[JackSpratts]

Tom & Jerry is a Disney Zionist Conspiracy Claims Iranian Ignoramus

The Doctor Is In…A Fugue State!
Jack

Nutty professor Hasan Bolkhari bamboozles his Iranian students with propagandistic nonsense that Tom & Jerry cartoons were a Zionist plot invented by the "Jewish" Walt Disney Company. Never mind the facts that Disney wasn’t Jewish – and he didn’t create Tom & Jerry! They were actually created by two U.S. animators, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who weren’t Jewish either, not that’s there’s anything wrong with that (they were Scottish-American and Italian-American respectively). Whew! The unfortunate thing is that this professor pontificates at the college level and the lies he spews are swallowed whole by an Iranian elite, seen taking copious notes in a televised address. Of course just a few moments of minor Internet fact checking would burst Bolkhari’s anti-Semitic balloons, if that is, the Iranian government didn’t block access to the web sites.





First Solar-Powered Recording Studio
Warren McLaren

According to Synthtopia, The Premises has just finished a three year long project to refurbish their suite of 14 recording studios in time for the business’s 21st birthday party (on June 30th). The one which piques our interest is Studio A. Apparently it’s the first fully professional solar powered recording studio in the UK. It was built using recycled materials where this was possible, and the electronics right down to the air conditioning is adapted to managing with a low energy demand. Studio Director Nathan Hale is reported as saying: “The idea of a solar powered studio has certainly raised a few eyebrows, but it works brilliantly. We’ve been doing dry runs with bands like Bloc Party and the audio quality is phenomenal. These days more and more music artists are thinking about their ‘carbon footprint’, so it was only a matter of time before a fully fledged eco-studio became a reality.” Maybe it's the sort of venue that treehugging vibe crafters like Kelley Stoltz, Shakira, Cloud Cult, ColdPlay, Sarah McLachlan, Jack Johnson, Joss Stone, and Moby would consider for their next album? ::The Premise Studios, via Synthtopia.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006..._solarpowe.php





Open Source Audio Applications Need To Learn From Listeners
Nathan Willis

Ask anyone what they use their computer for, and "listening to music" will no doubt be high on the list. Regrettably, there aren't any Linux applications designed let us do that. Sure, there are applications designed to accomplish data-centric tasks like "play and manage digital audio files" and "control an FM radio tuner card." These are two very different tasks from a programming standpoint, but interchangeable from the point of view of a user who just wants to listen to music.

Home and car stereos and portable devices all integrate disparate functions. No doubt it is a complex engineering problem for Blaupunkt and Sony, but by focusing on the user's tasks they create a far better product.

Only in software applications is this distinction made, and consequently we have to use separate apps to play music from different sources. And the problem is by no means limited to FM broadcasts and MP3 playback. How many of the mature open source audio players support basic CD playback? There are a few that support ripping CD audio directly within the app, but cannot play that audio directly off of the disc. Would anyone in their right mind buy a hardware device with that kind of limitation?

Building an application from a data-task perspective locks out the possibility of new features, yet history teaches us that there will constantly be new methods and approaches to delivering audio to listeners. CDs, audio files, streaming radio, DAAP sharing, FM, XM, podcasting -- the list goes on. How many new ones will be invented this year?

Nor is the problem strictly a matter of media delivery, in which each new medium has its own characteristic technical challenges.

Consider the interface to the music itself. Back in the WinAmp days, most media players utilized a dynamic playlist interface. Since the introduction of iTunes, most new apps have adopted its "library" browser approach.

But the majority of apps choose just one of these approaches and allow no other. Each approach has its pros and cons, but neither is right for all users, and certainly neither is right for all users all of the time. And unlike media delivery, restricting the way the end user can interface with his or her music collection is symptomatic solely of the developers' decision.

The underlying cause

There is no malice behind any of these shortcomings in the Linux audio player ecosystem. Rather, I think they are the unintended result of a philosophy that predates Linux, and may in this particular application space do more harm than good.

"Do one thing and do it well" is the first tenet of the Unix philosophy as expressed by Doug McIlroy. Its purpose is not to discourage programmers from building powerful applications, but rather to remind programmers to focus.

But "do one thing and do it well" is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it focuses our attention on core tasks. On the other, it is a convenient excuse to ignore features, even important ones. And in some cases, it can cement into the design core problems that really ought to be cut out and replaced with no mercy. It is certainly part of the reason we still use separate applications for listening to digital audio files, CDs, DVDs, TV audio, and FM radio.
Links
"Doug McIlroy" - http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/
http://software.newsforge.com/articl.../05/16/1640221





Analysis

Apple Dealt Loss In Apple v. Does Trade Secret Case
Ryan Paul

A California appeals court judge has ruled in favor of a petition filed by the EFF that frustrates Apple's attempt to force rumor sites AppleInsider and Powerpage to reveal their sources. In 2004, web site AppleInsider published an "exclusive" account of a new Apple product alleged to be in development, a breakout box for GarageBand dubbed Asteroid (presumably because it allowed you to rock. Rimshot!).

The ruling concludes that trade secrets do not categorically transcend freedom of the press, that there is no relevant legal distinction between journalistic blogging and journalism with regards to the shield law, and that Apple's attempt to subpoena the e-mail service provider of one of the sites was a violation of the federal Stored Communications Act.

A brief history of Apple v. Does, and its significance

Following the unauthorized disclosure of alleged proprietary Apple trade secrets, Apple subpoenaed several web site publishers along with their e-mail providers in order to discover where they got their information about Asteroid. Challenging Apple's subpoenas, the EFF filed a petition for a protective order in Santa Clara Superior Court insisting that the site's and their works are entitled to protection under the shield law.

Then in March of 2005, Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg issued a decision in favor of Apple, asserting that the legal protections conferred upon journalists by the first amendment and the California shield law do not imbue reporters with the right to disseminate trade secrets divulged to them by others.

The EFF appealed the ruling, suggesting that coerced disclosure of journalistic sources would silence potential whistle-blowers by depriving them of the ability to remain anonymous. Pointing out that important information about dangerous products could be obscured from public scrutiny by the excessive application of trade secret laws, the EFF argued that Apple shouldn't be allowed to arbitrarily silence journalists when the company had failed to pursue due diligence and internal investigation. Under the interpretation of the first amendment, subpoenas necessitating disclosure of a journalist's source are supposed to be used only when no other means of attaining the relevant information are available. The EFF hoped to demonstrate that Apple had not conducted their own investigation in good faith.

In September of 2005, additional evidence emerged to support the EFF's claim that Apple had failed to internally investigate the leak before initiating legal action, a distinctly ironic revelation in light of the fact that Apple had attempted to deflect examination of its internal investigatory policies by claiming that the procedures used in their investigations were themselves trade secrets.

During the appellate court proceedings, the judges vigorously examined Apple's claims, challenging the computer company's assertion that the information disclosed by the journalists constituted a trade secret, and questioning the adequacy of Apple's internal investigation.
Understanding California's shield law

In general, shield laws are designed to prevent journalists from being held in contempt of court for refusing to disclose a source. The California shield law specifically offers this protection to any "publisher, editor, reporter, or other person connected with or employed upon a newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication or by a press association or wire service, or any person who has been so connected or so employed."

The law states that individuals that are eligible for protection cannot be compelled "to disclose, in any proceeding as defined in § 901, the source of any information procured while so connected or employed for publication in a newspaper, magazine or any other periodical publication or for refusing to disclose any unpublished information obtained or prepared in gathering, receiving or processing of information for communication to the public." Section b of the California shield law extends the same protections to radio and television news reporters.

The California shield law only has one major exception: shield protection is not applicable when the testimony of a journalist is required in order to ensure that a defendant in a criminal case receives the constitutional right to a fair trial.

In 2000, the California shield law was expanded to add some minor additional protections in order to prevent law enforcement agencies from exploiting loopholes in the legislation. When Assemblywoman Carol Midgen proposed the expansion, she also issued a legislative report that articulated with great clarity the importance of the shield law. The report contained the following tremendously cogent summary:

Journalists are professional investigators. The main purpose of the shield law is to prevent government from making journalists its investigative agents and to prevent a journalist who is trying to cover the story from becoming part of the story (which makes them wholly unable to cover it). Increasingly, when a criminal case is newsworthy, the first thing (not the last thing) defense attorneys do is subpoena any journalist who has covered the story.

In this case, Apple v. Does, applicability of the shield law is an important aspect. In a way, Apple is attempting to utilize the writers in question as its own investigators, trying to force them to reveal the source of Apple's leak so that the company wont have to fully pursue an internal investigation. Apple believes that it has the authority to force compliance with its demands in part because the company's legal representatives are convinced that bloggers are not entitled to shield law protection. Although the superior court sided with Apple, the appellate court sided with the bloggers.
The appellate court ruling

The decision issued by the California Court of Appeals in favor of the petitioners echoes many of the concerns articulated by the EFF. One of the most significant sections of the decision discusses the shield law and its applicability to the petitioners and this particular case. Apple argued that the petitioners intentionally engaged in "trade secret misappropriation," and that the goal of the petitioners' articles was not journalistic in nature. The appellate judges rejected the distinction, ruling that any effort to establish distinctions that address journalistic legitimacy is fundamentally antithetical to the function of the first amendment:

"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."

Now we get to Apple's claim that bloggers are not entitled to shield law protection. This is possibly the single most important issue associated with this case, because it deals directly with the question of whether or not bloggers have the same rights as professional journalists. Apple's assumption regarding applicability of the shield law to bloggers is based on two arguments: Apple says that the petitioners do not fall into any of the categories of individuals entitled to protection under the terms of the California shield law, and that the shield law does not recognize or address Internet publications.

Apple claims that bloggers "are not members of any professional community governed by ethical and professional standards," and that shield law protection could then lead to abuse and misconduct. (Ironically, if trade secrets were completely protected from journalistic disclosure as Apple desires, intellectual property law could also be be abused to conceal misconduct.) In the decision, the judges argue that Internet news publication by bloggers is functionally identical to professional journalism within the context of the shield law:

"[T]he open and deliberate publication on a news-oriented Web site of news gathered for that purpose by the site's operators ... appears conceptually indistinguishable from publishing a newspaper, and we see no theoretical basis for treating it differently. 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."

With regards to Internet publications, the judges concluded that the term "periodical publication" is applicable to the Mac rumor sites, and that the petitioners are entitled to shield law protection as a result:

"[The legislature] must have intended that the statute protect publications like petitioners', which differ from traditional periodicals only in their tendency, which flows directly from the advanced technology they employ, to continuously update their content. We conclude that petitioners are entitled to the protection of the shield law, which precludes punishing as contempt a refusal by them to disclose unpublished information."

Although the judges do not state outright that bloggers are entitled to shield law protection (they explicitly avoid doing so because they feel that the term "blog" is too amorphous to be the subject of a legal precedent), they more or less imply that those who work on web based publications designed to provide news are entitled to shield law protection, and need not reveal their sources.

The judges also briefly addressed whether or not the petitioners are entitled to the constitutional right to freedom of the press. This issue receives only superficial attention, because the matter is simply not disputed by Apple. The judges state the obvious:

"[W]e can see no sustainable basis to distinguish petitioners from the reporters, editors, and publishers who provide news to the public through traditional print and broadcast media. It is established without contradiction that they gather, select, and prepare, for purposes of publication to a mass audience, information about current events of interest and concern to that audience."

In the subsection entitled Importance of Preserving Confidentiality, the judges examine the implications of Apple's claims and discuss the importance of protecting the identity of journalistic sources. The judges start off the section by analyzing Apple's argument that the public has no right to access corporate trade secrets. The appellate judges disagree with Judge Kleinberg, and argue that classifying a piece of information as a trade secret does not give it unlimited protection from journalistic disclosure:

Apple first contends that there is and can be no public interest in the disclosures here because "the public has no right to know a company's trade secrets." Surely this statement cannot stand as a categorical proposition. As recent history illustrates, business entities may adopt secret practices that threaten not only their own survival and the investments of their shareholders but the welfare of a whole industry, sector, or community. Labeling such matters "confidential" and "proprietary" cannot drain them of compelling public interest. Timely disclosure might avert the infliction of unmeasured harm on many thousands of individuals, following in the noblest traditions, and serving the highest functions, of a free and vigilant press. It therefore cannot be declared that publication of "trade secrets" is ipso facto outside the sphere of matters appropriately deemed of "great public importance."

Next, the judges approach the difficult issue of resolving conflicts between the rights of intellectual property holders and the rights of journalists. In the decision, the judges state that when intellectual property rights conflict directly with the journalistic function of disclosure in the name of public interest, freedom of expression necessarily takes priority:

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.

The decision also addresses issues relating to the content and nature of the articles written by the petitioners. The judges point out that the "trade secrets" exposed by the Apple rumor sites didn't include any specific information regarding technological methods or innovations, and that the Asteroid device itself isn't particularly unique or innovative. The judges seem to feel that articles about the future release of a product carry more value as items of public interest than articles that disclose the secret methods and techniques used by a product:

Here, no proprietary technology was exposed or compromised. There is no suggestion that anything in petitioners' articles could help anyone to build a product competing with Asteroid. Indeed there is no indication that Asteroid embodied any new technology that could be compromised. ... The newsworthiness of petitioners' articles thus resided not in any technical disclosures about the product but in the fact that Apple was planning to release such a product, thereby moving into the market for home recording hardware. ... Such a secret plan may possess the legal attributes of a trade secret; that is a question we are not here required to decide. But it is of a different order than a secret recipe for a product. And more to the point, the fact of its impending release carries a legitimate interest to the public that a recipe is unlikely to possess.

The decision also addresses the intrinsic newsworthiness of the content in question. The appellate court judges challenge Judge Kleinberg's assumption that, although public interest is served by disclosure of safety hazards, it is not served by disclosure of an upcoming product release. The appellate judges argue that the release of new products, particularly technological products, can have a profound impact on society, and consequently constitute a subject of public interest:

"More generally, we believe courts must be extremely wary about declaring what information is worthy of publication and what information is not. At first glance it might seem that Asteroid is nothing more than a hobbyist's gadget with no ponderable bearing on the great issues of the day. But such an impression would be, in our view, erroneous. ... [Apple's entry into the audio production market] would inevitably contribute to blurring the line between professional and amateur audio production, and hence between professional and amateur composing and performing, in much the same way that the personal computer coupled with telecommunications technology has blurred the distinction between commercial and amateur publishing. The decentralization of expressive capacity represented by such developments is unquestionably one of the most significant cultural developments since the invention of the printing press."

Although I think the judges overstate the significance of Apple's product, the point they make is valid and very important. Product releases can have a profound impact on the technology industry, on consumers, and on the very nature of modern society. Although Asteroid itself may not be particularly significant, the availability of information about such products is essential to modern consumers, and the judges argue that unfettered access to such information is a fundamental right:

"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."

The ruling of the appellate court and the issues addressed in the written decision represent an enormous victory for free speech advocates and the entire independent press community. Assuming that the decision doesn't get overturned by a higher court, the precedent established by this case could potentially help to ensure that journalistic bloggers receive full protection under state shield laws. This case also affirms that intellectual property law doesn't universally take priority over freedom of speech. EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl comments:

"Today's decision is a victory for the rights of journalists, whether online or offline, and for the public at large," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl, who argued the case before the appeals court last month. "The court has upheld the strong protections for the free flow of information to the press, and from the press to the public."

As a journalist that specializes in technology, I have had countless opportunities over the years to witness the impact of emerging technologies and I can't help but agree with the assessment of the judges as a result. Access to information about emerging technologies and technological products is necessary for those that wish to live and thrive in the modern world. Without information about the latest technologies, we can't make informed purchasing decisions, and we will be unable to take advantage of the fruits of technological progress. As a result, the availability of such information (or sometimes, the lack thereof) has a profound impact on the quality of our lives. It is encouraging to see judges openly acknowledging the value and importance of independent Internet news sources, and actively trying to protect them.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060527-6933.html





'X-Men' Has 4th-Biggest Opening In History
Christina Almeida

"X-Men: The Last Stand" stormed to an estimated $107 million three-day opening, the largest ever for Memorial Day weekend and the fourth-biggest in box office history.

Preliminary estimates were released Sunday for the third installment of the series featuring a cast of mutants with names like Storm (Halle Berry), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn).

The 20th Century Fox film opened in 3,690 theaters and grossed a whopping $28,997 per theater.

"People had such a huge awareness of the movie that it just translated into these huge numbers," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.

The film benefited from a huge base of fans who had seen the first two "X-Men" films, plus great marketing and solid reviews, Dergarabedian said.

"This is what the summer is all about," he said, adding the box office has rebounded well since last year's slump. "With `Da Vinci Code' doing better than anticipated ... we could not be in a better position."

Estimates for "The Da Vinci Code" over the start of the holiday weekend were not immediately available. That film, starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard, had a solid $77 million opener last weekend.

On the all-time list, "X-Men: The Last Stand" ranks behind only "Spider-Man," "Star Wars: Episode III" and "Shrek 2" for opening weekend gross. None of the other films opened on a holiday weekend, which usually gives movies a boost.

For Memorial Day openers, "X-Men" crushed the previous three-day high of $72 million, set by "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" in 1997.

Estimates for all films were expected Monday, with final figures scheduled for Tuesday.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





With 'Cars,' Pixar Revs Up to Outpace Walt Disney Himself
Charles Solomon

IF the pre-show jitters are more than usually apparent in the bayside town Emeryville, Calif., it's because Pixar Animation Studios, the little movie factory that recently sold itself to the Walt Disney Company, stands on the verge of pushing its unbroken string of critical and box-office hits to seven. Its record is already unmatched in American animation history, even by Walt Disney himself.

"It's really scary for all of us," said Darla K. Anderson, producer of "Cars," the film that is reaching for that record with its release on June 9. As Ms. Anderson tells it, the filmmakers behind each Pixar hit — "Monsters, Inc.," "Finding Nemo," "The Incredibles," et al. — have just made things tougher for the next in line.

"After each film's opening weekend, we pass the pressure on to the next director," she said. "Pete Docter did it to Andrew Stanton, Andrew did it to Brad Bird and Brad passed it to us. It's almost like we should deliberately put out something that isn't good, just to get it over with."

This time around, the director in the hot seat is none other than John Lasseter, who already has "A Bug's Life" and the "Toy Story" movies to his credit, and, with the merger, has been designated creative leader of both Pixar and Disney Feature Animation.
That Mr. Lasseter has chosen to stake the Pixar winning streak on animated automobiles owes something to a lifelong fascination. "I've always loved cars, and the idea of cars being alive came up during 'A Bug's Life,' " he said in a recent telephone interview from Emeryville, several weeks after showing "Cars" at a charity event at the studio there.

"One of my favorite Disney cartoons is 'Susie, the Little Blue Coupe,' " he added. But nostalgia of another sort played a part too. "I was at exactly the right age when Hot Wheels came out," explained Mr. Lasseter, 49, speaking of Mattel's toy cars. "I remember buying my first two Hot Wheels cars with my allowance, and I was hooked from then on."

"Cars" tells the story of Lightning McQueen (voice by Owen Wilson), an ambitious, arrogant young racing car out to win his first Piston Cup Championship, and the fame and endorsements that go with it. When he's accidentally stranded in the tiny town of Radiator Springs, he learns the importance of love, friendship and discipline from its eccentric inhabitants. His misfit teachers include Sally, a perky Porsche (Bonnie Hunt); Doc Hudson, a 1951 Hudson Hornet whose gruff demeanor conceals a surprising past (Paul Newman); and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), a ramshackle old tow truck who's clearly not the shiniest vehicle on the lot.

To make "Cars," Mr. Lasseter used a combination of design and motion to turn full-size automobiles into characters with recognizable personalities but that still feel like heavy steel-and-glass machines. Traditional squash-and-stretch animation of the characters' faces and bodies made the autos look too rubbery, and the usual way of putting a face on a machine proved equally unsatisfactory.

"The natural eyes of a car are the headlights," he explained. "Moving the eyes to the windshield separates them from the front of the face; the hood becomes the nose and the mouth is down by the grille. Now the body of the car becomes the head of the character, and you can gesture with the front tires when he talks. That design gave the animators more opportunities for acting, because the movement of the chassis over the tires feels almost like a head moving in relation to the shoulders. But to make it really believable, we had to move the cars in ways that maintained their integrity. I kept telling the animators, they're going to look like real cars, so let's move them like they weigh 3,000 pounds."

Moving the car characters and adding realistic reflections and other details posed formidable problems. " 'Cars' was a really difficult film technically," said Ms. Anderson, the producer. "It's the most complex film we've ever made." Even with a network of processors that ran four times faster than the ones on "The Incredibles," each frame of "Cars" took an average of 17 hours to render.

As for the town of Radiator Springs, the quirky desert hamlet on Route 66, it provides a reminder of the less homogenized America Mr. Lasseter saw as a boy.

"For a lot of our vacations, my brother and sister and I would pile into the station wagon, and our parents would drive Route 66 from L.A.," he recalled. "When they started building the Interstate, my dad would drive it for parts of our journeys and say, 'Now we can really make time.' But the Interstate was so smooth, you'd lose track of where you were. When you drove Route 66, you really felt the land. You knew where it was hilly and where it was flat. On the Interstate it was all flat."

The melancholy images of the forgotten town balance the fast-paced racing scenes and broad comic sequences. Mr. Lasseter says his use of these moments was inspired by the films of Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animation director.

"In every one," he said, "there are beautiful quiet scenes. The drive in our early films was to trim out all the 'dead spots,' because the executives were always saying: 'I'm going for popcorn.' 'You're losing me.' After a while I realized I wasn't going to lose the audience. The executives were used to seeing the movie, but the audience wouldn't be. They'd be with us in those moments."

An early graduate of the character animation program at the California Institute of the Arts, Mr. Lasseter was trained at the Disney studio by members some of the legendary Nine Old Men, Walt Disney's celebrated cadre of animators. In addition to Mr. Miyazaki, Mr. Lasseter cites lessons he learned from his mentors Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston and from the films they made for Disney, who maintained that a laugh should be balanced with a tear. Disney also believed that for an audience to be touched, the emotions had to be genuine, arising from the characters and their situations.

"Frank and Ollie always said the thing to strive to get into a film is heart, or pathos," Mr. Lasseter said. "To really get the audience to feel that heart, they have to discover the emotion for themselves. You can't tell them to feel sad."

Last August the cast and crew of "Cars" got their own dose of pathos when Joe Ranft, the film's co-director, was killed in a car accident. He provided the voices for Heimlich the caterpillar in "A Bug's Life" and Red the firetruck in "Cars," and was widely respected within the animation industry as one of the best story men of his generation. "Cars" is dedicated to Mr. Ranft's memory, and Mr. Lasseter's usually ebullient voice softens when he talks about his friend and collaborator. He sometimes still speaks of him in the present tense:

"Joe has been by my side on every movie I've made from the very beginning. He was such a big, lovable guy that no matter what mood I was in, he could make me laugh immediately. Joe's personal humor didn't come from funny lines or quips, but the characters he would become. The brilliance of his story work in each of our films lies in the strength and individuality of the characters he developed. His heart runs all the way through this picture."

Disney's $7.4 billion acquisition of Pixar was announced just as Mr. Lasseter was finishing "Cars," triggering widespread speculation, both inside and outside the animation world, about how he will juggle his life as a director while continuing to oversee Pixar and revitalizing Disney's feature animation studio.

"I've always worn two hats at Pixar: I'm the creative head of the studio and I'm a film director," he said. "I directed the first three movies at the studio, but it was important to build Pixar into a place where other directors could make their movies and I would help them.

"After 'Monsters,' 'Nemo' and 'Incredibles,' it was my turn again. Andrew Stanton, who's vice president of creative, oversaw the other projects while I was on 'Cars.' His next movie is kicking in now, so it's time for me to take the executive role. I'll be overseeing two studios — for a while anyway. But I love directing, and hope to direct again."

Dick Cook, the chairman of Walt Disney Pictures, offered a reassuring message about Mr. Lasseter's future prospects as a filmmaker.

"I think initially John is going to have his hands full, but it's certainly our hope that once he has things going and feels comfortable, he'll direct a movie," Mr. Cook said. "John's got too many great stories to tell not to direct again. When he feels the time is right, and he has the right project, he'll step back in. It's too much a part of him not to. And I think it's to everyone's advantage for him to do so."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/movies/28solo.html





Brothels Ask Exemption From Smoking Ban
AP

Brothel owners in the southern state of Victoria have called for an exemption to a new ban on smoking in the workplace, saying customers like to light up after sex.

The Australian Adult Entertainment Industry has written to Victoria's health minister arguing that new laws banning smoking in bars and brothels could push prostitution back into the streets, according to a report in the Sunday Herald Sun newspaper.

"People smoke when they drink, and people smoke when they fornicate," association representative William Albon said. "These smoking laws are going to drive women back onto the streets courtesy of the health minister."

The association - which represents more than half of the 87 legal brothels operating in Victoria's capital city Melbourne - wants an exemption to the ban, which comes into effect in July 2007.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Why Redmond Feels So Threatened By ODF
Neil McAllister

Could any subject be less interesting than electronic document formats? Even programmers’ eyes start to glaze over when the conversation shifts to how an application stores its data. For software end users, the topic seldom even comes up.

How strange, then, that so much ink has been devoted in the past few months to the ODF (OpenDocument format). It’s just a file format! Various open source office productivity suites have incorporated code that allows them to save and load ODF documents, and that’s great. But nearly every application ever written saves and loads data in some file format or another. Why all the fuss about this one?

ODF first came to prominence last year, when the State of Massachusetts announced that it would adopt the format for public documents and abandon Microsoft’s proprietary Office format. What started as a seemingly simple, albeit significant, decision quickly erupted to near-scandalous proportions. Microsoft, naturally, decried the move. Almost immediately, companies and individuals on both sides of the fence let their opinions be known. Amid the ruckus, Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn, widely recognised as being responsible for the decision to use ODF, resigned.

Since those early days there’s been a steady trickle of news stories about OpenDocument: such-and-such company offers its support for ODF. An industry consortium forms to promote the format; OASIS (the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) has chimed in, too. And another story had ISO adopting it as a formal standard. And so on.

The celebrity tabloids cover Angelina Jolie’s love life as extensively as the IT trade press tracks the progress of ODF. The question is: why? How did something so completely mundane and uninteresting as an office document file format get to be the subject of so much press coverage?

The answer, of course, is Microsoft. As ODF has progressed, Microsoft’s mouthpieces have been there each step of the way, to give the company’s own contrarian spin on the topic. The ODF camp should probably thank the folks in Redmond for helping to make OpenDocument a household word — assuming, that is, that they hold with the popular wisdom that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Because, if you’ve been paying attention, one fact becomes clear: Microsoft really has it in for ODF.

Why? It’s just a file format. Actually, Microsoft has never made any public statement disputing its merits. It’s not that ODF is no good, we are told; Microsoft merely prefers having two standards instead of one.

But if that’s true, then one easy way to squash this whole hullabaloo would be to build ODF support into Microsoft Office. Presumably, that would be the easiest way to demonstrate the superiority of Microsoft’s own XML-based file formats over ODF. What fool would go to the trouble of choosing ODF when there’s an obvious better option, selected by default in the Save As box?
It’s not as if it would be technically difficult to do, either. In fact, the OpenDocument Foundation went ahead and wrote a plugin on its own, without any input from Microsoft.

By now it should be clear where I’m going with this. It’s been said before, but it merits repeating: the reason Microsoft won’t write any code to support ODF, and the reason it wants to block OpenDocument, is because OpenDocument is a threat to Microsoft’s bottom line. Period. The revenue stream generated by locking customers into closely guarded proprietary file formats is the proverbial golden goose for Microsoft.

Think about it. Protecting those file formats must be worth countless millions, if not billions, of dollars to Microsoft. That’s why Microsoft is paying attention to ODF, and it’s why you should keep paying attention, too, even if digital file formats aren’t normally your thing. Because, if your business relies on office applications, that’s your money.

Interested now?
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...25717A001A0EC9





US Marshals Switching to Red Hat Linux
Michael Arnone

Federal agencies want uniform software platforms to run on varied hardware, said Helmut Kurth, chief scientist and lab director at IT consulting firm Atsec. "Linux is one of the few [operating systems] that can achieve that and provide the security they need."

The U.S. Marshals Service is switching the databases at all 94 of its district offices in the United States and its territories to Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) Linux.

The Marshals expect to have as much as 80 percent of their production databases and all of their data running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux by the end of June, said John Campbell, an information technology specialist for the Marshals' Justice Detainee Information System. The move will include all databases for prisoner information, some financial databases and decision-support systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Server is cheaper and has better features than the Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) SCO Linux the Marshals have used for years, Campbell said. "It was a natural for us to consider Red Hat as an [operating system] to run on," he said.
Remote Patching and Monitoring

The federal government is following the lead of financial and other private-sector enterprises by simplifying its infrastructure, said Paul Smith, Red Hat's vice president of government sales operations.

Since starting the Red Hat government sales division in February 2005, the company has reported sales increases of 40 percent overall and 80 percent in the government sector. The company is doing a significant amount of business with the Justice Department's Criminal Division, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI.

"The whole IT community is really behind Red Hat," Campbell said. Application and database vendors are making more products to run on it, he said.

Because Red Hat provides open source software, it's easy to download a free evaluation copy, Campbell said. It also doesn't have to run on proprietary equipment like Sun products do, which lowers the total cost of ownership.

"Agencies don't have a ton of money to spend," Campbell said. The Marshals expect to save US$50,000 to $100,000 a year by using Red Hat.

Another benefit is that Red Hat Network allows the Marshals to patch and monitor servers remotely, Campbell said. That's important because the agency doesn't have IT staff in every office to update software manually, he said. "This makes our life so much easier," he added.

The Marshals are using Red Hat Enterprise Server Version 3.0 for most applications and are introducing Version 4.0 on some machines, Campbell said. When Red Hat releases Version 5.0, due in December, the Marshals will consider it, too.
Uniform Platform for Variety of Hardware

Red Hat supports other software the Marshals use and provides better technical support than other vendors, Campbell said, adding that Red Hat supports Enterprise Server 3.0 for eight years, while Sun only supports SCO for five.

Upgrading operating systems allows federal law enforcement agencies to migrate from the proprietary applications and hardware they have, said Helmut Kurth, chief scientist and lab director at Atsec, an IT consulting firm that evaluates products for Common Criteria certification.

The Marshals chose SCO Linux years ago because it was one of the first operating systems that ran on the Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) Pentium processors the agency has, Campbell said. Solaris and other operating systems now run on Intel machines, but the Marshals prefer Red Hat, he said.

Federal agencies want uniform software platforms to run on varied hardware, Kurth said. "Linux is one of the few [operating systems] that can achieve that and provide the security they need," he said.

"It was a natural for us to consider Red Hat" as an operating system.
Red Hat Linux Keeps Sensitive Info Under Its Hat

The U.S. Marshals Service and other law enforcement agencies use Red Hat Linux because it handles sensitive information securely, said Paul Smith, Red Hat's vice president of government sales operations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 3.0 is at Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4 out of a possible 7 and is certified under Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP) at EAL 3+.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is embracing security profiles that other commercial operating systems have not yet adopted, said Salvatore La Pietra, president and cofounder of atsec, an information technology consulting firm. These include CAPP, the Labeled Security Protection Profile (LSPP) and the Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).

LSPP and CAPP are important for the federal government because they specify software controls for the flow of information into different classification levels and who can access that information, said Helmut Kurth, chief scientist and Lab director at atsec. RBAC assigns access based on users' responsibilities and strengthens the weak points of the other two, he said.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 is at EAL 4+ for CAPP, Smith said. Version 5.0, due in December, will have a higher EAL rating and wilL include the other two profiles, he said.
http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/50750.html#





Google Takes Half Of All US Searches, Nielsen says
Ben Ames

American web surfers continued to flock to Google in April, using the internet search site for 50% of their 5.3 billion queries, according to a research report.

That marked a rise from Google's year-ago market share of 47%, while second-place site Yahoo held steady at 22%, and Microsoft's MSN dropped from 12 to 11%, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

The trend mirrors an announcement that Dell has agreed to load as default on new consumer PCs certain Google software, such as its desktop search application and browser toolbar, at the expense of competing Microsoft products.

Google cannot sit on its lead for long, warns Michael Lanz, vice present of search industry solutions for Nielsen/NetRatings. The top search providers will continue to compete for customers' loyalty with new features, improved functionality and rewards programs.

In the past year alone, all three have succeeded in boosting their number of monthly searches. Google's search count rose 34%from 1.9 billion searches in April 2005 to 2.6 billion in April 2006. Yahoo rose 27% from 919 million to 1.1 billion, and MSN rose 10% from 515 million to 570 million.

Those numbers can translate into revenue as increased traffic allows each search company to charge a higher rate for more exposure of clients' advertisements.

That could be lucrative territory, since the top shopping terms entered on Google in April included retail giants like Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Target, Sears and Best Buy. Of course, pure entertainment still rules the internet; the top overall Google search terms for the month included Nick Lachey, Denise Richards, Miss USA, Cinco de Mayo and Bettie Page.

This landscape could begin to change by the second half of 2006, says Allen Weiner, an analyst with Gartner.

Search providers are moving from a "straight search" method based on algorithms and page rankings to a "social search" method that incorporates human knowledge and other people's preferences.

Yahoo has made the most progress, with its Yahoo Answers site already running, while Google has lagged with its Google Co-op site still ramping up. Yahoo also has an advantage in worldwide traffic, with a greater web presence outside the US than Google does, Weiner says.

In the meantime, Google will rely on sheer numbers to preserve its advantage. "These three guys are like the three TV networks back in the old days, and right now, Google has the top ranking show. Until proven otherwise, they're the leader," he says.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...25717D0019A097





YouTube Thrashes Google, MSN, Yahoo In Web Video Market
Juan Carlos Perez

YouTube is the most visited video web site, attracting almost half of all visitors and towering over giants like Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft's MSN, according to Hitwise.

For the week ending May 20, YouTube, founded in January 2005, nabbed almost 43% of all visits to video web sites, while the video section of News' MySpace.com came in second with 24.2%, the market researcher says.

The video search engines of Yahoo (9.6%), MSN (9.2%), Google (6.5%) and AOL (4.3%) followed. Rounding out the top 10 were iFilm, Grouper Networks, Dailymotion.com and Custom One Media's vSocial.com.

Collectively, traffic to the top 10 video web sites increased 164%in the past three months, says New York-based Hitwise.

For many years, online video remained an unfulfilled promise, hampered by high broadband prices, inferior image quality and reluctance by TV networks and film companies to put their shows and movies on the web.

However, in the past year, video on the web has gained momentum, helped by a critical mass of users with broadband access, improved quality and an embrace by production companies to distribute their films and programs online.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...25717900132837





Yahoo Reprograms Online Video Service
Michael Liedtke

Yahoo Inc. is reprogramming its online video service so it's more like YouTube.com, an Internet upstart that has amassed a large audience during the past year with a free Web service that encourages people to post and share homemade clips.

Under the changes unveiled Thursday, Yahoo will store homemade videos on its own site for the first time as it attempts to build a platform for people to browse and rate the clips. The videos will be separated into different categories, including a section devoted to the most-watched selections.

Those features mirror YouTube, which has become the Web's most popular video channel since a pair of twentysomething technology whizzes started the San Mateo, Calif.-based company a year ago.

Now, Internet heavyweights like Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo are trying to chip away at YouTube's early lead as the rapidly growing number of high-speed Internet connections make it easier to transfer and watch online videos.

Just two weeks ago, Google Inc. retooled its video service so a special piece of software would no longer be required to upload clips to the online search engine leader. Meanwhile, Time Warner Inc.'s AOL is testing a service, called UnCut Video, that accepts clips.

Since launching its video service in late 2004, Yahoo has focused on indexing the clips available on other Web sites.

Although the company intends to continue indexing material from other sites, Yahoo is betting it will be able to lure more visitors and give them more reason to stick around longer by creating a unique video library through submissions from its 208 million registered users.

"We felt this was a necessary next step in our evolution," said Jeff Karnes, Yahoo's director of multimedia search.

Yahoo has been adding more attractions to its Web site to maintain its status as the Web's most trafficked destination and spur even more spending by advertisers - the main source of the company's revenue.

By accepting homemade videos, Yahoo risks showing material that infringes on copyrights or contains pornographic scenes. Both of those problems have cropped up on YouTube, despite restrictions prohibiting users from posting such content.

Like YouTube, Yahoo will depend on its own users and copyright holders to flag rule-breaking videos so they can be removed from the site. To minimize the chances of an offensive video appearing before a big audience, Yahoo editors will screen all the clips that are featured on the service's front page, said Jason Zajac, the company's general manager of social media.

Yahoo will have to make up a lot of ground to catch up with YouTube, which boasts of streaming more than 40 million videos per day.

In April, YouTube attracted 12.5 million U.S. visitors, well ahead of MSN Video's second place service at 9.5 million visitors, according to Nielsen/NetRatings Inc. Yahoo's video service attracted 2.6 million visitors, trailing rival offerings from MySpace.com, Google and AOL, as well as YouTube and MSN, Nielsen/NetRatings said.

Although it leads the rest of the video pack, YouTube still hasn't proven it can make money as it subsists on $11.5 million in venture capital. Yahoo, in contrast, earned $160 million during the first three months of this year and ended March with $1.4 billion in cash.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





VoIP And New Ways To Cut Out The Middle Man
Nancy Gohring

Voice over IP peering, which can, essentially, cut out the local telco and thus save costs, promises to be one of several hot topics at this year’s VON Europe conference in Stockholm.

Enterprise peering, where companies can connect their private IP networks directly to other companies they do business with, represents a significant shift in the way enterprises manage their networks. It is a subject leaders will likely discuss at the conference.

The process is, essentially, “in-sourcing telco spend,” says James Enck, European telco analyst at Daiwa Securities. As an example, he cites an announcement earlier this year that Royal Bank of Canada would convert fully to VoIP, directly connecting the IP networks of all its offices.

“Instead of paying Bell Canada for use of the PSTN [public switched telephone networks], they’re emigrating all of their internal traffic between offices onto their IT network, and the IT department will manage this,” he says.

A similar peering movement could help further reduce the cost of VoIP calls for other users. Speakers at a voice over cable panel session at VON are expected to touch on this subject. Some VoIP service providers, such as cable operators, are beginning to offer free calls to other VoIP customers — even those on different networks — as a way of competing against telcos. To make that offering efficient, the operators are finding ways to connect directly to each other, without involving the telcos.

Several cable operators in the Netherlands, for example, are using a third party, XConnect Global Networks, to handle call routing without relying on the PSTN, Enck says. XConnect helps cut costs for the cable operators so that they can offer free calling to end users.

“They lose some revenue but they want to get customers so that they can sell them TV or other services,” Enck says.

In the wireless domain, moves to similarly circumvent the operators are being met with resistance — another topic sure to spur debate at VON. T-Mobile UK says it forbids the use of VoIP for users subscribing to a new mobile data plan. While this move is related to customers using data cards on their PCs, it could worry third-party developers of VoIP clients for mobile phones.

“It’s a big discussion topic,” says Ross Brennan, chief executive officer of Cicero Networks, the developer of a VoIP client for converged wi-fi and cellular phones. He hasn’t seen many operators actually blocking such calls and also believes those that do might be met with legal challenges.

VoIP software client developers are already responding to the threat. In early May it emerged that Skype Technologies tweaked the most recent version of its software to be harder to detect and thus block.

Other VON topics include IMS deployment and triple and quadruple services.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...257176006199A2





Vonage Moves to Reassure Nervous Investors
Ken Belson and Matt Richtel

Vonage, tarred by a disastrous initial public offering last week, is scrambling to reassure investors. The company, which provides Internet phone service, said yesterday that it would reimburse the bankers who handled the sale if any Vonage customers refused to pay for shares that were allotted to them.

Vonage gave its customers a chance to buy as much as 15 percent of the 31.25 million shares that were offered last week. About 10,000 of the company's 1.6 million customers ultimately received shares, which were sold at $17 each, according to a person briefed on the deal. Customers had until yesterday to open an account with a specified broker and pay for their shares.

Some customers who participated in the "directed share program" were reluctant to pay for their shares after the stock fell. The shares have lost more than 26 percent of their value since their debut last Wednesday. They fell 52 cents, to $12.50 yesterday.

Vonage said in a statement given to the "Squawk Box" program on CNBC: "While all avenues are available to us, we cannot imagine alienating our customers in that way." The company added that if some participants in the program did not pay, "we expect to repurchase the shares from the underwriters if necessary."

The company's assurances are consistent with regulatory filings it made earlier that said it would cover the bankers if necessary.

Brooke Schulz, a company spokeswoman, declined to say how many customers had not paid for their shares in the program.

A few investors posted angry notes on Vonage-related Web sites saying they were unwilling to pay for their shares. Some blamed the company and bankers for overvaluing the shares.

"There is no way I am paying for this and you are out of your minds if you do," read one posting from someone using the name "ipobust."

Vonage, which has racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in losses in part because of its aggressive marketing campaign, does not want to spend more to retain angry customers, analysts said.

"Clearly they've gotten a significant amount of bad press, and for a company spending a lot of marketing to get customers, they will have to spend even more to keep customers from defecting," said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Research. "It appears that management feels that the directed stock program could backfire and result in higher churn," or customer turnover, he added.

Mr. Greenfield, who has a sell rating on the stock, said the shares were fairly valued at $11.50.

However, Albert Lin, an analyst at American Technology Research, said shares of Vonage could rise to $20 in 6 to 12 months because its cost of finding new customers was relatively low.

He added that the company could become a "tremendous acquisition target."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/te.../31vonage.html





Skype Accused of Patent Infringement
AP

Net2Phone Inc., which enables cable companies to provide residential phone service, has charged that Internet phone service provider Skype Technologies SA has infringed on its patent on point-to-point Internet calling.

Net2Phone sued Skype and its parent company, eBay Inc., charging that Net2Phone has lost an unspecified amount of money as a result. Net2Phone, a unit of Newark-based IDT Corp., sued Thursday in U.S. District Court in Newark.

Skype spokeswoman Alicia Divittorio said the company does not comment on litigation.

Luxembourg-based Skype was acquired last year by eBay Inc. for $2.6 billion.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...rss_technology




1800 pages per hour

Introducing BookDrive DIY

Finally, you can now own a perfect book scanning station that doesn’t break your bank.
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BookDrive DIY is a highly productive scanning solution that enables you to easily scan books at 1,000 pages an hour.

It represents a new way for scanning books as it employs digital cameras, which are much faster than flatbed or overhead scanners. Instead of capturing the information one line at a time, digital cameras capture the information of the whole document in just a blink. This fact makes a digital camera obviously a better choice for scanning documents.

In the past, it has been extremely difficult to shoot good images of a book and make sure all those shots come out consistently and cropped properly.

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• Properly configuring the settings of a camera (e.g. shutter speed, aperture, focus, distance, positioning, etc.)
• The laborious process of post image processing (e.g. cropping the pictures, renaming the files, etc.)

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http://www.atiz.com/letter.html





Mob Rule On China's Internet: The Keyboard As Weapon
Howard W. French

SHANGHAI It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of China's most popular Internet bulletin boards, from a husband denouncing a student he suspected of carrying on an affair with his wife.

Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack. "Let's use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons," as one person wrote, "to chop out the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband." Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams to hunt down the student's identity and address, hounding him out of his university and causing his family to barricade themselves inside their home.

It was the latest example of a growing phenomenon the Chinese call Internet hunting, in which morality lessons are administered by online throngs and where anonymous Web users come together to investigate others and mete out punishment for offenses real and imagined.

In recent cases, people have scrutinized husbands suspected of cheating on their wives, fraud on Internet auction sites, the secret lives of celebrities and unsolved crimes. One case that drew a huge following involved the poisoning of a Tsinghua University student - an event that dates to 1994, but was revived by curious strangers after word spread on the Internet that the only suspect in the case had been questioned and released.

Even a recent scandal involving a top Chinese computer scientist dismissed for copying an American processor design came to light in part because of Internet hunting, with scores of online commentators raising questions about the project and putting pressure on the scientist's sponsors to look into allegations about intellectual property theft.

While Internet wars can crop up anywhere, these cases have set off alarms in China, where this sort of crowd behavior has led to violence in the past. Many here draw disturbing parallels to the Cultural Revolution, whose 40th anniversary was in May. During that episode of Chinese history, mobs of students taunted and beat their professors and mass denunciations and show trials became common for a decade.

In recent years, the Chinese government has gradually tightened controls, requiring, for example, that customers at Internet cafés provide identification.

It also introduced an Internet policing system whose cartoon figure mascots show up on people's screens to remind them they are being monitored, and recently blocked access to the most popular blog search engine, the American company Technorati.

There has been recurrent talk by the government of registering all Internet users, and many here worry that a wave of online threats and vigilantism could serve as a pretext to impose new limits on users.

The affair of the cuckolded husband first came to public attention in mid- April, after the man, who goes by the Web name Freezing Blade, said he discovered online correspondence between his wife, Quiet Moon, and a college student, Bronze Mustache. Following an initial conversation, in which he forgave his wife, the man said he found messages on his wife's unattended computer that confirmed to him that the extramarital liaison was continuing. He then posted the letter denouncing Bronze Mustache by his real name, opening the floodgates.

The case exploded on April 20, when a bulletin board manifesto against Bronze Mustache was published by someone under the name Spring Azalea. "We call on every company, every establishment, every office, school, hospital, shopping mall and public street to reject him," it said. "Don't accept him, don't admit him, don't identify with him until he makes a satisfying and convincing repentance."

Impassioned people teamed up to uncover the student's address and telephone number, both of which were then posted online. Soon, people eager to denounce him showed up at his university and at his parents' house, forcing him to drop out of school and barricade himself with his family in their home.

Others denounced the university for not expelling him, with one poster saying it should be "bombed by Iranian missiles." Many others, meanwhile, said the student should be beaten or beheaded, or that he and the married woman should be put in a "pig cage" and drowned.

"Right from the beginning, every day there have been people calling and coming to our house, and we have all been very upset," said the student's father, who was interviewed by telephone but declined to provide his name.

"This is an awful thing, and the Internet companies should stop these attacks, but we haven't spoken with them. I wouldn't know whom to speak to."

In hopes of quieting the criticism, Bronze Mustache issued a six-minute online video denying any affair with Quiet Moon, whom he is said to have met at a gathering of enthusiasts of the online game "World of Warcraft." At the same time, Freezing Blade has twice asked people to call off the attacks, even joining in the denials of an affair - all to no avail.

At its height, the Bronze Mustache case accounted for huge traffic increases on China's Internet bulletin boards, including a nearly 10 percent increase in daily traffic on Tianya, the bulletin board with the most users.

In many countries, electronic bulletin boards hark back to the earliest days of the Internet, before Web browsers were common, and when text messages were posted in static fashion in stark black and white. In today's China, however, bulletin boards have been colorfully updated and remain at the heart of the country's Internet culture.

"Our Web site is a platform, not a court," said Zeng Lu, a Web master for Tianya, which boasts 40 million page visits daily and says it is the world's largest bulletin board. "We cannot judge who is a good or bad person by some moral standard, but we have our own bottom line. If it's a personal attack on someone, we delete it, but it is very difficult, given that we have 10 million users." Although concerned about online threats, advocates of free speech say that is no reason for the Chinese authorities to place further limits on the Internet.

"The Internet should be free, and I have always opposed the idea of registering users, because this is perhaps the only channel we have for free discussion," said Zhu Dake, a sociologist and cultural critic at Tongji University in Shanghai. "On the other hand, the Internet is being distorted. This creates a very difficult dilemma for us."

Zhan Jiang, a professor of journalism, also defended open discussion on the Internet.

"As freedom of expression is not well protected here, we have to choose the lighter of two evils," said Zhan, who teaches at China Youth University of Political Science, in Beijing. "The minority who are hurting other people in such cases should be prevented, but this behavior should not disturb the majority's freedom of expression."

But there are drawbacks to unfettered discussion, as the Bronze Mustache case illustrates. "What we Internet users are doing is fulfilling our social obligations," said one man who posted a lengthy attack on the college student and his alleged affair. "We cannot let our society fall into such a low state."

Asked how he would react if people began publishing online allegations about his private life, he answered, "I believe strongly in the traditional saying that if you've done nothing wrong, you don't fear the knock on your door at midnight."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/...ess/chinet.php





China Begins Effort to Curb Piracy of Computer Software
David Lague

When Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, played host to President Hu Jintao of China in Seattle last month, he learned that he had a customer at the apex of the world's biggest market.

In a conversation with Mr. Gates, President Hu volunteered that the computer he used in his Beijing office was loaded with the Windows operating system, according to two senior Chinese-born Microsoft executives, Zhang Yaqin and Harry Shum, who escorted the Chinese leader during the visit.

"Bill said: 'If you need any advice using Windows, I would be happy to help,' " Mr. Zhang said in an interview in Beijing.

It is probably not every day that Mr. Gates offers Windows users personal technical support. However, with piracy rampant in China, Microsoft and other software companies have every incentive to seek the good will of the country's top leaders.

Their efforts appear to be having some effect. Responding to years of intensive international lobbying, the Chinese government recently introduced a range of measures that have the potential to curb widespread piracy and increase revenue for software companies.

The Business Software Alliance, a software industry lobby group based in Washington, estimates that more than 90 percent of the software used in China is unlicensed.

On March 31, Beijing announced that local computer makers must ship all their products with licensed operating systems pre-installed. The government has also started a drive to ensure that all computers in the country's sprawling bureaucracy are loaded with legitimate software.

"It is indeed good news, marking a clear step in the right direction to reverse the serious problem of software piracy that frustrates the development in China for both foreign and domestic vendors," said Gregory Shea, the Beijing-based president of the United States Industry Technology Office, which represents more than 6,000 technology companies.

Senior Chinese officials acknowledge that software piracy is widespread, though they argue that foreign critics, including the Business Software Alliance, vastly exaggerate the scale of the problem.

Washington intensified pressure on the Chinese government ahead of President Hu's visit to the United States to protect the property rights of software companies.

One of the complaints of the Bush administration is that intellectual property theft contributes to the soaring United States trade deficit with China. On a visit to Beijing in March, the American secretary of commerce, Carlos M. Gutierrez, noted that China ranked second in the world for computer sales but only 25th for software.

"We believe that is an indication of the use of pirated software," he said.

After Beijing's decision to compel computer makers to install licensed operating system software, Microsoft signed licensing deals with the leading Chinese computer manufacturers Lenovo, the TCL Group, Tsinghua Tongfang and the Founder Technology Group.

Lenovo, the maker of personal computers, agreed to spend $1.2 billion on Windows software over the next 12 months.

Senior Microsoft executives described the licensing deals as a breakthrough in the company's 14-year presence in China, although analysts said it seemed that a significant amount of the licensing revenue would come from computers made for export.

In an April 17 statement announcing the agreement with Lenovo, Microsoft said the $1.2 billion in license fees would pay for software loaded in computers the Chinese company shipped to 65 countries and territories.

Lenovo made about a third of the almost 20 million personal computers sold in China last year, according to industry estimates. Sales figures compiled by industry research groups suggest it is on track to sell more than twice that amount to foreign customers this year.

Some experts doubt that the pre-installation requirement will lead to a sharp increase in legitimate software sales in China, a market where computer sales soared 29 percent in 2005, according to the technology research firm Gartner.

Those experts point out that China has made promises in the past to crack down on software piracy without any noticeable effect.

"There will still be piracy for a considerable period of time," said Michael Chen, the Beijing-based general manager for Red Hat, a leading supplier of open-source software. "People's buying behavior is slow to change."

Chen and other experts maintain that the relatively high prices charged for licensed software to Chinese customers, who have relatively low incomes by Western standards, are part of the reason for China's high piracy rates.

Before the new regulation, most personal computers sold in China were sold without any operating system or loaded with DOS, an early operating system that preceded Windows. Some were sold with versions of Linux open-source software pre-installed. Up to 90 percent of customers then loaded pirated copies of Windows that sell for about 10 yuan, or $1.23, according to computer industry analysts. A legitimate copy of Windows purchased separately costs about 600 yuan.

Industry experts estimate that Microsoft sells licensed copies of Windows XP to Chinese computer makers at a heavy discount, which would add up to 300 yuan to the cost of a 6,000-yuan desktop PC sold without an operating system.

Some analysts suggest that the new rules will simply swell the number of computers loaded with Linux. The Chinese government has strongly encouraged the use of this open-source software to minimize the country's dependence on expensive software supplied under license from companies like Microsoft.

"It could open up a whole new area for companies supporting open-source software to make their technology known," Mr. Chen said.

Even with a sharp reduction in theft of operating systems, experts say the effect on overall piracy will be limited. They say the illegitimate copying of other software is estimated to account for the majority of piracy in China.

The Business Software Alliance, however, calculates that even a relatively small decline in piracy will deliver a windfall for China and the software industry. A joint study between the alliance and IDC, a market intelligence group, published late last year said that a drop of 10 percentage points in software piracy from 90 percent would increase the Chinese economy by $87 billion and lead to an extra 1.8 million jobs in information technology.

The study also said that a reduction of piracy on this scale would lift local industry revenue by $67 billion and allow the government to collect an extra $6.5 billion in tax. Some industry experts maintain that legitimate pre-installed software will be attractive to some Chinese computer buyers. Mr. Shea said he had received reports of increased sales from vendors offering computers with licensed operating systems.

"If the government is committed to buying legitimate software, it sets the tone for the country," said Arthur Kobler, a business consultant based in Hong Kong and a former president of AT&T in China.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/te...gy/30soft.html





Hollywood Bypassing Critics And Print As Digital Gets Hotter
David Carr

The makers of "The Da Vinci Code" opened their film this month despite protests from a historically powerful institution, which labeled the Sony Pictures effort "a provocation" and "spirit-lowering tripe."

The institution was the news media, specifically the critics, who gave a C-plus to an A-list enterprise that included Tom Hanks and Ron Howard. Sony Pictures did not treat the press much better, making minimal accommodations for reviewers, skipping the usual advance screenings and requiring critics to wait for a screening in Cannes the night before the film was released.

Maybe the filmmakers knew what they were doing. "The Da Vinci Code" collected $231.8 million in opening-day ticket sales worldwide. The critics might have had some latent influence, too. Ticket sales for "The Da Vinci Code" fell 66 percent on Friday from a week earlier, the date it opened in the United States and many other countries, according to Box Office Guru. But some of that decline may have been a result of the opening Friday of "X-Men: The Last Stand."

"The Da Vinci Code," with more than 60 million copies of the book sold and a controversy all over the Web about the religious implications of its plot, did not lack publicity before its release.

But three recent movies that were the top openers in their respective weekends this year - "When a Stranger Calls," "Underworld: Evolution" and Tyler Perry's "Madea's Family Reunion" - were never even screened for reviewers, going directly to audiences without pausing for critics' opinion.

According to The Associated Press, 12 movies in the first three months of the year bypassed critics, compared with two last year. Since then, "Silent Hill" took the stealth route to a weekend box office victory, and last week, even though critics did not see "See No Evil," plenty of filmgoers did. Some movies have been labeled critic-proof, but vast swaths of the industry now seem interested in heading to the market without accommodating film reviewers.

The shrinking list of movies scheduled for review is just one more indication that the long marriage between print and film seems to have hit a midlife crisis. Historically, the movie business has supplied stars and stories for newspapers - not to mention almost $1 billion a year in advertising - and newspapers returned the favor by promoting and reviewing movies.

But the dialogue over films has increasingly gone digital. Long before a movie review comes out, young people are text-messaging friends during the first showing of a movie about how disappointing or how must-see it is. Even among adults, the time-honored practice of perusing large-print newspaper ads and then checking the fine print for listings has been replaced by clicking on the Web.

When he first took hold of the newly formed AOL Time Warner in 2000, Steve Case talked of the day when companies could open movies without buying significant print ads. That never came to pass, but now a new division of Fox Film Entertainment aimed at teenagers, Fox Atomic, will produce eight films a year without a print budget.

Of course, the embrace of the new has led to some hurt feelings on the part of Hollywood's old flame. After years of trying to rise above the clutter of releases by increasing print advertising, and enriching newspapers in the process, the industry cut back newspaper advertising last year. It fell $60 million compared with the previous year, its first decline in five years, according to TNS Media Intelligence, a market research firm.

In part, Hollywood is taking some hard lessons from the music industry, which saw the threat but not the opportunity that the Web presented. "Snakes on a Plane," a New Line Cinema movie starring Samuel L. Jackson and many reptiles, has become a cult classic on the Web months before its release in August. SnakesonaBlog.com, conceived by Brian Finkelstein, a Georgetown law student, has had 500,000 visitors and has become a maypole of kitsch and speculation about the movie.

"It is an Internet meme," Finkelstein said. "It is funny and very quickly understood, a simple joke with broad appeal."

The movie is benefiting from a huge no-cost push, and New Line is doing more than getting out of the way. It spent a seven-figure sum on an elaborate Web site of its own and, more unusually, shot new scenes integrating some of the suggestions ricocheting around the Web.

The sometimes rocky marriage of Hollywood and the press is not completely over. Particularly during awards season, the ego needs of big-time actors and directors are often sated by a certain size ad in a certain sort of newspaper. But newspapers, which increased rates for movie advertising as other categories fell apart after the dot-com bust, may be partly to blame for the prospect of a paperless movie industry.

"I know everyone is trying to make it come true because the cost of print ads could be considered extortion in some jurisdictions," said Mark Cuban, who founded 2929 Entertainment, which produces, distributes and exhibits a variety of films. "Every distributor wants to find the best promotional mix away from traditional media and get a far greater bang for their buck. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone has found it yet. Whoever does will have Hollywood gold in their hands."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/...iness/carr.php





The Seven-Terabyte Solution

The 500 Hours of 9/11
Glenn Collins

A brown fedora rests abandoned in ground zero dust: owner's fate, unknown. In images shot from space, a plume of smoke rises miles above the World Trade Center. Two workers cling to a scaffold that dangles from an office building beneath the inferno. A handheld video camera, pointing at a north tower in flames, shakily veers to show the second hijacked jet striking the other tower.

Those images, captured largely by amateurs, are moments from more than 500 hours of videos and films, the largest collection of raw visual data from what historians say is the best-documented catastrophe in history. About 1,700 clips from the collection have attracted more than a million hits in the three months since they were put on Google Video.

The 7,000-gigabyte archive was assembled by Steven Rosenbaum, a Manhattan-based documentary producer. In the days after the terrorist attacks, he put up posters and fliers and placed an ad in The Village Voice urgently requesting images that captured the attack, its aftermath and the mood of the city.

Now his collection is the largest asset of his dormant television production company, CameraPlanet, and Mr. Rosenbaum is working out an agreement with the Bank of America, the company's primary lender. He wants to structure a deal with a donor, buyer or partner that would keep the collection from being sold piecemeal, would repay the company's debt of more than $500,000 and would make the videos available to researchers, filmmakers and the public.

As the fifth anniversary of the attack approaches, Mr. Rosenbaum is hardly alone among 9/11 collectors in struggling with financing, and with the need to find a permanent home for a repository and provide greater access to it.

Beyond at least 260 major private and institutional collections, an estimated 100,000 people have squirreled away 9/11 materials. They range from video and document collections to flags, badges, roadside shrines, electronic archives of trade center blogs and even compilations of conspiracy theory materials.

As yet, the logical repository for ground zero materials, the planned World Trade Center memorial and museum, has no place to store them, and it faces a budgetary and leadership crisis as well.

Beyond that, seeming to profit from 9/11 is still taboo. David N. Redden, a vice chairman of Sotheby's in Manhattan, said his auction house has not been offered Sept. 11 collections to sell.

"Things from that day should be unsalable," he said, "and anything that is ghoulish is beyond the pale."

Among all the archives, Mr. Rosenbaum's video collection may be unique in that it can be sampled by anyone with access to the Web, at www.911archive.net/Google.

It is "an extraordinary compilation of perspectives, a very important archive to keep together," said Jan Seidler Ramirez, chief curator of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.

Mr. Rosenbaum, 42, said that two appraisers had valued his archive in excess of $1 million.

"This collection is about five years of my life," Mr. Rosenbaum said. "It's not about money. We don't have the resources to make it available to researchers and other documentarians, and we are very selective in giving approval to use our video."

Mr. Rosenbaum's Google video clips are low-resolution teasers of longer sequences, and some have been encoded so that they cannot be downloaded, allowing Mr. Rosenbaum alone to approve uses of the full high-resolution images.

Seventy-six people contributed to the collection, which is owned by Mr. Rosenbaum and his business partner and wife, Pamela Yoder.

The archive's value is greatly enhanced, they say, by videotaped interviews with those who provided their pictures, "because in 40 years everyone who shot this video will be gone, and we think the circumstances are as important as the videos," Ms. Yoder said.

A few of the clips have been used in documentaries, including a film produced and directed by Mr. Rosenbaum, "Seven Days in September." In a review in 2002, A. O. Scott of The New York Times called it "an almost unbearably powerful documentary."

When another director of documentaries, Ric Burns, made a film about the trade center, he was also allowed to use some of Mr. Rosenbaum's images.

Archives like this, Mr. Burns said, are tremendous assets.

"What is lying in wait for historians of the future is daunting," he said. "How do you keep the videotapes and the digital computer archives of 300 million Americans, preserve them, sort them and evaluate them? What are the criteria? There aren't enough real-time years to sort it all."

Mr. Rosenbaum's collection may one day be used by historians as a template for coping with huge sets of historical data.

"We'd like to work with the collection to develop the kind of software that can be useful to search historical data," said Orville Vernon Burton, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is director of the Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science there.

In the past, historians often had to sift through meager records. "Scholars of the future will have an overwhelming task coping with e-mails, videos, newscasts, radio broadcasts and written accounts generated by historically important events like 9/11," Dr. Burton said.

If financing can be found, Dr. Burton and scientists at Urbana-Champaign, a leading supercomputing center, would like to work with Mr. Rosenbaum's collection "to store it, preserve it and develop the kind of software that can be useful to search this data," he said, "to develop tools that can take e-mails, newscasts and videos, index them and search them by topic and time, so they can be evaluated."

Mr. Rosenbaum hopes to make this possible by turning the collection over to an advisory board that would determine access, but that plan hinges on a deal with the bank, which said it does not comment on its customers.

Dozens of others, like Louis E. V. Nevaer, are also seeking homes for their collections. He is curator of an archive that contains 5,200 missing-persons fliers and related artifacts from the days after the attack in Lower Manhattan. An exhibition derived from it, "Missing: Last Seen at the World Trade Center," traveled for 18 months to 17 American cities, and to Mexico City and Milan.

"These fliers were going to be discarded as litter, and if we didn't save them, then they'd be lost," Dr. Nevaer said.

The flier collection has been catalogued and stored in climate-controlled warehouses in New York and Miami, "and we're negotiating with several museums," he said.

"We won't permit it to go to any institution that charges admission," Dr. Nevaer said. That rules out the 9/11 museum planned for ground zero.

Other spontaneous collections are housed by institutions and government agencies.

For example, more than 100 artifacts are located in the Jersey City police headquarters of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The items were donated in an outpouring of sympathy for families of the 37 Port Authority officers who died. They include handmade quilts, needlepoint messages, signed flags flown in Afghanistan in honor of the lost, cards from schoolchildren and a framed painting of Sirius, the bomb-sniffing golden Labrador retriever who died in the attack.

"These are all treasured possessions, and we'd like to keep them together," said Barbara Mahon, a retired detective who helps oversee the collection. "It may take some time, but we're going to find the right place for them."

The exact number of such collections is unknown, but "there must be more than 100,000 people of one sort or another who have these materials," said Althea Bernheim, a professional archivist who has been developing a database of major ones for the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York, which has resources for collectors at www.nycarchivists.org/surveyintro.html.

So far, the Roundtable has identified more than 260 major repositories in a program financed by New York State's Documentary Heritage Program. Some archives have thousands of artifacts and documents.

Others are limited to just a few souvenirs of the trade center that were snatched — or rescued — from chaos. One collector "got a big letter T from one of the trade center towers," Ms. Bernheim said.

"There are individuals everywhere who have a few things and are wondering, 'Where do I store it and how do I preserve it?' " she said. "But with the fifth anniversary approaching, the danger is that a lot of materials will be discarded. People need their office space back."

Dr. Ramirez, the memorial foundation's curator, agreed that the anniversary — "a natural demarcation point" — is creating a sense of greater urgency.

The foundation has received more than 50 offers of donations of major collections and has a responsibility to act as a clearinghouse, she said.

"Some are looking to organize their collections, and some are ready to move on and want to deposit their collections," she said. "Many may be financially unable to support them anymore."

But the ground zero museum has yet to be built, costs are far greater than expected, fund-raising has lagged and the president of the memorial foundation, Gretchen Dykstra, resigned on Friday.

"We have to think carefully about the nature of the materials we take responsibility for — the cost of housing, maintaining and cataloguing them," Dr. Ramirez said.

She added that she was working to join with other institutions — including the New-York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York and the New York State Museum in Albany — in a consortium to protect trade center materials in existing repositories.

Somebody has to protect them, said Mr. Rosenbaum, the keeper of the video archive, because it could take years "before we can comprehend the importance of all these collections."

He added: "They contain things that we don't know, right now, that we need to know. We don't know why these things need to be preserved. But we know they need to be."

In future, as collectors lose interest or die off, more and more ground zero materials are expected to become available — or to be put into the trash.

Ms. Bernheim said she is worried that valuable materials may be discarded. But she said: "Though only a few years ago it would have been blasphemy to say so, not everything needs to be saved. The question is, who gets to decide?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/ny...30archive.html





Dude, Here’s My Show
Rob Long

Right now, there are two kinds of people in the entertainment industry. Those who've heard of You Tube, and those who haven't. Which is to say that some of us are a little worried, and some of us aren't. Yet.

You Tube is a website, and yeah, for years people have been predicting that the web will eventually rewrite the rules -- and the economics -- of show business, but this time, maybe, it's really happening. You Tube is a little like Google Video, which is a little like a lot of other sites on the web, which are themselves a little like a mix of reality television, America's Funniest Home Videos, American Idol, and tame soft-core pornography. You know: television as we know it.

I've seen some pretty clever things on You Tube lately. Someone somewhere recut a trailer for The Shining to make it seem like a heartwarming father-son tale. And someone else recut a trailer for Sleepless in Seattle to make it seem like a gripping Fatal Attraction-kind of thriller. And I think we've all seen the various trailer recuts of movies like Back to the Future or Top Gun with a strong Brokeback Mountain angle.

So a few weeks ago, on that lumbering occasionally funny warhorse, Saturday Night Live, Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell made a short digital film parody of a rap video. It was called Lazy Sunday, and it was about two guys waking up late on Sunday and deciding to go see The Chronicles of Narnia, but set in the aggressive rap style. I'm not doing it justice, but it was pretty funny.

I didn't see it on the show, of course. I mean, Saturday Night Live is such a hit-or-miss thing -- I do what everybody does: I watch the first fifteen minutes and then turn it off. Right? After 11:45pm, the show just gets worse and worse -- it's been that way for 10 or 15 years -- so why bother?

I saw the clip on You Tube. Some kid somewhere took it off the TV and zapped it on the web, probably with the heading "This Was The Only Funny Thing on SNL Last Night" or something. So that's where I saw it. That's where a lot of people saw it, too, apparently, because it spawned a constellation of responses from all over the country -- people -- normal people, people NOT in the 212 or 310 area codes -- young men, mostly -- remember them? They're the ones who aren't watching TV anymore or going to the movies -- did their own versions of the sketch using the DV cam and the computer software they've been fiddling around with since Christmas...and it turns out that two guys from Indiana did one and zapped it up to You Tube and called it "Lazy Muncie" and it's pretty funny. I mean, funnier than anything that appears on Saturday Night Live after, say, 11:53pm. Funnier than the last Albert Brooks movie. Funnier than an episode of Joey.

So what does it say if you're Lorne Michaels -- the guy who runs Saturday Night Live -- or, for that matter, the head of comedy development for pretty much any network -- and it turns out there are two funny guys in Muncie who don't really need you to give them permission to make a funny little movie because You Tube is their network and You Tube doesn't have a vice president of comedy development to say, "Yeah, yeah, um, I just don't see where this goes. Can it be about people in their 30's juggling relationships and their careers?" And if there are two guys in Muncie, how many are there in Fort Wayne? Or South Bend? Or Indianapolis? And we haven't even left Indiana yet.

What does that say about that huge, packed auditorium at the Oscars, filled mostly with people who get paid to say yes. Or no. It means, I think, that in the future, a lot of them are going to be scrambling to get out of their pricey car leases. I mean, maybe I'm delusional, but it's just possible that what You Tube means is that sooner, rather than later, this privileged, pompous, overpaid class of gatekeepers -- studio executives, network executives, development executives -- is going to get squeezed pretty tight. Of course, that also means that the privileged, pompous, overpaid class of writers and actors is going to get squeezed tight, too. But I don't know: it sounds worth it.

After I saw the thing on You Tube that those two guys from Muncie did, I checked out real estate prices there. Not bad. Could be another Mar Vista situation, if you get my drift.
http://www.kcrw.com/cgi-bin/db/kcrw....mplt_type=show





Technology and Easy Credit Give Identity Thieves an Edge
John Leland and Tom Zeller Jr.

In a Scottsdale police station last December, a 23-year-old methamphetamine user showed officers a new way to steal identities.

His arrest had been unremarkable. This metropolitan area, which includes Scottsdale and Phoenix, has the highest rate of identity theft complaints in the nation, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Even members of the Scottsdale police force have had their identities stolen.

But the suspect showed officers something they had not seen before. Browsing a government Web site, he pulled up a local divorce document listing the parties' names, addresses and bank account numbers, along with scans of their signatures. With a common software program and some check stationery, the document provided all he needed to print checks in his victims' names — and it was all made available, with some fanfare, by the county recorder's office. The site had thousands of them.

The data were not as rich as some found in stolen mail or trash bins. But for law enforcement officials here, this was another turn in a cat-and-mouse game in which criminals have outpaced most efforts to stop them.

"We're trying to keep up with the technology," said Lt. Craig Chrzanowski, who runs Scottsdale's property crimes division, including a computer crimes unit started two years ago. "But they're getting a lot better."

In an economy that runs increasingly on the instantaneous flow of information and credit — aggressively promoted by banks and credit card companies despite the risks — Phoenix and its surrounding area provide a window on one of the system's unintended consequences.

According to a Federal Trade Commission survey in 2003, about 10 million Americans — 1 in 30 — had their identities stolen in the previous year, with losses to the economy of $48 billion. Subsequent surveys, by Javelin Strategy and Research, a private research company, found that the number of victims had declined to nine million last year but that the losses had risen to $56.6 billion.

In Arizona, one in six adults had their identities stolen in the last five years, about twice the national rate, according to the Javelin survey.

Arizona officials have responded with a preventive mantra: shred all documents and avoid giving Social Security numbers or bank account numbers to strangers over the telephone or the Internet. The State Legislature has passed tougher penalties for people caught stealing or trafficking in stolen identities.

But the real problem, many officials and consumer advocates say, lies elsewhere. In recent years banks have campaigned energetically to extend more credit to more people with fewer hassles, and retailers and consumers have embraced instant, near-anonymous access to credit.

Last year a group of prosecutors, law enforcement officers and security executives from banks and credit card associations met to discuss ways of curbing identity theft. The group had plenty of ideas, including PIN numbers or fingerprint verification for all credit card purchases and a ban on mailings that include blank checks.

But all ran counter to the promotional campaigns of banks and, banks say, to the desires of consumers.

"There's a disconnect between corporate leadership at financial institutions and their security departments," said Brad H. Astrowsky, a former prosecutor who was part of the group. "Marketing people are ruling the day in banking. They can do things to fix the problem, but they have no incentive and motivation to do it. Preventing something from happening is a cost. What's the benefit? It's hard to quantify."

A Hot Spot for Thieves

Several factors converge to make Arizona a hot spot for identity theft. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, according to the Census Bureau, and its growth exaggerates trends that exist in many communities: a mobile population and high numbers of immigrants and retirees. It also has a heavy traffic in methamphetamine.

Methamphetamine users, whose binges keep them up for days in a row, have the time to sort through trash or old mail for Social Security numbers, bank account numbers or other identifying information, said Andrew P. Thomas, the county attorney. Dealers trade drugs for stolen identities that they use to launder their profits. Nearly half the identity theft cases in Mr. Thomas's office have a connection to methamphetamine, he said.

At the same time, he added, "More than half of the illegal immigrants entering the U.S. come through Arizona," creating a market for fraudulent Social Security numbers and driver's licenses.

Though Arizona passed the nation's first identity theft law in 1996, law officers say they are fighting a crime that is as swift and adaptive as the economy it exploits.

The newest wave of thefts here involves copying the magnetic strip from a victim's credit card onto the back of another. When thieves use the doctored cards, the transactions are charged to their victims' accounts. "Even if the cashier asks for my driver's license, the name on the front is going to match," said Todd C. Lawson, an assistant attorney general in Phoenix who specializes in identity theft prosecutions.

The machine to copy the magnetic strip, Mr. Lawson added, is the one nearly every hotel in America uses to recode room key cards.

And the county's Web site, which earned a place in the Smithsonian's permanent research collection on information technology innovation, has made Social Security numbers and other information, once viewable only by visiting the county recorder's office, accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Police officers and prosecutors in Phoenix knew of just two cases involving public records, but most victims do not know how their identities are stolen.

For local law enforcement, pursuing even low-tech, small-time thieves is often complicated and expensive. The victim could be in Arizona, the thief in another state and the transactions spread all over the world. "If someone goes on the Internet and buys goods from Bangladesh, do you call witnesses from Bangladesh?" asked Barnett Lotstein, a special assistant county attorney.

Mr. Lawson said, "I don't think we prosecute 5 percent of it."

On a recent afternoon, Lt. Russ Skinner, who runs the county sheriff's computer crimes division, hefted three vinyl binders onto a wooden table. For the detectives in his unit, this is what the "crime of the 21st century" looks like: photographs of litter-strewn hotel rooms, and of a 33-year-old woman in various stages of methamphetamine-fueled decline.

When detectives caught up with her last August, after nearly three months of investigation, the woman was paying other users to steal mail for her — especially preapproved credit offers — and had parlayed those into credit cards or fraudulent accounts in 46 different names. She had secured housing, utilities and a series of small online loans in her victims' names.

"She wasn't the smartest or the most creative," Lieutenant Skinner said. "She just knew how to get it done."

A Connection to Drug Use

In the past, a drug user who needed money might go into a convenience store with a gun, Lieutenant Skinner said. "They're on the surveillance camera. They might get shot. They might get stopped in the parking lot for having a broken taillight," he said. "Now they can just sit at a computer, no one sees them and they can buy whatever they want."

Officials here began to notice a sharp rise in identity theft about five years ago, said Paul K. Charlton, United States attorney for the District of Arizona.

"The first tip-off was that we started to see a lot of mailbox break-ins by tweakers," Mr. Charlton said, referring to methamphetamine users.

When police officers raided home methamphetamine laboratories that were then proliferating on the outskirts of town, they found stacks of stolen mail or notebooks filled with credit card information. They also found thieves were using acetone, an ingredient used in methamphetamine production, to "wash" the ink off checks, a simple means of identity fraud.

These small laboratories lend themselves to identity theft rings, said John C. Horton, a White House aide in the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In a laboratory, one or two people typically have some technical knowledge, and others specialize in procuring materials.

Identity theft rings follow the same pattern, with a handful of grunts stealing mail for one person who knows how to turn the information into credit cards or checks, Mr. Horton said. "It doesn't seem to happen with cocaine or heroin because we don't produce heroin and cocaine in this country," he said. "Meth production is to some degree a social activity in the same way as identity theft."

Though the Arizona police have closed many laboratories, the identity theft rings have survived or multiplied.

From its commercial downtown, Phoenix extends in a patchwork of satellite communities, some so new that the highway connecting them does not appear on the maps in the central post office. In the mid-1990's, as Phoenix's population boomed, the Postal Service created cluster mailboxes that served whole housing developments. Like other conveniences associated with the city's rapid growth, the boxes have proved a boon for identity thieves.

"You can jimmy one open and get everyone's mail at the same time," said Mr. Lawson, the prosecutor. After numerous break-ins, the Postal Service has spent $12 million on reinforced mailboxes, but many communities here still have the old ones.

Some thieves drive around neighborhoods with their laptops until they find a resident's unsecured wireless Internet connection. If the police investigate a fraudulent purchase, they will trace it to the customer with the connection, not to the thief who placed the order.

Since 1994, a Phoenix security officer named Bob Hartle, frustrated by his own experience with identity theft, has led an often lonely campaign for tighter controls on organizations that handle people's data, and curbs on the way credit card companies, banks and stores grant credit.

Data breaches in the last year have exposed the personal information of more than 80 million Americans, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization that follows identity theft. On May 3, a thief stole computer disks holding the names, Social Security numbers and other information of 26.6 million veterans from the residence of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee who had taken the data home without authorization. In most states, organizations are not required to tell consumers if their identities have been compromised.

"It's the sharing of data without necessary safeguards that enables this crime to grow as it has," said Torin Monahan, an assistant professor of justice and social inquiry at Arizona State University. "The response is always 'protect yourself, go to these workshops, get a shredder.' That diverts attention away from the extent to which these are systemic problems."

Seventeen states have passed "credit freeze" laws enabling consumers to prevent banks or credit agencies from issuing new accounts in their names.

But here, as in other states, businesses have successfully opposed such legislation.

"They're fighting us tooth and nail," said Mr. Hartle, who runs ID Theft Services Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides free help for victims.

"Banks, credit card companies, retailers want to make it easy to buy," Mr. Hartle said. "They write off identity theft as a cost of doing business. So whenever legislation comes up that's going to cost them money, they throw themselves against it."

Nessa E. Feddis, senior federal counsel for the American Bankers Association, said freezing credit could create problems for consumers, especially if they needed to get a new cellphone or change residences in a hurry.

"A credit freeze is one of those things that sounds like a good idea, but people don't realize how often they need to use their credit report," Ms. Feddis said. "There's a balance between security and convenience."

She continued, "We all want fraud to go away, but we don't want to take 20 extra minutes every time we do online banking. We like buying airline tickets online, but there's a risk."

Though consumers worry about identity theft, Ms. Feddis said, banks absorb most of the losses.

Credit card companies point to new monitoring systems that have reduced loss from fraud as a percentage of overall transaction volume. At Visa, fraud accounted for 7 cents per $100 in transactions, down from 18 cents per $100 in 1990. "We could have a system reducing fraud to zero basis points, but it wouldn't meet what consumers are demanding," said Rosetta Jones, a Visa spokeswoman. "We need to deliver what consumers want in a way that is secure."

Fritz M. Elmendorf, a spokesman for the Consumer Bankers Association, described a chess match with identity criminals. For example, banks now protect prescreened credit card offers with address-matching technologies that make it harder for thieves to have cards sent to a drop address, Mr. Elmendorf said.

"There are more tools today than ever to ascertain the identity of a credit applicant," he said. "And the industry can point to a lot of things — some of which they won't talk about in detail — to validate people."

In the community of Chandler, southeast of Phoenix, Bobby Joe Harris questioned the efforts of businesses and banks to protect his identity.

Mr. Harris, 60, is a retired police chief. His wife, Judy, is a retired bank manager. Last December, Mrs. Harris was shopping at a Sam's Club store when a cashier said their membership had been canceled. When Mr. Harris tried to reactivate their membership in January, he learned that the store had issued a new credit card on their account to a woman who had said she was the couple's daughter.

"I don't have a daughter," Mr. Harris said. "I told the lady, 'I don't think so.' "

In two phone calls, possibly working with a store employee, the thief had raised the Harrises' credit limit to $10,000 from $3,500 and then to $15,000, and had run up charges of $11,093. No one had called them.

"It was only by luck that we found out," Mr. Harris said.

Seeking Protection

Though like most consumer victims the Harrises did not have to pay the bogus charges, they now pay $220 a year to LifeLock, a protective service that started last September in Phoenix.

The company's core service is simple: Whenever a bank or other business requests to look at a LifeLock subscriber's credit history, the company gets a fraud alert asking to confirm that the customer applied for credit. Federal law empowers consumers to get these alerts on their own, but they must reapply regularly to one of the three companies that issue credit reports.

Other companies offer different protections. None has had to prove that its services are effective.

When the Maricopa County recorder's office began posting records online in 1997, it was one of the first in the country to do so. Since then, legislatures in other states, including New York and Florida, have wrestled with whether — or how — to make their information available online.

A law in Florida requires that all Social Security and financial account numbers be stripped from online records by 2007, although new legislation may delay that another year.

In Phoenix, the county recorder's office posts 8,000 to 10,000 documents a day. Most are innocuous, but some, including divorce decrees and tax lien records, have sensitive information.

"I'm not insensitive to people's fear," said Helen Purcell, the county recorder. "I have the same fear. My information is out there, too." But it is far too late to start editing Social Security numbers or other data from the county Web site, she said. "We have 100 million documents out there now."

In the absence of full security, Arizonans cling to what protections they can. On a recent morning in Ventana Lakes, a development of older residents northwest of Phoenix, Lois Owen and Joan Schanks joined a small procession of neighbors to a community "shredathon" organized by the attorney general's office and AARP. Since the first shredathon last fall, residents around the state have carted 12 tons of paper to the mobile machines, in many cases supplementing the shredding they do at home.

"It's a big relief," Ms. Schanks said as she watched 20 pounds of old bank statements disappear. Yet even with the shredding, the residents here cannot begin to estimate how many people have their personal information, or how tempted any of those individuals may be to sell that information, Mr. Lawson, the prosecutor, said.

"You can take all the precautions you want," he said. "But everyone's exposed to a certain extent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/us/30identity.html





Couple's Supposedly Destroyed Hard Drive Purchased In Chicago

A year ago, Henry and Roma Gerbus took their computer to Best Buy in Springfield Township to have its hard drive replaced.

Henry Gerbus said Best Buy assured him the computer's old hard drive -- loaded with personal information -- would be destroyed.

"They said rest assured. They drill holes in it so it's useless," said Gerbus.

A few months ago, Gerbus got a phone call from a man in Chicago.

"He said, 'My name is Ed. I just bought your hard drive for $25 at a flea market in Chicago,'" said Gerbus. "I thought my world was coming down."

Gerbus and his wife had good reason to worry.

A total stranger had access to the couple's personal information, including Social Security numbers, bank statements and investment records.

Through information listed on the hard drive, the man in Chicago was able to contact the couple.

"He said, 'Do you want me to wipe it clean or send it to you?' I told him to send it to me. I wanted it in my hands," said Gerbus.

Gerbus received the hard drive a few weeks later.

As a precaution, the couple alerted the major credit bureaus to protect their information.

"I'm not leaving myself open to identity theft," said Gerbus.

Target 5's Tom Sussi contacted Best Buy to figure out how the Gerbus' hard drive wound up at a flea market outside Chicago.

Best Buy issued the following statement to Target 5.

"Our company values and places the utmost importance on maintaining the privacy of our customers. We will fully investigate these allegations."

In the meantime, Gerbus said he hopes the couple's private information didn't fall into the wrong hands. "I don?t know if we're going to have a problem," said Gerbus. "I just don't know."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/wlwt/20060601/lo_wlwt/9303216





A Privacy Upgrade

In today's terrorism-conscious world, personal privacy seems to be a diminishing luxury.

The StealthSurfer II ID Protect from Stealth Ideas, an upgrade of a previous product, combines several off-the-shelf programs to let a user navigate the Web anonymously and create e-mail that cannot be read by others.

The programs come loaded on a flash drive in capacities ranging from 256 megabytes ($99) to 2 gigabytes ($279).

Plug the flash drive into a PC's USB port, and all files that are created when surfing the Web are stored on it.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/...tgadgets27.php





High Court Trims Whistleblower Rights
Gina Holland

The Supreme Court scaled back protections for government workers who blow the whistle on official misconduct Tuesday, a 5-4 decision in which new Justice Samuel Alito cast the deciding vote.

In a victory for the Bush administration, justices said the 20 million public employees do not have free-speech protections for what they say as part of their jobs.

Critics predicted the impact would be sweeping, from silencing police officers who fear retribution for reporting department corruption, to subduing federal employees who want to reveal problems with government hurricane preparedness or terrorist-related security.

Supporters said that it will protect governments from lawsuits filed by disgruntled workers pretending to be legitimate whistleblowers.

The ruling was perhaps the clearest sign yet of the Supreme Court's shift with the departure of moderate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the arrival of Alito.

A year ago, O'Connor authored a 5-4 decision that encouraged whistleblowers to report sex discrimination in schools. The current case was argued in October but not resolved before her retirement in late January.

A new argument session was held in March with Alito on the bench. He joined the court's other conservatives in Tuesday's decision, which split along traditional conservative-liberal lines.

Exposing government misconduct is important, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority. "We reject, however, the notion that the First Amendment shields from discipline the expressions employees make pursuant to their professional duties," Kennedy said.

The ruling overturned an appeals court decision that said Los Angeles County prosecutor Richard Ceballos was constitutionally protected when he wrote a memo questioning whether a county sheriff's deputy had lied in a search warrant affidavit. Ceballos had filed a lawsuit claiming he was demoted and denied a promotion for trying to expose the lie.

Kennedy said if the superiors thought the memo was inflammatory, they had the authority to punish him.

"Official communications have official consequences, creating a need for substantive consistency and clarity. Supervisors must ensure that their employees' official communications are accurate, demonstrate sound judgment, and promote the employer's mission," Kennedy wrote.

Stephen Kohn, chairman of the National Whistleblower Center, said: "The ruling is a victory for every crooked politician in the United States."

Justice David H. Souter's lengthy dissent sounded like it might have been the majority opinion if O'Connor were still on the court. "Private and public interests in addressing official wrongdoing and threats to health and safety can outweigh the government's stake in the efficient implementation of policy," he wrote.

Souter was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Stephen Breyer also supported Ceballos, but on different grounds.

The ruling upheld the position of the Bush administration, which had joined the district attorney's office in opposing absolute free-speech rights for whistleblowers. President Bush's two nominees, Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, signed onto Kennedy's opinion but did not write separately.

"It's a very frightening signal of dark times ahead," said Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project.

Employment attorney Dan Westman said that Kennedy's ruling frees government managers to make necessary personnel actions, like negative performance reviews or demotions, without fear of frivolous lawsuits.

Ceballos said in a telephone interview that "it puts your average government employee in one heck of a predicament ... I think government employees will be more inclined to keep quiet."

Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley said in a statement that the ruling "allows public employers to conduct the people's business without undue disruption and without turning routine personnel decisions into federal cases."

The court's decision immediately prompted calls for Congress to strengthen protections for workers.

Kennedy said that government workers "retain the prospect of constitutional protection for their contributions to the civic discourse." They do not, Kennedy said, have "a right to perform their jobs however they see fit."

The case is Garcetti v. Ceballos, 04-473.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&type=politics





The End Of Internet Freedom
Max Fomitchev

Unless you have not heard, Verizon, AT&T, Bell South and other telecommunications giants are lobbying Congress to establish a legal basis for charging website owners for traffic with the help of two-tier Internet.

If telecommunication lobby succeeds it would mean the end of online freedom and higher prices for online goods and services for all of us.

So what do telecommunication companies want? Quite naturally, greedy corporations want more profit and they are keen to find a way to stuff their pockets even tighter.

Hold on there, telecom companies already charging us - the consumers - for broadband and cable access, right? But now they want to charge content providers too based on the amount of traffic their sites generate. Nonsense! Although telcos argue that they want to curb proliferation of online video and other types of data-hungry streaming that allegedly taxes their networks they think imposing traffic fees on content providers would be a fair solution.

But content providers already pay traffic charges to their hosting providers! So what telcos want is to charge content providers twice! Not only that, the whole premise of two-tier Internet puts high-dollar companies ahead of cash-strapped runner-ups effectively killing start ups and low-key businesses. With two tier you've got to cash-out to cable providers if you want to ride 'high-bandwidth' channel and make sure that your pages are served fast and clear, whereas if you are a cash-strapped nobody like most of us you would be stuck to an auxiliary channel choked with spam, porn and god knows what else.

But most troubling of all is that the introduction of two-tier Internet creates a unique opportunity for censorship and interferes with the free speech right so much treasured by online community. Indeed what a clever move! The bill does not prohibit free speech not it interferes with the free speech directly. Sure, you can say all you want and blog all you want about anything you want. But we just won't serve your pages!.. Unless you pay a hefty price... and even then we may choose not to serve them.

The two-tier Internet bill must be stopped. Activist groups already pressure US senate to abandon the bill. And even an opposing Net Neutrality bill was proposed by democratic senators. Net Neutrality bill requires all online content to be served without discrimination, which is a nice idea in theory, yet it is vigorously opposed by equipment manufacturers and ISPs due to fears of potential liability (arising presumably from bugs, outages and custom content filters).

While Net Neutrality bill sounds like overkill, two-tier Internet bill is ought to be stopped too. If it passes freedom of speech would be seriously hampered, startups and small businesses will take a hit and we will pay higher prices for online advertising as well as goods and services delivered or sold over Internet. Do we really want that? I think not.
http://techsearch.cmp.com/blog/archi...eb_development





Why the Democratic Ethic of the World Wide Web May Be About to End
Adam Cohen

The World Wide Web is the most democratic mass medium there has ever been. Freedom of the press, as the saying goes, belongs only to those who own one. Radio and television are controlled by those rich enough to buy a broadcast license. But anyone with an Internet-connected computer can reach out to a potential audience of billions.

This democratic Web did not just happen. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented the Web in 1989, envisioned a platform on which everyone in the world could communicate on an equal basis. But his vision is being threatened by telecommunications and cable companies, and other Internet service providers, that want to impose a new system of fees that could create a hierarchy of Web sites. Major corporate sites would be able to pay the new fees, while little-guy sites could be shut out.

Sir Tim, who keeps a low profile, has begun speaking out in favor of "net neutrality," rules requiring that all Web sites remain equal on the Web. Corporations that stand to make billions if they can push tiered pricing through have put together a slick lobbying and marketing campaign. But Sir Tim and other supporters of net neutrality are inspiring growing support from Internet users across the political spectrum who are demanding that Congress preserve the Web in its current form.

The Web, which Sir Tim invented as a scientist at CERN, the European nuclear physics institute, is often confused with the Internet. But like e-mail, the Web runs over the system of interconnected computer networks known as the Internet. Sir Tim created the Web in a decentralized way that allowed anyone with a computer to connect to it and begin receiving and sending information.

That open architecture is what has allowed for the extraordinary growth of Internet commerce and communication. Pierre Omidyar, a small-time programmer working out of his home office, was able to set up an online auction site that anyone in the world could reach — which became eBay. The blogging phenomenon is possible because individuals can create Web sites with the World Wide Web prefix, www, that can be seen by anyone with Internet access.

Last year, the chief executive of what is now AT&T sent shock waves through cyberspace when he asked why Web sites should be able to "use my pipes free." Internet service providers would like to be able to charge Web sites for access to their customers. Web sites that could not pay the new fees would be accessible at a slower speed, or perhaps not be accessible at all.

A tiered Internet poses a threat at many levels. Service providers could, for example, shut out Web sites whose politics they dislike. Even if they did not discriminate on the basis of content, access fees would automatically marginalize smaller, poorer Web sites.

Consider online video, which depends on the availability of higher-speed connections. Internet users can now watch channels, like BBC World, that are not available on their own cable systems, and they have access to video blogs and Web sites like YouTube.com, where people upload videos of their own creation. Under tiered pricing, Internet users might be able to get videos only from major corporate channels.

Sir Tim expects that there are great Internet innovations yet to come, many involving video. He believes people at the scene of an accident — or a political protest — will one day be able to take pictures with their cellphones that could be pieced together to create a three-dimensional image of what happened. That sort of innovation could be blocked by fees for the high-speed connections required to relay video images.

The companies fighting net neutrality have been waging a misleading campaign, with the slogan "hands off the Internet," that tries to look like a grass-roots effort to protect the Internet in its current form. What they actually favor is stopping the government from protecting the Internet, so they can get their own hands on it.

But the other side of the debate has some large corporate backers, too, like Google and Microsoft, which could be hit by access fees since they depend on the Internet service providers to put their sites on the Web. It also has support from political groups of all persuasions. The president of the Christian Coalition, which is allied with Moveon.org on this issue, recently asked, "What if a cable company with a pro-choice board of directors decides that it doesn't like a pro-life organization using its high-speed network to encourage pro-life activities?"

Forces favoring a no-fee Web have been gaining strength. One group, Savetheinternet.com, says it has collected more than 700,000 signatures on a petition. Last week, a bipartisan bill favoring net neutrality, sponsored by James Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, and John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, won a surprisingly lopsided vote in the House Judiciary Committee.

Sir Tim argues that service providers may be hurting themselves by pushing for tiered pricing. The Internet's extraordinary growth has been fueled by the limitless vistas the Web offers surfers, bloggers and downloaders. Customers who are used to the robust, democratic Web may not pay for one that is restricted to wealthy corporate content providers.

"That's not what we call Internet at all," says Sir Tim. "That's what we call cable TV."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/op...=1&oref=slogin





Surveillance

Crashing the Wiretapper's Ball
Thomas Greene

The dingy hotel corridor was populated with suits, milling about and radiating airs of defensive hostility. They moved in close-knit groups, rounding a stranger or a rival group conspicuously, the way cats do. They spoke in whispers. They glanced nervously over their shoulders as they took calls on their cell phones, then darted swiftly into alcoves.

They were government officials, telephone company honchos, military officers, three-letter-agency spooks and cops, all brought together by salesmen dealing in the modern equipment of surveillance. It was my job to learn what they were up to.

They'd gathered for the ISS World Conference, a trade show featuring the latest in mass communications intercept gear, held in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Crystal City, Virginia. Situated conveniently between Reagan National Airport and the Pentagon, Crystal City is an artificial place dominated by conference centers and hotels, set up to accommodate the endless, and often secret, intercourse between the U.S. military and its myriad itinerant contractors, lobbyists, consultants and trainers. They rotate in and out, civilians using the airport, military personnel taking the subway from the Pentagon, with Crystal City as the intersection in a figure-eight circuit of constant activity.

Back in the narrow hotel corridor, vendors manned their booths, exhibiting the latest gadgets for mass electronic surveillance: machines capable of scouring the data streams of millions of subscribers -- industrial-strength kits for packet interception and analysis, RF interception, and voice and keyword recognition.

These devices are a bonanza for the communications hardware industry, vouchsafed by the U.S. Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act of 1994, or CALEA, which mandates that all new telephone company gear must be wiretap-friendly, or "CALEA compliant," according to the popular euphemism. This has led to a seller's market with equipment makers pushing their dual-use kits with exceptional confidence. The sales pitch has evolved beyond the traditional points of reliability, scalability, total cost of ownership and ease of deployment to exploit the hard-sell undercurrents of mass-scale commerce that's mandated by law and funded by taxpayers who are powerless to review the deals and evaluate their various costs and benefits to society.

While U.S. telephone companies are well accustomed to CALEA requirements (designed originally to make mobile phone networks as wiretap-friendly as land-line systems), the Federal Communications Commission has declared itself competent to expand the act to cover voice over internet protocol outfits and internet service providers as well. This expansion has been challenged in federal court, and the conflict has boiled down to a simple phrase in the law, exempting providers of "information services" (as opposed to communications services) from CALEA obligations. The Department of Justice, ever eager for opportunities to plug law enforcement into the internet at the most basic levels, claims that ISPs, like telephone companies, are communications services, on grounds that instant messaging, VOIP and e-mail constitute a significant replacement for traditional telecommunications.

The FCC is in complete agreement with the Justice Department, and has issued its demand for compliance by May 14, 2007. The case, currently on appeal, is pending in a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., where, comically, one judge characterized the FCC's legal arguments as "gobbledygook." Thus it's possible that only VOIP services that use the public switched telephone network will be covered by the CALEA, leaving peer-to-peer VOIP outfits and ISPs in the clear. A decision should arrive in a few months' time.

Despite this uncertainty, ISPs (and universities) have become new sales targets for the surveillance equipment industry -- fresh leads, so to speak -- and the hustle is uniform and loud: "CALEA is coming, and you'd better be ready."

In the conference rooms, salesmen pitched their solutions for "lawful interception." In attendance were the generally responsible representatives of North American and Western European government and law enforcement, but also numerous representatives of naked state control in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The phrase "lawful interception" might have meaning in the United States, Canada and Europe, but this was the ISS world conference, after all, with attendees from more than 30 countries.

Narus was there, maker of the kit fingered by Mark Klein and allegedly used with impunity by the National Security Agency at numerous AT&T facilities for mass, domestic internet surveillance, and, the company boasts, used by Shanghai Telecom "to block 'unauthorized' internet calls."

There were European heavyweights like Ericsson and Siemens, American giants like Raytheon and light-heavyweights like VeriSign and Agilent, along with a vast host of leaner, more specialized, surveillance outfits such as Verint, Narus and the like. They offered equipment and services capable of every manner of radio frequency and packet interception, with user interfaces and database structures designed to manage and deliver not just information but "actionable data," properly organized and formatted for easy prosecutions.

Certain conference sessions, according to the schedule, were "open to sworn law enforcement agents only." But there was no discrimination between the more punctilious law enforcement agencies of democratic nations and those hailing from quarters where darker practices are commonplace.

The last thing anyone involved wanted was publicity. Unfortunately, I had a job to do, although it would be difficult; the press had been strenuously dis-invited, and Wired News' efforts to get credentialed for the event firmly rebuffed. I spent my first day lurking in public areas of the hotel. In the lobby, two nattily dressed men with Caribbean accents were being hustled by an American salesman. The Caribbean fellows stiffened upon my approach, and warily lowered their voices. I buried my nose in the paper and listened.

I could hear little of what the two potential customers said, but the salesman, God bless him, was a loudmouth, and I was able to piece together parts of the conversation from his various announcements. It seemed elements of the deal that he was attempting to close were challenging. This may have had to do with his customers' qualifications to take delivery of surveillance equipment, perhaps because they weren't legitimate government representatives, or the government that employed them was subject to U.S. export restrictions. I never learned the exact problem with getting the equipment into the customers' hands, but it was obvious that there was one.

The salesman concluded with a hearty recap. "I'm glad we had the chance to meet in person; this is not a conversation I'd want to have on the phone, for obvious reasons," he roared. Everyone laughed heartily.

Later, at the bar, I sat beside three Americans: two cops and a civilian police employee. They bitched about how difficult RF interception is, how the equipment is complicated and its user interfaces mysterious, and the difficulty of getting adequate funds and properly trained personnel to carry out surveillance effectively.

Grant money is to be avoided, they agreed. It's got strings attached -- strings like performance milestones and complicated reporting demands. And on top of that, there's such an assload of damned frequencies, and it's such a trial just to get the kit dialed in. You can waste hours listening to TV instead of the subject's cell phone. But all the brass understands is hard evidence leading to arrests, they whined.

This was suggestive stuff, but it's not what I came for. On day two, it was time to make a move. I went to the registration booth and requested a pass and a press fee waiver. "The conference isn't open to the press," a receptionist explained with a fluty tone of voice and an android smile. A uniformed security guard took a step closer, for emphasis.

I withdrew, bloodied but unbowed.

In the bar that night, things got interesting. A group of men associated with the Pen-Link and Lincoln electronic surveillance systems came in. I exchanged small talk with them for a bit, then moved to their table. Although I had identified myself as a journalist, an enthusiastic reseller of the equipment decided to hold forth. We drank a great deal, so I won't name him.

"I'm not much concerned about wiretaps in America and Europe," I'd been saying to one of the Pen-Link engineers, "but I wonder if it bothers you to consider what this technology can do in the hands of repressive governments with no judicial oversight, no independent legislature."

Our man interrupted. "You need to educate yourself," he said with a sneer. "I mean, that's a classic journalist's question, but why are you hassling these guys? They're engineers. They make a product. They don't sell it. What the hell is it to them what anyone does with it?"

"Well, it's quite an issue," I said. "This is the equipment of totalitarianism, and the only things that can keep a population safe are decent law and proper oversight. I want to know what they think when they learn that China, or Syria, or Zimbabwe is getting their hands on it."

"You really need to educate yourself," he insisted. "Do you think this stuff doesn't happen in the West? Let me tell you something. I sell this equipment all over the world, especially in the Middle East. I deal with buyers from Qatar, and I get more concern about proper legal procedure from them than I get in the USA."

"Well, perhaps the Qataris are conscientious," I said, "and I'm prepared to take your word on that, but there are seriously oppressive governments out there itching to get hold of this stuff."

He sneered again. "Do you think for a minute that Bush would let legal issues stop him from doing surveillance? He's got to prevent a terrorist attack that everyone knows is coming. He'll do absolutely anything he thinks is going to work. And so would you. So why are you bothering these guys?"

"It's a valid question," I insisted. "This is powerful stuff. In the wrong hands, it could ruin political opponents; it could make the state's power impossible to challenge. The state would know basically everything. People would be getting rounded up for thought crimes."

"You're not listening," he said. "The NSA is using this stuff. The DEA, the Secret Service, the CIA. Are you kidding me? They don't answer to you. They do whatever the hell they want with it. Are you really that naive? Now leave these guys alone; they make a product, that's all. It's nothing to them what happens afterward. You really need to educate yourself."

On day three, the last day of the conference, I had nothing left to gain from working the periphery, hence nothing to lose from being tossed out, so I strolled past the android and the uniformed guard. No one challenged me. I chatted with vendors. I grabbed brochures from their tables and handouts in the conference rooms. I hung out on the veranda and smoked with fellow tobacco addicts.

The best conversation I had was with Robert van Bosbeek of the Dutch National Police. I asked him if he was tempted to buy anything.

"Not really," he said with a laugh. "But it's always good to see what's on offer. Basically, we're three or four years ahead of all this."

He said that in the Netherlands, communications intercept capabilities are advanced and well established, and yet, in practice, less problematic than in many other countries. "Our legal system is more transparent," he said, "so we can do what we need to do without controversy. Transparency makes law enforcement easier, not more difficult."

By noon on day three, the conference had wound down. The final thing I needed was the forbidden packet, with its CD of the slides from the presentations. I would have it in spite of the android. Indeed, because of the android.

I waited in the lobby. A group of Koreans came down the stairs. I know this because they spoke Korean, and few outsiders speak it. It's not a popular language, like French or English.

As it happens, I can speak it a little. Most Koreans are charmed by foreigners who can mutter even a few words of their mother tongue, so I chatted for a bit, and asked if I might copy the conference CD onto my notebook computer. They were happy to oblige.

Naturally, this forbidden object contained nothing that could justify keeping it from a journalist. There were no stunning revelations about new intercept equipment designs, capabilities or techniques. Making it unavailable was just another expression of the conference director's small-minded attitude of hostility toward the press.

An attendee told me that during one presentation, a discussion arose about whether the press should be invited to future ISS conferences. Some of those present believed that secrecy only leads to speculation, which is usually worse for trade than the facts. Others believed that reporters are too ignorant to write competently about the secret intercourse between big business and law enforcement, and should be told as little as possible in hopes that they'll have nothing to write. Judging by my own experiences, it was clear that the second line of reasoning had prevailed.

But it's foolish to be secretive: A determined reporter can't be thwarted, and it's better that one should have more rather than less information to work with.

It's ironic that spooks so often remind us that we've got nothing to fear from their activities if we've got nothing nasty to hide, while they themselves are rarely comfortable without multiple layers of secrecy, anonymity and plausible deniability. While there was little or nothing at the conference worth keeping secret, the sense of paranoia was constant. The uniformed guard posted to the entrance was there to intimidate, not to protect. The restrictions on civilians attending the law enforcement agency sessions were, I gather, a cheap marketing gesture to justify their $6,500-per-head entrance fee with suggestions of secret information that the average network-savvy geek wouldn't have known.

In the end, all this surveillance gear and attendant hype becomes meaningless with simple precautions like encrypted VOIP, a good implementation of virtual private networks, and proxies and SSH for web surfing, IM, internet relay chat, webmail and the like. Skype's VOIP service is encrypted but closed-source. Still, there's SpeakFreely, a peer-to-peer, open-source VOIP app; Zfone, an open-source VOIP crypto plug-in from PGP honcho Phil Zimmermann; Invisible IRC, an open-source IRC proxy implementation that includes anonymization and encryption features, plus other dodges too numerous to mention.

The popular law enforcement myth is that crooks are getting ever more sophisticated in their use of modern technology, so the police have got to acquire more "sophisticated" point-and-drool equipment to catch them. We find versions of this incantation in virtually every Justice Department press release or speech related to CALEA. But these tools -- especially in the IP realm -- are not so much sophisticated as complicated and very expensive. They're a bad alternative to old-fashioned detective work involving the wearing down of shoes and dull stakeout sessions in uncomfortable quarters such as automobiles. The chief impulse behind this law enforcement gizmo fetish is laziness, and it's a bad trend: The more policemen we have fiddling with computer equipment, the fewer we have doing proper legwork.

The windup is that garden-variety crooks will remain those most susceptible to remote, electronic surveillance, while sophisticated, tech-savvy bad guys will continue operating below the radar. CALEA and its most potent technological offspring are inadequate to catch the people who most need catching. The project of "lawful interception" is huge, grotesquely expensive, controversial, infused with unnecessary secrecy and often useless against the most important suspects it purports to target.

It poses a tremendous threat to human rights and dignity in countries without adequate legal safeguards, and still invites occasional abuses in countries with them. Its costs are paid by citizens who are deliberately kept in the dark about how much they're paying for it, how effective it is in fighting crime and how susceptible it is to abuse. And that's the way the entire cast of characters involved wants to keep it.

Which, of course, is exactly why the public needs to know much more about it, even if it requires rude tactics like crashing the spooks' soire.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71022-0.html





European Court Bars Passing Data to U.S.

The European Union's highest court ruled Tuesday that the EU acted illegally when it struck a deal giving U.S. authorities personal details of airline passengers in a bid to fight terrorism.

Under an agreement reached in 2004, European airlines are compelled to turn over 34 pieces of information about each passenger -- including name, address and credit card details -- within 15 minutes of departure for the United States.

The United States says such measures are required to help fight terrorism. But the law has been heavily criticized in Europe as a violation of privacy.

The European Court of Justice said EU nations acted without the correct legal basis. It did not, however, take issue with specific measures of the law.

Lawyers have until Sept. 30 to address the concerns raised by the court. If they fail to fix legal technicalities by that date, airlines may have to change the way they collect and transfer data.

The European Parliament had asked the court to annul the deal which was reached with the Americans in May 2004 despite strenuous objections.

Washington has warned airlines face fines of up to $6,000 per passenger and the loss of landing rights if the relevant information is not passed on.

The European Commission said Tuesday it would work to find a solution within the 90-day deadline.

Airline representatives also expressed confidence that changes could be made to comply with the ruling without jeopardizing the substance of the agreement.

''It does not seem to alter the reality of the situation to any major extent,'' said David Henderson, a spokesman for the Association of European Airlines, which represents British Airways, Air France, Lufthansa and other top carriers. ''It's really a problem for the lawyers,'' he added.

During the negotiations, the EU won some concessions from the Americans such as shortening the time the information is stored and deleting sensitive data such as meal preference, which could indicate a passenger's religion or ethnicity.

The U.S. also said the information would be shared with other countries on a restricted basis only.

EU and U.S. officials say the data collected can only be used to fight terrorism and other serious crimes, including organized crime. Under the current terms, the information can be stored for up to 3 1/2 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/worl...n er=homepage





'Idol' Taylor Hicks Signs Record Deal
Kevork Djansezian

Taylor Hicks has taken step two on his "American Idol"-fueled career, signing the record contract that comes with winning the hit show.

The gray-haired crooner inked a pact with music mogul Clive Davis in conjunction with 19 Recordings Unlimited, the label managed by "AI" creator Simon Fuller, it was announced Wednesday.

The 29-year-old Alabama native's recording of two songs - "Do I Make You Proud," which he performed in the show's finale, and a soulful cover of the Doobie Brothers classic "Takin' It to the Streets" - will be released in stores and through digital outlets on June 13.

With Davis' guidance, Hicks is expected to release a full-length album later this year.

In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Davis, who has molded the careers of previous "Idol" winners, said he thinks Hicks has charisma and a unique singing style that will help him establish his pop audience.

"He definitely has his own sound," Davis told the AP. "He does have that gift, you know who it is when you hear him."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





PC's That Are a Lot Smaller Than a Breadbox
Peter Wayner

Chris DiBona's work as manager of open-source programs for Google takes him on the road, where laptops grow heavier with every gate he passes in the airport. So he has been experimenting with piecing together the ultimate lightweight PC.

At the core of his ensemble is the OQO-01, a full-featured PC running Windows XP that is not much bigger than a pack of 3-by-5 index cards. It's measured in ounces (14), not pounds.

"I use both this and my cellphone in the same manner," he said. "They're read-only devices. I can do cursory work." The OQO comes with a built-in keyboard that can be tapped by the thumbs.

When he wants to do more serious work, he unpacks a full-size, foldable keyboard from Think Outside that is scarcely bigger than the OQO when he packs it away. Mr. DiBona says he types as quickly with the folding keyboard as he does with a normal one. The 5.6-ounce keyboard connects with the OQO wirelessly with the Bluetooth standard.

Mr. DiBona is not the only one exploring replacing a laptop with a combination of cellphones, hand-helds and foldable keyboards. The folding keyboards have been around since the introduction of some of the first palmtops, but they are playing an increasingly viable role in laptop replacement as the combined elements become more and more capable.

Many of the latest palmtops will run all the software needed to browse the Web, exchange e-mail or even drive a projector to give a presentation. A Palm TX ($299, 5.25 ounces), for instance, can let you handle most basic editing chores with files created in Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

These microsize versions can do many of the simple tasks of their bigger cousins, but are limited by the size of the screen. The tiny processors, after all, are as powerful as the desktop machines of a few years ago. The TX and competitors from companies like Hewlett-Packard and Dell can do most of what a traveler could want except, perhaps, play the most sophisticated games. The thin slabs can even display low-resolution movies, albeit not from DVD disks.

To use more than a stylus or a thin thumb keyboard, a user must stitch together a fully functioning system out of parts that all speak the current lingua franca, Bluetooth. Regular keyboards cannot be connected. While full-size keyboards are the tools most commonly added to a cellphone or a hand-held, there are also mice, headphones, microphones, digital cameras and even satellite navigation receivers.

The advantage is that people can carry just the parts they need. On a short trip, the keyboard and mouse can stay home. The disadvantage is that each of these devices needs its own power system, potentially requiring a number of charging bricks.

Screens

The heart of these machines lives behind the screens of the cellphones or palmtops where the main processors, memory and wireless receiver can be found. Hand-helds like the Palm TX connect with the Internet with Wi-Fi connections common in coffee shops and homes, while higher-end tools like the Palm Treo 650 use cellular networks to fetch information. (Cingular sells the 6.3-ounce 650 for about $370 with a two-year service agreement priced at $105 a month.)

The latest Treo, the 700P, also includes the ability to connect with the emerging EV-DO networks from Verizon and Sprint, which offer download speeds that can exceed those of cable modems and digital subscriber lines.

Some of these devices include tiny keyboards while others use just a stylus and a few buttons. The OQO, Treos and BlackBerrys come with built-in keyboards best operated with thumbs, while others, like the Palm TX and the Nokia 770, are meant to be driven by a stylus.

The focus of the software also varies. While many palmtops keep track of appointments, phone numbers and notes, the eight-ounce Nokia 770 (about $400) is sold as a window to the Web and is labeled an "Internet tablet." It latches on to any local Wi-Fi connection to link into the Web. The screen has a higher resolution than most small devices, offering a grid of 800 by 480 pixels instead of the more standard 480 by 320 or 320 by 320.

These devices are designed to be a bit simpler and focused on the needs of the traveler. On the other hand, the OQO ($1,900 to $2,100 at www.oqo.com) behaves just like a desktop PC running Windows XP and offers 30 gigabytes of disk space.

The interest in the micro Windows PC is growing. Microsoft is pushing a standard called the Ultra-Mobile PC, running a stylus-enabled version of Windows in a larger package that weighs a bit more than two pounds. The first model, the Samsung Q1 ($1,100), has a 40-gigabyte hard drive and a seven-inch display.

Keyboards

While all of these cellphones, palmtops and tablets can operate by themselves, a full-size keyboard makes them much more efficient and useful. It may be simple to page through a list of phone numbers with a stylus, but for writing anything more than a disjointed, error-filled and uncapitalized text, a real keyboard is essential.

A number of keyboards are jostling for attention. Device makers like Palm often distribute customized keyboards, while companies like Think Outside (www.thinkoutside.com) and Freedom Input (www.freedominput.com) sell their own versions.

Freedom Input, for instance, sells full-size foldable keyboards for BlackBerrys (typically $112 to $131). If these keyboards are still too big, the company also makes a tiny thumb keyboard the size of a credit card for Bluetooth phones that have no built-in keyboard. A stand for the phone or palmtop is integrated on most, separate on some.

Palm sells a keyboard for $70 that connects using the infrared port on the Palm. And the Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard from Think Outside weighs 5.6 ounces, costs about $150, and comes with the cachet of being included in the Museum of Modern Art's design collection.

There is also a great deal of experimentation in this area. The FrogPad, for instance, comes from FrogPad Inc. (www.frogpad.com), a small Texas company devoted to building keyboards that can be operated with one hand. The most common letters require only one keystroke, while the least common are composed by pushing two or more of the 20 keys at once, in much the same way that a pianist strikes a chord. The small form and lack of hinges make the keyboards ideal for travelers, but they are also finding uses among the disabled and among graphic designers who like to keep one hand on the mouse.

The flashiest keyboard, literally, may be the Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard from i.Tech (www.itechdynamic.com), a tiny device (1.38 by 3.6 by 1 inch) that draws the keyboard on the desk with a ruby laser and watches the movement of your fingers with a motion sensor. It weighs three ounces and costs about $180 from thinkgeek.com and others. There are no hinges or moving parts to jam, bend or break, but the only feedback is a click.

If your favored combination begins to look too complicated, laptop makers continue to make their offerings smaller and lighter. Dynamism.com, for instance, imports laptops from Japan not normally sold in the United States. The Panasonic R5 ($2,000 to $2,500) weighs only 2.2 pounds, a number almost small enough to quote in ounces — about 35.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/te.../01basics.html





Police Investigate Angry eBayer's Revenge Site

Met called in laptop dispute
Chris Williams

Police are investigating a disgruntled eBayer who took online revenge after paying £375 for a laptop which, he said, did not work.

The buyer recovered the hard drive from the malfunctioning notebook, finding it full of personal details, allegedly including access to email accounts, 90 voyeuristic leg shots taken on the London Underground and gay porn. He posted the material on a website, naming and shaming Barnet 19-year-old Amir Tofangsazan as the seller.

Clearly, someone doesn't see the funny side. A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said Barnet police are investigating a complaint made on 29 May at Fulham police station regarding improper use of a public electronic communications network. She added: "The allegation follows from a civil dispute. No arrests have been made and inquiries continue."

At time of writing the site had clocked up almost 950,000 hits. A dismayed Amir told the Daily Mail the website had made his life a "living hell", and that his family had received threats. He said: "The laptop wasn't even broken. It was in working order. The last few days have been a nightmare, some of my friends have seen it and my father is very angry."

Amir said he had not received any "polite requests" for a refund. On his revenge site the buyer counters: "This site is 100 per cent genuine, I swear I'm not making anything up."

Amir told the Daily Mail: "I will obviously be trying to get the website taken down as soon as possible." In the meantime, the site is available here.®
Bootnote

The buyer has been named as Thomas Sawyer, a 23-year-old student from Exeter. He offers to pull the site sown voluntarily in exchange for a refund.

Meanwhile, The Daily Mail reports that Amir allegedly pulled a similar scam on Newport Pagnell woman Debbie McInerney, who says she paid him £147 for an iPod which never arrived. Amir said: "The police are investigating the iPod case and I can't comment on it
http://www.theregister.com/2006/05/31/ebay_laptop_site/





Clerk Says Scanty Attire Was Distraction
AP

Well, she LOOKED 21 anyway, maybe older, and what's more the clerk at the small store in this Coos County town says he was much distracted by what he called the young lady's scanty attire. So distracted, he said, that he didn't see the "Minor until 2007" stamped on her driver's license. She got the six-pack, and store owner David Cardwell got a $1,320 fine. The clerk had to pay $750.

Cardwell is hollering "Entrapment," "Draconian" and more.

Rather than pay, Cardwell says, he will take the alternative and close the store for a week. He says it doesn't make than much in a week in any case.

His clerk had been stung by an Oregon Liquor Control Commission decoy sent to test for underage sales.

His two clerks will be jobless until June 7.

Cardwell is not denying his employee erred, but says it was hardly fair.

"This young woman was dressed in very provocative clothing more suited for the bedroom," Cardwell said in a letter to the OLCC. "I would not allow my daughter to leave the house dressed in such a way."

He says the law should target clerks and servers, not the owners.

"We feel we did everything right," Cardwell wrote. "We trained (our clerk) correctly. We tested him correctly."

But Gary Francis, the local OLCC agent who coordinates the stings and hires the decoys, isn't persuaded.

"Maybe he should have been looking at her driver's license," Francis said of the clerk. "It was a straight-up deal. By the numbers. No trickery at all."

He said the decoy was dressed in a tank top, attire many woman her age wear.

People who serve or sell alcohol in Oregon are required to card anyone who looks 26 years old or younger, Francis said. He wants the decoys to look like 18-, 19- or 20-year-olds, not a 40-year-old.

"We are out there to see who is doing their job and who is not," he said.

He said female decoys can't wear makeup or doctor their hair to look older.

"This guy wasn't paying attention," Francis said. "If he would have looked at that young lady's ID, he would have seen the big red box on her ID that said she was a minor until 2007.

"DMV makes it easy. But if you don't use the tools that the state provides, then you deserve to get caught."

Cardwell disagrees.

"They're baiting. They're disguising. They're camouflaging them. They are trying to create a situation and trying to induce someone into taking the bait."

The store had never been similarly fined before.

"There's a first time for everything," said Francis.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT



















Until next week,

- js.




















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