"To criminalize the necessary materials of discovery is one of the worst things you can do in a free society." – Shawn Carlson
"That's not what we call Internet at all. That's what we call cable TV." – Sir Tim Berners-Lee
"This [Court’s] approach of course finds no support anywhere in our legal system, and was clearly erroneous." – Ray Beckerman
"We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace." – P.J. Rushing
"Whatever is given to trade secrets law is taken away from the freedom of speech. Where both cannot be accommodated, it is the statutory quasi-property right that must give way, not the deeply rooted constitutional right to share and acquire information." – P.J. Rushing
"This ruling will probably prove instructive to other online writers. It says that what makes a journalist is not the format but the function." – Kurt Opsahl
"We didn't sit down and think, 'What's the best way to make money on the Internet?' This is very much a labor of love. When we started the company, there was no commercial use of the Internet." – Col Needham
"This is what the summer is all about. With `Da Vinci Code' doing better than anticipated ... we could not be in a better position." – Paul Dergarabedian
"People smoke when they drink, and people smoke when they fornicate. These smoking laws are going to drive women back onto the streets courtesy of the health minister." – William Albon
"They said rest assured. They drill holes in it so it's useless." – Henry Gerbus
An Angry Establishment Missteps
Popular torrent site operators at The Pirate Bay got a startling wake up call when 50 of Sweden's finest raided the feisty little group, seizing servers, arresting members at home and - open wide kids! - taking DNA samples. The good news is that Sweden's crime rate is now so low the cops have plenty of time on their hands. The bad news is that dozens of them are spending it by terrorizing tiny groups at the behest of U.S. interests. The MPAA crowed victorious about the raid but they'll be begging for the thorazine soon. The bold violation of these Swede's sovereign rights has sparked outrage over both the scope of police abuse and the growing power of international conglomerates that use extra-legal means to accomplish what they otherwise can't.
It is not so different here.
In the States the judge-musician who found the late ex-Beatle George Harrison guilty of plagiarism is now hearing an RIAA John Doe file-sharing case and has denied defense motions to quash a shaky subpoena, appearing, according to the defense both erroneous and ignorant of the law, not to mention having a possible conflict of interest. It is apparently Federal Judge Richard Owen's dangerous contention that the mere fact of possessing property suggests it's stolen. To the judge, having music on a computer means by definition it's probably ill-gotten and must be investigated, something I'm sure Apples' legions of paying iTunes customers would be startled to hear.
Clearly this judge was acting clueless, but he got away with it under the nose of defense attorney Ray Beckerman and maybe that's even worse. It's Beckerman's job to convince the court, by education if necessary, of the profound fallacy of such thinking. He should have insisted to the judge that the act of placing music on a hard drive must come with a presumption of innocence, that
simply having a song on a computer cannot mean it is there illegally, because if it did then every single computer user in the United States is a presumptive felon
because they all have files! That's the RIAA's circular reasoning in essence and I think the judge would've grasped the utter nonsense of it had it been explained in such a way, assuming he wasn't being deliberately obtuse. Then again as an aspiring opera composer the judge can be expected to have such compositions on his own hard drive so being obtuse, deliberately or otherwise might not be beyond the realm of possibility. The RIAA lawyer slipped by Beckerman, dizzying Owens with conspiratorial chaff about Kazaa share folders the judge wasn't making much of an effort to follow and weren't particularly relevant anyway. Motion denied!
We see this over and over again. Our cultural rights lost not only by lawmakers and jurists who don't get it, but by the very people hired to defend us who don't quite get it or can't explain it either.
Very unfortunate.
Contrast this with the appeals
verdict last week on the Apple bloggers vs. the California Superior court. That court originally ruled against the bloggers, demanding their sources of leaked Apple marketing plans, but the appeals court decisively overturned the judgment on every count. For anyone interested in how a responsible court should work, with
judges that actually take the time to grasp the issues, look no further. It's a well-reasoned, important legal decision.
Quote:
|
"It is often impossible to predict with confidence which technological changes will affect individual and collective life dramatically, and which will come and go without lasting effects. Any of them may revolutionize society in ways we can only guess at. The lawful acquisition of information necessary to anticipate and respond to such changes is the birthright of every human, formally enshrined for Americans in our state and federal constitutions. The publications at issue here fully implicated that birthright and the interests protected by those constitutional guarantees."
|
With language both common and lofty he focuses his argument,
Quote:
|
"We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace."
|
And arrives at the heart of the matter (emphasis mine),
Quote:
|
"This case involves not a purely private theft of secrets for venal advantage, but a journalistic disclosure to, in the trial court's words, 'an interested public.' In such a setting, whatever is given to trade secrets law is taken away from the freedom of speech. In the abstract, at least, it seems plain that where both cannot be accommodated, it is the statutory quasi-property right that must give way, not the deeply rooted constitutional right to share and acquire information."
|
As long as we have judges like this in office in the West, we will not totally abandon the hope that our constantly diminishing rights here both in America and Europe may be restored.
There were a few things I had planned for the holiday weekend, but one I didn't anticipate was reading a sixty-six page legal brief. Kudos to this court of appeals for
writing one that was worth it.
Enjoy,
Jack.
June 3rd, ’06
Judge Says He Will Deny John Does' Motion to Vacate and Quash in Warner v. Does 1-149
Friday, May 19, 2006. In Warner v. Does 1-149 today, at the first major oral argument of a motion by "John Doe" defendants to (a) vacate the RIAA's ex parte discovery order, (b) quash the subpoena issued pursuant to the order, and (c) sever and dismiss the case as to all "John Does" other than Doe #1, Judge Richard Owen terminated the oral argument with an indication that he was denying the John Doe defendants' motion to vacate the ex parte discovery order and quash the subpoena issued to ISP Time Warner Cable. The judge did not indicate how he would rule on so much of the motion as sought to sever and dismiss as to John Does 2-149 for misjoinder.
Among the issues which had been put in issue by the motion papers were:
-whether the evidence the RIAA had submitted in support of the ex parte order sufficiently made out a prima facie case;
-whether the evidence the RIAA submitted was technically valid;
-whether merely 'making available' is a copyright infringement;
-whether the complaint in the action adequately pleads copyright infringement; and
-whether there was any basis for joining 149 different defendants in one case.
During the argument the Judge first indicated it was his understanding that plaintiffs had alleged that the exhibit A songs were downloaded by the defendants.
When the RIAA's lawyer conceded that the downloads were by the RIAA's own investigators, the Judge said the RIAA had the right to find out if in fact the defendants had downloaded them too.
When the defendants' lawyer -- the undersigned -- brought to the Court's attention that files on the defendants' computer might have been downloaded lawfully, the Judge cut off the defendants' lawyer's argument, and said that was the weakness in the defendants' case -- the word "might". The judge then indicated he was denying defendants' motion.
Earlier in the argument, when defendants' lawyer said that the plaintiffs' lawsuits were 'wrecking people's lives', the Judge asked where defendants' lawyer was getting that from, and indicated that in view of that statement he was inclined to disbelieve anything defendants' lawyer might say.
The proceedings were recorded, and a transcript will be posted when it becomes available.
Warner v. Does is the case where two Two "John Does", one from the Southwest, the other from the Greater New York area, joined forces in Manhattan to fight back against the RIAA.
As it did in Motown v. Does 1-99 , the RIAA hesitated to adopt the strategy it had employed in Atlantic v. Does 1-25, and refrained from introducing any evidence in opposition to the defendants' motion. In Atlantic it had introduced a second declaration by RIAA executive Jonathan Whitehead which contradicted his first declaration, in attempting to rebut the attack by computer programmer Zi Mei on the legitimacy of the RIAA's "investigation". In this case, as in Motown, it only introduced a memorandum of law by its counsel.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...john-does.html
'A Dark Moment For Our Country'
p2pnet
"All in all, this was a dark moment for our country."
That's New York lawyer Ray Beckerman's view on a decision by judge Richard Owen where two John Does, one from the Southwest the other from New York, teamed up in Manhattan to fight back against the Big Four Organized Music cartel's RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).
Beckerman represented both Does.
"I'm very disappointed in the proceedings," he told p2pnet. "I was hoping for a full and fair opportunity to air the landmark issues that were before the court. Instead, it seemed that the court wasn't familiar with the facts or the law, and placed a burden on the defendants to disprove the unsupported allegations the plaintiffs' counsel had irresponsibly made in their complaint and discovery application.
"This approach of course finds no support anywhere in our legal system, and was clearly erroneous.
"The judge first indicated it was his understanding that the plaintiffs had evidence that the defendants had made unauthorized downloads. When the RIAA's counsel - to his credit - admitted that the evidence showed only downloads by plaintiffs' own investigators, the judge then ruled that the RIAA is entitled to bring lawsuits to find out if the defendants had in fact downloaded the songs illegally, and cut off the oral argument.
"The judge also indicated that he was disinclined to believe anything I would say because I had said that the RIAA's lawsuits 'wreck people's lives'.
"I don't think that was an appropriate approach for a judge to take, especially on such important issues. If the Court's ruling were appealable, I'd file an appeal. Unfortunately it isn't. And it will never be subject to review by an appeals court, because the RIAA will - as it always does - discontinue the John Doe lawsuit."
During the argument, Owen first said he understood the labels had alleged songs were downloaded by the Does, says Beckerman, going on:
"When the RIAA's lawyer conceded that the downloads were by the RIAA's own investigators, the judge said the RIAA had the right to find out if in fact the defendants had downloaded them too.
"When, as the defendants' lawyer, I brought to the Court's attention that files on the defendants' computer might have been downloaded lawfully, the Judge cut off my argument, and said that was the weakness in the defendants' case - the word 'might'. The judge then indicated he was denying defendants' motion.
"Earlier in the argument, when I said that the plaintiffs' lawsuits were 'wrecking people's lives', the Judge asked where defendants' lawyer was getting that from, and indicated that in view of that statement he was inclined to disbelieve anything defendants' lawyer might say."
As it did in Motown v. Does 1-99 , the RIAA, "hesitated to adopt the strategy it had employed in Atlantic v. Does 1-25, and refrained from introducing any evidence in opposition to the defendants' motion," states Beckerman. In Atlantic, it introduced testimony by the RIAA's Jonathan Whitehead which contradicted his first statement when he'd tried to rebut the attack by computer programmer Zi Mei on the legitimacy of the RIAA's "investigation".
Here's an excerpt from transcript. 'Gabriel' is Holme Roberts & Owen lawyer Richard Gabriel.
THE COURT: You are skipping over one sentence, which it reads that: "Exhibit A identifies on a defendant-by-defendant basis that each defendant has, without the permission or consent of the plaintiffs, downloaded."
MR. GABRIEL: Distributed and --
THE COURT: But you don't need to go beyond "downloaded," do you?
MR. GABRIEL: I submit we don't. What the law requires, contrary to what Mr. Beckerman says, is we need to allege in a Complaint that we own a valid copyright, that we have registered the valid copyright, and that the plaintiffs had violated exclusive rights.
THE COURT: Isn't that the end of it?
MR. GABRIEL: And we have done that.
MR. BECKERMAN: Ask him to identify which songs the defendant downloaded.
THE COURT: He did. He does in Exhibit A.
MR. BECKERMAN: No, he does not.
THE COURT: Yes, he does.
MR. BECKERMAN: If he does, he misrepresents to the Court. Ask him what basis he has --
THE COURT: Counsel, look at Doe 37. The artist is named what, Linkin Park, "One Step Closer."
MR. BECKERMAN: Your Honor, Mr. Gabriel described to your Honor the investigation that he conducted. He said to you -- he represented to your Honor that the investigation consisted of his investigators at MediaSentry, using some proprietary software and techniques, went on and downloaded these songs, and that's what Exhibit A is. He's saying that the plaintiffs' agents downloaded those songs.
THE COURT: He said the defendants downloaded it. They allege the defendant downloaded.
MR. BECKERMAN: He has no basis for alleging that and he told your Honor what the basis was.
THE COURT: He said if you go to trial and it doesn't end up being proven, you have won your case.
MR. BECKERMAN: But he is here to admit to you that he has no evidence of anybody -- of the defendants having downloaded those songs. He has no clue as to how the defendants --
THE COURT: Counsel, would you tell me how you get, for example, to Doe 37? What I'm hearing here I'm having trouble putting in some frame of rationality.
MR. GABRIEL: Yes, your Honor.
THE COURT: Tell me, how do you get to the seven or eight songs for Doe 37?
MR. GABRIEL: We find these particular Doe share files, as a number of all the other Does. We then will take a picture of what is in their computer shared file.
THE COURT: Showing where it went?
MR. GABRIEL: It doesn't show a line. We know it got to their computer, and we believe that provides a sufficient Rule 11 basis for asserting downloading. Somehow it got to their shared drive, and we do take it and make -- we then download ourselves so we can confirm that it is our copyrighted recording by listening to it, by making sure this is our recording.
THE COURT: Run this by me again, please. You hav somebody go where?
MR. GABRIEL: Right into Kazaa, one of these programs like you or I could.
THE COURT: Right.
MR. GABRIEL: And then they will look for people's shared files who have a large number of music files.
THE COURT: How do you get, for example, to Mariah Carey's "One Sweet Day"?
MR. GABRIEL: By looking at the person's shared file.We get the whole shared file, and not everything --
THE COURT: But tell me, whose shared file?
MR. GABRIEL: We get the defendant's shared file, the shared file on the computer associated with the defendant.
THE COURT: With at this point only identified as 37?
MR. GABRIEL: That's correct. Actually, more specifically identified by this Internet protocol address that I referred to you.
THE COURT: I got you.
MR. GABRIEL: So we know the numbers --
THE COURT: You look in that person's shared file?
MR. GABRIEL: Right.
THE COURT: And you see that they've got Mariah Carey in there?
MR. GABRIEL: Right.
THE COURT: OK. And there is no authorization for that?
MR. GABRIEL: Right.
MR. BECKERMAN: Nope, your Honor, they have no knowledge of how that file got there. It might be completely lawful. It could be a lawful --
THE COURT: It might be, but you know, if the bank robber is running away from a bank in a car and he's got a bag with $5,000 in the back, he might say I took that out as a loan, and, therefore, you've got an issue of fact as between him and the bank as to whether this isn't the guy they gave $5,000 at the point of a gun. So that might be -- what you just said is in my opinion what kills your position here. They've got this and if it might be, and it is logical that it is and entirely possible that it could be, they want to know who it is and you want to depose him, right?
MR. BECKERMAN: No, they want to sue him.
THE COURT: Sue him, of course.
MR. BECKERMAN: Your Honor, the plaintiff has the burden of establishing that they have a case. If your Honor --
THE COURT: I find on these papers they have established that, and, therefore, your motion to suppress these subpoenas is denied.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/8906
The Pirate Bay
SITE DOWN - WILL BE UP AND FULLY FUNCTIONAL WITHIN A DAY OR TWO
In the morning of 2006-05-31 the Swedish National Criminal Police showed a search warrant to Rix|Port80 personnell. The warrant was valid for all datacentres of Rix|Port80 and was directed at The Pirate Bay. The allegation was breach of copy-right law, alternatively assisting breach of copy-right law.
The police officers were allowed access to the racks where the TPB servers and other servers are hosted. All servers in the racks were clearly marked as to which sites run on each. The police took down all servers in the racks, including the non-commercial site Piratbyrĺn, the mission of which is to defend the rights of TPB via public debate.
According to police officers simultaneously questioning the president of Rix|Port80, the purpose of the search warrant is to take down TPB in order to secure evidence of the allegations mentioned above.
The necessity for securing technical evidence for the existance of a web-service which is fully official, the legality of which has been under public debate for years and whose principals are public persons giving regular press interviews, could not be explained. Asked for other reasoning behind the choice to take down a site, without knowing wether it is illegal or not, the officers explained that this is normal.
The TPB can receive compensation from the Swedish state in case that the upcoming legal processes show that TPB is indeed legal.
http://thepiratebay.org/
Police Close File Sharing Site
James Savage
Police have closed down The Pirate Bay, a Sweden-based file sharing site and one of the most popular websites of its kind in the world.
Three people were taken in for questioning after police raids in Sweden on Wednesday. The trio, ages 22, 24 and 28, are suspected of violating property rights legislation, police spokesman Ulf Göranzon said.
Servers connected to the site have been impounded and the site was down on Wednesday afternoon, although the operators of The Pirate Bay have set up a temporary website to provide updates on the situation.
Some fifty policemen and women were involved in raids on ten homes and offices in Sweden.
The three men taken in by police were still being questioned on Wednesday afternoon. They all have links to The Pirate Bay. Prosecutors will decide whether to detain the men after they have been questioned.
"The suspects are not people who download files, but are people who have relations to the website," Ulf Göranzon told The Local.
He would not reveal anything more about the roles that the men played.
Police have been monitoring the website and the men behind it for some time. Computers were taken during raids on the men's homes and offices to secure evidence.
"We are now going to look at how the operation is structured," Göranzon said.
"At the moment we are talking to lots of people about this case. We are still at a very early stage in our investigations," he said.
He would not reveal whether police had their eyes on further suspects.
Henrik Pontén, lawyer at Antipiratbyrĺn (The Anti-Pirate Bureau) in Stockholm, welcomed the move to close down the site.
"It is good that the Swedish police are now prioritising this kind of crime. The copyright laws finance creativity within film, computer gaming, music and other culture," said Pontén.
"People who break copyright laws steal from the creators and movie-watching public of the future. The closure of The Pirate Bay is therefore good for all of us who enjoy new film and entertainment."
But Tobias Andersson at pressure group Piratbyrĺn (The Pirate Bureau), which founded The Pirate Bay, stressed that there was no copyright-protected material on the servers.
“The Anti-Pirate Bureau has clearly misled the police in this case, “ said Andersson.
“They appear to have persuaded police who are incompetent in IT that the servers in question are full of copyright-protected material. This is a gross misuse of taxpayers’ money.”
Andersson also condemned the fact that police had closed down a number of other websites, including The Pirate Bureau, which he says is no longer officially linked to the Pirate Bay.
“This is the greatest infringement. The Anti-Pirate Bureau has clearly fooled the police into closing down its antagonists, The Pirate Bureau.”
“We are very upset that the film industry doesn’t dare to have a debate , and chooses instead to trick politicians and the police into criminalizing their opponents and a large portion of the Swedish population.”
The Pirate Bay is a BitTorrent tracker, which enables people to download large files such as movies from other users.
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=3955
YARR! Swedish Police Site Broadsided After Pirate Bay Raid
Eric Bangeman
It looks like the raid on The Pirate Bay and confiscation of its servers upset somebody. That's one conclusion to be drawn from the sudden unavailability of the web site of Sweden's national police. Beginning last night, the the site came under a widespread and intense denial of service attack, according to National Police Administration Director Lars Lindahl.
"Our homepage had to handle 500,000 visits per second and it's obviously not going to handle that. It's sort of like 10,000 people calling the same phone switch at once."
According to Lindahl, the attack began at 9:30pm local time. Judging by the time it's taking to load polisen.se, the attack seems to be still going on in full force, despite assurances that the site would be back up by now. The Swedish police are investigating the origin of the attack.
Warner Music and Sony's web sites were also attacked, but in this case, a single Turkish hacker is thought to be responsible. It's doubtful that the hack is related to the DoS broadside against the Swedish police, although the timing is interesting.
The Pirate Bay is arguably the largest and most popular torrent site in the world, and news of the raid was met with great dismay by fans of the site. Piratpartiet, a Swedish political party affiliated with a view on copyright very similar to The Pirate Bay, has called the raid illegal. They have also accused the Swedish government of responding to pressure from American media companies, a concern shared by others in the country.
"We want to find out whether pressure from the U.S. government was behind the action," Center Party spokesman Johan Linander said. "I think all of this smells of direct political influence and we want to reach clarity about who really did what."
Three people affiliated with the torrent site were taken into custody after the raid and have since been released. Swedish police say that despite their release, they still face possible criminal charges.
The Pirate Bay maintains that the raid was a violation of Swedish law and that the site will be back up "soon," operating from another country this time. In the meantime, Piratpariet and the Pirate Bureau are organizing "Pirate Demonstration Saturday," a protest in Stockholm beginning at 3pm local time.
"This is no longer about just a raid on the Pirate Bay, but has become a major justice scandal. We have contacted all Parliamentary parties and their youth organizations regarding a demonstration we are planning," says Pirate Bureau spokesman Marcin de Kaminski.
Let's be clear about one thing: taking a law enforcement site offline with a DoS attack is bad, m'kay? That said, it is apparent that the action against The Pirate Bay has struck a nerve with the public. It's doubtful that this marks the start of any widespread backlash against Hollywood, the MPAA, and the RIAA. But in Sweden, this looks to be turning into a major political scandal, as accusations of knuckling under to US influence are growing.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060602-6969.html
Russian Download Site Is Popular and Possibly Illegal
Thomas Crampton
Rising consumer popularity is turning AllofMP3.com, a music downloading service based in Moscow, into a global Internet success story, except for one important detail: The site may well be illegal.
So great is the official level of concern about AllofMP3 that American trade negotiators darkly warned that the Web site could jeopardize Russia's long-sought entry into the World Trade Organization.
Operating through what music industry lobbyists say is a loophole in Russia's copyright law, AllofMP3 offers a vast catalogue of music that includes artists who have not permitted their work to be sold online — like the Beatles and Metallica — at a fraction the cost of services like Apple Computer's iTunes service.
Sold by the megabyte instead of by the song, an album of 10 songs or so on AllofMP3 can cost the equivalent of less than $1, compared with 99 cents per song on iTunes.
And unlike iTunes and other commercial services, songs purchased with AllofMP3's downloading software have no restrictions on copying.
It is an offer that may seem too good to be true, but in Russia, considered to be a hotbed of digital piracy and theft of intellectual property, courts have so far allowed the site to operate, despite efforts by the record labels Warner, Universal and EMI to aid prosecutors there.
Music industry officials say AllofMP3, which first came to their attention in 2004, is a large-scale commercial piracy site, and they dismiss its claims of legality. "It is totally unprecedented to have a pirate site operating so openly for so long," said Neil Turkewitz, executive vice president of the Recording Industry Association of America, who is based in Washington.
People associated with AllofMP3, which lists no telephone contacts on its Web site, declined to comment for this article when tracked down by domain-name ownership records kept by Verisign. Those records show that Ivan Fedorov of Media Services in Moscow is the owner.
AllofMP3.com says on the site that it can legally sell to any user based in Russia and warns foreign users to verify the legality within their countries for themselves. The site features a wide selection of Russian music, but is written in English with prices listed in United States dollars.
AllofMP3 asserts its legality by citing a license issued by a collecting society, the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society.
In most countries, the collecting societies that receive royalty payments for the sale or use of artistic works need reciprocal agreements with overseas copyright holders, according to agencies that represent right holders.
According to Russia's 1993 copyright law, however, collecting societies are permitted to act on behalf of rights holders who have not authorized them to do so. Collecting societies have thus been set up to gather royalties for foreign copyright holders without their authorization. Infringement cases have also affected foreign-produced software, films and books.
The result is that numerous organizations in Russia receive royalties for the use of foreign artistic works, but never pass on that money to the artists or music companies, according to the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, the umbrella organization for collecting societies.
"These collecting agencies are thieves and frauds because they accept money while pretending to represent artists," said Eric Baptiste, director general of the confederation. "They play off a bizarre aspect of the Russian law that we are lobbying to change."
Consumers have been flocking to the site, particularly from Britain, where a survey in March ranked AllofMP3 second only to iTunes in popularity among self-described music enthusiasts surveyed by XTN Data.
Amazon.com's Web site rating service, Alexa, ranks AllofMP3 as having the 986th highest level of traffic of any site on the Web over the past three months.
Use in the United States reached 345,000 unique visitors in April, an increase of 57 percent over January, but a tiny fraction of the 19 million that used the iTunes software online, according to Comscore, a service that monitors the habits of Internet users.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/...rmoney/mp3.php
Loading the iPod With Egalitarianism
French bills have firms singing blues
John Ward Anderson
PARIS -- All is not well in the French world of digital music, as Nicolas Paitre, a salesman at one of Paris's largest electronics stores, hears from customers every day.
Filing into Surcouf, a glitzy French electronics chain where Paitre specializes in digital music gadgets, they have the same bewildered looks and exasperated queries:
I can download digital songs from one company, but I can't play them on another company's machine?
My hard drive with all my music files crashed, and I can't transfer the songs from my handheld into a new computer?
Oui and oui again. The legal and technical issues of protecting music copyrights are so complex, Paitre said, that many music lovers "feel stuck in the middle" and eventually are forced into the business of trying to foil the protections on their own.
Now comes France's National Assembly to the rescue, or so claim lawmakers who have crafted legislation to force compatibility between digital songs and the different machines that play them. Under the proposed law, Apple Computer Inc., Sony Corp., Dell Inc. and other companies could have to reveal trade secrets of their software so that their songs can play on competitors' devices.
Laypeople call it the iPod bill, after Apple's hugely successful digital music player. The tiny device plays songs downloaded from Apple's online music store embedded with code that prevents them from being played on anything other than an iPod. Many American music lovers complain about this incompatibility, too, but haven't been able to get Congress behind them.
French lawmakers say their bill is enlightened consumerism for cutting-edge technology, an effort to force Apple and other companies to freely compete, rather than relying on techno-secrets to crush the competition.
"We oppose the idea that the seller of a song or any kind of work can impose on the consumer the way to read it, forever, and especially in the consumer's home," said Assembly member Christian Paul. "Can we allow a couple of vendors to establish monopolies tightly controlling their clients and excluding competition?"
After the bill first came to light, Apple denounced it as "state-sponsored piracy." Without encryption, the company argued, people would be able to digitally transfer music to one another for free, without paying royalties to the artists, and in violation of copyright laws. Industry analysts say the company might withdraw its music products from France rather than submit to the law. After its initial remarks, Apple has refused comment on the legislation.
The Assembly's proposal is "about ripping off technology from those who developed it and putting it in the public domain," said Francisco Mingorance, European policy director for the Business Software Alliance, which represents Apple, Dell, Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other major companies.
"It's more than just Apple. What's been adopted is a broad, sweeping exception to intellectual property rights and patents and software under the flag of interoperability between an iPod and your Sony," he said. "Businesses in France are going to have to ask themselves a question: Is our continuing presence in the French market outweighed by the risks of disclosing our content to more piracy?"
In the midst of the debate, the French Senate passed a version of the bill with changes that consumer advocates say would gut it. According to Loic Dachary, vice president of the Free Software Foundation France, the Senate bill would leave computer companies with too much control over hardware and software.
"From a citizen's point of view, it's like having a policeman in your machine who has all the power," he said. "If Apple is allowed to keep its secrets, then no other programs can interact with their programs. This is not competition, this is software totalitarianism."
Both versions would decriminalize piracy and make it equivalent to a traffic infraction, with fines that computer companies say are so small they would offer no deterrence. Software companies complain that the law could hold them accountable for piracy that occurs with use of their products, even if that is not the purpose of the software.
The debate pits French egalitarianism and its tilt toward consumers and regulation against American capitalism and its tilt toward business and markets. Also in the mix is a dose of French nationalism and concern about the U.S. dominance of cyberspace.
"The idea in France is to protect consumers, but in the U.S., it would be seen as short-term protection, because if you are forced to share the technology you developed with others, that stifles the incentives to innovate and invest," said Andrea Renda, an economic and legal analyst at the Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies. "In France, there is a tendency to protect competitors, not just competition. It's very short-sighted."
Dominique Moisi, of the French Institute of International Relations, said that "in France, it is the state which is responsible for great technical innovations, and there is also an emphasis on what is called 'cultural diversity' -- the idea that you must have more than one source of national expertise, and that in particular, you should not let America monopolize the technologies of the future."
French President Jacques Chirac feels strongly about those issues, analysts said. Fearing that Internet search engines -- particularly Google and Yahoo -- are heavily biased toward British and American culture and sensibilities, he has proposed the development of a "European search engine" known as Quaero (Latin for "I seek"). The public-private venture could cost $1.2 billion or more.
Chirac is also a driving force behind the public-private development of a $300 million, 6 million-title European Digital Library as an alternative to Google's proposed digitization of 15 million books from collections at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library and Oxford University.
France supports the European Union's efforts to strip the United States of its effective technical control of the Internet and turn over regulatory oversight to an international body, perhaps the United Nations. Chirac has also pushed for a state-funded, French-language alternative to CNN and the BBC that is scheduled to be launched later this year.
"In France, there are two distinct mentalities," said Christian Vanneste, the National Assembly sponsor of the iPod bill. "On one side is the backwards left, which is anti-American, and on the other is the right, which thinks that the U.S.A. shouldn't be the only one with good ideas, and who want to compete with them."
The two versions of the bill that have passed the National Assembly and Senate now await reconciliation in a conference committee.
Researcher Corinne Gavard contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...?nav=rss_world
HONG KONG: War On Piracy Recruits 200,000 Youthful Spies
State anti-Internet piracy campaign launched, 200,000 youths enlisted to report illegal file transfers
Rickin Majithia
The government has recruited 200,000 members of youth groups to spy on internet activity and report illegal file transfers as part of an anti-internet piracy campaign launched yesterday.
Senior Superintendent Tam Yiu-Kueng, of Customs' Intellectual Property Investigation Bureau, said the involvement of youth groups provided his department with extra monitoring capabilities.
"Initially we used 700 cadets from the Civil Aid Service for a three-month period," he said. "In that time we received over 800 reports of people illegally uploading... We were then able to inform the copyright holder and subsequently ask the website to remove the illegal content. If only 700 youths brought us such good results in three months, I think we will be very successful when the full 200,000 start helping us on July 19."
The campaign, jointly organised by the Commerce, Industry and Technology Bureau, the Customs and Excise Department and the Intellectual Property Department, includes two television and radio ads to encourage parents to monitor their children's internet activities.
Intellectual Property Department director Stephen Selby stressed the need for parental involvement. "We can't do this by ourselves, it is important for parents to watch what their kids are doing on the Net," he said.
At the launch, Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology Joseph Wong Wing-Ping said the government is considering releasing a public consultation paper on internet privacy this year. The document would also cover copyright protection in the digital world, he told the launch ceremony.
"We will study how to facilitate copyright owners to take civil action against infringing activities on the internet as well as the role of internet service providers ... Because it involves privacy we must be very careful - but we will study the examples set by other countries first," he said.
"The important thing is that it is not just enforcement and prosecution which matter.
"The important thing is that we really need to continue to convey the message to members of the public, in particular to our younger generation, that it is wrong to commit such an act."
Customs will trial an intellectual property protection scheme, called the Fast Action Scheme, at an electronic products exhibition in October. It aims to protect companies at trade fairs by allowing them to register products and copyright in advance. If an infringement occurs, it is hoped customs officers will be able to identify the culprit by checking the product records.
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/articl...parentid=46920
µTorrent Spyware/Adware Claims Refuted
Thomas Mennecke
µTorrent began as a BitTorrent favorite. Its small memory and CPU consumption footprint, coupled with a total package size of less than 1 megabyte and near-full functionality, gave few people a reason to complain against this BitTorrent client.
The honeymoon came to a screeching halt on February 28, 2006, when PeerFactor and µTorrent announced a six month deal to distribute authorized content online. This drew the ire of the µTorrent community, who remember the days when PeerFactor was affiliated with French anti-piracy company RetSpan. The two companies separated in late 2005 however, and the newly formed PeerFactor SARL are now working on P2P distribution software rather than anti-piracy technology, (although their website is still linked from the RetSpan homepage.)
The controversy blew over, and µTorrent avoided a disaster.
Being the magnet link for controversy it is however, µTorrent is once against finding itself the center of attention. This time, reports of third party software (adware, spyware) have begun to shake some of the µTorrent faithful.
The latest version of µTorrent, version 1.5, contains an integrated search feature. The end user can opt to search several of the major search engines, such as Mininova, ThePirateBay, TorrentSpy, and isoHunt. Once the search is conducted, an independent browser window is opened. Instead of going to the Mininova.org domain however, the browser is directed to NanoTorrent.com. Once redirected, the browser displays a 728x90 UseNext ad, along with the queired torrent files. UseNext is a newsgroup portal that offers “anonymous, uncensored access to Usenet.”
But does µTorrent’s affiliation with UseNext advertising earn the label of being an adware or spyware client?
Definitely not. When the P2P curious download µTorrent, they only receive the µTorrent client and nothing else. No tracking cookies, no data miners, and no Bonzi Buddies.
“Nothing else than µTorrent is installed, like it always has been,” Ludvig Strigeus told Slyck.com.
Once the banner ad appears, one may question whether information is subsequently collected via data miners or some other clandestine method. Reassuringly, the ads are simple HTML delivered banners via Ludvig’s owned NanoTorrent.com website.
“Nothing is placed on the user's machine [when the NanoTorrent browser opens,]” Ludvid explains. “It's an advertisement inside the web browser only, the ad comes from a webserver owned by me, and it's removed when the window is closed. No cookies at all are installed, not even my own…The ads are generated by the script on the webserver. The µTorrent client as such does not contain any ads. They are generated by the webserver and shown through a php script to the webbrowser when the user searches.”
The arrangement is part of a standard affiliate program, where µTorrent benefits financially whenever a new user signs up for UseNext. Additional testing found no evidence of any third party or malicious software. By comparison, it’s little different than conducting Google search via FireFox’s plugin. µTorrent may use ads to support development, however Ludvig's creation is not an adware client.
µTorrent took considerable effort to avoid including third party software in their client; and opted to keep the ads dedicated on an independent domain. Not every file-sharing client does this, and speaks volumes on µTorrent’s commitment to keep the reputation of their client intact.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1199
BitTorrent: Shedding No Tiers
Adam Livingstone
Newsnight's ubergeek talks to BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen and finds him distinctly equivocal about fears of a two speed internet.
So there's me driving up to Homebase to get some new wine glasses for my posh media chums to come round and watch the World Cup. And I get to within half a mile of the store and my car starts to slow down.
Before I know it, I'm doing five miles an hour. What's more, half the other cars around me are doing the same. But the cars on the other side of the road are all fine. So I turn round and head home and suddenly it's all back to normal. "What on earth is going on?" as our man Paxman would say.
"It's simple" said the grease monkey at my local garage. "The people who made your car have done a deal with B&Q. They've fixed it so that if you ever drive towards Homebase, you'll start going at 5 miles an hour."
Network neutrality
Alert readers among you might observe that I'm talking rubbish, and, despite this being the BBC, I must admit I made the whole incident up. But imagine if such a thing were possible. How happy would you be if you were on the receiving end? Which brings us to the principle of network neutrality.
In a network neutral world, every piece of internet data is treated equally. Whether you're downloading porn from Japan or buying music from iTunes in California or reading a blog in Russian, the Internet doesn't care. It's all just data and it's all treated the same, all given the same priority on the information superhighway.
And if some big corporation were to start paying your internet service provider to start prioritising their offerings over their rivals, then that ISP would, arguably, be selling that internet connection twice, once to you and once to the corporation. That would be a violation of network neutrality.
Last week the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee produced a draft bill to make network neutrality an explicit legal requirement in the US. This follows a big row where the infrastructure manufacturers like Cisco and 3M have been lobbying heavily against network neutrality while internet companies like Google and Microsoft have been calling for the opposite.
BitTorrent
Why? One reason, perhaps, is because if toll roads are to be allowed on the internet, then someone has to build them, and that means jobs for the hardware boys. But the internet companies may not fancy having to pay those tolls and dance attendance on a new gatekeeper.
At which point enter our old friend the BitTorrent. You'll recall that this protocol has lately spread across the internet like Japanese knotweed, gobbling up perhaps a third of internet capacity, so that many service providers have virtually banned it from their networks before they become choked up completely.
Technically that is perhaps a violation of network neutrality, but one born of practicality rather than any darker motive, they would argue if they were here. Anyway the main losers are pirates and they can look after themselves.
Bram Cohen, the 'ubergeek' who gave us BitTorrent, is right up there in the pantheon of Internet gods. But unlike such luminaries as Shawn Fanning and Tim Berners Lee, Bram still hopes to make money from the fruits of his intellect. To which end he's done a deal with Warner Brothers to help them to distribute their movies on BitTorrent.
One of the things that's hoped might sweeten the deal is a new kind of faster torrent which the makers hope will make the current version look like paint drying. At the same time it will also unblock those congested pipes, so that his invention can avoid getting banned from networks quite so often.
Massive acceleration
The new version is currently trialling as a collaboration between Bram, NTL and a company called Cachelogic here in Britain. Cachelogic are offering a series of data stores strategically placed around the Internet which the new BitTorrent system talks to. Whenever they see a commercially approved BitTorrent, they make a copy of the data.
The next time someone on the Internet requests that data, it comes not from the original sender but from the Cachelogic store, only this time massively accelerated.
You can see where this is going. The companies who subscribe to the service will see their data race down the toll roads much faster than everyone else's can travel. What then for network neutrality?
We asked Bram about network neutrality. He told me "I most definitely do not want the internet to become like television where there's actual censorship... however it is very difficult to actually create network neutrality laws which don't result in an absurdity like making it so that ISPs can't drop spam or stop... (hacker) attacks. "
Does the Cachelogic proposal violate network neutrality? "Depending on how you define net neutrality that violates some definitions of it," says Cohen.
And would he feel comfortable if a media company using BitTorrent did start seeking network priority for its data?
"It depends really on the nature of the whole thing... I'm against net censorship. However when you're talking about large file transfers going to very large numbers of people there frequently are significant costs involved... (the media companies) are frequently bearing a lot of costs already today. They make some stuff available and pay for bandwidth on it so it's just a question of the download costs as well as the upload costs."
Taking its toll
He has a point. Big media corporations already pay a fortune for powerful internet capacities so that you can more easily read articles like this one. This would just be the logical next step - rather than merely improving their capacity to send data out the door, the companies upgrade your ability to receive it as well.
To go back to our analogy, it's not that your car will necessarily slow down when you head to Homebase. It's just that you'll suddenly start travelling at several hundred miles per hour if you go to the rival store. They're not doing anything to harm your surfing.
Objectively they're making it better. Even if you don't want to download their movies you might still benefit from the relief in congestion over the whole internet. And if capital wants to build something and people want to pay for it, well, chances are it's going to get built.
Which is exactly what you'd say about a toll road.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ht/5017542.stm
Cinequest Launches Download-And-Burn Indie Movie Service
Anders Bylund
Indie film festival Cinequest is trying to grow out of its festival breeches, and the latest move involves selling its catalog of arthouse films in download formats. Of course, they're doing it while trawling for new material at the Cannes Film Festival. Cinequest already has distribution deals in place with Netflix, Palm, and Intel Viiv, and has been selling physical DVDs alongside a few free downloads on its own site since launching its own DVD label last fall. The PlaysForSure-protected files are available with three-day rental licenses for US$1.99 per movie or $4.99 if you want to burn your own DVD, and are taking up a unique position in the non-pr0n movie industry of today:
"Other companies are working on it (the idea), but at the moment they are too expensive, and the rights protection is too strict. We are also building a community feature into the site, and I think we are going to be the first out of the gate," said Dave Le, Jaman's senior designer. Jens Michael Hussey, a company director, added: "This is a distribution platform which bypasses Hollywood. There are a lot of films that just don't get the audiences they deserve, and then I see all the crapola that's in the theatres and it's so unfair. This is a chance to take back control of what you see."
The founders are hoping to get its audience involved in some community action around its movies. Online chats linked to the movies you are currently holding a license for are intended to bring back a little piece of that oldtime "going to the movies" feel, even though you're sitting in your own living room:
"This is like a global movie theatre, like when you go to movies and come out and talk about what you've just seen. With home movies you are kinda disconnected from that. Here we are bringing your home into the cinema," said Jens Michael Hussey. Viewers will be able to chat on line, while they are watching the movie or afterwards, to discuss the film.
Cinequest's stated mission isn't to make a lot of money, but rather to help independent filmmakers reach a wider audience and hopefully even make a living. 30 percent of the download fees go directly to the filmmaker, and similar revenue-sharing agreements are in place for other media channels as well. "Some films will have theatrical releases and we definitely support that, but the majority of them won't," says Kathleen Powell, Cinequest President and Co-Founder. The new-media online distribution model seems like a perfect fit for independent film houses, and conversely, indies provide great guinea pig material for testing out new methods so the big studios can point to actual results when making their own decisions.
The new distribution model may not "do for the film industry what iTunes and MySpace have done for the world of pop music" as the backers are hoping, based on the fact that 400 arthouse movies does not equal the more than 3 million songs in iTMS, including major labels and artists. But it's a good idea, and every revolution has to start somewhere. Good luck, Cinequest!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060526-6924.html
Disney To Sell Films To Own On CinemaNow
Gary Gentile
Disney films such as "Glory Road" and the animated "Chicken Little" will soon be available to own via computer download from the Internet-based movie site CinemaNow, but the movies can't be played on a standalone DVD player.
The companies were expected to announce Wednesday that CinemaNow will sell the films for $19.95 and in June will allow consumers to transfer films to a portable device running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media software.
In a deal similar to others announced in April, The Walt Disney Co. will sell its films online the same day they become available on DVD, thus closing the gap between DVD sales and video-on-demand by several months. The deal includes new releases plus some library titles.
Consumers will be able to watch their films on up to three devices and will be able to make a backup DVD copy that will only play on a computer.
CinemaNow will offer the option of transferring the film to a portable device later in June.
Major Hollywood studios have not yet allowed films to be burned onto a DVD that can be played on a standard DVD player, although adult entertainment company Vivid Entertainment has started doing just that through CinemaNow.
In April, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and MGM began selling some first-run and older titles on Movielink, a PC-only download service jointly owned by five Hollywood studios.
Those films are priced between $20 and $30.
Sony and Lionsgate have also begun selling some films on CinemaNow, which is partly owned by Microsoft, Lionsgate, Cisco Systems Inc. and Blockbuster Inc. Lionsgate is owned by Lionsgate Entertainment Corp.
CinemaNow said it is negotiating with other studios to offer films on the site. Announcements of similar deals could come as early as this week.
Portability is a key factor for studios such as Disney, whose films are watched as often by children riding in cars as college students on their computers. Disney's deal with CinemaNow is it's first foray into the download-to-own market, although it rents its films online.
Portability also makes it easier to transfer a movie from a computer in a den or bedroom to a large TV screen in the living room, where most people prefer to watch films.
Movielink does not yet offer transfer of films to portable devices, although the company said it hopes to have that feature within a year.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT
Software to Look for Experts Among Your Friends
John Markoff
For anyone who has hesitated before making a purchase on a Web site, uncertain which brand is preferable, Tacit Software is preparing to introduce an online service that will make it simple to pick the brains of friends and colleagues for opinions and expertise.
Tacit plans to start testing the service, called Illumio, next month. The service allows the user to mine the data on the computers of friends, business associates and others with shared interests on any subjects.
However, Illumio is not a search engine, like Google or Yahoo. The system works by transparently distributing a request for information on questions like "Who knows John Smith?" and "Are Nikon digital cameras better than Olympus?" to the computers in a network of users. The questions can then be answered locally based on a novel reverse auction system that Illumio uses to determine who the experts are.
The system is intended to extend a growing category of software that helps groups collaborate and work together more efficiently. Efforts to create systems that augment the intellectual power of work groups go back to the earliest days of computing technology development. The widespread availability of networks and Web browsers, however, has made such technologies far more accessible in recent years.
"The collaboration space is big and busy," said David L. Gilmour, president and chief executive of Tacit. "We don't consider ourselves a collaboration environment, rather we are about communication and search."
Currently, the privately held Tacit, which was founded in 1997, sells similar technology, known as ActiveNet, to corporate customers like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley and Sanofi-Aventis. The new Illumio version is intended to be used over the open Internet. It will be free for individual users and sold commercially to private groups, although the company has not announced pricing.
Software such as Illumio is representative of the rapid emergence of new markets for digital information, said Michael Schrage, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.
"This represents the eBayification of organizations," he said. "The reality is that organizations are run off of informal connections and tools such as this facilitate gray markets in information and interpersonal exchange."
Tacit's top achievement in its software for connecting people and expertise may be in a design that keeps personal information private.
"The biggest problem we had to solve was the privacy problem," Mr. Gilmour said.
Because the information used to determine if someone is an expert on a particular question stays on local computers, Tacit's executives said Illumio would avoid potentially troubling privacy questions. The Illumio software is installed on users' PC's, where it is connected through a software interface to either Microsoft or Google's desktop search programs that index local user content, including documents and electronic mail.
The anonymity offered by Illumio is a significant advantage over other social networking software services that place pressure on users to offer assistance.
The Illumio software uses a reverse auction model to restrict the answer to the best expert. In a reverse auction, sellers compete for the right to provide goods or services. For example, in response to the question, "Who knows John Smith?" each Illumio local system would independently determine who had the best relationship in the network based on parameters such as who had recently exchanged the most e-mail with John Smith.
If the local system found a strong relationship, the local Illumio client software would pop up a request on that user's screen asking whether the user wished to respond to the person asking the question. Initially only the strongest candidates would be notified locally of the query. If that user ignored the request, the reverse auction system would, in effect, lower the bar to ask the person with the next strongest relationship. Then, if there were no responses, the bar would be again lowered until an expert responded. It is possible that difficult questions would find no experts.
The system insures that experts remain anonymous until they agree to answer the query. When a user answers, the connection is made either through the Illumio system, by e-mail or by other channels such as instant messaging or telephone.
In addition to the keywords that make up the question, a user is permitted to send an accompanying message that will help people determine whether they have relevant information to a particular question.
Tacit hopes to market the service by providing Web masters with icons it calls "hot spots." For example, a person running a digital photography or similar Web site could place a hot spot on its home page and then anybody who wanted to join an Illumio network on digital photography could do so by simply clicking on the link.
If they already had the Illumio software, it would automatically add them to the group. If not, it would download and install both the indexing software and the Illumio client software. Illumio is currently available for Windows-based computers.
The potential of Illumio lies in its ability to help small groups of friends and associates tap expertise that they might otherwise not know existed, said Esther Dyson, publisher of Release 1.0, a computer industry newsletter and an Illumio investor. "This is searching your friends' heads as reflected in what's on their computers," Ms. Dyson said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/te...29gilmour.html
StopBadware.org Adds To Its Hall Of Shame List
"Jessica Simpson Screensaver" one of the worst badware applications ever, says co-director
Ellen Messmer
StopBadware.org, the organisation dedicated to highlighting software that consumers might prefer to avoid, adds another round of software programs to its "Badware Watch List."
The latest inductees into this hall of software shame include four programs: FunCade, a gaming application that comes bundled with BullsEye and NaviSearch; Team Taylor Made's "Jessica Simpson Screensaver"; a scanner called "UnSpyPC"; and WinFixer 2005 and 2006. Each was cited by StopBadware.org for specific reasons that relate to deceptive installation, causing harm to other computers, modifying other software or transmitting user data, interfering with computer use or being difficult to uninstall completely.
These four software programs are the second round of selections for the Badware Watch List, following the first batch of "badware" announced last March, which included Kazaa, MediaPipe, SpyAxe and Waterfalls 3.
FunCade is named as spyware which when removed, does not uninstall bundled adware and spyware programs, according to StopBadware.org.
Team Taylor Made's "Jessica Simpson Screensaver" is said to bundle more than a dozen pieces of software, including undisclosed adware, a 'dialer' which automatically dials for pay-porn sites with a modem, and toolbars that modify the installer's browser.
John Palfrey, co-director of StopBadware.org and executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, calls the Jessica Simpson Screensaver from Team Taylor Made "one of the worst badware applications we've ever seen," adding, "It's almost a textbook example of a small software vendor using deceptive means to fund a software business."
"UnSpyPC" is described as identifying legitimate software, such as VMWare, WinPatrol and Windows Defender as spyware. It's also said to add an UnSpyPC icon to Internet Explorer without notification.
In the case of WinFixer 2005 and 2006, StopBadware.org says both versions "deceptively attempt to get the user to purchase the full version of its software by making exaggerated claims about 'severe system threats' on the user's computer, while also making it difficult to opt out of purchasing the software altogether." WinFixer 2005 is said to install a rootkit, making the program difficult to detect and remove.
StopBadware.org, (originally called "The Stop Badware Coalition") is the group formed with Harvard University, Oxford University and Consumer Reports last January to identify unethical and harmful software programs through lab testing and legal reviews of end-user licenses and other documentation.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...2571790014227E
A Third Of Us Are TV Pirates: Survey
Dan Warne
Over a third of Australian broadband users are now regularly downloading pirated television episodes on their home internet connection, according to Whirlpool’s latest survey of over 16,000 of its members.
The results are hardly a surprise: as we wrote in a recent edition of APC, TV piracy is incredibly easy to do, and since Australian TV networks are often criticised for axing series halfway through, crudely editing episodes to fit ads and running one to two years behind US/UK TV, it’s easy to see why.
Meanwhile, US TV networks are facing up to the fact that they have no option but to sell online. TechCrunch has a good roundup of the options available in the US. The number of shows you can legally download now is quite staggering, but none of them are available to Australians, because of the way TV series distribution deals are sold by region.
In Australia, Channel 9 has been progressive in this respect though, recently unveiling a “catchup TV” download service for episodes of McLeod’s Daughters. Channel 9, is of course, part of the PBL, which is the media conglomerate that owns APC Magazine and is a stakeholder in NineMSN… but before you claim “Bias!”, I’m not spruiking for 9 just because they’re in the same group.
They’re also one of the only TV stations in Australia to make a free electronic program guide available online… if other TV stations would stop being obstinate, Windows Media Center wouldn’t have been such a dismal failure in Australia and people could easily watch TV when it suited them without having to subscribe to a third party EPG like IceTV.
I just think it’s encouraging to see an Australian TV station doing what it can — making locally produced drama available for download at a reasonable price of $1.95 per episode.
However, no doubt the 37 per cent of broadband users that pirate TV shows won’t actually be doing somersaults of joy at being able to download McLeod’s Daughters… they’ll still be combing the torrent sites, or Easynews.com, or whatever, for House M.D., The West Wing, South Park and other top international shows.
BigPond’s movie download service has a range of TV shows available, but the limited selection (and total reliance on Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player) is, unfortunately for them, no match for the vast selection available on pirate networks and DivX/Xvid compatibility with all platforms.
What is clear, though, is that the studios and networks had better work something out, and fast … that 37 per cent of broadband users taking advantage of pirated TV eps from overseas isn’t going to get any smaller, but it is certainly going to keep eroding free-to-air TV audiences.
http://www.apcstart.com/site/dwarne/...pirates-survey
China Sets State Secrets Trial for Times Researcher in June
David Lague
Chinese authorities have preliminarily fixed a June 8 trial date for a researcher for The New York Times who is accused of fraud and disclosing state secrets, his lawyer said Friday.
The decision to try the researcher, Zhao Yan, 44, who worked in the Beijing bureau of The Times, followed a move by prosecutors to revive the case against him after earlier dropping the indictment.
Mr. Zhao denies the charges.
In the Chinese legal system, fixing the date of a trial is often tantamount to a decision to convict. It is very rare that the accused is found not guilty in a trial, particularly when the charges involve disclosing state secrets or subversion.
The definition of state secrets in China is extremely broad, and can even include routine economic statistics compiled by the government.
The decision to bring Mr. Zhao to trial comes as the Chinese authorities continue one of the most sweeping crackdowns on the news media in decades. It is a campaign in which journalists and writers have been jailed, senior editors fired and news outlets reined in from covering issues the authorities have deemed a threat to political or social stability.
Mr. Zhao, a longtime journalist, has been in custody for 21 months without appearing before a judge.
He had worked for The Times for about four months before his arrest on Sept. 17, 2004.
The indictment confirmed that his arrest had been linked to an article in The Times reporting that a former president, Jiang Zemin, had offered to resign from his position as chairman of the Central Military Commission, the final top post he held in the government.
The Times also denies that Mr. Zhao disclosed state secrets.
Prosecutors have refused to discuss the case on the ground that they were restricted from commenting on cases involving state secrets.
When the charges against Mr. Zhao were dropped in March, his lawyer, Mo Shaoping, a veteran defense attorney, concluded that the authorities had decided to abandon the case.
However, optimism that his client would be released was dashed earlier this month, when prosecutors reintroduced what appeared to be the same indictment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/wo...a/27china.html
China Sets Fines For Net Piracy
Bloomberg News, The Associated Press
China said Monday that it would impose fines of as much as 100,000 yuan on distributors of illegally copied music, movies and other material over the Internet, a move likely to put pressure on search engines like Baidu.com.
Internet service providers must give the authorities contact information for owners of sites that distribute pirated material, the State Council, China's cabinet, said in a statement dated May 18 and posted on its Web site Monday. The maximum fine is the equivalent of $12,500.
Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, EMI Group and Universal Music Group sued Baidu, the most-used search engine in China, last year for allowing free downloads of their music. The company, based in Beijing, offers a service allowing users to find MP3 files and may be forced to cooperate with the authorities in cracking down on illegal music sites.
"Baidu will be under a lot of pressure to stop offering links to illegal MP3 files and may have to stop their MP3 search service," said Edward Yu, chief executive of the research company Analysys International, based in Beijing. The new rules could also cut the number of Baidu's users, he said.
Calls to a Baidu spokeswoman, Cynthia He, were not returned.
The government can fine individuals and companies selling equipment and technology designed to allow illegal copying, according to the rules. It can also confiscate equipment used for making and distributing pirated material.
Yu said that China had repeatedly promised to crack down on illegal copying. "China's piracy problem is an enforcement problem," he said. "There have always been piracy laws."
Wireless 'conspiracy' claim
The agency promoting a wireless encryption standard in China has accused a U.S. engineers' group of participating in a conspiracy that led the International Standards Organization to reject the Chinese system, The Associated Press reported from Beijing.
China made the accusation in its appeal against the organization's decision in March to reject its encryption system, WAPI, in favor of the widely used 802.11i encryption standard developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, the state- run Xinhua news agency said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/...ss/chifine.php
Judge Orders Private Drafts Turned Over in Leak Case
Neil A. Lewis
The judge overseeing the case against I. Lewis Libby Jr. ruled on Friday that Time magazine had to turn over drafts of articles so that Mr. Libby, the former White House aide, could defend himself.
The judge, Reggie B. Walton, of Federal District Court, said that because the interviews that Mr. Libby gave to some reporters were at the heart of the criminal case against him, news organizations had no privilege to withhold their confidential materials and drafts of articles from his lawyers.
Judge Walton said he had concluded that most of the documents sought from Time, part of Time Warner; NBC News; and The New York Times would not be relevant or help the defense.
He said lawyers for all the news media organizations had agreed to let him review the documents that were responsive to Mr. Libby's request. That allowed him, he said, to personally review those documents in reaching his decision.
Judge Walton called some of the defense requests nothing more than "a fishing expedition."
He took a different view of internal Time documents that he reviewed. Judge Walton said there were variations in the drafts of articles written by Matthew Cooper after he had testified before the grand jury that investigated and indicted Mr. Libby in the case involving the leaking of a C.I.A. operative's name.
"Upon reviewing the documents presented to it, the court discerns a slight alteration between the several drafts of the articles which the defense could arguably use to impeach Cooper," the judge wrote.
Judge Walton said that he was quashing the subpoena for documents sought from NBC News and two of its journalists, Tim Russert and Andrea Mitchell, and that most documents sought from The Times did not have to be turned over.
But he said the court would hold some transcripts of interviews by Judith Miller, a former reporter for The Times, and the draft of an article that she wrote to see whether they should be turned over in the trial.
Mr. Libby, former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, faces charges of perjury and obstruction of justice over his testimony to a federal grand jury and to F.B.I. agents. A special prosecutor has charged that Mr. Libby lied when he said he did not disclose the identity of the operative, Valerie Wilson, in summer 2003 to Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper.
Judge Walton said some documents from The Times could be turned over to the defense lawyers at the trial if they proved useful in impeaching Ms. Miller's testimony.
The judge suggested that was unlikely because his review showed them to be consistent with Ms. Miller's account to a grand jury.
He reasoned that if her trial testimony, that Mr. Libby told her of Ms. Wilson's role, remained consistent, the documents would have no value for the defense lawyers.
Mr. Libby was indicted after he told a grand jury and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents on two occasions that he did not disclose Ms. Wilson's identity to Mr. Cooper and Ms. Miller. The reporters testified otherwise to the grand jury.
Administration critics have said disclosing Ms. Wilson's identity was part of a campaign to discredit assertions made by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons.
Judge Walton repeated earlier rulings that nothing in the Constitution or law provided a privilege for reporters to refuse to provide information in a criminal case.
He said Mr. Libby's case provided a special reason for reporters to provide relevant testimony because they were not just reporting on events, but were also participants in the events that formed the basis of the criminal case.
"The reporters did not simply report on alleged criminal activity," he wrote, "but rather they were personally involved in the conversations with the defendant that form the predicate for several charges in the indictment."
The judge added, "Their testimony is crucial to the government's case, and challenging it will likely be critical for the defense."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/wa...rtner=homepage
Publicly Debating Privacy
Dan Mitchell
WIRED NEWS shook the blogosphere (though not the mainstream media) this week by publishing documents that appear to support accusations by a former AT&T employee that the company has helped the government monitor huge amounts of private Internet traffic (wired.com).
Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, had earlier submitted the documents as part of a lawsuit against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The United States District Court judge in the case had ordered the documents sealed while he considered contentions by the government and by AT&T that making them public could compromise national security.
Wired News decided to publish them because "we believe the public's right to know the full facts in this case outweighs AT&T's claims to secrecy," wrote Evan Hansen, the site's editor. Ryan Singel, a reporter, obtained the documents from "an anonymous source close to the litigation," he added.
The documents are highly technical, detailing the methodology behind the AT&T program. But they also describe how the company set up a "secret room" for the operation in a San Francisco switching center. In an introductory note for the documents, Mr. Klein wrote he was "presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project."
The information has been described in previous media accounts, but releasing all 30 pages, along with some photos of the secret room, allows people to assess Mr. Klein's assertions for themselves.
And so they are. The denizens of Slashdot, a site dominated by network managers and programmers, have for the most part decided that Mr. Klein's accusations are true.
There is some disagreement, though, as to what it means. For instance, while Slashdotters are largely appalled at the notion of the National Security Agency's reading their e-mail messages, one anonymous poster called them "hypocrites" and pointed out that their own network policies were often similar. "It's everywhere; what's bothersome is knowing you are being monitored. If you are doing something illegal/immoral/nasty/dumb/stupid maybe the N.S.A.'s monitoring system will make you think twice about doing it."
Contested Space
Hollywood WireTap, a gossip site, revealed this week that several famous pornography stars are promoting themselves on MySpace, a community site that's popular among people of all ages — but especially teenagers.
As a result, Hollywood WireTap reported, Weight Watchers has withdrawn its advertisements and T-Mobile is talking to MySpace, which is owned by the News Corporation, about the situation. Both companies told the site that their contracts with MySpace, which takes in a reported $156 million in annual ad revenue, are intended to prevent their ads from appearing on pages that promote pornographic material.
The pages of sex-film stars like Jenna Jameson and Tera Patrick show they have thousands of "friends" — other MySpace users who ask for full access to a user's page. Those pages, in turn, link to the stars' own homepages, which are often replete with pornographic images.
Their MySpace pages are "popular with the kids who are MySpace's mainstay," according to Hollywood WireTap. Some of the stars' "friends" are as young as 14. "Obviously parents, already concerned about the site's alleged pedophiles, won't be happy with this newest twist," the gossip site concludes.
The Wrong Guy
In retrospect, it seems inevitable that Guy Goma — the man accidentally interviewed by the BBC last week in a case of mistaken identity — would become an Internet celebrity. The BBC hauled Mr. Goma onto its soundstage and started asking him about downloading music. He had no idea what was going on, but he answered well enough. The interviewer thought he was Guy Kewney, a technology journalist, but he was just a guy who was there looking for a job.
The video has been passed around the Internet, and is featured on a new site, guygoma.com, dedicated to the incident and to Mr. Goma's job search.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/te.../27online.html
First Amendment Applies to Internet, Appeals Court Rules
Laurie J. Flynn
A California appeals court ruled Friday that online reporters are protected by the same confidentiality laws that protect traditional journalists, striking a blow to efforts by Apple Computer to identify people who leaked confidential company data.
The three-judge panel in San Jose overturned a trial court's ruling last year that to protect its trade secrets, Apple was entitled to know the source of leaked data published online. The appeals court also ruled that a subpoena issued by Apple to obtain electronic communications and materials from an Internet service provider was unenforceable.
In its ruling, the appeals court said online and offline journalists are equally protected under the First Amendment. "We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news," the opinion states. "Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment."
The ruling states that Web sites are covered by California's shield law protecting the confidentiality of journalists' sources.
Apple had argued that Web sites publishing reports about Apple were not engaged in legitimate news gathering but rather were misappropriating trade secrets and violating copyrights. But in its ruling on Friday, the panel disagreed.
"Beyond casting aspersions on the legitimacy of petitioners' enterprise, Apple offers no cogent reason to conclude that they fall outside the shield law's protection," the ruling states.
If upheld, the ruling could have far-reaching impact in California courts on other writers who publish electronically, including bloggers who regularly publish news and opinion online without the backing of a mainstream news operation.
"This ruling will probably prove instructive to other online writers," said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, who argued the case in front of the appeals court last month. "It says that what makes a journalist is not the format but the function."
Apple declined to comment Friday on the ruling or on a possible appeal.
Apple's close guarding of company secrets, particularly unannounced products, is legendary. Friday's ruling arose from a suit filed in December 2004 against the unknown individuals who Apple said had leaked information about unannounced Apple products to two sites devoted to news of the company, AppleInsider and PowerPage.org.
Both sites published reports in November 2004 describing secret Apple projects, including one known at Apple by the code name Asteroid.
Apple did not sue the sites directly but sought to subpoena their e-mail records. As part of the investigation, Apple subpoenaed the e-mail records of Nfox, the company that provided Internet service to Jason D. O'Grady, the publisher of PowerPage.
About the same time, Apple filed a trade-secret suit against Think Secret, another online news site that the company accused of publishing confidential data about its future products. That case is pending.
Friday's ruling is also significant because it addresses whether private e-mail is protected from subpoenas. "The court correctly found that under federal law, civil litigants can't subpoena your stored e-mail from your service," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/te...y/27apple.html
Give me an inch girl
Feds Put Squeeze On Internet Firms
Tracking pornography, terrorists sited as reasons for data retention
Kevin Bohn
During a meeting last week with some of the nation's leading Internet service companies, the attorney general and the FBI director asked a variety of customer information and other data be kept for two years, much longer than the companies do now, the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.
Companies have varying policies regarding what information is kept and for how long.
One thing the Justice Department wants is some type of subscriber information, such as the Internet address assigned to a person when logging on to a service provider, two sources familiar with the meeting told CNN.
The online industry is expected to strongly oppose any request to retain these types of records because of privacy concerns for their customers.
"It is a slippery slope," one of the sources said of the government's interest in the information. "It becomes a fishing expedition."
The Internet companies have said there are other ways to get the information without them having to hand it over and believe requests like this are burden to the industry, the sources said.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said government and private industry officials are continuing to discuss the privacy issues involved and some of the concerns raised by the companies at the meeting Friday at the Justice Department.
The meeting, first reported by CNET News.com, included representatives from Verizon, Comcast, AOL (which is owned by Time Warner, as is CNN.com), Microsoft, Google and the U.S. Internet Service Provider Association, the sources told CNN. Companies involved refused to comment on the meeting.
The original request for the record retention came as part of the Justice Department's efforts to fight child pornography. During a speech last month, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he would press the CEOs of Internet service providers about retaining records.
During last week's meeting, though, the FBI "made clear they wanted [information on subscribers] for other reasons as well. ... Terrorism was mentioned," one of the sources said.
After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to secretly wiretapping e-mail and phone calls to track people linked to terrorist activity.
Earlier this month USA Today reported three telecommunications giants provided the NSA, the nation's super secret spy agency, with records from billions of domestic phone calls after 9/11.
Another meeting of government and industry representatives is scheduled for Friday, according to an official of the Internet Service Provider Association.
CNN's Terry Frieden contributed to this story.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/interne...rds/index.html
Pre-9/11 Records Help Flag Suspicious Calling
John Diamond and Leslie Cauley
Armed with details of billions of telephone calls, the National Security Agency used phone records linked to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to create a template of how phone activity among terrorists looks, say current and former intelligence officials who were briefed about the program.
The template, the officials say, was created from a secret database of phone call records collected by the spy agency. It has been used since 9/11 to identify calling patterns that indicate possible terrorist activity. Among the patterns examined: flurries of calls to U.S. numbers placed immediately after the domestic caller received a call from Pakistan or Afghanistan, the sources say.
USA TODAY disclosed this month that the NSA secretly collected call records of tens of millions of Americans with the help of three companies: AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. The call records include information on calls made before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Verizon and BellSouth released statements last week denying they had contracts with the NSA to provide the call information. A Verizon spokesman said the company's statement did not include MCI, the long-distance company that Verizon acquired in January.
The "call detail records" are the electronic information that is logged automatically each time a call is initiated. For more than 20 years, local and long-distance companies have used call detail records to figure out how much to charge each other for handling calls and to determine problems with equipment.
In addition to the number from which a call is made, the detail records are packed with information. Also included: the number called; the route a call took to reach its final destination; the time, date and place where a call started and ended; and the duration of the call. The records also note whether the call was placed from a cellphone or from a traditional "land line."
"They see everything," says Sergio Nirenberg, director of systems engineering at Science Applications International Corp., a Fortune 500 research and engineering company that works with the federal government. Nirenberg said he does not have direct knowledge of the NSA database.
The disclosure of the call record database has raised concerns among lawmakers, such as Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that the records give the government access to information about innocent Americans. President Bush has insisted that intelligence efforts are only "focused on links to al-Qaeda and their known affiliates."
The intelligence officials offered new insight into one way the database of calls is used to track terrorism suspects.
The officials, two current U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the program and two former U.S. intelligence officials, agreed to talk on condition of anonymity. The White House and the NSA refused to discuss the template or the program.
Using computer programs, the NSA searches through the database looking for suspicious calling patterns, the officials say. Because of the size of the database, virtually all the analysis is done by computer.
Calls coming into the country from Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Middle East, for example, are flagged by NSA computers if they are followed by a flood of calls from the number that received the call to other U.S. numbers.
The spy agency then checks the numbers against databases of phone numbers linked to terrorism, the officials say. Those include numbers found during searches of computers or cellphones that belonged to terrorists.
It is not clear how much terrorist activity, if any, the data collection has helped to find.
Not every call record contains the same level of detail. Depending upon how a business has its phone system set up, the call detail records might not register complete information on an outgoing call, Nirenberg says.
The records might note only the general number of the business, not the desk extension or, in the case of a hotel, the room extension. Incoming calls that don't go through the switchboard and are dialed directly would have complete call detail records, Nirenberg says.
Not all local calls generate a call detail record, Nirenberg says. But that's not to say that phone companies can't create a record for local calls.
"It's just a matter of whether they enable that function" that allows that to happen, he says. Cellphone calls, on the other hand, create call detail records in almost every case.
Toll calls — meaning those that aren't technically long-distance but still cost extra — also generate call detail records, he says. "If they charge you separately for it, they have a call detail record," Nirenberg says.
The current and former intelligence officials say that the point of the database is to create leads. The database enables intelligence analysts to focus on a manageable number of suspicious calling patterns, they say.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...template_x.htm
Intelligence Czar Can Waive SEC Rules
Now, the White House's top spymaster can cite national security to exempt businesses from reporting requirements
Dawn Kopecki
President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.
Unbeknownst to almost all of Washington and the financial world, Bush and every other President since Jimmy Carter have had the authority to exempt companies working on certain top-secret defense projects from portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials told BusinessWeek that they believe this is the first time a President has ever delegated the authority to someone outside the Oval Office. It couldn't be immediately determined whether any company has received a waiver under this provision.
The timing of Bush's move is intriguing. On the same day the President signed the memo, Porter Goss resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency amid criticism of ineffectiveness and poor morale at the agency. Only six days later, on May 11, USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had obtained millions of calling records of ordinary citizens provided by three major U.S. phone companies. Negroponte oversees both the CIA and NSA in his role as the administration's top intelligence official.
FEW ANSWERS. White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino said the timing of the May 5 Presidential memo had no significance. "There was nothing specific that prompted this memo," Perino said.
In addition to refusing to explain why Bush decided to delegate this authority to Negroponte, the White House declined to say whether Bush or any other President has ever exercised the authority and allowed a company to avoid standard securities disclosure and accounting requirements. The White House wouldn't comment on whether Negroponte has granted such a waiver, and BusinessWeek so far hasn't identified any companies affected by the provision. Negroponte's office did not respond to requests for comment.
Securities-law experts said they were unfamiliar with the May 5 memo and the underlying Presidential authority at issue. John C. Coffee, a securities-law professor at Columbia University, speculated that defense contractors might want to use such an exemption to mask secret assignments for the Pentagon or CIA. "What you might hide is investments: You've spent umpteen million dollars that comes out of your working capital to build a plant in Iraq," which the government wants to keep secret. "That's the kind of scenario that would be plausible," Coffee said.
AUTHORITY GRANTED. William McLucas, the Securities & Exchange Commission's former enforcement chief, suggested that the ability to conceal financial information in the name of national security could lead some companies "to play fast and loose with their numbers." McLucas, a partner at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr in Washington, added: "It could be that you have a bunch of books and records out there that no one knows about."
The memo Bush signed on May 5, which was published seven days later in the Federal Register, had the unrevealing title "Assignment of Function Relating to Granting of Authority for Issuance of Certain Directives: Memorandum for the Director of National Intelligence." In the document, Bush addressed Negroponte, saying: "I hereby assign to you the function of the President under section 13(b)(3)(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended."
A trip to the statute books showed that the amended version of the 1934 act states that "with respect to matters concerning the national security of the United States," the President or the head of an Executive Branch agency may exempt companies from certain critical legal obligations. These obligations include keeping accurate "books, records, and accounts" and maintaining "a system of internal accounting controls sufficient" to ensure the propriety of financial transactions and the preparation of financial statements in compliance with "generally accepted accounting principles."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12952860/
Federal Judge Allows Lawsuit Against NSA
A federal judge will go ahead with hearings in a legal challenge to a warrantless domestic surveillance program run by the National Security Agency.
U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor also criticized the Justice Department for failing to respond to the legal challenge, The Detroit News reported Friday.
The NSA and the Justice Department declined immediate comment. The Bush administration has said that hearings would reveal state secrets that affect national security.
The American Civil Liberties Union in Detroit and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed lawsuits against the program in January, saying it violates Americans' rights to free speech and to privacy.
In March, the plaintiffs asked the judge to declare the National Security Agency's program illegal. They said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires that the spy agency go to a secret court in order to spy within the United States.
The government filed a motion saying that no court can consider the issues because of a privilege against revealing state secrets, if doing so harms national security. The judge said she will hear the government's motion only after proceeding with a June 12 hearing on the plaintiffs' motion to summarily declare the spying illegal.
"Although defendants have not responded to said motion they may, if they appear, argue against it," she said
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/ar...+National+news
Gattaca, NY
NYC Mayor Advocates U.S. Worker Database
Sara Kugler
Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg thrust himself into the national immigration debate Wednesday, advocating a plan that would establish a DNA or fingerprint database to track and verify all legal U.S. workers.
The mayor also said elements of the legislation moving through Congress are ridiculous and said lawmakers who want to deport all illegal immigrants are living in a "fantasy."
In an editorial for The Wall Street Journal and two nationally televised interviews, the mayor reiterated his long-standing belief that the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States should be given the opportunity for citizenship, saying that deporting them is impossible and would devastate the economy.
Aides said Bloomberg believes his views are relevant because he has a rare perspective as a former businessman who ran a company for two decades before he became mayor, in charge of enforcing the laws in a city with an estimated half-million illegal immigrants. They said that the editorial was his idea and that CNN and Fox News approached him to discuss his views on the air.
In the article and on air, Bloomberg slammed lawmakers who want to deport all illegal immigrants, saying on Fox News that "they are living in a fantasy world."
Asked in that interview whether his opinions put him at odds with his political party, the mayor, a former Democrat, shot back: "With which party?
"I'm not a partisan guy," Bloomberg said. "I am a mayor who has to deal with 500,000 people who are integral to our economy but are undocumented."
Bloomberg compared his proposed federal identification database to the Social Security card, insisting that such a system would not violate citizens' privacy and was not a civil liberties issue.
"You don't have to work _ but if you want to work for a company you have to have a Social Security card," he said. "The difference is, in the day and age when everybody's got a PC on their desk with Photoshop that can replicate anything, it's become a joke."
The mayor said DNA and fingerprint technology could be used to create a worker ID database that will "uniquely identify the person" applying for a job, ensuring that cards are not illegally transferred or forged.
Donna Lieberman, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said a DNA or fingerprint database "doesn't sound like the free society we think we're living in."
"It will inevitably be used not just by employers but by law enforcement, government agencies, schools and all over the private sector," she said.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/05/24/D8HQE6B80.html
Don't Try This at Home
Garage chemistry used to be a rite of passage for geeky kids. But in their search for terrorist cells and meth labs, authorities are making a federal case out of DIY science.
Steve Silberman
The first startling thing Joy White saw out of her bedroom window was a man running toward her door with an M16. White’s husband, a physicist named Bob Lazar, was already outside, awakened by their barking dogs. Suddenly police officers and men in camouflage swarmed up the path, hoisting a battering ram. “Come out with your hands up immediately, Miss White!” one of them yelled through a megaphone, while another handcuffed the physicist in his underwear. Recalling that June morning in 2003, Lazar says, “If they were expecting to find Osama bin Laden, they brought along enough guys.”
The target of this operation, which involved more than two dozen police officers and federal agents, was not an international terrorist ring but the couple’s home business, United Nuclear Scientific Supplies, a mail-order outfit that serves amateur scientists, students, teachers, and law enforcement professionals. From the outside, company headquarters – at the end of a dirt road high in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque – looks like any other ranch house in New Mexico, with three dogs, a barbecue, and an SUV in the driveway. But not every suburban household boasts its own particle accelerator. A stroll through the backyard reveals what looks like a giant Van de Graaff generator with a pipe spiraling out of it, marked with CAUTION: RADIATION signs. A sticker on the SUV reads POWERED BY HYDROGEN, while another sign by the front gate warns, TRESPASSERS WILL BE USED FOR SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS.
Science experiments are United Nuclear’s business. The chemicals available on the company’s Web site range from ammonium dichromate (the main ingredient in the classic science-fair volcano) to zinc oxide powder (which absorbs UV light). Lazar and White also sell elements like sodium and mercury, radioactive minerals, and geeky curiosities like aerogel, an ultralightweight foam developed by NASA to capture comet dust. The Department of Homeland Security buys the company’s powerful infrared flashlights by the case; the Mythbusters guys on the Discovery Channel recently picked up 10 superstrong neodymium magnets. (These come with the sobering caveat: “Beware – you must think ahead when moving these magnets … Loose metallic objects and other magnets may become airborne and fly considerable distances.”) Fire departments in Nevada and California send for United Nuclear’s Geiger counters and uranium ore to train hazmat crews.
A former employee of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the 47-year-old Lazar radiates a boyish enthusiasm for science and gadgets. White, 50, is a trim licensed aesthetician who does herbal facials for local housewives while helping her husband run the company. When the officers determined that Lazar and White posed no physical threat, they freed the couple from their handcuffs and produced a search warrant. United Nuclear’s computers and business records were carted off in a van.
The search was initiated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal agency best known for instigating recalls of faulty cribs and fire-prone space heaters. The CPSC’s concern with United Nuclear was not the uranium, the magnets, or the backyard accelerator. It was the chemicals – specifically sulfur, potassium perchlorate, and powdered aluminum, all of which can be used to make illegal fireworks. The agency suspected that Lazar and White were selling what amounted to kits for making M-80s, cherry bombs, and other prohibited items; such kits are banned by the CPSC under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act.
“We are not just a recall agency,” explains CPSC spokesperson Scott Wolfson. “We have turned our attention to the chemical components used in the manu-facture of illegal fireworks, which can cause amputations and death.” A 2004 study by the agency found that 2 percent of fireworks-related injuries that year were caused by homemade or altered fireworks; the majority involved the mishandling of commercial firecrackers, bottle rockets, and sparklers. Nonetheless, Wolfson says, “we’ve fostered a very close relationship with the Justice Department and we’re out there on the Internet looking to see who is promoting these core chemicals. Fireworks is one area where we’re putting people in prison.”
In the past several years, the CPSC has gone after a variety of online vendors, demanding the companies require customers to prove they have a license to manufacture explosives before they can purchase any chemical associated with making them. Many of these compounds, however, are also highly useful for conducting science experiments. Sulfur, for example, is an ingredient in hydrogen sulfide, an important tool for chemical analysis. Potassium perchlorate and potassium nitrate are widely used in labs as oxidizers.
The CPSC’s war on illegal fireworks is one of several forces producing a chilling effect on amateur research in chemistry. National security issues and laws aimed at thwarting the production of crystal meth are threatening to put an end to home laboratories. In schools, rising liability concerns are making teachers wary of allowing students to perform their own experiments. Some educators even speculate that a lack of chem lab experience is contributing to the declining interest in science careers among young people.
United Nuclear got its computers back a few days after they were hauled away, and three years passed before Lazar and White heard from the authorities again. This spring, the couple was charged with violating the Federal Hazardous Substances Act and shipping restricted chemicals across state lines. If convicted, Lazar and White each face a maximum penalty of 270 days in prison and a $15,000 fine.
The lure of do-it-yourself chemistry has always been the most potent recruiting tool science has to offer. Many kids attracted by the promise of filling the garage with clouds of ammonium sulfide – the proverbial stink bomb – went on to brilliant careers in mathematics, biology, programming, and medicine.
Intel cofounder Gordon Moore set off his first boom in Silicon Valley two decades before pioneering the design of the integrated circuit. One afternoon in 1940, near the spot where Interstate 280 intersects Sand Hill Road today, the future father of the semiconductor industry knelt beside a cache of homemade dynamite and lit the fuse. He was 11 years old.
Moore’s pyrotechnic adventures grew out of his experiments with a neighbor’s chemistry set. He turned a shed beside the family house into a lab, stocking it with chemicals mail-ordered from San Francisco and filling an old dresser with beakers and funnels. Now retired, the 77-year-old Moore looks back on his days and nights in the shed as a time when he learned to think and work like a scientist. “The things I made, like nitroglycerin, took a fair amount of lab technique,” he recalls. “I specialized in explosives because they were fun, and I liked doing things that got results in a hurry.”
Many of Moore’s illustrious peers also first got interested in science by performing experiments at home. After reading a book called The Boy Scientist at age 10, Vint Cerf – who became one of the architects of the Internet – spent months blowing up thermite volcanoes and launching backyard rockets. Growing up in Colorado, David Packard – the late cofounder of Hewlett-Packard – concocted new recipes for gunpowder. The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about his adolescent love affair with “stinks and bangs” in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. “There’s no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids – particularly boys – to science,” says Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1981. “Now the potential for stinks and bangs has been legislated out.”
Popular Science columnist Theodore Gray, who is one of United Nuclear’s regular customers, uses potassium perchlorate to demonstrate the abundance of energy stored in sugar and fat. He chops up Snickers bars, sprinkles in the snowy crystals, and ignites the mixture, which bursts into a tower of flame – the same rapid exothermic reaction that propels model rockets skyward. “Why is it that I can walk into Wal-Mart and buy boxes of bullets and black powder, but I can’t buy potassium perchlorate to do science because it can also be used to make explosives?” he asks. “How many people are injured each year doing extreme sports or playing high school football? But mention mixing up chemicals in your home lab, and people have a much lower index of acceptable risk.”
The push to restrict access to chemicals by those who have no academic or scientific credentials gained momentum in the mid-’90s following the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. In the years since 9/11, the Defense Department, FBI, and other government agencies have strategized ways of tracking even small purchases of potentially dangerous chemicals. “The fact that there are amateurs and retired professors out there who need access to these chemicals is a valid problem,” acknowledges Rice University chemistry professor James Tour, who consulted with the Pentagon and the Justice Department, “but there aren’t many of those guys weighed against the possible dangers.”
A provision in the 2002 Homeland Security Act mandated background checks and licensing requirements for model-rocket enthusiasts on the grounds that ammonium perchlorate fuel is an explosive; the Justice Department argued that terrorists could deploy model rockets to shoot down commercial airliners. A bill pending in both houses of Congress would empower the Department of Homeland Security to regulate sales of ammonium nitrate, a common fertilizer that Timothy McVeigh used to make the Oklahoma City bomb. “We finally have bipartisan support and encouragement from the chemical industry on this, which is important, because we’ve seen what can happen when these materials fall into the wrong hands,” says US representative Curt Weldon (R-Pennsylvania), who is sponsoring the House bill. “As we move forward, we’re going to be taking a very close look at other chemicals that should be regulated.”
In the meantime, more than 30 states have passed laws to restrict sales of chemicals and lab equipment associated with meth production, which has resulted in a decline in domestic meth labs, but makes things daunting for an amateur chemist shopping for supplies. It is illegal in Texas, for example, to buy such basic labware as Erlenmeyer flasks or three-necked beakers without first registering with the state’s Department of Public Safety to declare that they will not be used to make drugs. Among the chemicals the Portland, Oregon, police department lists online as “commonly associated with meth labs” are such scientifically useful compounds as liquid iodine, isopropyl alcohol, sulfuric acid, and hydrogen peroxide, along with chemistry glassware and pH strips. Similar lists appear on hundreds of Web sites.
“To criminalize the necessary materials of discovery is one of the worst things you can do in a free society,” says Shawn Carlson, a 1999 MacArthur fellow and founder of the Society for Amateur Scientists. “The Mr. Coffee machine that every Texas legislator has near his desk has three violations of the law built into it: a filter funnel, a Pyrex beaker, and a heating element. The laws against meth should be the deterrent to making it – not criminalizing activities that train young people to appreciate science.”
The increasingly strict regulatory climate has driven a wedge of paranoia between young chemists and their potential mentors. “I don’t tell anyone about what I do at home,” writes one anonymous high schooler on Sciencemadness.org, an online forum for amateur scientists. “A lot of ignorant people at my school will just spread rumors about me … The teacher will hear about them and I will get into legal trouble … I have so much glassware at my house, any excuse will not cut it. So I keep my mouth shut.”
Ironically, a shadow of suspicion is being cast over home chemistry at a time when the contributions of amateurs to the progress of science are highly regarded. In recent years, citizen scientists have discovered comets and supernovas and invented tools for gauging Earth’s magnetic field. Peer-reviewed journals like Nature now welcome papers coauthored by auto-didacts like Forrest Mims III, who studies solar storms and atmospheric conditions at his home observatory in Texas. Personal computers, digital cameras, and other consumer electronic devices are putting more accurate means of recording and measuring phenomena into the hands of home tinkerers than were available in high-end labs just a few years ago. The Internet is the ultimate enabling technology, allowing amateurs to collaborate with their counterparts at NASA and other organizations.
Porting the hacker ethic to the nonvirtual world, magazines like Make and blogs like Boing Boing are making it cool for geeks to get their hands dirty again, offering how-tos on everything from building your own telescope to assembling an electronic insect army. DIY robotics-fests like Dorkbot (“people doing strange things with electricity,” according to the Web site) are taking off from Boston to Bangalore.
But the hands-on revival is leaving home chemists behind. While surplus lab equipment is available on eBay, chemicals are subject to the site’s filtering software, which tracks or blocks the sale of items tagged as hazardous by the US Postal Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency. “There are very few commercial supply houses willing to sell chemicals to amateurs anymore because of this fear that we’re all criminals and terrorists,” Carlson says. “Ordinary folks no longer have access to the things they need to make real discoveries in chemistry.”
The heyday of home experimentation in the US coincided with the rise of the Porter Chemical Company, makers of the legendary Chemcraft labs-in-a-box, which contained enough bottles and beakers to perform more than 800 experiments. At the height of its popularity in the 1950s, Porter awarded college scholarships, mined its own chemicals, and was the biggest user of test tubes in the US. The company produced more than a million chemistry sets before going out of business in the 1980s amid increasing liability concerns.
One kid whose interest in science was sparked by the gift of a chemistry set was Don Herbert, who grew up to host a popular TV show in the 1950s called Watch Mr. Wizard. With his eye-popping demonstrations and low-key midwestern manner, Mr. Wizard gave generations of future scientists and teachers the confidence to perform experiments at home. In 1999, Restoration Hardware founder Stephen Gordon teamed up with Renee Whitney, general manager of a toy company called Wild Goose, to try to re-create the chemistry set Herbert marketed almost 50 years ago. “Don was so sweet,” Whitney recalls. “He invited us to his home to have dinner with him and his wife. Then he pulled his old chemistry set out of the garage. It was amazing – a real metal cabinet, like a little closet, filled with dozens of light-resistant bottles.”
Gordon and Whitney soon learned that few of the items in Mr. Wizard’s cabinet could be included in the product. “Unfortunately, we found that more than half the chemicals were illegal to sell to children because they’re considered dangerous,” Whitney explains. By the time the Mr. Wizard Science Set appeared in stores, it came with balloons, clay, Super Balls, and just five chemicals, including laundry starch, which was tagged with an ominous warning: HANDLE CAREFULLY. NOT EXPECTED TO BE A HEALTH HAZARD.
“It wasn’t really something you could use to teach kids about chemistry,” acknowledges Thomas Nikosey, head of Mr. Wizard Studios, which handles licensing for the 88-year-old Herbert.
Kits that train kids how to do real chemistry have yielded to innocuous science-flavored toys. At the Web site Discover This, one typical product promises lessons in making “rock candy, superbubbles, and molding clay … without blowing up the house.”
One of the few companies still selling chemistry sets worthy of the name is a German-American venture called Thames & Kosmos, run by former Adobe software engineer Ted McGuire. The company’s top-of-the-line kit, the C3000, is equipped with a full complement of test tubes, beakers, pipettes, litmus paper, and more than two dozen useful compounds. But even the C3000, which retails for $200, comes with a shopping list of chemicals that must be purchased elsewhere to perform certain experiments. “A lot of retailers are scared to carry a real chemistry set now because of liability concerns,” McGuire explains. “The stuff under your kitchen sink is far more dangerous than the things in our kits, but put the word chemistry on something and people become terrified.”
The chemophobia that’s put a damper on home science has also invaded America’s classrooms, where hands-on labs are being replaced by liability-proof teacher demonstrations with the explicit message Don’t try this at home. A guide for teachers of grades 7 through 12 issued by the American Chemical Society in 2001 makes the prospect of an hour in the lab seem fraught with peril: “Every chemical, without exception, is hazardous. Did you know that oxygen is poisonous if inhaled at a concentration a bit greater than its natural concentration in the air?” More than half of the suggested experiments in a multimedia package for schools called “You Be the Chemist,” created in 2004 by the Chemical Educational Foundation, are to be performed by the teacher alone, leaving students to blow up balloons (with safety goggles in place) or answer questions like “How many pretzels can you eat in a minute?”
“A lot of schools don’t have chemistry labs anymore,” explains CEF educational coordinator Laurel Brent. “We want to give kids lessons that tie in to their real-world experiences without having them deal with a lot of strange chemicals in bottles that have big long names.”
Many students are ill at ease when faced with actual compounds and lab equipment for the first time at school. A study of “chemistry anxiety” in the Journal of Chemical Education concluded in 2000 that “the presence of this anxiety in our students could be a contributing factor in the overall poor performance of high school students in science.” (Commonly reported fears included “lighting the Bunsen burner,” “fire,” and “getting chemicals on skin.”) Restrictions on hands-on chemical experience is “a problem that has been building for 10 or 15 years, driven by liability and safety concerns,” says John Moore, editor in chief of the JCE.
“The liability issues are a cop-out,” says Bassam Shakhashiri, the author of a four-volume guide to classroom chemistry who has taught for 36 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Kids are being robbed of the joy of discovering things for themselves.” Compared with students in previous generations, he says, undergraduates raised on hands-off science seem passive: “They want someone to do things for them. Even those who become chem majors and grad students are not as versatile in the lab, because their experiences in middle school and high school were so limited. This is a terrible shame. By working with real substances, you learn how to ask the right questions about the physical world, which is half the battle in science.”
Paradoxically, at a time when young people are particularly excited about technology, their enthusiasm for learning about the science behind it is waning. Thirty years ago, the US ranked third in the world in the number of science and engineering degrees awarded in the 18-to-24 age group. Now the country ranks 17th, according to the National Science Board. A 2004 report called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Education Study found that while fourth graders in the US rank sixth in basic science scores when measured against their peers worldwide, by the time they’re in eighth grade, they’ve slipped to ninth place. Prompted by concern that America is falling behind, President Bush proposed a $380 million “competitiveness initiative” this year that promises to train 70,000 new teachers of Advanced Placement science and math. By the time students have the opportunity to enroll in an AP course, however, many have already absorbed the message that science is best left to trained professionals.
“You have to capture kids’ imaginations very young or you lose them forever,” says Steve Spangler, a former protégé of Mr. Wizard who is now a science correspondent for the NBC affiliate in Denver. “But that’s hard when you have teachers required to check out vinegar and baking soda from the front office because something bad might happen in class. Slowly but surely the teaching tools are being taken away, so schools end up saying, ‘Let’s get a college professor to do this demonstration, and kids can watch the streaming video.’”
To Bill Nye, the “Science Guy” who hosted an Emmy award-winning series on PBS in the 1990s, unreasonable fears about chemicals and home experimentation reflect a distrust of scientific expertise taking hold in society at large. “People who want to make meth will find ways to do it that don’t require an Erlenmeyer flask. But raising a generation of people who are technically incompetent is a recipe for disaster.”
To ensure that the tradition of home chemistry survives, self-proclaimed “mad scientists” are creating a research underground on Web sites like Sciencemadness, Readily Available Chemicals, and the International Order of Nitrogen. There, in comfortable anonymity, seasoned experimenters, novices, and connoisseurs of banned molecules share tips on finding alternative sources for chemicals and labware.
One key to working as a DIY chemist, says Matthew Ernst, the 25-year-old host of Sciencemadness, is realizing how many useful chemicals are still available as household products or items designed for specialized niches. Silver nitrate, for example, can be found at potters’ supply stores, where it lends raku glazes an uncanny luster. “Amateur chemists become compulsive label readers,” Ernst says. “Many compounds are available if the chemist is willing to split his shopping between the paint store, hardware store, ceramics supplier, gardening center, welding supplier, feed store, and metal recycler.”
Out-of-print texts like Julius B. Cohen’s 1910 Practical Organic Chemistry are being made available again in PDF form on file-sharing networks and the Internet Archive. To route around stigmatized chemical pathways, home experimenters are reviving 19th-century methods of synthesizing reagents from scratch. Shawn Carlson of the Society for Amateur Scientists calls this “embracing Grandpa’s chemistry.”
Carlson’s group acts as a virtual co-op for its nearly 2,000 members by facilitating small purchases of legal chemicals and equipment. The group is also launching an ambitious national program called Labrats to provide mentoring to the next generation of researchers by teaming students with working scientists.
The father of three young children, Carlson understands parental concerns about safety. But he believes that the exhilaration of risk has always been a powerful factor in engaging kids’ interest in science, and should be actively encouraged – while minimizing the physical hazards. “We can get rid of most of the actual dangers, but it’s important that we preserve the perception of danger in science,” he says. “When I do experiments with my own kids, I’m more than happy to let them believe that if they’re not careful, something could happen to them. It adds that extra element of ‘my fate is in my hands – but if I do this right, everything will be fine.’”
In March, Bob Lazar and Joy White were building a new two-story home for United Nuclear in a clearing behind their house, hiring three assistants, and weathering a nerve-wracking shortage of aerogel after Boing Boing posted a link. Then news of the Justice Department’s charges against them arrived, and they called their lawyer to begin planning their defense.
“Kids read about the great scientists and their discoveries throughout history, and marvel that people once did these things,” Lazar says. “But they marvel a little too much. Taking chemicals and lab equipment away from kids who love science is like taking crayons and paints away from a kid who may grow up to be an artist.”
http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html
Symantec Denies 'Highly Severe' Antivirus Flaw
Ed Sutherland
Could Symantec’s antivirus software guarding company, as well as government computers include a backdoor allowing hackers access to corporate data?
A new security vulnerability rated as highly severe by a security research firm, "has everything required for a worm," according to Mike Puterbaugh, vice president of marketing for eEye Digital Security.
Symantec security protects more than 200 million computers, according to the company. Symantec has also recently argued its software -- not Microsoft's – should be trusted to keep computers safe.
The flaw could impact users of Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.0 and Symantec Client Security 3, according to eEye. The firm said the vulnerability can "compromise affected systems, allowing for the execution of malicious code with system level access."
Unlike some security glitches, which need a user to open an attachment, visit a Web site or click on something, the Symantec Antivirus flaw requires no user interaction, according to a security advisory posted on the eEye site.
In a posting to its Web site, Symantec described the reports as unverified.
"Symantec's Product Security team has confirmed that the reported vulnerability by eEye Digital does not affect its Norton brand," the company said, referring to its Norton line of security products such as firewalls and anti-virus updates.
Puterbaugh said eEye’s latest research confirms Norton products are not affected by the bug.
Promising "prompt mitigation solutions for any confirmed issues," Symantec added: "there is no known exploit code currently in the wild that takes advantage of this reported vulnerability."
Should enterprises be concerned? “No one is going to uninstall antivirus – nor should they,” Puterbaugh said. The flaw should encourage network administrators to re-evaluate their policies about mobile devices, he commented. While steps should be taken to be extra vigilant, "attack prevention cannot equal business disruption," according to the eEye exec.
While eEye has privately informed Symantec about the flaw, the company remained circumspect when talking publicly. “We’re not releasing details of the flaw,” Putersbaugh said. Providing too much information about the security hole could assist hackers, he said.
Putersbaugh said he was a "little surprised at the media spin on this." Initial public security reports include little detail with more explicit information shared only between the researcher and the affected company.
Although eEye has already provided a patch to customers of their "Blink" intrusion prevention service, the company couldn’t name when a publicly-available patch will be released.
http://www.internetnews.com/security...le.php/3609501
Buttoned Up
Jack
An interesting bit about customizing the Opera browser that not even many Opera users know is that often adding features is as easy as dragging them right up onto the toolbar. Pretty simple eh? I think dragging them around is fun, plus you can drop them exactly where you want them, but you can click to install them too.
I recently added click-to-launch Firefox/IE buttons. Now if I’m surfing a site in Opera and I want to see the page in another browser I just click the Opera toolbar icon for IE or Firefox and they launch to that page. I don't use it much but it's fast.
If you don't like something they uninstall w/a right click, and you can even make your own if you're so inclined. Here’s a bunch of Opera "
Custom Buttons" for page commands etc.
From a Small Stream, a Gusher of Movie Facts
Richard Siklos
BRISTOL, England
THE closest that Col Needham gets to corporate life is the Dilbert calendar in his neat office — a converted bedroom in a quaint house in the ancient village of Stoke Gifford, a suburb of Bristol, the harbor city that is 90 minutes west of London by train.
As the founder and managing director of the Internet Movie Database, Mr. Needham might just be the archetype of the telecommuting Web-head. The site he founded and runs,
www.imdb.com, ranks as the 10th-most-popular entertainment spot online, according to ComScore Media Metrix. It had 18.6 million unique visitors in April, a 67 percent surge from a year earlier.
In Stoke Gifford, Mr. Needham works solo — without even an assistant — but is in constant contact by instant message with other employees scattered across the globe and at the Seattle headquarters of Amazon.com, which acquired the business eight years ago. "Everybody assumes that we have a massive office complex on Wilshire Boulevard," Mr. Needham said with a grin. "I always say, 'We're headquartered on the Internet.' "
Mr. Needham, a boyish, closely-shorn 39-year-old walked to the kitchen, put on the kettle and made tea. Part of what makes him a curiosity — beyond his enviable work setup — is that Internet Movie Database, or Imdb for short, has become a classic example of a hobby that turns out to be a powerful media asset. For years, it has quietly gone about its business almost entirely separately from its parent, and only subtly does it encourage users to go to the Amazon site to buy videos.
"We didn't sit down and think, 'What's the best way to make money on the Internet?' " Mr. Needham said. "This is very much a labor of love. When we started the company, there was no commercial use of the Internet."
Even so, Imdb's convergence moment may soon be at hand, say studio executives who have worked with Amazon on developing a download service that could let people burn DVD's on their desktops. Though Amazon and Mr. Needham decline to talk about plans, Imdb could play a more prominent role in the retailer's media strategy. Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers are all involved in the project, executives close to the project have said.
Several weeks ago, one media executive who had been briefed on Amazon's strategy but did not want to be identified because it was still being formulated, pointed out one aspect of Imdb's popularity: if you use search engines to look for the title of virtually any past movie or television show, or the names of celebrities from those realms, Imdb often comes up as the first result.
In the retail business, that is the equivalent of excellent shelf frontage, or, in television, of having a single-digit channel number rather than being relegated to Channel 284 on the cable lineup.
There are glimpses of a grander media plan beyond Imdb. For instance, Amazon has quietly built up its own
www.a9.com search engine, which places more emphasis on displaying results in multiple media formats than bigger rivals like Google and Yahoo. But even if Amazon's foray into downloading fizzles, Imdb holds its own. Its climb also provides some interesting lessons for burgeoning digital media barons.
Internet Movie Database began in 1990 as a bulletin board database of movie credits. It was started by Mr. Needham and some film-buff friends. At the time, Mr. Needham was working as an engineer in Bristol at Hewlett-Packard (or, as he says in his native Manchester lilt, "Hewlett Pa-Cod") and had only a rudimentary strategy for financing the site.
By 1998, the database had established itself as a favorite on the early Internet, and Mr. Needham was amused to receive a number of buyout approaches.
One was an invitation to a London hotel in January to meet with Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Mr. Bezos told Mr. Needham that he thought the movie database could help Amazon sell VHS cassettes and DVD's — Mr. Needham points out that it was in that order in those days — but also recognized that the site would need to be run separately to maintain its personality. Amazon, of course, could handle the technological end and pour resources into upgrades.
Today, Imdb makes money a variety of ways: from advertising, selling publicity photos, licensing its content, selling movie tickets through partners and offering a premium Imdb Pro service (started in 2002). For $99 a year, Imdb Pro subscribers get granular access to all kinds of industry data, like movie budgets and details about films in production. By chronicling everyone who ever worked on a film, the service has become a de facto directory of most everyone from key grips to producers, actors and directors.
Its most clever feature is probably the Starmeter and Movimeter ratings, which gauge the popularity of people and films, based on search topics. To no one's surprise, Audrey Tautou was No. 1 last week on the Starmeter, up from No. 215 early last year, when she joined the cast of "The Da Vinci Code."
Like the social networking sites that are now so popular in media, Imdb has found that much of its success is built on the participation of site visitors. Last year, Mr. Needham said, its users submitted information to the database 16 million times, adding minutiae like what commercials Hollywood actors have performed in abroad, or what video games they have done voice-overs for.
When its users are not adding information, they are perusing — or debating and challenging — material related to the 787,000 film, television and video game titles detailed on the site. One can learn, for example, that while Jennifer Grey played Jeanie in the film "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986), Jennifer Aniston played Jeanie in the TV series "Ferris Bueller" (1990).
Those submissions are then monitored — vetted is too strong a word — by a team of editors who take their entertainment geekdom seriously. Any factual mistakes they may not find on their own are usually brought to their attention by users, who also make frequent accusations that some Hollywood wannabes who submit their biographies to the site are padding their résumés.
In Mr. Needham's office, the only visible connection to Amazon is a separate laptop that has a secure feed to the company's internal server in Seattle. On the wall is a gift from Mr. Bezos: a framed original poster of "Vertigo," Mr. Needham's favorite film.
While Mr. Needham is thrilled to talk about the business, he is reticent about giving too many details. He does say that the company is profitable, that there are more than 50 employees and that they are in the United States, Britain, Switzerland and Germany. At Imdb, he says repeatedly that "the customer is the celebrity," and that the company is not.
AS for his own fortunes, a clue is found in the original announcement of Imdb's acquisition in April 1998. It said Imdb and two separate European businesses were bought mostly for Amazon shares then worth close to $55 million. Though it is impossible to know how the shares were divided among the three companies, the shares would be worth roughly $213 million now.
For his part, Mr. Needham dresses like a regular guy, and he drives a Toyota to take me to the train station. But it does turn out that the house in Stoke Gifford is actually just his former home; it now serves only as offices for him and his wife, although it retains all the furnishings, including his daughters' bunk beds.
The Needhams live in what he calls their "dream house" about 15 minutes away. It is there that Mr. Needham keeps his prized possession: an ever-growing collection of 7,500 films, mostly DVD's.
Asked whether someday it would all be digital, with his collection floating on a hard drive, Mr. Needham thought not: "I like to kick the tires of things I own."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/bu.../28frenzy.html
For Data Security, Sometimes Small Is Not Beautiful
Hubert B. Herring
It's wonderful, isn't it, that information can be packed into such an infinitesimal space that vital facts about millions of people can fit on a few little computer disks. Farewell, bulky file cabinets; hello, vast empty spaces that can be used, say, for meditating on the joys of miniaturization.
But any such meditation was rudely interrupted last week by yet another reminder that there is a hazardous flip side to all this. And the latest breach was a big one: Social Security numbers and other personal information on up to 26.5 million veterans were stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee.
All the more reason, then, to take note of a survey for the Cyber Security Industry Alliance that shows, among other things, that nearly half of likely voters may turn against any member of Congress who opposes swift action on data security. And that survey, of course, was taken before the loss of the veterans' data.
Suddenly those nice, bulky, hard-to-transport file cabinets don't look so bad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/bu...y/28count.html
Pull The Other One ... How iPods Took Over The World
Simon Caulkin
Like thousands of others, I got an iPod nano for Christmas. It's a gorgeous object. But in use the striking thing about Apple's iconic music player is neither its sexy looks nor even its playback performance - which is much the same as that of a dozen rivals. This tiny object does a lot more than play music: as part of a larger system with iTunes and the iTunes music store, it defines a new relationship between customer and producer and reshapes an industry. One day all products and services will be like this.
The first unexpected thing the iPod has done is make estranged customers like me music buyers again. I haven't bought music regularly for years - CDs aren't attractive in themselves, prices and reissuing policies are as cynical as ever, and the 'retail experience', hunting for what you want in the big record stores, is about as tempting as a visit to an emergency ward. (I don't need to add that today's bands are crap.)
But iTunes changes all that. Via the music store, I know when the Rolling Stones or Dr John have a new album out (what a giveaway). What's more, it's possible to buy on impulse: hearing something on a film soundtrack or radio show, you no longer have to go to HMV or Amazon (or more likely just forget about it), you download it straight away - instant gratification. The saviour of the industry is not 'Ł50 man' but '79p anyone with broadband'. No thanks to the record industry, but I'm enjoying being a customer again because it's on my own terms.
And that's the second thing about the iPod: it puts you, not them, in control. Basically, the record labels are devotees of the Henry Ford business model: 'You can have any music you want so long as it's what I want to give you.' But using the cyberspace jukebox, you're no longer at their mercy. You don't have to pay for the four filler tracks on every album. You don't have to buy albums at all. You can put country next to classical, punk next to jazz, Barry Manilow next to Placido Domingo (wait, that's a joke).
And you can play them in the same way. Indeed, by plugging the iPod into a pair of speakers, many people are dispensing with a traditional home hi-fi set up altogether. The sound quality isn't as good (purists say), but it's good enough, and for many - perhaps most - of us the gain in control and simplicity easily outweighs the disadvantages. So the iPod signals the end of another, if less malign, producer tyranny - hi-fi manufacturers beware.
Understand that this is not a puff for Apple. The iPod is certainly not perfect. Incompatibility with other formats means that at one level it perpetrates its own version of Henry Fordism: 'You can have anything you like so long as it's Apple.' This is the more irritating because the music store's coverage is by no means universal.
Nevertheless, the things it has got right hold key lessons for companies trying to woo customers in any industry, whether product- or service-based.
One lesson is the importance of using the right medium, and executing it properly. The iPod is a textbook example of getting applications - for playing, organising and buying music - to work seamlessly together through the net without dropping you between the gaps. The second is simplicity. The more complicated the product, the harder it has to work to make you love it. A large part of the iPod's appeal is how easy it is to use - put another way, the fact that nothing gets between you and what you want from it.
This leads to the third, most important and least obvious of the iPod's trumps: the power of 'pull'. Most companies distribute their product by 'push'. They estimate demand, build according to the estimate and then sell ('push') what they have built. This is essentially business as central planning, and it works little better at company than at country level - hence the need for advertising and promotional price-cuts to reconcile sales with estimates, extra features to help sell the product and, finally, huge computer power to keep track of all the product variations, sales estimates and production plans.
When, as with iTunes, the product is 'pulled' by the customer, on the other hand, the engines required for 'push' are redundant. It's like using gravity instead of fighting against it. Pull inherently uses fewer resources; tells managers directly what consumers want; and above all delivers on customers' own terms.
In their book The Support Economy, Shoshana Zuboff and Jim Maxmin charge that the rising tide of consumer discontent amid material plenty is the result of companies failing to change along with their customers. People are no longer grateful for what companies give them; they want what they want, in the form they decide. Part of the iPod's phenomenal success is that as one of the first of a new breed of products to put customers on equal terms with producers, it begins to respond to this need.
That said, don't go thinking you don't have work to do, Apple. Some colleagues were grousing that you can't download sleeve notes from iTunes. It's ridiculously hard to transfer a track downloaded for one iPod to another. And why does the database still not contain LaVern Baker's 'Saved'?
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/busin...784548,00.html
Microsoft Defies iPod in Japan
Microsoft is developing portable music players with NTT DoCoMo, Toshiba and other Japanese companies to compete against Apple Computer's iPod.
Microsoft is working with eight companies in Japan to offer audio players and content that is compatible with the Windows Media Technology operating system, Microsoft said late Wednesday. Napster Japan, NTT Communications and Aoyama Capital will provide content and other services, the statement said.
The partnerships may challenge Apple's dominance in Japan's Ą34.3 billion, or $306 million, Internet music download market. Microsoft's link with DoCoMo, the largest mobile phone company in Japan, and the electronics maker Toshiba may give its music software and media business a bigger foothold in Japan, where more people access the Internet from mobile phones than from personal computers.
The value of music downloads in Japan rose to Ą10.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005, up 58 percent from the beginning of the year, according to the Recording Industry Association of Japan. Mobile phones accounted for 94.3 percent of all music downloads in the year.
Apple's iTunes is the world's most- used online music store, and the iPod is the most popular portable music player.
Microsoft said it had begun a two- month campaign this week at Japanese electronics retailers showcasing portable music players or mobile phones from DoCoMo, Toshiba, Victor Co. of Japan, iRiver Japan and Creative Technology. Users will be able to transfer music and video files from their computer to the portable gadgets and mobile phones.
Windows advances in China
The number of PCs sold in China containing legal copies of Microsoft's Windows operating system doubled in the first quarter from the fourth, as major vendors joined a campaign to stamp out piracy, Reuters reported from Shanghai.
About 48 percent of PCs shipped in China in the three months through March came with legal copies of Windows already installed, compared with 25 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005, according to figures supplied from the data-tracking firm International Data Corp.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/01/business/ttk.php
Profiles
Howard Stringer, Sony's Road Warrior
Richard Siklos and Martin Fackler
SAY hello to George Osborne, Britain's shadow chancellor of the exchequer. Chat up the pop musicians Sir Bob Geldof and Peter Gabriel. Plant a quick kiss on the cheek of Tessa Jowell, Britain's secretary of state for culture, media and sport. It is a May evening, and Sir Howard Stringer, the Sony Corporation's avuncular chief executive, works the room at a party that the media scion James Murdoch holds for him at Aspinall's Club, a casino in the Mayfair district of London.
Mr. Murdoch, chief executive of British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, salutes a new partnership in which Sony is packaging high-definition broadcasting gear and televisions with BSkyB's latest digital HDTV service. He boasts that HDTV will allow viewers to see every blade of grass in the World Cup soccer tournament. Sir Howard thanks his host and, observing his surroundings, pokes fun at their alliance: "I thought you were trying to imply that the whole relationship with us is a crapshoot." He nods toward a new Sony Bravia television and tells partygoers that the set's crystalline display means that even "watching grass grow is fundamentally exciting."
Not that he would know. It is nearly a year since Sir Howard, 64, began his tenure as chief executive of Sony, the Japanese electronics and entertainment behemoth, declaring himself a "Sony warrior" committed to selling "champion products." He has spent much of that time crisscrossing the globe, trying to shake up the venerable but wayward company. He has traveled from corporate headquarters in Tokyo to his home in New York and to visit his wife and children, who live in the English countryside. And he has ventured to many points in between — last fall, for example, to a traditional spa in rural Japan where he and Ryoji Chubachi, the Sony president, bonded by bathing nude in warm spring water.
Sir Howard, the former head of Sony's American subsidiary, was an unconventional choice to revamp a Japanese corporate icon at risk of losing its relevance, market share and profits to more nimble and innovative competitors in the digital age. As his wife, Jennifer A. K. Patterson, observed at Mr. Murdoch's party, Sir Howard's new role is a potential "career breaker." The next several months promise to define the rest of Sir Howard's tenure at Sony as he tries to refocus this conglomerate's vast electronics business, shore up its film operations and jump-start its video game offerings, among a host of other challenges. If he fails to do so, more than just his résumé may be blotted. As Sir Howard is the first to acknowledge, Sony may find itself permanently stunted.
If he pulls it off, the upside is equally substantial. "Sony is as complicated as it gets," said William Drewry, an analyst at Credit Suisse who is bullish on the company. "Stringer's not taking anything for granted, but the risk of him not succeeding, in my mind, is less than it was when he took over 11 months ago."
Sir Howard has approached his duties with energy, enthusiasm and an alarm clock. The morning after Mr. Murdoch's party, he boarded a train to Cannes, France, with Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and various Sony Pictures executives to help them promote their much anticipated new film, "The Da Vinci Code." By the end of the same week, he traveled to Japan to handle his most urgent task: rallying Sony's top managers around the next phase of a revitalization strategy he announced last fall.
AS part of that plan he has set out to streamline and reorganize Sony's core electronics business, which accounts for 70 percent of the company's $64 billion in sales. More crucially, he is trying to overhaul Sony's culture to become more internally collaborative and much more software-savvy. And he is tackling these challenges at an enterprise that is so large and diverse that it simultaneously produces some of the coolest gizmos on the planet (like Sony's Location Free TV viewer or its latest CyberShot camera), yet appears lumbering and clueless in other aspects (think of the faded glories of the Walkman or the Sony Connect downloading service).
Even the American entertainment businesses that Sir Howard more closely oversaw in the past — Sony Pictures Entertainment and a half-interest in Sony-BMG Music Entertainment — have been roiled by notable flops and management clashes.
With Sony's stock up 24 percent in the last year, Sir Howard has the wind at his back — for now, at least. Part of the reason for that handsome stock surge is the overall buoyancy in the Japanese stock market. Japan's Topix index is up 44 percent over the last year, versus 7 percent for the Dow Jones industrial average. But Sony has also managed to beat analysts' earnings expectations in each of the last four quarters. Nonetheless, Sony's core electronics business continues to lose money. Most of its $1 billion earnings in the fiscal year ended March 31 came from big gains in its sprawling domestic financial services business, which owns a hefty portfolio of Japanese equities — hardly lines of business that electronics buffs have typically associated with the company.
So far, the reviews for Sir Howard's first year are better than those that have greeted "The Da Vinci Code." For one thing, the company's Bravia televisions — a result of a joint venture with Samsung— have given him bragging rights in a category in which Sony previously stumbled. He also gets credit for holding onto the financial services business rather than selling it as soon as he took over, a move that many analysts had erroneously predicted. "Stringer hasn't had such a big impact on earnings," said Yuji Fujimori, an analyst in Tokyo for Goldman Sachs. "But he's succeeded in changing the tone of the company."
In the near term, much is riding on the introduction of the PlayStation 3 — which was delayed by several months until this November and has cost more to produce than the company envisioned — and the success of Blu-ray, the high-definition DVD format that Sony pioneered. While PlayStation 3 runs the risk of being lapped by other platforms such as Microsoft's Xbox 360, Blu-ray faces its own hurdles in a looming format war with rival Toshiba's HD-DVD. These high-stakes products will hit the market at roughly the same time as "Casino Royale," the first James Bond film that Sony has produced since it led a consortium of investors in a purchase of MGM in 2004.
Cross-cultural friction also persists. Some critics say Sir Howard's arrival in the executive suite represents a further westernization of a business that would be better off selling its Hollywood assets and moving back to its Japanese roots — roots grounded in the creation and perfection of elegant electronic devices. Kazukuni Kobayashi, a former Sony employee who has written five books about the company's problems, including one called "Sony Sickness," is among those who think that the company should install a Japanese chief executive. "In Japan, Sony is an engineering company," Mr. Kobayashi said in an interview. "In America, it's a brand."
Takuma Miyazaki, a former Sony engineer who quit last year and wrote a book about the company called "Technological Hollowing," said: "Watching Sony now is like watching 'The Osbournes.' We see how pathetic our former hero has become."
Sir Howard faces internal pressures as well. When he approved a $2 billion cost-cutting plan announced last September, Sir Howard said some Japanese executives challenged him about why he was focusing on expenses rather than growth. For the most part, however, Sony's 61,000 Japanese employees appear to have embraced the first phase of Sir Howard's plan — called Sony United. In part, that is because the closure of 11 of 66 plants would result in the loss of 10,000 jobs, far less severe than the cutbacks Sir Howard had overseen at the American division. He and Mr. Chubachi appeared to quietly win points with the rank and file when, several weeks ago, they told 45 retired Sony executives who maintained comfortable offices as paid advisers that their services were no longer needed.
Sir Howard's good humor, pragmatic approach and openness have brought him some acceptance among the company's senior managers as well — even though he does not speak much Japanese. Unlike Sony's remote and enigmatic past leaders, he and Mr. Chubachi hold regular town-hall meetings at Sony plants and offices. On one such visit he made in November to a plant in central Japan, one female employee told him that it was her birthday and asked him, jokingly, to sing her a song. Sir Howard instantly broke into "Happy Birthday."
"For someone in that position to sprinkle in so many jokes is rare in Japan," Mr. Chubachi said. "Some employees had been resistant because of his image as a cost-cutter. But when employees actually met him, he gave them a totally different impression."
Of course, Sony's future and Sir Howard's legacy do not rest on his charm but on his stated goal of increasing the company's sluggish annual profit margins to 5 percent from last year's 2.6 percent by March 2008. By comparison, Samsung and Apple Computer rack up annual margins of 14 percent and 12 percent. Every percentage point that Sony adds to its margins could bolster its stock price by $8 a share, Mr. Drewry said. Sony's shares closed on Friday at $46.81.
How significantly Sir Howard can change Sony's culture will determine how the company fares in a world where most homes may someday be filled with closely networked devices linked to the Internet. "When you're transforming a company, and you're really trying to drive fundamental change, early success is both your best friend and your best enemy," said Louis V. Gerstner, the former I.B.M. chairman, whom Sir Howard persuaded to work as a consultant to Sony.
On the one hand, Mr. Gerstner said, quick improvement gives people confidence that they can make progress. On the other, it could lead Sony's notoriously insular legions of engineers to think that further change is unnecessary. Sony's "fundamental problem," he said, "frankly has nothing to do with margins in TV and the timing of a PlayStation 3."
"It's got everything to do with how Sony is going to compete against other companies like Microsoft and Apple and others that are coming into its traditional space with a different set of skills and a different sense of how to approach the marketplace and the consumers," Mr. Gerstner added.
On the morning of the premiere of "The Da Vinci Code" at Cannes, Sir Howard sat on the Eden Roc Hotel terrace in Cap d'Antibes and spoke about his current and future plans for Sony. He advocated his case for Sony while indulging a mischievous wit that has served him well over three decades in journalism and broadcasting. At one point, he doubled over laughing as he described internal trepidation at Sony about informing one imperious retiree that he would no longer have an office at the company.
Sir Howard's presence at the "Da Vinci Code" premiere stemmed from the fact that he recommended that Sony acquire rights to the book two years ago — well before it sold nearly 60 million copies globally. As the afternoon rolled around, Sir Howard would join Michael M. Lynton, the chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, for lunch aboard a yacht docked at Cannes.
WHILE the perks of Sir Howard's position are obvious, so are the burdens: after lunch, he would spend the afternoon in his room, phoning into a board meeting of Sony-BMG Music. That joint venture, created in 2004, is typical of the constant upheaval that has defined Sony in recent years. The partnership has been strained lately, because of a drought of new music hits from Sony as well as corporate jockeying by both sides. Andrew R. Lack, a former NBC News executive whom Sir Howard recruited, clashed with BMG and in February was forced to swap his position as Sony-BMG's chief executive with the BMG-appointed chairman. Now, Sony and BMG are in new talks about changing the terms of their partnership.
Sir Howard is no stranger to such abrupt changes, having already navigated the unpredictable paths of corporate life himself. The former Sony chairman Nobuyuki Idei recruited him to the company's American subsidiary in 1997 after a 30-year career at CBS, where he rose from being a documentary producer and news executive to running the network for seven years. Mr. Idei charged him with rebuilding tattered bridges between the American entertainment businesses and Tokyo. He was soon overseeing all of Sony's United States assets, and by 2004 had put into effect a reorganization that reduced its United States work force by 9,000, or roughly one-third.
Mr. Idei offered Sony's top job to Sir Howard during the Oscars weekend last year. Sir Howard had never actively lobbied for the job, but Mr. Idei's own reorganization efforts had stalled and Sony's board was pushing him to make drastic changes. Once Sir Howard accepted, one of the first things he did was to enlist Mr. Gerstner. Sir Howard lured him out of retirement by turning up at his Florida home with a copy of Mr. Gerstner's book about reviving the stalled and once invulnerable computer giant. "I have scratched out the word I.B.M. and replaced it with the word Sony on almost every page of this book and its still reads well," Mr. Gerstner recalled Sir Howard telling him.
Inside the company, Sir Howard gave new or expanded duties to executives who previously worked closely with him, including Robert S. Wiesenthal, Sony's United States chief financial officer, and Nicole Seligman, now Sony's global general counsel. Sir Howard has also worked hard to forge relationships with executives he leapfrogged on his way to the top. One of the most important was Ken Kutaragi, the maverick behind PlayStation, who had been in the running for Mr. Idei's job but elected to stay with Sony after he was passed over. Another is Mr. Chubachi, who also heads the electronics division and previously ran the company's components business.
Unlike some of his predecessors, Sir Howard does not appear to have the power to rule Sony on his own. Mr. Chubachi was appointed Sony's president four months before Sir Howard became chairman and chief executive. Analysts say decision-making is by consensus under the new regime, and Mr. Chubachi, a member of a management committee that advises Sir Howard on major corporate decisions, said as much in an interview. "I make the final decisions when it comes to electronics," he added.
The two men, who did not know each other well before last year, have some things in common. They avoid pomposity, and Mr. Chubachi favors a blunt, homespun friendliness that reflects his rural origins in northern Japan.
Last fall, as the men were hashing out the final details of their reorganization, Mr. Chubachi and his wife invited Sir Howard to a hot springs resort at the foot of Mount Fuji — where the men took their naked dip together. Conversation was tough. Mr. Chubachi once ran a tape factory for Sony in Alabama and spoke English in a heavily accented Southern patois. At times, he found Sir Howard's British accent equally hard to follow. The two executives now prefer to use translators when they converse.
But by all accounts, the two men bonded in the mountain springs and they eventually agreed on a cost-cutting plan. Mr. Chubachi more recently pressed for the removal of the retired advisers as a gesture of fairness to other Sony employees. "There was a certain amount of indignation" from the advisers, Sir Howard said. The company also sold two corporate jets in Japan and put its Maxim's de Paris restaurant chain up for sale. Even Norio Ohga, a former chairman, is expected to lose his office at the company.
Nobuyuki Oneda, Sony's chief financial officer, said that the company would eliminate 600 of some 3,000 products it makes in order to focus on growth markets. It has punted such marquee offerings as its Aibo robot dogs and high-end Qualia electronics gadgets — both of which Mr. Idei looked upon as pet projects.
SIR HOWARD acknowledges that cutting some ventures raised concerns that Sony was losing its innovative edge. "We are aware of the perception, but we have to deal with reality," he said.
He is equally sensitive to the perception that Sony's changes have not gone far enough. Even with the recent bump in Sony's stock price, it still trades at less than one-third of the heights it hit in early 2000. That explains why Sir Howard's next stop after Cannes was Tokyo.
By the time he arrived last Sunday to prepare for an annual management conference of some 1,200 Sony executives, he looked jetlagged. But he bore good news. Despite its critical drubbing, "The Da Vinci Code" hauled in $77 million in North America the previous weekend — Sony's best showing other than the huge box office returns of its "Spider-Man" franchise. Overseas, "The Da Vinci Code" brought in an additional $154 million. That was the biggest opening ever for a Sony film outside of North America and currently ranks second to "Star Wars: Episode III" for the best overseas box office weekends in Hollywood history.
It was a welcome development for Sony, coming in the wake of a disappointing 2005 that included the much-touted but poorly received "Memoirs of a Geisha." Last Wednesday, Sir Howard laid out the second phase of what he cinematically calls "Sony United — Into The Future." His top managers gathered in a Tokyo conference hall for a surprise address from Steven Spielberg, whom Sir Howard invited to talk about creativity and his fondness for gadgetry.
Sony made a point of seating its top engineers in the front rows for the gathering. Sir Howard played to Sony's considerable corporate pride by flashing images on a screen of the company's well-known product line — the transistor radio that the Sony co-founder Akio Morita pioneered, the Trinitron television and the PlayStation. He also touted a new Walkman mobile phone — developed with Ericsson of Sweden — which is the company's latest effort to make inroads into a market dominated by Apple's popular iPod.
Sony's next and biggest priority, Sir Howard told his managers, is to create new software that will allow it to better link the content and hardware the company produces. "We take great pride in the power of Sony hardware," he said "However, when we think about Sony's software, we have to honestly admit that our capabilities remain quite modest."
He also noted that Sony has to start new digital downloading services — another area where it has fallen far behind. To jump-start that effort, Sony hired a senior Apple executive, Tim Schaaff, last fall to oversee its software development. Company executives said Mr. Schaaff would focus on Marlin, a consortium of Sony and other consumer electronics giants developing a way to securely share content among different media products.
Sony executives said it could take several years to transform the company. And one question is how long Sir Howard himself can maintain his relentless pace. He is undergoing treatment for a degeneration of his left eye, a condition that makes it difficult for him to indulge in one of his passions: collecting and reading rare books. Doctors have told him that his travel schedule does not affect the condition, but there is a 50 percent chance that it could spread to his other eye within five years. "It's not irreversible," he said, but added: "If it went into the other eye, that would be depressing."
Perhaps no one understands Sir Howard's thirst for work better than his brother, Rob Stringer, who heads a Sony-BMG unit in Europe. He recalled that his older sibling, born in Wales but now an American citizen, once had a plaque in his office quoting the belief of the broadcasting legend Edward R. Murrow that no non-American would ever head CBS News — a job Sir Howard eventually snared. Now he is the first gaijin to run Sony.
"I think he feels it's an honor to be given this job, and it is such an unusual set of circumstances that he feels duty-bound to get it right," Rob Stringer said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/bu...ey/28sony.html
2 Executives at Sony Music Step Down Amid a Shake-Up
Jeff Leeds
Sony BMG Music Entertainment yesterday announced the resignations of the top two executives at its Sony Music Label Group, less than four months after the company's owners appointed a new chief executive in a bid to resolve management discord.
The sudden departures of Don Ienner, chairman of the unit, and Michele Anthony, the president, ended the reign of two of music's most powerful executives — each known for an aggressive, bare-knuckled style — who in the last 17 years built the careers of artists like Destiny's Child, Pearl Jam and John Mayer.
The resignations came as Sony BMG's new chief executive, Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, has been revamping the company, which ranks as the industry's second-largest behind Vivendi's Universal Music Group.
Sony BMG said Rob Stringer, the chairman and chief executive of the company's British unit, would take over as president of the Sony label unit in the United States effective Sept. 1. Until then, the unit will report to Tim Bowen, Sony BMG's chief operating officer. Mr. Stringer is the brother of Sony's chairman, Sir Howard Stringer.
The shake-up is the latest jolt to hit the company since Sony and Bertelsmann formed it in 2004 by merging their worldwide music operations. Almost since the outset, the company has been plagued by infighting between executives from Sony Music Entertainment and Bertelsmann's BMG.
Since the creation of the venture, executives integrated many of Sony and BMG's international business units, but the two companies' American labels have continued to run essentially as separate companies. In the more than 18 months of the company's existence, executives have clashed over issues including executive pay, and marketing and promotion strategies.
Top executives on each side have remained fiercely protective of their operations.
The feud boiled over last year when Bertelsmann demanded the ouster of Andrew Lack, an executive from the Sony side who was the venture's first chief executive. In February, the companies reached a deal that resulted in Mr. Lack's switching jobs with Mr. Schmidt-Holtz, a Bertelsmann executive who had been the nonexecutive chairman of the venture.
After taking the reins, Mr. Schmidt-Holtz moved quickly to begin rearranging the organizational chart. In April, he scaled down Sony Music's Nashville division — which had reported to Mr. Ienner — and folded it into the bigger BMG unit there.
"The American recording industry has been built on fiefdoms," said one executive close to Sony BMG's management, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wished to avoid further damage to the relationship between the parties. "Those fiefdoms are irrelevant today."
Mr. Ienner had less than a year left on his employment contract, according to executives close to him.
Recently, Mr. Ienner — who shuffled the management at the Columbia and Epic labels of Sony late last year — had been planning to oust Columbia's president, Steve Greenberg, according to executives involved in Sony BMG's decision-making. Mr. Schmidt-Holtz had at first asked whether another role could be found at the company for Mr. Greenberg, who has been in the job for a little more than a year. Even with yesterday's moves, however, it remains doubtful whether Mr. Greenberg will stay.
Before becoming head of Sony's music operations, Mr. Ienner served as chairman of the company's Columbia Records label, which under his management cranked out a string of hits from artists like the Offspring and Bow Wow.
Ms. Anthony, a lawyer who once represented rock bands like Alice in Chains, has been one of Sony's top deal makers and legal advisers and has become one of the industry's most influential voices in shaping policies on battling piracy and other issues.
Both executives had been top lieutenants to Sony Music's former chairman, Thomas D. Mottola.
After an earlier shake-up resulted in Mr. Mottola's exit in early 2003, many industry insiders expected his successor to oust Mr. Ienner and Ms. Anthony. Instead, Sony Music's new chief, Mr. Lack, kept both of them. Since then, the company has moved to cut costs — but it has struggled to break through with new artists.
Sony's labels accounted for approximately 15.2 percent of sales of new releases at the end of 2002. Last year, the company's share of new releases was 12.4 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.
This week, however, the company scored with a new album from the Dixie Chicks, which hit the national album sales chart at No. 1.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/...iness/sony.php
Cutting Sony, a Corporate Octopus, Back to a Rational Size
Martin Fackler
When Kumiko Ishioka bought car insurance last year, she chose the company that offered the cheapest rate. It also helped that the company bore the same brand name as that on her life insurance policy, her favorite skin lotion and her television set — Sony.
"Sony is definitely a name you can trust," Ms. Ishioka, 38, the owner of a clothing boutique in this Tokyo suburb, said. "But it's not really an electronics company anymore.
In the United States, Sony is known as an aggressive electronics giant that expanded into music and Hollywood films, with mixed results. But at home in Japan, Sony is large and diffuse, a sprawling conglomerate that sells products as diverse as flashlight batteries, online banking services — even foie gras.
This presents a problem. Sony has expanded into so many business areas in Japan and abroad that it has blurred its original identity as an engineering innovator. Analysts say this murkier image threatens one of the company's most profitable assets: the so-called Sony premium, the higher prices long commanded by its electronics products, which still account for 64 percent of revenue, excluding sales between Sony divisions.
Restoring this premium, they say, is one of the most pressing challenges facing Sony's chief executive, Sir Howard Stringer, who took over nearly a year ago, as he tries to reinvigorate the company after years of lackluster products and disappointing profits. While earnings have begun recovering, analysts say, the premium is still shrinking.
Sony remains one of the world's best-known brands. But even in the United States, analysts say, it is as likely to be associated with the movie "The Da Vinci Code" as with portable music devices, a product category Sony invented in 1979 with the Walkman cassette player but which the Apple iPod now dominates.
"What is Sony?" asked Hitoshi Kuriyama, an analyst with Merrill Lynch. "We don't even know anymore. Consumers used to pay more because the brand meant something special."
While Sony has lost the most ground in Japan, analysts say the Sony premium has also shrunk in the United States, where the company has had to price newer products like high-definition television sets close to the level of rivals like Sharp, Panasonic and Samsung.
"Sony has to trim its premium," said Paul O'Donovan of the market research company Gartner. "The brand equity, although still high, is clearly on the decline in consumers' minds."
Sir Howard calls restoring Sony's image a priority, to prevent the problems in Japan from spreading overseas.
He has pledged to refocus the company on electronics, and on creating the sort of "champion products" that made Sony famous in the first place. In February, he announced plans to sell several noncore businesses based in Japan, including a cosmetics maker, a mail-order shopping company called the Sony Family Club and a chain of Parisian restaurants.
While Sir Howard has made progress, as was demonstrated in a recent upturn in earnings, analysts say he has a long way to go.
"We need to rebuild the brand seriously," he said in an interview, "in terms of energy and perception around the world."
Globally, the company has about 1,000 subsidiaries and affiliates, of which about a third are unrelated to its core electronics business. While many are in Japan, they include the likes of the Sony Metreon shopping mall in San Francisco.
In fact, the Sony group's most profitable line of business last year was not electronics or entertainment, but finance. The company has three financial units in Japan, whose low fees have made them popular: Sony Life Insurance; Sony Assurance, a nonlife insurer whose coverage includes auto policies; and Sony Bank, an online lender. These subsidiaries earned $1.7 billion in the fiscal year ended in March, though losses in electronics dragged Sony's overall profit down to $1.1 billion.
Sony's success as a cut-rate financial company seems to run counter to its desire to remain a top-end brand in electronics, analysts say. And nowhere is the loss of the Sony premium more apparent than in Japan, where it took in 20 percent of its electronics-related revenue last year.
Visit electronics stores in Tokyo, and Sony's new Bravia line of liquid-crystal-display television sits prominently in front, next to the rival Sharp and Panasonic. This is the work of the new chief executive of Sony's electronics division, Ryoji Chubachi, who regularly visits large retailers to offer incentives for making Sony products more visible — something his predecessors never deigned to do.
More important, Bravia TV's now cost about the same as rival sets, the result of price-cutting last fall as Sony tried to regain its position as the world's top-selling TV maker. It succeeded, replacing Sharp last quarter, according to an American market data company, Display Research. But this success came at the cost of Sony's ability to charge more than its competitors.
"The Sony premium keeps getting smaller," said Hiroshi Takada, an analyst in the Tokyo office of J. P. Morgan. "The top end of the TV market is much more crowded now."
Sony's slipping status is not lost on consumers here. "Buying a Sony TV used to be like buying a Mercedes-Benz," said Yoshihiro Ueda, 42, a bank employee shopping for liquid-crystal-display television sets at a discount retailer in central Tokyo. "It's still a good name, but Sony doesn't stand out anymore." Mr. Ueda said he was buying a Sharp TV instead.
This hazier image is also showing up in recent consumer surveys. Last month, BP Nikkei Consulting in Tokyo released a survey showing that Sony dropped to Japan's eighth-most admired brand, from the top position last year. The number of consumers saying that Sony showed "conspicuous individuality" dropped to about 25 percent, from about 40 percent the year before, BP Nikkei said.
For a generation of consumers in Japan and the United States, Sony was the company that transformed personal entertainment with its Trinitron color television sets, Walkman portable music players and compact disc players.
But Sony also showed early ambitions to reach beyond electronics and become a global conglomerate, as many companies aspired to do in the decades after World War II. Akio Morita, the company's co-founder, envisioned offering consumers not just television sets and stereos, but movies and songs to play on them and also the bank credit with which to buy them.
Sony made its first foray into finance, establishing a life insurance unit in 1979. The casualty insurer and bank were established in 1999 and 2001 respectively under Nobuyuki Idei, then chief executive, who shared Mr. Morita's penchant for empire-building.
It was also under Mr. Morita that Sony started a French restaurant chain in 1966, licensing the Maxim's de Paris name. He later led Sony into entertainment, acquiring record labels and then Columbia Pictures in 1989. Seen at the time as a symbol of Japan's rising economic might, the Columbia takeover ended up costing Sony billions as the Japanese struggled to understand Hollywood's culture.
Since he took Sony's helm last June, Sir Howard has promised to increase cooperation between the electronics and entertainment arms. He has also tried to prune the sprawling electronics business by shedding 600 of Sony's 3,000 product models, including the Qualia line of luxury electronics and Aibo the robot dog.
"Sony was just too diversified," said Iwao Nakatani, dean of Tama University in Tokyo, who was a member of Sony's board until last year. "Howard Stringer is doing what his predecessors were unable to do."
So far, Sir Howard has defied expectations that he would sell larger noncore businesses, particularly the three big finance units. Sony has flirted with selling parts of its financial units before, including talks with several American and European financial companies four years ago about selling a stake in Sony Life, the company said.
Many analysts and even Sony employees say Sir Howard could spin the finance units off as early as next year. One possibility, according to analysts, is to take them public while holding on to a controlling stake, a sale that could earn Sony billions of dollars.
But many Japanese are sad to see some Sony products go. Entire Web sites have sprung up on which owners of Aibo robot dogs fume about the product's demise.
Ms. Ishioka, the boutique owner, said she hoped nothing happened to the line of skin lotions and treatments bearing the Sony name and sold by Sony's cosmetics maker, B& C Laboratories. She said she first started using the products after hearing that Crown Princess Masako used Sony skin care products before her wedding in 1993. Ms. Ishioka said she also visited Sony's cosmetic outlets for beauty massages, a service popularly known here as the Sony Esthe.
"I want my Sony Esthe as much as my Sony TV," she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/te...gy/29sony.html
Timing the Electronics Market for the Best Deal on a New PC
Damon Darlin
Lower prices are part of the natural order in the world of electronics. Sometimes, though, the slow but relentless drop in price turns into a torrent. That's happening now in personal computers.
Prices are falling fast on notebook computers, as much as 18.5 percent so far this year, according to statistics compiled by Current Analysis, a market research firm. The bulk of notebooks now sell for less than $1,000.
The lower-priced notebooks are pushing desktop prices down, too. "I would expect even more intense price competition," said Charles Smulders, an analyst with Gartner, another market research firm.
The pace of price cuts has accelerated because a price war has broken out that offers great benefits to anyone in the market for a PC. And that could be a pretty large market. Forrester Research estimates that 70 percent of PC's in use are more than two years old and 90 percent of second, third and fourth computers are even older. The wars started quietly a year ago this week when Acer, a PC maker in Taiwan, re-entered the American market. The strategy was to get into the top tier of PC vendors as quickly as possible, which meant it would grab market share by keeping prices low.
Acer and other makers took business from Dell, which began to look less like the growth company that its investors were accustomed to. Dell's response came earlier this year as it cut prices.
Intel, meanwhile, was losing a significant portion of the microprocessor market to Advanced Micro Devices. Intel's share dropped to 77.9 percent from 81.5 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Gartner, while A.M.D.'s market share grew to 20.4 percent from 16.6 percent two years ago. Intel is fighting to win back share, which means PC makers use the rivalry to get a price break.
Apple switched its processor to an Intel chip. Apple also makes running Windows applications on a Mac very easy. Owners of iPods are beginning to notice that Apple does more than sell music.
At the same time, Microsoft has pushed back the release of Vista, its new operating system, from before Christmas to early next year. Normally that would slow PC sales. But Microsoft is considering whether to offer incentives for consumers to buy PC's before Vista's release.
Some analysts had expected coming into the year that prices would actually go up slightly. Instead, the average price of a notebook computer dropped to $963 in April, an 18.5 percent decrease from a year ago, according to Current Analysis, which is based in Sterling, Va.
When an electronic device breaks through the $1,000 psychological barrier, sales take off. Samir Bhavnani, director for research at Current Analysis, said 37 percent more notebooks have been sold so far this year. About 60 percent of all notebook computers sold last month were priced below $1,000. He credits Dell, saying, "They love getting down in the mud."
Dell is running a promotion, which it bills as a celebration of its 22nd anniversary, with a $400 discount on PC's, plus a free monitor and free shipping.
Another statistic will tell you just how good consumers have it. While the number of notebooks sold is up 37 percent, revenue growth in the period is up only 15.5 percent, Mr. Bhavnani said. Companies are making less money on each notebook. Desktop computers are literally being given away. Retailers sold 14.8 percent more of them in the first five months of the year, but revenue declined 4 percent, Mr. Bhavnani said. Half of the computers sold for less than $500.
Consider the Hewlett-Packard Compaq Presario desktop offered this week at Office Depot. For $300 you get a PC with 512 megabytes of RAM and a 100-gigabyte hard drive. Office Depot tossed in a 17-inch CRT monitor and a printer.
"The material cost, before the printer, was around $400," estimated Mark Hill, Acer's vice president for sales in the United States. "It's crazy." Not that he's complaining. Acer has gained one point of market share this year by artful pricing.
So how does a consumer play this? As always with electronics, it is worth waiting. Expect even better deals around the Christmas season. But if you need to get one now, you certainly won't suffer. Deals will abound during the back-to-school season, which starts in June just as the school year ends.
Many consumers will end up waiting for Vista, Microsoft's new operating system. Some analysts expect that to keep computer sales from flagging during the year-end holidays, manufacturers will pressure Microsoft to offer a free upgrade to Vista to anyone buying a new PC.
Decide on the particular features you want on the computer. A notebook with one gigabyte of random access memory and an 80-gigabyte hard drive is recommended. Don't worry about the processor. Unless you are using the computer for designing nuclear power plants or playing video games professionally, any one of them on the market will serve you well.
Why a notebook, rather than a desktop? Convenience, mostly. Desktop models are becoming a relic of a bygone era as the artificial price difference between notebooks and desktops collapse. Notebooks now outsell desktops in stores. IDC estimates that by the middle of next year, more than half of all PC's sold will be notebooks.
Decide on a size. The computers that weigh less than four pounds are considered ultra portables, the kind you take on business trips. Anything heavier is a desktop replacement, perfect for moving from room to room or on a jaunt to the coffee shop. Go to a store to test the heft.
Reflect on how much style you want. As this category matures, manufacturers differentiate their products by making some notebooks look prettier than others. They charge more for anything on the color wheel besides gray and anything that glows.
Then watch the prices at retailers and at the manufacturers' Web sites. The last time you bought a PC, the best deals were probably online. That's not necessarily true anymore. The best deals can be inside the stores because those retailers are using PC's and notebooks in particular as loss leaders to drive traffic.
Here is another business trend that is helping consumers. As the prices of PC's drop, even if retailers sell more units their year-on-year revenue comparisons may drop. Investors closely watch that figure. So stores need to bolster revenue by selling even more of them. They do that by offering even better deals on notebooks because notebook buyers tend to buy other gear like bags and home networking equipment.
The brand you pick will depend on which one gives you the most computer for the price. Current Analysis compiles a "competitive value index" that measures the price of PC's against the features offered. When it looks at computers sold in all channels, the top berths go to Acer, Gateway, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
Columns providing advice on buying a computer usually have a paragraph or two where the writer pauses and briefly genuflects at Apple. Great computer, they'll say, but — there is always that but — they carry a premium of 20 percent to 30 percent over a similarly configured computer running Windows.
Here comes those paragraphs. However, that required "but" may soon be retired. Gene Munster, a senior research analyst with Piper Jaffray in Minneapolis, compared Mac notebooks with similarly equipped notebook computers running Windows and discovered that the premium for a Mac is now only about 10 percent. "I don't think consumers go through this exercise," he said. The premium shrank, not because Apple cut its prices, Mr. Munster said, but because Apple, in switching to an Intel processor, increased the performance of its Macs, and then didn't raise prices.
A few more consumers may notice. Apple's market share, which climbed as high as 2.5 percent last year before the switch to Intel, has grown from 1.8 percent. Macs compete at the high end of the PC market, where the machines costing more than $1,500 are loaded with multimedia features like TV tuners and bigger hard drives to store photos, videos and music. Some have special chips designed to enhance the performance of video games. Price cuts have not been as deep up there, which is one reason Mr. Munster thinks the premium won't go back to 30 percent.
He said that the media viewing and editing software that comes with the Mac compensates for much of the remaining premium. "Apples are always going to be at a premium," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/te...y/27money.html
Just Give Me a Simple Phone
AP
Nathan Bales represents a troubling trend for cellular phone carriers. The Kansas City-area countertop installer recently traded in a number of feature-laden phones for a stripped-down model. He said he didn't like using them to surf the internet, rarely took pictures with them and couldn't stand scrolling through seemingly endless menus to get the functions to work.
"I want a phone that is tough and easy to use," said Bales, 30. "I don't want to listen to music with it. I'm not a cyber-savvy guy."
But the wireless industry needs him to be comfortable with advanced features and actively use them. As the universe of people who want a cell phone and don't already have one gets smaller, wireless carriers are counting on advanced services to generate the bulk of new revenue in coming years.
Consumers last year paid $8.6 billion for so-called data applications on their phones, up 86 percent from the year before, according to wireless trade group CTIA.
But they've also shown a growing frustration with how confusing those added features can be. A J.D. Power & Associates survey last year found consumer satisfaction with their mobile devices has declined since 2003, with some of the largest drops linked to user interface for Internet and e-mail services.
That has providers working hard to make their devices easier to use -- fewer steps, brighter and less cluttered screens, different pricing strategies -- so consumers will not only use data functions more often but also be encouraged to buy additional ones.
For Sprint Nextel, the process begins in a suite of small rooms on its operations campus in suburban Kansas City.
On one recent day, a trio of researchers watched through one-way glass and overhead cameras as a volunteer navigated her way through a prototype program that lets parents set limits on their children's phone use.
The observers monitored how many steps it took for the woman to make the program work, how easily she made mistakes and how quickly she could get herself out of trouble. The results could be used to further tweak the program, said Robert Moritz, director of device development.
"If you bring somebody in and they have problems, it's not because they're dumb, but we were dumb with the design," Moritz said, adding that the lab typically tests devices and programs with up to 50 users over three to nine months. The company also uses focus groups to determine what people want from their phones and what they say needs fixing.
The results of those studies can sometimes push back the release of a product. For example, Michael Coffey, vice president of Sprint's user-experience design, said the company delayed releasing its walkie-talkie Ready Link service for about a year after testers said they didn't like the short delay between when the user pushes the button and the recipient answers.
Coffey said the testing is worth it because ease-of-use can be a competitive edge.
"IPod was not the first MP3 player on the market, but once they figured it out (the user interface), they became the predominant one overnight," he said. "Whether you make it a marketing message or not, the public will discover that usability and choose your product over a competitor's."
So far, Sprint Nextel is doing something right as its subscribers spend the highest average amount for data services in the industry. "We believe there's a strong correlation between our standard of success and how usable the products are," Coffee said.
The other major wireless providers use similar techniques to improve their devices and programs.
Cingular Wireless, the nation's largest wireless provider, developed MEdia Net, which allows users to personalize their phones for using the internet, downloading ringtones or getting e-mail.
Verizon Wireless has V-Cast, a service that makes it easier to download music and video. The company has also pushed designs that allow users to accomplish many things with one button press.
"It's not fun to download a ringtone and have to figure out how to get that on your phone," said Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Ramey. "We do not shy away from testing. If the device or service doesn't work, it's a reflection on our network."
T-Mobile also has focused on a few key areas, introducing T-Zone to help customers find ringtones and screen wallpaper by subject and decreasing the number of steps to take and send photos, for example.
"Communication and personalization will continue to be the driver for phone use," said Michael Gallelli, director of product marketing at T-Mobile.
Industry experts say the companies understand the stakes involved in making sure their designs attract customers and keep them loyal.
"Five years ago, I wouldn't have seen a commercial from Cingular that you can customize your layout," said David Chamberlain, principal wireless analyst for research firm In-Stat. "To think that they're putting this kind of effort into the interface is welcome news."
How well they're doing is a different matter.
Some analysts pointed to phones from niche providers, such as youth-oriented Amp'd Mobile and sports-centric ESPN Mobile, as good examples of intuitive design, marrying easy-to-understand menus with pared-down lists of content aimed at their particular markets.
But Roger Entner of the market research firm Ovum said none of the major carriers impresses him. He says most of them are trying to replicate how people use personal computers instead of coming up with a new approach.
"What do (customers) do best on the phone? They talk. What do they do worst? Type. Why is every user interface based on typing?" Entner said. "Right now, the software developers take advantage of every weakness a device has and none of the strengths."
Some wireless carriers and third-party companies are experimenting with voice-recognition technology. Kirkland, Washington-based VoiceBox Technologies, for instance, plans to release a product later this year that recognizes words and context in a customer's speech to immediately bring them content on their phones.
Charles Golvin of Forrester Research said a recent survey indicated few cellular customers choose a phone based on its usability, typically because they either don't think there's anything better or, like Bales in Kansas City, don't think they need those services.
But Golvin said for the market to truly grow, the programs and phones themselves are going to have to become more graceful and not just the purview of tech-junkies.
"Early adopters are less retarded by the user interface," he said. "As we're moving from the early adopters to the more mainstream customers, it will make a huge difference."
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservic...l?tw=rss.index
Is it Still Possible to Find a Pirates Gold?
R.J. Smith
Often in these times of corporations and modern warfare, we forget that some places in this world are still virtually untouched by our evil developmental hands. It has become hard to believe that there are still mysteries in this world. If you would have told me three years ago that a large stash of pirates gold still existed unfound I might have scoffed. That is, until I came across the tale of the Coco’s Island
This story is concerning 10 square miles of rain forest 500 clicks due west of Costa Rica. “Jurassic Park” and possibly “Treasure Island” were written with this tropical paradise in mind, while Jacque Cousteau called it “The most beautiful Island in the world.” The tip of a volcano, the island is surrounded by unfriendly cliffs protruding over the rocky shorelines. It is said to have two seasons, the wet season and the rainy season. The jungle surrounding Mt. Iglesias, the islands highest peak, is said to be scattered with waterfalls like something out of a movie. It is to date the largest uninhabited island in the world.
But the real story lies in the legends surrounding the tiny mass of land. It wasn’t always totally uninhabited.
The story begins in 1596, when a Spanish pilot by the name of Cabecas discovered the place. Sixteen years later, the French put it on a map and labeled it as lle de Coques, meaning roughly “Shell Island.” The Spanish misinterpreted that name and soon began to call it Isle Del Cocos, which proved to be fitting as early accounts of the island state that there was a large concentration of coconut trees present.
For the next century, the island became popular amongst the merry old jacking crews of back in the day. Yes, it is the fabled and legendary pirates I speak of. It was said that they had made the place into a sort of a bank, where they came to deposit their riches and would return later to retrieve them.
The trouble with being a pirate back in those days was that you did not always make it back to snag the booty. With all the pesky diseases and unsanitary conditions going around, plus the fact that someone was always looking to hang you, it tended to get a little hectic for those guys some days.
1820 was said to be the height of the treasure hiding. A couple of years before that, a British Naval Captain Bennet Graham took up a life of piracy and amassed a fortune of over 350 tons of gold from Spanish ships. He was eventually caught and executed. Years later, an old woman claimed to have witnessed the pirate bury his gold and also to know the location. She led an expedition to the island, however, by the time she had got there, decades had passed and it is said many of the landmarks she had once known were gone.
Another interesting story involves a pirate by the name of Benito “Bloody Sword” Benito. There could not be a more awesome name for a pirate anywhere, and around the same time as old Captain Graham was out robbing the Spanish blind, Mr. Bloody Sword was terrorizing everyone on the west coast of the Americas. He was said to have been one of the swash bucklers who used Cocos as his pirate bank. He was eventually snitched out by two right foul Englishmen and cut down at his hideout. However, the tattlers were killed before they could make it back to the island to retrieve the gold. To this day it is still not clear what happened to Benito’s stash of gold.
This brings us to the most famous of all the legends, and also the most sensational. During the same time there was a revolutionary army headed towards the Spanish stronghold of Lima. The Spanish, wanting to protect their treasures, put everything on a boat and gave it orders to sail around until the war had calmed down. The treasure was estimated at between 12 and 60 million dollars and included a life size, gem encrusted, and solid gold image of Mary the virgin.
A British sea captain named William Thompson was the man they entrusted with the task of keeping the loot safe. However, Thompson and his men had different ideas and cut the throats of the Spaniards on board and dumped their bodies into the ocean. They immediately made a beeline for the Cocos Island where they are said to have hidden the treasure. Not long after they left, the crew was picked up by a Spanish vessel, tried for piracy, convicted and hung. All except for Thompson and his first mate, providing they lead the Spanish back to their gold.
As soon as they stepped foot on the tropical island, the two made tracks into the jungle. There is no record of the Spanish treasure ever being recovered. It is said that the first mate died on the mainland of yellow fever; however, Mr. Thompson was never seen nor heard from again. There is no indication anywhere he ever returned to the island and retrieved the treasure.
Since the pirates disappeared, over 300 expeditions have traveled to the island in search of treasure. Nothing has been reported found except a few Spanish pieces-of-eight.
It is now one of the top scuba diving destinations in the world due to the huge number of hammerhead sharks that congregates off its coasts. If you are thinking about finding treasure there now you better break out your pirate flag because Costa Rica is no longer issuing permits to hunt for treasure on the island.
When you think about it, however, who better to find the loot than those flying the very same Jolly Roger as the men who put it there in the first place?
http://www.thesop.org/index.php?id=1153