mr. Kagermann said SAP had set up a computer ’firewall’ when it acquired TomorrowNow that had prevented the transfer of inappropriate data to SAP’s United States headquarters.

Oracle, however, said Mr. Kagermann’s admission proved its case.

“Henning Kagermann has now admitted to the repeated and illegal downloading of Oracle’s intellectual property,” Geoff Howard, a lawyer for Oracle at the law firm Bingham McCutchen, said in a statement. “’Oracle filed suit to discover the magnitude of the illegal downloads and fully understand how SAP used Oracle’s intellectual property in its business.”

Barring an out-of-court settlement, lawyers for Oracle and SAP plan to meet in United States District Court in San Francisco on Sept. 4 to lay out a legal timetable for the case.

One reason Oracle has made a big deal about the downloads is that through the TomorrowNow subsidiary, SAP has had access to large corporate customers of Oracle. As the software industry has matured, and most major corporate clients have already bought and installed vast internal software systems, software makers like TomorrowNow are trying to get an edge by selling support for products made by their competitors.

Besides providing revenue, the maintenance contracts also give software makers access to potential new long-term customers. Even Oracle last fall began selling discounted, 24-hour maintenance for Suse Linux operating systems sold by Red Hat, a rival based in Raleigh, N.C., that is the leader in open-source software.

Under their maintenance contracts, TomorrowNow’s customers gave the company their passwords to Oracle’s Web site, which TomorrowNow used to obtain software updates and fixes, Mr. Kagermann said. But during late 2006, according to SAP’s legal filing, TomorrowNow employees representing contracts with Honeywell, Merck, OCE, SPX, Metro Machine and Yazaki performed downloads from Oracle Web sites that exceeded those authorized by Oracle.

Some industry analysts downplayed the significance of Oracle’s lawsuit, noting that the downloads were probably for application fixes and updates for discontinued Oracle software — nothing of a nature that would give SAP a competitive advantage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/04/bu...racle-web.html





Online Customized Ads Move a Step Closer
Louise Story

Yahoo will announce new tools for online advertising today that could pull the company ahead in the race for what is called “behavioral targeting,” that is, the ability to better tailor online advertisements to the people most likely to buy.

The product, Yahoo SmartAds, would help marketers create custom advertisements on the fly, using information on individual buyers and information on real prices and availability from the vendors. For example, a person who had recently searched for information about blenders might see an ad from Target that gives the prices for the blenders that are on the shelves in the store closest to that person’s home.

The Internet has long promised this kind of one-to-one marketing, but it has often been difficult for advertisers to customize display advertisements with a broad reach.

“Ad agencies have been really struggling with how to scale the value proposition of the Internet,” said Todd Teresi, senior vice president of display marketplaces at Yahoo. “We now can get scaleable one-to-one marketing.”

The announcement of SmartAds also comes while Yahoo is recovering from an extensive reshuffling in the executive offices, including the departure of its chief executive, Terry S. Semel, and Wenda Harris Millard, the company’s longtime chief sales officer. Yahoo has struggled to catch up with Google in search advertising and has disappointed investors with its ad sales the past few quarters.

SmartAds is one attempt to catch up. Although the technology is complex, the goal of SmartAds is simple: show the right advertisement to the right person at just the moment that he is about to pull out his wallet to make a purchase.

SmartAds is being tested on Yahoo’s network of sites — which includes local newspapers as well as its own portal — by two major airlines, although Mr. Teresi would not name them. He said the system will be offered to other industries in the coming months, including automobile companies and retailers in the fall.

The technology will also be applied for free across advertisements bought on Right Media, the online ad exchange that Yahoo purchased this spring (although the deal is still pending). The new feature may give Right Media a competitive advantage over other exchanges — like a new one created by DoubleClick, the online company that Google agreed to purchase for $3.1 billion in April. (The Google-DoubleClick merger is pending an antitrust review by the Federal Trade Commission.)

This is how Yahoo’s new system works: the advertiser (or its agency) would provide Yahoo with the components of its display ads — including the logos, tag lines and images. The retailer would share information from its inventory databases that track the items on the shelves in each of its stores. Next, Yahoo would combine that data with the information it has about its users’ demographics and actions online to create a product-specific advertisement.

For airlines, SmartAds uses Yahoo’s information about its Web surfers to create display advertisements for each person that feature ticket offers with actual prices listed. In time, Yahoo plans to offer rich media advertisements where users can buy the ticket at that price right within the ad unit, rather than having to click through to another Web site.

Mr. Teresi said Yahoo hopes to work directly with creative agencies as they design their online advertisements. Large advertisers, he said, can buy entire sites, and Yahoo will step in to create the right advertisement for individual consumers.

“We’re doing real-time creative assembly that leverages what we know about our audience,” Mr. Teresi said. “You can buy the entire Wall Street Journal site, and when a female shows up, we will create a different ad or when someone from New York shows up, another one.”

Display advertisements have lagged behind search and text advertisements in the ability to send consumers specific product messages. Instead, much of display advertising online has been brand messaging. Yahoo’s new product may help ad agencies begin thinking of display ads differently, said David W. Kenny, chairman and chief executive of Digitas, a digital agency in the Publicis Groupe.

“This fills a need that some advertisers have needed for a while — applying personalization to display ads, so they work like search and listing ads,” Mr. Kenny said. “Yahoo has a real advantage in SmartAds because of the data from their big and engaged audience, the combination of deep display and improving search capabilities, and the new changes to work with us at the technology level instead of just selling inventory.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/te...y/02yahoo.html





Engaging at Any Speed? Commercials Put to Test
Louise Story

In new experiments for NBC, people are hooked up to sensors as they watch television, and researchers observe changes in their heart rate, palm sweat, eye movement and breathing patterns.

But the panelists are not watching just NBC programs. They are watching commercials — in fast-forward mode.

So far, the findings have been just what NBC hoped: judging from the biological reactions, the test subjects were just as engaged while watching fast-forwarded advertisements as they were while viewing opening scenes from the NBC show “Heroes” at regular speed.

And that conclusion — which is still preliminary — could have big implications for NBC and other networks as they negotiate rates for air time with advertisers. Although advertisers have steadfastly refused to pay the networks for viewers who fast-forward commercials, as more households buy digital video recorders like TiVo, the networks may one day argue that this system should change.

When it comes to fast-forward advertisements, “the assumption has always been that they have no economic value, that they have no communication value,” said Alan Wurtzel, president for research at NBC Universal. “But the fact of the matter is we’re learning that they are valuable.”

The thesis flies in the face of the assumption among advertisers that their ads have no effect when played at a high speed on a DVR. Over the last month, as advertising agencies and television networks negotiated billions of dollars in deals for commercials during next year’s season, executives who buy commercial time did not waver in their position that people who zap past the ads are of no value to them.

“Would we pay when they’re fast-forwarding? No,” said Jason Maltby, president and co-executive director for national broadcast at MindShare North America, an agency in the WPP Group that buys advertisements. “You’ve created a message that in theory requires 15 seconds or 30 seconds to get that selling message across. On a high-speed DVR, 30 seconds gets pushed down to 1.5 seconds with no audio. It just wouldn’t work.”

For decades, advertisers have paid for advertisements based on how many people see them — or how many “impressions” an advertisement receives, in industry terms. Now that technology has reshaped people’s viewing habits, advertising executives are looking for other ways to quantify their audiences and gauge the impact of messages.

Some researchers said efforts like NBC’s to find alternative measurements are a step in the right direction.

“Whether people watch or not is not a useful measure of anything,” said Joe Plummer, chief research officer for the Advertising Research Foundation. “Exposure has very, very weak correlation with purchase intent and actual sales, whereas an engagement measure has high correlation and are closer to what really matters, which is brand growth and creating brand demand.”

Media executives have long discussed the potential of using physical reactions and brain scanning to track their messages, and advances in medical research in the past few years have made this more practical. NBC is working with Innerscope Research, a small company in Boston that uses wearable sensors to translate physical responses into what the company calls “emotional engagement.”

Panelists wear black-netted vests with tubes running out of them. Sensors on fingers measure sweat or “skin conductance,” as the researchers like to say. A monitor picks up on heartbeats, and an accelerometer tracks movement when panelists wiggle in their seats or chuckle. A respiratory band can tell if the abdomen and chest stop moving — noticing when someone holds their breath, for example, in a scene of suspense.

Innerscope has developed its own scale for engagement that combines the biometric factors that it tracks. On a scale of 1 to 100, a 50 is neutral, and above 60 is engaged. In Innerscope’s test for NBC, viewers of the first 20 seconds of live advertisements clocked in with a 66 engagement score and those fast-forwarding scored 68.

“People don’t turn off their emotional responses while they’re fast-forwarding,” said Carl Marci, the chief science officer of Innerscope. “People are obviously getting the information.”

Innerscope is working on a second study for NBC that will try to pin down which types of commercials generate the most engagement in fast-forward mode. Innerscope will monitor things like how often brands are shown during the advertisement, how quickly the camera cuts to new images, and whether audio is important in the storyline.

From there, NBC may be able to offer tips on how to make commercials stand out, even at rapid speeds.

“We can then go through our advertisers and help them optimize a commercial for fast-forwarding, while also not denigrating the quality while watched live,” Mr. Wurtzel said.

Millward Brown, an advertising research company in the WPP Group, has also studied physical responses to television commercials. The company found that people who have already seen an advertisement will tend to experience the same emotional response when seeing the same advertisement again in fast-forward mode.

Fast-forwarding should not scare advertisers because consumers are engaged to some degree, just by the act of pushing the button, said Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst for Millward Brown.

“We probably pay more attention to doing that than we do when watching a regular TV program,” Mr. Hollis said. “You’re sitting there saying, ‘when is the program coming back on?’ You are actually attending to it.”

But even if physiological measures become more accepted, media buyers said they do not see them replacing viewership ratings anytime soon.

“I can’t imagine the logistics of actually buying and selling commercial time based on physiological responses,” said Steve Sternberg, executive vice president of audience analysis for Magna Global, an agency that buys ads in the Interpublic Group. “We need data that is projectable.”

Mr. Wurtzel of NBC acknowledged it was early in the research process. But over time he hopes to expand bio-testing of commercials to the facilities NBC has used to test potential television programs in front of an audience. General Electric, the parent of NBC, has worked on security technology that can track people’s facial expressions and follow eye movements. He said he may also put that to use.

In time, he said, he hopes to shift NBC away from discussing advertisements based on eyeball counts to something incorporating physiological measures and engagement. But advertising executives said they plan to go only so far.

“I would say I’m not ready to jump on cost per perspiration,” said Mr. Maltby of MindShare.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/bu...ia/03adco.html





Seagate Joins The Terabyte Disk Club
Chris Mellor

Seagate is a launching a pair of 1TB capacity disks with advanced power-saving technology. This could save up to a quarter of the power consumed by normal drives. It has also announced a ruggedized 2.5-inch drive holding 80G bytes. Hitachi was first to market with a 1T byte drive a month or so ago.

The Barracuda 7200.11 is a 3.5-inch format drive, spinning at 7,200rpm and holds 500GB, 750GB or 1TB of data. Its sustained data rate of 105MB/s is the highest ever attained for a desktop drive and it is also the world's quietest desktop drive. Conceptually the 1TB drive is four 250GB platters using Seagate's 2nd generation perpendicular recording technology. The interface is serial ATA (SATA) II running at 3GB/s.

The Barracuda ES.2 is the enterprise version of the drive with improved mean time before failure of 1.2 million hours compared to the consumer version's 1 million hours. It has both SATA and SAS (serial attached SCSI) interfaces and comes in 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB configuration.

Seagate has added a power-saving technology, branded PowerTrim, to these drives. Their electronics are managed by new firmware and hardware that monitors what the drive is doing and switches off power to unused parts of the drive electronics. If the drive is reading then separate read electronics can be switched off. Ditto for the write electronics if the drive is reading data. If there is no data being transferred then the cache and memory can be switched off and/or refresh cycles delayed.

This micro-control of power within the drive yields an average power saving of about 25 percent over a drive without the technology. That translates into quite a substantial power saving in an array of such drives. It generates a 125GB/watt rating compared to the previous ES generation's 80GB/watt.

The drives come with either SATA (for consumers and enterprises) or SAS (for enterprises) interfaces and have an MFRP of US$399, which is the same as competitor Hitachi GST's 1TB drive.

Hitachi's 5-platter 1TB drive does not come with an SAS interface making it less attractive to enterprise customers.

Seagate has also announced the ES25.2, a hardened 80GB, 2.5-inch, SATA drive built to operate in rough environments with hostile temperature, vibration, humidity, shock and altitude conditions. It can withstand more vibration than any other stand-alone drive and comes with a 5-year warranty.
http://storage.itworld.com/4650/0706...e/pfindex.html





Sony Patents Liquid Airbag
Bryan Betts

Sony has filed for a U.S. patent on a liquid airbag for electronics - in particular, for hard disks. The idea is that the electronics will be wrapped in a fluid-filled bag so if the outer case suffers a shock, the liquid acts as a cushion.

The technology is intended for use in mobile devices such as cameras and media players, and could also find its way into business-orientated technology such as smartphones and laptops.

Sony's engineers said that while the use of liquids to absorb shock has been suggested before, previous versions depended on floating the electronics between two immiscible fluids, or using a gel-like viscous substance. They argued that those systems would be difficult to configure and may not provide enough absorption to deal with heavy shocks.

The new scheme proposes that the fluid-filled inner skin will also contain "biasing units" to keep the electronics central, and a system of irises that adjust their resistance to liquid flow according to the force of impact.

The irises are created by protrusions - the patent calls them convex portions and apertures -- aligned opposite each other on the inside walls of the fluid bag. As the walls converge under pressure, the protrusions come closer together and provide increased resistance to the flow of fluid, thereby absorbing more shock.

The liquid used could be water or silicon oil, the Sony boffins said. They added that the electronics would of course be in a liquid-tight case.
http://storage.itworld.com/4619/070702sony/page_1.html





In depth

iPhone Review
Ryan Block and Chris Ziegler

The last six months have held a whirlwind of hype surrounding the iPhone the likes of which we've rarely seen; an unbelievable amount of mainstream consumer electronics users -- not just just Engadget-reading technology enthusiasts -- instantly glommed onto the idea of a do-it-all smartphone that's as easy to use as it is powerful. The fact is, there's only a very short list of properly groundbreaking technologies in the iPhone (multi-touch input), and a very long list of things users are already upset about not having in a $600 cellphone (3G, GPS, A2DP, MMS, physical keyboard, etc.). If you're prepared to buy into the hype, and thusly, the device, it's important that purchase (and its subsequent two year commitment to AT&T) not be made for features, but for the device's paradigm-shifting interface.

The hardware

Industrial design
We're just going to come out and say it: the iPhone has the most beautiful industrial design of any cellphone we've ever seen. Yes, it's a matter of taste, and while we imagine some won't agree, we find it hard to resist the handset's thoughtful minimalism and attention to detail.

The edges of the beautiful optical-grade glass facade fit seamlessly with its stainless steel rim; the rear is an incredibly finely milled aluminum, with a hard, black plastic strip at the bottom, covering the device's antenna array, and providing small, unsightly grids of holes for speaker and mic audio. On the rear is the slightly recessed 2 megapixel camera lens, a reflective Apple logo, and some information about the device (IMEI, serial, etc.) in nearly microscopic print. (Sorry, iPhone engravings don't seem to be available yet for online customers.)

The iPhone's curves and geometry make it incredibly comfortable to hold. It fits well in the hand horizontally and vertically (completely one-handed operation is a snap in portrait mode), and its slim profile lets it slip into even a tight pocket with little effort. The device feels incredibly sturdy and well balanced -- no end seems any heavier than another. Every edge blends perfectly with the next (which will probably help fight gunk buildup over time), and holding the device to one's ear is comfortable enough, although not as comfortable as, say, the HTC Touch.

Our only real complaint with the device's design isn't one we take lightly: Apple went to the trouble of giving the iPhone a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, but the plug is far too recessed to use most headphones with -- we tested a variety, and were highly unimpressed with how many fit. What's the point of a standard port if it's implemented in a non-standard way? Apple might have at least included an extender / adapter for this, but didn't. Luckily, the iPhone earbuds sound very decent, and also include a minuscule, clicky in-line remote / mic -- but that's not going to alleviate the annoyance for the myriad users with expensive Etys or Shures who have to pay another $10 for yet another small part to lose.

The display

The iPhone features the most attractive display we've ever seen on a portable device of this size, by far and bar none. While its 160ppi resolution isn't quite photorealistic, the extremely bright 3.5-inch display does run at 480 x 320, making it one of the highest pixel-density devices around today (save the Toshiba G900's mind-popping 3-inch 800 x 480 display). But pixel density doesn't necessarily matter, it's how your device uses the screen real estate it's got. Instead of printing microscopic text, as Windows Mobile often does with high resolution displays (see: HTC's Universal and Advantage), iPhone text looks smooth and natural in every application -- everything on-screen is eminently readable.

The screen also provides an excellent outdoor viewing experience. With optical properties reminiscent of transflective displays, the iPhone remains completely readable (if a only bit washed out) even in direct sunlight. Unfortunately, the display's viewing angle left a little something to be desired, and the rumors about the glass face being an absolute fingerprint magnet are totally true: this thing picks up more smudges than almost any touchscreen device we've ever used. Honestly though, we'd attribute this to the fact that unlike most other smartphones, you are exempt from using a stylus on the iPhone's capacitive display, meaning you must touch it with your bare finger to do almost anything.

Thankfully, like the rest of the phone, the glass face feels extremely sturdy, and one should have absolutely no hesitation in wiping it off on their jeans or sleeve -- we've yet to produce a single scratch on the thing, and we understand others testing under more rigorous circumstances (like deliberately trying to key its face up) have also been unable to mar its armor.

The sensors
One of the more unique features in the iPhone is its trio of sensors (orientation, light, and proximity -- the latter two are behind the glass right above the earpiece) which help the device interact with its user and the world at large. Some of these sensors are more useful than others. The light sensor (for dimming the backlight) is great for saving power, but its use doesn't compare to the the other two sensors, which worked like champs. The proximity sensor, which prevents you from accidentally interacting with the screen while the iPhone is pressed against your ear, switches off the display at about 0.75-inches away; the screen switches back on after you pull away about an inch. This very useful automatic process took a little getting used to from us oldschool touchscreen users, who have long since grown accustomed to diligently turning off the screen while on a call, or holding our smartphones to our ear ever so gently.

The orientation sensor also worked well enough. Although you can't turn the phone on its head, when browsing in Safari you can do a 180, jumping quickly from landscape left to landscape right. The iPhone would occasionally find itself confused by the odd angles one sometimes carries and holds devices at, but in general we didn't expect the orientation sensor to work as well as it did.

Button layout

Despite the iPhone's entirely touchscreen-driven interface, all of its external buttons are mechanical and have a distinct, clicky tactility. There is, of course, the home button on the face, which takes you back to the main menu; along the left side of the unit is the volume up / down rocker (which is clearly identifiable by touch), and a ringer on / off switch -- something we wish all cellphones had, but that far too few actually do. Turning off the ringer briefly vibrates the device to let the user know rings are off; it's worth noting that turning the ringer off doesn't turn off all device audio, so if you hit play on a song in iPod mode, audio will still come out the speaker if you don't have headphones inserted.

On the top of the unit is the SIM tray (each unit comes pre-packaged with an AT&T SIM already inserted), which pops out by depressing an internal switch with a paperclip. Finally, the largest perimeter button is the sleep / wake switch, which does as you'd imagine. Press it (and swipe the screen) to wake up the device, or press it to put it to sleep; hold it (and swipe the screen) down to shut it off completely. (You can also use it turn off the ringer - -one click -- or shunt a call to voicemail -- two clicks -- if someone rings you.)

The headphones

The iPhone comes bundled with a standard set of iPod earbuds, but there are two differences from the kind that comes with your regular old iPod. First, these earbuds don't have the small plastic cable separator slide that helps keep your cables from getting tangled. Second, on the right channel cable about halfway up you'll find a very slim, discreet mic / music toggle. When listening to music, click it once to pause, or twice to skip tracks; when a call comes through, click it once to pick up, and again to hang up.

That same in-line piece also picks up your voice for the call, and it sounds pretty good -- some people on the other end of the line said it sounds even better than the iPhone's integrated mic. For those worried that there would be issues with interference, put your mind at ease. We heard absolutely no cell radio interference over the headset, even when we wrapped it four times around the iPhone antenna, and sandwiched it between a second cellphone making a call. The headphones are an essential and amazing accessory that makes the seamless media and phone experiences of the device possible. We only wish Apple managed to integrate an inline volume switch in there too, since that's really the only essential control it lacks.

Unfortunately for us, iPod headphones just don't fit our ears, so no matter how good they may sound, they're unusable since we can't seem keep them in longer than 30 seconds. (We typically prefer canalphones, they can't really go anywhere.) Since the included headphones are the only ones on the market right now that can interact with the iPod function, have an inline mic, and, of course, listen to audio, you're kind of stuck with Apple's buds if you want to get the most out of your iPhone. The same also applies to the expensive phones you invested in, which probably won't fit in the recessed jack anyway: even if you get an adapter, you still won't get the full experience.

Apple's included headphones are about 42-inches long (3.5 feet), just about the perfect length to reach from your pocket to your head with a little extra slack. You'd be surprised how many cellphone manufacturers screw this up with bundled headphones that are way too long, or way too short.

The dock, charging

The included dock is up to par for Apple's typically high standards -- it feels very solid and sturdy with no visible mold lines, and is capped on the bottom by a solid rubber base (with a nearly hidden vent for letting sound in and out of the iPhone's speaker and mic) to keep it in place. On its rear is the usual cable connector and line out. We thought the dock props the iPhone way too vertically -- about 80°, significantly more upright than the stock iPod dock we compared it to. If you're using it on a desk, you'll probably wish Apple angled it back a little so you're not leaning over to fumble with your phone like some miniature monolith.

Charging the iPhone as an easy enough affair. Pulling power from its adapter (and not a computer's USB), we were able to quick-charge it from 0% to 90% in just under two hours, but it took us almost another hour and a half to get that last ten percent. We also twice ran into this weird bug, where charging the iPhone from 0% power would deactivate the screen. The only way to recover was to soft-reset the phone. No big deal, just irritating.

Other accessories
Apple also includes a microfiber polishing cloth -- a welcome addition, but the device's sturdy glass will stand up to rubs on most of your clothes, so don't bother carrying it along if you're planning to just brush off some dust or residue left by your face / ears / fingers, etc. Also included is an extremely small power brick, and USB connector cable. Worth noting: the iPhone connector cable doesn't include tensioned clips, like most iPod connectors -- just pull it out, nothing messy to get caught and broken, and fewer moving parts in general.

User interface

If there's anything revolutionary, as Apple claims, about the iPhone, it's the user interface that would be nominated. Countless phones make calls, play movies and music, have maps, web browsers, etc., but almost none seem able to fully blend the experience -- which is part of the reason people flipped out at the idea of an iPhone. The device's user interface does all this with panache, but it's not without a number of very irritating issues. Before we get into those issues, however, we should quickly rundown the functions of the iPhone's primarily gesture-based input system.

iPhone gestures
Drag - controlled scroll up / down through lists
Flick - quickly scrolls up / down through lists
Stop - while scrolling, tap and hold to stop the moving list
Swipe - flick from left to right to change panes (Safari, weather, iPod) and delete items (mail, SMS)
Single tap - select item
Double tap - zooms in and out (all apps), zooms in (maps)
Two-finger single tap - zooms out (maps only)
Pinch / unpinch - zoom in and out of photos, maps, Safari

As you can probably already tell, gestures in the iPhone are by no means consistent. By and large one can count on gestures to work the same way from app to app, but swipes, for example, will only enable the delete button in mail and SMS -- if you want to delete selected calls from your call log, a visual voicemail message, world clock, or what have you, you've got to find another way. Swiping left to right takes you back one pane only in iPod, and two-finger single tap only zooms out in Google maps -- none of the other apps that use zooming, like Safari, and photos.

These kinds of inconsistencies are worked around easily enough, but add that much more to the iPhone learning curve. And yes, there is definitely a learning curve to this device. Although many of its functions are incredibly easy to use and get used to, the iPhone takes radically new (and often extremely simplified and streamlined) approaches to common tasks for mobile devices.

Another rather vexing aspect of the iPhone's UI is its complete inability to enable user-customizable themes -- as well as having inconsistent appearances between applications. Users can set their background (which shows up only during the unlock screen and phone calls), but otherwise they're stuck with the look Apple gave the iPhone, and nothing more. This is very Apple, and plays right into Steve's reputation as a benevolent dictator; he's got better taste than most, but not much of a penchant for individuality.

Even still, Apple's chosen appearance varies from app to app. Some apps have a slate blue theme (mail, SMS, calendar, maps, Safari, settings), some have a black theme (stocks, weather), some have a combination blue / black theme (phone, iPod, YouTube, clock), some have a straight gray theme (photos, camera), and some have an app-specific theme (calculator, notes). Even the missing-data-background is inconsistent: checkerboard in Safari, line grid in Google maps. There's little rhyme or reason in how or why these three themes were chosen, but unlike OS X's legacy pinstripes and brushed metal looks, there's really no reason why the iPhone should have an inconsistent appearance between applications.

Keyboard

Since its announcement, the iPhone's single biggest x-factor has been its virtual keyboard -- primarily because the quality of its keyboard can make or break a mobile device, and of the numerous touchscreen keyboards released over the years, not one has proven a viable substitute for a proper physical keyboard. We've been using the keyboard as much as possible, attempting to "trust" its auto-correction and intelligent input recognition, as Apple urges its users to do in order to make the transition from physical keys. (The iPhone uses a combination of dictionary prediction and keymap prediction to help out typing.)

The whole idea of a touchscreen is a pretty counterintuitive design philosophy, if you ask us. Nothing will ever rid humans of the need to feel physical sensations when interacting with objects (and user interfaces). Having "trust" in the keyboard is a fine concept, and we believe it when people say they're up to speed and reaching the same input rates as on physical keyboards. But even assuming we get there, we know we'll always long for proper tactile feedback. That said, we're working on it, and have found ourselves slowly growing used to tapping away at the device with our stubby thumbs.

As for the actual process of typing, one hindrance we've had thus far is that despite being a multi-touch system, the keyboard won't recognize a second key press before you've lifted off the first -- it requires single, distinct key presses. But the worst thing about the keyboard is that some of the methods it plies in accelerating your typing actually sacrifice speed in some cases. For example, there is no period key on the main keyboard -- you have to access even the most commonly used symbols in a flipped over symbols keyboard. This is almost enough to drive you crazy. (We really, REALLY wish Apple would split the large return button into two buttons: one for return, one for period.)

Caps lock is also disabled in the system by default, but even if you enable it in settings (and then double-tap to turn it on), you still can't hold down shift for the same effect -- it's either caps on, or you have to hit shift between each letter. Also, whether you're in upper or lower case, the letters on the keyboard keys always look the same: capitalized. (This makes it difficult to see at a glance what case of text you're about to input, especially since when using two thumbs your left thumb always hovers over the shift key.) Oh, and don't hit space when typing out a series of numbers, otherwise you'll get dropped back into the letter keyboard again.

We also found the in-line dictionary tool to be more cumbersome than helpful. Supposedly, to add a word that's not in the dictionary, type in your word, then when you get an autocorrect value, just press on that word and the word you typed will be added to the dict file (uhh, ok). But you can also accidentally add words to your dictionary by typing out a word, dismissing the autocorrect dropdown by adding another letter, then backspacing over it. Yeah, for some reason that adds a word to the dictionary file, too. And believe it or not, this confusing little problem caused us to add a number of bum words to the dict file (which you can only keep or clear in its entirety -- and no you can't back it up, either).

On the up side, the horizontal keyboard (which is only enabled when typing into Safari while browsing horizontally) is a much more palatable experience. The keys are far larger, resulting in drastically fewer typing mistakes. (We sincerely hope Apple will enable horizontal input for all its iPhone apps that require keyboard input.) The horizontal web keyboard also has very convenient previous / next buttons for tabbing through fields. The keyboard you're given when entering URLs is one of the most brilliant bits we've seen in the device, and is an incredible time-saver. Since there are almost never spaces in URLs, instead users have shortcuts to ".", "/", and ".com". Finally, the magnification loupe is the best touchscreen cursor positioning method we've seen to date in a mobile device. Too bad you can't highlight and cut / copy / paste text with the iPhone.

So what's the long and short of the keyboard story? We're still getting used to it, but for a touchscreen keyboard it could have been a lot worse -- and a whole lot better. Some among the Engadget staff have been able to pick it up quickly, others, not so much -- your mileage may vary. We have to wonder though, what would it take to get Steve to give us a proper physical keyboard for this mother, anyway? (We already smell the cottage industry brewing.)

Phone and contacts

Apple broke rank during its ubiquitous iPhone advertising campaign in the last few weeks -- typically the company doesn't go out of the way to highlight the specific functionality of its devices, instead choosing to sell products with iconography and emotion. But the bottom line Apple made is that the iPhone must live up to it's name: before anything else, it's a phone. And it has to be, because if it's an awful phone, no one's going to use it as their phone, get it? Well, Apple obviously succeeded here. We found nearly everything about making and receiving calls on the iPhone to be dead simple -- scratch that, pleasurable, even. It's almost enough to make us call home every weekend. (Almost.)

While finding contacts might have been improved, calling contacts is as far from a chore as we've seen on a mobile. What the iPhone contact app most needs is use of the keyboard to hone in on names, like Windows Mobile's excellent Smartdial feature -- even the device's own SMS app has a keyboard-based contact finder. Instead, you're given just two options for finding your pals' contact cards: flicking up and down the list, or using the alphabet column on the right side, which makes short work of scrolling through hundreds of names.

However, the pleasure of the elastic scroll-drag motion isn't to be underestimated. Despite the fact that the iPhone has no haptic feedback, traversing lists of emails, text, and songs has a nearly tactile feel due to the interface's "rubber band" effect. You can swing through about 60 contacts with a quick swipe -- traversing long lists without a scroll wheel is feasible, but if you've got a few hundred people in your address book, you'll probably soon be jonesing for keyboard-based contact search.

Call functions are organized into five categories

Favorites - Apple's take on speed dial. A simple list of your favorite contacts. Adding favorites is very simple -- every non-favorite contact has a huge button allowing you to add them to the list. The list can be re-ordered by tapping edit, then using an icon on the right to drag each entry around.
Recents - Shows a list of all or missed calls, and the call time / date. Incoming and outgoing calls are not differentiated, annoyingly. Missed calls are highlighted in red. Like some phones, unknown numbers have the region of call origin displayed (i.e. if you missed a call from a 415 area code number, beneath the digits it says "San Francisco, California" -- very handy!).
Contacts - Your contact list, with your phone number listed at the top. (Having your number listed at the top is deceptively clever -- how many times have you needed to show someone your phone number in a loud area? For us, often.) Users can select to show all their synced contacts, or just select groups. (Creating contacts on the iPhone easily syncs back to the desktop.) Pushing against the final contact does not return the user to the top of the list, as is the typical expected behavior.
Dialpad - The usual 12-key. You aren't presented with contact list-assisted dialing, but if you punch in a known number the device will give you a small prompt confirming who it is you're dialing (i.e. "Ryan Block, mobile"). From this pane users can add a dialed-in number to a new or existing contact -- users can also add numbers from the contacts pane, with the added option of plus and pause dialing. Note: numbers dialed in during calls are lost -- so prepare to take down proper notes in your phone, you can't just dial them in and save them for later, like some phones.
Voicemail - Visual voicemail pane. Visual voicemail allows for email-like voicemail interaction, using caller ID and small voicemail files (transmitted to the phone automagically in the background). Visual voicemail quality leaves a lot to be desired, but we'd argue the functionality itself supersedes the audio fidelity, poor though it may be. Also in the VV pane: a speakerphone toggle and voicemail greeting option pane where you can select and locally record a new VM greeting (and transmit it back to AT&T for playback). Sorry, you can only set a single outgoing message; you can't record multiple and swap them out for various occasions (i.e. on vacation, or whatever).

Dialing a number is extremely simple: in a contact card (or in an email, or anywhere else) tap the number you want to call and it dials. That's it. In-call functions are also very simple: users are presented with just a few common options: mute, keypad, speakerphone on / off, add call (which brings up the contact list), pause, and contacts (presumably for finding someone's contact info to read into phone). Incoming calls present obvious prompts: ignore, hold call & answer, and (in a huge red button) end call & answer. Users can conference up to five calls on a single line -- the sixth call gets put on hold.

Using a Bluetooth headset is also super easy. If it's paired and powered up you'll be prompted with an audio source button instead of the speakerphone button. Tap that and you can choose which audio source you'd like to use. Note: if your iPhone headphones are plugged in, that takes priority over all other audio sources.

Call quality
As GSM handsets go, the iPhone's voice quality can only be described as "unremarkable." Not bad, but not particularly stellar, either. Anyone stepping down from a UMTS handset will likely notice a slightly more "compressed" sound than they're used to, but the call clarity is good -- we noticed virtually no static hiss in the background. We were able to get decent volume out of the speakerphone's bottom-facing grill (particularly when set on a hard surface) but even at full volume the earpiece was a little soft for our liking. Realistically, we could've used a couple more notches -- the ability to turn it up to 11, if you will -- for use in loud environments.

Likewise, folks on the other end of the call reported decent, if not good, sound quality from us. Background noise was within acceptable limits -- something that's more often a problem for candybar devices than for clamshells -- and we were coming through with plenty of volume. If anything, the most chintzy aspect of the iPhone's voice is its inability to use data while talking, and vice versa (no Class A EDGE or 3G, hint hint), but we digress.

Ringtones and vibration
We're still kind of bummed you can't (yet) add custom ringtones or even use MP3 ringtones with the massive library of tracks your iPhone is walking around with, but the default sounds are all pretty good. In fact, as far as ringtones go, they're definitely above average. (We have a feeling we're going to be hearing a LOT of "Marimba" in the coming years.) When you turn the ringer off with the side switch, the device enters vibration mode (duh); we found the iPhone's vibration totally suitable for pocket use -- both standing up, moving, and sitting down. But in-bag use is a whole 'nother game, and few phones (including this one) could rattle enough to catch our attention from inside a sack.

Mail

There's no other way than to come out and say it: we are extremely disappointed in the iPhone's email app. So much so, in fact, that despite the keyboard and the rest of the things the iPhone lacks in the features department, its mail support may be the largest factor in killing its status as a productivity device. Don't get us wrong, the application is just fine for anyone who wants to do light email, but it lacks the power and convenience that frequent-emailers require.

For starters, if you've ever been out for an hour or two and checked your mail from your phone only to find a good 50 messages waiting for you, your iPhone nightmare has just begun. Scrolling through messages is just as easy as in other lists, but opening even a small, simple message has a noticeable delay -- the same kind of delay you get moving from one message to the next (with the up / down arrows), or deleting each message with the trash can button (which only appears with the message open).

One may take it for granted, but mobile email deletion can be a serious problem. The only other methods of message deletion is a swipe over the message to be deleted, then tapping the delete button; or tapping the edit button, then tapping the minus button, then tapping the delete button for each message to be erased. Maybe this doesn't sound too extrarodinary, but using the swipe-delete or edit-minus-button-delete on even a dozen or so messages is incredibly tedious.

We suspect even a moderate email user won't be able to delete 20 emails on their phone without fantasizing about throwing their iPhone across the room. If you can delete 50 emails in one sitting, you deserve to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Oh, and you have to manually delete all these messages again from the trash, there's no empty trash button (only an auto-delete option buried deep within settings, which removes deleted emails never, or after a day, a week, or a month). We kid you not.

Which brings us to our next serious email matter: the iPhone's complete lack of integration with Mail.app, OS X's powerful-enough mail client. We expected that if you're an email user, when you plug in your iPhone and iTunes says it's "syncing your mail accounts," that means it's actually comparing and moving messages between the device and Mail.app. Not so. In fact, the iPhone does not interact in any meaningful way with Mail.app, other than to simplify the setup on the iPhone by copying account settings over from the desktop client's settings. Specifically:

• The POP mail you read on your iPhone does not show up as read in Mail.app after sync.
• Sent messages on your iPhone are not synced to Mail.app's sent folder (you can automatically CC, but not BCC, yourself on every outgoing iPhone message, though).
• Filters in Mail.app are not applied to incoming mail on the iPhone.
• The iPhone keeps its own set of non-contact addresses you manually enter -- these are not copied over from Mail.app.

What's more, the iPhone mail application has a number of other harsh shortcomings:

• There is no BCC.
• Messages on IMAP cannot even be marked as read.
• No ability "mark all / selected" as read.
• No empty trash option.
• There is a save to draft, but there is no spellcheck. (We suppose that's because Apple thinks spellcheck should be inline with auto-correction as you type.)
• Users can only download and view the latest 200 messages from their server -- there is no "retrieve all" messages option. This is a very bad thing when you just got off a trans-continental flight and it's time to triage some serious email.

If we haven't already driven the point home, for heavy email users such as ourselves, the iPhone didn't even come close to cutting the mustard. Email is, in fact, the weakest aspect of the whole device. While the Yahoo push-IMAP worked beautifully (and we do mean flawlessly -- push mail was delivered instantaneously), the Gmail integration requires POP access, and basically has similar issues with fetching messages, magnified by the different organizational requirements the web mail service has. One Engadget editor called the Gmail integration "a crime against humanity" -- and let's be frank, it's not "years ahead of everything else," it's actually years behind even the simple Java Gmail app Google released a while ago.

To us, a productivity device is anything that helps us Get Things Done while we're out and about, and email, web, and SMS are the holy trinity on a smartphone device. If any part of that trifecta is crap, the whole device may as well be crap. And unfortunately for us, even if you can put up with the keyboard, the Mail client is so awful it actually makes us wish Apple made a Foleo for the iPhone. An iFoleo, if you will. Anyway, if you're anything like us, this is a major, major dealbreaker.

Safari

Ease of use aside, there's no question that the iPhone's build of Safari serves up the most true-to-PC web browsing experience available for a phone today. Opera Mini and S60's native browser (which happens to be based on the same core as Safari, coincidentally) do commendable jobs, but the iPhone has taken it to the next level. Anyone who has used the Nokia 770 or N800 internet tablets will be roughly familiar with what the iPhone is trying to do here: render a page faithfully without trying to work any fit-to-screen magic, and give the user convenient options for zooming in on text.

Of course, it could be argued that the iPhone shouldn't even be trying to present a PC-like rendering of pages because it necessitates zooming. Emphasis on "necessitates" here -- you really can't go to any mainstream site on the iPhone and expect to glean useful information from it without dragging, double tapping, pinching, and unpinching your way around. Zooming in on a page produces an interesting transient display artifact: everything looks really fuzzy for just a moment, as though you've overzoomed on a low-resolution picture. (Microsoft's new Deepfish browser has a similar effect on zoom-in.) The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Granted, after a while the browsing motions become a little more natural, and we'd always prefer to have the option of seeing and interacting with sites that don't have dedicated mobile versions. WAP is supported, but Safari isn't detected as a mobile browser, so you need to specifically navigate to the WAP version if the site you're trying to visit has automatic browser detection.

Bookmarks are supported and automatically synchronized with Safari on the host computer; adding a new bookmark is a simple matter of hitting the "+" button in the address bar, naming the bookmark, selecting a destination folder, and hitting Save. Mobile Safari's meager four-button toolbar along the bottom edge dedicates a button for this, along with forward, backward, and tabs. The tab implementation is pretty clever -- all you see on the tab button is a count of the number of tabs currently open (or nothing if your current page is the only tab). Tapping the button takes you to a Cover Flow-esque display that shows a small view of each tab; flicking left and right changes tabs and tapping opens a tab. A red X in the upper left and corner of each tab's display allows you to close it.

Of all the iPhone's wares, Safari most thoroughly implements rotation detection, which makes sense considering that most sites are designed with a landscape display in mind. The phone can be held vertically, 90 degrees clockwise, or 90 degrees counterclockwise, and the currently displayed page will be rotated (complete with a nifty animation, naturally) to fill up the screen. Safari is also the only iPhone app to implement the horizontal keyboard, which some will find far easier to use than its more ubiquitous vertical counterpart. One small complaint we have here is that if you have the keyboard up and rotate the phone, the page and keyboard won't reorient -- you have to manually close the keyboard with the Done button, at which point the page will do its thing and you can bring up the keyboard again in the correct orientation.

On the iPhone, Safari is boiled down to the very most basic set of features necessary to do its thing, but the rendering engine is true to the original, for better or for worse. Take Gmail, for example; just like Safari on the desktop, there's a screwy looking little box immediately to the left of the subject line of each email in the inbox if you have personal level indicators enabled. It works, but it's a very Safari-esque experience -- Safari users will feel right at home, but folks coming from other browsers might run into the occasional surprise when hitting up sites optimized for Internet Explorer or Firefox.

On the subject of Gmail, Ajax-enabled sites are hit or miss. One gotcha is that there's no gesture to simulate a double-click, so it's impossible to open up a new IM window in Meebo by double-tapping a contact, for example (though we were able to initiate one using the IM Buddy button on the buddy list). Google Documents worked okay for reading text and spreadsheets, but we weren't able to edit anything. A good rule of thumb here: if it's not designed specifically for the iPhone, keep your expectations to a minimum until you try it out yourself.

Unfortunately, Safari seems to share more than just a rendering engine with its distant S60-based cousin. Specifically, we've had some problems with stability -- the browser will often unceremoniously disappear from time to time. We have no problem opening it back up (and the offending page works the second time more often than not), but it's still a pain in the ass. It seems like the number of open tabs (and hence, memory consumption) might be at least one of the culprits, but we've yet to find any reproducible scenarios. Mobile browsers aren't typically the most stable pieces of software around, so we've gotta say we're not terribly surprised. Here's hoping future firmware updates shore up the goods just a little bit.

iPod / media functionality

Historically, we haven't been huge fans of the iPod. We've found its interface generally simple, but irritating to navigate; its lack of numerous basic features other devices have long since had, like the ability to create multiple playlists on the go, has persisted as the iPod has undergone very conservative functionality additions through the years. Whereas our biggest complaint about the iPod -- its dire lack of codec support -- hasn't been addressed in the iPhone, its user interface definitely has.

Playing back music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, etc. has never been easier on an iPod, or more more seamlessly integrated into a phone. Most of the iPod interface has been revised to take advantage of the iPhone's massive touchscreen, so navigating artists and albums in lists is simple, where before it was a tedious, thumb-joint-popping experience. Tilting the device horizontally allows you to browse your music in Cover Flow mode, a novelty of breakthrough proportions. Tapping an album in Cover Flow mode lets you select which track to play.

When browsing in list mode, you get the same alphabet column on the right as you do with contacts. Again, keyboard search would have been nice here, but it's still far more livable than the click wheel. If you put your iPhone in sleep while listening to music, when waking it up instead of your usual background on the unlock screen you'll see the cover art of the album you're listening to, and the name of the track beneath the current time -- an extremely useful bit of glanceable information, saving you from having to dig through your mobile to see what's playing.

The media integration with the rest of the device is obviously far better than on any mobile we've seen to date -- but it's not without its issues. It's wonderful seeing SMS messages pop up while watching movies, for instance, but if you load up a YouTube video while listening to music, the audio automatically fades out when the video starts, but doesn't come back when the video ends. This is counter to the phone experience, where an incoming call pauses your music and brings it back when the call is over. We also noticed that even while under heavy load multitasking, the music would never skip or falter, just crash.

We managed to continuously crash the iPod app while listening to music and doing other things, namely browsing. We wouldn't call it incredibly unstable, but we wouldn't say it's rock solid, either. Movie playback did seem very stable though, even when skipping around and playing video for long periods of time. (It may also be of note that even when playing video for hours on end the device hardly ever even got warm to the touch.) The biggest upshot we found on the media playback, though, was the iPhone's Herculean battery life. We've seen other reviews' media playback results vary, but ours seemed to jump far ahead of even Apple's lofty expectations.

Playing relatively high bitrate VGA H.264 videos, our iPhone lasted almost exactly 9 freaking hours of continuous playback with cell and WiFi on (but Bluetooth off). Yeah, we had to pick our jaws up off the floor, too. So by our tests, you could watch a two hour movie and drain off a little more than 22% of the battery -- totally acceptable for trip-taking and the like.

Our music testing showed similarly outstanding results. Playing back 160-192Kbps MP3s, our iPhone pushed about 29 hours and 30 minutes music playback. To put that in perspective, the Apple claims the iPod nano gets about 24 hours playback on a full charge, and the iPod a scant 14 - 20 hours.

To do a little simple math, you could watch two hours of video, listen to 8 straight hours of music, and still have only drained off less than half your device's capacity -- that is, if your iPhone's battery works as well as ours. (Read: your battery life may differ.) Still, if that's a good estimate of what users can expect from their device's power drain, you should have little issue making the iPhone your music and video player, in addition to your cellphone.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/03/i...face-keyboard/





iPhones iPlenty: the Sell-Out That Wasn't
Ken Fisher

Doesn't it seem like January 9th of this year was much, much more than just a half year ago? In the nearly six months since it was announced, the iPhone has dominated the technology press. Coverage online reached such a feverish pitch that smitten geeks felt like they had one option: brave the crowds and the lines on June 28... or give up any hopes of getting an iPhone anytime soon. It was sure to be a sellout.

Except it didn't happen this way; not exactly. There were lines and crowds—a mixture of eBayers, the techno chic and the techno geeks—but once the dust had settled, once the fog of war had cleared... there were still giant piles of iPhones left. I imagine Phil Hartman on a giant mountain of Colon Blow, except it's Steve Jobs laughing maniacally on top of a hill of iPhones. Only Steve Jobs could get people to wait in line for something that, well, you didn't need to wait in line for. And talking to a bunch of new iPhone owners, most don't seem to care! Smitten, indeed. (It's ok to be smitten, of course.)

24 hours ago, few thought it would be like this. Mad people were lining up in New York City days in advance of the sales. People camping out, people trying to sell their place in line for hundreds of dollars. And then there's "Mike," who I met at the North Shore Mall (just north of Boston), who walked in and bought his iPhone and accessories this morning, without so much as waiting in line 5 minutes. Mike told me that he had been informed that there were hundreds left at the store. My own attempt to find out how many were left was met with the classic "we don't know" line, which is apparently what Apple has instructed its staff to say (this is the answer I get calling around, too). Mike could be full of it, but there were plenty of boxes in the store, that's for certain.

Jacqui with the goods

Call the massive amounts of stock left the result of overblown hype of an insanely expensive device, and the Apple faithful will say nay: the great Steve Jobs wanted to have as many phones as possible out there, and that's why there's so many phones waiting for an iBuyer. In fact, the AAPL aficionado will tell you that this is how every new Apple product launch should be, so Apple should be patting itself on its back.

The truth is, we don't have any idea of the real scope of this launch (yet), but sources are telling us that Apple moved more than 2,000 phones through its Chicago Michigan Ave. store last night alone. It's certainly not the case that people aren't buying. Blackfriar's Marketing did their own informal headcount and number crunching, and they suggest "peak physical sales in Apple Stores on the order of 30,000 an hour." That's amazing, if true.

We've heard from readers who were standing in lines all over the country; those same readers are reporting that there are loads of iPhones left in NYC, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Indianapolis, and everywhere else.

According to Apple's iPhone locator, nearly every one of their stores ended sales last night (at midnight in most locations) with plenty of stock. Calls around the Boston area today show that both the 4GB and 8GB models are readily available in the region, and AT&T stores also had phones, although one mall location would not actually reveal their stock to us, which was rather strange.

Some AT&T stores did sell out of iPhones according to readers, as they appear to have been given a much smaller allotment. Whatever you do, don't bother with vouchers if you have an Apple Store near you. Trust us, they have plenty even if the AT&T stores don't. In any case, Apple is providing a better shopping experience, as you can get in and out without a sales pitch on the plan you might choose for the phone, or without a credit check, which is going down at most AT&T locations.

Of course, it hasn't been all smiles. Starting late last night, the activation process for the iPhone became bogged down, and several readers told us that they were waiting four or more hours for activation to take effect. Things appear to have almost caught up now, as we ourselves have activated now three different phones: two last night and one today.

In the coming days we're going to be continuing work on our iPhone review, and trust us, we're going to actually use the phones before we review them. We bought a few phones ourselves, and we also have a review unit from Apple. If you want to see us test any particular aspect of the iPhone, let us know in the comments. Yes, we're going to stress-test it, but you knew that already.

Clint and Jacqui have posted their first impressions, including video coverage. Check it out.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...hat-wasnt.html





iPhone Futures Prove to Be a Bad Investment
Katie Hafner

David Flashner thought he had it wired: buy two iPhones last Friday when they first went on sale, keep one and sell the other at a profit so big it would pay for most of the first one.

Mr. Flashner wasted no time. He began advertising the extra phone while still in line at an Apple store in Burlingame, Calif., south of San Francisco. During his 21-hour wait, he posted half a dozen different ads to Craigslist — with prices ranging from $800 to $1,200 — and waited for the calls to come in.

But no calls came because consumers expect that stores will soon have phones in stock. He continued to advertise the extra phone through the weekend, and ended up with just one call, which went nowhere. On Wednesday, he returned the phone.

Mr. Flashner, 25, who manages an audio-visual equipment rental company, is not the only would-be iPhone reseller whose plan failed to follow the script. “I haven’t heard of a single person who sold one,” he said.

Across the nation, people looking to make a quick and easy profit bought one, two or as many phones as they could by recruiting friends to stand in line with them. Many of them were the first to get in line, camping overnight outside the stores. But now they are finding that the iPhone is much more like a Harry Potter book than a hard-to-find Wii video game machine: a great thing to be one of the first to own, but not high in resale value because supply is not constrained.

Last Friday, just after the first iPhones were sold, thousands of listings showed up on eBay and Craigslist, with prices of $1,000 for the 8-gigabyte phone, a $400 markup. Some bold sellers were asking $2,000. But as it became clear that supply was meeting demand, they found themselves stuck. Few of the phones have sold for more than $700, which after sales tax, is not a remarkable profit margin.

Corey Spring, a columnist at newsvine.com who analyzed eBay auctions, estimated that a significant number of sellers “were only making their money back, even closing at a loss.” Most Apple stores in the United States have no phones available, but the most determined customers seem to have been able to buy a phone. Few people seem willing to pay even $100 over the retail price.

Some frustrated resellers say they will keep trying, then return their extra phone or phones within the 14-day return period.

D. J. Ostrowski is typical. Mr. Ostrowski, a 20-year-old college student who lives in Carol Stream, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, stood in line “in the hot sun” outside an Apple store for nine hours and talked a friend into joining him.

Like other resellers, Mr. Ostrowski was hoping the iPhone demand would duplicate the Xbox, PlayStation and Wii crazes. Lines are still long for the Wii gaming console, because Nintendo misjudged demand. Devices sell on eBay for around $100 more than the $250 retail price. In his ad, Mr. Ostrowski offered to “rendezvous anywhere,” or even deliver the phone. The only call he got was from another unsuccessful reseller, asking if he had had any luck.

Mr. Ostrowski had used a day off from his job at a hookah bar to stand in line. Now, he said, after factoring in the money he spent on gas and the waste of a free day, he views the entire venture as a net loss. “I’m probably better off getting a side job,” he said.

A few people got lucky. Trevor Lyman, 21, a senior at Temple University in Philadelphia, sold an 8-gigabyte phone on eBay for $1,300 while waiting in line last Friday afternoon to buy it. He has sold two more, but for far less than the first one.

Demand for the phone was remarkably strong in the first days. Analysts estimate that Apple and AT&T stores have sold around 500,000 phones so far. One analyst ventured a guess as high as 700,000. But Apple appears to have anticipated demand and contracted with manufacturers in Asia to build far more. Apple has said it expects to sell as many as 10 million phones by the end of 2008.

Over the last few weeks, Apple stirred a great deal of speculation about inventory levels by shrouding them in secrecy. As a result, resellers decided to take a chance. The company declined to comment on the rush to resell the phones, and on the status of iPhone inventories. On Wednesday night, on the Apple Web page that lists the phone’s availability, only two Apple stores were listed as having phones available Thursday: Tigard, Ore., and the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

Jim Fazio, 41, an entrepreneur in Fort Collins, Colo., said he had seen people make huge profits off the PlayStation 3 last Christmas and decided to jump into the iPhone market. “I took a chance that the prerelease hype would create a supply-demand imbalance, but obviously that scenario didn’t play out this time,” said Mr. Fazio, who advertised his iPhone on eBay for $1,200. “I pity the poor goobers that camped for these things.”

On Tuesday, when Mr. Fazio failed to sell his phone at a reduced price of $850, he took the phone back to the Apple store, which was out of 8-gigabyte phones. The instant he returned it, another customer in the store bought it.

“It’s a lot easier with tickets,” said Aron Honig, a 23-year-old equity research analyst who lives in Boston and has had more success selling Yankees and Red Sox tickets. Mr. Honig bought one 4-gigabyte phone and advertised it for $700 on both eBay and Craigslist, but heard only from people he assumed were scam artists, offering to wire him the money. “I think it’s the last time I’m going to do any kind of electronics product,” he said.

Some resellers are amused, if not wealthier. Jack Boyce, 62, a graphic designer in Boston, bought two 8-gigabyte phones last Friday, after waiting four and a half hours in line. Mr. Boyce took his computer with him and was able to do a little work. He charges clients $100 an hour and calculates that he lost three and a half billable hours.

Still, Mr. Boyce said, he “had a ball” waiting outside the Apple store in Cambridge, Mass. “The people around me were wonderful,” he said. “We took pictures of each other.”

And he remains optimistic that someone might still pay him $950 for his extra phone, pointing out that only a few Apple stores have iPhones in stock, and none of the AT&T stores do. “So my wish may be coming true,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/te.../06iphone.html





Chasing the iPhone
Martin Fackler

While Americans have been blitzed with news about the iPhone’s debut, many in South Korea’s and Japan’s technology industries initially greeted Apple’s flashy new handset with yawns.

Cellphones in these technology-saturated countries can already play digital songs and video games and receive satellite television. But now that analysts and industry executives are getting their first good look at the iPhone, many here are concerned that Asian manufacturers may have underestimated the Apple threat.

Analysts and executives in South Korea say that the iPhone, with its full-scale Internet browser and distinctive touch screen with colorful icons, is more than just another souped-up cellphone. They fear this Silicon Valley challenger could leap past Asian makers into the age of digital convergence by combining personal computing and mobile technologies as no device has before.

“Apple’s impact will be bigger than Asian handset makers think,” said Kim Yoon-ho, an analyst in Seoul at Prudential Securities. “The iPhone is different from previous mobile phones. It is the prototype of the future of mobile phones.”

The fear now is that Apple may repeat in wireless communications what it accomplished in portable music with the iPod: changing the industry. And just as when the iPod came out six years ago, big Asian manufacturers like Samsung Electronics and Sony could find themselves wondering what hit them, say analysts and industry executives.

Here in South Korea, manufacturers are taking the threat seriously, and are rushing out their own iPhone-like handsets. By the end of the year, Samsung, South Korea’s biggest cellphone maker, will unveil its Ultra Smart F700, with a large touch-controlled screen displaying rows of icons, much as the iPhone does.

LG Electronics, another large Korean handset maker, has begun selling a smartphone in Italy that can view full-size Web pages. Pantech, which sells most of its phones in the United States under the carriers’ brand names, will also unveil its first touch-screen smartphone this fall.

Sony Ericsson plans this fall to introduce its latest Walkman phone, the W960i, which will feature a touch screen and memory space for 8,000 songs. Nokia of Finland, whose N95 is probably the closest competitor to the iPhone in the United States, said it also plans a touch-screen cellphone called the Aeon, though the company has not said when it will go on sale.

Motorola, based in Schaumburg, Ill., plans to sell this summer the Razr 2, the successor to its once-popular Razr upgraded with a Linux operating system and full-scale Web browser.

“If the iPhone changes the rules in the cellphone market, then we have to adapt as soon as possible,” said Yi Seung-soo, a cellphone designer at Pantech. “We can take advantage of being a follower,” he said.

It’s the same method Korean manufacturers have used before — quickly developing similar products that are cheaper but which contain a few more features than Apple, he said. That strategy has not diminished iPod’s dominance in the music-player market in the United States, but makers in Asia have fared a bit better in their home markets.

For the time being, their concern is over the handset market in the United States, where the iPhone went on sale Friday. Apple will not sell its new phone in Asia until next year, and there are also doubts whether iPhone will catch on in markets like South Korea, where consumers often pay for small, sleek phones packed with functions. Bulkier smartphones and BlackBerrys have so far failed to sell well here.

But even if iPhone’s success is limited to America, it could be a setback for South Korean electronics companies, which export heavily to the United States. In particular, say analysts, Apple could end up seizing much of the top end of the American cellphone market, where a handset that cost $100 or more offers the highest profit margins.

That segment of the American market represents about a quarter of America’s 250 million cellphone subscribers, according to Strategy Analytics, a market research firm based in Newton, Mass. In contrast with cellphone users in Asia, more than half of American subscribers paid $50 or less for their cellphones.

Apple, whose biggest challenge may be persuading Americans to spend $500 or $600 for an iPhone, has said it wants to have the devices in the hands of 1 percent of the world’s cellphone users, or about 10 million people, by the end of next year.

For its part, Samsung says it is ready for Apple’s challenge, offering a far broader range of high-end products. Some of Samsung’s recent products in this segment in the United States include the BlackJack, a $200 smartphone that uses Windows Mobile, and the UpStage, a phone on one side and an MP3 player on the other.

“Samsung is not a one-hit wonder,” said Pete Skarzynski, senior vice president of strategy at Samsung Telecommunications America. “We offer many different products, for all different market segments, and not just one blanket product.”

For a glimpse of what Samsung may offer Americans in the future, step into one of its Anycall cellphone stores in South Korea. One new device, the SCH-B450, fits in the palm of a hand, yet it packs a 2-megapixel camera, MP3 player, satellite TV receiver and an English-Korean dictionary with 330,000 words. Its biggest selling point: Plug it into a TV to turn it into a mini game console, allowing the user to play video games with the phone itself serving as controller.

“Oh, it’s a phone, too,” said Lee Eun-jung, manager at an Anycall cellphone store in the Shinchon neighborhood of Seoul. She said the phone, which costs the equivalent of $700, is popular among college-age Koreans. Ms. Lee herself owns a different model with an additional function that appeals to mothers in education-obsessed Korea. It shows animated fairy tales in four languages, helping children learn not only their native Korean, but also English, Japanese and Chinese.

“I use this phone to baby-sit my children,” she said.

Samsung employees insist, and analysts agree, that Samsung handsets offer better durability and higher performance than the iPhone. But if the iPhone succeeds, the lesson will be that engineering alone is not enough to win consumers, say analysts and others in the industry.

Analysts and executives say that Apple is leading the cellphone industry into a new stage, where success depends on features that are outside the phone, such as the ease of downloading music and video content and an easy-to-use operating system.

“Tech-wise, the iPhone is not so advanced,” said S. Jay Yim, vice president of overseas marketing at Pantech. “But Apple makes up for that in content and software. As handsets look more like PCs, software gets more important.”

Indeed, Dr. Yim said that riding on Apple’s coattails may turn out to be the best business strategy for Pantech, which recently underwent a bank-led revamping. He said the hype around iPhone may open more Americans to the idea of paying more for cellphones, including the function-packed phones that Korean makers excel at building.

“In the past, U.S. consumers were unwilling to pay $300 for a phone,” Dr. Yim said. “If Apple can change their buying habits, then that would be good for us, too.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/te...cellphone.html





For iPhone, Some Shortages and Activation Problems
John Markoff

Apple’s long awaited iPhone began selling briskly on Friday evening, but press officers at both Apple and AT&T acknowledged that some customers have had problems activating their phones to connect to the AT&T cellular network.

An AT&T spokesman said on Sunday morning that many of the AT&T stores had sold out quickly, but declined to offer details on the number of stores that were out of stock or the number of phones sold.

“This is a dynamic situation, and I don’t think it would be helpful to say this many had sold out,” said Mark Siegel of AT&T. He said the stores that had run out of stock had permitted customers to place orders for phones that would be shipped to their homes or offices.

Apple’s Web site had a list of which of its stores were sold out on Sunday morning. Eighteen of the company’s 36 California stores were listed as being sold out of iPhones, but all of its New York stores still had phones available.

On Saturday evening, an employee at one of the company’s two stores in Palo Alto, Calif., said that the location had sold out on Friday, but received new stock the next morning and that more phones were expected on Monday morning. Other stores reported that they had the less-expensive 4-gigabyte version that sells for $500, but were running short of the 8-gigabyte machine that sells for $100 more.

Both companies acknowledged that they heard customers’ complaints about the new activation process. Rather than activate the phones in the store, buyers are required to activate them via an Internet-connected personal computer.

Those who reported problems in online discussion groups included AT&T business customers who found that they were unable to transfer their new phones quickly to a business account. Others were customers who switched from a rival service who said that the transfer process had disconnected their existing cellular service but had not turned on their iPhones.

Glenn S. Tenney, a computer industry consultant in San Mateo, Calif., said that he had spent more than three hours on the phone on Saturday, mostly on hold, only to be told that AT&T requires that he switch his account to a more expensive plan designed for the iPhone.

He said his phone had still not been activated and that he was planning to insist that AT&T honor his existing account. “If they wanted to have exceptions to what they advertised, they should have said so,” he said. “It seems like false and misleading advertising, or bait and switch — I’m not sure which.”

On Friday evening, a number of customers found that they needed to wait overnight before their phones were activated, and several said they were still waiting despite long phone calls with AT&T representatives.

The AT&T spokesman said the complaints were minimal. “What we are seeing is that the overwhelming majority are activating in minutes with no difficulty at all,” Mr. Siegel said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/te.../02iphone.html





iPhones Offline as AT&T Buckles

AT&T's network went down for most of yesterday, leaving as many as 500,000 new iPhone owners without internet access
Jonathan Richards

Apple was counting the cost today of choosing a slower network on which to run its new iPhone in the US after new owners reported being unable to access the internet on the device for most of yesterday.

Across the breadth of the country - from Hawaii to Illinois - there were reports that AT&T network was down, apparently as a result of intense use of the phone by the more than 500,000 people who are reported to have bought it since it went on sale Friday.

A spokesman for AT&T said that the problems experienced on its EDGE network, which carries all "data", such as internet pages, requested by iPhone users, were not connected with the new phone, and by evening the situation was beginning to right itself, but not before websites had been deluged with complaints by owners unable to use their new toy.

"It was near impossible to connect either to get my e-mail or access a website," Phil, a user in San Diego, wrote on the Engadget website. "I tried my AT&T BlackBerry (8800), which uses the same network and it worked fine."

Another, based in San Fransisco, wrote: "There seems to be no real explanation as to why the US carriers suck so bad — they are some of the most profitable operators in the world, yet they just don't seem to be able to build out their networks enough so that there's ubiquitous coverage."

Difficulties were also experienced by users in Texas, Colorado and the state of Washington.

Apple's decision to have the iPhone run on EDGE, which is slower than 3G networks but has better geographic coverage in the US, was described by a reviewer in The Wall Street Journal as a "major drawback" of the device.

Some users also reported having difficulty activating their phones over the weekend, a problem that AT&T attributed to initial overload which had now, the network said, been rectified.

"There is a small percentage of iPhone customers who have had a less than perfect activation experience,” an Apple spokeswoman said.

Alan Brown, an analyst specialising in wireless technology at Gartner, said: "It's a bit like New Year's Day phone calls. A network will make certain provisions to cope with high volumes, and once that's exceeded, it's likely the network will fall over."

Mr. Brown said that the uptake of the iPhone would have "stretched" AT&T more than any other new handset — partly as a result of the unlimited internet usage that comes with all iPhone price plans, but that it was possible there were other sources of the outage than the wireless or "air" network, such as servers or other telecommunications equipment.

If, as has been widely predicted, Apple brings out a 3G version of the iPhone in Europe, it was likely that the networks would be better equipped to cope with high data volumes, Mr Brown said, although there would still be concern about "buckling", particularly because of the bullish forecasts about early sales.

Faster download speeds could be guaranteed by including a higher-end 3G chipset in the phone, but that would depend on whether Apple was willing to increase the cost of the handset by as much as 50 per cent, he said.

In a separate development, it emerged today that at least one British company had secured contracts to supply parts to the iPhone.

Wolfson Microelectronics, an Edinburgh-based firm, is supplying Apple with a sound component known as an audio codec.

ARM Holdings, based in Cambridge, is reported to have licensed some of its microprocessor designs to other iPhone suppliers, such as Samsung, but the company declined to confirm this.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle2020484.ece





Brute-forced in 16 seconds

iPhone Root Password Cracked in Three Days
Nick Gibson

It's been out just three days, but already the Apple iPhone has been taken apart both literally and figuratively. The latest: inquisitive Apple fans have hacked into the firmware and discovered the master root password to the smart phone.

The information came from an official Apple iPhone restore image (rename as a zip file and extract). The archive contains two .dmg disk images: a password encrypted system image and an unencrypted user image. By delving into the unencrypted image inquisitive hackers were able to discover that all iPhones ship with predefined passwords to the accounts 'mobile' and 'root', the last of which being the name of the privileged administration account on UNIX based systems.

Hackers used the simple UNIX program 'strings' to extract a list of human readable character strings from the disk image, which contained a list of user accounts and their corresponding encrypted passwords (equivalent to the /etc/passwd file on UNIX and Linux systems). A call was then made out on the Full Disclosure mailing list for someone to run the popular password cracking tool John the Ripper on the encrypted passwords.

It took one replier just sixteen seconds to extract the passwords for both accounts -- both passwords were simple six letter words of lower case letters.

Having the passwords will not do anybody any good for the moment. The iPhone has no console or terminal access, so there is no way to log in as either account. In fact, nobody even seems certain that the accounts access the machine at all, some Internet commentators suggesting that the password file was left over from early development work, or was intentionally included to throw hackers off the scent.
http://www.builderau.com.au/blogs/by...tm?p=339270810





iPhone Independence Day
Jon Lech Johansen

I’ve found a way to activate a brand new unactivated iPhone without giving any of your money or personal information to AT&T NSA. The iPhone does not have phone capability, but the iPod and WiFi work. Stay tuned!

Update:

Magic iTunes numbers:

Offset 2048912: 33C0C3

Offset 257074: 28

Offset 257013: 33C9B1

Add “127.0.0.1 albert.apple.com” to c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Download Phone Activation Server v1.0 to activate your iPhone for iPod+WiFi use. Note that this application will not do anything unless you understand the magic numbers as well as add the hosts entry. Phone Activation Server (PAS) requires that you have the MS .NET Framework 2.0 installed.

Download PAS v1.0 Source Code.

Unbricking the iPhone

I’ve been playing with a friend’s iPhone to see how the activation process works (there are people who want an iPhone to use it as an iPod and WiFi device without having to enter into a 2-year AT&T contract).

The following pieces of information are used to activate an iPhone:

» DeviceID
» IMEI
» ICCID

Unfortunately, the activation data is cryptographically signed. The following certificate (”Apple iPhone Activation”, issued by “Apple iPhone Certification Authority”) is used to verify the signature:
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIIDZzCCAk+gAwIBAgIBAjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADB5MQswCQYDVQQGEwJV UzET
MBEGA1UEChMKQXBwbGUgSW5jLjEmMCQGA1UECxMdQXBwbGUgQ2VydGlmaWNh dGlv
biBBdXRob3JpdHkxLTArBgNVBAMTJEFwcGxlIGlQaG9uZSBDZXJ0aWZpY2F0 aW9u
IEF1dGhvcml0eTAeFw0wNzA0MTYyMjU1MDJaFw0xNDA0MTYyMjU1MDJaMFsx CzAJ
BgNVBAYTAlVTMRMwEQYDVQQKEwpBcHBsZSBJbmMuMRUwEwYDVQQLEwxBcHBs ZSBp
UGhvbmUxIDAeBgNVBAMTF0FwcGxlIGlQaG9uZSBBY3RpdmF0aW9uMIGfMA0G CSqG
SIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQDFAXzRImArmoiHfbS2oPcqAfbEv0d1jk7G bnX7
+4YUlyIfprzBVdlmz2JHYv1+04IzJtL7cL97UI7fk0i0OMY0al8a+JPQa4Ug 611T
bqEt+njAmAkge3HXWDBdAXD9MhkC7T/9o77zOQ1oli4cUdzlnYWfzmW0PduOxuve
AeYY4wIDAQABo4GbMIGYMA4GA1UdDwEB/wQEAwIHgDAMBgNVHRMBAf8EAjAAMB0G
A1UdDgQWBBShoNL+t7Rz/psUaq/NPXNPH+/WlDAfBgNVHSMEGDAWgBTnNCouIt45
YGu0lM53g2EvMaB8NTA4BgNVHR8EMTAvMC2gK6AphidodHRwOi8vd3d3LmFw cGxl
LmNvbS9hcHBsZWNhL2lwaG9uZS5jcmwwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEFBQADggEBAF9q mrUN
dA+FROYGP7pWcYTAK+pLyOf9zOaE7aeVI885V8Y/BKHhlwAo+zEkiOU3FbEPCS9V
tS18ZBcwD/+d5ZQTMFknhcUJwdPqqjnm9LqTfH/x4pw8ONHRDzxHdp96gOV3A4+8
abkoASfcYqvIRypXnbur3bRRhTzAs4VILS6jTyFYymZeSewtBubmmigo1kCQ iZGc
76c5feDAyHb2bzEqtvx3WprljtS46QT5CR6YelinZnio32jAzRYTxtS6r3Js vZDi
J07+EHcmfGdpxwgO+7btW1pFar0ZjF9/jYKKnOYNyvCrwszhafbSYwzAG5EJoXFB
4d+piWHUDcPxtcc=
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

http://nanocr.eu/2007/07/03/iphone-without-att/


















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

June 30th, June 23rd, June 16th, June 9th, June 2nd, May 26th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. Questions or comments? Call 213-814-0165, country code U.S.. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black