[JackSpratts]

Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records Before 9/11, Lawyers Say

The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation's largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.

``The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,'' plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. ``This undermines that assertion.''

The lawsuit is related to an alleged NSA program to record and store data on calls placed by subscribers. More than 30 suits have been filed over claims that the carriers, the three biggest U.S. telephone companies, violated the privacy rights of their customers by cooperating with the NSA in an effort to track alleged terrorists.

``The U.S. Department of Justice has stated that AT&T may neither confirm nor deny AT&T's participation in the alleged NSA program because doing so would cause `exceptionally grave harm to national security' and would violate both civil and criminal statutes,'' AT&T spokesman Dave Pacholczyk said in an e-mail.

U.S. Department of Justice spokesman Charles Miller and NSA spokesman Don Weber declined to comment.

Pioneer Groundbreaker

The NSA initiative, code-named ``Pioneer Groundbreaker,'' asked AT&T unit AT&T Solutions to build exclusively for NSA use a network operations center which duplicated AT&T's Bedminster, New Jersey facility, the court papers claimed. That plan was abandoned in favor of the NSA acquiring the monitoring technology itself, plaintiffs' lawyers Bruce Afran said.

The NSA says on its Web site that in June 2000, the agency was seeking bids for a project to ``modernize and improve its information technology infrastructure.'' The plan, which included the privatization of its ``non-mission related'' systems support, was said to be part of Project Groundbreaker.

Mayer said the Pioneer project is ``a different component'' of that initiative.

Mayer and Afran said an unnamed former employee of the AT&T unit provided them with evidence that the NSA approached the carrier with the proposed plan. Afran said he has seen the worker's log book and independently confirmed the source's participation in the project. He declined to identify the employee.

Stop Suit

On June 9, U.S. District Court Judge P. Kevin Castel in New York stopped the lawsuit from moving forward while the Federal Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation in Washington rules on a U.S. request to assign all related telephone records lawsuits to a single judge.

Robert Varettoni, a spokesman for Verizon, said he was unaware of the allegations against AT&T and declined to comment.

Earlier this week, he issued a statement on behalf of the company that Verizon had not been asked by the NSA to provide customer phone records from either its hard-wired or wireless networks. Verizon also said that it couldn't confirm or deny ``whether it has any relationship to the classified NSA program.''

Mayer's lawsuit was filed following a May 11 USA Today report that the U.S. government was using the NSA to monitor domestic telephone calls. Earlier today, USA Today said it couldn't confirm its contention that BellSouth or Verizon had contracts with the NSA to provide a database of domestic customer phone call records.

Jeff Battcher, a spokesman for Atlanta-based BellSouth, said that vindicated the company.

``We never turned over any records to the NSA,'' he said in a telephone interview. ``We've been clear all along that they've never contacted us. Nobody in our company has ever had any contact with the NSA.''

The case is McMurray v. Verizon Communications Inc., 06cv3650, in the Southern District of New York.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...O64zJE&refer=#





Computer Consultant Hacked Into FBI's Classified System
Eric M. Weiss

A government consultant, using computer programs easily found on the Internet, managed to crack the FBI's classified computer system and gain the passwords of 38,000 employees, including that of FBI Director Robert Mueller.

The break-ins, which occurred four times in 2004, gave the consultant access to records in the Witness Protection program and details on counter-espionage activity, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Washington. As a direct result, the bureau said it was forced to temporarily shut down its network and commit thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars to ensure no sensitive information was lost or misused.

The government does not allege that the consultant, Joseph Thomas Colon, intended to harm national security. But prosecutors said Colon's "curiosity hacks" nonetheless exposed sensitive information.

Colon, 28, an employee of BAE Systems who was assigned to the FBI field office in Springfield, Ill., said in court filings that he used the passwords and other information to bypass bureaucratic obstacles and better help the FBI install its new computer system. And he said agents in the Springfield office approved his actions.

The incident is the latest in a long string of foul-ups, delays and embarrassments that have plagued the FBI as it tries to update its computer systems to better share tips and information. Its computer technology is frequently identified as one of the key obstacles to the bureau's attempt to sharpen its focus on intelligence and terrorism.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson declined to discuss the specifics of the Colon case. But he said the FBI has recently implemented a "comprehensive" security program.

Pleaded guilty

Colon pleaded guilty in March to four counts of intentionally accessing a computer while exceeding authorized access and obtaining information from any department of the United States. He could face up to 18 months in prison when sentenced next week. He has lost his job with BAE Systems, and his top-secret clearance has been revoked.

His attorney, Richard Winelander, declined to comment.

According to Colon's plea, he entered the system using the identity of a FBI special agent and used two computer hacking programs found on the Internet to get into one of the nation's most secret databases.

Colon used a program downloaded from the Internet to extract "hashes" — user names, encrypted passwords and other information — from the FBI's database. Then he used another program to crack the passwords by using dictionary word comparisons, lists of common passwords and character substitutions to figure out the plain text passwords.

What Colon did was hardly cutting edge, said Joe Stewart, a senior researcher with Chicago-based security company LURHQ. "It was pretty run-of-the-mill stuff five years ago," Stewart said.

Asked if he was surprised that a secure FBI system could be entered so easily, Stewart said, "I'd like to say, 'Sure' — but I'm not really. They are dealing with the same types of problems that corporations are dealing with."

Obstacles

Colon's lawyer said in a court filing that his client was hired to work on the FBI's "Trilogy" computer system but became frustrated over "bureaucratic" obstacles, such as obtaining a written authorization from the FBI's Washington headquarters for "routine" matters such as adding a printer or moving a new computer onto the system. He said Colon used the hacked user names and passwords to bypass the authorization process and speed up the work.

Colon's lawyers said FBI officials in the Springfield office approved of what he was doing, and that one agent even gave Colon his own password, enabling him to get to the encrypted database in March 2004. Because FBI employees are required to change their passwords every 90 days, Colon hacked into the system on three later occasions to update his password list.

The FBI's struggle to modernize its computer system has been a recurring headache for Mueller and has earned it considerable criticism from lawmakers.

Better computer technology might have enabled agents to more closely link men who later turned out to be involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, according to intelligence reviews conducted after the terrorist strikes.

The FBI's Trilogy program cost more than $535 million but failed to produce a usable case-management system for agents because of cost overruns and technical problems, according to the Government Accountability Office.

While Trilogy led to successful hardware upgrades and thousands of new PCs for bureau workers and agents, the final phase — a software system called the Virtual Case File — was abandoned last year. The FBI announced in March that it would spend an additional $425 million in an attempt to finish the job. The new system would be called "Sentinel."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...651_fbi06.html





FBI Plans New Net-Tapping Push
Declan McCullagh

The FBI has drafted sweeping legislation that would require Internet service providers to create wiretapping hubs for police surveillance and force makers of networking gear to build in backdoors for eavesdropping, CNET News.com has learned.

FBI Agent Barry Smith distributed the proposal at a private meeting last Friday with industry representatives and indicated it would be introduced by Sen. Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

The draft bill would place the FBI's Net-surveillance push on solid legal footing. At the moment, it's ensnared in a legal challenge from universities and some technology companies that claim the Federal Communications Commission's broadband surveillance directives exceed what Congress has authorized.

The FBI claims that expanding the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act is necessary to thwart criminals and terrorists who have turned to technologies like voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.

"The complexity and variety of communications technologies have dramatically increased in recent years, and the lawful intercept capabilities of the federal, state and local law enforcement community have been under continual stress, and in many cases have decreased or become impossible," according to a summary accompanying the draft bill.

Complicating the political outlook for the legislation is an ongoing debate over allegedly illegal surveillance by the National Security Administration--punctuated by several lawsuits challenging it on constitutional grounds and an unrelated proposal to force Internet service providers to record what Americans are doing online. One source, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of last Friday's meeting, said the FBI viewed its CALEA expansion as a top congressional priority for 2007.

Breaking the legislation down
The 27-page proposed CALEA amendments seen by CNET News.com would:

• Require any manufacturer of "routing" and "addressing" hardware to offer upgrades or other "modifications" that are needed to support Internet wiretapping. Current law does require that of telephone switch manufacturers--but not makers of routers and network address translation hardware like Cisco Systems and 2Wire.

• Authorize the expansion of wiretapping requirements to "commercial" Internet services including instant messaging if the FCC deems it to be in the "public interest." That would likely sweep in services such as in-game chats offered by Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming system as well.

• Force Internet service providers to sift through their customers' communications to identify, for instance, only VoIP calls. (The language requires companies to adhere to "processing or filtering methods or procedures applied by a law enforcement agency.") That means police could simply ask broadband providers like AT&T, Comcast or Verizon for wiretap info--instead of having to figure out what VoIP service was being used.

• Eliminate the current legal requirement saying the Justice Department must publish a public "notice of the actual number of communications interceptions" every year. That notice currently also must disclose the "maximum capacity" required to accommodate all of the legally authorized taps that government agencies will "conduct and use simultaneously."

Jim Harper, a policy analyst at the free-market Cato Institute and member of a Homeland Security advisory board, said the proposal would "have a negative impact on Internet users' privacy."

"People expect their information to be private unless the government meets certain legal standards," Harper said. "Right now the Department of Justice is pushing the wrong way on all this."

Neither the FBI nor DeWine's office responded to a request for comment Friday afternoon.

DeWine has relatively low approval ratings--47 percent, according to SurveyUSA.com--and is enmeshed in a fierce battle with a Democratic challenger to retain his Senate seat in the November elections. DeWine is a member of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee charged with overseeing electronic privacy and antiterrorism enforcement and is a former prosecutor in Ohio.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., decided 2-1 last month to uphold the FCC's extension of CALEA to broadband providers, and it's not clear what will happen next with the lawsuit. Judge Harry Edwards wrote in his dissent that the majority's logic gave the FCC "unlimited authority to regulate every telecommunications service that might conceivably be used to assist law enforcement."

The organizations behind the lawsuit say Congress never intended CALEA to force broadband providers--and networks at corporations and universities--to build in central surveillance hubs for the police. The list of organizations includes Sun Microsystems, Pulver.com, the American Association of Community Colleges, the Association of American Universities and the American Library Association.

If the FBI's legislation becomes law, it would derail the lawsuit because there would no longer be any question that Congress intended CALEA to apply to the Internet.
http://news.com.com/FBI+plans+new+Ne...3-6091942.html





Wait'll they find the tunes

Students Cry Foul Over Cell Phone Policy: Teens Say Officials Are 'Overreacting' And Violating Their Privacy
Eric Athas

Fearing their wireless freedom may be in jeopardy, students at Framingham High School were fuming over a new school policy that allows administrators to seize cell phones and search their contents.

The policy, administrators say, is to improve security and stop the sale of drugs and stolen goods, but students said that the edict is an invasion of privacy.

"It's not anyone's business what is in students' cell phones," said Demitriy Kozlov, who will be a senior in September. "If they think someone's dealing a pound of coke or pot, then there is a reason to, but that doesn't happen here."

Kozlov said he believes administrators are overreacting and making the school appear more troublesome than it actually is.

School officials "reserve the right to look through the cell phone," when they suspect a student has drugs or stolen goods, according to Principal Michael Welch.

"People shouldn't get power based on suspicions, people should be considered innocent until proven guilty," said senior Adam Goldberg. "It feels like our rights are stripped away when we walk through the doors."

Scott Siegal is a senior at Newton South High School, where Welch was principal before going to Framingham, and said there is a major difference in Newton South and Framingham's policies.

"We have an open campus at Newton South, and it seems like (Welch) is making things stricter at Framingham," said Siegal, who was a sophomore when Welch was the principal at Newton South. "We would never have had a policy like this."

The rule complies with federal law, which says a school can conduct searches when there is "reasonable suspicion" that a student has contraband.

"It's kind of ridiculous," said Dayna Green, who recently graduated from Framingham, and is headed to Fitchburg State College in September. "They try to make us feel independent, but then they invade our privacy."

The cell phone policy is not the only change at Framingham: Staff will be required to wear identification badges at school. That move is an attempt to keep track of people who should not be on school property.

Green said the policy will only make students feel uncomfortable, and will not stop students from breaking the rules.

"I think it is more of a scare tactic," she said. "Something bad is going to happen everywhere."
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/lo...ticleid=134816





Identity Thief Finds Easy Money Hard to Resist
Tom Zeller Jr.

By the time of Shiva Brent Sharma's third arrest for identity theft, at the age of 20, he had taken in well over $150,000 in cash and merchandise in his brief career. After a certain point, investigators stopped counting.

The biggest money was coming in at the end, postal inspectors said, after Mr. Sharma had figured out how to buy access to stolen credit card accounts online, change the cardholder information and reliably wire money to himself — sometimes using false identities for which he had created pristine driver's licenses.

But Mr. Sharma, now 22, says he never really kept track of his earnings.

"I don't know how much I made altogether, but the most I ever made in a quick period was like $20,000 in a day and a half or something," he said, sitting in the empty meeting hall at the Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome, N.Y., where he is serving a two- to four-year term. "Working like three hours today, three hours tomorrow — $20,000."

And once he knew what he was doing, it was all too easy.

"It's an addiction, no doubt about that," said Mr. Sharma, who inflected his words with the sort of street cadence adopted by smart kids trying to be cool. "I get scared that when I get out, I might have a problem and relapse because it would be so easy to take $300 and turn it into several thousand."

That ease accounts for the sizable ranks of identity-fraud victims, whose acquaintance with the crime often begins with unexplained credit card charges, a drained bank account or worse. The victims' tales have become alarmingly familiar, but usually lack a protagonist — the perpetrator. Mr. Sharma's account of his own exploits provides the missing piece: an insight into both the tools and the motivation of a persistent thief.

Identity theft can, of course, have its origins in a pilfered wallet or an emptied mailbox. But for computer-savvy thieves like Mr. Sharma, the Internet has forged new conduits for the crime, both as a means of stealing identity and account information and as the place to use it.

The Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have invested millions of dollars in monitoring Internet sites where thousands of users from around the world congregate to swap tips about identity theft and to buy and sell personal data. Mr. Sharma frequented such sites from their earliest days, and the techniques he learned there have become textbook-variety scams.

"Shiva Sharma was probably one of the first, and he was certainly one of the first to get caught," said Diane M. Peress, a former Queens County prosecutor who handled all three of Mr. Sharma's cases and who is now the chief of economic crimes with the Nassau County district attorney's office. "But the kinds of methods that he used are being used all the time."

As far back as 2002, Mr. Sharma began picking the locks on consumer credit lines using a computer, the Internet and a deep understanding of online commerce, Internet security and simple human nature, obtained through years of trading insights with like-minded thieves in online forums. And he deployed the now-common rods and reels of data theft — e-mail solicitations and phony Web sites — that fleece the unwitting.

Much of this unfolded from the basement of a middle-class family home in Richmond Hill, Queens, at the hands of a high school student with a knack for problem solving and an inability, even after multiple arrests, to resist the challenge of making a scheme pay off.

That is what worries Mr. Sharma's wife, Damaris, 21, who has no time for the Internet as she raises the couple's 1-year-old daughter, Bellamarie.

"I hate computers," she said. "I think they're the devil."

A Thief's Tool Kit

Mr. Sharma is soft-spoken, but he does not shrink from the spotlight. He gained fleeting attention after his first arrest, as the first person charged under a New York State identity-theft statute — and later, at his high school graduation at the Rikers Island jail, where he was the class valedictorian.

For a prison interview, he has applied gel to his mane of black hair. He is Hollywood handsome, with deceptively sleepy eyes and smiles that come as tics in reaction to nearly every stimulus — a question, a noise. Prosecutors interpreted those smiles as evidence of smug indifference.

A tattoo of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and his namesake, is just visible on Mr. Sharma's right arm, under the short sleeve of his green prison jumpsuit.

Recalling his youth, Mr. Sharma said he was not unlike many other young people growing up with the mating calls of modems and unprecedented access to people, sounds, software and other thrills streaming into the family's home over the Internet.

As the youngest of three children in a family of immigrants from Trinidad — his parents brought the family to Queens when he was 6 — Mr. Sharma said sibling battles for access to the computer were common. He studied programming at Brooklyn Tech, one of New York's most selective public high schools, where he met Damaris.

He enjoyed chatting on AOL and was drawn, along with millions of his peers in the early days of file sharing, to downloading MP3's.

As he got older, he began hanging out on Internet-based chat channels that dealt with bigger game, like bootleg software. And amid the chatter were whispers of other something-for-nothing sites — ones where thieves had set up bazaars involving credit cards, banks and account numbers.

"So I ended up registering and then I started just looking, really," Mr. Sharma said. "Not really taking anything in, just looking and seeing what's going on there."

Mr. Sharma said he chiefly visited two such sites, Carderplanet.com and Shadowcrew.com, where he was known by the screen name sniper5984 (the number denoted his birthdate). The sites were shut down in 2004, but many others have sprung up to replace them.

"For the aspiring little computer hacker in the United States, they're an excellent opportunity to learn," said Greg Crabb, the assistant director for economic crimes at the United States Postal Inspection Service's international group in Washington. On Carderplanet, for example, "a person could learn how to set up a drop, receive packages, develop other relationships and generally get started in the business."

Mr. Sharma got started with phishing — sending e-mail meant to dupe recipients into revealing their personal or financial data, which can then be exploited. He told investigators that he paid $60 to someone he had met on Carderplanet to buy a program designed to harvest AOL e-mail addresses.

"I pretty much stuck with AOL because I knew AOL is most likely people new to the Internet," Mr. Sharma explained, "people who don't use the Internet for much but chat rooms."

He managed to gather about 100,000 addresses, and crafted an e-mail message that told recipients, "We regret to inform you, but due to a recent system flush, the billing information for your account was deleted." Recipients were instructed to follow a link to a Web page to remedy the situation.

The Web page, which mimicked AOL's look and feel, including a bogus AOL Web address, had form fields requesting everything from name and address to mother's maiden name, Social Security number, date of birth, credit card number, expiration date and bank.
The "submit" button sent the data to Mr. Sharma's e-mail account. He then went shopping.

From the 100,000 phishing e-mails Mr. Sharma sent, investigators say, about 100 recipients were duped into clicking through to the phony AOL Web page he created and filling out the form. Mr. Sharma said he did even better, with about 250 to 300 responses.

And Mr. Sharma went on to more elaborate and lucrative schemes. By the end, he said, he had become well known at Carderplanet and Shadowcrew for being able to "cash out" victims' credit accounts by making large wire transfers from their accounts to himself.

"I cash them out all the time," sniper5984 wrote at Carderplanet on July 5, 2004. "Here's two examples of Citi Cards I have used last month just to show."

Sniper5984 then provided links to two images of the account statement of the victim, a California resident, showing, amid various legitimate charges, nearly $10,000 in Western Union wire transfers made over three days in June 2004.

There were also two charges for Domino's pizza in Ozone Park, Queens.

"There was always a challenge," Mr. Sharma said. "You know, like it's always something like, wow, can I take it to the next step, you know?"

Ms. Sharma recalled that on trips to a Six Flags amusement park, her husband rarely took to the rides, preferring instead the games of chance. "The ones where you win a giant stuffed animal if you can throw some ball into a bucket or something like that, but there's obviously some trick to it," she said. "Well, he would always know the trick."

She also recalled one evening in the summer of 2004, when Mr. Sharma came to her apartment with $27,000 in cash and asked her to hold onto it overnight. The next morning he picked up the money and returned later with a new Acura RSX.

"He liked to race cars," Ms. Sharma said.

Back at the correctional facility, Mr. Sharma struggled to find a clear explanation for his crimes. At times he suggested he was taking aim at a usurious banking industry. At other moments he offered that it was simply a game, that he was young, that he was not thinking clearly.

"Well, you know — I mean there's no, there's no justification behind it at all," he said. "You know it was wrong, and I did it — it was wrong."

He also suggested it all became too easy too fast.

"The challenge was really stopping, you know?" he said. "That was the hardest challenge of them all."

'It's Sharma Again'

The tools that allowed Mr. Sharma to profit from his thievery were also his undoing, more than once.

On Sept. 19, 2002, William Robertson, a 73-year-old retired physical education teacher in Ormond Beach, Fla., received one of the 100,000 e-mail lures that Mr. Sharma's had sent out from Queens, and he fell for the scam.

"I don't know what made me fill out that whole form," Mr. Robertson said. "At that time I was a fairly new user of the computer. And after I did it, I just didn't feel right. But it wasn't until after the credit card company called me that I knew I'd done anything wrong."

A $3,000 Eltron photo ID printer had been bought on his Chase credit card from an online store in Buffalo. He canceled the card and made a report to the Flagler County police. The police determined that the printer had been shipped to a Brent Sharma in Queens.

Just over a month later, on Nov. 8, Peter Ruh, a United States postal inspector, arrived at Mr. Sharma's parents' home wearing a postal delivery uniform and carrying a box of high-end racing car parts that Mr. Sharma had ordered using another credit card account he had hijacked. When Mr. Sharma identified himself and signed for the package, Mr. Ruh, wearing a wire, gave a pre-arranged signal and his fellow inspectors, along with New York City police officers, moved in.

Among the items seized from his parents' basement were a computer, two digital cameras, a scanner, nearly 500 blank plastic identity cards with magnetic strips, two Marine Corps ID's — with Mr. Sharma's name and photo — and a newer model Eltron photo ID printer. A search of his computer revealed personal identifying information on hundreds of people from across the country.

"We were surprised at how forthcoming he was," Mr. Ruh said. "He was very proud of his accomplishments."

It was the first of many encounters that Queens postal investigators would have with Mr. Sharma over the next two years. "I'd get a call from someone over at Postal and they'd say, 'You're not going to believe this,' " Ms. Peress said. "And then they'd say, 'It's Sharma again.' "

Even with charges of identity theft pending in the AOL case, Mr. Sharma was arrested and charged again, in May 2003, for schemes involving the hijacking of Amazon.com accounts, moving fraudulently bought merchandise through auctions at eBay and Yahoo, and enlisting the father of a friend to receive shipments at his home in exchange for a digital camera.

Four months later, as part of a combined plea agreement, Mr. Sharma was permitted to plead guilty in the first case as a youthful offender, avoiding a felony designation. He pleaded guilty in the second case to two felony counts of identity theft and unlawful possession of personal identification information. In November 2003 he was sentenced to five years' probation and 350 hours of community service and was ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution.

But within a month, on Jan. 21, 2004, sniper5984 was active again at Carderplanet. "I am looking for partners," he wrote.

Logging Off

By the summer of 2004, investigators had begun piecing together a string of complaints from out-of-state consumers whose credit card accounts had been hijacked for tens of thousands of dollars in bogus charges, and they quickly recognized the modus operandi.

Mr. Sharma was arrested again in October while accepting a package under the watch of postal inspectors. A search of his apartment in Ozone Park on Oct. 16, 2004, the day after his final arrest, turned up consumers' credit bureau reports, assorted hand-written notations of credit card accounts and Social Security numbers and printed chats showing him negotiating online for the purchase of FirstUSA and MBNA credit cards.

Mr. Sharma remembers making heavy use, just before his last arrest, of the credit card of a commercial airline pilot from Florida.

Receipts show that a Jean Pascal Francis, presenting a Michigan state identification card, signed in Queens for nearly $5,500 in Western Union cash transfers charged to the pilot's account on a single Friday afternoon in July 2004. A Michigan state identification card with that name and Mr. Sharma's photograph was among the documents later found in Mr. Sharma's apartment.

"I thought it was horrible," recalled the airline pilot, who did not want to be named because he feared it would invite other thieves to take a crack at him. "You just feel violated in terms of your privacy."

Meanwhile, Mr. Sharma, whose family had moved to Florida, was largely on his own in New York and was burning through cash like rocket fuel.

"I tried every five-star hotel in Manhattan," he said. "That's why they say, 'Oh, he stayed at the Parker Meridien, the Regency, the Waldorf-Astoria.' You know, I went to all those and just stayed. The Mandarin Oriental is by my wife's house, and that's supposed to be the nicest one and the newest one, so I went there and it's like $3,500 a night."

"The more you make," he added, "it's like, it becomes a different kind of lifestyle."

The question now is whether Mr. Sharma, who has a parole hearing in August, can adapt to a less lucrative lifestyle when he gets out.

He says he is determined to stay clean long enough for his knowledge of fraud techniques to become obsolete. "I've just got to stay with my daughter and just try and stick it through another year or two," Mr. Sharma said, "because by then things have changed so much that it will be kind of hard for me to just go back in there and do everything."

His wife understands the temptations that will lurk in the meantime.

"I do worry a whole lot because — I don't want to say I agree, but I understand his mentality," Ms. Sharma said. "People work really hard for eight hours a day and make minimum wage. And he knows he can get out and make the same thing with the computer in half an hour."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/us/04identity.html





Skype fights back

Can Skype Convince The Doubters That It Is Capable Of Being Secured?
John E. Dunn

The image of VoIP Internet calls pioneer Skype has been struggling recently but it is fair to say that only a tiny fraction of its millions of regular users will have had the faintest idea that anything has been even slightly awry.

Judging by the slow reaction, Skype’s management have also been unaware that the image of the program had started to change in some circles, or that such a body of opinion, however small, might matter.

Now that tardiness appears to be changing – Skype is shedding its startup complacency and counter-attacking against its critics.

Problems started around the time that the version 2.0 beta appeared last year, the moment when a handful of software engineers started to assess a troubling issue thrown up by the program’s new and evasive design: it was incredibly hard to detect using perimeter security systems.

Skype’s unofficial explanation for its extreme stealthiness has always been that this was necessary to avoid telcos threatened by its business model from blocking it. While this presents no issues for a home user, using “invisible” software capable of making and receiving voice calls, opening instant messaging sessions and exchanging files on a corporate networks, caused some to ponder whether the ever-more-popular Skype hadn’t just turned itself into a huge security risk.

Is such a design really that big a security deal? It could be if the company in question is expected to comply with laws on information disclosure, or simply to meet best security practice. It stands to reason that any application moving data in and out of a company’s network without that company being aware it is even there offers the potential for abuse.

And Skype has certainly been turning up on corporate networks, though people disagree about whether this has been driven by a naïve desire by departmental heads to save on phone charges or just employees importing their home software into places of work because they happen to like using it.

In May, Techworld reported that US company Reconnex had detected Skype running on 22 percent of analysed company networks, one program among a growing panoply of unauthorised P2P software. According to the company, companies were not aware of the program’s existence, and were not tracking, blocking or managing it in any way.

As with any software, the program has also suffered its own vulnerabilities, which open a new class of risks of their own. How can you patch something on a risk you don’t even know, nor can know, you have on your network? You can’t.

With all this going on it is surprising that Skype has been able to keep its head down. About the only concession the company has made is to start publishing a security blog of sorts, where it attempts to explain its position. At best, these have been partial rebuttals of some of the criticisms the program has attracted.

For instance, one from March discusses the possibility of managing Skype, turning off features considered inappropriate in enterprises, such a file transfers.

This assumes, however, that companies know about Skype’s existence, are prepared to devote time to using it in the ways described, and are willing to configure security using a proxying setup where applications must pass through an access layer.

Interesting then that earlier this month Skype embarked on a campaign to put its point of view, speaking to a number of journalists, Techworld included. According to Kurt Sauer, Skype’s CSO, the program is misunderstood by its critics.

“One of the reasons Skype is difficult o find is that the people who provide the carrier services [ISPs, telcos] are in competition with Skype,” he said, repeating the claim that Skype uses stealthiness because it has to.

“We don’t want the product to work in such a way as to allow it to be degraded.”

According to Sauer – by way of evidence - unnamed US cable companies had been blocking third-party services such as Skype and Tivo because they wanted to make money from the same services. But invisibility and its accompanying problems still seems a high price to pay to stop the interference of a few companies nobody outside of certain states in the US will even have heard of, surely?

He also revealed that the company was currently looking at the issues of how it recommends user patches and upgrades that have been driven by security vulnerabilities. There is a body of opinion that users should be compelled to patch, or at least have the choice properly explained to them (at the moment, security is not given as a reason to upgrade which allows people to ignore the prompts).

Sauer revealed that Skype has now seen the errors of its silence on enterprise security and had just appointed someone to oversee the creation of security guides that would set out how to use and manage it securely.

He wasn’t able to set a date by which these would be publically available, but they are sure to attract a great deal of interest from the vocal minority who view Skype in a critical light, when they do finally appear.

Short of a wide embracing of the proxying technologies suggested by Skype, it seems unlikely that the controversy about Skype security-worthiness in companies will recede quickly. It is, nevertheless, good that the company is no longer simply denying it has a problem to sort out, and is bothering to puts its case.

There is no reason why Skype should adopt the awkward mantle of its parent, eBay, and retreat into arrogance and convenient silence.
http://www.techworld.com/security/fe...featureid=2640





Internet Calling Pressures Bells to Lower Rates
Matt Richtel and Ken Belson

Competition in the phone business, intensifying this year as Internet-based calling has taken root, has reached the point where many industry experts are anticipating an era of remarkably cheap and even free calls.

That era would be built on a vast migration of phone service from traditional networks to the Internet, where the calls become just another way to use Internet connections that consumers are paying for anyway.

"People are going to look at voice communications as something they expect to get for free," said Henry Gomez, general manager of Skype, which eBay bought last year for $2.6 billion. The company usually charges a few cents a minute for calls from computers to regular phones, but in May it eliminated those fees through the end of the year for users in the United States and Canada.

New competitors, including the major cable companies and start-ups like Vonage and SunRocket, are putting intense pressure on traditional phone companies like AT&T and Verizon that have built multibillion-dollar empires by selling phone service over copper wires. On the defensive, AT&T and Verizon are discounting heavily and pushing customers toward packages of more advanced services.

Online services like Skype that offer free calls from computer to computer for users with headsets have attracted the tech-savvy and are trying to push into the mainstream. In the process, they are dragging down everyone else's prices and pointing the way toward a time when it will be harder and harder for companies to charge anything for a basic home phone line on its own.

There are signs that changes in the business of calling are also altering the way people use these voice services. Mr. Gomez said some Skype users take language classes over the phone, unconcerned about the length of their calls. He has also heard of parents going out and leaving their child with a babysitter, but using the free voice link as a baby monitor to listen in on their child's room.

"When the cost is so little, you start to see people using voice differently," he said.

Internet-based calling is not new, but the momentum behind it is growing. In 2005, the number of subscribers to Internet-based calling services nearly tripled from the year before, to 5.5 million, or about 3 percent of the overall market. By 2010, the research firm TeleGeography expects Internet phone providers to win about a quarter of the traditional local phone business.

To stem the tide, the traditional Bell operating companies have been moving into new businesses like television and strategically dropping the price of traditional phone service. In New York, Verizon recently sent letters to customers offering a calling plan that includes unlimited phone service for $35 a month, instead of $60, a 42 percent cut. For people signing up for service through its Web site, AT&T now offers unlimited local and long distance service for $40, down from $50 a year ago.

The average user of Internet voice calling, known as voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, pays $25 a month for unlimited calling, according to VoipReview.org, a Web site that tracks the industry. International calls are most often not included in the flat rate, but those prices are also coming down.

The Bells still control the bulk of the country's 180 million landlines and are far from giving up on what has been a giant cash cow. When pushed, they are even offering their own Internet-based calling, but these services are rarely advertised. It is cheaper to cut prices to keep customers, they figure, than to try to win back customers later from a rival.

During the first quarter of this year, the number of traditional telephone lines dropped by 150,000 a week, according to TeleGeography. At the same time, the number of subscribers to Internet telephone services has increased by 100,000 a week.

AT&T, among others, says the drop in lines is not as painful for the Bells as it looks. Many customers cancel phone lines they used for dial-up Internet service, but then sign up for broadband services provided by their phone company. Other customers eliminate a phone line but buy a cellphone plan from Cingular, which AT&T owns with BellSouth.

Even so, the Bell companies' stocks have been undercut by the growing prominence of the cable companies' phone businesses and by having to invest tens of billions of dollars in new businesses like television.

The main reason for falling prices for phone service is that it costs less to deliver voice communications over the Internet than over the traditional phone network.

With the old technology, phone companies use costly equipment that directs a call through complex switches to its destination. On the Internet, phone calls are broken up into small packets of data, just like an e-mail message or a Web page, and then delivered to their destination. Instead of having to build and maintain their own networks, VoIP services generally use the infrastructure of the Internet, which is far cheaper but can sometimes lead to degraded service.

Charles A. White, senior vice president of the research firm TNS Telecoms, said that down the road consumers would "spend less and less for voice" and stop paying a separate fee for calls. Instead, he said, they will "just pay for 'communications services.' "

There are some hurdles to adoption of the new services. To use most of them, consumers must first have a high-speed Internet connection, which can cost $15 to $70 a month. Some of the lowest-cost services, like Skype, require people to download software, and users generally talk through a headset plugged into the computer.

Services like SunRocket, Packet8 and Vonage sell unlimited calling plans that let customers use ordinary phones. Internet-telephone plans from cable companies are often only a few dollars cheaper than comparable offers from the Bells, but are typically more reliable than service from the start-ups.

One recent convert to low-cost calling is Walter Andrews, 66, a retired language teacher in Cambridge, Mass., who signed up for SunRocket early last year, paying up front for a year of unlimited phone service at $16.50 a month. He signed up again this year, but when his annual contract expires in 8 months, he plans to consider other options. SunRocket itself recently had a promotion offering unlimited service for $8.29 a month.

"I'm certainly not going to pay even $16, as cheap as that sounds, if the price drops to nothing," said Mr. Andrews, who spends part of the year in Scotland and uses the technology to communicate with his wife, who lives overseas year round.

In a world in which everyone placed and received calls over the Internet, the cost of transmitting the calls would, in fact, be virtually nothing. But there are government-regulated fees of a fraction of a penny per minute for transferring calls onto the regular phone network, which most people continue to use. VoIP services also have their own costs that they must either pass along to customers or find a different way to subsidize, including administration, marketing and technology.

For example, 8x8 Inc., a company that sells an unlimited Internet telephone service called Packet8 for $20 a month, figures it spends around $7 a month per user to connect calls. The company spends another $4.50 a month on customer service and $4 to cover customer acquisition costs, bringing its expenses to around $15 per user, said Huw Rees, vice president of sales and marketing for 8x8.

In this way, Internet-based calls may often be free, but there is a cost of entry. "Voice calls will never be totally free," said Jeffrey A. Citron, the founder and chairman of Vonage, the largest Internet phone provider with 1.6 million customers. "If you want voice mail, you pay. If you want a phone number, you pay. Suddenly, free is $15."

Still, $15 is one-third of the typical phone bill. As they cope with falling prices, some companies are experimenting with ways of subsidizing calls, either through advertising or by giving away basic phone service and charging only for additional features like caller I.D. EBay sees Skype as a way to help buyers and sellers on its auction site close deals.

Verizon is concentrating on selling a suite of products to customers in its faster-growing markets and is considering pulling out of markets where it sees little profit potential in upgrading its older network for the new technologies. These markets may include Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, according to people with knowledge of the company's strategy.

AT&T hopes it can offset the loss of land-based lines with gains in wireless phone service, and by shifting the core of its business to the high-speed Internet connections known as digital subscriber lines, or D.S.L., a technology that divides old phone lines into two parts: one for voice and one for data.

"We view D.S.L. as the access line of the future," said Mikal Harn, vice president of consumer marketing for AT&T. As for consumers paying for calls by the minute or the distance the call travels, "I don't think you've seen the death if it," he said. "But there's a point where you drive to that."

New competitors keep jumping into the phone business. The nation's biggest cable companies, including Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Cablevision, are using phone services — which are relatively cheap to offer — as a way to draw consumers to their high-speed Internet and television services.

Earthlink, the Internet access provider, last month opened its first retail store in Seattle, where it is testing out a new service plan: $70 for fast Internet access of up to 8 megabits per second, along with unlimited phone service. It plans to offer the same service soon in San Francisco and Dallas, and then to more cities.

"We're an Internet company and we didn't really view this as us getting into the voice business. It's that the voice business is becoming an Internet business," said Stephen Howe, vice president of voice services at Earthlink.

Perhaps a perverse indication of widespread expectations that phone prices will continue to fall was the botched public offering of Vonage last month. Vonage, an Internet telephone pioneer whose name has become synonymous with the concept, watched its share price fall sharply on its debut.

But Wall Street analysts and industry executives said this was hardly a rejection of the technology, but rather a reflection of the stiffening competition and relentless price pressure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/03/te...rtner=homepage





I'll Call You
Kelli B. Grant

WHO DOESN'T SCREEN CALLS these days? Whether you're hiding from a telemarketer, your college alumni association or that cutie you met at a bar last weekend, there are many times when you seriously regret having given out your precious digits.

So don't.

Thanks to Private Phone, a free new service launched June 1 by Internet provider NetZero, you can now set up a disposable phone number — kind of like the free email account you use to hold spam.

Unlike paid subscriptions that offer an extra phone line, this free disposable number service works with your existing number. You sign up online, selecting the area code and number. When people call your disposable number, they're forwarded automatically to voicemail. You'll get an email or text message notifying you of the message, which you can retrieve online or by phone.

You can open multiple accounts and close them at any time. And the person calling you need never know they're not reaching your real number. The mailbox only holds 10 messages, however, so you'll need to keep it clear to keep receiving calls.

You might benefit from a disposable phone number if you:

Post classified ads on Craigslist, in your local newspaper, or on community bulletin boards.
Have an unlisted number — and want to keep it that way.
Frequently sign up for sites, newsletters and freebies online. (Signing up often means your info is shared with site partners and third-party retailers.)
Want to make your contact information available online, say, on your blog or personal web site.
Get asked for your number by a (cute) stranger.

Another company, Jangl, is conducting beta tests for a similar service, though no launch date has yet been announced. Here, calls to your disposable number will be automatically forwarded to your phone, while keeping your real number anonymous. Interested in trying it? Sign up for their beta tests online.
http://foxnews.smartmoney.com/dealof...story=20060705




A Terror Strike, Choreographed on a Computer
Raymond Bonner

The bombs should be small and placed in day packs, making them harder to detect. The bombers should dress like tourists. They should not bother targeting hotels because security is too tight. Instead they should consider restaurants, discos and theaters.

A thorough survey should be done in advance by the bombers themselves. That way, they are more familiar with the sites, and no one is left behind to be hunted later by the police.

"There is no escape plan because the perpetrators will become martyrs," the planning document states. "They will go to the targets and not return."

That is part of the playbook for a suicide bombing, including even a minute-by-minute choreography of the bombers' final hours. The Indonesian police uncovered the document from the computer of one of the planners of an attack last October in Bali, which killed 20 people when three men walked into separate restaurants and blew themselves up.

The document offers a rare glimpse into the minds of the most cunning terrorist plotters and of the kind of meticulous planning that lies behind their operations. It also shows what even a small, local group with few resources can do, and the difficulty of thwarting their plans.

"It tells us that these guys tried to think of every contingency," said Sidney Jones, project director of the International Crisis Group's office in Jakarta, and one of the foremost authorities on terrorism in Southeast Asia. "Even when they're being hunted, they had the capacity to think through what had to be done right down to the second."

The 34-page document, titled "The Bali Project," was found on the computer of Azhari Husin, a Malaysian-born engineer educated in Australia and Britain who became a master bomb maker and was one of the most dangerous terrorists in Southeast Asia until he was killed in a shootout with the police last November.

The document was given to The New York Times by a person who requested anonymity because it had not been officially released. It was first reported on by Tempo, an English-language weekly newsmagazine here.

Mr. Azhari's co-planner was Mohammad Noordin Top, who has narrowly escaped capture several times and remains on the run, one of the most wanted men in Southeast Asia.

The Indonesian police have said they found no evidence of any link to Al Qaeda in the Bali bombings. Members of Jemaah Islamiyah, the fundamentalist Islamic movement here, were involved, but the operation was not directed from the top of that organization, the police have said.

The document, written in six sections, sheds little new light on those links but corrects some initial speculation about the attack — that the bombs were assembled in the Philippines, for instance, and that the attack was aimed at the Indonesian government, or the Balinese economy.

The author, who the police say they believe was Mr. Azhari himself, begins by asking, "Why Bali?" Because it will have a "global impact," he answers. "Bali is known around the world, better than Indonesia itself," the author writes. "An attack in Bali will be covered by the international media."

In Section 2, "Method of Attack," he notes that the plan must differ from the first attack in Bali, in October 2002, when a minivan loaded with explosives was detonated in front of two nightclubs, killing 202 people.

Now, "security is tighter," the author writes, noting that the police chief in Bali had increased the number of intelligence officers to 256 from 70.

The author concludes that it is too risky to bring in a truck or a similarly large amount of explosives and that it would be more difficult to rent a house with a garage to assemble a bomb. "The bomb must be smaller, and brought in ready to use," the document says.

The targets, the author writes, are "foreign tourists from America and its allies," which included all NATO countries, as well as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Thailand and the Philippines.

The author knew that the bombers would have trouble determining the native country of many tourists. "So, we will consider all white people the enemy," the document says.

A few weeks before the attacks, the three men who would carry out the operation were sent to Bali to do a "survey" of possible targets for themselves.

Beforehand, they were told to learn what they could about Bali, a popular tourist island, on the Internet, and to get tourist brochures from travel agents and a tourist map.

The possible targets surveyed included McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Burger King and KFC restaurants, theaters, a golf course, tattoo parlors, art galleries and souvenir stalls.

As part of their surveillance, the men were told to "pay attention to clothes worn by local tourists" and what kind of day packs or shoulder bags they carried and whether they carried more than one.

The men did their reconnaissance, then reported back.

The next section includes a question-and-answer exchange between the men and their "field commander," presumably Mr. Azhari.

The men had concluded that the bombers should not use taxis to reach their targets because a taxi driver might help with the backpacks and be suspicious of their weight.

Rather, they should take a motorcycle taxi, which offers no opportunity for the driver to talk to the passenger. As for how to dress, they decided on black shirts, below the knee shorts or jeans and exercise shoes or sandals.

They decided that discos and nightclubs offered potential targets because most of the patrons were foreigners, and there was "no security to speak of, easy to enter."

But those sites were ultimately rejected, because backpacks would be suspicious at the time of night when the clubs got crowded, after 9 p.m.

That led the men to consider restaurants in Kuta, one of the most popular tourist districts, as well as the seafood restaurants on the beach at Jimbaran. "Of all the places," the document says, "this may be the easiest, God willing."

The team explained how the tables at Jimbaran were arranged in the sand, about a yard apart with three to seven diners at each. "Almost 80 percent of the patrons are white," they said. Others were Chinese or Japanese, they noted, using a derogatory term.
The best time would be around 7:30 p.m., when the restaurants were the most crowded and a backpack would not be suspicious.

The survey team came up with four options. Mr. Azhari and Mr. Noordin, it is presumed, chose the fourth: one restaurant at Kuta Square and two restaurants at Jimbaran.

Simultaneous attacks in two locations "will have greater effect than simultaneous attacks in one location," the document states.

There was a further reason for choosing the restaurants at Jimbaran: many of the patrons were businessmen. "The death of foreign businessmen will have a greater impact than of young people," the document says.

The backpack bombs were to be assembled by Mr. Azhari at his base in Java, and there was a serious concern about whether they could be taken on a bus to Bali without being detected. At the Bali port of Gilimanuk, where the vehicle ferry lands, passengers are required to get off and their identification cards are checked.

The backpacks with the bombs could be left on the bus — the police did not inspect baggage left on the bus, the team reported.

The team determined that the backpacks should not be mountaineering backpacks, but student day packs, to avoid suspicion. For that reason, Mr. Azhari constructed relatively light bombs weighing 10 to 12 kilograms, or 22 to 26 pounds.

He devised two elaborate detonating systems, which Section 4 of the report explains in detail, including schematic diagrams of the wiring system and drawings of a man with the wired backpack.

The first was "direct" and connected to the explosives in the backpack. The other was on "delay," for explosives in a fanny pack worn by the bombers.

The delay time was 30 seconds; the bomber would flip the switches for that one as he approached the restaurant. That way, if he were stopped by a guard and could not set off the main bomb, the fanny pack would still explode.

Mr. Azhari worried that the bombs might explode during the bus ride from the base to Bali, if the bus hit a bump or the backpack was jostled, or on the motorcycle from the boardinghouse to the targets. For that reason, he decided to use four switches as a precaution.

"It's important to make the bomb systems as simple as possible so the perpetrators don't get confused," the author wrote.

There was a green light, placed on the chest side of the left backpack strap so that it was visible only to the bomber, which would go on when the delay system had been an activated. A red light, similarly hidden on the right strap, would indicate that the main bomb was ready, and the bomber only had to flip the last switches. The order in which the switches were flipped did not matter.

In Section 5, "The Attack," the final movements of the suicide bombers are planned, in some cases to the second.

5:25 p.m. — Pack, check out of the boardinghouse and synchronize watches.

5:30 — Look for a motorcycle taxi to Legian Beach, in Kuta.

6:15 — Arrive near the Hard Rock Cafe and look for a place to pray.

6:35 — End evening prayers. Then the two groups split up.

7:21 — The man who is going to detonate his explosives in Kuta begins moving toward the restaurant, making sure the red and green lights are on.

7:33:04 — Arrive at the restaurant.

7:33:25 — Make sure the delay switches are all ready, and enter restaurant.

Meanwhile, the other two suicide bombers reach Jimbaran Beach at 6:50, loiter at a food stall until 7:30, then synchronize their watches again, and begin walking to the outdoor tables on the beach, one 45 yards behind the other. The first man walked into the table area, and the second did the same. Then, the document concludes its choreography.

7:34 — "ALLAH-U AKBAR!!!"

"We tried to minimize the impact on Muslims," the author explains in the final section, which was written after the attack. "Nevertheless, there were still Muslim victims killed and wounded."

The death toll was a relatively low number compared with the first Bali attack. Five of the 20 killed were foreigners: 4 Australians and a Japanese. Fifteen were Indonesians.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/03/wo... tner=homepage





Preteen Mag Accused of Military Pitching
AP

Parents and teachers are complaining that the latest issue of a popular magazine for preteens amounts to little more than an early recruitment pitch for the Army.

Cobblestone magazine, which is put out by Carus Publishing in Peterborough, is aimed at children ages 9-14 and is distributed nationwide to schools and libraries. Its latest issue features a cover photo of a soldier in Iraq clutching a machine gun and articles on what it's like to go through boot camp, a rundown of the Army's ''awesome arsenal'' and a detailed description of Army career opportunities.

Most controversial has been a set of classroom guides that accompany the magazine, which suggest teachers invite a soldier, Army recruiter or veteran to speak to their classes and ask students whether they might want to join the Army someday.

One of the teaching guides -- written by Mary Lawson, a teacher in Saint Cloud., Fla. -- suggests having students write essays pretending they are going to join the Army: ''Have them decide which career they feel they would qualify for and write a paper to persuade a recruiter why that should be the career.''

''Some of the teachers were like, 'Holy cow, look at this,''' said Francis Lunney, a sixth-grade English teacher in Hudson, Mass., who quickly called the publishing company to complain. He told The Boston Globe that the guides looked exactly like the official recruiting material distributed at high schools.

The dozen or so similar complaints come at a time when the military, struggling to meet recruitment goals, has become more aggressive in trying to attract young people. But Cobblestone's editors insist the idea for the special issue was theirs alone, though they received permission to use Army photos.

Managing editor Lou Waryncia said the magazine did not intend to recruit for the Army but will consider future issues in light of the criticism, which has been greater than for any previous issue. Though previous issues have dealt with the Civil War and other military conflicts, the recent one is somewhat of a departure in that the Army was a focus by itself.

''We planned to do this well over two years ago,'' he said. ''It just happened to come out at a time when the country's feelings are in a certain place'' about the war in Iraq.

Virginia Schumacher, a retired teacher and manager at the History Center in Ithaca, N.Y., wrote one of the classroom guides. She defended the magazine, saying joining the military is a career option for any child.

''That doesn't suggest that they should or should not,'' she said. ''In that magazine, I felt they gave a wonderful portrayal of jobs that are not what everyone thinks of when they think of the Army. It was not meant to offend anyone.''

Cobblestone, which has a paid circulation of 30,000, is one of a family of award-winning children's magazines published by Carus. It was started by two teachers in 1979 to promote reading and history and grew into six magazines that cover American history, geography, world cultures, world history, science and space, general studies and reading.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...ecruiting.html





Widebody Boondoogle

Lawsuits Fly Over Google Founders' Big Private Plane
Kevin J. Delaney

Even billionaires have disputes with their contractors.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the low-key co-founders of Google Inc., set tongues wagging last year when they bought1 a used Boeing 767 widebody as an unusually large private jet. The 767-200 typically carries 180 passengers and is three times as heavy as a conventional executive plane. Mr. Page said last year that he and Mr. Brin would use it for personal travel, including taking "large numbers of people to places such as Africa." He said it would hold about 50 passengers when refurbished, but declined to comment on other details of the plane, which has been kept ultra secret.WALL STREET JOURNAL VIDEO

Now the Delaware holding company that technically owns the 767, Blue City Holdings LLC, is embroiled in multiple lawsuits with an aviation designer hired to plan and oversee the massive plane's interior renovation.

Blue City in early 2005 hired Leslie Jennings, a high-end aviation designer whose work includes planes for Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen and assorted royalty and heads of state, to transform the plane, which aviation records indicate previously flew for over a decade in Qantas Airways' fleet.

Under the plans Mr. Jennings worked up for the executives, and repeatedly modified according to their specifications, the widebody airliner was to include a lounge near the front primarily for Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt's use, with two adjoining staterooms for the co-founders farther aft, Mr. Jennings says. People familiar with the matter said last year that the plans also called for a large sitting-and-dining area and space near the rear for staff and passengers.
Leslie Jennings says these drawings, which were created and distributed to aviation executives, are near-exact copies of his plans for refurbishing the Blue City 767. The plans depict, from front to back, a lounge area, two adjoining bedrooms, a large sitting and dining area, a seating area and large galley.

Mr. Jennings says Messrs. Brin and Page "had some strange requests," including hammocks hung from the ceiling of the plane. At one point he witnessed a dispute between them over whether Mr. Brin should have a "California king" size bed, he says. Mr. Jennings says Mr. Schmidt stepped in to resolve that by saying, "Sergey, you can have whatever bed you want in your room; Larry, you can have whatever kind of bed you want in your bedroom. Let's move on." Mr. Jennings says Mr. Schmidt at another point told him, "It's a party airplane."

But last October, Blue City terminated Mr. Jennings's contract, saying he wasn't doing his job properly. Mr. Jennings then filed a nearly $200,000 lien against the aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration for payment he hadn't received. He later filed a complaint related to the matter against Blue City and Gore Design Completions Ltd., the San Antonio executive-jet outfitting firm that worked on the plane, in District Court in Bexar County, Texas.

Months later, Blue City and Mr. Jennings continue to face off in acrimonious court battles with legal fees steadily mounting. In its complaint filed in California Superior Court in Santa Clara County, Blue City alleged that Mr. Jennings didn't properly perform the design work and failed to closely manage the plane's renovation in line with the contract for $340,000 he had signed, and various additional expenses that Mr. Jennings estimates at nearly $50,000. A court filing says the refurbishment was planned as a 10-month project, which Mr. Jennings says he understood was originally budgeted for about $10 million but eventually cost more.

Mr. Jennings, 67 years old, says the allegations are groundless. He says he was wrongly fired after trying to alert Mr. Schmidt that Blue City was going to be overcharged for some materials used in the interior of the plane. Mr. Jennings says allegations that he wasn't sufficiently involved in the project or accessible to the plane's owners are false, and has over 1,200 emails related to the project to disprove them.

David Schwarz, a lawyer for Blue City at Irell & Manella LLP in Los Angeles, said in a statement that the company proceeded with the plane's refurbishment following Mr. Jennings's firing, but took legal action to enforce its agreement with Mr. Jennings and protect the confidentiality of the project. Mr. Jennings's request for a temporary restraining order, which a Texas judge denied in January, could have halted work on the project.

Mr. Jennings, who does business as Design Associates International of Mead, Okla., says Blue City is deliberately running up his legal costs, as the suit takes a toll on his health and his business. "They're intent on seeing whether they can break every bone in my body and drain every cent out of me," says Mr. Jennings.
Copies of views of the planned interior, the designer says.

Mr. Schwarz in the statement said Blue City declined to comment on any aspect of the aircraft and said Mr. Jennings's comments to The Wall Street Journal about the plane appeared to violate a confidentiality agreement and an April court order.

In response, Mr. Jennings says there's a lot of information about the plane's refurbishment publicly available already, including a copy of the floor plan and other drawings circulating among aviation-industry executives. Mr. Jennings says those plans and drawings circulating appear to be virtually exact copies of his designs that someone else created. "I don't see how there's anything confidential about the layout of that plane," he says.

"It does seem to be a tremendous fight over relatively few issues," says Bruce Cleeland, a lawyer for Mr. Jennings with Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP in Santa Ana, Calif.

Mr. Schwarz did not respond to a request to interview Messrs. Brin, Page or Schmidt, which a Google spokesman referred to him. A spokeswoman for Gore Design declined to comment. A Google spokesman and Mr. Page said last year that the plane has no formal connection with the company and that Google would not be reimbursing the co-founders for its costs.

None of the parties will say where the 767 is or whether it has been finished. According to an online flight-tracking database, Blue City has requested with the National Business Aviation Association trade group that data related to the 767's whereabouts not be made public.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





A Search Engine That's Becoming an Inventor
Saul Hansell and John Markoff

When Google was a graduate-school project being run from a Silicon Valley garage, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built their own computers out of cheap parts meant for personal computers. They wanted to save money, and they felt that they could design a network of computers that would search the Web more efficiently than those available from traditional manufacturers.

Google no longer needs to pinch pennies. It is a solid member of the Fortune 500 with $9 billion in cash. Still, it is stubbornly sticking to its do-it-yourself approach to technology. Even as it spends more than $1.5 billion this year on operations centers and technology, most of the hundreds of thousands of servers it will deploy are being custom-made based on Google's own eccentric designs.

To be closer to its users and speed response time, it is building a worldwide string of data centers, including a huge site in The Dalles, Ore., with technologies it designed to reduce its ravenous need for electricity. These computers in turn use software developed with advanced tools that Google also designed itself. There are signs that Google is even preparing to create its own custom microchips.

"Google is as much about infrastructure as it is about the search engine," said Martin Reynolds, an analyst with the Gartner Group. "They are building an enormous computing resource on a scale that is almost unimaginable." He said he believed that Google was the world's fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.

Google's biggest rivals, Microsoft and Yahoo, certainly write much of their own software, and they work to configure their computers and data centers to their own needs. But they largely buy machines from existing manufactures like Dell, Sun Microsystems and Rackable Systems.

"At some point you have to ask yourself what is your core business," said Kevin Timmons, Yahoo's vice president for operations. "Are you going to design your own router, or are you going to build the world's most popular Web site? It is very difficult to do both."

Google, in fact, has decided it will do both. In many ways, it still has the head of an graduate-school project grafted onto the body of an multinational corporation. The central tenet of its strategy is that its growing cadre of world-class computer scientists can design a network of machines that can store and process more information more efficiently than anyone else.

Mr. Reynolds estimated that Google's computing costs are half those of other large Internet companies and a tenth those of traditional corporate technology users.

Google will not comment on its costs, but it does claim an advantage. "We don't think our competitors can deploy systems cheaper, faster or at scale," Alan Eustace, Google's vice president for research and systems engineering, told analysts in March. "That will give us a two-, three-, five-year lead."

Despite those boasts, some argue that Google's home-brew approach is unnecessary and inefficient, a headstrong indulgence masked for now by the growth and profitability of its advertising business. And Google's rivals say their networks are plenty efficient and powerful.

"Google doesn't have anything magic here," Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, said in an interview. "We spend a little bit more per machine. But to do the same tasks, we have less machines."

Google is notoriously secretive about its technology. Yet it also has published papers on some of its developments and been granted patents on others. These, along with the public statements of Google executives and interviews with current and former employees, vendors and other technology executives, paint a picture of a company devoted to pushing the boundaries of modern computer science, and applying those concepts on a vast scale.

"Google took the best ideas from the supercomputer research community and wove them into a working system," said Stephen E. Arnold, a technology consultant to investors and the author of "The Google Legacy" (Infonortics, 2005), a book on Google's technology.

Some of its innovations are designed to wring pennies from its growing spending on technology. Last year, it was granted a patent (06906920) on a "drive-cooling baffle," meant to funnel air into a rack of computers held together with Velcro, a Google design signature.

But some innovations are bolder, like a series of software tools that simplify the way it can divide a problem to be handled by thousands of processors simultaneously, an approach called parallel processing.

One such program, called MapReduce, is based on ideas discussed in computer science literature for decades, according to Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president for operations. "What surprised us was how useful it turned out to be in our environment," he said.

MapReduce, he said, "allows Joe Schmo software engineer to process large amounts of data and take advantage of our infrastructure."

Mr. Arnold, the consultant, said these tools created a significant cost advantage. "If you talk to guys who work in massively parallel computing operations, as much as 30 percent of their coding time is spent trying to figure out how to get the thing to run," he said. Google "has figured out how they can reduce a lot of the hassle and work of creating parallel applications."

Mr. Gates acknowledged that MapReduce was a significant technology, but he asserted that Microsoft was building its own parallel processing software, opening another front in the technological war between the two companies.

"They did MapReduce; we have this thing called Driad that's better," Mr. Gates said. "But they'll do one that's better."

Moreover, Google's focus on building general purpose tools and systems is different from that of most companies, which develop systems tailored to specific applications. And it is building these systems rapidly, with the billions of dollars in cash it generates and the thousands of engineers it hires each year. It hopes that it can build a lead that will allow it to create products that do more, for less money, than its rivals.

"If they can get a 30 percent cost advantage, in operating a service on the Internet that is a huge difference," said John M. Lervik, the chief executive of Fast Search & Transfer, a Norwegian search company.

Google's academic approach can be traced not only to its founders' graduate work in computer science, but even to their early home life, Mr. Arnold said, noting that Mr. Page and Mr. Brin had come from families with expertise in computer science and mathematics.

"The stuff they did in 1996 to 1998 was not as immature as it should have been," he said of the Google founders. He said that told him the two men learned a lot "when their parents were talking at the kitchen table."

By the time Mr. Page and Mr. Brin were designing Google, parallel processing was more than an academic dream; it was enabled on a large scale by the low prices of processors, memory and disk drives used to make personal computers. These components were hardly of the highest quality and could be counted on to fail often.

Mr. Page designed the initial Google servers, with the assumption that parts would fail on a regular basis. At first he tried to simplify assembly — and reduce the presumed repair time — by not fastening components to the servers at all but simply laying them on a bed of cork. This proved to be unstable, and so parts were connected with Velcro.

"Nobody builds servers as unreliably as we do," Mr. Hölzle said in a speech last year at CERN, the Swiss particle physics institute. Google is reducing cost while maintaining performance by shifting the burden of reliability from hardware to software — individual hardware components can fail, but software automatically shifts the local task and the data to other machines.

For example, Google designed a software system it calls the Google File System that keeps copies of data in several places so Google does not have to worry when one of its cheap servers fails. This approach also means that it does not have to make regular backup copies of its data as other companies do.

Another system, called the Google Work Queue, allows a big pool of servers to be assigned to various tasks as needed and reassigned to other projects later. This concept, called "virtualization," has become a trend among large data center operators, which also want to reduce the expense of having separate servers dedicated to each system. But most companies buy commercial software to track which computers are doing what, a complex process.

While Google's servers are built on inexpensive parts, the designs it uses have been modified every year or so, to improve their efficiency and increasingly to customize them to Google's applications. The current generation uses the powerful Opteron chip from Advanced Micro Devices, which uses less power than the Intel chips Google had used.

Google is among Advanced Micro's five largest clients, and the largest that does not make computers to resell, according to a semiconductor industry executive with knowledge of Advanced Micro's business.

Google is increasingly doing business with Sun Microsystems as well. Sun, known for systems that are both reliable and expensive, would not seem a natural match for a company that emphasizes economy and self-sufficiency. But Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, is a former Sun executive, and Sun has developed a new microchip that is especially efficient in electricity use.

Moreover, Google increasingly needs systems that are less likely to fail than those it uses for its search engine in order to handle important information, like e-mail and payments in its new Google Checkout service.

Beyond servers, there are signs that Google is now designing its own microchips. The company has hired many of the engineers responsible for the Digital Equipment Corporation's well-regarded Alpha chip.

"Google's next step is to build high-performance silicon," said Mark Stahlman, an independent technology analyst.

Mr. Hölzle said Google had considered custom semiconductor design, but he declined to say if the company had built any. He said that, in general, Google did not want to build anything from scratch if it could buy something that was just as good.

But he added that Google continued to believe that its approach to designing its own cheap and fast computer networks gave it an edge.

"Having lots of relatively unreliable machines and turning them into a reliable service is a hard problem," Mr. Hölzle said. "That is what we have been doing for a while."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/03/te.../03google.html





Sales Falter at Advanced Micro
Bloomberg News

Advanced Micro Devices, the second-biggest maker of chips for personal computers, reported preliminary second-quarter sales yesterday that missed the company's forecast after its larger rival Intel cut prices.

Sales for the period that ended Sunday fell 9 percent from the first quarter, to $1.22 billion, Advanced Micro, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., said yesterday in a statement. The company had previously forecast sales to be flat to slightly down from $1.33 billion in the first quarter.

Advanced Micro, which cited lower sales of laptop and desktop chips, is suffering as its larger rival drops prices to try to win back market share, according to John Lau, an analyst at Jefferies & Company in New York.

Advanced Micro pushed Intel's market share in PC microprocessors under 80 percent last year for the first time in four years.

"The pricing war is escalating between Intel and A.M.D.," Mr. Lau said. "Both Intel and A.M.D. will be feeling the same impact."

Last month, executives at Micro-Star International and Gigabyte Technology, two of Taiwan's biggest makers of circuit boards for computers, said Intel officials told them that price cuts of up to 60 percent would start July 23.

Signaling price cuts in advance causes demand to stall, as computer makers put off orders to wait for cheaper components, Mr. Lau said.

Advanced Micro, which will make a full earnings report on July 20, did not give any details of its profit.

Analysts predicted earnings of 28 cents a share on sales of $1.31 billion, according to the average estimate in a Thomson Financial survey.

Share of Advanced Micro fell 7 cents, to $23.83.

Intel, which has scheduled an earnings announcement for July 19, is expected to report its largest decline in profit and sales since 2001.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/07/technology/07amd.html





Octoliber!
Jack

Bill Goldsmith, laid-back owner/announcer of the perennially cash-strapped Radio Paradise, has launched an experimental stream at the popular internet music station using Octoshape, a commercial P2P media distribution system. Although designed to reduce bandwidth costs and increase scalability, listeners say the digital broadcast "sounds better" too.





BPI Gets Go-Ahead To Sue MP3 Site
BBC

The British recording industry has been given permission to sue Russian music website allofmp3.com in the High Court.

Members of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) want to prove the site, which offers downloads for as little as five pence, is illegal.

They were given the go-ahead to sue the company last week, and say proceedings will be issued in Russia this week.

The operators of allofmp3.com deny the recording industry's claims that their site is not licensed to sell music.

"This is an important step forwards in our battle," said BPI general counsel Roz Groome.

"We have maintained all along that this site is illegal and that the operator of the site is breaking UK law by making sound recordings available to UK-based customers without the permission of copyright owners.

"Now we will have the opportunity to demonstrate in the UK courts the illegality of this site."

Popular

Allofmp3.com is the UK's second most popular download site, accounting for 14% of downloads, a survey has said.

The website says it is licensed by the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society (Roms) and the Rightholders Federation for Collective Copyright Management of Works Used Interactively (Fair).

But the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) says the Roms licence is not legitimate and it would not cover consumers in other countries even if it was.

The BPI revealed it intended to take the owners of allofmp3.com to court at a hearing of the Parliamentary Culture Media & Sport Select Committee last month. It is not planning to sue users of the site.

Copyright lawyers say that, even if the BPI obtains a verdict that the website is illegal, it might have "enormous practical difficulties" enforcing the ruling in Moscow.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/5140788.stm





SBC Sued Over Deleted Screenplay
Declan McCullagh

Police blotter is a weekly CNET News.com report on the intersection of technology and the law.

What: An aspiring writer sues SBC (now AT&T) after a technician installing a DSL link allegedly deleted three screenplays from his computer.

When: A California appeals court ruled on July 5.

Outcome: Screenwriter basically gets no money.

What happened, according to court documents:
When Nicholas Boyd asked SBC to install a digital subscriber line (DSL), he got more than he bargained for.

In December 2000, a technician named James Kassenborg showed up, allegedly said that certain icons and files were not needed--and deleted all of Boyd's scripts and related projects when installing the connection.

Boyd claims he subsequently tried to contact SBC on numerous occasions, but he was repeatedly put on hold, cut off and even laughed at. Eventually, SBC did pay to recover the data and fired Kassenborg, the technician.

The screenplays, by the way, are called "Color of Tulip," "Blood on Ice," and "Blood on Seven Hills," and are about topics including genocide and Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. While pitching studios, Boyd claimed that his screenplays would make "far better" movies than "Gladiator," "Schindler's List" and "Ben Hur."

Boyd has never made a cent from selling a screenplay. But he did get a nibble from a freelance producer for Berlin-based Aurora Media, which made "An American Werewolf in Paris" and who testified he talked about paying Boyd $2.7 million for the three scripts and related productions. That apparently relied on securing financing from German fund managers, though, and was anything but a done deal.

SBC agreed to pay for a computer consultancy called Burgess Forensics to examine Boyd's hard drive.

It was able to recover only part of one screenplay. Burgess Forensics said the reason was that 4,134 files were saved to the hard drive after the screenplays were deleted--overwriting the unused space that could have otherwise been recovered. (Additions included Napster and RealPlayer and their related media files.)

SBC's attorneys claimed that Boyd's troubles were caused in part by his own negligence. They noted, for instance, that he backed up "Color of Tulip" on a floppy disk but not the other draft screenplays, and continued to use the computer after files were deleted.

The jury apparently didn't believe the German witness' testimony that a $2.7 million deal was in the works. Jurors found that Boyd could recover out-of-pocket damages of only $60,000 and said that he was responsible for 55 percent of the fault resulting in the deletion of the screenplays. The jury awarded Boyd $27,000 in compensatory damages and $33,000 in punitive damages.

Both SBC and Boyd appealed. The California state appeals court (second district) eliminated the punitive damages, upheld the compensatory damages--but said Boyd must pay for SBC's legal fees for the appeal, which could easily be in the range of his $27,000 compensatory damages award.

The bottom line? Boyd failed to hit the jackpot, and probably lost quite a bit of money after having to pay his own lawyer fees.

Excerpt from the court's opinion:

Boyd moved for a new trial on the issue of damages and punitive damages or, in the alternative, for additur to the damages and punitive damages. He argued that the evidence was insufficient to justify such low compensatory and punitive damages awards, and that it was error for the trial court to deny the motion to reopen the case...

As to Boyd's motion, the trial court stated: "Although Boyd produced evidence of a contract in the millions-of-dollars range through the testimony of various witnesses, the jury was free to, and obviously did, find the evidence not credible. There was evidence presented by (SBC) from which the jury could have so concluded, apart from the demeanor evidence of Boyd's witnesses (and their equivocations regarding the details of the 'contract').

The jury was also convinced that Boyd himself was negligent in not backing up or otherwise protecting his screenplays, finding him 55 percent contributorily at fault for deletion of the screenplays. The compensatory damage award of $60,000 was fully supported by the evidence...

First, Boyd contends that we must accept all the evidence that Kassenborg was acting in the scope of his employment with (SBC) when the incident occurred, (SBC) was negligent, (SBC)'s negligence caused Boyd harm, Boyd sustained damages, and Boyd and a movie producer had an economic relationship that probably would have resulted in an economic benefit to Boyd.

Second, Boyd contends: There was undisputed evidence that he entered into the agreement for $2.7 million...Syd Field, Boyd's film industry expert, testified that the agreement was reasonable. The minimum range of compensation for a single project, at least according to Gale, (SBC)'s film industry expert, was $60,000. Based on these facts, a damage assessment of $60,000 is clearly not supported by the evidence...

Instead of providing a fair statement of the facts and a discussion of all the evidence, Boyd's appellate briefs focuses only on the evidence he deems favorable to his position. He omitted any reference in his briefs to the necessity of getting approvals from the fund managers and the completion bond company in order to secure funding, the January 2001 e-mail (the wording of which suggested that the parties had not agreed to a contract), and his equivocations on the stand about the meaning of the January 2001 e-mail. One-sided record citations are at cross-purposes with the appellate process, which has justice as its utmost aim and strives for fairness and efficiency...

The finding of $60,000 in damages fell within the reasonable range permitted by the evidence. It is inferable that the jury found that Boyd did not have a contract with Aurora Media, but decided that Boyd should be compensated for the money he spent researching and preparing his projects. In other words, the jury assessed damages for out of pocket losses (the first measure of damages in the jury instructions), but not lost profits (the second measure of damages in the jury instructions)...

The punitive damages are reversed. In all other respects, the judgment is affirmed. (SBC) shall recover its costs on appeal.
http://news.com.com/Police+blotter+S...3-6091457.html





Use Red Swoosh to Serve Files For Free
Michael Arrington

Silicon Valley based Red Swoosh is launching a free, ad supported version of its file serving technology today.

Prior to today Red Swoosh was available to paying customers only, who use their bittorent-like technology to quickly transfer files using peer to peer technology. The result is significantly faster file downloads for users, with near-zero bandwidth stress on the file distributor.

The new product makes Red Swoosh available for free. Every fifth download request is shown an interstitial advertisement before the download begins. Customers can bypass the ads to their users by paying for the service.

Using Red Swoosh is extremely simple. As a content provider, you do not need to sign up for an account. All you have to do is add “http://edn.redswoosh.net” to the front of any URL and place that link on your website. If you choose to create an account, Red Swoosh will provide reporting to you on download statistics, and in the future will share revenue from advertising. This last bit is important.

There are some limitations to Red Swoosh. Users must install a client to facilitate the download. This is only required once - subsequent downloads from any Red Swoosh customer will then work. There is no client available for the Mac platorm yet, though. Red Swoosh promises it later this year. Until then, Mac users can still download the file directly from a server without using the P2P technology.

Red Swoosh was founded in 2001 and went through some troubled years during the crash. They recapitalized the company last year and raised an additional $1.7 million from Mark Cuban. They are currently in the middle of raising another round, which CEO Travis Kalanick tells me will be in the $5-8 million range.

On a side note, Red Swoosh was in the process of changing offices earlier this year and took the opportunity to “offshore itself” temporarily - they moved the six person company to Krabi, Thailand for a month while they built the new product (kudos to Mark Cuban for green-lighting this). See Travis’ blog posts on the project here and here. From what Travis tells me, it was an awesome experience and the team was more productive than they were back here in Silicon Valley.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/05...iles-for-free/





Project Gutenberg’s 1/3 Million eBooks Free from July 4 Through August 4
Press Release

1/3 of a million books, or 10 times the number found in the average public library, will be available for free downloading via the Internet and World Wide Web beginning July 4, as Project Gutenberg and the World eBook Library act on their dreams of increased world literacy and education.

Such a collection, if printed out in standard format would be large enough to outweigh elephant herds and to cover the sidelines at all 40 Super Bowl games.

Each year for one month, The World eBook Library and Project Gutenberg will team up to be major sponsors, planning to make ONE MILLION eBooks available in the World eBook Fair of 2009.

"It has been our goal since the dawn of the Internet to break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy," says Michael Hart, who founded the Project Gutenberg effort by placing the first permanent text online on July 4, 1971, 35 years ago. "Our projects are based on the premise that everyone in the world could have access to a free worldwide public library," for John Guagliardo, founder of The World eBook Library, this event marks the fruition of years of hard labor.

Over 100 languages will be represented for worldwide readers and that total is expected to increase, even as the preparations are underway. The books are the permanent property of whomever downloads them, but a warning is including to check your local copyrights, as the books are provided under U.S. copyright laws, and other nations have different copyrights. eBooks still under U.S. copyright have been donated via the permission of the copyright holders.

Project Gutenberg, perhaps the oldest Internet site, and The World eBook Library, perhaps the largest one of the growing number of eBook libraries, joined for the purpose of "bringing the most eBooks to the most people in the world."

"This is the fulfillment of a lifetime of dreams," a sentiment shared by Greg Newby, as Project Gutenberg CEO, he hopes his Library & Information Science PhD. will become the last of the olde library worlde, and perhaps the first of a new world of library science.

"We can only hope that Google, Yahoo, and the others can also achieve their goals in the next few years-- as we hope they will each reach for a million eBooks before the decade ends. Our own goals, with them or without them, are to bring the world the 1/3 million eBooks this year, 1/2 million next year, 3/4 million in 2008, and to reach a grand total of a one million volume World eBook Fair on July 4, 2009."


***


Additional facts and figures:


Proposed World eBook Fair totals for upcoming years:

July 4, 2006, 1/3 Million
July 4, 2007, 1/2 Million
July 4, 2008, 3/4 Million
July 4, 2009, ONE Million

*

By 2009, the terabyte [one thousand gigabytes] boxes we have seen enter the consumer marketplace in 2006, now priced as low as $500, will be commonplace on an average computer on the shelf and will easily hold a million volumes of a million characters each for the price of just one semester's books at a university.
http://www.gutenberg.org/events/fair-pressmay4.txt

Thanks Albed!





Make Way For The Terabyte Laptop Drive
Chris Mellor

Seagate Technology Inc. plans to increase disk capacity by 10 times with new technology it has just patented, meaning a computer hard drive could soon be storing as much as a terabyte of data.

The Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology created by Seagate includes nanotube-based lubrication to allow the read/write head of a disk to get closer to the surface and store more information.

The smaller the data-recording areas on a disk surface, the more of them that can be packed together, and subsequently the greater the capacity of the disk, Seagate said. But reading and writing ever-smaller bits means that the read/write head has to come closer to the disk surface, requiring a tough lubricant layer on the surface.

Storing data properly in extremely small areas requires the magnetic material to be heated during the writing phase, but this causes the lubricant film deposited on top of the magnetized recording layer to evaporate.

Seagate's patent resolves this problem by having a reservoir inside the disk casing that contains nanotube-based lubricant. Some of this is periodically pumped out as a vapor and deposited on the surface of the disk, replenishing the evaporated lubricant. The vapor deposition process is similar to that used in the production of CDs and DVDs.

Seagate anticipates that the new technology could increase disk capacity by a factor of 10, making possible a 600GB 1.8-in. drive, a 1.46TB 2.5-in. drive, and 7.5TB Barracuda 3.5-in. drive. The lubricant reservoirs will be built to last the life of the disk.

Seagate has not given a date by which the technology will appear in products.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...e =rss_news50





Legal Victory For Google In Library Project
Richard Wray

Google has won a crucial victory in a German court as it tries to persuade publishers that its drive to digitise library books to get at the information inside is not an attempt to smash copyright laws.

Scientific publisher Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (WBG), backed by the German publishers association, had asked a Hamburg court for an injunction stopping the American web giant from scanning its books as part of its library project.

Google is working with six libraries five in the US and the Bodleian in Oxford to digitise library books and place their contents in its search engine. While books that are out of copyright are fully searchable, if a search request brings back information from a book under copyright, access is restricted.

Users in the US, which has a "fair use" approach to copyright meaning that bibliographic data plus a few short sentences or "snippets" can be viewed will be able to see more of a copyrighted book than European users, who usually get no more than the title of the book and its author.

But in order to compile the index it uses for its search engine, Google has to scan the entire book, which publishers claim infringes the book's copyright. As a result, several US publishers are challenging the legality of Google Book Search.

The status of copyrighted material is made more complex because Google maintains that the country in which it copies a book rather than the country of that book's publisher dictates the copyright laws under which it can deal with its subject matter.

As a result Google maintains that books it scans from US libraries on US soil are subject to US copyright even though the publisher may be based in another country. It has much stricter rules on what information can be seen from within copyrighted books digitised as part of its contract with the Bodleian.

Google argued before the Hamburg court that the display of short snippets from in-copyright books does not infringe German copyright law. The copyright chamber of the regional court of Hamburg indicated though it did not rule specifically that it agreed by telling WBG that its petition for an injunction was unlikely to succeed. The court rejected WBG's argument that the scanning of its books in the US infringes German copyright law.

Following the court ruling on Wednesday, Google said it recognised the importance of copyright law "because we believe that authors and publishers deserve to be rewarded for their creative endeavour".

The company is working with several thousand publishers on a separate part of Google Book Search. Google digitises parts of books for publishers, makes them searchable and ensures it is easy for Google users to buy them.
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1808770,00.html






The Internet Knows What You'll Do Next
David Leonhardt

A FEW years back, a technology writer named John Battelle began talking about how the Internet had made it possible to predict the future. When people went to the home page of Google or Yahoo and entered a few words into a search engine, what they were really doing, he realized, was announcing their intentions.

They typed in "Alaskan cruise" because they were thinking about taking one or "baby names" because they were planning on needing one. If somebody were to add up all this information, it would produce a pretty good notion of where the world was headed, of what was about to get hot and what was going out of style.

Mr. Battelle, a founder of Wired magazine and the Industry Standard, wasn't the first person to figure this out. But he did find a way to describe the digital crystal ball better than anyone else had. He called it "the database of intentions."

The collective history of Web searches, he wrote on his blog in late 2003, was "a place holder for the intentions of humankind — a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends."

"Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward," he wrote. It was a nice idea, but for most of us it was just an abstraction. The search companies did offer glimpses into the data with bare-bones (and sanitized) rankings of the most popular search terms, and Yahoo sold more detailed information to advertisers who wanted to do a better job of selling their products online. But there was no way for most people to dig into the data themselves.

A few weeks ago, Google took a big step toward changing this — toward making the database of intentions visible to the world — by creating a product called Google Trends. It allows you to check the relative popularity of any search term, to look at how it has changed over the last couple years and to see the cities where the term is most popular. And it's totally addictive.

YOU can see, for example, that the volume of Google searches would have done an excellent job predicting this year's "American Idol," with Taylor Hicks (the champion) being searched more often than Katharine McPhee (second place), who in turn was searched more often than Elliot Yamin (third place). Then you can compare Hillary Clinton and Al Gore and discover that she was more popular than he for almost all of the last two years, until he surged past her in April and stayed there.

Thanks to Google Trends, the mayor of Elmhurst, Ill., a Chicago suburb, has had to explain why his city devotes more of its Web searches to "sex" than any other in the United States (because it doesn't have strip clubs or pornography shops, he gamely told The Chicago Sun-Times). On Mr. Battelle's blog, somebody claiming to own an apparel store posted a message saying that it was stocking less Von Dutch clothing and more Ed Hardy because of recent search trends.(A disclosure: The New York Times Company owns a stake in Mr. Battelle's latest Internet company, Federated Media Publishing.)

It's the connection to marketing that turns the database of intentions from a curiosity into a real economic phenomenon. For now, Google Trends is still a blunt tool. It shows only graphs, not actual numbers, and its data is always about a month out of date. The company will never fully pull back the curtain, I'm sure, because the data is a valuable competitive tool that helps Google decide which online ads should appear at the top of your computer screen, among other things. .

But Google does plan to keep adding to Trends, and other companies will probably come up with their own versions as well. Already, more than a million analyses are being done some days on Google Trends, said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search at Google.

When these tools get good enough, you can see how the business of marketing may start to change. As soon as a company begins an advertising campaign, it will be able to get feedback from an enormous online focus group and then tweak its message accordingly.

I've found Pepsi's recent Super Bowl commercials — the ones centered around P. Diddy — to be nearly devoid of wit, but that just shows you how good my marketing instincts are. As it turns out, the only recent times that Pepsi has been a more popular search term in this country than Coke have been right after a Super Bowl. This year's well-reviewed Burger King paean to Busby Berkeley, on the other hand, barely moved the needle inside the database of intentions.

Hal R. Varian, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who advises Google, predicts that online metrics like this one have put Madison Avenue on the verge of a quantitative revolution, similar to the one Wall Street went through in the 1970's when it began parsing market data much more finely. "People have hunches, people have prejudices, people have ideas," said Mr. Varian, who also writes for this newspaper about once a month. "Once you have data, you can test them out and make informed decisions going forward."

There are certainly limitations to this kind of analysis. It's most telling for products that are bought, or at least researched, online, a category that does not include Coke, Pepsi or Whoppers. And even with clothing or cars, interest doesn't always translate into sales. But there is no such thing as a perfect yardstick in marketing, and the database of intentions clearly offers something new.

In the 19th century, a government engineer whose work became the seed of I.B.M. designed a punch-card machine that allowed for a mechanically run Census, which eventually told companies who their customers were. The 20th century brought public opinion polls that showed what those customers were thinking. This century's great technology can give companies, and anyone else, a window into what people are actually doing, in real time or even ahead of time.

You might find that a little creepy, but I bet that you'll also check it out sometime.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/bu...leonhardt.html





An Internet Lifeline for Troops in Iraq and Loved Ones at Home
Lizette Alvarez

With mortar shells exploding near him sometimes twice a day in Ramadi, Iraq, Sgt. Mark Grelak found a way to shut out the heat, the noise, and all the demands of his job — sweeping the local highway for bombs left by insurgents. In a tiny space in his barracks, he would flip open his laptop, adjust his Web camera and watch his daughter Katie take her first halting steps.

From 6,000 miles away, Sergeant Grelak, 35, drew flowers with Sara, Katie's older sister, and witnessed, almost in real time, her first day of preschool. The soldier and his wife, Jennifer, 26, even bought a house in Baltimore together, e-mailing pictures and appraisals back and forth. Through instant messaging, they discussed the new landscaping and camping equipment as if they were sitting just across the kitchen table from each other.

"Do you care if I take out the crape myrtle?" Ms. Grelak messaged him in March.

"Why not leave it for now," her husband suggested.

Later, she messaged, "If you have some time, take a look on eBay for a tent. I'd like to go camping this year."

Military deployments have a way of chewing up marriages, turning daily life upside down and making strangers out of husbands and wives. But for this generation of soldiers, the Internet, which is now widely available on bases, has softened the blow of long separations, helping loved ones stay in daily touch and keeping service members informed of family decisions — important and mundane.

Most soldiers deploy with a laptop in hand and a hookup to the Internet in their barracks. Others, particularly those with young children, pay for Web cameras, a trend that began in earnest two years ago.

Mental health experts and military commanders say that the tens of millions of dollars spent on technology in Iraq for Internet cafes, computers and Web cameras have helped ease the isolation of soldiers' lives, as well as the turbulence of coming home, an often-bumpy transition from combat to kiddie pool and from commanding to compromising.

"It's rejuvenating," said Sergeant Grelak, an Army National Guard soldier who was gone for 18 months and is now at Fort Benning, Ga., awaiting his release from active duty. "It keeps you from getting detached from the person you left behind. You go outside, and you run the risk of getting shot and blown up. That changes people. If I didn't have that connection, I would feel like a stranger."

Those who benefit most are often families with young children, said Jaine Darwin, a psychologist and the co-director of Strategic Outreach to Families of All Reservists, based in Cambridge, Mass., which counsels reservists and families. "They make families much more connected to the soldiers. A voice is not the same as seeing a person," Ms. Darwin said.

Military spouses were once left to make all child-rearing, household and work decisions by themselves for months at a time; telephone calls were simply too brief, unpredictable and expensive. Now the burden is a little less lopsided and an answer is only a few hours away.

The constant communication makes for fewer unpleasant surprises after couples reunite, though there can be a downside: It brings the anxieties of the living room into the war. "Who wants to hear that your daughter got a tattoo?" Ms. Darwin asked. "Any piece of news that makes you preoccupied is not good for you in a war zone."

Sergeant Grelak, for example, became alarmed when he learned that Katie had an ear infection. "I had to be a shoulder for Jennifer," he said, but, he added, "I was 110 percent concentrating."

Ms. Darwin pointed out that soldiers, for their part, can have too much Web access between missions "and it's quite disruptive to a family," she said. "It poses a hard conflict between the wish to get every moment they can with their soldier and the need for life to go on. Talking to your soldier can become a full-time job."

Internet cafes with computers began to spring up at military camps during the crisis in the Balkans in the 1990's, but mostly in fits and starts. Since then the military and private organizations like the Freedom Calls Foundation have spent millions of dollars to wire camps in Iraqi war zones. The Defense Department alone has spent more than $165 million in the past two years to set up cybercafes in Iraq. In 2004, they began with 36 cafes, and now there are more than 170. The use of satellites has made the job considerably easier. Freedom Calls, which raises private funds to build satellite links and provide communications hardware for soldiers in Iraq, has enabled 30,000 service members in four camps to reach relatives free in the past two years, setting up live teleconferencing to broadcast the births of babies, birthday parties, weddings and graduations. About 1,000 families in the United States have been equipped with screens in their homes.

"A person can now keep his commitment to his family and keep his commitment to his country," said John Harlow, the executive director of Freedom Calls.

Specialist Kevin Groll, of the Michigan National Guard, took a virtual seat at the Thanksgiving Day children's table last year, a Groll family tradition. The family Web camera was positioned right next to the children's table. "Boy, you did it again," Specialist Groll joked with his mother, Vicki Groll. "I'm not even near the kiddies, and I still had to sit at the table. The kids just loved it."

While the divorce rate for returning soldiers remains relatively high, a testament to the difficulties of war and the number of pre-deployment leaps to the altar, commanders agree that the Internet has helped morale considerably. Yet such easy access to families also poses problems in terms of controlling the release of classified information. Service members are not allowed to discuss where they are going, what they are carrying, how they will get there or how long they will stay, for example. All communications on a base are typically shut down after a casualty or injury is reported until family members can be contacted, which can take anywhere from a few hours to two days.

Web logs relating to official duties must be registered with a service member's chain of command, but personal Web pages set up by people back home can run into trouble.

One mother, Robin Vaughan, whose son was a military policeman in Iraq and who created a Web site for people who wanted support and information about the unit, said soldiers and their relatives were told not to view her site because it was not an official, registered site.

But monitoring all calls, e-mails and Internet traffic is impossible, so to a large degree, the military relies on self-censorship. "It's a big challenge," said Maj. Sean Wilson, a public affairs officer at Fort Drum, N.Y.

"Soldiers are naturally proud of what they do. They want to tell somebody about it."

Juggling home and battle can prove stressful. The immediacy of the Internet allows little time for reflection, and rather than let a bad mood pass, a spouse may rush to the computer and rant, which is not always wise, Ms. Darwin said.

Rumors, too, can run rampant, even those about infidelity, she added. And not hearing from someone can be painful and frightening, on both sides of the divide, particularly when daily e-mail contact has been the rule, the families said. Breakups via the Internet do occur, in a contemporary equivalent of the Dear John letter.

Sherri Cropper, 30, said she e-mailed her husband, Sgt. William Cropper, in Iraq every day. It was her way of making sure he was all right. But it also helped her to cope with the demands of what seems the equivalent of single motherhood, and to express how she was changing, becoming more independent. "It did ease the transition a lot," said Mrs. Cropper, who lives at Fort Drum. "It wasn't bam, in your face, there are a thousand things that went on and I will sit here in the next two days and talk you to death."

The happiness of a reunion tends to wear off quickly, she said. "Then, it's, 'O.K., you missed nine months of baby-sitting and I'm out of here,' " Mrs. Cropper added. "I think this gives the person who is deployed a good grasp or perspective on how it will be when you get back."

Dixie Clark of Harrisburg, Pa., said she was lucky to get a quick phone call once a month from her husband in the 1980's when he was a marine.

Recently she had three family members to fret over. Her two oldest sons and her husband, all Army National Guardsmen, were all deployed to Iraq at the same time, posted to the same base.

This time around, she routinely watched her "three guys" on a Web camera. Once when a mortar shell hit the camp, Mrs. Clark e-mailed one son and demanded that all three appear in front of the camera to assure her that they were fine.

"My son comes running into the barracks saying, 'Mom is on the Internet and she wants us to get up there; she has to see everybody,' " Sgt. First Class James Clark Sr. recalled. "I didn't even know he had a Webcam set up at that time. We all huddled up and said, 'Here we are.' "

Every day, Mrs. Clark and her husband sat down for a 90-minute round of instant messaging, which cost a pittance compared with telephone calls.

They planned the renewal of their wedding vows together online. He chose the menu — chicken, roast turkey and broccoli and cheese. And when things went wrong with the house, she knew that an answer was a few hours away. "Honey, where is the furnace?" she messaged him. "I ran out of oil."

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/08/us...rtner=homepage





Microsoft Is Looking for More Elbow Room
Kristina Shevory

In the midst of its biggest expansion in nearly a decade, the world's largest software company has suddenly found itself with a major setback: not enough room to grow.

Microsoft — in the midst of a bitter rivalry with Google and Yahoo — snapped into action this April, saying the company would spend about $2 billion on new technologies to reinvigorate itself. Then last month, Microsoft's chairman and co-founder, Bill Gates, announced that he would leave his day-to-day role at the company in two years.

Easier said than done, at least when you consider that the company, which houses more than 30,000 people on its sprawling campus in Redmond, Wash., suddenly will have to make room for up to 12,000 new bodies. It will spend $1 billion to expand that campus by more than a third, or 3.1 million square feet, over the next three years. That includes new leases and the purchase and construction of 14 buildings. For a modest-size real estate market like Seattle, those are staggering numbers.

"The Redmond you'll see even in a year will make your eyes pop," said Lou Gellos, a Microsoft spokesman. "It's going to be a very different campus."

Microsoft is expanding beyond the boundaries of its current site, adding two buildings in a downtown Redmond shopping mall for a total of three, and consolidating its North American sales headquarters staff in a new skyscraper under construction in nearby Bellevue, Wash. By next summer, Microsoft will take over 15 of the 28 floors, or 320,000 square feet, in the office tower.

"They're pretty much leasing up all the vacant office space in Redmond," said Rob Odle, director of planning and community development for the city of Redmond.

Microsoft had planned to add 2.1 million square feet over 15 to 20 years, but overcrowding at its headquarters and a heated battle with Google and Yahoo forced the company to step up the pace.

The move comes none too soon. The latest version of the Windows operating system, Vista, has been hit with delays and will not reach store shelves until January. The update of Office business software, which was to be released this year, will not be out until January. Google has started making inroads in office applications, one of Microsoft's core businesses, with its release of spreadsheet and word processing software. Google, the search giant, has also overtaken Microsoft in online searches and accounted for 49 percent of them in May, versus 10.6 percent for Microsoft, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a New York market research firm.

"They see themselves as somewhat beleaguered, and that's been their pattern since the beginning," said Rob Helm, director of research at Directions on Microsoft, a research firm in Kirkland, Wash., that tracks only Microsoft. "There's always been a bogeyman driving significant parts of their business strategy."

Microsoft's increased spending should be a boon for the Seattle area, where unemployment has stubbornly floated from 4 percent to 5 percent for well over a year. The company plans to hire 4,000 to 5,000 new employees this year, more than half of whom will be located in the United States. (Microsoft would not say how many people it expects to hire in Redmond.) For every new technology-related job, nearly four new jobs — mostly in the service sector — are created in Washington State, according to the Technology Alliance, a state trade group based in Seattle.

"The real reason you want these jobs is for the multiplier effect," said Bill McSherry, director of economic development at the Puget Sound Regional Council in Seattle.

But some local residents do not applaud Microsoft's expansion. For them, it means increased traffic, higher home prices and crowded parks. Roads are clogged and median housing prices on the Eastside, the area east of Lake Washington where Redmond is located, have soared 17 percent, to $484,500, in May from a year ago.

"There are two times a day when people come and go to Microsoft that traffic is so bad you have to stay home," said Jack Bittner, 59, a resident of the Grasslawn neighborhood, which is next to Microsoft. "It's almost gridlock now."

Mr. Bittner and his wife have even considered selling his house, which they bought for $86,000 in 1987, and moving to Bellingham, a city north of Seattle. He expects he could get around $600,000 for his four-bedroom ranch.

Transportation has become the largest issue for the growing region. And for its part, Microsoft has vowed to spend $35 million on transportation improvements in Redmond, including an overpass over Route 520 near its campus, sewer upgrades and turn lanes on nearby roads.

But even a sizable cash infusion would merely be a temporary solution to a problem that has been steadily worsening for years. The area's roads and bridges, some of which are earthquake hazards, already struggle to handle the company's 30,000 employees. The Route 520 bridge, which crosses Lake Washington and connects Seattle to Redmond, was built in 1963 to handle 15,000 vehicles a day. Now, 115,000 vehicles cross it daily. Increased traffic, windstorms, earthquakes and boating and traffic accidents have further shortened the bridge's life and required extensive repairs. State officials worry a strong windstorm or earthquake could damage the bridge beyond repair.

"The economic impacts would be catastrophic," said John Milton, SR-520 project director with Washington's state transportation department. "It's the feeder for two of the major employment centers in the area."

Privately, Microsoft officials bristle at the notion that the transportation burden is theirs. But Microsoft's size makes it a convenient target for complaint among Redmond residents.

"Almost immediately after Microsoft began expanding in the late 1990's, the traffic in our neighborhood just went nuts," Mr. Bittner said. "That makes me not too excited about this expansion."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/re...te/05sqft.html





Europe's Antitrust Regulators Vote To Fine Microsoft
Jeremy Reimer

Antitrust regulators from the European Union's 25 member nations have voted unanimously against Microsoft, finding the software giant guilty of non-compliance with the EU's 2004 ruling. The decision opens the door for the EU to levy daily fines of up to €2 million (US$2.5 million) on Microsoft. The exact amount of the fine will be decided at another meeting to be held next week.

The debate centers on the EU's interpretation of Microsoft's compliance with an earlier judgement handed down in 2004. In that hearing, Microsoft was charged with unfair bundling and anticompetitive behavior, and was told to do three things: pay a fine, release a version of Windows without Media Player bundled, and disclose information about their server products to enable competitors to more easily write software that can interact with them. Microsoft paid the fine, delivered Windows XP N—with the N apparently standing for the version of Windows Nobody wanted to buy—and delivered large stacks of technical documents covering Windows Server protocols.

It was this last deliverable that the EU had problems with. A monitoring trustee, British professor Neil Barrett, was appointed to judge the information released by Microsoft, and his initial response was that the documentation was inadequate. Microsoft replied by offering to license parts of the source code itself, but that effort was dismissed by the EU regulators.

For its part, Microsoft claims to be working hard to deliver the information the EU desires. "Microsoft is dedicating massive resources to meet the aggressive schedule and high-quality standards set by the trustee and the commission in this process," a Microsoft employee said in a statement. "Our engineers are working around the clock to meet the seventh and final delivery date for this project scheduled for July 18."

Clearly the prospect of more fines and continued antitrust action is a concern for Microsoft, as much for their public image as for their bank balance. Given this, one wonders what the exact reasons are for the EU's dissatisfaction with Microsoft's documentation. A cynical answer might be that the EU simply wants to keep the Microsoft money train flowing. Looking at things from a different angle, perhaps Microsoft wants to make sure that while it may become possible for third parties to build replacements for Microsoft's server software, the documentation should not make it easy. The issue is made more difficult by the EU's failure to make it clear exactly what type of information they are looking for.

The EU is not the only governing body to issue fines and judgements against Microsoft. South Korea fined the software giant US$35 million for similar antitrust issues, although without the request to provide additional documentation. Microsoft has agreed to pay this fine. Back in the US, Microsoft recently agreed to extend federal oversight over their 2002 antitrust ruling until at least 2009, and the company has decided to "rewrite significant portions of the documentation in an effort to substantially improve the overall quality of the documentation."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060704-7186.html





Authors Take a New Approach to Audio Books: Do It Yourself
Motoko Rich

When "Ballad of the Whiskey Robber," a madcap chronicle of a Hungarian hockey goalkeeper turned bank robber, was published two years ago, it was praised by numerous critics and became a finalist for an award given by the Mystery Writers Association of America. It attracted fans including the novelist Gary Shteyngart and the actor and artist Eric Bogosian.

But none of that seemed to matter when Julian Rubinstein, the book's author, approached his publisher, Little, Brown & Company, about doing an audio book. While growing in popularity, audio books remain resolutely mass-market-oriented, and Mr. Rubinstein's nonfiction book, which sold fewer than 15,000 hardcover copies, simply had not generated enough revenue to justify the costs of producing a recorded version.

For many authors that would have been that. Mr. Rubinstein, however, was unbowed. He enlisted the help of a friend and sound-studio operator, Joe Mendelson, and managed to recruit a cast of some of his well-known fans, including Messrs. Shteyngart and Bogosian, as well as the rocker Tommy Ramone and the comedian Demetri Martin, to perform as characters in the book. (MP3 clip.)

Everyone donated time, and Mr. Mendelson did all the editing free. So when Mr. Rubinstein went back to Hachette Audio, the division that produces audio books for Little, Brown, the company agreed to release a digital-download-only version — its first — of "Ballad." Late last month online retailers, including iTunes and Audible.com, began offering the 11½-hour download, along with a video clip of the real-life protagonist of the book, Attila Ambrus, reading an introduction from prison.

Mr. Rubinstein is one of a handful of authors taking a pro-active role in developing audio versions of their books. Thinking this medium could attract new readers, they are trying to create more than a straightforward spoken version of their work.

"I just think that this audio book is a lot more lively than most," said Mr. Rubinstein, who added that he has listened to only one or two books in this form. "If I knew of other audio books that were like this, I would be much more into it," he said.

The same impulse drove Greg Palast, an investigative journalist and author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and "Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left, and Other Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Class War" (E. P. Dutton), which in hardcover will be No. 11 on the New York Times nonfiction hardcover best-seller list on Sunday. For the audio version Mr. Palast has assembled a cast including the comedian and actress Janeane Garofalo, the television veteran Ed Asner and the punk rocker Jello Biafra, whose voices are heard in between Mr. Palast's narration.

Sarah Vowell, a contributing editor on public radio's "This American Life" program, recruited a group that included the novelist Stephen King, the actress Catherine Keener and the host of "The Daily Show", Jon Stewart, to read for the audio book of "Assassination Vacation," produced by Simon & Schuster Audio last year. (MP3 clip.)

"I wanted to think about making it a little more show biz," Ms. Vowell said. "I wouldn't necessarily use the word dulcet to describe my voice all the time, so I wanted other readers to break it up."

The vast majority of audio books — which themselves represent less than 10 percent of all books published — are read by single narrators, either the authors themselves or unknown performers recruited by the publisher. On occasion, celebrities read a book, but generally, said Chris Lynch, publisher of Simon & Schuster Audio, they are difficult to attract, given typical pay rates of $4,000 to $6,000 for a six-hour audio book.

Those authors with boldface connections can spice up the audio versions of their books. Adriana Trigiani, the author of popular novels about Italian-Americans, asked Mario Cantone, a comedian and regular on "Sex and the City," to read the audio version of "Rococo," produced by Random House Audio last year. Ms. Trigiani, who knew Mr. Cantone from their days on the comedy circuit together, said Mr. Cantone had partly inspired the lead character in "Rococo," a New Jersey interior designer named Bartolomeo di Crespi.

Mr. Cantone even joined Ms. Trigiani for a few readings on her book tour. But he said he would not want to record another audio book, unless it was the sequel to "Rococo." "It's a lot of work," he said, "for that kind of money."

Indeed, those celebrities who perform on audio books see it mainly as a way to express their support for a friend or favorite author. Jello Biafra, the former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, said he agreed to read the part of Osama bin Laden on Mr. Palast's "Armed Madhouse" because he wanted to help Mr. Palast get out his muckraking message about the Bush administration. (MP3 clip.)

Jello Biafra spent less than an hour in the studio. "I gave them different flavors of bin Laden," he said. "I cut the lines of a wicked cartoon villain, Snidely Whiplash-style, with a lot of ya ha ha ha has. Then I did it straight in my own voice, and then I did it in something akin to bin Laden's voice from what I've heard of his videos. I believe they chose the one closest to bin Laden's voice."

Mr. Shteyngart, author of "The Russian Debutante's Handbook" and "Absurdistan," had given Mr. Rubinstein a blurb for the hardcover edition of "Ballad of the Whiskey Robber," and so was game to play a few characters on the audio book. But Mr. Shtenygart said he had nothing to do with the forthcoming audio versions of his own novels. "I'm not really a big audio fan," he said. "My iPod has cobwebs on it."

Using multiple voices on an audio book can add extra costs to the typical $15,000 to $20,000 production price tag, given extra studio time and editing costs. Mr. Palast said he had actually paid about $2,000 of his own money to book studio time.

For audio book publishers accustomed to single voices, the addition of a large cast can be daunting. With his first audio book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," Mr. Palast said his producers at Penguin Audio resisted the idea of multiple readers.

"They were absolutely obstructive," Mr. Palast said. "Penguin just wanted me to read the whole book" by himself. Penguin representatives did not return calls seeking comment.

Audio books with large casts are likely to remain relatively rare. In most cases "we probably wouldn't do more than two readers, because of the cost," said Karen Cera, digital audio director of Hachette Audio. The company decided to do a digital-only version of "Ballad" because it could not justify the $3-apiece cost of producing CD's.

But with improvements in home recording tools, some more entrepreneurial authors may decide to record their own works. "The truth is, if you have a Mac at home and the software that comes with it, it doesn't cost much more for you to have a decent little recording set up," said Geoff Shandler, editor in chief of Little, Brown.

Whether celebrity readers actually drive sales is difficult to measure. Audio books tend to sell about 10 percent of what is sold in hardcover, publishers say.

Ms. Garofolo, who read the part of a Republican party spokeswoman on "Armed Madhouse," said she did it to support Mr. Palast's journalistic activism. But, she said, "I don't know that if I as a consumer would be motivated by who was reading the book."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/books/05audi.html





'Stone' Renders a Vermont City's Origins in Grit and Granite
Katie Zezima

The men and their families came to Vermont from Canada, Scotland, Italy, Spain and Ireland at the turn of the last century for one reason: to work in the granite quarries.

Some blasted out rock from beneath the Green Mountains, while others meticulously shaped the white slabs into works of art. They also transformed Barre, a once-sleepy central Vermont town, into a bustling, blue-collar melting pot where pride in the declining industry, and an ability to spot bad granite, still run deep.

Now the words of the men and women who were lured here by the promise of quarry work are heard again in "Stone," a docudrama written and directed by Kim Bent and performed by the Lost Nation Theater here, eight miles west of Barre.

"Stone" is based on the book "Men Against Granite," a compilation of interviews that Mari Tomasi and Roaldus Richmond did in the 1930's with granite workers and their families. The conversations, part of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers Project, sought to chronicle life across the country.

Mr. Bent had long wanted to do a production about the granite industry, to explore both its local roots and the connection he believed it had to theater.

"I was attracted to the idea of the relationship between the stone worker and his heart, and the fact that something was going on in there," Mr. Bent said. "Like theater, it is a collaborative art form. It takes so many people coming together to make it happen."

"Stone" first ran last summer, and was so successful that Mr. Bent brought it back. It runs through Sunday.

The characters are, for the most part, composites of the people who were interviewed rather than mirror images of them. Elia Corti, a granite worker who was shot during a political rally in 1903, is the narrator. Almost all of the dialogue is text from the interviews, which Mr. Bent copied and shaped into scenes and characters. The play also relies heavily on traditional Irish, Italian and French-Canadian music to serve as a bridge between characters.

This year Mr. Bent tweaked the show, choosing to explore further the tension that has seemed to have a grip on Barre since its name, according to the play, was chosen by the winner of a fistfight between a man from Barre, Mass., and a man from Holden, Mass., in 1793.

This strain comes through in the play in abundant drinking, ethnic jokes that are thrown around in bars and lead to altercations, and the cries of widows trying to support families. Mr. Bent chronicles it through generations, from the first immigrants who struggled with assimilation to their children and grandchildren, who grappled with working in such a dangerous environment.

"Stone" depicts an industry built on both pride and sorrow, work that allowed men to make their mark through stonecutting but in many cases ultimately killed them. One scene shows men boasting of their quality work and ability to do just about anything in a quarry. Afterward, a group of widows whose husbands have died of lung disease or in accidents appear onstage, speaking of their struggle to make ends meet by crocheting, cooking and selling bootleg liquor while rearing fatherless children.

"Many times I wished he used to keep painting rather than work in granite," one Spanish widow who sells crochet work says. "It is very lucky for me I learned how to do this work. How else would I support myself and my three children?"

Mr. Bent said his characters had simply come together from the interviews.

"The initial work was done so well in how it captured the voices of these people," he said.

He and cast members, who mostly hail from the area, said working on "Stone" had given them a different view of the granite industry, cemeteries and the notion of memorializing oneself.

"When I carve a name on a memorial, I make a memory of that life," one stonecutter says in the play.

Mr. Bent said: "It makes you realize that it is not necessarily a selfish thing to want to memorialize oneself. It gives people who do this work a chance to be remembered."

The show, the actors said, also reflects the chasm between Montpelier, the state capital, which is filled with coffeehouses and boutiques, and Barre, where pizza places and chain restaurants are the norm. Some are upset that the play is not being performed there.

But audiences are still coming, including a group of older people from Barre who had never been to Montpelier and the theater. Last week an elderly man who provided the model for a character played by Mark Roberts took his family. They stayed after, and said the story the character tells during the play is one he has been regaling his family with for years.

"They said it was wonderful," Mr. Roberts said. "But it does give you pause to think you might be portraying someone whose family is in the audience."

Other cast members said they had seen older women crying in their seats and men solemnly nodding their heads at depictions of the mine. People whose fathers died of lung disease or who are friends of people portrayed in the show have stopped to speak to cast members.

"There are nights when there is an older person in the audience who leans over and says, 'I remember that,' " said John D. Alexander, another actor in the production.

The show, the actors said, allows people to remember heady days in a city now beset by financial problems and an industry that is on the decline.

"It brings back memories people haven't felt in a long time," said Mary Wheeler, who lives in a Barre home with granite steps.

Carol Dawes, who plays a Syrian immigrant peddler in the play and sits on the Barre City Council, thinks the play is a lesson for her home.

"We can't pass a budget, and eight miles down the road, we're singing and dancing about Barre," she said. "It's all the things we seem to have lost touch with in Barre."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/theater/04ston.html





Gizmos

USB Conversion Adaptor From Scythe Corporation

The USB conversion adaptor Kama Connect from Scythe Corporation is great for transferring files between hard disk drives and a must for any computer store tech bench. The conversion adaptor enables you to connect to both IDE/ATA drives, SATA drives and optical drives. Power for IDE HDD is from the PC while for the SATA HDD you must use power from the supplied AC adapter. At a time it is possible to use both SATA and IDE simultaneously. The adaptor has power and access lamp indications also. The Kama Connect measures 72.5×56×14mm, AC adapter 115×57.5×32mm and will be available from mid July for approximately 2,980 Yen ($25).

USB Kama Connect is a must have device for you to easily transfer data between hard disk drives during PC migration/upgrading, and a must have gadget for any PC service technicians.
http://www.fareastgizmos.com/other_s...orporation.php





EarthLink Christens Its First Citywide Wi-Fi
Marguerite Reardon

As EarthLink launches its first citywide Wi-Fi network in Anaheim, Calif., this week, serious questions arise about whether the company's strategy to build municipal wireless networks across the country will really work.

Over the past year, EarthLink has won bids to blanket eight different cities with Wi-Fi, including high-profile projects in Philadelphia and San Francisco. But the 49-square-mile network in Anaheim, which goes live Thursday, is the company's first commercial launch of the technology, and the country's largest citywide deployment to date.

EarthLink, which has had to rely on cable and DSL (digital subscriber line) networks to deliver broadband service to consumers, is using Wi-Fi, an unlicensed radio frequency technology, as an affordable way to build its own broadband infrastructure.

But citywide Wi-Fi is a nascent market with only a handful of small city deployments as test cases. There are still a lot of issues that need to be worked out. And even getting approvals and building the networks could take years, as EarthLink and its partners navigate the slow process of negotiating city contracts. As a result, some analysts say EarthLink's Wi-Fi gamble will take a long time to pay off, if it's successful at all.

"Even if EarthLink is hugely successful with citywide Wi-Fi, we'll only start to see meaningful results in 2009," said Jim Friedland, a senior Internet equities analyst at Cowen and Co. "EarthLink is essentially running a start-up within a public company, and it's funding this new business with revenue from its traditional dial-up business, which is rapidly shrinking. It's risky."

EarthLink, founded in 1994 as a dial-up Internet service provider, still generates the bulk of its revenue from dial-up customers. But that business is slowly dying. EarthLink alone loses about 700,000 to 800,000 subscribers a year, Friedland said. The company also provides broadband Internet access, but it must sell its service using connections from phone companies or cable operators, which also sell broadband service to consumers.

And to make matters worse, the company was dealt a one-two punch last year when the U.S. Supreme Court and then the Federal Communications Commission essentially eliminated any federal protection to keep wholesale rates of cable and DSL networks in check. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court's ruling that cable providers do not have to share access to their networks. A month later, the FCC followed suit by changing the classification of DSL, which eliminated the requirement that phone companies offer discounted rates to ISPs such as EarthLink.

"EarthLink's dependence on other companies' networks has always been a problem for the company, and more so recently with the regulatory shift," Friedland said. "Telecommunications companies that own their own networks have a huge advantage over those that don't, and EarthLink knows this."

To save its business model and prepare the company for a future without dial-up, EarthLink turned its attention toward citywide Wi-Fi as its best hope for building and owning its own infrastructure.

At the same time that EarthLink was looking for an affordable way to build its own network, cities across the country that were fed up with high broadband prices or a lack of coverage were also considering building their own networks. Not surprisingly, their efforts drew attention from cable and phone companies that didn't like the idea of cities competing with them. As a result, cities looked for partners in the private sector that could build and operate more affordable networks for them.

Enter EarthLink
"We were forced to look at alternative pipes," said Jerry Grasso, director of communications for EarthLink. "And muni Wi-Fi was a fortuitous opportunity because a month or so after all these federal rulings came out, we were named as the finalist in Philadelphia, and then the floodgates opened."

For more than a year, EarthLink has been answering requests for proposals, meeting with city officials to win contracts, and attending city council and community board meetings across the country to build their networks. And so far, it has won bids in eight cities: Anaheim; Arlington, Va.; Long Beach, Calif.; Milpitas, Calif.; New Orleans; Pasadena, Calif.; Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Despite criticism, cities bet big on broadband.

The cost of building Wi-Fi networks pales in comparison to what other telecommunications companies are spending to build infrastructure. EarthLink has estimated it will spend between $5.5 million, for cities such as Anaheim, to as much as $10 million for a city the size of Philadelphia, which is 135 square miles.

By contrast, Verizon is supposedly spending $20 billion to build its Fios fiber-to-the-home network, according to several analysts. And AT&T is spending $4 billion to upgrade its network. Despite its relative low cost, the EarthLink plan is still risky, some analysts say.

"There is no question EarthLink will lose money initially to build and operate these networks," Friedland said. "And it's really questionable whether they will get the subscriber penetration they need going forward to make this a profitable substitute service to cable or DSL."

Cable operators and phone companies are already in the broadband market with a large customer base. And DSL providers are beating EarthLink on price. EarthLink's Wi-Fi broadband service offers 1Mbps (megabit per second) downloads and 1Mbps uploads for $21.95 per month. A one-year promotional service offered from AT&T, which provides 1.5Mbps of service, costs only $12.99 per month. Verizon also offers a cheap 768Kbps (kilobits per second) service for $14.95 per month.

Citywide Wi-Fi service also isn't as stable as DSL or cable service and will never be able to offer the same high speeds that those two technologies will offer. Several smaller cities that have already deployed Wi-Fi, such as St. Cloud, Fla.; Tempe, Ariz.; and Chaska, Minn., have experienced coverage issues. And users have complained about not getting access inside their homes.

But EarthLink's Grasso said that all new technologies have their issues and that eventually early Wi-Fi problems will be worked out.

To solve the in-home problem, customers who have trouble getting a signal may have to add a box to their home to boost the signal indoors, he said. EarthLink is offering the wireless signal booster free of charge to existing EarthLink customers who sign up for the Wi-Fi service or to new customers committing to a year of the service.

Grasso also said EarthLink sales representatives will consult with customers before they buy the service to ensure they have appropriate Wi-Fi client hardware and software running on their PCs and laptops and to determine if a signal booster is needed.

While the EarthLink Wi-Fi service may not sell well as a broadband replacement service, it could do well among business travelers once EarthLink has networks up and running in more cities.

According to Jupiter Research, about 20 percent of Internet users said they had accessed either a free or paid public Wi-Fi hot spot in 2005. That figure is up from only 14 percent in 2004. Analysts expect an even greater increase for 2006.

EarthLink already recognizes the potential for the mobile market. And the company has anticipated adding easier access and more mobility features for business travelers. It also sees potential to work with cable operators that may want to use the EarthLink Wi-Fi network to offer mobile services for cable modem customers.

"This is our network, and once we get a larger footprint it will give us a lot more options," Grasso said. "Eventually, we have to get to a point where roaming is a part of the service. The folks in Anaheim should be able to log on and use their service in Philadelphia or San Francisco."
http://news.com.com/EarthLink+christ...3-6089302.html





Mass. Holding Tight to OpenDocument
Martin LaMonica

Massachusetts is sticking to its plan to adopt OpenDocument, despite a critical report calling for a delay to the high-profile move.

Louis Gutierrez, Massachusetts' chief information officer, said in an interview with CNET News.com that the Information Technology Division (ITD) is forging ahead with its project to make OpenDocument the default document format for executive branch agencies by January next year.

"Our next action is to do what we are doing right now, which is working toward the goal. We believe in the utility of open standards," Gutierrez said Friday.

On Thursday, state Sen. Marc Pacheco, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight, released a report that blasted the process behind the choice of OpenDocument, calling it "closed" and controlled by a few individuals.

Gutierrez said he disagreed with the report's characterization of the process that led up to the state's decision to standardize on OpenDocument, or ODF. But he noted that the oversight committee was not opposed to the state's movement to open standards.
"There is substantial concurrence on going forward in the right way," Gutierrez.

The report's release and the ITD's response to it are the latest twists in a months-long saga in Massachusetts that has attracted worldwide attention.

Supporters of the state's plan to go with OpenDocument, rather than a Microsoft format, have hailed it as a landmark move that will tilt the balance of power to customers and away from vendors. Critics, meanwhile, have called it a biased decision, unfairly favoring open-source products to the exclusion of Microsoft.

The state's efforts to wrest control of its data from proprietary formats appears to have struck a chord with a number of government agencies, companies and even individuals seeking to avoid "vendor lock-in."
Listen up

OpenDocument: CNET News.com reporter Martin LaMonica finds out from Louis Gutierrez, CIO of Massachusetts' IT division, why he's pressing ahead with OpenDocument. Download MP3 (3.25MB)

Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at RedMonk, said that Massachusetts has validated the idea of standardizing on a non-Microsoft format, giving its effort a symbolic significance for others.

"Many enterprises are not thrilled about paying Microsoft what they do for Office, but feel like they have to. ODF by itself does not remove those concerns, but it does begin to open doors that were not there previously, if only from a negotiating standpoint," O'Grady said.

Although Gutierrez was not involved in the original decision to choose OpenDocument, he lauded the decision as the right thing to do.

"That move has helped move the dial for everyone," he said, noting Microsoft has submitted its own document formats to standards bodies and that it has made changes to its licensing terms.

"I think it was surely controversial and it did, in fact, have certain defects the process...But it was the right thing. It's something that will be recognized as having been an important step in a really valid direction," he said.

The promise of plug-ins
Since taking over the reins as CIO earlier in January this year, Gutierrez has led a few pilot projects of OpenDocument-compliant products from Sun Microsystems, IBM and the open-source OpenOffice suite.

The state has also engaged IT services company EDS to do a full-scale, five-year cost analysis of moving to OpenDocument, which Gutierrez said the state was nearly done with.

In addition, the state has hired an expert and created a lab to address the needs of people with disabilities--an area where Pacheco and some disabilities advocates have been critical of the planned OpenDocument move.

Although observers initially thought the state's decision to use OpenDocument would lead to the removal of Microsoft Office from 50,000 desktops in Massachusetts, Gutierrez said that Office may stay around.

He said the state's IT department is investigating a plug-in that would allow people using Office to save and share documents in the OpenDocument format. Microsoft has said it will not build support for OpenDocument into Office 2007, citing lack of demand.

So far, that plug-in approach shows "enormous promise" because it could meet accessibility requirements and potentially cost less than a large-scale migration, Gutierrez said.

He added that he is prepared to evaluate Microsoft's Open Office XML formats, which are expected to become standardized next year.

But what's essential is a transition to XML-based document formats like OpenDocument, Gutierrez said.

"Our whole mindset is around writing memos and saving them to disk, but that is not the future of this. The future is about document workflow, and document workflow is greatly enhanced with XML-based documents," he said. "And it's hard to work with XML-based documents unless you have the standard form."

Gutierrez added that the Massachusetts IT Division, in conjunction with the Secretary of Administration and Finance, intends to give a formal update on the project in late July or early August.

Pacheco, who presented the oversight committee's report on Thursday, agreed in principle with the benefits of standards, but he was sharply critical of the process leading to the OpenDocument policy.

Pacheco's report contended that the state's IT division set the policy without having the legal authority and without sufficient input from people with disabilities. In addition, he said that ITD officials did not perform a proper cost/benefit analysis before finalizing the plan.

"The principles of open standards may offer the benefits of decreased costs and interoperability of documents, but the ITD did not pursue the policy in an open, collaborative or lawful manner," Pacheco said at a press conference at the Massachusetts State House in Boston.

He said that former Secretary of Finance and Administration Eric Kriss and former CIO Peter Quinn had decided on OpenDocument and deliberately disregarded the typically open process of choosing standards and technologies.

Quinn stepped down as CIO last December after facing political pressure, saying his presence has become a distraction to the implementation of the OpenDocument plan.

Gutierrez, who was hired to complete the implementation plan, said that the hoopla around the OpenDocument decision has had a "chilling effect" on other state CIOs. States have expressed interested in OpenDocument but are "waiting and watching" what happens in Massachusetts, he said.

"It's a mark of our times that technology decisions have become as important and interesting to the public discourse," Gutierrez said. "My own hope is that we move away from the theatre of conflict."

Gutierrez was named by current Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who will finish his term at the end of this year. Gutierrez said that it's possible the arrival of new governor could set the ongoing OpenDocument implementation off track, but it would only be a temporary delay.

"Massachusetts' stepping out on this in a technical reference model, saying this is where we're heading...triggered this firestorm we're all walking through," he said. "I really do believe this is an almost inevitable direction, and it's a question of when, not if. Even if there are a couple of spasms in the history, it's going there."
http://news.com.com/Mass.+holding+ti...3-6090196.html





Crazy Ivan
Jack

The movie was in Russian. It even said so – sort of (rus) - yet still I downloaded it and I don’t speak the language. D'oh! King Kong, the seventies version with Jeff Bridges and the leggy Jessica Lange should have been perfect for the Fourth. Fine rip too. But there was this little thing…The overdub. What’s that you say, never heard of an overdub? Me neither. I just made it up. Here’s why: they took this flick with an American soundtrack and simply TALKED OVER it in Russian! It’s like an audio subtitle where you still hear the original dialog. It’s like a friggin UN meeting now except fun because there’s a giant ape and dinosaurs. I deleted the damn thing then reconsidered and put it in my permanent collection, just for the weirdness factor. Should go great with vodka.





Preventing Movie Piracy

Researchers are developing tools to thwart the copying of films in theaters.
Kate Greene

Thomson’s prototype anti-piracy system inserts extra frames into a movie that contain text or obscure the scene. The frames flicker at a frequency imperceptible to the human eye, but picked up by camcorders, thereby ruining a bootlegged movie. (Credit: Thomson.)

Last month, we ran a story about an experimental device for locating and blocking cameras ("Lights, Camera -- Jamming"). Here we look at another set of technologies aimed at dissuading would-be bootleggers.

The movie industry has a problem. According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Hollywood loses billions of dollars a year on illegally sold copies of movies. The losses are impossible to calculate accurately, of course, since it's unclear how many of the people who download copies over the Internet or pay a few dollars for a pirated DVD would have paid $9 to $20 for a theatre ticket or legal DVD. Nonetheless, studios and theatre owners are eager to find ways of safeguarding their intellectual property.

Paris-based Thomson, which provides technology to the entertainment and media industry, is exploring methods for thwarting at least one type of bootlegger: the covert camcorder user. The company's technique involves inserting "artifacts" -- extra frames, flashes of light, or pixelated grid patterns -- into a movie during its digital-processing phase, before it's shipped to theatres. The goal is to mar a camcorder recording without degrading the images moviegoers see, says Jian Zhao, chief technology officer of subsidiary Thomson Content Security in Burbank, CA.

The artifacts exploit the differences in the way a human brain and a camcorder receive images. In the technique that's furthest along, extra frames -- with the words "illegal copy," for instance -- are inserted into the film. These warning words flicker by at a frequency too fast for the human brain to process -- yet they appear in a camcorder recording.

This difference is possible because movies are projected as a series of still shots. Film projectors flash 48 images per second (24 frames are collected each second, but each frame is flashed twice) and high-end digital projectors can flash even more, according to Thomson researchers. The limit for human visual processing is around 45 flashes per second; above that, a flickering image appears continuous. Furthermore, camcorders do not average frames, as eyes and brains do. Instead, they're sampling devices that take a series of snapshots -- collecting many more frames per second than our visual systems. Hence, frames that eyes would miss show up in a camcorder recording -- and are reproduced on a video screen when the recording is played.

Using extra frames to obscure a recording isn't as straightforward as it seems, however, since camcorders could theoretically be set to a sampling frequency low enough that they'd miss the hidden message, says Zhao. That possibility requires counter-countermeasures, such as randomly adjusting the frequency at which the extra frames appear. Camcorders can't yet adjust their sampling frequencies quickly enough to keep up and produce a quality recording. But camcorder technology will continue to evolve, says Zhao, "and thus, we've got to evolve."

In addition to the frame-insertion technique, Thomson is working on incorporating additional sabotaging mechanisms into its system, such as projecting ultraviolet or infrared light onto the screen and washing out camcorder pictures. Aware that the easy counter-measure to this is simply to place a filter over a camcorder's lens, Zhao says their system is being designed to combine many different wavelengths, so that finding the perfect filter would be difficult.
http://www.technologyreview.com/read...105&ch=biztech





VA Laptop Sold From Back Of A Truck
Bob Sullivan

We have a few more details on what happened to the nation’s most famous runaway laptop computer during those mysterious two months it was missing, courtesy of NBC’s Pete Williams. We’re talking about the computer and hard drive that were stolen from a Department of Veterans Affairs employee in May, an incident that made headlines because the hardware contained private information on 26.5 million veterans and current GIs. Last week, VA chief Jim Nicholson announced in dramatic fashion that the prodigal computer had been found, but details about the return were sparse.

NBC’s Williams has been able to fill in some of the blanks after talking to law enforcement officials investigating the incident.

Both the laptop and hard drive ended up for sale at a black market just north of Washington D.C., near a subway station outside the Beltway near Wheaton. We’re talking about the kind of market that is literally run out of the back of a truck, one official said. Fortunately, a buyer purchased both components at this black market, keeping the missing hardware together.

The male buyer, who has not been publicly identified, later spotted fliers posted at a nearby supermarket seeking the return of the equipment. After matching the serial numbers on the flier with those on the equipment, the buyer decided to turn in the equipment. No doubt, a posted $50,000 reward helped encourage that decision.

He had a friend in the U.S. Park Police who brokered the exchange with the FBI, Williams was told.

At that point, the FBI ran forensics tests on the equipment and concluded the sensitive data – such as veterans’ Social Security numbers -- had not been accessed. Knowing more about the secret life of the disappearing hardware should make veterans a little more comfortable that their personal information was not compromised during the incident.

But not all questions have been answered yet. The obvious missing puzzle piece is this: How did the hardware get from the VA employee’s home in Aspen Hill, Md., to the back of a truck in Wheaton, about 4 miles away? And what happened during the trip?
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/07/what_happened_t.html





'Leopard' puts its prey on the spot

Apple Taunts Microsoft With Faster OS Launches
John Boudreau

In 2004, when Apple Computer showed off its latest ``cat,'' Tiger, it couldn't help but taunt Microsoft.

The Redmond, Wash., software giant was working on its long-awaited next-generation Windows operating system, Vista, known then as ``Longhorn.'' During Apple's annual developer's conference in San Francisco, when its Tiger operating system was unveiled, the company jabbed at its mighty competitor with posters that read: ``Redmond, start your photocopiers,'' ``Introducing Longhorn'' and ``Redmond, we have a problem.''

In roughly the same time frame that Microsoft has labored over Vista -- its predecessor, Windows XP, was launched in 2001 -- Apple is on the verge of rolling out its fourth Macintosh operating system.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has delayed the release of Vista until early next year.

While it's easy to rib Microsoft and its inability to get Vista out to people sooner, the new operating system must be compatible with the vast majority of computers on the planet -- and just about every device software known to humanity. Still, that's not likely to prevent Apple from giving Microsoft a hard time when it unveils its newest operating system, Leopard, expected at August's World Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

``There will be another round of, `Why can't Microsoft get Vista out?' which Microsoft would just assume not happen,'' said Greg DeMichillie, senior analyst with Directions on Microsoft, an independent research organization. ``It's a bit of an embarrassment for the company.''

It's also easier for small-market-share Apple to poke fun at the world's largest software maker.

``The fun part of having 3, 4 percent market share is that you get to tweak the other guy's nose. You are not perceived as being a bully or mean,'' he said. ``If Microsoft were to make a press release tweaking some feature Apple doesn't have, it would be perceived as bad form.''

Critics and analysts credit Apple for its ability to continually innovate ahead of its much bigger rival. But unlike Microsoft, Apple has the advantage of controlling every level of the computing experience by making the hardware, as well. Apple can also keep the competition guessing until the last minute because, as a consumer-focused company, it does not have to show its hand until it wants to.

Microsoft, whose Windows XP runs on hundreds of millions of PCs, has a complex web of relationships it must work with. It has to broadcast its intentions to the world, or risk angering business clients and partners.

Apple has created its own ecosystem. And its ability to continually create elegant products gives it an influence that far exceeds its relatively small size in the computing world. That's why a new Mac operating system stirs up a buzz, from the blogosphere to Redmond.

``It's going to be really exciting,'' Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg said. ``This is going to be Leopard's coming out party.''

Apple's well-honed marketing strategy is the tech version of a slow striptease.

``When it comes to Apple, trying to predict what it might do in a short period is a bit of a fool's errand,'' Gartenberg admitted.

Nonetheless, plenty of bloggers and analysts feel confident Jobs will announce that his next operating system will have a significant upgrade to Boot Camp, Apple's free beta software that allows Mac users to run Windows on the newest Intel-based machines. The new Boot Camp could provide a much more seamless process that does not require people to reboot their computer to switch between Mac and Windows operating systems, as they do now with the Apple software. (A third-party software, Parallels Desktop for Mac, now allows people to run Windows on Intel-based Macintosh computers without clicking the restart button.)

There are expectations that the popular Mac iLife, an application that helps people manage and play with digital goodies like photos and video, could get spiffed up even more. There could also be better search technology, for Web-based and desktop information.

Envisioneering Group analyst Richard Doherty believes Apple's new operating system will put pressure on Microsoft.

``Apple has been delivering compelling upgrades every 12 to 18 months since 2001,'' he said. ``During that time, Windows XP has had a Service Pack, and that Service Pack has been more about fixing problems.''

Still, it remains to be seen if Apple can persuade a significant amount of people to switch from PCs to Macs that can run Windows.

Microsoft, on the other hand, actually has something to gain from a successful launch of Leopard, said Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who predicts Apple will ship the new operating system as early as December.

``I talked with a Microsoft employee after Boot Camp came out,'' he said. ``They think it's great. It means there are more computers they can sell Windows on.''
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...s marketwatch





The long and short of it

A Not-So-Small Small Screen
Damon Darlin

Samsung Electronics thought it won the bragging rights this year as maker of the world's biggest TV, with a 102-inch plasma screen, but Panasonic beat it by one inch. Samsung does have the largest plasma screen in stores, a 63-inch screen.

As it stands now, Sharp Electronics boasts of making the biggest liquid-crystal-display TV for sale, a 65-inch Aquos. It would be the biggest TV on the market if not for Samsung's 72-inch rear-projection TV. "We have the capability to build L.C.D. TV's much larger," said Bob Scaglione, senior vice president for marketing in Sharp's consumer electronics marketing group.

The title of maker of the biggest screen will constantly change hands, but one thing is certain: TV's will keep getting larger. Market analysts at Quixel Research of Portland, Ore., say many consumers now want a screen 50 to 55 inches. It projects that by 2009 the sweet spot will have shifted to a 60-inch screen. "That suggests the consumer doesn't have a maximum size," Mr. Scaglione said. "Maybe it will happen for an 80- or 90-inch screen."

Just how big is too big for a TV screen? Such an idea is anathema among TV executives.

"Can it be too large?" asked Phil Abram, Sony's vice president for television marketing. "Only in the sense that it overwhelms the room you are in. As a TV guy, I have trouble in my heart believing that a TV can overpower a room."

You wouldn't think that size matters, especially with new homes built ever bigger. The average new home is 2,434 square feet, 62 percent larger than a home built in 1970, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

But within the walls of the big new homes, changes are occurring that affect how people will watch TV. Some trends will make it easier to fit in a screen as big as 103 inches. Others will make it trickier to find the right spot for even the sought-after 50-inch screen.

A consumer might easily have space for a big screen in a home theater or media room. About 10 percent of homes are being built with a media room, the home builders' association said — although in many cases, it is just another name for the basement, or what builders in a previous era called the rumpus room or the rec room.

Another room that is increasingly conducive for big-screen TV's is the sprawling master bedroom. The dimensions of that room in the average new home is 15 by 20 feet, said Gopal Ahluwalia, staff vice president for research for the home builders' group.

All that bodes well for big TV's. But at the same time, the kitchen has opened up into the family room. Whole rooms are disappearing. "We think that in 10 years there will be no more living room," Mr. Ahluwalia said. Interior walls where a TV might be hung are gone. So now, where does the TV go?

This problem becomes clearer when you look at the mathematics of screen size. TV manufacturers measure sets on the diagonal of the screen. A 60-inch diagonal screen is about 52 inches wide and 29 inches high. That means a room needs to have an expanse of blank wall that is almost four and a half feet wide, or wider if the TV has speakers along the side of the screen or a wide-screen format.

A second consideration is viewing distance. A viewer should sit no closer than one and a half times the diagonal of a 1080p high-definition TV, the highest resolution TV available, according to the makers of high-definition sets. (The rule of thumb is two and a half times for TV's with lower resolution.) In the case of a 60-inch TV, that is about eight feet from the screen; otherwise you will start seeing the pixels in the picture.

Almost all new homes and most older homes have 12 feet of viewing distance for such a TV in a master bedroom or a family room. It starts getting difficult to find that room in many apartments.

Move up to a 103-incher and look what happens. You need a wall at least 90 inches wide — seven and a half feet. The TV has to be at least 13 feet away from the viewers. Some experts claim that the optimum viewing distance is about twice that. Now where does it go?

George McKechnie of Axiom, a high-end home theater installer in Monterey, Calif., put in a $24,000 Runco 3-chip DLP front projector for one customer that splashes a 100-inch or larger image on a movie screen in the room. "It's marvelous if you are sitting 16 feet away," said Mr. McKechnie, who founded the business with his son, Loren. "At 12 feet, you can see the pixels." In short, "you need a pretty big room." About 80 percent of his business is installing 50-inch TV's, and about 5 percent is for 61-inchers, he said.

John Revie, vice president for sales and marketing for visual displays at Samsung Electronics, is not worried that size will ever matter. "There is no reason why it can't get any bigger," Mr. Revie said. "It comes down to what the consumer wants and what they are willing to pay. As long as it is in reach financially, they will get the largest set possible."

Mr. McKechnie, a former clinical psychologist, is not so sure. "It's not driven by the consumer," he said. "The technology is so complex that is it driven by the perception of what the consumer wants."

Mr. Abram of Sony said the company's designers were starting to take note of size. For instance, the company's new 46-inch-diagonal rear-projection TV is only an inch wider than its 42-inch-diagonal plasma TV because the speakers are moved from the side to below the screen.

On some of its Bravia models, Sony gives owners the option of swapping the silver bezel around the screen for one that is red, white, blue, black or brown to help minimize the appearance of the TV in the room.

For rooms with controlled lighting, the front projectors may end up being the answer for many people. Front-projection TV's were the fastest-growing category last year, with a 55 percent increase in sales, according to Quixel. The units are portable — some are the size of a thick paperback book — and a screen could be pulled down from the ceiling when needed.

Robert Stephens, head of Best Buy's Geek Squad, said he had seen the future in college dormitories and fraternities. Students project movies and video games onto a large wall with special reflective paint. "If you want to see what's going to happen, watch the kids in college," Mr. Stephens said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/te.../06screen.html





A Movie Machine You Can Grab and Go



J. D. Biersdorfer

Portable video players have made it easy to kill your commute time with a few downloaded movies or TV shows. But if you want to watch a full-length movie on DVD and don't want to wrestle the video off the disc and onto a mobile device, the Philips PET320 portable DVD player could come in handy.

The PET320, which is roughly the size of a portable CD player, has a 3.5-inch color screen on the front and built-in stereo speakers for sound. The unit can play DVD films, home movies on recordable DVD formats, picture discs full of JPEG images and CD's full of MP3 files. The player uses a rechargeable battery that gets roughly two and a half hours of playback time, and it comes with an adapter for recharging with a dashboard power outlet.

More details on the player can be found at www.consumer.philips.com. It is just starting to arrive in stores and is available for preordering on Amazon.com. At $130, its price is well below that of most of the automobile DVD systems that are used to hypnotize fidgety passengers on long drives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/29/technology/29dvd.html
















Until next week,

- js.


















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