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Old 16-01-08, 01:32 PM   #2
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US Drafting Plan to Allow Government Access to Any Email or Web

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is drawing up plans for cyberspace spying that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps look like a "walk in the park," according to an interview published in the New Yorker's print edition today.
Debate on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “will be a walk in the park compared to this,” McConnell said. “this is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”

The article, which profiles the 65-year-old former admiral appointed by President George W. Bush in January 2007 to oversee all of America's intelligence agencies, was not published on the New Yorker's Web site.

McConnell is developing a Cyber-Security Policy, still in the draft stage, which will closely police Internet activity.

"Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the autority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search," author Lawrence Wright pens.

“Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation, he said," Wright adds. "Giorgio warned me, 'We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.'"

A zero-sum game is one in which gains by one side come at the expense of the other. In other words -- McConnell's aide believes greater security can only come at privacy's expense.

McConnell has been an advocate for computer-network defense, which has previously not been the province of any intelligence agency.

According to a 2007 conversation in the Oval Office, McConnell told President Bush, “If the 9/11 perpetrators had focused on a single US bank through cyber-attack and it had been successful, it would have an order of magnitude greater impact on the US economy.”

Bush turned to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, asking him if it was true; Paulson said that it was. Bush then asked to McConnell to come up with a network security strategy.

"One proposal of McConnell’s Cyber-Security Policy, which is still in the draft stage, is to reduce the access points between government computers and the Internet from two thousand to fifty," Wright notes. "He claimed that cyber-theft account for as much as a hundred billion dollars in annual losses to the American economy. 'The real problem is the perpetrator who doesn’t care about stealing—he just wants to destroy.'"

The infrastructure to tap into Americans' email and web search history may already be in place.

In November, a former technician at AT&T alleged that the telecom forwarded virtually all of its Internet traffic into a "secret room" to facilitate government spying.

Whistleblower Mark Klein said that a copy of all Internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office -- to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access -- via a cable splitting device.

"My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room," Klein. said "And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those Internet cables into the secret room -- and we're talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the Internet."

"As a technician, I had the engineering wiring documents, which told me how the splitter was wired to the secret room," Klein continued. "And so I know that whatever went across those cables was copied and the entire data stream was copied."

According to Klein, that information included Internet activity about Americans.

"We're talking about domestic traffic as well as international traffic," Klein said. Previous Bush administration claims that only international communications were being intercepted aren't accurate, he added.

"I know the physical equipment, and I know that statement is not true," he added. "It involves millions of communications, a lot of it domestic communications that they're copying wholesale."
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/US_dra...ment_0114.html





Bill Proposes Database of Offenders to Aid Dating
Rebecca Cathcart

Web sites that promise to give the dirt on prospective dates abound. A guy has a roving eye? Look him up on DontDateHimGirl.com.

But a California lawmaker says the background checks can be far more serious. The lawmaker, Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, the San Francisco Democrat who is the majority whip, introduced a bill last week to create an online database of men and women convicted of domestic violence in California.

Other states like Florida have databases used by law enforcement officials. Her proposal, Ms. Ma said, would be the first available to the public.

“If you’re online, Googling and looking for information on someone you met in a bar or on MySpace, this would provide a tool for people to go and look to see if someone who is suspicious and a little creepy has a history of violence,” Ms. Ma said.

The database would log the names of domestic violence offenders convicted of a felony or two misdemeanors, dates of birth, locations of convictions and other information. Unlike public registers of sex offenders, the database would not list addresses. It would, however, indicate how to obtain a restraining order.

“The site gives people knowledge,” said Jim Hammer, a former San Francisco prosecutor who worked with Ms. Ma on the bill. “To enable people to get restraining orders is giving them the power to do something about it.”

Mr. Hammer took the database idea to Ms. Ma last year. It came to him in the late ’90s, he said, after he prosecuted Ronnie Earl Seymour in the killing of Nadga Schexnayder and her mother during a domestic dispute in 1995.

Ms. Schexnayder’s parents had suspicions about Mr. Seymour, with whom she had a child, but they did not have the tools to check his background, Mr. Hammer said. Mr. Seymour had three felony convictions for attacks on former girlfriends when he killed the two women. He was sentenced to life in prison.

“They didn’t have the means to hire a private investigator to go to courthouses and pull documents,” Mr. Hammer said. “They had feelings, but no evidence.”

The bill would impose higher fines on domestic violence offenders to pay for the Web site, which the attorney general’s office would run. Ms. Ma said that she was optimistic about its prospects for passage, but that it was too early to gauge support in the Legislature.

Ms. Ma said the measure singled out domestic violence offenses because national statistics indicated that those crimes had a high rate of recidivism.

“Domestic violence is a cycle, and it’s hard to break,” she said. “But knowledge is power, and this is public information that’s already out there. This site would make it easily accessible.”
http://www.theledger.com/article/200...160343/-1/ZNYT





Microsoft Seeks Patent for Office 'Spy' Software
Alexi Mostrous and David Brown

Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.

Technology allowing constant monitoring of workers was previously limited to pilots, firefighters and Nasa astronauts. This is believed to be the first time a company has proposed developing such software for mainstream workplaces.

Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.

The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.

The Information Commissioner, civil liberties groups and privacy lawyers strongly criticised the potential of the system for “taking the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level”. Hugh Tomlinson, QC, an expert on data protection law at Matrix Chambers, told The Times: “This system involves intrusion into every single aspect of the lives of the employees. It raises very serious privacy issues.”

Peter Skyte, a national officer for the union Unite, said: “This system takes the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level with a new level of invasiveness but in a very old-fashioned way because it monitors what is going in rather than the results.” The Information Commissioner’s Office said: “Imposing this level of intrusion on employees could only be justified in exceptional circumstances.”

The US Patent Office confirmed last night that the application was published last month, 18 months after being filed. Patent lawyers said that it could be granted within a year.

Microsoft last night refused to comment on the application, but said: “We have over 7,000 patents worldwide and we are proud of the quality of these patents and the innovations they represent. As a general practice, we do not typically comment on pending patent applications because claims made in the application may be modified through the approval process.”
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle3193480.ece





FBI Wants Instant Access to British Identity Data

Americans seek international database to carry iris, palm and finger prints
Owen Bowcott

Senior British police officials are talking to the FBI about an international database to hunt for major criminals and terrorists.

The US-initiated programme, "Server in the Sky", would take cooperation between the police forces way beyond the current faxing of fingerprints across the Atlantic. Allies in the "war against terror" - the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - have formed a working group, the International Information Consortium, to plan their strategy.

Biometric measurements, irises or palm prints as well as fingerprints, and other personal information are likely to be exchanged across the network. One section will feature the world's most wanted suspects. The database could hold details of millions of criminals and suspects.

The FBI is keen for the police forces of American allies to sign up to improve international security. The Home Office yesterday confirmed it was aware of Server in the Sky, as did the Metropolitan police.

The plan will make groups anxious to safeguard personal privacy question how much access to UK databases is granted to foreign law enforcement agencies. There will also be concern over security, particularly after embarrassing data losses within the UK, and accuracy: in one case, an arrest for a terror offence by US investigators used what turned out to be misidentified fingerprint matches.

Britain's National Policing Improvement Agency has been the lead body for the FBI project because it is responsible for IDENT1, the UK database holding 7m sets of fingerprints and other biometric details used by police forces to search for matches from scenes of crimes. Many of the prints are either from a person with no criminal record, or have yet to be matched to a named individual.

IDENT1 was built by the computer technology arm of the US defence company Northrop Grumman. In future it is expected to hold palm prints, facial images and video sequences. A company spokeswoman confirmed that Northrop Grumman had spoken to the FBI about Server in the Sky. "It can run independently but if existing systems are connected up to it then the intelligence agencies would have to approve," she said.

The FBI told the Guardian: "Server in the Sky is an FBI initiative designed to foster the advanced search and exchange of biometric information on a global scale. While it is currently in the concept and design stages, once complete it will provide a technical forum for member nations to submit biometric search requests to other nations. It will maintain a core holding of the world's 'worst of the worst' individuals. Any identifications of these people will be sent as a priority message to the requesting nation."

In London, the NPIA confirmed it was aware of Server in the Sky but said it was "too early to comment on what our active participation might be".

The FBI is proposing to establish three categories of suspects in the shared system: "internationally recognised terrorists and felons", those who are "major felons and suspected terrorists", and finally those who the subjects of terrorist investigations or criminals with international links. Tom Bush, assistant director at the FBI's criminal justice information service, has said he hopes to see a pilot project for the programme up and running by the middle of the year.

Although each participating country would manage and secure its own data, the sharing of personal data between countries is becoming an increasingly controversial area of police practice. There is political concern at Westminster about the public transparency of such cooperation.

A similar proposal has emerged from the EU for closer security cooperation between the security services and police forces of member states, including allowing countries to search each other's databases. Under what is known as the Prum treaty, there are plans to open up access to DNA profiles, fingerprints and vehicle registration numbers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanright...241005,00.html





Government and Police Under Fire for Beating up Brian Haw

The British government and London's Metropolitan Police came under heavy criticism today for mercilessly beating up Britain's iconic peace protester Brian Haw over the weekend.

In an unprovoked attack by a police officer, Mr. Haw was assaulted in the face with his own camera and arrested while observing a demonstration against the ban on unauthorised protest under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) which was taking place outside Downing Street.

Mr. Haw, who was bleeding from the assault, was then dragged into the police van where he was further assaulted by policeman, according to witnesses.

"I utterly condemn the aggressive mishandling of Brian Haw during Saturday's demonstration, and his subsequent treatment while in the custody of police," Green MEP Caroline Lucas said. "He is a passionate and peaceful campaigner, and a popular hero following his outstanding efforts to publicly oppose the Iraq war."

According to other protesters arrested along with Mr. Haw, the peace protester was once again badly assaulted before being strip searched and charged under the SOCPA.

"This incident provides yet more proof that police actions taken under the terms of SOCPA are putting a stranglehold on civil liberties and threatening the right to gather in peaceful protest," Lucas added. "It is a sad day for this country when the face of modern democracy is frightened and bloodied and peering out of a police van on a Saturday afternoon."

Mr. Haw came into international prominence when he won the Channel 4 Political Personality of the Year Award 2007 by popular vote.

It is estimated that the British authorities have spent almost half a million pounds (million US dollars) trying to evict Mr. Haw from Parliamentary Square, where he has been since 2nd June 2001.

While the government has succeeded in severely restricting Mr. Haw's rights to protest by passing laws specifically aimed at thwarting him, courts have ruled that these pieces of legislation cannot be invoked retroactively, and allowed Mr. Haw to continue to protest.

Lucas called on the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who promised to look into the SOCPA, to stop these forms of police brutality immediately and prevent any further human rights abuses before the deadline for consultation ends on January 17th.
http://presscue.com/node/40731





MySpace Agrees to Youth Protections
Brian Stelter

The social networking Web site MySpace and the attorneys general for 49 states announced Monday that they had reached an agreement under which MySpace would make a number of changes aimed at protecting teenagers and children using its site from sexual predators.

“Today’s agreement makes it harder for adults to sexually solicit children online," said Tom Corbett, the Pennsylvania attorney general.

The announcement of expanded cooperation between the states — as well as the District of Columbia — and MySpace, a division of the News Corporation, came eight months after the attorneys general from eight states charged that the site had not done enough to block sexual predators from the service and had failed to cooperate with the authorities.

MySpace, which was started about four years ago and claims roughly 70 million users, is the most popular social networking Web site. Law enforcement officials say the site has attracted sex offenders and other individuals who are attempting to exploit children.

In Pennsylvania, for example, 31 of the 54 individuals arrested on child predator charges in 2007 had active MySpace profiles, Mr. Corbett said. Company officials also announced last year that they had removed 29,000 convicted sex offenders from the site.
MySpace already reviews all images and videos that users post on their pages, mostly through technological filtering. The site also deletes the profiles of registered sex offenders and makes the profiles of 14- and 15-year-olds automatically private.

Under the agreement announced Monday, MySpace will classify as private all profiles of users under the age of 18, strengthen its response to complaints of inappropriate content on the site; and organize a task force of Internet businesses, nonprofit organizations and technology companies to review and develop online safety tools. The site will also accept independent monitoring. The agreement is not a binding legal document, and users will likely be able to circumvent some of the changes.

“Rather than treating the online and offline world differently, our goal has been, and will continue to be, to make our virtual neighborhoods as safe as our real ones," said Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer for MySpace and its parent company Fox Interactive Media.

The states had been in talks with MySpace for almost two years. At a news conference in midtown Manhattan on Monday, the attorneys general acknowledged that law enforcement officials and social networking sites still do not see eye to eye on some specific changes. Most significantly, the two sides differ on the feasibility of new technology that would authenticate age and identity.

“We are not papering over or concealing our continued differences,” said Roy Cooper, the attorney general for North Carolina. “We’re going to work to bridge them. At the same time, we are going to continue to enforce laws against every child predator who threatens our children or anyone else on social networking sites.”

Mr. Cooper and Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut led the multistate working group on social networking. The group noted that states have explored litigation that would require social networking sites to make certain changes. Mr. Cooper and Mr. Blumenthal would not rule out future legal options, but said a partnership made more sense at the present time.

“Today, we are talking about a cooperative path that can realistically lead to better technology,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “What we have in common is much more important than what we would have in conflict.”

The attorneys general said they would encourage other social networking sites, including Facebook, to adopt the model adopted by MySpace. Last year, after an investigation by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, Facebook agreed to post stronger warnings about the dangers to children using the site and to respond more quickly to complaints from users about inappropriate sexual messages.

At the time, Mr. Cuomo predicted that the settlement would become a “new model” under which the authorities and Internet companies could work together to protect children from illegal activity online.

Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/te...yspace.html?hp





MySpace Bug Leaks 'Private' Teen Photos to Voyeurs
Kevin Poulsen

A backdoor in MySpace's architecture allows anyone who's interested to see the photographs of some users with private profiles -- including those under 16 -- despite assurances from MySpace that those pictures can only be seen by people on a user's friends list. Info about the backdoor has been circulating on message boards for months.

Since the glitch emerged last fall, it has spawned a cottage industry of ad-supported websites that make it easy to access the photographs, spurring self-described pedophiles and run-of-the-mill voyeurs to post photos pilfered from private MySpace accounts.

The bug, and its long-term survival, raises new questions about privacy on the News Corp.-owned site, even as it touts a deal with the attorneys general of 49 states meant to polish its online-safety image.

"If kids are doing what they think they need to do, and are still having their photos picked up by slimebags on the internet ... then these are serious issues," said Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.org, a children's-online-safety group. "It's a matter of trust and it's a matter of safety." (WiredSafety is not connected to Wired News or Wired magazine.)

Representatives for MySpace did not return Wired News phone calls Thursday.

The flaw exposes MySpace users who set their profiles to "private" -- the default setting for users under 16 -- even though MySpace's account settings page tells users, "Only the people you select will be able to view your full profile and photos."

Clicking on the photo link on a private profile gives unauthorized users this message: "This profile is set to private. This user must add you as a friend to see his/her profile." But anyone -- even those without a MySpace account -- can plug the target's public account number, called a "Friend ID," into a specially constructed URL that grants access to those photos.

The only users safe from the exploit are those who have explicitly configured their MySpace photo galleries (and not just their overall profiles) to be private.

A similar technique in circulation allows third parties to see the friends list associated with a private profile.

The photo-gallery backdoor has been discussed on message boards for at least three months. In an October post on the music-oriented forum sohh.com, a user asked a contingent of self-described "pedos" for help in accessing the photos of a 16-year-old girl who caught his eye online. "I got a mission for all you pedo soldiers," he wrote, explaining that the girl's profile was private.

"I can get them. I know a way around it," another forum member responded. Minutes later, he posted direct links to 43 photos of the girl. By request, he posted links the next day for another 12 photos, belonging to a 15-year-old girl whose profile is also private. Sohh.com later banned a number of users who called themselves a "pedo army," for posting MySpace photo links for underage girls. (None of the posts appears to have involved, or alluded to, child pornography or other illegal conduct.)

Beginning in October, commercial websites began springing up to perform the MySpace hack automatically, while earning a buck through online advertising. The sites all allow you to retrieve photos from private profiles merely by typing in the Friend ID of a targeted user.

That ease of use has led to discussion threads on a wide variety of web forums, including an automotive forum: "For all you phedos (sic) out there." Another thread appeared on the Slashdot-like technology news site Tribalwar.com.

At Tribalwar, a January poster tested one of the sites and reported on his successful pilfering of a randomly chosen 14-year-old girl's photo gallery "Since she's listed as 14 on her page, her MySpace puts her as private automatic," he wrote. "It worked and I was shown her pictures. Now lets see some naked sluts." Dozens of posts followed from other users, sharing Friend IDs and photo links for galleries they found interesting.

The photo leaks come at an inopportune time for MySpace. The company reached an accord with 49 state attorneys general Monday that was supposed to tie off a year of inquiries into safety issues on the site. The attention followed an October 2006 Wired News story on MySpace sex offenders.

In that story we used special software to expose hundreds of registered sex offenders with accounts on MySpace. That prompted the social network to run its own computerized search, which turned up at least 29,000 registered sex offenders

In the deal with the state attorneys general, MySpace agreed to a laundry list of measures. These include removing the option for under-18 users to report themselves as "swingers" and setting underage users' profiles as private by default. The company is also forming a safety task force to explore options for online age and identity verification.

That the photo glitch has survived for so long in plain sight suggests MySpace has some more work to do. WiredSafety's Aftab says MySpace and other social networking sites should have teams that do nothing but test for bugs and monitor web forums for discussions about privacy glitches.

"If this is something that's on the internet and people are talking about it, and MySpace doesn't know about it, they should know about it," Aftab said.

"If any site promises that, in doing something, your information will be private … and it turns out that's not the way it works, that could seen as consumer fraud under the FTC Act and 50 states' worth of consumer-protection laws."
http://www.wired.com/politics/securi...008/01/myspace





With Friends Like These ...

Facebook has 59 million users - and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won't catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking site
Tom Hodgkinson

I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval. ("I like Facebook," said another friend. "I got a shag out of it.") It also encourages a disturbing competitivness around friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. You are "popular", in the sense much loved in American high schools. Witness the cover line on Dennis Publishing's new Facebook magazine: "How To Double Your Friends List."

It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writing Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK, Facebook's third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That's 59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present rate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rate of growth will accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesman Chris Hughes says: "It's embedded itself to an extent where it's hard to get rid of."

All of the above would have been enough to make me reject Facebook for ever. But there are more reasons to hate it. Many more.

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the world's biggest brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.

Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners (more on him later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook's current valuation of $15bn, would be worth more than $1bn. There is much debate on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.

Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him "one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country". He has made money by betting on rising oil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled "The PayPal Mafia" by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness, saying: "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser."

But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian".

TheVanguard is run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: "Rod is one of our nation's leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their own businesses."

This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for the world: "TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman's message says: "Today we'll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons they never imagined."

So, Thiel's politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe."

Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

Thiel's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel's intellectual soirees. What you don't hear about in Thiel's philosophy, by the way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth.

The internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business, freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike. The internet opens up a world of free trade and laissez-faire expansion. Thiel also seems to approve of offshore tax havens, and claims that 40% of the world's wealth resides in places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco and Barbados. I think it's fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax. He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it makes the banking overlords hard to attack: "You can't have a workers' revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu," he says.

If life in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thiel wants to make it much longer, and to this end he has also invested in a firm that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged £3.5m to a Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who is searching for the key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board of advisers of something called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. From its fantastical website, the following: "The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies ... heading in this direction ... Artificial Intelligence ... direct brain-computer interfaces ... genetic engineering ... different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence."

So by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls "nature", and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer.

The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. He is a partner in the venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Now these are the people who are really making things happen in America, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like. Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock's senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions".

The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier. "We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries," defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. "We need to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation efforts." In-Q-Tel's first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the In-Q-Tel team is Anita K Jones, former director of defence research and engineering for the US department of defence, and - with Breyer - board member of BBN Technologies. When she left the US department of defence, Senator Chuck Robb paid her the following tribute: "She brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century."

Now even if you don't buy the idea that Facebook is some kind of extension of the American imperialist programme crossed with a massive information-gathering tool, there is no way of denying that as a business, it is pure mega-genius. Some net nerds have suggsted that its $15bn valuation is excessive, but I would argue that if anything that is too modest. Its scale really is dizzying, and the potential for growth is virtually limitless. "We want everyone to be able to use Facebook," says the impersonal voice of Big Brother on the website. I'll bet they do. It is Facebook's enormous potential that led Microsoft to buy 1.6% for $240m. A recent rumour says that Asian investor Lee Ka-Shing, said to be the ninth richest man in the world, has bought 0.4% of Facebook for $60m.

The creators of the site need do very little bar fiddle with the programme. In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favourite consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, "to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web". And indeed, this is precisely what's happening. On November 6 last year, Facebook announced that 12 global brands had climbed on board. They included Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Sony Pictures and Condé Nast. All trained in marketing bullshit of the highest order, their representatives made excited comments along the following lines:

"With Facebook Ads, our brands can become a part of the way users communicate and interact on Facebook," said Carol Kruse, vice president, global interactive marketing, the Coca-Cola Company.

"We view this as an innovative way to cultivate relationships with millions of Facebook users by enabling them to interact with Blockbuster in convenient, relevant and entertaining ways," said Jim Keyes, Blockbuster chairman and CEO. "This is beyond creating advertising impressions. This is about Blockbuster participating in the community of the consumer so that, in return, consumers feel motivated to share the benefits of our brand with their friends."

"Share" is Facebookspeak for "advertise". Sign up to Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships.

Now, by comparision with Facebook, newspapers, for example, begin to look hopelessly outdated as a business model. A newspaper sells advertising space to businesses looking to sell stuff to their readers. But the system is far less sophisticated than Facebook for two reasons. One is that newspapers have to put up with the irksome expense of paying journalists to provide the content. Facebook gets its content for free. The other is that Facebook can target advertising with far greater precision than a newspaper. Admit on Facebook that your favourite film is This Is Spinal Tap, and when a Spinal Tap-esque movie comes out, you can be sure that they'll be sending ads your way.

It's true that Facebook recently got into hot water with its Beacon advertising programme. Users were notified that one of their friends had made a purchase at certain online shops; 46,000 users felt that this level of advertising was intrusive, and signed a petition called "Facebook! Stop invading my privacy!" to say so. Zuckerberg apologised on his company blog. He has written that they have now changed the system from "opt-out" to "opt-in". But I suspect that this little rebellion about being so ruthlessly commodified will soon be forgotten: after all, there was a national outcry by the civil liberties movement when the idea of a police force was mooted in the UK in the mid 19th century.

Futhermore, have you Facebook users ever actually read the privacy policy? It tells you that you don't have much privacy. Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn't it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK's? Thiel and the rest have created their own country, a country of consumers.

Now, you may, like Thiel and the other new masters of the cyberverse, find this social experiment tremendously exciting. Here at last is the Enlightenment state longed for since the Puritans of the 17th century sailed away to North America, a world where everyone is free to express themselves as they please, according to who is watching. National boundaries are a thing of the past and everyone cavorts together in freewheeling virtual space. Nature has been conquered through man's boundless ingenuity. Yes, and you may decide to send genius investor Thiel all your money, and certainly you'll be waiting impatiently for the public flotation of the unstoppable Facebook.

Or you might reflect that you don't really want to be part of this heavily-funded programme to create an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodites on sale to giant global brands. You may decide that you don't want to be part of this takeover bid for the world.

For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books. Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven't read Keats' Endymion? And when there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I don't want to retreat from nature, I want to reconnect with it. Damn air-conditioning! And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It's free, it's easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it's called talking.
Facebook's privacy policy

Just for fun, try substituting the words 'Big Brother' whenever you read the word 'Facebook'

1 We will advertise at you

"When you use Facebook, you may set up your personal profile, form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, add applications, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalised features."

2 You can't delete anything

"When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information."

3 Anyone can glance at your intimate confessions

"... we cannot and do not guarantee that user content you post on the site will not be viewed by unauthorised persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content."

4 Our marketing profile of you will be unbeatable

"Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg, photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience."

5 Opting out doesn't mean opting out

"Facebook reserves the right to send you notices about your account even if you opt out of all voluntary email notifications."

6 The CIA may look at the stuff when they feel like it

"By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States ... We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...n/14/facebook?





Facebook Asked to Pull Scrabulous
BBC

Facebook has been asked to remove the Scrabulous game from its website by the makers of Scrabble.

The Facebook add-on has proved hugely popular on the social network site and regularly racks up more than 500,000 daily users.

Lawyers for toy makers Hasbro and Mattel say Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game.

The move has sparked protests by regular fans of Scrabulous keen to keep the add-on running.

Fan protests

Scrabulous is currently one of Facebook's ten most popular applications - little programs that Facebook members can add to the profiles they maintain on the site.

The request to remove the add-on came from both Hasbro and Mattel because ownership of the Scrabble trademark is split between the two. Hasbro owns rights to the game in the US and Canada while Mattel has rights everywhere else in the world.

Facebook told the PA newswire that it had no comment to make at this stage.

The Scrabulous add-on was not created by Facebook but was built for the site by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla - software developers based in Calcutta.

According to the Scrabulous website it has 594,924 daily active users - about a quarter of the total that have signed up to play it.

The game has spawned a host of "scrabble cheat" sites which work out every possible word that can be made from the available letters.

The threat to the game has spawned a new Facebook group called "Save Scrabulous" that already has more than 600 members.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live Karl Savage, a member of the Save Scrabulous group, said: "A lot of people are saying shame on Hasbro, shame on Mattel, if you wouldn't be so short-sighted about this then you have an opportunity to actually make some money from this rather than alienate your existing customers.

"I'd say find some common ground. Look at licensing," added Mr Savage. "Perhaps sit down together and say look, these guys have created this fantastic piece of software that lots of people use why not employ them or have a similar product on there that is licensed but use that to advertise your other products?"

There has been speculation that the challenge to Scrabulous had been launched as Hasbro and Mattel prepare their own online version of Scrabble.

Mr Savage said he doubted that would be a big success.

He said: "The main feature with Scrabulous for me is that I can play it in Facebook. I don't have to go to an external site and then search for all my friends all over again because I don't think that would work and I don't think many people would sign up for it."

Links have also been posted to the customer service areas of the Hasbro and Mattel websites so fans can register their protests with the toy makers
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/technology/7191264.stm





Free-Song Promotion is Expected from Amazon
Jeff Leeds

At the Super Bowl next month, the music industry will be switching teams--from Apple to Amazon.com.

The major record labels lined up with PepsiCo and Apple four years ago to give away 100 million songs through Apple's online store, unveiling the promotion in a Super Bowl commercial with music from the band Green Day. The effort helped spread the word about Apple's iTunes offerings.

Pepsi's promotion is back this year on a much bigger scale--but with the star wattage provided by Justin Timberlake instead of Green Day, and Amazon in place of Apple.

The switch is an indicator of the continuing tension between the music industry and Apple. Pepsi's earlier ad, set to Green Day's version of the song "I Fought the Law," prodded music fans to quit pirating music online and instead buy songs--legally--from Apple's then-fledgling iTunes. Four years later, iTunes is by far the biggest digital-music store, and the industry is taking a liking to Amazon's rival music service, introduced in September.

Although iTunes blazed a trail in encouraging fans to pay for music online, record executives now complain that Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, wields too much clout in setting prices and other terms. At issue now is whether the labels can help popularize a more industry-friendly service and accelerate the pace of digital sales.

Behind this strategy is a growing desperation: sales of digital albums and songs are rising far too slowly to offset the rapid decline of the CD, the industry's mainstay product. CD sales slid 19 percent last year; after adding in the 50 million digital albums sold last year and counting every 10 digital songs sold as an album, overall music sales were still down 9.5 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

In trying to nurture Amazon's service, the four major record companies have offered it one potential edge. One by one, they have agreed to offer their music catalogs for sale on the service in the MP3 format, without the digital locks that restrict users from making copies of the songs. (Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the second-biggest company and the last holdout, signed on last week. Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann).

All of the companies except the EMI Group still require Apple to sell their music wrapped in digital rights management software, or DRM, which is intended to discourage rampant copying. Some consumers say DRM creates confusing problems, like a lack of compatibility between most songs and the devices sold by Apple and Microsoft. In fact, it was Jobs who, in February, called on the industry to drop its longstanding insistence on the use of the software, saying it had failed to rein in piracy.

In any case, the industry is waiting to see whether--and how quickly--Amazon can grow into a credible alternative to iTunes, and whether Jobs will stand by as his service, which commands as much as 80 percent of digital-download sales, is challenged.

"This is really a stare-down," said one major-label executive, who was briefed on the new Pepsi promotion and who requested anonymity because he had not been authorized to speak about it.

Industry executives say the rivalry could intensify if the two services jockey over who will be given exclusive rights to some songs or special promotions. A senior executive at another record company, who requested anonymity out of concern about irritating Jobs, said he was prepared to keep copy restrictions on his label's songs on iTunes for six months to a year while Amazon establishes itself. Apple insists on selling all single tracks for 99 cents, while Amazon sells them for 89 cents to more than a dollar.

Danny Socolof, president of Marketing Entertainment Group of America, the Las Vegas marketing agency that developed the promotion, which is called "Pepsi Stuff," said the industry's collective shift away from DRM would "unleash a new age in the music business, and it's sorely needed." He said Pepsi's alliance with Amazon reflected in part the record companies' "desire to increase the retail space" online "and help level the playing field."

In the promotion, to be announced Monday, consumers who buy Pepsi drinks will receive points that can be redeemed for music downloads at a special section of the Amazon site. Amazon and Pepsi will give away up to a billion songs, along with prizes like DVDs and electronics, though only a fraction of the eligible Pepsi packages are expected to be redeemed.

The biggest of the four music companies, the Universal Music Group, has declined to join the offer, executives briefed on the situation said, over a pricing disagreement. (Universal, a part of Vivendi, will still sell music through the Amazon service.) The Warner Music Group is also expected to participate.

Amazon is expected to pay the record companies around 40 cents for each track that is given away in the Pepsi offer; Amazon's usual payment ranges from 65 cents to 70 cents, executives briefed on the deal said.

Industry analysts said they expected Apple to treat the situation as a minor annoyance. And an expansion of the digital-music market is likely to increase sales of iPods, which are more lucrative for Apple than the iTunes Store and dominate the digital-player market.

Forcing Apple to continue selling restricted music is "kind of like a couple of pebbles in the shoe," said Michael McGuire, an analyst at Gartner. To Apple, he said, "maintaining parity is probably somewhat important, but in the end, they're still selling iPods." He noted that Amazon also sells many iPods.

An Apple spokesman declined to discuss the company's competitors but pointed to Jobs' letter of February, which said Apple would embrace a DRM-free world.

It is far from clear that Amazon's unrestricted music files will be an advantage. Russ Crupnick, an analyst at The NPD Group, joked that DRM should stand for "doesn't really matter." Crupnick said he did not think many iTunes customers were bothered by copy restrictions or would defect to Amazon to buy unencumbered music.

But, he said, Amazon may find an opportunity to expand the overall market. "The much bigger target is all of the people who don't do digital downloading yet. How do I convince them that digital music is a good thing to begin with? I think Amazon is in a good position to do that, but it's a long struggle," Crupnick said.

Others suggest that the struggle may be so long that the industry will decide to experiment with other ideas, like the offering of music free through ad-supported Web sites, or subscriptions attached to cell phones.

"I've never thought that the pay-per-song model was really a replacement" for the CD, said David Goldberg, a former general manager of Yahoo's music service, who works at the investment firm Benchmark Capital. But the industry may endure more suffering before an answer emerges, he said. "It's going to be a very dramatic change in the business. It's just a question of when, not if."

John Markoff contributed reporting from San Francisco.
http://www.news.com/Free-song-promot...3-6225977.html





The RIAA Speaks--and it Gets Worse
Don Reisinger

The RIAA has quickly become one of the most disliked organizations in the world. Working ostensibly with the interests of the artists in mind, the organization has single-handedly instituted a policy of lawsuits and education in an attempt to curb the piracy of music.

Although this has been going on for quite some time now, I recently read a press release from the organization outlining its successes and what 2008 will look like for its College Deterrence program.

The press release tells us that the RIAA (on behalf of the music industry) has sent out "a new wave of 407 pre-litigation settlement letters to 18 universities nationwide as part of an ongoing campaign against online music theft. The letters reflect evidence of significant abuse of campus computer networks for the purpose of copyright infringement."

Once those students receive the pre-litigation settlement letters, they have the opportunity to surf over to the P2P Lawsuits Web page to settle with the RIAA before a court battle ensues.

Of course, the story doesn't quite end there.

To get a feeling for why the RIAA has implemented this strategy and has seemingly ignored the piracy cartels all over the world, choosing the soft target instead, I got in touch with the organization and asked a representative 10 questions to clear the air. This transcript will be made available tomorrow on The Digital Home.

Unfortunately, the answers given proved even more damning to an organization that is already sitting on a powder keg.

Perhaps more than anything, college students simply don't trust the RIAA and its questionable practices. As Cara Duckworth explained to me, "It was becoming clearer that despite cool new legal services and the ongoing educational efforts, too many students--some of music's biggest fans--were getting their music illegally and learning the wrong lessons about stealing and the law. Bringing lawsuits was by no means our first choice, but a necessary step we had to take."

Of course, whether or not lawsuits were not truly the first choice is debatable. In fact, judging by the lack of other alternatives offered except to say that the RIAA is "actively investing resources in the education of students of all ages on the value of music and importance of copyrights," there isn't too much evidence to suggest lawsuits isn't the organization's favorite form of deterrence.

Beyond that, the general theme of the interview with the RIAA could be characterized by a general lack of understanding and at some points, somewhat insulting.

When asked why the RIAA is going after an easy target--college students--the response made me cringe: "College students have reached a stage in life when their music habits are crystallized," Duckworth said. "And their appreciation for intellectual property has not yet reached its full development."

Sadly, this statement tells you everything you need to know about the RIAA. Does this organization actually believe that people who have the right to vote and go to war don't have the ability to make sound decisions about intellectual property? Maybe it has nothing to do with lack of development and everything to do with an extreme distaste for the recording industry.

The RIAA's discussion on students (and the general lack of understanding thereof) doesn't quite end there. Duckworth went on to explain that college students "used to be some of music's greatest fans, unfortunately that is no longer the case."

According to Duckworth, students who steal copyrighted music are not fans of music? I simply don't understand the logic. Look, I'm not here to endorse the stealing of music and I encourage everyone to buy it. But by undermining the intelligence of college students and insulting them because of their perceived "lack of development," I don't see how anything could (or will) change.

Beyond that, the real issue lies not with college students stealing music, but with huge piracy cartels overseas that have created a bit of a cottage industry out of stealing and redistributing media. Because of that, I asked Duckworth about it. After telling me that college students have become the world's largest group of pirates, Duckworth explained that the RIAA wants to "take action against the services themselves" and indicated that the organization is "working with policymakers in Washington to encourage countries whose copyright laws have not kept up with the times or who do not appropriately enforce intellectual property violations" to catch up.

Regardless, it doesn't seem to me that the RIAA is doing enough. Why are criminal enterprises that contribute a significant amount to the piracy losses that the organization is so quick to cite allowed to run amok, while grandmothers and students who pirate music are targeted? Sure, those people shouldn't be pirating music either, but shouldn't the organization go after the kingpins instead of the low-hanging fruit? I certainly think so.

Intriguingly, the RIAA believes its policy of suing violators is working, but depending on the study you read, piracy has flattened out or grown at a relatively steady, albeit slower, pace when compared with its meteoric rise just after the turn of the millennium. According to BigChampagne, a company that specializes in tracking P2P and Torrent use, May 2006 saw 9 million individuals connected on peer sharing sites, compared with 9.35 million just one year later. Beyond that, NPD found that 15 million people downloaded songs from P2P networks in 2006 and an estimated 5 billion files were added to computers--a 47 percent increase over the prior year.

As if that wasn't enough, a more recent study from NPD claims only 50 percent of Mac users paid for their music in the third quarter of 2007, compared with 16 percent of PC users. If true, are lawsuits really working?

According to Duckworth, lawsuits have made "people more aware of what is legal and illegal when it comes to downloading music." But if you ask me, the RIAA's policy of utilizing lawsuits to make people "more aware" is creating a more hostile environment that only harms the organization's standing in the court of public opinion.

Of course, Duckworth disagrees. She contends that although some may dislike the RIAA, "amongst the general public, the favorability ratings of the record industry remain as positive as ever and surpass other forms of entertainment like movie or TV studios." Of course, the question is not necessarily whether the public likes Sony BMG or EMI, the real question is whether or not people like the RIAA itself. And so far, very few do.

In the end, Duckworth says that we should be skeptical when we hear news on the RIAA. According to her, she would rather "give [us] the facts and encourage [us] not to believe everything [we] read that aggressively villainies the organization."

Unfortunately, that is easier said than done. When an objective observer looks at some of the actions taken by the RIAA over the past few years, including hiding behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 2003 to force Verizon to hand over private customer information, asking the court to force a 10-year old girl into a deposition over a lawsuit with her mother, and a host of others where the organization chose to attack low-hanging fruit instead of finding and charging those enterprises that have allowed piracy to become so ubiquitous in the first place, it's no wonder people dislike this organization.

In an environment where technology is changing by the minute, there are still some organizations that flounder in the past. Is piracy wrong? Yes. Should people pirate? No. But what the RIAA doesn't understand is that its policy of lawsuits only enrages people and fails to bring about change.

That said, it seems like the writing is on the wall. The RIAA will continue to employ its bullying tactics in the hopes that piracy will stop, but the recording industry will refuse to realize that what we really want as consumers is the ability to take music and do what we want with it. Beyond that, the industry will never realize that although I can copy a track I purchased and send it along to a friend, sales will continue to rise because most people are honest and are willing (and ready) to do the right thing.

I commend the RIAA for standing up to the issues I raised and answering them as forthrightly as possible. And while we may not have received the answers we would have liked, we gleaned even more knowledge of this organization than previously known.

Intriguingly, ArsTechnica reported on Friday that the recording industry has some doubts about the viability of the RIAA and at least one of the major labels--EMI--is considering pulling all of its funding by March 31, if major changes in policy and structure are not made. Regardless, there is no indication that we can expect a major shift going forward. And I, for one, am extremely saddened to hear that.
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13506_1-9...l?tag=nefd.top





Microsoft Accused of Patent Violation in China

A small Chinese high-tech firm is suing Microsoft Corp because it says the software giant has stolen its creation that allows Internet users to type Chinese characters, but Microsoft countered the claim on Friday.

Zhongyi Electronic Ltd., a 100-employee firm, alleged that Microsoft has used its inputting technology and fonts in Windows operating systems without commercial agreement for a decade, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The lawsuit puts Microsoft in the unfamiliar position of defending its intellectual property practices in China after years of fighting piracy of its software there.

Zhengma, the core product of Beijing-based Zhongyi, allows Internet surfers to convert Chinese words typed in the Roman alphabet into Chinese characters.

"Microsoft hasn't paid us for 10 years, since they paid for using Zhengma in Windows 95 in 1998," Lan Dekang, general manager of Zhongyi, was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

Microsoft said in a statement that it had the right to use Zhongyi's product and fonts after the two parties entered into agreements under the supervision of Chinese government agencies.

"Microsoft has fully performed its obligations including paying Zhongyi the license fees in accordance with the license agreements," the statement said.

Proceedings in the case began on Tuesday in the Beijing No.1 Intermediate People's Court, according to Zhongyi's Web site.

Zhongyi has not yet established a litigation target because it does not know how many sets of Windows operating systems are in use, Xinhua reported.

(Reporting by Simon Rabinovitch, editing by Will Waterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...K1092720080118





Eco-Patent Commons Shares Earth-Friendly Tech
Martin LaMonica

Environmental awareness has come to the race for patent bragging rights.

IBM on Monday will announce the creation of an Eco-Patents Commons--shared innovations geared at environmental sustainability--with the participation of Sony, Nokia, and Pitney Bowes.

The launch of the Eco-Patent Commons is timed with the yearly ranking of U.S. patent awards, which gives IBM the top spot for the 15th year in a row, with 3,148 patents in 2007.

The Eco-Patent Commons will start with the donation into the public domain of 31 patents that cover everything from a manufacturing process that reduces volatile compounds to a natural coagulant used to purify industrial waste water.

On Monday, a Web site that hosts the patents is scheduled to launch. The patent commons will be administered by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a Geneva-based organization devoted to promoting sustainability in business.

Co-founder IBM, which has a program called Big Green Innovations, hopes to encourage innovation in areas of ecology and benefit commercially through the venture, said Dave Kappos, IBM's lead patent attorney.

"There's no reason that environmentally sustainable activity cannot be commercially advantageous," he said. "The patents come out of the IT industry--at least ours do--but there is cross-industry applicability."

For example, communications company Nokia submitted a patent covering recycling cell phones into new electronic devices such as clocks, calculators, and remote controls.

Participants who submit patents into the Eco-Patents Commons pledge not to enforce these patents against others who use them.

They benefit from the commons by being able to use other companies' patents. They also benefit from further innovations or cost reductions on their donations, Kappos said. The company hopes others will join and expand the patent pool.

Kappos said part of the motivation for the creation of the patents-sharing organization is the difficulty in establishing intellectual property licensing agreements across industries.

In the IT industry, cross-licensing agreements are commonplace, but in other fields, such as chemicals or energy, intellectual property tends to be hoarded, he said.

The electronics and IT industries are seeing an upswell of environmental awareness. Vendors are offering more energy-efficient products and other green technologies.

But the manufacture of electronics remains energy-intensive and involves harmful chemicals. Although there are efforts to boost recycling, electronic waste is a growing problem.

IBM and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development said they hope to attract innovations and address energy conservation, pollution prevention, better materials, recycling, and more efficient use of water.
http://www.news.com/Eco-Patent-Commo...3-6225735.html





The Afterlife of Cellphones
Jon Mooallem



1. Cellphones in Hell

Americans threw out just shy of three million tons of household electronics in 2006. This so-called e-waste is the fastest-growing part of the municipal waste stream and, depending on your outlook, either an enormous problem or a bonanza. E-waste generally contains substances that, though safely sequestered during each product’s use, can become hazardous if not handled properly when disposed. Those products also hold bits of precious metals like silver, copper, platinum and gold.

The Belgian company Umicore is in the business of reclaiming those materials. It extracts 17 metals from our unwanted televisions, computers and cellphones and from more ominous-sounding industrial byproducts like drosses and anode slimes. Umicore harvests silver from spent photo-developing solutions collected at American big-box stores and sells it to Italian jewelers. The company describes its work as “aboveground mining.”

Umicore has roots in actual mining. In the late 1800s, during the reign of King Leopold II, the firm mined copper in the African Congo and shipped it to a riverside smelter near Antwerp. Today the same property houses a sprawling, state-of-the-art $2 billion smelter and refinery. Here, metals are recovered and processed. Then they are sold, sometimes to Asia, where they are used to manufacture brand-new electronics. It’s a reshuffling of the colonial arrangement: an abundant resource is sent from richer countries to poorer ones, made into goods, then sent back. That resource is our garbage.

Umicore’s smelter was burning furiously at 2,116 degrees Fahrenheit one afternoon last fall. Two heavy-set men in blue overalls sat in the control room, staring expressionlessly through heat-shielded windows. They were eye-level with the mouth of the smelter — a pit 13 feet wide by 46 feet deep. A conveyor belt fed shredded circuit boards and scrap into the fire in a dim, fast blur. I imagined the black-and-white television in my mother’s basement, or my first blue Nokia cellphone — all the devices I’d gotten close to and outgrown — spilling out and squealing like lobsters in a pot.

The metals exit the smelter’s base as a glowing sludge. It streams into another caldron the height of a house. From there, it moves into tanks of acid. The acid is electrocuted. As electricity flows through the mixture, copper accumulates on the tank’s end plate. I watched a giant claw move across the ceiling, rip out the plate and, with a violent whack, cleave off a gleaming layer of 99.9 percent pure copper, with the unmistakable sheen of a new penny. It was thrilling to see something so clean and recognizable emerge from such an alien process.

After explaining the final stages, Thierry Van Kerckhoven, Umicore’s e-scrap manager, handed me another of the end products from this process: a one-kilogram bar of gold. It felt the way I thought it would, based on what you see in the movies: substantial, mesmerizing. It was worth about $24,000. “This gold is recycled gold,” Kerckhoven said. “This gold is green gold.”

Recycling feels good because we imagine it as just this kind of alchemy — which Umicore achieves with impressive environmental controls. The centerpiece is a monstrous gas-cleaning-and-filtration system that captures and neutralizes enough of the carcinogenic and endocrine-altering chemicals produced from melting e-waste, according to Umicore, that the faint yellow emission finally released from its smokestack easily surpasses the European Union’s air-quality standards. (Martin Hojsik, who campaigns against toxics for Greenpeace International, notes that the process followed by Umicore and its few, similarly equipped competitors around the world is “not entirely clean” but still “the preferable solution” for recovering metals from e-waste.) Ultimately, by weight, only 1/2 of 1 percent of the e-waste Umicore takes in cannot be safely sent back into the world in a usable form. “There is often a discussion of separating what is valuable from what is toxic,” Christian Hagelüken, Umicore’s senior manager of business development, told me. “But sometimes they are the same thing.”

This may never be more true than for cellphones. They are the most valuable form of e-waste. Each one contains about a dollar’s worth of precious metals, mostly gold. And while single phones house far less hazardous material than a computer — an old, clunky monitor can incorporate seven pounds of lead — their cumulative presence is staggering. Last year, according to ABI Research, 1.2 billion phones were sold worldwide. Sixty percent of them probably replaced existing ones. In the United States, phones are cast aside after, on average, 12 months. And according to the industry trade group CTIA, four out of every five people in the country own cellphones.

Much more





Confirmed: Bricked iPhones Rise From the Grave With Firmware 1.1.3

For all those unlocked iPhones out there that were bricked after attempting firmware upgrades, we have some great news. It appears that Apple's new 1.1.3 iPhone firmware rewrites either most or all of the phone's firmware, allowing for bricked iPhones to be brought back to life. If this sounds too good to be true, watch the video above. We tested it on our own dead iPhone that was originally unlocked with AnySIM and later bricked by an attempted upgrade. This phone had just been gathering dust in one of Brian Lam's many gadget drawers, so we were surprised when we finally had success with bringing it back to life. Getting the iPhone working again wasn't as easy as we expected, and at times it didn't seem like the firmware upgrade had worked, so here's what happened.

To upgrade, we put the phone in recovery mode, then connected to iTunes and restored/ upgraded. After the phone had finished upgrading, it would not work with our already valid ATT sim, so we had to activate the phone using iTunes. This is where we ran into some trouble, because after activating the iPhone under our existing account, the phone still did not show any signal and would not activate to our account. We restarted the phone and just like magic, were taken directly to the home screen. The phone now had signal and was clearly activated to our account. We made a few test calls, and tested the data connection, both with complete success.

For all of you out there that will state the video could be fake because it has been edited, let us direct your attention to the plastic-film that is still on the glass of the iPhone. In every shot you will see that the phone still has it's plastic-film on, confirming we are using the same phone before and after.
http://gizmodo.com/346239/confirmed-...h-firmware-113





Japanese Govt Plans Input on Ultra High-Definition TV: Report
AFP

The Japanese government will begin a joint project with private companies to develop technology for next-generation ultra high-definition video, a daily newspaper report said Monday.

The communications ministry also aims to begin broadcasting with the system in 2015 and internationally standardised the Japanese technology, the Yomiuri Shimbun said without citing sources.

The technology, to be called "Super Hi-Vision", could show images of about 33 million pixels, 16 times more than the present Hi-Vision technology, a high-definition TV technology developed by public broadcaster NHK, it said.

The ministry was expected to spend 300 million yen (2.7 million dollars) on start-up research starting from the fiscal year in April, it said.

No comment on the report was available from the ministry on Monday, a public holiday in Japan.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080114...chnologysector





Kevin Martin Hopes For Q1 Decision On Satellite Merger
FMQB

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday about the FCC's impending auction of wireless airwaves, Chairman Kevin Martin said that he hoped the Commission would complete its review of the proposed satellite merger before the end of March. According to reports, Martin said, "If I had to guess, I would guess the commission will be trying to address it in the first quarter of this year."

The Chairman added that the FCC has not completed its review of the XM-Sirius merger and that this month, the Commission has met with representatives from both satcasters asking follow-up questions. He also said it that was customary for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to make its decision before the FCC on such a matter. However, Martin did not know when the DOJ would make an announcement about the merger and said the FCC would not necessarily wait for the DOJ to make its own decisions.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=550958





Study: Telecommuting Makes Work Worse for Non-Telecommuters
David Chartier

Telecommuting has become all the rage over the past half decade for companies that can pull it off with some or all of their employees. About 37 percent of US companies have adopted some kind of flexible work arrangement, and that rate is reportedly growing by 11 percent each year. While the health, life, and work benefits for those who can telecommute are undeniable, a new study says the practice is actually having a negative effect on coworkers who still have to fight morning traffic or jostle for a seat on the subway, also known as "those left behind in the office."

Until now, virtually all of the studies performed on telecommuting have focused on the benefits for employees and their employers. Timothy Golden, associate professor in the Lally School of Management & Technology at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, sampled 240 professional employees from an unnamed medium-sized company to observe how telecommuting affects employees who stay in the office. Golden found that in-office employees took less satisfaction in their jobs and felt less of a relationship and obligation to their company as the number of telecommuting coworkers grew. In-office employees in his study became disappointed at having fewer and weaker relationships. They also got frustrated at a perceived increase in workload and difficulties that telecommuting can present to finishing projects and building strong working relationships.

On the bright side, Golden also says that keeping a close eye on various aspects of telecommuting can potentially help stave off the negative effects on in-office employees. Managing the amount of time coworkers telecommute, having face-to-face interaction, and giving job autonomy can all potentially improve in-office coworkers' job satisfaction and company relationship. Requiring at least some office time for telecommuters, especially those in a team-based environment, could help balance the freedom that traveling employees enjoy with the relationships and traditional in-office requirements many environments may still require.

In my experience telecommuting for a few publications and working in environments that had telecommuters, I've seen a few pros and cons. Requiring telecommuters to come into the office at least once or twice a week definitely helped with interoffice relationships and building a functional team for projects. There are just some aspects of people and relationships that don't translate well, if at all, to e-mail, IRC, and instant messaging. But in some of the telecommuting positions I've had, I still found it possible to build a fairly strong and even fun team relationship by being smart about how we communicated over e-mail lists and via group chat. Enforcing things like specific work time and casual, personal time in the chat room did wonders for working when the time called for it, and yet joking around and getting to know each other when we were off the clock, so to speak.

That said, perhaps the most important takeaway from Golden's initial findings is that telecommuting isn't an exact science yet. It may work for some companies who implement face time for at least part of the week or month, while employees at another company may simply not be interested in letting their coworkers roam free. For those of you who either telecommute or work with telecommuters, how is it working out?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...commuters.html





For Political News, TV's Decline Opens Door to Internet, NPR
Nate Anderson

The Internet might be changing the way that people get their news, but television is still king. That's one result from a new Pew study into the Internet's role in the 2008 US presidential campaign. Unfortunately for television executives, though, TV's viewership is dropping steadily, while the Internet and National Public Radio are posting solid gains.

60 percent of all Americans still use the television as their major news source for following the various campaigns. That dwarfs the 15 percent of people who say that the Internet is their main source, but it's also down 8 points from the 2004 campaign.

...and listening to NPR

Despite the media's perception that it's a "bloggers' world" out there, most people trolling for news about politics on the Internet still turn to mainstream sources. The top three sites, in fact, are MSNBC, CNN, and Yahoo News (this is true among all age groups).

And it's not like the blogs are all stacked up at fourth place and lower. The remainder of the top ten include Google News, Fox, AOL News, the New York Times, Drudge Report, MySpace, YouTube, the BBC, USA Today, and the Washington Post. While the political blogs are not represented in the list, new properties like YouTube and MySpace are well on the way to becoming major destinations for election news, but only among young people (no one older than 30 appears to use the sites for election news).

The Pew report does note that there's a massive "long tail" of political news on the web, though. "While only 13 individual web sites were named by one percent or more of the people who get campaign news online," said the report, "hundreds of individual web sites were named by fewer than one percent."

Blogs aren't the primary news source for many people (which is probably a good thing) because most Americans want news with "no particular point of view." Leaving aside the debates about whether this is even possible (hint: it's not), the survey notes that 67 percent of Americans want news that at least tries to present a balanced perspective; 23 percent said that they like getting news that reflects their own political beliefs. College graduates are half as likely as high school grads to prefer news that fits their political leanings.

The Internet still isn't the main political news source for most Americans, but its influence is growing at a rapid clip (by one measure, it has nearly doubled since 2004). The only other media outlet showing any significant growth? National Public Radio, which has jumped 50 percent since 2000.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ernet-npr.html





Cyber Espionage Seen as Growing Threat to Business, Government

SANS Institute ranks it No. 3 on cyber menace list
Ellen Messmer

Cyber espionage is getting renewed attention as fresh evidence emerges of online break-ins at U.S. research labs and targeted phishing against corporations and government agencies here and abroad.

It's no wonder that research firm SANS Institute has ranked cyber espionage No. 3 on its ”Top Ten Cyber Menaces for 2008,” just behind Web site attacks exploiting browser vulnerabilities and botnets such as the infamous Storm.

“Economic espionage will be increasingly common as nation-states use cyber theft of data to gain economic advantage in multinational deals,” SANS Institute claims. “The attack of choice involves targeted spear phishing with attachments, using well-researched social engineering methods to make the victim believe that an attachment comes from a trusted source.”

Alan Paller, director of research at SANS Institute, adds that people should be aware that an “extraordinary treasure chest of information has been stolen,” and “the same people doing the military espionage are engaged in economic espionage using the same or very similar techniques to steal information from organizations that are working on business ventures in the attackers' country.” He offered no estimate as to how much cyber espionage is costing organizations.

Many have seen some form of cyber espionage up close.

“Absolutely there's espionage,” says Michele Stewart, manager of data security at Orlando-based AirTran Airways.
Members of AirTran's executive management team were recently targeted by phishing e-mail that sought to trick them into divulging confidential corporate information as well as attempted to place bot malware on their computers, she says.

“The e-mail did get through our filter, but fortunately [our team] had the presence of mind to realize something strange was going on,” Stewart says. AirTran, which relies on Lancope network-behavior-analysis equipment to watch for anything outside the norm and conducts awareness training with employees, doesn't know who was targeting it, she says.

Separately, the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) last month acknowledged that about a dozen staff members fell for phony e-mail urging them to go to phishing sites or open attachments with malware.

Hackers not only infiltrated the ORNL network, accessing some nonclassified databases, but director Thom Mason told employees (via an e-mail message, ironically enough) it was all part of a “sophisticated cyber attack that now appears to be part of a coordinated attempt to gain access to computer networks at numerous laboratories and other institutions across the country.”

ORNL has officially declined to say more. But some security researchers close to the matter say investigations now point to China.

“I work with the FBI as president of the InfraGard Philadelphia chapter, and the FBI thinks IP addresses link this to China,” says Tom Bowers, senior security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, referring to the FBI-industry collaboration called InfraGard. The FBI itself wouldn't comment on the matter.

In Great Britain, too, the threat of cyber espionage is being raised by the British Security Service MI5, which has warned hundreds of banks and legal firms there that they are under electronic espionage attack by Chinese state organizations — a claim angrily refuted by China, which says it's under attack itself by hackers

Cracking crimes

Many security experts are quick to point out that just because an attack might be traced to any server in any country doesn't provide direct evidence of much since attackers may simply be controlling the servers from almost anywhere in the world.

“The issue is not just who did it, it's that China is not actively trying to stop bad guys,” says Gartner analyst John Pescatore, who thinks government-funded cyber espionage is minimal in comparison to that carried out by criminals motivated to steal information for financial gain.

“Industrial espionage is not primarily for intellectual property; it's more for your customers' personal information,” he says.
Salesforce.com, Pescatore notes, last month disclosed a data breach in which one of its salespeople got hit with malware on a PC that was able to harvest customers' e-mail.

“The clever thing when you go after a salesperson is that they have a lot of contact and personal information about people,” Pescatore says. “They e-mail to these people quite a bit.”

The goal in corporate espionage is not just to grab sensitive corporate data but corporate credit card information with large credit limits and usage patterns outside the country that might not be noticed, Pescatore says.

In the Saleforce.com incident, the company started to get reports from customers about suspicious e-mail with fake documents that looked like they were coming from legitimate Salesforce.com sources but were actually phishing attempts. The company told Pescatore it thinks the attack had been ongoing since June.

The possibility that online espionage might occur is a concern for those who outsource IT functions as well.

“One reason we use the back-up service we do is because the data is not identified by financial institution on their end,” says Joe Sinkovits, vice president of operations and compliance officer at Illinois-based Lisle Savings Bank. “There will always be a problem with espionage — it's always a real possibility.”

F-Secure, which makes antimalware software, says its customers are discovering troubling indications that their networks have been targeted.

“We have a tool called Blacklight that discovers rootkits which are used to hide other files,” says Patrik Runald, F-Secure's security response manager. “The rootkit intercepts communications between the security software and Windows. People using our tools all over the world, especially in manufacturing or defense, find these rootkits are opening up back doors and sending data to China. When we check in some of these cases, the rootkit has been there for months.”

Runald adds it doesn't mean the perpetrators are from China, simply that the communications are to China. In contrast, most of the “bulk malware” targeting consumers, such as bank Trojans, seems to be associated with Russia and Eastern Europe, he says.

In one example of targeted corporate espionage that F-Secure saw recently, one company's human resources director was the victim of an infected e-mail attachment falsely posing as a résumé document for a position posted on the company's Web site. “The H.R. person is the contact, and it was about tricking him,” Runald says.

Runald points out that the rise of social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook is unfortunately giving attackers additional means to find out more about business relationships in order to exploit them for purposes of espionage.

The term “open source espionage” describes the process of gathering information through readily available posted information, says Nick Selby, director of the enterprise security practice at The 451 Group.

These days, that could be LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace or scouring Google searches for corporate info mistakenly left exposed to the public, he points out. And it's known that some companies have put some servers out on the Internet simply to try and sniff another company's unencrypted traffic.

Tim Mather, chief security strategist for the RSA Conference Advisory Board, says worries over online espionage may be overblown. But he does believe that open source intelligence gathering is big, with companies as diverse as Aegis Defence Services and Concentric Solutions International available for hire to scour every nook and cranny of the online world for desired information.

“These kinds of companies might be trolling chat sites, anywhere, to find out something,” says Mather. “It's a growth industry.”

How to defend yourself

To lower risks associated with cyber espionage, taking steps such as deploying data-leak prevention products to watch what data leaves the organization as well as database-monitoring tools and appropriate access controls may be a good idea. Selby suggests that classifying data as public or confidential is often desirable. But the main problem for corporations, he says, is that all too often they simply can't answer the question “Where is the data coming from? They just don't know.”

Some companies are taking an even more drastic approach.

Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research, which provides specialized security and product-design analysis to its business and government clientele, says his firm is so wary of cyber espionage that it maintains two separate networks.

“We run one for the Internet and e-mail, and another just for internal communications,” Kocher says. “Everyone has two computers under their desk. We buy twice as much software. It is inconvenient and it doubles out IT budget. We do this to protect our customers. We’re a logical target.”
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...espionage.html





Bits Debate: Is Copy Protection Needed or Futile?
Saul Hansell

Should creators insist on technology that will restrict the copying and transmission of copyrighted works? Any lock can eventually be picked. Do these restrictions provide speed bumps to help keep honest people honest? Or do they create a permanent war between creators and users that may hurt everyone?

Rick Cotton: Given our experience to date, it is clear that technology can be and needs to be part of the answer in many areas to protecting copyrighted works on-line. But this can be done flexibly, avoiding “war” between creators and users while respecting privacy, fair use and other reasonable concerns that too frequently are raised not as concerns to be addressed, but as excuses seeking to block any action at all.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to have a meaningful discussion on this issue unless we can agree on the following premise: the broadband, digital world is awash in a tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content. As to the question at hand, it is entirely reasonable to explore technological solutions. A few key building blocks:

1. There may not be a single answer to this question. It may vary by medium, by technological environment and by groups of creators. Some media may be more susceptible to flexible, effective and commercially reasonable technology protections than others. Some groups of creators may have different preferences than others. Some tech environments may be easier to address first than others.

2. Many creators devote huge amounts of time, creative energy, and — in commercial settings — monetary investment to produce copyrighted works. Media companies, including NBC Universal, have made major commitments to utilize technology to deliver great content to fans in many new ways and to build new business models. Both fairness and the law (firmly rooted in the U.S. Constitution) support creators’ right to control the use of their work and to be compensated for these efforts (if that is what they want). ” In today’s digital world, that includes taking steps to protect their works from indiscriminate, wholesale theft on the Internet.

3. Those who suggest that technological protections are not needed must, if they are intellectually honest, acknowledge, confront and speak to the tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content that is currently occurring in the digital world on the broadband Internet. This indefensible massive trafficking simply must be reduced in any kind of law abiding society. We should be working collaboratively and cooperatively to identify workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive and that fully respect other interests such as privacy and fair use.

4. Another feature of this debate that should change is technologists disingenuously trashing technology. Too often, the same people who enthusiastically and unreservedly sing the praises of the infinite and wondrous capabilities of digital technology in virtually every other respect pretend that technology has nothing to offer and no ability to reduce the massive trafficking in wholesale infringements of entire works (certainly in the area of video, film, TV, games and software). It is categorically and demonstratively untrue and unworthy of tech champions. Current filtering technology, for example, now being deployed on video sharing sites such as MySpace, Microsoft’s Soapbox, and even soon on YouTube work with a high degree of technical effectiveness, stopping unauthorized copyrighted material from being uploaded while permitting authorized material to be posted. There remain obvious challenges. But the tech community has demonstrated its capability to solve similar challenges in multiple other arenas. There is no reason to think that the challenges of content protection technology are any different.

5. The imperfect protection offered by anti-piracy technologies - “Every lock can be picked” - is no reason to give up on them. Despite the existence of lock picks, identity thieves, and hackers, cars and homes still have locks, e-mail accounts have passwords, and computers have firewalls. Our general approach — including most particularly in the digital world — is to put the strongest possible security in place and fix flaws and weak spots when they are identified through breaches, but not simply abandon the effort. The arena of content protection technology should be no different. Speed bumps do work.

6. Even if imperfect, the implementation of anti-piracy technologies also sends an important message. The technological infrastructure of the broadband internet must communicate to the vast majority of users that wholesale reproduction of entire works (or even major portions) is not acceptable. Committed hackers may develop work arounds, but that is not the point. The reality is that technology speaks — and speaks loudly. Today — and for the last decade — the ease of accessing pirated content has spoken to internet users — and particularly young users — “if can’t really be wrong if it is so easy to do.” That perception needs to change.”

7. Technological protections clearly need to be constructed to take account of a wide number of legitimate concerns such as not interfering with legitimate consumer expectations, privacy and fair use. But the extraordinary capabilities of digital technology have brought us the broadband Internet, dizzying mobile communications and marvelous desktop, laptop, and handheld computing. Digital technology is also capable of great exactitude and flexibility in identifying copyrighted content and targeting infringements with no more intrusiveness than when it screens out viruses and hacker attacks. I am sure we will be exploring those subjects in greater detail later this week.

Tim Wu: Relying on digital locks is one business model, but certainly not the only or best one for all creators. I believe that the content industry tends to grossly overestimate its own interest in digital locks, let alone our collective interest. It is natural to want to secure and protect things that are yours. But decisions in this area are often driven by a sense of panic that displaces careful thinking about the true costs and benefits of digital locks. In short: digital locks are no substitute for a good business model.

Digital locks help protect the traditional business model based on unit sales; that makes them a useful tool, but hardly a panacea for industry woes. Too often ignored is the fact that every lock makes the product less valuable, by disabling the product in some way. Imagine that your car was feature-locked so that it could only make left turns — you’d probably want a different one. The example is ridiculous but it shows that at their worst, bad locking strategies can destroy a market and hurt consumers.

Sony BMG, of course, learned this lesson a few years back when they put on their CDs such an aggressive lock (the rootkit) that it began to damage people’s computers, creating a giant fiasco and class-action lawsuits. Similarly, the general failure of e-books over the last 10 years is also probably a product of too much security. Imagine buying an iron that required a password to operate.

There are other costs too often ignored. Locks will be broken, and so a business model that depends on locking is very vulnerable. The creator must budget money, effort and talent for the arms race. That’s a weird role for an industry that’s supposed to be good at developing talent, not trying to out-geek every basement-dweller in the world. Finally, a successful locking strategy also requires intense cooperation between many actors – if you protect a song with “superlock,” and my CD player doesn’t understand that, you’ve just created a dead product.

The other costs are missed opportunities. Content that is too locked down loses exposure. Remixes, fan sites and tributes are something firms pay millions for when they call it “marketing.” When a firm overlocks, it may so successfully build a stronghold around its product that no one actually finds out about it.

My sense is that the race to locks is too often a panicked reaction to a failing business model that can extract a terrific public cost. Locks may form a part of certain successful business models. But too much reliance on locking can seriously backfire. There is a reason, after all, that restaurants do not lock their doors during lunch.


Tim Wu (4:18PM): The point of my post was to emphasize that a locking strategy exacts costs that are sometimes underestimated by creators and industry. Since readers asked, here is some discussion of business models that are less dependent on extreme locking — though this is such a huge topic it cannot be done justice here.

Business Model #1. Lock lightly.

Apple I think made a big step forward when first introduced its iTunes download store, and its relatively lighter locks. You can move the content around from your computer to iPod and so on, but not engage is mass distribution. Yes, the iPod has led to some more piracy, but it has led to a lot more buying of content as well.

Business Model #2. Sell unlocked content to avoid the costs of a locking strategy.

It may be that whether locked or unlocked, content is likely to get “out there” anyhow, and the costs of fighting piracy remain the same. On this logic it may be worth selling unlocked content just to avoid the expense and complexity of a locking strategy, on the rationale that locking is irrelevant to the available of materials on illegal sites. Stated otherwise, it is not always clear that selling unlocked content actually would destroy the market, any more than things are now.

Business Model #3. Content as Marketing

Many business models depend on free or cheap “enticements” that get users interested in the product, and then find a cash out later on. The most obvious examples are good old broadcast TV and radio — which if you haven’t noticed, gave away the product for free, based on both advertising and the prospect of later recoupment.

Sometimes things are taken to a different level, like the old Transformers TV show was an example of content designed to create revenue through toy purchases. The point is simply that content has long been used as a way of getting consumer buy-in that then builds a business model.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ded-or-futile/





BITS DEBATE: Should Internet Providers Block Copyrighted Works?
Saul Hansell

Assuming that creators do have the right to block the unauthorized use of their work, should third parties not directly involved in the sale of that content, like Internet service providers and consumer electronics manufacturers, create technology that restricts the copying or transmission of copyrighted material?

Tim Wu: I take the question to be whether government should so mandate; and I say no. Doing so turns copyright into a too intrusive form of government regulation of the telecom and computing industries; if the entertainment industry needs help, it is better done directly.

I think of our copyright system as type of worthy industrial policy for a favored class: authors and creators. It is the “tax on readers for the benefit of authors,” or, as Jack Valenti put it, the “the life-sustaining protection” for the entertainment industries. This may be an unromantic, but let’s face it: the Federal Government supports a variety of industries, such as farmers and the defense sector, and also our world-leading entertainment industry.

As with any government program, the policy question, is how large the subsidy to the entertainment industry should be, and how it is best delivered. It is this second question, I think, that is relevant to whether electronics manufacturers and Internet providers ought be required to help block the transmission of copyrighted works. For while I agree strongly with government support for creators, I think this is among the worst ways to go about it.

Here’s why: The communications and electronics sectors are also areas of particular U.S. strength and engines of growth and innovation. Since so much relies on communicating and computing, the stronger our infrastructure in these area, the richer the country. I accept that these industries’ very success is making life difficult for the entertainment industry. But, as with most forms of government regulation, there are dangers of being too heavy-handed in response. I think it’s dangerous to force these sectors to optimize their operation around the goal of preventing damage to the entertainment industries. At worst, it could kill whatever comparative advantage Silicon Valley has.

By analogy (and I know some readers hate my analogies, but hey it gives you something to complain about). Say you think American the family farm is important, and it faces financial ruin thanks to new imports made available by plane. One answer is to regulate the airline industry; but the less costly answer may be to spare the airlines and subsidize the farm (as we do).

Rick Cotton: The answer is a function of the scale of trafficking in unlawful infringing material, and the technical feasibility and commercial reasonableness of third parties taking steps to reduce that trafficking. Today unfortunately the scale of infringing traffic has exploded to the point that as much as 50% of the carrying capacity of many, if not most, Internet service providers are being hijacked by a relatively small percentage of users to carry huge volumes of complete, unchanged pirated digital copies of films, games, and software. Any discussion of the question you pose should start with a clear simple statement by those participating as to whether they regard the current situation as acceptable.

My own answer is that it is neither acceptable nor tenable in a law abiding society that respects the rights of creators. In addition, this breathtaking volume of traffic – globally hundreds of millions of whole TV shows and movies - also imposes large costs on Internet providers (telephone and cable systems) and their customers. It slows down the network, and it imposes financial burdens on the system created by a relatively small number of users that are borne by all.

There are tailored, technically feasible and commercially reasonable steps that can be taken by the commercial institutions (whether those are Internet providers, video sharing Web sites, consumer electronics manufacturers, or IT companies) that create the broadband Internet ecosystem to reduce today’s huge volume of infringements. When highly targeted at pirated, unchanged digital copies of copyrighted works, these steps (which fully respect the privacy of those who are not driving the high volume of infringing copies) should indeed be taken.

Should creators insist on technology that will restrict the copying and transmission of copyrighted works? Any lock can eventually be picked. Do these restrictions provide speed bumps to help keep honest people honest? Or do they create a permanent war between creators and users that may hurt everyone?

Rick Cotton: Given our experience to date, it is clear that technology can be and needs to be part of the answer in many areas to protecting copyrighted works on-line. But this can be done flexibly, avoiding “war” between creators and users while respecting privacy, fair use and other reasonable concerns that too frequently are raised not as concerns to be addressed, but as excuses seeking to block any action at all.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to have a meaningful discussion on this issue unless we can agree on the following premise: the broadband, digital world is awash in a tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content. As to the question at hand, it is entirely reasonable to explore technological solutions. A few key building blocks:

1. There may not be a single answer to this question. It may vary by medium, by technological environment and by groups of creators. Some media may be more susceptible to flexible, effective and commercially reasonable technology protections than others. Some groups of creators may have different preferences than others. Some tech environments may be easier to address first than others.

2. Many creators devote huge amounts of time, creative energy, and — in commercial settings — monetary investment to produce copyrighted works. Media companies, including NBC Universal, have made major commitments to utilize technology to deliver great content to fans in many new ways and to build new business models. Both fairness and the law (firmly rooted in the U.S. Constitution) support creators’ right to control the use of their work and to be compensated for these efforts (if that is what they want). ” In today’s digital world, that includes taking steps to protect their works from indiscriminate, wholesale theft on the Internet.

3. Those who suggest that technological protections are not needed must, if they are intellectually honest, acknowledge, confront and speak to the tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content that is currently occurring in the digital world on the broadband Internet. This indefensible massive trafficking simply must be reduced in any kind of law abiding society. We should be working collaboratively and cooperatively to identify workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive and that fully respect other interests such as privacy and fair use.

4. Another feature of this debate that should change is technologists disingenuously trashing technology. Too often, the same people who enthusiastically and unreservedly sing the praises of the infinite and wondrous capabilities of digital technology in virtually every other respect pretend that technology has nothing to offer and no ability to reduce the massive trafficking in wholesale infringements of entire works (certainly in the area of video, film, TV, games and software). It is categorically and demonstratively untrue and unworthy of tech champions. Current filtering technology, for example, now being deployed on video sharing sites such as MySpace, Microsoft’s Soapbox, and even soon on YouTube work with a high degree of technical effectiveness, stopping unauthorized copyrighted material from being uploaded while permitting authorized material to be posted. There remain obvious challenges. But the tech community has demonstrated its capability to solve similar challenges in multiple other arenas. There is no reason to think that the challenges of content protection technology are any different.

5. The imperfect protection offered by anti-piracy technologies - “Every lock can be picked” - is no reason to give up on them. Despite the existence of lock picks, identity thieves, and hackers, cars and homes still have locks, e-mail accounts have passwords, and computers have firewalls. Our general approach — including most particularly in the digital world — is to put the strongest possible security in place and fix flaws and weak spots when they are identified through breaches, but not simply abandon the effort. The arena of content protection technology should be no different. Speed bumps do work.

6. Even if imperfect, the implementation of anti-piracy technologies also sends an important message. The technological infrastructure of the broadband internet must communicate to the vast majority of users that wholesale reproduction of entire works (or even major portions) is not acceptable. Committed hackers may develop work arounds, but that is not the point. The reality is that technology speaks — and speaks loudly. Today — and for the last decade — the ease of accessing pirated content has spoken to internet users — and particularly young users — “if can’t really be wrong if it is so easy to do.” That perception needs to change.”

7. Technological protections clearly need to be constructed to take account of a wide number of legitimate concerns such as not interfering with legitimate consumer expectations, privacy and fair use. But the extraordinary capabilities of digital technology have brought us the broadband Internet, dizzying mobile communications and marvelous desktop, laptop, and handheld computing. Digital technology is also capable of great exactitude and flexibility in identifying copyrighted content and targeting infringements with no more intrusiveness than when it screens out viruses and hacker attacks. I am sure we will be exploring those subjects in greater detail later this week.

Tim Wu: Relying on digital locks is one business model, but certainly not the only or best one for all creators. I believe that the content industry tends to grossly overestimate its own interest in digital locks, let alone our collective interest. It is natural to want to secure and protect things that are yours. But decisions in this area are often driven by a sense of panic that displaces careful thinking about the true costs and benefits of digital locks. In short: digital locks are no substitute for a good business model.

Digital locks help protect the traditional business model based on unit sales; that makes them a useful tool, but hardly a panacea for industry woes. Too often ignored is the fact that every lock makes the product less valuable, by disabling the product in some way. Imagine that your car was feature-locked so that it could only make left turns — you’d probably want a different one. The example is ridiculous but it shows that at their worst, bad locking strategies can destroy a market and hurt consumers.

Sony BMG, of course, learned this lesson a few years back when they put on their CDs such an aggressive lock (the rootkit) that it began to damage people’s computers, creating a giant fiasco and class-action lawsuits. Similarly, the general failure of e-books over the last 10 years is also probably a product of too much security. Imagine buying an iron that required a password to operate.

There are other costs too often ignored. Locks will be broken, and so a business model that depends on locking is very vulnerable. The creator must budget money, effort and talent for the arms race. That’s a weird role for an industry that’s supposed to be good at developing talent, not trying to out-geek every basement-dweller in the world. Finally, a successful locking strategy also requires intense cooperation between many actors – if you protect a song with “superlock,” and my CD player doesn’t understand that, you’ve just created a dead product.

The other costs are missed opportunities. Content that is too locked down loses exposure. Remixes, fan sites and tributes are something firms pay millions for when they call it “marketing.” When a firm overlocks, it may so successfully build a stronghold around its product that no one actually finds out about it.

My sense is that the race to locks is too often a panicked reaction to a failing business model that can extract a terrific public cost. Locks may form a part of certain successful business models. But too much reliance on locking can seriously backfire. There is a reason, after all, that restaurants do not lock their doors during lunch.


Tim Wu (4:18PM): The point of my post was to emphasize that a locking strategy exacts costs that are sometimes underestimated by creators and industry. Since readers asked, here is some discussion of business models that are less dependent on extreme locking — though this is such a huge topic it cannot be done justice here.

Business Model #1. Lock lightly.

Apple I think made a big step forward when first introduced its iTunes download store, and its relatively lighter locks. You can move the content around from your computer to iPod and so on, but not engage is mass distribution. Yes, the iPod has led to some more piracy, but it has led to a lot more buying of content as well.

Business Model #2. Sell unlocked content to avoid the costs of a locking strategy.

It may be that whether locked or unlocked, content is likely to get “out there” anyhow, and the costs of fighting piracy remain the same. On this logic it may be worth selling unlocked content just to avoid the expense and complexity of a locking strategy, on the rationale that locking is irrelevant to the available of materials on illegal sites. Stated otherwise, it is not always clear that selling unlocked content actually would destroy the market, any more than things are now.

Business Model #3. Content as Marketing

Many business models depend on free or cheap “enticements” that get users interested in the product, and then find a cash out later on. The most obvious examples are good old broadcast TV and radio — which if you haven’t noticed, gave away the product for free, based on both advertising and the prospect of later recoupment.

Sometimes things are taken to a different level, like the old Transformers TV show was an example of content designed to create revenue through toy purchases. The point is simply that content has long been used as a way of getting consumer buy-in that then builds a business model.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...righted-works/





Bits Debate: Responding to Readers on Filtering
Saul Hansell

We’ve covered a lot of ground so far in our debate this week on copyright, piracy and digital filtering. Our debaters, Tim Wu, of Columbia Law School, and Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, have had a lot to say. What is amazing to me is how many very thoughtful comments we have gotten to the posts from all over the world.

So rather than throw out an entirely new topic for the debate today, I’ve culled some of the more interesting ideas and questions that have been raised to throw back at the panelists to help clarify and sharpen the arguments. Because they are coming from such different places, I’ve asked different questions to each. Today’s batch relates to the topic of filtering of content by Internet service providers. I’ll do the same thing tomorrow related to the fair use discussion.

Questions for Tim Wu

1) You write that you oppose a government mandated regime of filtering content, which you compare to censorship. Isn’t content filtering a legitimate behavior by private networks that are trying to manage their expenses and reduce illegal activity using their systems?

Tim Wu: In a word, no. These aren’t private networks you’re talking about. If you want to filter your intranet or home network, be my guest. But what we’re talking about here, mostly the old phone networks, are part of the public infrastructure. They are like innkeepers or ferries: public callings, common carriers, with a duty to the public to carry our information without messing with it along the way.

Even the good old AT&T monopoly (1913-1984) while abusive in its ways, never thought to try and filter “bad” phone calls. The potential for abuse of power is tremendous; it is a serious potential threat to free speech in addition.

Meanwhile content filtering does not improve performance; it degrades it. As I write here, it is a mystery why any carrier would voluntarily filter for copyright; they spent years and millions writing a law to avoid that.

2) Rick writes that 50 percent of all traffic on some networks infringes on copyrights. Doesn’t the scale of piracy call for a bold response?

Tim Wu: First, that 50 percent figure is picked out of thin air; so it shouldn’t be the basis of our discussion. Second: show me the harm — in real terms, not abstract or projected. NBC Universal’s revenue grew 10% last year when, by Mr. Cotton’s account, it sounds like they ought be bankrupt. Viacom’s revenues, similarly, are growing smartly.

I don’t see an industry in crisis: I see one that would like to make more money. That’s fine, but not worth hijacking the internet for.

Finally, let me remind readers that our concern, in the end should be for creators, not the creative industry. The two are different, as the ongoing strike suggests.

3) You write that creators could profit from the marketing value of free distribution and the money they make from selling content to people who choose not to pick “light locks.” Isn’t that wishful thinking? And doesn’t it deprive creators of the choice of the business model that is most appropriate for what they do?

Tim Wu: I’ll repeat: creators and the creative industry should think seriously and carefully as to whether heavy locking schemes are really in their interest, as opposed to a reflexive response that can be self-defeating.

I hate to oversimplify, but decisions based on fear, panic and poor understandings of the underlying technology don’t always work out that well.
Questions for Rick Cotton

4) Do you really need the restrictions you are asking for? Isn’t the money you can make from people who chose to pay, and other ancillary revenue streams more than enough compensation for the revenue lost from piracy?

Rick Cotton: The foundation for discussing these topics really does rest on an understanding of the extraordinary deluge of illegal pirated material being accessed over the broadband ecosystem. I note the skeptical reaction of several comments posted this week. (My debate partner affectionately refers to my sources as “thin air.”) So it may help for me to provide some third-party sources that have looked at P2P traffic and quantified it.

In 2005 CacheLogic, a tech company that provides traffic management services to ISPs both in the U.S. and globally, published “P2P in 2005″ and presented its figures to the FTC in December that year. It reported that “P2P represented 60% of internet traffic at end of 2004 “and is still growing”.

Another paper prepared by the company PeerApp, which specializes in peer-to-peer infrastructure, found similar volumes of P2P traffic: “the figure today may be as high as 60% of all internet traffic

A third study conducted by the tech company Sandvine came to similar conclusions: “In Europe, where broadband adoption has steadily outpaced the United States, upstream traffic represents up to eighty-five percent (85%) of all bandwidth consumed on broadband provider networks. Downstream P2P traffic represents about sixty percent (60%) of all bandwidth consumed. In contrast, file sharing in the UK and North America consumes about forty-eight (48%) of total downstream bandwidth and seventy-six percent (76%) of upstream traffic.”

The figure appears to be even higher for last-mile traffic, 80% of which consists of P2P.

Thus, the simple answer to your question is “yes”, restrictions are needed to reduce the huge scale of piracy currently occurring. The technology environment must communicate to users that indiscriminate and wholesale pirating of copyrighted content is not acceptable and not legal.

Content companies are making a major effort to develop new business models to deliver digital content to consumers. For example, the Hulu website, which is in beta at the moment and is a JV between NBC Universal and News Corp, will make a broad array of premium TV content available on demand for no fee on an ad supported basis. But these new digital distribution models cannot compete against widespread pirated distribution of the same content.

5) Why are you so sure that the technology will make a difference? Why won’t all the people trading files simply encrypt them?

Rick Cotton: It is always ironic to me that technologists express limitless optimism about the capabilities of technology in every arena EXCEPT content protection. My optimism flows from the content protection technology that has been developed and already deployed on video-sharing websites. Our conversations with engineering experts who have looked at the ISP environment suggest that technology can make a difference – much the way similar technologies look for digital matching patterns in blocking viruses, spam, and hackers. All law enforcement efforts involve on-going, move and counter-move strategies.

If some P2P networks move to encryption to avoid detection of epidemic copyright violations on their networks that will require a new response – though it will also underline the fact that these networks are committed to facilitating wholesale copyright violations.

6) How can a regime of ISP filtering be fair and workable in all the cases that will come up as people use the Internet: How will people who do have rights to transmit information—authors, people who quote works in compliance with fair use doctrine—deal with blocking? Will independent creators have the same protections as big companies?

Rick Cotton: The short answer is that the technologies under discussion are aimed at the transmission of whole works where creators have not authorized transmission outside specific, authorized digital distribution systems. The focus is on putting roadblocks in the way of the “bandwidth hogs” who engage in large scale pirating of copyrighted works. In the video-sharing environment, content identification technologies have been made available to content owners large and small who submit their work for “fingerprinting.”

7) How do you react to this thought from Tim:

Technologies designed to examine what kind of content is passing the network are technologies of censorship. Tolerating the routine inspection of all content, in the search for “forbidden” content, is a fast road to a private police state.

Rick Cotton: Are technology protections aimed at reducing viruses, spam and hacker attacks part of the fast road to a private police state?

Everyone can see how these filtering technologies work on MySpace and DailyMotion. These are technologies that look for perfect digital matches of copyrighted material, nothing else. They aim to prevent the easy distribution of unchanged, perfect copies of copyrighted content. Tim’s rhetorical boogeyman is hardly apposite.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...-on-filtering/





Bits Debate: Mixing It Up Over Remixes and Fair Use
Saul Hansell

If the issue behind our debate this week about copyright and piracy in the digital age is how much control creators should have over what happens to thier works, one of the key extensions to that question is the matter of fair use. Remixing is a key part of today’s culture, as people use commercial music and video as the raw materials for their own creations. Not surprisingly, Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC, and Tim Wu, the professor at Columbia Law school see these issues rather differently.

What is fair use in the digital age? How much can I remix, quote, make fun of, or summarize without infringing on a copyright?

Rick Cotton: Before responding to this question, I want to make a preliminary observation. The debate about content protection in the digital world — and most particularly about content protection on the broadband internet — is really and truly NOT a debate about fair use. The millions upon millions of pirated, infringing copies of entire movies, TV shows, games and software that are epidemic in today’s digital world have no claim whatsoever to being fair use. And efforts to reduce that traffic on video-sharing sites, on ISP networks, and on devices can be engineered to accommodate fair use. Hopefully, therefore, we can all agree, for example, that the vast P2P traffic involving the transmission of entire movies that is indexed on pirate websites and exchanged endlessly through broadband connections is most assuredly not fair use and deserves no protection. And similarly posting whole movies or whole episodes of TV shows or extended unedited excerpts on video websites deserves no protection.

Turning then to the question of fair use as posed in today’s question, I offer the following observations:

Fair use in the digital age is the same as fair use in the non-digital age. The fact that digital tools make it easier to use other people’s work doesn’t affect the analysis of whether that use is fair. Generally speaking, if you are making fun of, criticizing or commenting on a work (and not just reproducing or copying it), courts have found that you can use the work only to the degree necessary to make your point about that work.

It is also helpful to note what is not included. The fact that now individuals with relative ease can layer three or four songs, copy their favorite scenes from their favorite television shows, or take three or four movies and splice together their favorite action scenes and post them online does NOT mean that these uses are fair. Although some commentators have argued that the “non-commercial” nature of this type of use makes these uses fair, that is not the test under the Copyright Act. There needs to be something more — something that truly injects some degree of original contribution from the maker other than just the assembly of unchanged copies of different copyrighted works.

Lawyer’s footnote: Since fair use is a legal standard with a long history of interpretation, it is difficult to try to capture it in a brief answer. But, as a technical legal matter, fair use is not a “right,” a misconception and misstatement frequently made these days. Rather it is an exception to the copyright owners’ exclusive rights to determine how their expression is used in new works. Fair use permits use of portions of a work under limited circumstances, many but not all of which are set out in the Copyright Act. Because fairness cannot be reduced to a set of bright line rules, whether a use is fair is determined on a case by case basis and a large body of law has developed over decades to address this issue. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The Copyright Act sets out a four factor test (although other factors can be considered). The factors include the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the original work, the amount taken from the existing work and the importance of what is taken and the effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. Thus, as a legal matter, a case-by-case analysis remains the standard.

Tim Wu: Fair Use doctrine is creaking and groaning in the digital age, and it threatens to be surpassed by industry practice. There was once a well-understood line between what original and “secondary” authors were allowed to do. In the literary world this was the line between original book on the one hand, and a book review or literary criticism on the other. But today things are much more confusing. Books begat films, character merchandising, giant fan guides, remix videos, fan art and other forms of secondary authorship that simply didn’t exist 100 years ago. These forms of authorship are in a gray zone; likely to fail the “four factor test” of fair use, but nonetheless largely tolerated by firms like NBC as a form of marketing. It is a sign of how ridiculous things are today that a copyright lawyer cannot give you a straight answer as to how much of Wikipedia is actually legal.

That’s why it is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. In my view that’s a principle already behind the traditional lines: no one (well, nearly no one) would watch Mel Brook’s Spaceballs as a substitute for Star Wars; a book review is no substitute for reading The Naked and the Dead. They are complements to the original work, not substitutes, and that makes all the difference.

This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web. Fan guides like the Harry Potter Lexicon or Lostpedia are not substitutes for reading the book or watching the show, and that should be the end of the legal questions surrounding them. The same goes for reasonable tribute videos like this great Guyz Nite tribute to “Die Hard.” On the other hand, its obviously not fair use to scan a book and put it online, or distribute copyrighted films using BitTorent.

We must never forget that copyright is about authorship; and secondary authors, while never as famous as the original authors, deserve some respect. Fixing fair use is one way to give them that.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/830/index.html





Bits Debate: On the Rights of Readers and Viewers
Saul Hansell

Throughout the debate this week on copyright issues, the question of fair use has come up repeatedly. On Wednesday, the topic for Rick Cotton, the general Counsel of NBC Universal, and Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor, was the legal concept of fair use: how much of a copyrighted work can be included in a review or other sort of work. But in many of the comments we received all week, readers have asked about their own broader sense that when they buy a CD or movie, they purchase rights that include making copies for their personal use.

In this installment of the debate, I asked Mr. Wu and Mr. Cotton to clarify their thoughts about both aspects of fair use.

Rick, There is a major movement to create mashups, compilations, parodies, reinterpretations, and other works comprised built in whole or in part from sounds, video and images from mass culture. How much of this is appropriate. And does taking a stance against mashup creations again put Hollywood in a position of fighting with its most devoted fans?

Rick Cotton: It bears repeating that short-form mashups, parodies and the like are NOT the primary focus of content owners’ anti-piracy activities. Let’s be clear that sympathy for parodies and “re-interpretations” should not be used as a justification for inaction in addressing aggressively the wholesale trafficking in complete, unchanged copies of movies and TV programs.

Having said that, most major content owners today want to see fans fully engage with their favorite content and are working hard to provide legitimate ways to do that.

Tim, you give the example of the Harry Potter Lexicon—A guide to the Potter world. J. K. Rowling, who created that world, wants to write her own encyclopedia about it. Why isn’t the Lexicon depriving her of the opportunity to continue to profit from the world she has created (and which so many enjoy). Would it be acceptable for someone to write a complete Harry Potter book, using all the characters, without her authorization? What is the difference?

Tim Wu: I love the Potter books, and consider Rowling a kind of genius. But we have gotten very far from the point of copyright if we think she should have a veto on so much writing and thinking about the Potter world. Since there was the word, there have been commentators, reviewers, summarizers and restaters - secondary authors of all types. These are all forms of authorship that deserve respect. We are at a very strange and unprecedented point in history if we seriously think it should be illegal for a child to write a guide to his favorite book.

To say the existence of the H.P. Lexicon deprives Rowling of an opportunity to write her own guide is like saying that Mark preempted Matthew, Luke, and John. More than one guide to the Potter world is not a tragedy but a bounty. To answer your question on sequels, it is easy to distinguish a guide from a sequel - the one examines, while the other uses the relevant characters. But I want to resist the implication in the question that we ought automatically consider an “unauthorized” Potter-based fiction a bad thing. Harrypotterfanfictioncom has over 44,000 unauthorized Harry Potter stories - and the sky hasn’t fallen.

Rick, How do you react to Tim’s proposed guideline “work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use”?

Rick Cotton: Tim’s proposed guideline does not solve the “bright line” test problem. How is one to know — and who is to judge — whether material adds to the value? Different people can come to different conclusions on that broad and somewhat vague test. He is simply changing the test. It would seem that his proposal would empower any movie company, for example, to make a film based on any book, play or other copyrighted work without the author’s permission and argue that the film “adds to the value” of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original. The film company would always think their visual creation “adds to the value” of the written word – but that hardly seems to justify creating a commercial product from a copyrighted work without permission.

One aspect of fair use is commonly held to be creating copies for personal use, such as backups and mix tapes to use in private parties. Many readers noted that technology, such as DVD copy protection, is reducing the ability of people to make such copies. And there are laws against selling technology that would allow such copies. Are people’s rights to content being eroded? And is this appropriate?

Tim Wu: I haven’t dwelt on this, but yes. What’s being eroded is our ownership over personal property. Most physical objects, once you buy them, are truly yours - if you buy an old motorcycle, you can pull it apart any way you like, without even thinking about the law. Today, many of the things we own aren’t fully ours. Computer software is not owned, but leased. If you tinker with your DVD too much, you can violate federal law. It’s not IP, but our cell phones are similarly built to prevent us from opening them up and using them as they wish.

I may be sounding like a Ron Paul libertarian here, but at its worst, its an invasion of what it means to own things; an invasion of the prerogatives of personal property and personal space. Ownership should mean more.

Rick Cotton: Once again I am going to separate the legal answer from the consumer proposition. Simply put, copying a DVD is not fair use, as a legal matter. Never has been. But that is not and should not be the end of the discussion. We have to ask ourselves what’s a “fair” and attractive offer for consumers?

If consumers want multiple or backup copies, content companies have an obvious incentive to meet that demand. In the physical world, that is not easy. To permit easy decryption unfortunately opens the flood gates to unlimited digital copying and distribution. NBCU, like many content companies, does have policies in place to replace at a discount DVDs that wear out. But we recognize that is awkward and far from ideal.

But, looking forward, one of the exciting characteristics of the new, digital world is that technology will allow us greater flexibility to respond to consumer desires. In some of our new digital download services, we are looking at creating a “three-copy” model that empowers consumers to have files that can be loaded into various devices. In addition, we’re offering viewers download-to-own movies on Amazon Unbox and via iTunes. They can choose to download commercial free episodes of our TV shows or watch free, streaming, ad-supported programs on our websites. We’ve offered fans material from “Battlestar Galactica” and “The Office” to create mashups. And we expect to expand those offerings both on our websites and on Hulu.com.

We would also hope for cooperation from the consumer electronics industry to create a secure, managed copy capability on DVD players of the future enabling encrypted copies for personal use. Digital technology holds the key to new capabilities that will create a secure copying functionality in the home while protecting digital content from unwarranted piracy.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ers/index.html





MediaDefender Hacker Speaks Out
Enigmax & Ernesto

In September 2007, anti-piracy company MediaDefender’s emails went public after a hacker gained access to their systems. The attacks cost the company a huge amount of money, not to mention acute embarrassment. Now the person behind the attacks speaks.

The whole Media Defender scandal needs little introduction. The anti-piracy company is incredibly unpopular with most of the file-sharing community, so when they fell victim to a hacker and their company secrets spread all over the Internet, few held much sympathy for them.

Soon it became known that a shadowy group known as MediaDefender-Defenders appeared to be behind the attack - they host the Media Defender emails on their website to this day, but little was known about the chain events, or who was behind them - until now.

In an interview with portfolio, the hacker (using the pseudonym ‘Ethan’) explains how things led up to the leak. Ethan, a polite high-school student who lives with his family, was on his Christmas break when he first gained access to the anti-piracy companies servers by exploiting a weakness in their firewall. This was the end of 2006, at a time when business was still good for Media Defender, with revenue standing at nearly $16m.

The interviewer, Daniel Roth, says he communicated with Ethan on pre-pay phone to ensure security. Meeting after school in a local bookstore, Ethan handed over a flash drive holding confidential Media Defender information, explaining that the initial security breach hadn’t amounted to much and that he had difficulty in gaining the interest of fellow hackers. However, a few months later Ethan decided to go back and take a second look - which bore more fruit - giving him access to the company’s email, it’s networked resources and even its telephone system. He then explains how he passed on some of the information to a fellow hacker who gained access to Media Defender servers and used them for denial-of-service attacks.

Logging in a handful of times each month through the summer of 2007, Ethan started to get bored with ‘Monkey Defenders’ - his pet name for the anti-piracy outfit. Deciding to go out with a bang, he and the Media Defender-Defenders gathered thousands of the company’s internal emails and published them on web.

A text file included with the emails stated: “By releasing these emails we hope to secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users. The emails contains information about the various tactics and technical solutions for tracking p2p users, and disrupt p2p services,” and “A special thanks to Jay Maris, for circumventing there entire email-security by forwarding all your emails to your gmail account”

Just days later, slamming the anti-piracy company again and again seemed to be the aim of Ethan and friends, as they released a private telephone conversation with the New York attorney general’s office, a P2P tracking database, followed a few days later by all of Media Defender’s anti-piracy tools.

Ethan said that he didn’t set out to ruin Media Defender: “In the beginning, I had no motivation against Monkey Defenders” he said. “It wasn’t like, ‘I want to hack those bastards’. But then I found something, and the good nature in me said, These guys are not right. I’m going to destroy them.”

Ethan, who is now sought after by the FBI because of the leaked emails, is getting close to this goal. It all went downhill for MediaDefender after the leaks got out. In November it turned out that MediaDefender’s parent company ArtistDirect lost almost $1,000,000 because of the hack, and their stock price plunged soon after that.

To make it even worse, a week after the sensitive information was made public, the Pirate Bay launched a counterattack against their arch rival. They decided to use the information from the emails to file charges against some of MediaDefenders customers including Paramount Home Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Music Group for corrupting and sabotaging their BitTorrent tracker.

There is no doubt that the pirates have won this battle, and it will be very hard for MediaDefender to regain their credibility. To quote MediaDefender CEO Randy Saaf: “This is really fucked…”. Yes, I’m afraid it is Randy.
http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefende...speaks-080114/





The Pirates Can't Be Stopped
Daniel Roth

A teenager hacked into the outfit charged with protecting companies like Sony, Universal, and Activision from online piracy—the most daring exploit yet in the escalating war between fans and corporate giants. Guess which side is winning.


From: Ty Heath [MediaDefender]
Sent: Wednesday, June 6, 2007 7:02 p.m.
To: it <it@mediadefender.com>
Subject: pm webserver

The 65.120.42.146 pm webserver has been compromised […]
As a side note, please do not ever use the old passwords on anything.

The first time Ethan broke into MediaDefender, he had no idea what he had found. It was his
Christmas break, and the high schooler was hunkered down in the basement office of his family's suburban home. The place was, as usual, a mess. Papers and electrical cords covered the floor and crowded the desk near his father's Macs and his own five-year-old Hewlett-Packard desktop. While his family slept, Ethan would take over the office, and soon enough he'd start taking over the computer networks of companies around the world. Exploiting a weakness in MediaDefender's firewall, he started poking around on the company's servers. He found folder after folder labeled with the names of some of the largest media companies on the planet: News Corp., Time Warner, Universal.

Since 2000, MediaDefender has served as the online guard dog of the entertainment world, protecting it against internet piracy. When Transformers was about to hit theaters in summer 2007, Paramount turned to the company to stop the film's spread online. Island Records counted on MediaDefender to protect Amy Winehouse's Back to Black album, as did NBC with 30 Rock. Activision asked MediaDefender to safeguard games like Guitar Hero; Sony, its music and films; and World Wrestling Entertainment, its pay-per-view steel-cage championships and pudding-wrestling matches.

MediaDefender's main stalking grounds are the destinations that help people find and download movies and music for free. Sites such as the Pirate Bay and networks like Lime Wire rely on peer-to-peer, or P2P, software, which allows users to connect with one another and easily share files. (See what movies, television shows, and music are most downloaded.) MediaDefender monitors this traffic and employs a handful of tricks to sabotage it, including planting booby-trapped versions of songs and films to frustrate downloaders. When the company's tactics work, someone trying to download a pirated copy of Spider-Man 3 might find the process interminable, or someone grabbing Knocked Up might discover it's nothing but static. Other MediaDefender programs interfere with the process pirates use to upload authentic copies. When Ethan hacked into the company, at the end of 2006, MediaDefender was finishing an exceptional year: Its revenue had more than doubled, to $15.8 million, and profit margins were hovering at about 50 percent.

Ethan and I had first started talking over an untraceable prepaid phone that he carried with him. He eventually agrees to speak in person, as long as I protect his identity. (Ethan is a pseudonym.) We meet after school, in a bookstore that he says is near his house. He hands me a flash drive containing documents that I was later able to independently verify as internal, unpublished information belonging to MediaDefender. He also pulls out a well-creased sheet of paper bearing my name, the first five digits of my Social Security number, a few pictures of me, and addresses going back 10 years. "I had to check," he says. Then he asks me about another Roth he has been researching; it turns out to be my brother. "I was just starting to dig in to him," he says. "There's a lot there." Ethan is a handsome kid, with broad shoulders and a preppy style, and is unfailingly polite, cleaning up the table after I buy him a coffee and patiently walking me through the intricate details of Microsoft security procedures.

Ethan explains to me that the Christmastime break-in didn't proceed very far. While logged into MediaDefender on one computer, he chatted on another with some hacker friends to see if they knew anything about the firm. But the conversation quickly shifted to other exploits the group wanted to pull off on that cold evening—cell-phone hacks, fake pizza deliveries, denial-of-service attacks—and Ethan moved on.

In the spring, however, he decided to explore the company again. Over the next few months, Ethan says, he figured out how to read MediaDefender's email, listen to its phone calls, and access just about any of the company's computers he wanted to browse. He uncovered the salaries of the top engineers as well as names and contact information kept by C.E.O. and co-founder Randy Saaf (with notations of who in the videogame industry is an "asshole" and which venture capitalists didn't come through with financing). Ethan also figured out how the firm's pirate-fighting software works. He passed on his expertise to a fellow hacker, who broke into one of MediaDefender's servers and commandeered it so that it could be used for denial-of-service attacks.

Ethan continued to log in to MediaDefender about twice a week throughout the summer of 2007. Usually, he'd head down to the basement office after his S.A.T. prep classes. After a while, his friends grew tired of hearing about his stunts inside Monkey Defenders, as he began to call the company. And eventually, he himself got bored. So in September, he decided to give the entire thing up, but not before he and a few fellow hackers pulled a prank: They grabbed a half-year's worth of internal emails and published them on the same file-sharing sites prowled by MediaDefender. A comment posted with the messages read, "By releasing these emails we hope to secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users. The emails contains [sic] information about the various tactics and technical solutions for tracking P2P users, and disrupt P2P services.... We hope this is enough to create a viable defense to the tactics used by these companies." It was signed MediaDefender-Defenders.

A few days later, Ethan and his friends put more material online. One file contained the source code for MediaDefender's antipiracy system. Another demonstrated just how deep inside the company they had gone. This file featured a tense 30-minute phone call between employees of MediaDefender and the New York State attorney general's office discussing an investigation into child porn that the firm was assisting with. (MediaDefender refused to comment for this story.) The phone call makes clear that the hackers had left a few footprints while prowling MediaDefender's computers. The government officials had detected someone trying to access one of its servers, and the hacker seemed to know all the right log-in information. "How comfortable are you guys that your email server is free of, uh, other eyes?" an investigator with the attorney general asked during the call.

"Oh, yeah, yeah, we've checked out our email server, and our email server itself has not been compromised," the MediaDefender executive said.

But, of course, it had.

"In the beginning, I had no motivation against Monkey Defenders," Ethan tells me. "It wasn't like, 'I want to hack those bastards.' But then I found something, and the good nature in me said, These guys are not right. I'm going to destroy them."

And so he set out to do just that: a teenager, operating on a dated computer, taking on—when his schedule allowed—one of the entertainment world's best technological defenses against downloading. The U.S. movie industry estimates that it loses more than $2 billion a year to file sharers; the record industry, another $3.7 billion. "Piracy," intoned Dan Glickman, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America trade group, to Congress in late 2006, "is the greatest obstacle the film industry currently faces." Instead of figuring out whether there is a way to make online distribution work—to profit from downloading—the industry has obsessed for years with battling it. Yet it took only a few months for Ethan to expose just how quixotic that fight has become.

From: Randy Saaf
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 9:24 p.m.
To: [various MediaDefender employees]
Subject: Fw: .edu filtering

Team Universal is curiouse [sic] if we have any historical data over the last 3 months that show whether .edu IP addresses on p2p have gone down. They want to see if their lawsuits are getting students to stop using p2p (take a moment to laugh to yourself). Let me know if anyone has any ideas.

When Saaf co-founded MediaDefender in 2000, Napster was at the height of its popularity. The file-sharing service was wildly popular on college campuses, where students used speedy broadband lines to amass huge music collections. The Recording Industry Association of America, the music-business trade group, considered Napster to be its No. 1 problem. Saaf thought he had a way to contain it. He invited Cary Sherman, then an R.I.A.A. executive and now its president, to drop by the startup's cramped Claremont, California, offices. As soon as Sherman walked in, he heard a yet-to-be-released Madonna track blaring from a set of speakers. "He was shocked," says Ron Paxson, one of the company's co-founders. "We showed him how we could block it from getting out onto the internet."

Over the next few years, the firm grew as downloading flourished and terrified entertainment execs turned to it for help. The content-wants-to-be-free chant of the internet generation began reverberating in the nightmares of music moguls—and then of executives further and further up the entertainment industry food chain. As broadband speeds increased and data storage got cheaper, it became easier and faster for anyone with a passing interest in pop culture to trade larger files like TV shows, movies, and software.

The technology for trading them also kept improving. When the record industry shut down Napster in 2001, a drove of oddly named services took its place: Ares, eDonkey, Grokster, Kazaa. In 2002, a lone programmer working at a table in his dining room invented BitTorrent, a technology that made file sharing even faster and more efficient. Within a few years of its creation, BitTorrent activity accounted for nearly 20 percent of all internet traffic. Between 2002 and 2006, the file-trading audience nearly doubled, with an average of more than 9 million people sharing files at any given time, according to BigChampagne, a company that monitors P2P traffic. The firm estimates that more than 1 billion songs are traded each month, a number that has more or less remained constant as the trading of feature films and TV shows has exploded.

Yet it has been difficult to quantify the damage supposedly wreaked by downloading. In mid-2007, economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee, from Harvard, and Koleman Strumpf, from the University of Kansas, published the results of their study analyzing the effect of file sharing on retail music sales in the U.S. They found no correlation between the two. "While downloads occur on a vast scale," they wrote, "most users are likely individuals who in the absence of file sharing would not have bought the music they downloaded." Another study published around the same time, however, found there was, in fact, a positive impact on retail sales, at least in Canada: University of London researchers Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz reported that the more people downloaded songs from P2P networks, the more CDs they bought. "Roughly half of all P2P tracks were downloaded because individuals wanted to hear songs before buying them or because they wanted to avoid purchasing the whole bundle of songs on the associated CDs, and roughly one-quarter were downloaded because they were not available for purchase."

Still, the entertainment industry believes it knows a bad guy when it sees one and has reacted to file sharing exactly as a character in one of its thrillers or shoot-'em-up games would: with a full-frontal, guns-a-blazing assault. For the past few years, the R.I.A.A. has employed MediaDefender's competitor, MediaSentry, to trace people uploading music so that the trade group can sue them. The R.I.A.A. and the M.P.A.A. have worked to get government on their side: In 2007, the organizations lobbied to water down a California bill designed to crack down on pretexting—the practice of using false pretenses to get personal information about someone. The M.P.A.A. argued that laws against pretexting would cripple its antipiracy efforts by imperiling "certain long-employed techniques to obtain information." In November, the groups lobbied the House of Representatives in support of a bill to make federal funding for universities partially contingent on how effectively they rid their campuses of file sharing.

"This is not Napster," says Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul who heads the Weinstein Co., a MediaDefender client. "Online piracy has got to be stopped. The biggest spear in the neck of the pirates will be (a) being vigilant, (b) prosecuting, and (c) in a way, making fun of them, finding a way to say, 'That's not cool—that's anything but cool.' If you had people who the young people respect in this industry—Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Shia LaBeouf—if these guys did public service announcements that said, 'Don't steal, stealing's not cool,' I think you can go a long way toward stopping this." Weinstein says that if Democrats maintain control of Congress and gain the White House, he'll flex whatever political muscle he has acquired by being a major donor to achieve one thing: "Tougher, more stringent piracy laws." Does he see any use for P2P systems? "No."

Certainly, the few attempts that entertainment companies have made to accommodate downloaders have come across as halfhearted and have turned out dismally. Five major movie studios—Sony, MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Universal—sank $150 million into a cumbersome film-downloading service called Movielink, rolled out in 2002. In August, they unloaded the unit to Blockbuster for $6.6 million, after concluding that few consumers had the patience to master a technology that didn't match the ease or quality of that being offered by the pirates. NBC and News Corp. are optimistic about Hulu, a site that offers new and archived TV fare, but the shows contain unskippable ads and can't be downloaded, a disadvantage in this era of DVRs and iPods. All this comes after years of the music industry's blundering around for solutions. "The music companies were put on earth to make the video companies seem like visionaries," says Michael Gartenberg, research director of analysis firm JupiterResearch.

So the entertainment business lives by the motto "If you can't join them, beat them." As with all wars, of course, escalation most benefits the arms merchants. In 2005, the music portal ArtistDirect purchased MediaDefender for $42.5 million, making Saaf and his remaining co-founder, Octavio Herrera, multimillionaires at age 29. To retain the two men, ArtistDirect paid them an additional $525,000 each and gave them easy-to-hit bonuses that would keep their income at about $700,000 a year each. And the clients continued to come, even though those inside MediaDefender could see they were losing ground.

From: Jonathan Perez [MediaDefender]
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2007 6:33 p.m.
To: [various MediaDefender employees]
Subject: Sicko Torrents Results 6/22

Attached are today's internal testing results for Sicko. Our overall effectiveness did improve. However, we still have no presence on Pirate bay which is a site they are likely watching as it was mentioned in the AdAge article they referenced.

>From: Ethan Noble [Weinstein Co.]
>Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 10:41 a.m.
>To: [various Weinstein employees]
>Subject: Re: Piracy—this is a real
>problem
>
>This is AdAge's main story today and
>they talk about ThePirateBay.org
>having [Michael Moore's Sicko] so I
>did a quick search and there are a
>couple of copies of the film on there
>right now. MAYBE and HOPEFULLY
>those are our guy's 'fake' versions…

Before Ethan started toying with MediaDefender, the company's biggest problem was a tall 29-year-old Swede named Peter Sunde. He and two partners run the most popular file-sharing site, the Pirate Bay. It draws about 25 million unique visitors every month; dozens of new movies, games, and TV shows pop up each hour. The R.I.A.A.'s international counterpart refers to the site as the "international engine of illegal file sharing." The Pirate Bay doesn't host any of the actual content; it just lists it and supplies the BitTorrent files that let people connect with each other in order to share their libraries.

Sunde lives in a tranquil suburb of Malmö, Sweden, once the country's shipbuilding capital. Today, he's dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt embroidered with a mushroom from the videogame Super Mario Bros. He opens the MacBook Pro in his living room and starts reading a recent email from an attorney representing Prince and the Village People: " 'The owners of the Pirate Bay willfully and unlawfully exploit and misappropriate both Prince's and the Village People's intellectual property and infringe on their rights of publicity,' blah, blah, blah. 'Regardless of Pirate Bay's wishful thinking and erroneous public-relations position on its website that U.S. intellectual property laws are inapplicable,' blah, blah, blah, 'the Swedish government may not be able to protect you.'

"I was reading this yesterday, and I started laughing so hard," Sunde says, swiveling in his chair. "They're going to reach our company? We're not even a company." The partners run the site more as a hobby: There is no registered trademark and minimal overhead. The Pirate Bay is basically just the domain name and a website. Sunde then reads me the reply he is about to post. "For fuck's sake," it begins, "get your facts straight," and becomes more insulting from there.

Sunde is a bit of a philosopher when it comes to what his site does. As he sees it, the Pirate Bay is simply delivering a service to consumers, giving them the entertainment they want when they want it. He motions to the home theater he has rigged up: "Just look at this. I have my own cinema. When I watch a movie, I'd rather be here with a blanket and a girlfriend than at the cinema with a lot of people that are annoying. And that has nothing to do with file sharing. The technology is here for us, so why shouldn't we do it?" As far as Sunde is concerned, Hollywood should stop attacking him and start listening. According to him, consumers don't care about how Hollywood wants to schedule its releases—movie theaters first, then pay-per-view, and so on. They want the content when and where it's convenient and comfortable. Is that so hard to understand?

Sweden is a file sharer's heaven. Its laws protect internet service providers from being sued for what passes through their networks, which gives them little incentive to turn downloaders over to groups like the R.I.A.A. or the M.P.A.A. The country is one of the most wired in the world, with high-speed-internet penetration as high as 75 percent in some areas and an average broadband speed that's nearly five times faster than that of the U.S. And as a rule, Swedish authorities have never been that interested in going after a bunch of websites that didn't seem to be doing anyone any real harm.

Nonetheless, Hollywood tried lobbying Sweden to do something about the Pirate Bay. In May 2006, partly at the prodding of the M.P.A.A., 52 Swedish police barged into multiple locations, including the Stockholm offices of the I.S.P. run by Sunde's partners, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. Police confiscated 186 pieces of computer equipment and hauled in Svartholm and Neij for questioning. Sunde, who was at home in Malmö, learned about the raid from an email. He quickly downloaded the entire site to his home computer—source code, images, everything—finishing just as the last server was shut down in Stockholm. Three days later, he had the site back up and running, and soon thousands of supporters were turning up at pro-Pirate Bay rallies throughout the country. (The Swedish police have yet to bring charges, though the lead investigator promised in the fall to do so by the end of January—nearly two years after the raid, a delay highly unusual in Sweden.)

Sunde could handle the cops—one of the country's top attorneys immediately signed on to defend the Pirate Bayers. MediaDefender and the rest of the antipiracy firms presented a trickier problem. Even as police officers were preparing their blitz, the Pirate Bay guys were trying to figure out who was already attacking them online. Users complained in message boards and chat rooms that certain files failed to download fully and some that did were pure garbage. Sunde and his partners eventually traced some of the files back to a few hundred IP addresses—the series of numbers assigned to any device connected to the internet in order to identify it.

First, Sunde started blocking IP addresses from servers that appeared to host fake or corrupted files—MediaDefender had thousands of such computers hidden in server farms around the world—and then he blocked all the IP addresses originating from MediaDefender's headquarters. If MediaDefender wanted to search to see whether a client's files were accessible through the Pirate Bay, well, they'd just have to do it from home. Finally, Sunde started messing with his enemy: When MediaDefender tried to upload a torrent—the vital file that coordinates the download process—to the Pirate Bay, MediaDefender would get a notice that there had been a database error, requiring it to start the process over again. As far as the folks at MediaDefender could tell, the problem was with the Pirate Bay and not with the fact that its IP addresses had been detected. It would spend the rest of the day trying and trying to complete the upload. Sunde had managed to turn one of MediaDefender's tricks back on itself.

But for Saaf and Herrera, the Pirate Bay was just one of many problems. The two men had always been technically savvy, but now they were vastly outnumbered by the swarm of pirates and programmers collaborating to improve file-sharing technology. MediaDefender's IP addresses were exposed so quickly that the company was forced to buy new banks of numbers each month; at one point it considered using its employees' home connections to get fresh IP numbers. MediaDefender's year-over-year cost of doing business jumped 28 percent in the first quarter of 2007. Even worse, its parent company was dealing with the fallout from an S.E.C. inquiry into its accounting practices. To placate the government, ArtistDirect had restated its earnings, which triggered a clause that put into default the $46 million in debt the company had taken out to pay for MediaDefender.

Saaf and Herrera couldn't afford to have the wheels come off their division, which accounted for two-thirds of ArtistDirect's revenue. Worried about the efficacy of its piracy countermeasures, executives sent flurries of emails about how to stage-manage product demonstrations. In one instance, Universal Music Group was in the middle of negotiating a contract renewal worth more than $3.5 million with MediaDefender and wanted to test how effective the firm's tactics were. MediaDefender tried to persuade Universal to use a downloading program called µTorrent, which had been prone to falling for MediaDefender's tricks. In a note to Universal, Saaf hailed µTorrent as "the most popular" in the industry. A month earlier, when µTorrent developers appeared to be fixing the hole that MediaDefender had exploited, one of Saaf's underlings sent out an email asking if MediaDefender's engineers had come up with a plan B. "Randy will ask you very soon, so I'm just trying to preempt a shitstorm," he says.

From: Jonathan Lee [MediaDefender]
Sent: Wednesday, July 4, 2007 9:26 a.m.
To: Octavio Herrera, Randy Saaf, Ben Grodsky, Jay Mairs
Subject: Fw: hahahha

We have such a lovely fan base.

----- Original Message -----
>From: David White
>Sent: Wednesday, July 4, 2007 6:04 a.m.
>To: sales@mediadefender.com
>Subject: hahahha
>HAHAHAHAHAHA Digg got your site
>killed, thats what you guys get for
>trying to entrap people. MUSIC AND
>VIDEOS BELONG TO THE PEOPLE!!!!!
>quit trying to trap people downloading
>and suing then [sic], MEDIA
>DEFENDER SUCKS […]
>HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
>HAHAH

At some point, MediaDefender's clients were going to notice that Saaf was getting schooled by a bunch of amateur coders and by "the douche," as Saaf referred to Sunde in an email. The solutions devised by Saaf and his programmers were invariably ferreted out by the file-sharing community. In early July, a user at Digg, a heavily trafficked social-bookmarking site, put up a link to an item showing that MediaDefender was behind a new online video site called MiiVi. Bloggers accused the company of running a honeypot to trap pirates who were uploading protected content. Saaf quickly pounded out an email to his senior staff: "This is really fucked," he wrote. "Let's pull MiiVi offline." Ethan says he was behind the leak that led to the Digg post, and of course, he kept up his forays until that weekend in mid-September when he decided to show off his work.

After the company's internal affairs were made public, Saaf and Herrera spent the next few weeks trying to reassure everyone in the entertainment business that their antipiracy efforts were still effective. At a digital music conference held in L.A.'s Roosevelt hotel in early October, the men walked the halls, collaring colleagues and clients to explain what had happened and how they intended to bounce back from the hack. One way was with cash: Within weeks, the company shelled out $600,000 in service credits and another $225,000 to pay for legal advice.

Reading the purloined MediaDefender emails on the computer screen in his Malmö living room, Sunde realized there might be another method he could use to fight back against MediaDefender. The messages made it clear that Saaf and Herrera had put considerable energy into trying to degrade his work. Sunde called a lawyer to ask whether MediaDefender's actions were legal in Sweden. Then Sunde emailed the Swedish inspector who had raided the Pirate Bay's office—who else knew the operation better?—and informed the inspector that he wanted to bring charges against MediaDefender's clients: Sony, Universal, Atari, and others. Not only had they paid a company to break the Pirate Bay's terms of service—which forbid companies from tracking usage, logging IP addresses, or doing anything disruptive—but MediaDefender had created code specifically for hacking into the Pirate Bay's system. "As long as what you're doing is legal, why should you be attacked by someone using illegal methods?" asks Sunde. The Swedish police have yet to press charges.

Of course, as with many a popular movie, the underdog always mounts a comeback. And recently, some other pirates have also chosen to fight instead of run. After the M.P.A.A. filed a lawsuit against several websites in 2006, the file-sharing portal TorrentSpy countersued for illegal wiretapping, saying the trade group had amassed evidence by hiring a hacker to obtain internal documents. (A judge dismissed the countersuit; TorrentSpy is considering an appeal.) And Sunde is heading up an initiative in the file-sharing community to develop a more secure, less traceable version of BitTorrent. The new protocol, tentatively called SecureP2P, got a boost through Ethan's work: Because programmers were able to view the blueprints for MediaDefender's technology, they will be able to design an even more effective countertechnology.

From: Randy Saaf
Sent: Wednesday, May 2, 2007 1:11 p.m.
To: [various MediaDefender employees]
Subject: digg story on hd dvd crack

Look how ape shit the digg community went over the hd dvd crack code post getting pulled from the site.
http://digg.com/news/popular/24hours

People sure love their pirated movies

However Saaf and his crew intend to mount a comeback, it's clear that the war against downloading is escalating. "Hollywood is not burned out on silver-bullet technologies the way music is after years of defeat," says Eric Garland, C.E.O. of BigChampagne. "It's just 1999 for video, and the gold rush may be on now." In December, the ratings giant Nielsen announced its plans to enter the piracy-fighting business with a new service that would place traceable fingerprints on copyrighted media.

Perhaps, though, the entertainment business has it wrong. Downloaders aren't thieves; they're just rabid fans. But for the industry's perspective to change, it would have to trample long-held business practices. Hollywood would have to toss out its ability to stagger the opening of films across different media. It would also have to abandon technologies like the encryption used on HD-DVDs to prevent them from being copied or even played on certain machines. (A hacker cracked the encryption in January 2007.) And record labels would have to stop suing downloaders and continue to find other sources for revenue, like ringtones. But for the most part, the Weinsteins of the world see fighting as the only way forward.

"What should a police department do when it turns out there's been a burglary?" asks Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal and the chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy. "Should the police department give up, close its doors, and say this is an impossible task? No. That's silly.

Still, a few months after the MediaDefender-Defenders played their prank, there was a sign that some in Hollywood might be shifting their thinking. A new independent movie called Jerome Bixby's The Man From Earth showed up on one of the file-sharing sites in November. The film's producers had no idea it had even been pirated; all they knew was that suddenly its popularity was skyrocketing. Their websites received 23,000 hits in less than two weeks, and the film's ranking among the most-searched-for movies on the internet movie-tracking site IMDB went from 11,235 to 15. Eric Wilkinson, the film's co-producer, wrote a fan letter to the site responsible for driving traffic to the pirated film: "Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download.... People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the Net!" He requested that fans buy the DVD as well and added, "In the future, I will not complain about file sharing. you have helped put this little movie on the map!!!! When I make my next picture, I just may upload the movie on the Net myself!"

When I try reaching Wilkinson, though, I'm told that the producer is not available. Instead, the movie's director, Richard Schenkman, returns the call. "Eric was clearly being sarcastic," Schenkman says about the offer to upload the film. "That's why he put in the exclamation points." I tell him his partner certainly sounded enthusiastic about file sharing. "Look, I have mixed feelings about this," Schenkman replies. "As a filmmaker, I love that people love the movie and have seen the movie. But as a person who literally has a hunk of his own life savings in the movie, I don't want to be ripped off by people illegally downloading the movie. Some of these downloaders want to believe they're fighting the man. But we're all just people who work for a living." He acknowledges, however, that DVD sales of the film increased after the leak, and that people have even been pledging money on a site the filmmaker set up to accept donations in markets where the DVD isn't for sale. "I'm not saying I have the answers," Schenkman says.

Meanwhile, Ethan has moved on to other companies. He and his friends have a few targets in mind that don't happen to be in the entertainment industry. He told me he'd also like to quit the business altogether but hasn't been able to give up the rush it brings. No doubt, other kids are hunkering down over their keyboards to see if they can't replicate the MediaDefender-Defenders' work. And some pirate is finding new ways to disseminate the material. Eventually, Hollywood will no longer be able to continue fighting its enemies at the expense of its customers. If they can't beat them, they'll finally have to join them. That is, if they want to keep having customers.
http://www.portfolio.com/news-market...enders-Profile





Time Warner Cable: Pricing Model Changing Soon

For those of you asking here is the exact wording from the MS word document I recieved.

Quote:
TEAM: Some of you are interested in TWC’s future projects/development plans. Here’s a summary of a few.

Network

Project to plan integration of the Adelphia backbone into the TWC network, creating a nationwide TWC backbone. TWC will merge all IP based services (video, voice, data) onto a single common converged network platform.

Residential Hsd

The introduction of Consumption Based Billing will enable TWC to charge customer based upon usage, impacting only 5% of subscribers who utilize over half of the total network bandwidth. The trial in the Beaumont, TX division will apply to new HSD customer only, will provide a destination for customer to track usage for each month and will enable customers to upgrade from one tier to the next to avoid payment of overage charges. Existing and new subscribers will have tracking capability, however only new subscribers will be charged incrementally for bandwidth usage above the cap. Following the trial, a determination will be made as to whether or not existing subscribers should be charged. Only residential subscribers will be impacted. Trial in Beaumont, TX will begin by Q1. We will be testing technical backend as well as Marketing and Messaging to customers. We will use the results of the trial to evaluate results for possible future nationwide rollouts.

Speed Preview will allow subscribers of Road Runner lite to preview a higher speed/tier of service for a limited amount of time. Similar to a free HBO weekend. We are deploying Speed Preview on a national basis. We will be utilizing a select # of available ports on all CMTS, which will amount to about 85% of the total RR Lite universe of subscribers. Customers download speed will be upgraded from 768kbs to 7m, with a possible intro price of $29.95 for the first 6 months. Speed preview will be deploying throughout 2008.

Residential Video

Remote DVR enables subscribers to create recordings from a webportal from their computer or wireless portal on the phone. Phase I: Basic DVR control (setup of a future recording) from a remote device primarily a PC> Phase II: Basic DVR control from aa wireless device. The solution will allow a TWC customer with an internet connected computer and or a sprint jv wirelress phone to remotely control and manage a TWC DVR. The plan is to deplay in a single market (Milwaukee) with a limited set of controlled users by April 2008.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19813387-





Time Warner: Download Too Much and You Might Pay $30 a Movie
Saul Hansell

Let’s say you buy a new Apple TV because you want to rent high-definition movies. And say you are about to move to Beaumont, Tex. If so, you might wind up paying Time Warner Cable as much as $30 when you download a movie using its high-speed Internet service.

Time Warner said on Wednesday that it was going to start testing a new rate plan in Beaumont that would limit the amount of bandwidth each customer can use each month before additional fees kick in. Alexander Dudley, a Time Warner spokesman, said that the exact terms had not been set, but that packages would probably offer between 5 gigabytes and 40 gigabytes a month. The top plan would cost roughly the same as the company’s highest-speed service, which typically runs between $50 and $60 a month.

Mr. Dudley said the company was still working on what to charge people who exceed their limits, but he pointed to Bell Canada, which has imposed bandwidth limits on its customers. According to its Web site, Bell Canada charges as much as 7.50 Canadian dollars ($7.42) for each gigabyte when customers exceed the 30-gigabyte limit on a plan that costs 29.95 Canadian dollars a month. Since the average high-definition movie is 4 gigabytes to 5 gigabytes, that would mean a charge of at least $30 a download for customers on a plan like that who were over their limit.

On more expensive plans, the over-limit charges at Bell Canada are as low as 1 Canadian dollar a gigabyte. That would represent a $4 to $5 charge for an HD movie for people over their monthly limits. Standard-definition movies are typically 1 gigabyte to 2 gigabytes.

Mr. Dudley said that Time Warner wants to test bandwidth limits to crack down on a minority of customers who are heavy downloaders. Indeed, only five percent of customers use half of its total bandwidth, he said.

I spoke to Dave Burstein, the editor of DSL Prime, and one of the most knowledgeable people around on the economics of high-speed Internet service.

He argued that Time Warner’s interest in bandwidth caps had little to do with its own costs and a lot to do with the emergence of movie downloads and streaming television programs over the Internet.

“The smart people at Time Warner are scared of people watching TV directly over the Internet,” he said. “‘Lost’ and ‘Desperate Housewives’ look better over the Internet than they do on digital cable.”

Moreover, the marginal cost of extra bandwidth is very small, he said. For broadband Internet service, 80 percent to 90 percent of the costs are fixed regardless of use. And the all-in cost of a gigabyte of use is about 10 cents or less. Most cable and phone systems keep their costs secret. Mr. Burstein cited an interview he conducted two years ago with Tony Werner, then the chief technical officer of Liberty Global, John Malone’s collection of European cable systems. Costs in Europe, he added, are likely to be a bit higher than in the United States.

Mr. Dudley disputed this view. “This is not targeted at people who download movies from Apple,” he said. “This is aimed at people who use peer-to-peer networks and download terabytes.”

Reaction to Time Warner’s test has been somewhat mixed. Some, of course, see this as a price increase that gives mainstream users the added stress of keeping track of bandwidth use.

Others suggest that it is a more straightforward pricing system that does make heavy users pay more, especially since some Internet service providers are quietly slowing down or otherwise restricting some service, most notably to users of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. That’s why Public Knowledge, a group that is certainly not afraid to criticize telecom companies, put out a statement praising the test:

Quote:
Time Warner’s pricing test could be a welcome development for consumers and for the cable industry. Consumers will have a better idea of how they are using their Internet connections and will have the flexibility to adjust according to the rates. Cable companies could be able to better manage their networks and costs, so they won’t have to resort to cutting off customers for exceeding phantom usage levels or throttling some applications.
Whether cable users agree, or they start to complain because of occasional surprise bills for $30 movie downloads, depends on how Time Warner actually structures its rate plans.

“A big part of what we are doing is to test customer feedback,” Mr. Dudley said. “We want our customers to feel like they are getting a good value.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ay-30-a-movie/





A Tenfold Improvement in Battery Life?
Alex Serpo

Stanford University researchers have made a discovery that could signal the arrival of laptop batteries that last more than a day on a single charge.

The researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to give rechargeable lithium ion batteries--used in laptops, iPods, video cameras, and mobile phones--as much as 10 times more charge. This potentially could give a conventional battery-powered laptop 40 hours of battery life, rather than 4 hours.

The new batteries were developed by assistant professor Yi Cui and colleagues at Stanford University's Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

"It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development."

Citing a research paper they wrote, published in Nature Nanotechnology, Cui said the increased battery capacity was made possible though a new type of anode that utilizes silicon nanowires. Traditional lithium ion batteries use graphite as the anode. This limits the amount of lithium--which holds the charge--that can be held in the anode, and it therefore limits battery life.

Silicon anodes have the "the highest theoretical charge capacity" according to Cui's paper, but they expand when charging and shrink during use: a cycle that causes the silicon to be pulverized, degrading the performance of the battery. For 30 years, this dead end stumped researchers, who poured their battery life-extending energy into improving graphite-based anodes.

Cui and his colleagues looked at this old problem and overcame it by constructing a new type of silicon nanowire anode. In Cui's anode, the lithium is stored in a forest of tiny silicon nanowires, each with a diameter that is a thousandth of the thickness of a sheet of paper. The nanowires inflate to four times their normal size as they soak up lithium, but unlike previous silicon anodes, they do not fracture.

Cui said there are a few barriers to commercializing the technology.

"We are working on scaling up and evaluating the cost of our technology," Cui said. "There are no roadblocks for either of these."

Cui has filed a patent on the technology and is considering formation of a company or an agreement with a battery manufacturer. He expects the battery to be commercialized and available within "several years," pending testing.
http://www.news.com/A-tenfold-improv...3-6226196.html





AT&T Begins Massive Battery Replacement
Phil Harvey

After four equipment fires in two years, including a Christmas Day 2007 explosion in Wisconsin, AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T - message board) says it is no longer comfortable with the batteries that provide backup power to thousands of its equipment cabinets in neighborhoods all over the U.S.

"Following incidents involving batteries used in AT&T U-verse network cabinets, the company is replacing 17,000 similar batteries, all manufactured by Avestor," writes an AT&T spokesman, in an email to Light Reading.

"Normally, we would work with a vendor to diagnose problems and develop solutions. We can't do that in this case because Avestor filed for bankruptcy in October 2006 and closed shortly thereafter. As a result, we have decided to move forward with the removal of all Avestor batteries as quickly as possible," the spokesman adds.

AT&T says it has no immediate guess as to how quickly it can replace all those batteries. The carrier also declined to speculate on the costs of such an endeavor.

A company spokesman does note, however, that AT&T stopped deploying Avestor batteries during the first quarter of 2007. The company announced a new battery supplier in July 2007. (See AT&T Eyes Batteries in Explosion Probe.)

Whatever the timing and cost, it won't be trivial, according to industry analyst Kermit Ross, principal of Millenium Marketing.

"It's no small task to change out the batteries in thousands of remote cabinets, especially when many of them are already powered up and handling working U-verse subscribers," Ross says. "It looks like a multimillion-dollar job, considering the cost of replacement batteries plus the labor to install them. They'll probably need to change the wiring to the batteries, too."

Bad battery background
AT&T's troubles with Avestor surfaced in October 2006, when an equipment cabinet exploded in a suburban Houston neighborhood, startling homeowners and ripping out a sizable chunk of fencing from one elderly couple's yard. (See AT&T Investigates DSLAM Explosion.)

In January 2007, another incident occurred just 20 miles away from the first one. This time the cabinet caught on fire, though that was quickly extinguished. However, the concerns about the safety of the batteries powering the cabinets kept growing. (See AT&T Confirms Second VRAD Fire.)

Following the first two Houston incidents, AT&T hired a leading scientific consulting firm to investigate the cause of the October 2006 equipment cabinet explosion and the January 2007 equipment fire.

The consulting firm, Exponent, concluded that the problems were caused by manufacturing defects, that the battery's safety features and overall design were "sound," and "concluded that the risk of hazardous failures with this battery is as low, if not lower, than the risk with alternative batteries." (See AT&T: Defect Caused VRAD Explosion.)

Light Reading requested a copy of the Exponent report from AT&T, but has not yet received one.

But wait... there's more
AT&T now admits it had two more incidents before the end of 2007 -- one small fire in an equipment cabinet and one cabinet explosion. The small fire occured in one of AT&T's cabinets near Cleveland, the carrier says, though it won't elaborate on the location.

But on Christmas Day, a cabinet at the corner of 64th Street and North Avenue in Wauwatosa, Wis., exploded and burned violently, according to city officials and a blog post on SaveAccess.

Local officials there used Light Reading's reporting on the earlier cabinet fires to learn how Avestor's lithium metal polymer batteries had been a factor in previous AT&T equipment cabinet incidents. (See Exclusive Photos: Fire to the Node.)

In the Wauwatosa fire, the main cabinet door was "displaced and landed about five to six feet southwest of the cabinet," according to Assistant Chief Jeffrey S. Hevey, Wauwatosa's fire marshal, who spoke with Light Reading on Monday.

Hevey reckons the cabinet door, which probably weighs 50 to 60 pounds, was blown off during the cabinet's explosion because the "bolts and rivets were sheared off cleanly," which suggests "a sudden, powerful displacement."

The cabinet that exploded in Wauwatosa sat next to a two-story office building with an exterior brick wall, so the building only suffered water damage (as the fire was extinguished) and some melted vinyl shutters as a result of the fire. Though companies transporting Avestor lithium metal polymer batteries are required to adhere to special hazardous material (hazmat) procedures, Hevey says the scene of the fire wasn't treated as a hazmat fire because, "basically, we didn't know much about it."

Wauwatosa residents report that AT&T moved quickly on the scene, clearing the debris and installing a new cabinet within seven hours of the explosion.

Now, all the controversy surrounding AT&T's cabinets has come full circle. The batteries, once deemed to be safe and sound by independent experts, have failed at least four times now, and the carrier has committed to continuing its removal and replacement of the 17,000 Avestor batteries spread out across its network.

On the one hand, AT&T pushed past the experts and is addressing a potentially huge public safety risk. "As we gained experience with these batteries, we felt that they no longer met our stringent safety and performance criteria," an AT&T spokesman told Light Reading on Monday.

On the other hand, Millennium Marketing's Ross says the carrier could have acted more quickly: "It would have been much less disruptive and costly to have addressed this problem a year ago, when it first cropped up."
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=143185





Video Podcasts: The Sleeping Giant on AppleTV
Saul Hansell

While Steve Jobs talked for a long time Tuesday at Macworld Expo about the movie rental feature of iTunes and Apple TV, he spent only a short time demonstrating its capabilities for podcasts. In fact, the ability of Apple TV to view podcasts may in the long run be its most important feature.

“Huh,” you say, thinking that podcasts are Wayne’s World run amok. But in Apple’s world, podcasts are any free video and audio programs. They are usually organized as a series to which you can subscribe, but you can also choose one program at a time.

Until now, podcasts have been programs to download and watch later, usually on an iPod (hence the name). But the online demo of the Apple TV podcast feature shows that programs can be played on demand.

Suddenly, this lets any TV connected to the $229 Apple TV box display any of tens of thousands of programs from the Internet. Readers of this blog have heard it before that free, ad-supported Web video will ultimately dwarf the $1.99-per-show downloads that Apple is selling.

Apple has no restrictions on distributing podcasts that have advertising in them. Indeed, Dina Kaplan, the chief operating officer of Blip.TV, which distributes advertising-supported video programming, says Apple has gone out of its way to help support its advertising technology.

“They know for independent content creators to work, the ads have to travel to, and work on iTunes,” Ms. Kaplan said.

Now many mainstream broadcasters are starting to distribute some of their programs—typically not their most profitable—as podcasts, selling ads on them. For a while, I was trying a Microsoft Zune, which uses its wireless capability to keep the player automatically updated with the latest episodes of podcasts I subscribe to. I got my political news fix by watching “Meet the Press,” CNN’s daily political made for the Web podcast, and other programs on the Zune.

The Apple TV (and other devices) could well create an even better experience for living room televisions. It could, like a Tivo, automatically download programs a viewer wants. And it could allow a viewer to browse a whole range of other programming on demand. In some ways, the podcasting format resembles the browser for television that many TV watchers have been wishing for. It is an open standard that lets any publisher reach any TV.

But it’s not entirely open. It is far, far easier to use iTunes and Apple TV with podcasts that Apple has listed in its podcast directory. So far, Apple has been a benign gatekeeper. But it certainly could start asking programmers to pay for distribution. Also, Apple mainly supports its own Quicktime video format and notably excludes Adobe’s flash—the leader in Web video for streaming content—and Microsoft’s up and coming Silverlight format.

Networks, moreover, may not want to distribute free content through podcasting unless there is a way to restrict users from skipping the commercials. It’s not clear whether Apple has any interest in supporting such a feature. But one footnote in today’s announcements is that Apple did expand the technology for video to be divided into “chapters” so people can jump to certain sections. It isn’t that much of a stretch to imagine that every time you start a new chapter, you will be forced to watch a commercial. That’s not saying this is a good idea, but network execs may insist on this before releasing “Heroes” as a podcast.

It’s possible video podcast format may start to do to television what the blog format did to text publishing.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...etv/index.html





What Bugs Apple Fans
Brian Caulfield

It was a moment that showed the two sides of Steve Jobs. It was the mid-1990s, before Jobs' triumphant return to the company he founded. Newton Munson rode in an elevator with Jobs and two of his employees at NeXT, the computer company Jobs founded after leaving Apple. Jobs was telling the pair off. Loudly.

Munson was going to speak up, but then he thought better of it. The feisty Jobs was giving their work his full attention, Munson realized. "That probably was a wonderful day for them," says Munson, now director of information technology and networking services at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and one of thousands of Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) fans who gathered this week at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco.

If there's one quality that sets Apple apart from other companies, it's the passion its users have for its products. "There's almost a personal connection with the computer," observes Herzl Goldin, a white-bearded man who has been an Apple user for nearly three decades. That passion starts at the top, with Jobs.

But while Apple users will line up to buy Apple's latest and greatest--and will eagerly defend the Mac from slights in the press--they aren't sheep. Wade in among the Apple fans gathered at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco this week and you'll find there are things that bug even the most ardent fans about Apple.

Would you point Apple's attention in a different direction? Or is this as good as it gets? Weigh in. Add your thoughts in the Reader Comments section below.

You can put Steve Jobs at the top of the list. Sure, Jobs deserves a spot in the technology hall of fame. And over the past 10 years, Apple shares are up 34-fold. You can't do that unless you're doing a whole lot right. And Apple users love Jobs for it.

Jobs, however, can't love them all back, at least not the way they want. When blogger Violet Blue--who has pictures of herself posing with her Apple laptop on her Web site--approached Jobs on the floor of the MacWorld Expo to ask for a photo, lightly touching his arm, Jobs rebuffed her. "He told me curtly, flatly that I was rude. And turned his back to me. The small circle of people around him sniggered," Blue wrote on her blog, Tiny Nibbles. "That's the first time I've ever "fangirled" anyone. And it'll be my last."

A more serious concern: When Jobs' attention wanders, will the products they love suffer? Munson, for example, is concerned that Apple's server and hard-core desktop products got short-shrift during Jobs' keynote. "If Steve Jobs isn't interested in it, it might not survive," Munson says. "We want to make sure they keep making 'real' computers."

Jobs' and Apple's obsession with beautiful design also leads to other worries. Dive into the crowd at MacWorld gathered around Apple's latest product, the MacBook Air, and they'll quickly point out what could be the wafer-thin machines biggest flaw: Users can't swap in fresh batteries. (See: " Into Thin (MacBook) Air") That could be a deal-breaker for road warriors looking for a lightweight notebook.

It's a recurring problem in many Apple designs. You can't easily replace the batteries in Apple's iPhone and iPods. Most users will need expert help to get it done. By contrast, laptops and smart phones built by Apple's competitors allow users to easily pop in a new battery. Of course, they're not as pretty.

Another nit, however, is wholly beyond Apple's control: Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ). It's the downside of one of Apple's most brilliant moves, namely switching to Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) microprocessors. The switch makes it possible to seamlessly run Windows applications on Apple's machines, thanks to software from Parallels and VMWare.

However, users who decide to ditch Windows for Apple quickly find that they can't escape the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. If they want to run their Windows applications they've still got to have a copy of Windows somewhere on their Mac--and that means plunking down $200 and up for an edition of Windows Vista.

Of course, the biggest thing bugging Apple fans--at least those who own the company's stock--might be the performance of its shares this year. After the iPhone was unveiled a year ago, nothing Apple could do this year could top the hype the company kicked off with the hot-selling gadget. As a result, Apple's shares are down nearly 6% this year, as the stock market punishes fast-growing technology companies.

Long-term Apple shareholders will just have to console themselves with a dip in the pool or a drive in the car they bought after (hopefully) cashing out some of their gains.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/bus..._0118jobs.html





Sun Micro to Buy MySQL for $1 Billion
Duncan Martell

Sun Microsystems Inc said on Wednesday it would buy Swedish open-source developer MySQL AB for about $1 billion to expand into the $15 billion database market, and that preliminary quarterly results showed no impact from the slowing U.S. economy.

Sun shares rose more than 6 percent, which analysts said had more to do with Sun's results easing concerns about its financial services customers than about the acquisition.

Sun and its Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz have sought to emphasize the company's small but fast-growing software business, which includes the Solaris operating system and Java programming language. If Sun is successful with MySQL, whose database software is used by huge Internet sites such as YouTube and FaceBook, it could mean increased bundled sales of support for MySQL and more hardware sales.

"Sun is looking for new growth engines, and this is one of the areas they're going to try and make a bet on," said Pacific Crest Securities analyst Brent Bracelin.

Schwartz said in an interview that Sun was not seeing less interest in the Internet from consumers due to the U.S. economic slowdown, and pointed to 7 percent growth in its bookings for the December quarter.

"In times of recession, companies look to technology to drive efficiency," Schwartz said.

Forrester Research analyst Mike Gilpin said the acquisition was not so much about going head to head in the database market with Oracle Corp or IBM, but about strengthening its position in helping to run the Internet.

"This is Sun girding its loins for battle against Microsoft in terms of who's going to run the Web," he said.

Many of the biggest Internet sites are built on what is known as a LAMP software bundle: a combination of the Linux operating system, a Web server from open-source provider Apache, MySQL, and the PHP computer programming language.

"Sun is very enthusiastic about making the LAMP (software) stack available in a scale-out way to their customers," Gilpin said, referring to a vast collection of Intel servers lashed together in a high-speed network.

Bold Move For Sun

Sun said it would pay about $800 million cash for all MySQL stock and assume about $200 million in options in the deal.

Analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research said the price was too steep, noting "less than 1 percent of MySQL users pay."

Although MySQL did not disclose revenue or profit figures, Kevin Harvey, general partner at Silicon Valley venture firm Benchmark Capital, which has a 26 percent stake in MySQL, said the company was growing "extremely well."

Harvey, who has been involved in the sale of companies like TellMe Networks to Microsoft Corp and Zimbra to Yahoo! Inc, said the acquisition "solidifies (Sun's) position as a very large open source vendor."

Sun said it expects MySQL's open-source database, widely used across operating systems, hardware vendors and applications, to bring new markets for Sun's systems, software and other technologies.

Sun said it expected the deal to add to its fiscal 2010 operating income, and to close late in the third quarter or early fourth quarter of its fiscal 2008.

Sun also said it expected revenue for its fiscal second quarter ended Dec. 30 to show a rise of about 1 percent to $3.6 billion. Analysts were expecting $3.58 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.

Sun said net profit would range between $230 million to $265 million, or 28 cents to 32 cents per share, up from $133 million, or 15 cents per share, a year earlier.

The company said gross margin in the quarter was around 48 percent, up about 3 percentage points from a year ago. Net bookings were seen up 7 percent at $3.85 billion.

Sun shares were up 89 cents, or 5.9 percent, at $15.87 in afternoon trading. (Additional reporting by Anupreeta Das in San Francisco, Michele Gershberg in New York and Jim Finkle in Boston; Editing by Gunna Dickson, Toni Reinhold)
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssT...28233020080116





U.S. Dominance in Science at Risk, Report Says
Cornelia Dean

The United States remains the world leader in scientific and technological innovation, but its dominance is threatened by economic development elsewhere, particularly in Asia, the National Science Board said on Tuesday in its biennial report on science and engineering.

The country’s position is especially delicate, the agency said, given its reliance on foreign-born workers to fill technical jobs.

The board is the oversight agency for the National Science Foundation, the nation’s leading source of funds for basic research in the physical sciences.

The report, available at www.nsf.gov/statistics/indicators, recommends increased financing for basic research and greater “intellectual interchange” between researchers in academia and industry. The board also called for better efforts to track the globalization of manufacturing and services in the high-tech sector, and their implications for the American economy.

Over all, it said, surveys of science and mathematics education are both “disappointing and encouraging.” Fourth- and eighth-grade students in all ethnic groups showed improvement in math, the report said, but progress in science is far less robust. And knowledge gaps persist between demographic groups, with European- and Asian-Americans scoring higher than students from other groups.

Many Americans remain ignorant about much of science, the board said; for example, many are unable to answer correctly when asked if the Earth moves around the Sun (it does). But they are not noticeably more ignorant than people in other developed countries except on two subjects: evolution and the Big Bang. Although these ideas are organizing principles underlying modern biology and physics, many Americans do not accept them.

“These differences probably indicate that many Americans hold religious beliefs that cause them to be skeptical of established scientific ideas,” the report said, “even when they have some basic familiarity with those ideas.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/sc...nd-nsf.html?hp





Global Patent Explosion Threatens Patent Regulatory System

Global hunger for inventions and new technologies sparks an explosion in patent applications, threatening to swamp the system responsible for dealing with them; another problem: Massive, systematic Chinese campaign, encouraged by the Chinese government, to steal Western trade secrets and violate intellectual property rules

The global appetite for inventions and the money-making spin-offs potential of such patents has sparked an explosion in patent applications, mainly in Asia and the United States, which now threatens to swamp the system responsible for dealing with them, experts have warned. Worldwide patent applications are growing at about 4.7 percent a year, according to the 2007 report of the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), and the pace is even faster among Asian economic power houses such as China and South Korea. In China, applications grew eight-fold in the decade since 1995 and doubled over the same period in South Korea. Alison Brimelow, who heads the Munich, Germany-based European Patent Office (EPO), said China, which is particularly inventive, has overtaken Europe in terms of patents filed, while the United States and Japan still lead the pack. In 2005, 1.6 million applications were filed worldwide. "It is a source of anxiety in that globally, we are looking at a huge backlog of unexamined patents," said Brimelow, whose organization grants patents valid in up to 34 European countries. Piles of unexamined patents represent uncertainty in the market place because "you don't know if someone's got in ahead of you and may come in with an idea that kills yours," she said.

A recent EPO-linked report said patent applications to the organization had quadrupled over the past twenty-five years to reach 208,500 in 2006, mainly because of greater input by new Asian players, increased global business activity, and ever-faster development in information, communication and biotechnologies. A year ago, the backlog at the EPO stood at 440,000 files. In Japan it stood at 838,000, and in the United States at 1.1 million. Of the applications received by the EPO, 30 percent are ruled out in the early stages of the research for "prior art" -- finding out if inventions are indeed new -- while nearly half of the remainder falls by the wayside later in the process. "That does tell us that quite a lot of rubbish is coming in," said Brimelow.

In a bid to reduce backlogs, the EPO is looking at ways of encouraging greater cooperation among patent offices in Europe, and between top international players in Europe, the United States, Japan, China, and South Korea. "Given the rapid growth of both Korea and China, it is very important to find ways to work effectively with them," said Brimelow, who points to difficulties, for example, in cooperating with China in the search for "prior art." Paradoxically, however,it is growing Chinese piracy which is currently putting a dampener on patenting in Europe, according to German business circles. "The technical details (of patent applications) are available online eighteen months after a patent application has been filed, making it easy for an expert to understand them," the head of the German patent office Juergen Schade recently said. Because of pirating "we actually register very few patents," said Heinrich Weiss, head of the SMS steel group. Chinese competitors regularly take advantage of technical data published by patent offices to rush out copycat products, he claimed. The head of German crane manufacturer Demag, which specializes in lifting apparatus for ports, said the Chinese had earlier copied two versions of its cranes. "Now we try to keep the Chinese at a distance for as long as possible," said an official. According to a study by the German association representing producers of machines and industrial equipment (VDMA), four out of five of its members have suffered from Chinese piracy. "Now we recommend that our members only apply for patents if their product involves very complex technical know-how," VDMA official Hannes Hesse.
http://hsdailywire.com/single.php?id=5347





Showdown Looms Over Pirated-Media Directory

Swedish prosecutors target organizers of Pirate Bay, a huge file-sharing guide
Aaron O. Patrick and Sarah Mcbride

One of Hollywood's biggest foes is about to be called on the carpet. After years of steering Web surfers to free entertainment, the organizers of a massive directory of pirated movies, music and software in Sweden could finally face serious legal repercussions.

Based on evidence collected in a 2006 raid on the offices of The Pirate Bay, Swedish prosecutors say that by the end of January they expect to charge the individuals who operate the file-sharing service with conspiracy to breach copyrights.

While Sweden might seem to be an unlikely harbor for pirates of any kind, weak copyright laws, lax enforcement, high broadband penetration and general antipathy toward the entertainment industry have made it a file-sharing free-for-all. Last year, 43% of the people participating in a survey by Sweden's biggest phone company said they planned to download music during the year. A pro-piracy political party has more members than the Greens.

The prosecutors' move comes after years of complaints from Hollywood executives and U.S. government officials. U.S. Embassy officials have described Sweden as home to the "worst Internet piracy in the world," and the Motion Picture Association of America has been fighting to shutter Pirate Bay's site for years.

Sweden, which enjoys some of the world's fastest Internet speeds, strengthened its laws in 2005 to make online theft of movies a crime. But its efforts to crack down have had little success so far. In 2006, shortly after Swedish Justice Department representatives visiting Washington received a stern lecture from U.S. officials about the alleged damage being caused by Pirate Bay, Swedish police raided the site's offices and shut it down.

Although the site was back up within days, the raid inspired hundreds of pro-piracy citizens to take to the streets in protest and led to allegations that the U.S. was interfering in Swedish affairs. Pirate Bay won cult status among file sharers globally, and many Swedes continue to revere its founders as plucky upstarts who dared to take on Hollywood.

Underscoring Sweden's pro-piracy attitude, seven parliamentarians from the ruling conservative party called in a newspaper opinion article last month for the decriminalization of file sharing. "It has become a big part of people's lives," Karl Sigfrid, one of the politicians, said in an interview. "I believe it is impossible to really stop this."

There's no doubt millions of people across the world turn to Pirate Bay whenever they want a free movie, game or piece of software. Its reach is so vast that the family of Ron Goldman has filed suit against the site, claiming in court documents to have lost at least $150,000 because of Pirate Bay. The Goldman family is supposed to receive the proceeds from O.J. Simpson's book "If I Did It," but the text is available free using the directory at ThePirateBay.org.

The trial will probably grapple with complex technical issues. One question is the legality of BitTorrent, a computer program that breaks up large files like movies into small pieces so they can be transferred quickly over the Internet.

Although The Pirate Bay maintains an index of BitTorrent files, the files themselves are stored on the computers of other people around the world. Because the copyright files aren't stored on Pirate Bay computers, the site says it isn't breaking the law. Police, prosecutors and entertainment-industry lawyers say the distinction is bogus. The MPAA estimates The Pirate Bay's Web site generates $60,000 a month in advertising revenue. Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde says he isn't sure about exact revenue numbers, but he maintains that Pirate Bay has never made a profit, in part because of the high cost of maintaining servers around the world.

For all the resources the entertainment industry, the U.S. and Sweden have put into the case, the outcome is far from certain. Even if Sweden wins convictions and jail time, the site won't be shut down immediately. Separate legal action would be required to accomplish that, and it might be beyond the reach of Swedish authorities because Pirate Bay says its computer servers have been moved to other countries. "The suspects hide their information all around the world, and I am pretty sure even if they are convicted that wouldn't stop the service," says Swedish prosecutor Hakan Roswall.

The Pirate Bay's operators say they are expecting the charges and will prepare their defense with the aid of government-funded lawyers for a trial later this year. "We're not worried," says Fredrik Neij, a Pirate Bay co-founder. "We think the law is on our side." The movie industry, which in Europe typically focuses on public-relations campaigns to sway public opinion rather than the lawsuits it uses in the U.S., is hoping that details will emerge to turn the tide against file sharers in Sweden.

That is a tall order given the site's local popularity. For example, the heir to the Wasabröd fortune -- a popular cracker-like snack in Sweden -- has supported the group in the past, allowing a phone company he owned to provide the site with bandwidth and server space in its early days.

The public delights in the group's attitude toward anybody who sends it cease-and-desist letters, which are often published on the Web site along with Pirate Bay's cheeky replies. Some 157,000 movies, songs and other files can be found on the site, according to the MPAA, and 1.5 million people visit it a day, Mr. Neij says. The most popular movie on the site: Will Smith's "I Am Legend."

Rather than operate underground, The Pirate Bay's operators court publicity. Last year, they gained control of an Internet domain name used by the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, a music trade group that is essentially the international version of the Recording Industry Association of America. The site, www.ifpi.com, was redubbed the International Federation of Pirate Interests. The London-based IFPI got the domain name back last month.

The Pirate Bay's operators say they have been followed in recent weeks by camera-toting private detectives in foreign-registered cars. In September, they filed a police complaint claiming that MediaDefender, a U.S. counterpiracy company, had been hired by several Hollywood studios and music companies to hack into their site and shut it down.

MediaDefender, which itself was hacked by a shadowy group last year, denies the accusation. "We're a reputable public company," says Chief Executive Randy Saaf. "We're not going to be doing hacking. That's silly."

While the entertainment industry hopes a guilty verdict will deter other Swedes from file sharing, it acknowledges that making more entertainment available for legal download would help.

"New services are being explored," says Geraldine Moloney, a spokeswoman in Europe for the MPAA. "The industry is committed to offering film fans as much choice as possible."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120001282486582581.html





From the archives

Hollywood Execs Blame Texting For Summer Movie Flops
Ed Driscoll

August 31, 2003- According to Andrew Gumbel of London's Independent, some Hollywood studio executives think they know why their big-budget blockbusters bombed at the box office. (And no, an excess of alliteration isn't the reason!) It's all your fault, if you used a text-enabled cell phone to instantly tell your friends that the film was bad! Gumbel writes:

Quote:
In Hollywood, 2003 is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed blockbuster, and the industry now thinks it knows why.

No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely nothing new about that.

The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."

But those days are over, because the technology of hand-held text-message devices has drastically cut down the time it takes for movie-goers to tell their friends that a heavily promoted summer action movie is a waste of time and money.

Five years ago, when summer movies were arguably just as bad as they are now, the average audience drop-off between a film's opening weekend and its second weekend was 40 per cent. This summer, it has been 51 per cent. In some cases, the drop-off has started between the film's opening on a Friday night and the main screenings on Saturday. The upshot: unsuccessful films disappearing from cinemas so fast that there is no time for second opinions.

A 56 per cent drop over the first week of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was not what the studio moguls had expected. As Arnold Schwarzenegger himself might say, hasta la vista, baby.
As Peter Biskind explains in Easy Rider, Raging Bulls, nationwide simultaneous releases of films only became standard practice for Hollywood in the mid-1970s, when Universal tested it on Jaws, and found they had a huge hit on their hands. This was also an era when ten or 12 million dollars was considered an expensive movie. These days, the studios appear to be caught in a catch-22: budgets have escalated to the point where they're extremely unlikely to be returned in an opening weekend. But thanks to the Web, and apparently, text-enabled cell phones(!), the speed that word of mouth travels has moved to the point where a second weekend of decent returns on a film that isn't very good is less likely to happen.

The recording industry has blamed downloads for reducing their sales, rather than questioning the quality of the content they release. It appears that the film industry is doing the same with another new technology.
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/08/31/124903.php





Suzanne the 1000th Malone
Alex Papadimoulis

"In my home county of Wake County, North Carolina", Scott "Malone" wrote in, "when you request library books from another branch, an automated telephone system will call you back when the books arrive at your local branch. However, whenever my wife reserves books, the telephone system calls up and lets 'Suzanne the 1000th Malone' know her books are ready."

The messages sounded just like this: suzanne1000.mp3. Or, if you can't listen to that message:
This is the Wake County Public Library. Suzanne, the 1000th, Malone, you have materials waiting for you at the Cameron Village branch. They will remain on hold for three days before returning to circulation. Thank you, and have a good day.

Scott continued, "This has been going on for years and it had simply been an inside joke for us. Who knows, there must have been 999 other Suzanne Malones in Wake County."

"However, after a nine year hiatus, I actually stepped foot in the library. Suzanne the 1000th Malone had forgotten to return some books and the automated system was calling daily, counting down the days until it was going to send out the automated goons to collect."

"While returning the late books and paying my $8 fine, I asked the librarian why the automated telephone system referred to my wife as Suzanne The 1000th Malone. She looks at the entry in her database and everything looks fine:
Name: Suzanne M. Malone

"Now if you look at that for a minute, you will see the reason for one of the most absurd software bugs I have ever encountered. Yes, 'M' (her middle name is Marie) is 1000 in Roman numerals. I guess if my name were 'Pope John Paul IV', then I would want the system to interpret Roman numerals. Of course interpreting Roman numerals in the person's middle name or something on the order of 'M', is just plain stupid.

"I guess all those poor saps out there whose middle initial are I, V, L, X, C, D or M have their own inside jokes too.


Note: Scott & Suzanne's last name was changed (and the message re-recorded via AT&T TTS) to protect the innocent.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Suza...th-Malone.aspx





We’re All Gonna Die! Grab Your Video Camera!
Manohla Dargis

It was only last month that Will Smith started up boogeyman patrol in Manhattan in “I Am Legend,” and yet here we go again with the end of the world, or at least some of the city’s most exclusive ZIP codes. This time, the annihilation comes courtesy of a reptilian creature with a slithering, smashing tail, multiple grabby appendages and an apparently insatiable appetite for destruction. At one point in “Cloverfield” you get a close, very personal look at that hungry mouth, which agape recalls that of the adult monster designed by H. R. Giger for the first “Alien,” though without any of the older beastie’s freakily sexualized menace or resonance.

Like “Cloverfield” itself, this new monster is nothing more than a blunt instrument designed to smash and grab without Freudian complexity or political critique, despite the tacky allusions to Sept. 11. The screams and the images of smoke billowing through the canyons of Lower Manhattan may make you think of the attack, and you may curse the filmmakers for their vulgarity, insensitivity or lack of imagination. (The director, Matt Reeves, lives in Los Angeles, as does the writer, Drew Goddard, and the movie’s star producer, J. J. Abrams.) But the film is too dumb to offend anything except your intelligence, and the monster does cut a satisfying swath through the cast, so your only complaint may be, What took it so long?

As it happens, “Cloverfield” clocks in at 84 minutes, a running time that includes the usual interminable final credits. The movie moves relatively fast, though it’s nowhere near as economical as its colossus, whose thunderous shrieks and fiery projectiles bring a downtown loft party to a merciful, abrupt end. The loft belongs to a blandly pretty young thing named Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who, on the eve of relocating to Japan for work, has been thrown a farewell party by some other blandly pretty young things. The names we’re meant to remember are those of Rob’s brother, Jason (Mike Vogel), and Jason’s insignificant other, Lily (Jessica Lucas); a bored, boring single, Marlena (Lizzy Caplan); and Rob’s nitwit buddy, Hud (T. J. Miller), who has been recruited to videotape the party.

“Cloverfield” is nominally a monster movie, but mostly it’s a feature-length gimmick. It opens with some official-looking United States government text claiming that the following images were retrieved from what was once known as Central Park. The big (or rather only) idea here is that almost everything we subsequently see is the presumably unedited video material shot by Hud, who, though initially reluctant to pick up the camera, develops a mania for documentation once the monster strikes. So consummate is his dedication to his version of cinéma vérité that he keeps the camera plugged to his eye even while he’s running through hailstorms of debris, trying to cross a fast-collapsing bridge and witnessing friends melt down, bleed out and even die.

For a brief, hopeful moment, I thought the filmmakers might be making a point about how the contemporary compulsion to record the world has dulled us to actual lived experience, including the suffering of others — you know, something about the simulacrum syndrome in the post-Godzilla age at the intersection of the camera eye with the narcissistic “I.” Certainly this straw-grasping seemed the most charitable way to explain characters whose lack of personality (“This is crazy, dude!”) is matched only by their incomprehensible stupidity. Smart as Tater Tots and just as differentiated, Rob and his ragtag crew behave like people who have never watched a monster movie or the genre-savvy “Scream” flicks or even an episode of “Lost” (Hello, Mr. Abrams!), much less experienced the real horrors of Sept. 11.

And, so, much like a character from a crummy movie, Rob hears from an estranged lover, Beth (Odette Yustman), who, after the attack, begs for help on her miraculously working cellphone. Against the odds and a crush of fleeing humanity, he tries to rescue her (unbelievably, ludicrously, the others tag along), which is meant to show what a good guy he is. But heroism without a fully realized hero proves as much a dead end as subjective camerawork that’s executed without a discernible subjectivity. Like too many big-studio productions, “Cloverfield” works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt.

Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.


“Cloverfield” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Monster violence and bloody wounds.


CLOVERFIELD

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Matt Reeves; written by Drew Goddard; director of photography, Michael Bonvillain; edited by Kevin Stitt; production designer, Martin Whist; visual effects by Double Negative and Tippett Studio; produced by J. J. Abrams and Bryan Burk; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes.

WITH: Lizzy Caplan (Marlena), Jessica Lucas (Lily), T. J. Miller (Hud), Michael Stahl-David (Rob), Mike Vogel (Jason) and Odette Yustman (Beth).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/movies/18clov.html





Scavengers Redefine Recycling With Used Books
Susan Dominus

By 9:15 most mornings, Thomas Germain, a ruddy-faced man in a yellow slicker, is pushing his oversize black wheeled suitcase down 12th Street in the direction of the Strand Bookstore on Broadway. Sometimes, the suitcase is stuffed full of books; sometimes the books fill a box or two or three that he balances carefully on top of it, a mass of swaying literature he rolls all the way from Greenwich Village or SoHo or Stuyvesant Town.

By 9:30, he’s often sitting outside the Strand, waiting for the store to open, drinking a breakfast of Budweiser with his friend Brian Martin, who’s pushed and pulled his own collection of books to the same destination in a large, teetering grocery cart.

The men are regulars at the Strand, book-scavenging semipros who help the city’s best-known used-book store keep its shelves stocked. They have no overhead, no employees and no boss. They also have no home. What they have is experience, and a fitful sense of industry.

“Perseverance,” Mr. Germain said one recent Monday. “Other people fail at this because they don’t persevere.”

For them, that means rising from their street-side slumber around 3 a.m. to start sifting through recycling bins outside people’s homes or in front of buildings. (For the record, paperbacks are recyclable; the city requires the covers to be removed from hardcovers before they can be recycled, a request that for booklovers is tantamount to asking 10-year-old girls to rip Barbie’s head off before discarding her in the trash.)

The two 50-ish men — Tommy Books and Leprechaun , they call themselves — are often the first people waiting on the Strand’s bookselling line, a queue also populated by N.Y.U. students, genteel booklovers moving to smaller apartments, frugal cleaner-outers, and a fair number of down-and-out fellow book scavengers, many of whom live on the street.

Hundreds of men and a smaller number of women eke out a living scavenging books in Manhattan, according to Mitchell Duneier, author of “Sidewalk,” a book about the subculture of sidewalk book scavengers and vendors. Some of them sell their books on the street; others, the less entrepreneurial, or the more impatient, go for the surefire cash at the Strand.

When the store opened that Monday morning, Tommy Books and Leprechaun each in turn emptied their boxes onto the counter, where Neil Winokur, a Strand employee, quickly sorted them into two piles. An incomplete encyclopedia got rejected, as did Donna Tartt’s “Secret History.” (Too many on the market.) An hour or two later, another scavenger scored a hit selling the store a supply of children’s books, but had no luck with Newt Gingrich’s “Winning the Future” (“No one buys him here,” said Mr. Winokur).

Around lunchtime, Neil Harrison, another regular who’s lived mostly on the street, showed up with a stash of leather-bound 19th-century books, their marbleized covers aswirl with greens and blues. He said that a building superintendent had allowed him to clear out a storage area used by a man who had died whose family did not want the books. Mr. Harrison didn’t know the authors — Thackeray, Gibbon — but he knew enough to know that the books had value.

Sure enough, the books went straight to the third floor, where book preservationists would clean them up and eventually offer them for sale. “Six hundred,” Mr. Winokur told him (he thought the store could sell the Thackeray volumes for between $1,000 and $1,500). When he heard the number, Mr. Harrison crossed himself, then whooped. He peeled off a $20 to give a clerk as a tip; he left and came back five minutes later to hand Mr. Winokur $20, paying back some money he’d borrowed from the store the week before.

Is there any other industry in which such high-quality goods regularly make their way to consumers via a trash bin? Stand in the bookselling line at the Strand and the store starts to feel less like a dusty bastion of erudition and more like a messy, mulchy place where old ideas struggle to find new life.

Even in better days than these for books, the economy of publishing was bloated, based on guesswork, mercurial taste and the talents of people whose keenest interests rarely included making money. Book recycling in Manhattan is just the opposite, a perfectly efficient system with no fat at all: So many discarded books go from someone’s garbage to a scavenger to a bookseller and, often enough, land gently in someone else’s home. Feel guilty, if you must, for never finishing Tony Judt’s “Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945”; but don’t feel guilty for chucking it. It will most likely live to haunt someone else’s bedside table. It will find a new home.

Tommy Books and Leprechaun would like a new home themselves, they said. Also, a van.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/ny...igcity.html?hp





Amazon's Free Shipping Costing €1,000 Per Day in France
Nate Anderson

Did you hear the one about Amazon? It offered free shipping in France, got sued for it by the French Booksellers' Union, and lost. Now it's choosing to pay €1,000 a day rather than follow the court's order. Ba-da-bing!

No, it's not funny, but that's because it's not a joke. The Tribunal de Grande Instance (a French appeals court) in Versailles ruled back in December that Amazon was violating the country's 1981 Lang law with its free shipping offer. That law forbids booksellers from offering discounts of more than 5 percent off the list price, and Amazon was found to be exceeding that discount when the free shipping was factored in.

The company was told to start charging within ten days or pay a daily fine. It also owes €100,000 to the French Booksellers' Union for the court battle and for the losses it has apparently caused them. With the holidays over and the ten-day grace period over, Amazon has officially announced its plan to ignore the court order and pay the fine instead, according to the International Herald Tribune.

Amazon can do so for 30 days (€30,000), but after that time the court will review the fine. They could raise it, or they could lower it, but given that Amazon has chosen to flip the justices the bird, guess which outcome is more likely? At some point, if Amazon doesn't change its ways, the fine will probably be jacked up so high that the company has no choice but to comply.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, has taken to the virtual airwaves to rally the French public in support of Amazon's free shipping. He sent out a recent e-mail to French customers in which he claimed that "France would be the only country in the world where the free delivery practiced by Amazon would be declared illegal." He then asked people to sign an online petition that has so far garnered more than 120,000 signatures.

It's a bold and potentially antagonistic move for an American company to make, but Amazon is serious about its free shipping. Judging from the response to Bezos' e-mail so far, so are Amazon's customers.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...in-france.html





Broken Hearts, Sore Thumbs: Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular
Norimitsu Onishi

Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, “The Tale of Genji,” a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.

Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.

“Will cellphone novels kill ‘the author’?” a famous literary journal, Bungaku-kai, asked on the cover of its January issue. Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature.

Whatever their literary talents, cellphone novelists are racking up the kind of sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of.

One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors.

After cellphone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007, according to a closely watched list by Tohan, a major book distributor.

“My mother didn’t even know that I was writing a novel,” said Ms. Rin, who, like many cellphone novelists, goes by only one name. “So at first when I told her, well, I’m coming out with a novel, she was like, what?

“She didn’t believe it until it came out and appeared in book stores.”

The cellphone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making Web site, Maho no i-rando, realized that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialized cellphone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began booming only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached one million last month, according to Maho no i-rando.

The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by mobile-phone companies’ decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004.

“Their cellphone bills were easily reaching $1,000, so many people experienced what they called ‘packet death,’ and you wouldn’t hear from them for a while,” said Shigeru Matsushima, an editor who oversees the book uploading site at Starts Publishing, a leader in republishing cellphone novels.

The affordability of cellphones coincided with the coming of age of a generation of Japanese for whom cellphones, more than personal computers, had been an integral part of their lives since junior high school. So they read the novels on their cellphones, even though the same Web sites were also accessible by computer. They punched out text messages with their thumbs with blinding speed, and used expressions and emoticons, like smilies and musical notes, whose nuances were lost on anyone over the age of 25.

“It’s not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there,” said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. “Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write.”

Indeed, many cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers.

Cellphone writers are not paid for their work, no matter how many millions of times their novels might be read online. The payoff, if any, comes when the novels are reproduced and sold as traditional books. Readers have free access to the Web sites that carry the novels, or pay at most $1 to $2 a month, but the sites make most of their money from advertising.

Critics say the novels owe a lot to a genre devoured by the young: comic books. In cellphone novels, characters tend to remain undeveloped and descriptions thin, while paragraphs are often fragments and consist mostly of dialogue.

“Traditionally, Japanese would depict a scene emotionally, like ‘The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country,’ ” Mika Naito, a novelist, said, referring to the famous opening sentence of Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country.”

“In cellphone novels, you don’t need that,” said Ms. Naito, 36, who recently began writing cellphone novels at the urging of her publisher. “If you limit it to a certain place, readers won’t be able to feel a sense of familiarity.”

Written in the first person, many cellphone novels read like diaries. Almost all the authors are young women delving into affairs of the heart, spiritual descendants, perhaps, of Shikibu Murasaki, the 11th century royal lady-in-waiting who wrote “The Tale of Genji.”

“Love Sky,” a debut novel by a young woman named Mika, was read by 20 million people on cellphones or on computers, according to Maho no i-rando, where it was first uploaded. A tear-jerker featuring adolescent sex, rape, pregnancy and a fatal disease — the genre’s sine qua non — the novel nevertheless captured the young generation’s attitude, its verbal tics and the cellphone’s omnipresence. Republished in book form, it became the No. 1 selling novel last year and was made into a movie.

Given the cellphone novels’ domination of the mainstream, critics no longer dismiss them, though some say they should be classified with comic books or popular music.

Ms. Rin said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold.

“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

As the genre’s popularity leads more people to write cellphone novels, though, an existential question has arisen: can a work be called a cellphone novel if it is not composed on a cellphone, but on a computer or, inconceivably, in longhand?

“When a work is written on a computer, the nuance of the number of lines is different, and the rhythm is different from writing on a cellphone,” said Keiko Kanematsu, an editor at Goma Books, a publisher of cellphone novels. “Some hard-core fans wouldn’t consider that a cellphone novel.”

Still, others say the genre is not defined by the writing tool.

Ms. Naito, the novelist, said she writes on a computer and sends the text to her cellphone, with which she rearranges the content. Unlike the first-time cellphone novelists in their teens or early 20s, Ms. Naito said she felt more comfortable writing on a computer.

But at least one member of the cellphone generation has made the switch to computers. A year ago, one of Starts Publishing’s young stars, Chaco, gave up her phone even though she could compose much faster with it by tapping with her thumb.

“Because of writing on the cellphone, her nail had cut into the flesh and became bloodied,” said Mr. Matsushita of Starts.

“Since she’s switched to a computer,” he added, “her vocabulary’s gotten richer and her sentences have also grown longer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/wo...0japan.html?hp





The Church of Scientology Sued for Copyright Infringement

By now, you probably have seen the slightly creepy, nine minute video of Tom Cruise discussing his infinite love of the Church of Scientology with the theme from Mission: Impossible looping every eight seconds in the background. As the video spread across the internet, the distraught Church of Scientology sent out several cease and desist letters claiming copyright infringement. A day after its release, it was taken down from YouTube and several other sites also stopped hosting the video. The litigious religious cult almost was able to cull the hype.

Apparently this has backfired. Not only has the mainstream media picked up the story and shown the video in its own endless loop, but Danny Elfman, who composed the music to Mission: Impossible, is also claiming copyright infringement for his music being used without his permission. That horrible, looping in the background of the video is copyrighted and Mr. Elfman has stated through his lawyer that permission to use the music was never granted. Mr. Elfman’s lawyer filed suit in the Los Angeles County Superior Court this afternoon.

The Church of Scientology has not commented on the lawsuit. Danny Elfman's only comment was that he is in no way shape or form related to Jenna Elfman and requested that the media and blogosphere to please stop asking.
http://www.holyjuan.com/2008/01/chur...-sued-for.html


















Until next week,

- js.



















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