A Challenge for Miss America in Reality TV Era
Iver Peterson
Miss America has lost her TV show, and now has to decide how much of her famous modesty she's willing to shed to get it back on the air.
Organizers of the pageant are considering a number of plans to resuscitate the 85-year-old contest and bring it back to television this September. The mildest plans include tweaking the broadcast program slightly by eliminating the talent portion, which the ABC network had complained about before dropping the show in the aftermath of last year's disappointing ratings.
A bolder plan is being shopped by national pageant officials among network executives: turning the event into a multinight elimination, complete with appeals for audience sympathy and votes, something like "American Idol" on Fox. It would include behind-the-scenes segments and, perhaps, some of the plotting that has made shows like "The Apprentice" on NBC so popular.
Even the pageant's executives say that Miss America has to face the realities of reality television, although state and local organizers say they would rather see their program stay off the air than have contestants get down in the mud and the bugs like the competitors on "Fear Factor."
"I'll tell you one thing, I am not going to have my contestants eating bugs," said Joe P. Sanders 3rd, president of the Miss South Carolina Organization. "That's just not something that's going to happen in this state."
Short of that, though, organizers say that something needs to change to catch up with an audience whose tastes have wandered far beyond the Miss America pageant's mild tone.
"The television audience today has a coliseum mentality, and they are not cheering for the gladiator, they're cheering for the lion," said Robert W. Arnhym, director of California Miss America, the group that runs the state-level pageant. "I'll tell you this: We're going to have to cross the line somewhere or we're not going to appeal to those folks."
Other state and national officials agree that the pageant has to do more to grab the public's attention.
"Television is a very competitive game, we all get that," said Kevin McAleese, executive director of the Miss Philadelphia Scholarship Pageant. "The question is, how do we adapt to that and bend the rules a little, but not give up all the values that we've stood for 85 years? We've got to be realistic, because we've got to be visible, and if you're not on television, you're not visible."
The Miss America pageant was born in 1921 as a stunt to keep summer visitors at the Jersey Shore after Labor Day, and it has felt the pressure to change before. After feminists protested on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City in 1968, pageant officials shifted the emphasis from beauty to scholarship, and stressed the talent portion of the contest over the famous runway parade in swimsuit and four-inch heels.
These days the challenge is not to move away from female exploitation, but to make it work for the pageant - without giving up too much of the core values of a show that did not even allow two-piece bathing suits until 1997.
The pressure is coming from a television industry that now embraces shows like Pamela Anderson's "Stacked." Despite polls showing that Americans deplore the values being beamed or cabled into their family rooms, the ratings say otherwise, and in its 50 years on the air, the pageant's audience has eroded.
Last year, when its audience fell to fewer than 10 million viewers, ABC decided to drop the pageant. At stake is the pageant's long-term viability: Miss America relies on the $3.2 million broadcast contract to help stay afloat as a national organization.
Broadcasters show data proving that the talent show and the interviews, the pageant's answers to feminist criticism, were the least popular portions of the pageant, while the swimsuit part still had the power to bring viewers back from the kitchen.
So pageant officials - who still require chaperones for contestants when they are in Atlantic City - are thinking about showing a little more.
"What we are proposing out in L.A. is that we open up the sacred doors of Miss America," said Art McMaster, executive director of the national organization, who said he was negotiating with several networks and producers to find a perch for the pageant on television.
He said the organization was proposing to "offer up to the networks the entire group of young individuals who have been out there competing, so they can see them backstage, rehearsing or getting ready - to see their strengths and their fears."
People close to the negotiations say Mr. McMaster is pitching a multinight competition that allows viewers to develop a connection with individual contestants, perhaps capped by a national phone or Internet vote for the winner.
"The only way Miss America is going to get a piece of the competitive craziness out there is for Miss America to be chosen by Americans themselves," said Mr. McAleese of the Philadelphia pageant.
Late last month, Broadcasting and Cable Magazine, a trade publication, reported that the pageant was close to reaching a deal, but the pageant refused to discuss the report.
"We are still in negotiations in Los Angeles, and there are still several people who are interested in this thing," Mr. McMaster said. "Where we end up is up to our board of directors, but we still believe strongly that we can be on live network television this fall."
Ronica Licciardello, who as the newly crowned Miss Philadelphia is in line for the state and then the national competition, said she liked the idea of giving viewers a look backstage. But she was sure that what the sacred curtain conceals is only more of what goes on in front of it: women who are positive, supportive and cheerful.
"Seeing the real side of these contestants could be a real experience for people," she said, "because I think they would go into this with the expectation of cattiness and meanness, and they don't realize the sense of camaraderie and the sense of support that we feel for each other."
But Jessica Eddins, 25, a former Miss South Carolina and now a graduate student in Southern California, insisted that Miss America's values were more durable than the cheap thrills of reality television.
"Everybody has expressed to me the moral value of retaining this positive tradition, one that shows traditional values and personal achievement," she said.
The organization's chief rival, Miss USA and its subsidiary, Miss Universe, are beyond these concerns. Both show more skin than Miss America shows, and both are annual broadcasting successes.
While Miss America is a nonprofit, volunteer-run organization whose pageant is the culmination of a network of separate local contests, Miss USA is a show business venture - with no local competitions - owned by Donald Trump and NBC. And where Miss America insists that it is all about the millions in scholarships its contestants win each year, Miss USA, as its Web site points out, is simply "the search for the most beautiful girl in the U.S."
NBC has even combined Miss USA with "Fear Factor." It is staging "Miss USA Fear Factor" as the lead-in for the national telecast of the beauty pageant on Monday. With the broadcast possibilities limited for Miss America, though, organizers say a potential reality television savior has come knocking: Mr. Trump.
"He has reached out to us, no question about it," Mr. McMaster said. "He has made no proposal to us, and we're not sure where this thing is going to wind up, and as we continue down the road with the networks, we are going to be interested in seeing what kind of proposals Donald is willing to bring to the Miss America Organization."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/ny...09pageant.html
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BET Cancels Its Nightly News Program
David Bauder
BET canceled its "Nightly News," saying it instead will offer news briefs throughout the day, specials about newsworthy events and an urban affairs show, "The Cousin Jeff Chronicles," that will run four times a year.
Robert Johnson, founder of the leading cable channel for black viewers, said the change does not represent a lessening of BET's news commitment. He said it would improve how BET offers news.
"With 24-hour news networks and everyone getting news off the Internet, our audience doesn't want to wait until 11 p.m. to find out what the news is," said Debra Lee, BET president and chief operating officer.
As its executives explained in a sales presentation to advertisers in New York on Tuesday, BET's focus is reaching black viewers aged 18-to-34 with music programming as its primary focus. Lee said it had not been decided what would replace "BET Nightly News" when it ends this summer.
The decision comes after BET canceled other public affairs programming such as "Lead Story" (now replicated by host Ed Gordon on National Public Radio) and "Teen Summit" in recent years, noted Richard Prince, who writes the "Journal- isms" online column for the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
BET also fired "BET Tonight" host Tavis Smiley in 2001 following a dispute about Smiley offering a newsworthy interview to ABC instead of BET.
"What can you say?" Prince said. "I guess one could sigh. But that hasn't done much in the past."
If the hourly news briefs are done well and manage to reach more people than the half-hour newscast does, it could be a good thing, he said.
But BET has to overcome the perception that it marginalizes its news and public affairs responsibilities, he said, and it's especially crucial that BET's young viewers learn the importance of news and public affairs.
Lee said that "hopefully people will work with us and we'll find a way of doing the news in a way that works."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...=ENTERTAINMENT
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Actors' Union Shouts 'Cut' On Digital Film
Seamus Byrne
The Australian actors union is blocking a world-first remixable film project, and possibly forcing the production offshore, out of fear that footage of actors could be misused.
The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance has stopped production on the "re-mixable" film experiment because of plans to release the film under a Creative Commons (CC) licence. The $100,000 short film Sanctuary has been seeking a dispensation from the MEAA since January to allow professional actors to participate in the production. The film's cast supports the concept but the MEAA board has refused any dispensation, stalling production scheduled to start in late March.
The CC licence will allow audiences to freely copy and edit the film's digital assets for non-commercial purposes, this being the issue of central concern to the MEAA. "We don't see any safe way a performer can appear in this," says Simon Whipp, MEAA national director. "Footage could be taken and included in a pro-abortion advertisement or a pro-choice advertisement.
"Any non-commercial usage the performer may or may not agree with. Then for commercial work, performers are asked to sign a statement about what other commercials they have appeared in and this can be used to determine whether or not to include that performer. Without full knowledge of future usage of the film, it could unwittingly place that performer in breach of future commercial agreements."
The film's Australian director, Michela Ledwidge, received an Inventions award from Britain's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, in recognition of the groundbreaking nature of the experiment.
This has led to further support from the Australian Film Commission, which is funding the interactive and CGI elements of the work. Carole Sklan, AFC director of film development, says: "We appreciate that there are many issues raised by the application of the Creative Commons licence to Australian productions and have encouraged both the MEAA and the producer to negotiate to address these."
Ms Ledwidge hopes to allay MEAA fears as part of the application for dispensation. "We (showed) our intent to be conservative in the re-use we showcase. If we fail in our duties to operate a trust network there will be problems but we're up for the responsibility."
The licence supports the moral rights of the author, but Mr Whipp says the conflict with the CC licence is particular to Australia. "If you come from where performers also have moral rights, this isn't such an issue. But here performers have no moral rights - nothing prevents the ridicule of the performers. We have spoken with Brian Fitzgerald, the dean of the faculty of law at QUT (who is closely associated with Creative Commons development in Australia), who understands our concerns and will look to work with us on the matter."
Ms Ledwidge fears her project will have to head back overseas. "We will still make the film but plans for an Australian shoot will have to be revised."
The Creative Commons system is a "some rights reserved" form of copyright, providing an alternative to the black and white of full copyright and public domain. Australian versions of the CC licences only came into effect in February.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Outsou...?oneclick=true
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DIRECTV Awarded $21.7 million in Case Against Company that Sold Signal Theft Devices
Federal Court Grants Summary Judgment Against California-based SD Logic Technologies
Press Release
DIRECTV, Inc., announced today that U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner for the Central District of California, awarded the company $21.7 million in damages in a lawsuit it filed against SD Logic Technologies, Inc., and other defendants.
DIRECTV alleged in its complaint that SD Logic and its proprietors Scott and Ken Booth, based in Big Bear, Calif., designed, manufactured and sold via a Web site, pirate access devices that enabled users to steal DIRECTV's satellite signals.
Among the devices sold by SD Logic was the "Universal Smart Card Terminal," which SD Logic claimed was a legitimate, general purpose smart card device. Based on a substantial amount of evidence that the Universal Smart Card Terminal and other devices were primarily designed and marketed for DIRECTV piracy, DIRECTV moved for summary judgment on its claim against SD Logic.
Judge Klausner granted DIRECTV's motion, finding that DIRECTV had provided "overwhelming evidence" to support its claim that SD Logic's products were primarily of assistance in the unauthorized decryption of DIRECTV's satellite television broadcasts and awarded DIRECTV $10,000 per device sold by SD Logic.
"Despite their persistent claims to the contrary, the Booths and SD Logic were selling pirate devices, and now a federal court, after reviewing the evidence in the case, has come to the same conclusion," said Dan Fawcett, executive vice president, Business and Legal Affairs, DIRECTV, Inc. "Booth and his company picked up the misguided endorsements of digital civil liberties advocacy groups, who cited SD Logic as a source for legitimate smart card technology, giving the company's Web site a patina of respectability that it didn't deserve. This is a significant victory against signal thieves who often masqueraded as respectable businessmen."
The case against proprietors Ken and Scott Booth has been stayed since they filed for protection under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
The devices, like the Universal Smart Card Terminal, were used to operate illegally modified P3 access cards. Last year, all P3 cards were replaced with cards using new conditional access technology, and to date those cards have not been compromised.
http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/aboutu...id=03_29_2005A
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Consolidation
In Restructuring, Sony BMG Introduces Classical Label
Allan Kozinn
Sony BMG Music Entertainment said yesterday that it would restructure its classical music division with the introduction today of Sony BMG Masterworks. The division will encompass the former Sony Classical and BMG Classics lines.
The individual labels, including subsidiary imprints, will retain their names, logos and artist rosters. So, as examples, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the pianists Emanuel Ax and Murray Perahia, and the violinists Midori and Joshua Bell will continue to be marketed as Sony Classical artists; the pianist Evgeny Kissin and the tenor Ramón Vargas will still record for RCA Red Seal; and the conductors Nikolaus Harnoncourt and David Zinman will record for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi and Arte Nova, respectively.
But Gilbert Hetherwick, who became president of the division in January, said yesterday that the new name was meant to suggest a change of philosophy. It is intended not only to evoke past glories - Masterworks was CBS's flagship classical line long before Sony bought the company from CBS in 1989 - but also to signal what Mr. Hetherwick described as a renewed commitment to the core classical repertory.
Mr. Hetherwick reports to Michael Smellie, the chief operating officer of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and both men repudiated the notion, standard at classical labels since the mid-80's, that pop-classical crossover projects were necessary to keep a classics line afloat. Peter Gelb, who ran Sony Classical until Mr. Hetherwick's appointment and who is to become general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, was a strong proponent of crossovers.
"This is a dream job for me and an amazing opportunity to get it right," said Mr. Hetherwick, 52, who joined BMG Classics in 2003 after running EMI's American classical operations and holding positions at Polygram, Telarc and Sony Classical. "The people above me totally buy and support what I'm trying to do, which is to put the focus on classical music. We will do some Broadway and soundtrack recording, as we've always done. But it has to start with classical artistry."
Mr. Hetherwick pointed out that in the 15 months he ran BMG Classics, before the merger, he was able to turn a profit with a line devoted fully to classical repertory. At BMG, the theater and film departments, originally part of Red Seal, had been spun off, and there were no crossover projects: just straightforward standard repertory recordings by the likes of Mr. Kissin and Mr. Harnoncourt.
Mr. Hetherwick added that during his years at EMI, when crossover projects by Sarah Brightman accounted for 30 percent of the label's sales, he ran the numbers for the classical projects alone and found them to be profitable as well. (He declined to provide numbers.)
Mr. Smellie, who professed to know nothing about classical music, said he found Mr. Hetherwick's approach persuasive.
"I don't buy the reports that the classical record market is collapsing," Mr. Smellie said. "It's just a question of recording the right repertory, marketing it convincingly and applying the right discipline. And in my view, getting rid of crossover allows people to be focused.
"Crossover distorts people's values. You have a record that sells a million copies, and the universe shifts towards finding the next one. That's not what we want to do."
Central to Mr. Hetherwick's plans is exploring the back catalog of the combined label. That trove reaches back to the 1890's, when Sony's original predecessor, the Columbia Phonograph Company, and BMG's ancestor, the American Gramophone Company, were rivals in the nascent record market.
In the heyday of classical recording, from the late 20's through the late 70's, each label amassed a huge library of recordings that are now considered classic.
Mr. Hetherwick said that he had no idea how many master tapes the company's combined archives now hold, but that a computer catalog is being created. In any case, the trove is extraordinary, with legendary recordings by the conductors Fritz Reiner, Arturo Toscanini, Charles Munch, Pierre Monteux, Bruno Walter, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leonard Bernstein, George Szell, Eugene Ormandy and Pierre Boulez; the violinists Jascha Heifetz and Isaac Stern; the pianists Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin and Glenn Gould; and a vast array of vocal stars, from Enrico Caruso to Plácido Domingo, many of them appearing in complete recordings of operas.
Before the merger, Mr. Hetherwick restored some of RCA's legendary recordings, reissuing them as hybrid conventional and Super Audio CD's. He said he would do the same for Sony's Masterworks Heritage series, an archival project that was shelved after several well-regarded releases in the late 90's.
Reissues may, in fact, become the engine that drives Sony BMG Masterworks. Mr. Hetherwick said he would probably release more than 100 (but probably fewer than 200) reissues a year, a number that dwarfs the 20 to 25 new recordings. He said, too, that he hoped to use the Internet to revive even more of the back catalog.
"For the collector, you could have the complete Toscanini always available online," he said. The Internet, he added, "would be ideal for some of the contemporary-music recordings that Sony has: avant-garde productions from the 1960's that are important but that we couldn't afford to remaster, put into a plastic box and sell in stores."
The Internet is crucial for marketing, too, he said, pointing out that Yo-Yo Ma's latest disc, "Silk Road Journeys: Beyond the Horizon," has sold extremely well through iTunes, where it was the No. 4 seller for a time.
"What the Internet offers," he said, "is a place where nonspecialists can go and listen to samples to see what they like in the privacy of their homes, without being embarrassed."
More broadly, the label's plans are still vague. Mr. Hetherwick did not hold out great hope for a revival of operatic or symphonic recording, at least in the United States, although he is interested in opera DVD's. As for expanding the currently small rosters of his labels, Mr. Hetherwick said he would do so cautiously.
"There are two kinds of artists," he said. "Those who look at a recording as a work of art and those who see it as a snapshot of what they were doing that day. I like the ones who see recordings as art, who are passionate about making statements with their work in the studio."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/ar...ic/12sony.html
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Fiona Apple Saga Shows Sony's Core Dilemma
Charles Arthur
Comment You think that record companies are all geared up for the 21st century, and that the fact that online downloads will count towards the Official Chart Countdown means that they're au fait with the online future - right? That they realise that you can make a profit by continually selling a small number of digital copies of songs, because there's no cost of replication, compared to CDs - right?
As I discovered while half-listening to an internet radio station the other day, wrong.
What grabbed my attention was a voice I hadn't heard for some years: Fiona Apple, American chanteuse best known for her 1996 debut album "Tidal" and its 59-word- titled followup "When The Pawn..." (we'll save you the rest). Noted the title of the song being played, thinking to listen to it again, as both her ripped albums lurk in my MP3 collection. But the track ("Red Red Red") wasn't there.
Odd: it can't be off her third album, because Ms Apple hasn't released one. But Google the song title, and a much more interesting story emerges. It turns out she has done a third album, titled "Extraordinary Machine", which was completed in May 2003. Recorded, produced, done, dusted. All it needed was the nod from the people at Sony for the CD presses to roll.
They didn't. The album "was quickly shelved by the sad corporate drones over at Sony because they didn't 'hear a single' and because it doesn't sound exactly like Norah Jones and because they're, well, corporate drones," wrote (http://
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...otes031605.DTL) Mark Morford in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sony wanted something more like her earlier stuff. But she wasn't writing that stuff any more. Impasse.
Which has left Ms Apple in artistic limbo, her contract half-fulfilled and her music unheard, for 18 months. The site set up for her by Sony, at
http://www.fiona- apple.com (
http://www.fiona-apple.com/), gathers virtual dust, untouched since the launch of her second album in 1999.
Enter a group of fans of Ms Apple. First there was fionaapple.org (http://
www.fionaapple.org), set up in 2002. Then, enter BitTorrent, and somehow the tracks from Extraordinary Machine began showing up here and there on the Net. Somehow again the whole CD (or the tracks off it) reached a Seattle DJ, Andrew Harms, who began playing it on his show. And then a CD-quality version appeared on BitTorrent which, according to its BitTorrent page (
http://www.torrentbox.com/torrents- details.php?id=13132), has been downloaded (as I write) more than 18,500 times.
OK, 18,500 sales barely registers for Sony, which wants sales in the hundreds of thousands to feel warm about an album. But that's the old thinking - that you have to sell tons of physical copies of something to make a profit.
As Chris Anderson of Wired has demonstrated with his Long Tail©™® (http://
www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html) concept, that's not true online. Amazon and iTunes sell loads of tracks which make them money even though they'd never get onto a physical store's shelves. The music business has heard of this too: Rob Wells, Universal Music's head of new media, quoted the "long tail" concept at me late last year: the iTunes Music Store, he noted, has 1.2m tracks, "and every one of them has been downloaded at least once."
So let's ask: why hasn't Sony gone for a digital-only release on Ms Apple's new album? It would save all that tedious CD pressing. Every track would get downloaded at least once. After all, the intersection of people who are mad keen Fiona Apple fans with those who are on the internet and who understand BitTorrent can't be that huge; yet it's already got 18,500 members. The intersection of people who are mad keen Fiona Apple fans and are online and have access to the iTunes Music Store or Napster or whatever must be a lot bigger. Surely there's a big profit waiting there for Sony, which might even recoup that whacking advance. Perhaps restart her multi-platinum career, who knows.
But my contacts in the music industry listened to this suggestion and pursed their lips. "Well," said our mole - who sadly we can't name; but he's been around, trust us. "It's like this. OK, so there's now no retailer standing in the way between the owner of the repertoire, which is still the record company - though that could change - and the consumer. There's no retailer acting as a middleman. If Sony owns the rights to the album, they could just put it out on the Web."
Uh-huh. So why don't they? "Because you have to ask whose interest it serves. It doesn't do much for the artist or the record company. When you release an album, there has to be a story that you tell about it for the release to make sense." You thought it was about making a profit? No, it's about what Joni Mitchell called "the star-making machinery".
And the trouble with Ms Apple's difficult third album is that it won't do what Sony wants. "They've got to be thinking that even if they do put it out only in virtual form, they're not going to sell many more of the first two albums. And taking it one stage further, when it comes to marketing repertoire online, all four major labels are much more interested in getting their huge back catalogue there that hasn't been available for years and years. Just look at what Sony and BMG have - Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, how many albums are there of theirs? It's all about real deep catalogue."
So a picture starts to form. Ms Apple's problem isn't that Sony wouldn't everwant to put her stuff online. It's just that she should join the queue in an orderly fashion - somewhere behind all the more famous artists who recorded something in the 20th century.
But what about the fans, and the 18,500 downloads? Doesn't that indicate significant suppressed demand? "Look. Right now, online is only about 2 per cent of our business. It's still just a piss in the ocean. The whole underlying media theme for the past five years or whatever is that the record companies had their heads up their arses and ignored the online element. But actually when you add up the amount of time spent in meetings about the digital space on the subject by people at Sony and other labels in the past five years, it's ridiculous, compared to where the business was really coming from. Which is bricks and mortar stores up and down the UK."
Which leaves us where we came in, with an artist who has willing buyers, but no way to reach them; a record company that has a conduit to put the artist and buyer together, but prefers to keep them apart; and a cadre of fans who have used a technology that the US Supreme Court might declare illegal to cut out the middleman.
So nobody wins. Fiona Apple's album goes mostly unheard. Sony gets no revenues from its being downloaded. And all because the idea of selling music online has to be made to fit into the strategies used for 90-odd years. You've adapted your job and your business to this interweb thing. But the record labels still think the Net should bow to their thinking.
Oh, and there's a final irony in it all. Sony, the company at the centre of all this, should be celebrating whoever wins that case. For it's arguing on both sides. That's right. Check the dockets at this page (
http://washingtonpost.findlaw.com/supreme_court/ docket/2004/march.html#04-480) and you'll find that one of the "petitioners" (http:// news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/mpaa/petitioner12405brf.pdf) (379KB PDF) along with MGM is Sony Music.
Look further down at those "supporting respondents" (ie backing Grokster), and you'll find the Consumer Electronics Association's amicus brief (http:// news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/mpaa/cea030105brf.pdf) (273KB PDF). And among the members of the CEA? Sony Electronics.
So you could look at it this way. If MGM wins, Fiona Apple might get her album released some time, because there'll be less "piracy" eating away the record companies' profits (assuming you buy their claims that P2P ate their breakfast, rather than their insane use of "groups" and "artists" from "talent" shows), so they'll feel safe putting tracks online.
Or if Grokster wins, then Sony Electronics can sell lots more gizmos that will store songs. Such as those you downloaded via BitTorrent from Fiona Apple's unreleased third album. It's a mess. The sort of thing you never expect to find from listening to a bit of radio.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04..._online_music/
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Will Sony Crack Down on PSP Hacks?
Eric Hellweg
Less than two weeks after Sony released its long-anticipated PlayStation Portable, a handheld gaming device with multimedia capabilities, the device's most ardent fans began spreading details about their successful hacks. Among the more ingenious: Web browsing additions, instant-message chats, and TiVo-recording playbacks.
The PSP is already a strong seller in that short timeframe. Reviews of the multi-function device are almost universally positive, and with the heavy overlap between hardcore geeks and hardcore gamers, it seems a natural fit for hacker interest to run high. What's more, the unit comes with 32MB of memory, music and movie playing capabilities and built-in WiFi access, meaning it offers plenty of tools for hackers to play with.
Sony has been mum on the hacks so far. The company didn't respond to TechnologyReview.com's request for comment.
However, the company's history with product hacks suggests that it will tread this situation very carefully. In 2001, Sony forced a fan of the company's robotic dog toy Aibo to remove code from his site that allowed the dog to do such things as dance.
That fan, known as AiboPet, was served with a lawsuit for his efforts. As a result, Aibo fans boycotted the robotic dog and Sony eventually relented in its efforts when public outcry over the crackdown grew.
The lesson learned: Sony might do well to let the hackers run their course with the device -- it would likely engender an even more slavish devotion to the device.
"The hacks show there's enthusiasm for the platform -- that”s good news," says P.J. McNealy, an analyst with American Technology Research. "If people want to use the device to chat with someone, where's the revenue loss for Sony?"
With Aibo, Sony's hand was forced by the public's reaction, but in the game space, several examples exist of companies succeeding by allowing -- and even encouraging --these hacks.
One particularly striking example came with Valve Software's decision to make the code for its popular game Half-Life available to hackers who then took to the code and created Counter-Strike, which grew to become the most-played online game. Eventually, Valve Software decided to release the game -- with full support --- in 2002, while still allowing the players to use the older, hacked versions.
The decision turned out to be a good one. After its official release, it went on to become one of the most popular multiplayer games of the year.
Sometimes, consumers come up with entirely new ideas for a product, ideas that loosely adhere to the product's original intention such as the nascent pod-casting phenomenon.
Podcasting is the act of recording an audio "show" similar to a radio program, and then putting it online for other people to freely download to their iPods. Apple is happy to let these users explore podcasting, provided they're not playing copyrighted music or allowing others to download their playlists.
If podcasting really catches on, then companies such as Apple likely will sell more iPods as a result, thereby increasing revenues, profits, and user devotion.
But Apple hasn't always acted so benevolently, as evidenced by the company's steamroller legal assault on blogs that posted pre-release product information.
These days, companies are faced with the problem of correctly guessing when to embrace their customers and when to clamp down. "Very few companies encourage hacking," says Schelley Olhava, an analyst with IDC. "But at the same time, how do you stop it without alienating your users?"
Clearly, there are times when a company must crackdown on user modifications of its products. In 2002, for example, Microsoft shut down a Hong Kong-based company that was selling modified chips for the company's Xbox game system. The chips allowed users to play pirated games on their Xboxes, and Microsoft move was swift and warranted.
But for Sony, the decision on how to react to this PSP hack is a tough one indeed. Any company has a right to defend its intellectual property, but Sony must weigh the balance between coming down hard on this hack and gently steering users away from more malicious modifications.
Making the decision even tougher, Sony as a company is struggling to find its way in the digital era. Most of its digital music efforts have been disastrous, and the PSP is the first technology hit the company has had in some time.
With a new CEO, Sir Howard Stringer, at the helm, maybe now's the time to strike a new relationship with its most ardent fans, by allowing these innocuous hacks and saving the lawyers for the ones that will hurt the bottom line.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...805hellweg.asp
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Authorities Seize 60,000 Pirated Nintendo Consoles, Arrest Four
AP
More than 60,000 pirated copies of Nintendo Co. game consoles were seized Wednesday during raids in New York and New Jersey, prosecutors announced.
Four people were arrested in the crackdown on the theft of popular games such as ``Donkey Kong,'' ``Mario Brothers,'' ``Duck Hunt,'' ``Baseball'' and others, according to a
release by federal authorities and papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
The arrests occurred after the defendants agreed to sell the games to FBI agents posing as gaming thieves willing to resell the games in Manhattan and through a distributor in the Midwest, prosecutors said.
According to a criminal complaint filed in the case, the defendants between September and December 2004 had imported into the United States more than 280,000 illegal video game consoles.
More than 60,000 game consoles were seized during searches Wednesday in Brooklyn, Queens and Maple Shade, N.J., authorities said.
The Japanese game maker told the FBI that individuals and companies copy the video games and sell the pirated versions throughout the world, costing the company millions in lost revenue annually, according to the complaint.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/11386090.htm
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Apple iPod Mini 6GB
Trusted Reviews
Review In a hundred years' time, if there one object was to be chosen to represent the Western world of the early 21st Century, the iPod would be a strong contender. Once merely a music player it's become the 'must have' fashion accessory of the moment. And even with its ubiquity, there's no backlash yet in sight, writes Benny Har-Even.
Introducing the Mini was certainly a very smart move on Apple's part, and the player could be seen as the most important of the entire current iPod line-up. By moving from a 1.8in HDD to a 1in drive, Apple was able to shrink the already svelte iPod to an irresistibly cute, highly pocketable package. It opened up the iPod to a whole range of new listeners, such as girls and accountants, to whom having a tiny, cool looking MP3 player was far more important than being able to carry round their entire music collection.
The original Mini saw introduced the click wheel which integrated the four navigation buttons, later adopted by the fourth-generation iPod and the iPod Photo. While the original sported a 4GB hard disk, the Mini's competitors, such as Creative's Zen Micro (
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11...ive_zen_micro/) and the iRiver H10 (
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01...ew_iriver_h10/), featured 5GB disks. Now Apple has hit back by leapfrogging them with a 6GB drive, only for Creative to respond again with a 6GB Zen Micro.
However, big news is how effectively Apple has dealt with the Mini's biggest failing: the feeble battery life. Thanks to a new, more efficient chipset from PortalPlayer, the Mini now boasts a very impressive claimed battery-life of 18 hours - a lot better than the eight hours of the original. This figure is based upon playback of 128Kbps AAC files, which is a lot more realistic than the 48Kbps figure used by Sony. Higher bit- rates will lower battery life due to increased CPU usage, but the figure is still very impressive.
The other change is that Apple retired the 'bling' Gold-coloured Mini, while changing the shade of the remaining colours. Our review sample is a rather lovely blue colour but you can also be silver, green and pink.
But it's not just about looks - the iPod Mini sounds fantastic. After comparing it with my third-generation iPod, tracks definitely sounded clearer on the iPod Mini, as if it were capable of better frequency response. By comparison the 3G iPod sounded positively muffled. A sign of PortalPlayer's enhanced audio chip, perhaps.
The Mini's packaging is as lovely as ever. The box lid slides off to reveal the mini wrapped in plastic. The box underneath is split in two halves - one for the install discs and one for the headphones, USB cable and a belt holster. As with all the new iPods there's no Firewire cable, no dock, no remote - but they are available as optional extras. There's no AC adaptor either, so you can only charge when connected to the PC.
There are other missing features that might give pause for thought, such as a radio, recording function and microphone. But if it's just a player you want these absences won't be noticed. For me the only reason I wouldn't want one is that I do want to carry my entire music collection around with me. Or at least more of it than I could fit on a 6GB drive.
The good news is that Apple is still offering a 4GB version, with all the benefits of extended battery life, at an affordable £139/$199. So if your main aim in owning a Mini is to look trendy, the cheaper 4GB version could be the way to go.
One day of course, a 20GB iPod will be this size, but for now six gigs is your limit. At this capacity it no longer loses out to the Zen Micro and H10, but while Creative and iRiver have both worked hard on improving the look and usability of their players, the Mini is still miles ahead. With its rounded sides and neat click-wheel interface, it feels right in you hand and is easy to control and use too.
Verdict
With the new iPod Mini, Apple has increased its capacity by a third, battery-life by two-and-a-half times and improved sound quality. It's a pretty impressive triple whammy and as long as its capacity is large enough for you, the iPod Mini would be our recommended digital audio player.
Revied by
(
http://www.trustedreviews.com/)
Apple iPod Mini
Rating
90%
Price
£169 inc. VAT/$249 (6GB), £139 inc. VAT/$199 (4B)
More info
The Apple iPod Mini site (
http://www.apple.com/ipodmini/)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/12/ review_apple_ipod_mini_6gb/
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Apple Beats Outlook on iPod and Mac Sales
Laurie J. Flynn
Continuing a trend that has run for several quarters, Apple Computer on Wednesday reported a profit for the second quarter that beat even its expectations based on continued brisk sales of its iPod portable music player, as well as improving sales of Macintosh computers.
The company, based in Cupertino, Calif., posted revenue growth of 70 percent in the second quarter, from $1.91 billion to $3.24 billion. Profit in the quarter was $290 million, or 34 cents a share, compared with $46 million, or 6 cents in the period a year ago.
The chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, called the quarter "fantastic," and said that Apple was clearly picking up market share from Windows-based computers. "IPods did very well but so did Macs," Mr. Jobs said in an interview, in which he tried to move the focus from Apple's success in the music business to its increasing success in selling Macs. "We had a fantastic Mac quarter."
Mr. Jobs said Apple had a 43 percent increase in sales of Macs during the quarter, including strong demand for the new low-priced Mac mini. Today, Apple's share of the PC market is around 2 percent, but its sales are growing at a faster rate than the overall PC market. Macintosh business accounted for 52 percent of the company's total revenue.
"The two key areas - Macs and iPods - are doing very well," said Eugene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray. "I think the evidence of a halo effect is very clear," he said, referring to the idea that the iPod is driving sales of the Macintosh.
The results beat Apple's own outlook. In January, Apple had forecast earnings of 20 cents a share, adjusted for a February stock split, on $2.9 billion in sales. Analysts had, on average, forecast earnings of 24 cents a share and revenue of $3.15 billion, according to Thomson Financial,
Looking ahead to the third quarter, executives said they expected revenue of about $3.25 billion and earnings of 28 cents a share.
Yet given the high expectations of investors, Apple shares fell $1.62 on Wednesday, to $41.04, before the earnings were released.
Apple's iPod sales appear to have disappointed many investors and helped cause the sell-off late in the day. Many investors had expected Apple to report it had sold six million iPods, whereas the company shipped 5.31 million iPods in the quarter, a 558 percent increase over the period a year ago. In the quarter, Apple introduced the iPod Shuffle, its first flash-based digital music player.
"I think there was a lot of chatter about iPod sales," said Charles R. Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company, who owns Apple shares. "Investors were looking for something even better. Some investors weren't paying enough attention to Mac sales, which grew 43 percent."
During the quarter, Apple shipped 1.07 million Macintosh machines, generating $1.49 billion in revenue. In the second quarter a year ago, it shipped 749,000 Macs and generated $1.16 billion. The company has 103 retail stores, and expects to have 125 stores by the end of the year.
Apple's earnings report came a day after it announced that it would release the next version of its Macintosh operating system, called Tiger, on April 29, as much as a year earlier than Microsoft is expected to release the next major update to Windows. Apple hopes the new software release will bolster Macintosh sales even further.
In the call with analysts, executives tried to temper investors' expectations going forward and warned that they did not expect Apple to sustain its record-high growth rates indefinitely.
The chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, said that he expected revenue growth to eventually start to hover at a more reasonable 15 percent level, still higher than the industry average.
Gross margin for the quarter, an indicator of profitability, was 29.8 percent in the quarter, higher than the company's projected range of 27 percent to 28 percent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/te...rint&position=
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Pirates of the 'Share'-ibbean
Music File Sharing Is Not The Harmful Crime The Music Industry Claims
Aylsworth, Tim
Music piracy is a clever phrase. It denotes unauthorized copying and redistribution of property; however, it connotes an idea of parrots and eye patches. Pirates were vile plunderers whose crimes at sea ravished innocent victims. Today's pirates no longer need warships, cannons or swords. To become a pirate in modern society, one only needs a computer, an Internet connection and a fondness for music. Everyone is being told that this crime is robbing the music industry blind. This heinous villainy is supposedly destroying the industry to the point that it has compelled legal retaliation. This brings into question intellectual property rights, technological specificities and the amount of real harm being done to musicians. In reality, music downloading hurts no one; The Record Industry Association of America must leave people alone.
The RIAA is planning on suing nine students at Texas A&M. Industry sales have been dropping, and the association is quite certain that music downloading is to blame. At first, members of the industry targeted the big guns. They went after Napster, which was one of the original file sharing programs during the dawn of music downloading. The case was taken all the way to the Supreme Court, where Napster lost and a precedent was set.
This did not have the intended effect. People were still downloading music. Programs like KaZaa did not have centralized servers, and the owners were not easy to target. According to Marci Hamilton from FindLaw.com, "The industry then had no choice but to go after users, which meant going after students," and it did.
These claims are justified by the notion that there is a clear, undeniable link between music downloading and dropping CD sales. This would consequently harm the musicians, which could possibly ward off future music production. After all, if Lars Ulrich, member of the band Metallica, can't afford a Gulf Stream Jet, then why would he want to play the drums?
First, the correlation between music downloading and CD sales is not so obvious. Kembrew McLoud made this claim in the New York Times, saying "The two primary direct competitors for young music buyers' dollars - video games and DVDs, both also widely and freely traded on the Internet - continued to do quite well." He also pointed out that during the first quarter of 2004, sales were up more than 10 percent from the previous year. The industry proudly stated that this is a result of its legal action against the scurvy- ridden Internet pirates. Strangely, a survey came out at the same time, which said that music downloading had increased by 5 million downloads since the survey the year before.
Janis Ian is a singer/songwriter. In a pro-music downloading article, she pointed out that, "The music industry had exactly the same response to the advent of reel-to-reel home tape recorders, cassettes, DATs, minidisks, VHS, BETA, music videos and MTV." Each and every creation was thought to be the end of purchasing music. This notion has clearly proven to be nonsense.
This premise that music downloading is killing the industry is clearly mistaken. The second premise, which states that this will hurt musicians, is even more defective. If it is not hurting the industry, it does not hurt musicians. But even if this did harm the sales, how much could it hurt musicians?
Downhillbattle.org, a Web site dedicated to a more fair music industry, claims that in most cases, the purchase of a $16 CD only translates into a dollar or less for the musicians. Practically all of the money that musicians make comes from concert tickets. Downloading music does not keep anyone from coming to the concerts. The site also claims that the music industry is dominated by five major corporations that do not really protect the interest of artists. The site says that a breakdown of these corporations would allow more artists to come out and could give them a chance to make plenty of money.
So why are college students being sued by the RIAA? Unlike piracy of the high seas, this crime seems victimless. Even shoplifting does more damage. Downloading music does not mean the labels will stop making money, it does not hurt the artists and it doesn't seem to be directly stealing from anyone. To the contrary, it is aptly named music "sharing." The RIAA is suing nine students at A&M. It can sue 12-year-old girls for downloading songs by Britney Spears or Disney movies. This tactic is somewhat shady. These pirates want to listen to music, not make the RIAA walk the plank.
http://www.thebatt.com/news/2005/03/...n-904007.shtml
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Review
Goodbye to Privacy
William Safire
NO PLACE TO HIDE
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
348 pp. The Free Press. $26.
CHATTER
Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping.
By Patrick Radden Keefe.
300 pp. Random House. $24.95.
YOUR mother's maiden name is not the secret you think it is. That sort of ''personal identifier'' being used by banks, credit agencies, doctors, insurers and retailers -- supposedly to protect you against the theft of your identity -- can be found out in a flash from a member of the new security-industrial complex. There goes the ''personal identifier'' that you presume a stranger would not know, along with your Social Security number and soon your face and DNA.
In the past five years, what most of us only recently thought of as ''nobody's business'' has become the big business of everybody's business. Perhaps you are one of the 30 million Americans who pay for what you think is an unlisted telephone number to protect your privacy. But when you order an item using an 800 number, your own number may become fair game for any retailer who subscribes to one of the booming corporate data-collection services. In turn, those services may be -- and some have been -- penetrated by identity thieves.
The computer's ability to collect an infinity of data about individuals -- tracking every movement and purchase, assembling facts and traits in a personal dossier, forgetting nothing -- was in place before 9/11. But among the unremarked casualties of that day was a value that Americans once treasured: personal privacy.
The first civil-liberty fire wall to fall was the one within government that separated the domestic security powers of the F.B.I. from the more intrusive foreign surveillance powers of the C.I.A. The 9/11 commission successfully mobilized public opinion to put dot- connection first and privacy protection last. But the second fire wall crumbled with far less public notice or approval: that was the separation between law enforcement recordkeeping and commercial market research. Almost overnight, the law's suspect list married the corporations' prospect list.
The hasty, troubling merger of these two increasingly powerful forces capable of encroaching on the personal freedom of American citizens is the subject of two new books.
Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s ''No Place to Hide'' might just do for privacy protection what Rachel Carson's ''Silent Spring'' did for environmental protection nearly a half-century ago. The author, a reporter for The Washington Post, does not write in anger. Sputtering outrage, which characterizes the writing of many of us in the anti-snooping minority, is not O'Harrow's style. His is the work of a careful, thorough, enterprising reporter, possibly the only one assigned to the privacy beat by a major American newspaper. He has interviewed many of the major, and largely unknown, players in the world of surveillance and dossier assembly, and provides extensive source notes in the back of his book. He not only reports their professions of patriotism and plausible arguments about the necessity of screening to security, but explains the profitability to modern business of ''consumer relationship management.''
''No Place to Hide'' -- its title taken from George W. Bush's post-9/11 warning to terrorists -- is all the more damning because of its fair-mindedness. O'Harrow notes that many consumers find it convenient to be in a marketing dossier that knows their personal preferences, habits, income, professional and sexual activity, entertainment and travel interests and foibles. These intimately profiled people are untroubled by the device placed in the car they rent that records their speed and location, the keystroke logger that reads the characters they type, the plastic hotel key that transmits the frequency and time of entries and exits or the hidden camera that takes their picture at a Super Bowl or tourist attraction. They fill out cards revealing personal data to get a warranty, unaware that the warranties are already provided by law. ''Even as people fret about corporate intrusiveness,'' O'Harrow writes about a searching survey of subscribers taken by Conde Nast Publications, ''they often willingly, even eagerly, part with intimate details about their lives.''
Such acquiescence ends -- for a while -- when snoopers get caught spilling their data to thieves or exposing the extent of their operations. The industry took some heat when a young New Hampshire woman was murdered by a stalker who bought her Social Security number and address from an online information service. But its lobbyists managed to extract the teeth from Senator Judd Gregg's proposed legislation, and the intercorporate trading of supposedly confidential Social Security numbers has mushroomed. When an article in The New York Times by John Markoff, followed by another in The Washington Post by O'Harrow, revealed the Pentagon's intensely invasive Total Information Awareness program headed by Vice Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra infamy, a conservative scandalmonger took umbrage. (''Safire's column was like a blowtorch on dry tinder,'' O'Harrow writes in the book's only colorful simile.) The Poindexter program's slogan, ''Knowledge Is Power,'' struck many as Orwellian. Senators Ron Wyden and Russell D. Feingold were able to limit funding for the government-sponsored data mining, and Poindexter soon resigned. A Pentagon group later found that ''T.I.A. was a flawed effort to achieve worthwhile ends'' and called for ''clear rules and policy guidance, adopted through an open and credible political process.'' But O'Harrow reports in ''No Place to Hide'' that a former Poindexter colleague at T.I.A. ''said government interest in the program's research actually broadened after it was apparently killed by Congress.''
The author devotes chapters to the techniques of commercial data gatherers and sellers like Acxiom, Seisint and the British-owned LexisNexis, not household names themselves, but boasting computers stuffed with the names and pictures of each member of the nation's households as well as hundreds of millions of their credit cards. He quotes Ole Poulsen, chief technology officer of Seisint, on its digital identity system: ''We have created a unique identifier on everybody in the United States. Data that belongs together is already linked together.'' Soon after 9/11, having seen the system that was to become the public-private surveillance engine called Matrix (in computer naming, life follows film art), Michael Mullaney, a counterterrorism official at the Justice Department, told O'Harrow: ''I sat down and said, 'These guys have the computer that every American is afraid of.' ''
Of all the companies in the security-industrial complex, none is more dominant or acquisitive than ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Ga. This data giant collects, stores, analyzes and sells literally billions of demographic, marketing and criminal records to police departments and government agencies that might otherwise be criticized (or de-funded) for building a national identity base to make American citizens prove they are who they say they are. With its employee-screening, shoplifter-blacklisting and credit-reporting arms, ChoicePoint is also, in the author's words, ''a National Nanny that for a fee could watch or assess the background of virtually anybody.''
From sales brochures that ChoicePoint distributed to its corporate and government customers -- as well as from interviews with its C.E.O., Derek V. Smith, the doyen of dossiers, who claims ''this incredible passion to make a safer world'' -- The Post's privacy reporter has assembled a coherent narrative that provides a profile of a profiler. As if to lend a news peg to the book, ChoicePoint has just thrust itself into the nation's consciousness as a conglomerate hoist by its own petard. The outfit that sells the ability to anticipate suspicious activity; that provides security to the nation's security services; that claims it protects people from identity theft -- has been easily penetrated by a gang that stole its dossiers on at least 145,000 people across the country.
ON top of that revelation, the company had to admit it first became suspicious last September that phony companies were downloading its supposedly confidential electronic records on individual citizens. Not only is the Federal Trade Commission inquiring into the company's compliance with consumer-information security laws, but the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating prearranged sales of ChoicePoint stock by Smith and another top official that netted a profit of $17 million before the penetration was publicly disclosed and the stock price plunged.
''ChoicePoint Data Cache Became a Powder Keg'' was The Washington Post headline, with the subhead ''Identity Thief's Ability to Get Information Puts Heat on Firm.'' This was followed by the account a week later of another breach of faith at a competing data mine: ''ID Thieves Breach LexisNexis, Obtain Information on 32,000.'' Now that a flat rock has been flipped over, much more scurrying about will be observed. This will cause embarrassment to lobbyists for, and advisers to, the major players in the security-industrial complex. ''No Place to Hide'' names famous names, revealing associations with Howard Safir, former New York City police commissioner; Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO commander; and former Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas. (If you hear, ''This is not about the money'' -- it's about the money.)
More of the press has been showing interest, especially since Congressional hearings have begun and data is being disseminated about the data collectors. A second book -- not as eye-opening as O'Harrow's original reporting but a short course in what little we know of international government surveillance -- is ''Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping,'' by Patrick Radden Keefe. This third-year student at Yale Law School dares to make his first book an examination of what he calls the liberty-security matrix.
Chatter, he notes, is a once innocuous word meaning ''gossip . . . the babble of a child'' that in the world of electronic intelligence has gained the sinister sense of ''telltale metabolic rhythm: chatter; silence; attack.'' The flurry of ''sigint'' -- signals intelligence, picked up by the secret listening devices of our National Security Agency -- sometimes precedes a terrorist attack, and almost always precedes an elevation of our color-coded security alerts.
Keefe does what a brilliant, persevering law student with no inside sources or a prestigious press pass should do: he surveys much of what has been written about sigint and pores over the public hearing transcripts. He visits worried scientists and some former spooks who have written critical books, and poses questions to which he would like to get answers. He doesn't get them, but his account of unclimbable walls and unanswered calls invites further attempts from media bigfeet to do better. Keefe is a researcher adept at compiling intriguing bits and pieces dug out or leaked in the past; the most useful part of the book is the notes at the end about written, public sources that point to some breaks in the fog.
''Chatter'' focuses on government, not commercial, surveillance, and thereby misses the danger inherent in the sinister synergism of the two. Moreover, the book lacks a point of view: at 28, Keefe has formulated neither a feel for individual privacy nor a zeal for government security. It may be, as Roman solons said, Inter arma silent leges -- in wartime, the laws fall silent -- but the privacy- security debate needs to be both informed and joined. This is no time for agnostics.
For example, what to do about Echelon? That is supposedly an ultrasecret surveillance network, conducted by the United States and four other English-speaking nations, to overhear and oversee signals. ''We don't know whether Echelon exists,'' Keefe writes, ''and, if it does exist, how the shadowy network operates. It all remains an enigma.'' Though he cannot light a candle, he at least calls attention to, without cursing, the darkness.
Keefe's useful research primer on today's surveillance society, and especially O'Harrow's breakthrough reporting on the noxious nexus of government and commercial snooping, open the way for the creation of privacy beats for journalism's coming generation of search engineers. A small furor is growing about the abuse of security that leads to identity theft. We'll see how long the furor lasts before the commercial-public security combine again slams privacy against the wall of secrecy, but at least Poindexter's slogan is being made clear: knowledge is indeed power, and more than a little power in unknowable hands is a dangerous thing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/bo...VERSAFIRE.html
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Surveillance
Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest
JIM DWYER
Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.
"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."
Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.
During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.
A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.
For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.
Among them was Alexander Dunlop, who said he was arrested while going to pick up sushi.
Last week, he discovered that there were two versions of the same police tape: the one that was to be used as evidence in his trial had been edited at two spots, removing images that showed Mr. Dunlop behaving peacefully. When a volunteer film archivist found a more complete version of the tape and gave it to Mr. Dunlop's lawyer, prosecutors immediately dropped the charges and said that a technician had cut the material by mistake.
Seven months after the convention at Madison Square Garden, criminal charges have fallen against all but a handful of people arrested that week. Of the 1,670 cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial. Many were dropped without any finding of wrongdoing, but also without any serious inquiry into the circumstances of the arrests, with the Manhattan district attorney's office agreeing that the cases should be "adjourned in contemplation of dismissal."
So far, 162 defendants have either pleaded guilty or were convicted after trial, and videotapes that bolstered the prosecution's case played a role in at least some of those cases, although prosecutors could not provide details.
Besides offering little support or actually undercutting the prosecution of most of the people arrested, the videotapes also highlight another substantial piece of the historical record: the Police Department's tactics in controlling the demonstrations, parades and rallies of hundreds of thousands of people were largely free of explicit violence.
Throughout the convention week and afterward, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that the police issued clear warnings about blocking streets or sidewalks, and that officers moved to arrest only those who defied them. In the view of many activists - and of many people who maintain that they were passers-by and were swept into dragnets indiscriminately thrown over large groups - the police strategy appeared to be designed to sweep them off the streets on technical grounds as a show of force.
"The police develop a narrative, the defendant has a different story, and the question becomes, how do you resolve it?" said Eileen Clancy, a member of I-Witness Video, a project that assembled hundreds of videotapes shot during the convention by volunteers for use by defense lawyers.
Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, said that videotapes often do not show the full sequence of events, and that the public should not rush to criticize officers simply because their recollections of events are not consistent with a single videotape. The Manhattan district attorney's office is reviewing the testimony of Officer Wohl at the request of Lewis B. Oliver Jr., the lawyer who represented Mr. Kyne in his arrest at the library.
The Police Department maintains that much of the videotape that has surfaced since the convention captured what Mr. Browne called the department's professional handling of the protests and parades. "My guess is that people who saw the police restraint admired it," he said.
Video is a useful source of evidence, but not an easy one to manage, because of the difficulties in finding a fleeting image in hundreds of hours of tape. Moreover, many of the tapes lack index and time markings, so cuts in the tape are not immediately apparent.
That was a problem in the case of Mr. Dunlop, who learned that his tape had been altered only after Ms. Clancy found another version of the same tape. Mr. Dunlop had been accused of pushing his bicycle into a line of police officers on the Lower East Side and of resisting arrest, but the deleted parts of the tape show him calmly approaching the police line, and later submitting to arrest without apparent incident.
A spokeswoman for the district attorney, Barbara Thompson, said the material had been cut by a technician in the prosecutor's office. "It was our mistake," she said. "The assistant district attorney wanted to include that portion" because she initially believed that it supported the charges against Mr. Dunlop. Later, however, the arresting officer, who does not appear on the video, was no longer sure of the specifics in the complaint against Mr. Dunlop.
In what appeared to be the most violent incident at the convention protests, video shot by news reporters captured the beating of a man on a motorcycle - a police officer in plainclothes - and led to the arrest of one of those involved, Jamal Holiday. After eight months in jail, he pleaded guilty last month to attempted assault, a low-level felony that will be further reduced if he completes probation. His lawyer, Elsie Chandler of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, said that videos had led to his arrest, but also provided support for his claim that he did not realize the man on the motorcycle was a police officer, reducing the severity of the offense.
Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said that despite many civilians with cameras who were nearby when the officer was attacked, none of the material was turned over to police trying to identify the assailants. Footage from a freelance journalist led police to Mr. Holiday, he said.
In the bulk of the 400 cases that were dismissed based on videotapes, most involved arrests at three places - 16th Street near Union Square, 17th Street near Union Square and on Fulton Street - where police officers and civilians taped the gatherings, said Martin R. Stolar, the president of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Those tapes showed that the demonstrators had followed the instructions of senior officers to walk down those streets, only to have another official order their arrests.
Ms. Thompson of the district attorney's office said, "We looked at videos from a variety of sources, and in a number of cases, we have moved to dismiss."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12video.html
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Security
Boris and Natasha?
Russian Police: 'Our Hackers Are The Best'
Dan Ilett
The Russian police's cybercrime division has warned that Russian hackers are the best in the world.
"Everyone knows that Russians are good at maths," said Lieutenant General Boris Miroshnikov of the division known as Department K. "Our software writers are the best in the world, that's why our hackers are the best in the world."
Speaking at the e-Crime Congress in London on Tuesday, Miroshnikov said that the casual teenage hackers of the past developed their techniques as they grew older.
"It used to be naughty boys (doing this)," he said. "But now they've grown up. They realize if you are clever at something then you should use it to earn a living. They are hacking to get rich and uniting over networks."
Miroshnikov called for unified international laws for Internet crime that would make it easier for the police to carry out arrests and charges around the world.
Britain's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit said Tuesday that cybercrime costs British firms 2.4 billion pounds ($4.5 billion) last year as consequence of online crime last year. Miroshnikov said this was alarming, but that the international police effort was starting to take effect.
"The statistics are really very worrying," he said. "If you look at 2001, 2002 and 2003, computer crime was doubling. It's only this year that we've started to hold back the growth. That's because we've worked so hard.
"When governments get (ISPs), law enforcement, public and private sector cooperating, then and only then will we be able to succeed in holding back this type of crime."
http://news.com.com/Russian+police+O...3-5661547.html
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Beats smoke signals
Spyware Threatens to Pierce Vatican Walls
Aidan Lewis and Jim Krane
Computer hackers, electronic bugs and supersensitive microphones threaten to pierce the Vatican's thick walls next week when cardinals gather in the Sistine Chapel to name a papal successor.
Spying has gotten a lot more sophisticated since John Paul was elected in 1978, but the Vatican seems confident it can protect the centuries-old tradition of secrecy that surrounds the gathering.
"It's not as if it's the first conclave we've handled," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Vatican security refused to discuss the details of any anti-bugging measures to be used during the conclave. But Giuseppe Mazzullo, a private detective and retired Rome policeman whose former unit worked closely with the Vatican in the past, said the Holy See will reinforce its own experts with Italian police and private security contractors.
"The security is very strict," Mazzullo said. "For people to steal information, it's very, very difficult if not impossible."
Thousands of reporters will be watching as the 115 cardinals gather in the Sistine Chapel on April 18. Hackers and government informants may also be monitoring the conclave.
The temptations to spy will be immense. The papal election will likely see keen competition, notably between reformers and conservatives. It is also expected to witness a strong push for the first non-European pope.
Revelations of the proceedings could prove embarrassing to the Vatican. For instance, sensitive discussions on a papal candidate's stand on relations with Muslims or Jews, recognizing China rather than Taiwan or views on contraception would be sought-after by governments or the press.
John Paul was sensitive to meddling from outside. He spent his formative years in Soviet-run Poland under pervasive government spying. The Turkish gunman who shot him in 1981 was suspected of ties to the Soviets, a regime later brought down by forces the pope openly supported.
In 1996, John Paul set down rules to protect cardinals from "threats to their independence of judgment." Cell phones, electronic organizers, radios, newspapers, TVs and recorders were banned.
The ban on cell phones and personal data organizers makes sense, security experts say, since they can be hacked and used to broadcast the proceedings to a listener.
"An eavesdropper can reach into those devices and turn on the microphone and turn it into an eavesdropping device," said James Atkinson, who heads a Gloucester, Mass., company that specializes in bug detection. "It's extraordinarily easy to do."
Another worry for the Vatican will be rooftop snoops with sensitive microphones. Laser microphones can pick up conversations from a quarter-mile away by recording vibrations on window glass or other hard surfaces. The Sistine Chapel has windows set near the roof.
"You focus the laser on a window or on a hard object in the room, like the glass on a picture," said a New York-based security expert with Kroll, Inc., who asked that his name not be used. "When people are talking the glass will modulate with the sound of the voice and they can recover the audio."
Laser microphones can be thwarted with heavy drapes and by masking conversations with ambient noise.
Tougher to root out are tiny bugs: transmitters or recorders as small as a coin.
To handle those, bug-sweeping teams - acting on the pope's 1996 orders - will need to mount complex sweeps of sensitive meeting areas, taking out carpets, poking through chair cushions, opening heating ducts, testing electrical wiring, light bulbs and water pipes, Atkinson said.
The late pope deemed the threat to the conclave serious enough to decree that those who break their oaths of secrecy can be cast out of the Roman Catholic Church.
For the first time, however, cardinals voting in the conclave will be free to move outside the complex that includes the Sistine Chapel. Previously, cardinals were allowed to sleep only in the adjoining Apostolic Palace, but this time they will be housed in a $20 million hotel residence, the Domus Sanctae Marthae. They will be allowed to use Vatican City chapels for Masses.
In a sign of nervousness about maintaining secrecy, the College of Cardinals decided Saturday to halt interviews with the media. Cardinals had been giving interviews, and the clampdown is believed unprecedented.
"They've assured us there are ways to block all communications and conversations," Chicago Cardinal Francis George told reporters earlier in the week.
But even with precautions, halting a spy inside the Vatican - perhaps an unwitting one - is probably the toughest threat to block, experts said.
A spy could import a listening device, or even signal people outside the Vatican by a color-coded message. Atkinson suggested using colored smoke or by flushing dye down a toilet with a discharge pipe that could be monitored elsewhere.
"Are they going to search all the cardinals to see whether someone bugged their spectacles or crucifixes?" asked Giles Ebbut, a surveillance expert with the London consultancy Jane's. "The imagination can run riot."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2005Apr11.html
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Tips From The DIMACS Cybersecurity Conference
Industry and academic cybersecurity experts will convene Thursday and Friday (April 14-15) at Rutgers University to discuss new and as-yet- unresolved threats to safe and secure e-commerce. Their meeting is the first scientific conference devoted specifically to phishing and related e- commerce issues.
Industry and academic cybersecurity experts will convene Thursday and Friday (April 14-15) in Piscataway, N.J., to discuss new and
as-yet-unresolved threats to safe and secure e-commerce. Their meeting is the first scientific conference devoted specifically to phishing and related e-commerce issues. It will be hosted by the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) at Rutgers University. J.P. Morgan Chase Senior Vice President for Consumer Risk Management Richard A. Parry is an invited speaker.
"Messin' with Texas" reveals President Bush's not-so-personal information
Mothers' maiden names may seem like a safe way to authenticate the identity of an Internet user, but Indiana University School of Informatics research assistant Virgil Griffith and IU Bloomington computer scientist Markus Jakobsson will show how easy it is to mine online public records for this information using President George W. Bush and 3,773,882 other Texans as faux-victims. The researchers were able to retrieve the names despite the removal of online birth and death records in 2000 and 2002, respectively, as ordered by the Texas legislature. Because mothers' maiden names are so easily retrieved, the researchers urge American businesses to use other means of authentication. Jakobsson is an associate director of the IU Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research.
Distributed phishing attacks could evade authority
The easiest way for Internet service providers (ISPs) to end a phishing attack is to pull the plug on the phisher's fake Web site. This protects future victims from revealing their personal information. But what if phishers use their computer savvy to make endless copies of their false Web sites, each one hosted in a different place? Many of these sites may be unwittingly hosted by companies and individuals whose firewalls have been compromised by the attacker. Indiana University Bloomington computer scientist Markus Jakobsson and LEGC LLC Senior Managing Consultant Adam Young will discuss how phishers might go about hijacking users' accounts to stay one step ahead of ISPs. They'll also explain how ISPs might protect themselves -- and their clients. Although this type of phishing attack has not yet been seen, Jakobsson and Young believe it is inevitable unless something is done preemptively to stop it. Jakobsson is an associate director of the IU Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research.
A better way to can spam: block it, don't screen it
Experts estimate 60 to 80 percent of today's e-mails are unsolicited junk, and that's because e-mail "spammers" are playing the averages. For a mere $100, spammers can buy a list of 30 million e-mail addresses. If a mere 0.001 percent of those who receive a spam message respond favorably to a $10 scam, that still earns the spammer a $2,900 net profit. If the spammer is an e-mail phisher, a similarly low success rate still yields personal information from 300 victims. Indiana University Bloomington computer scientist Minaxi Gupta says a better way of preventing spam e-mails from ever reaching their intended recipients is to perform active "spam management" by creating criteria that block or delay spam, turning the local incoming mail server into a sort of nightclub bouncer. Today's spam filtering software does not stop spam at the door. Instead it screens and deletes unwanted messages only after they've been copied to the local server. Gupta says this method of spam prevention is costly -- in terms of both hard drive space and Internet bandwidth use.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/511060/?sc=swtn
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LexisNexis: Files May Have Been Breached
Jane Wardell
Criminals may have breached computer files containing the personal information of 310,000 people, a tenfold increase over a previous estimate of how much data was stolen from information broker LexisNexis, the company's parent said Tuesday.
Last month, London-based publisher and data broker Reed Elsevier Group PLC said criminals may have accessed personal details of 32,000 people via a breach of its recently acquired Seisint unit, part of Dayton, Ohio-based LexisNexis. LexisNexis is a Reed subsidiary.
Reed said it identified 59 instances since January 2003 in which identifying information such as Social Security numbers or driver's license numbers may have been fraudulently acquired on thousands of people.
Information accessed included names, addresses, Social Security and driver license numbers, but not credit history, medical records or financial information, the company said.
Reed spokesman Patrick Kerr said that the first batch of breaches was uncovered by Reed during a review and integration of Seisint's systems shortly after it purchased the Boca Raton, Fla.- based unit for $775 million in August.
Seisint provides data for Matrix, a crime and terrorism database funded by the U.S. government, which has raised concerns among civil liberties groups. The Matrix database was not involved in the breach, the company has said.
Seisint's databases store millions of personal records including individuals' addresses and Social Security numbers. Customers include police and legal professionals and public and private sector organizations.
The company said the 59 identified instances of fraudulently obtained information - 57 at Seisint and two in other LexisNexis units - are largely related to the improper use of IDs and passwords belonging to legitimate customers. It stressed that neither LexisNexis nor the Seisint technology infrastructure was breached by hackers.
Kerr said the company has since ensured that the system is watertight by improving login systems and security checks.
He said only 2 percent of the 32,000 people it notified about the possible theft of their personal information in March have contacted LexisNexis to accept its offer of free credit reports and credit monitoring, and none has so far advised LexisNexis that they have experienced any form of identity theft.
However, LexisNexis Chief Executive Kurt Sanford said Tuesday that of the 32,000 who were notified, law enforcement officials have identified 10 who investigators believe may have been victims of identity theft. He said it is unclear whether those possible thefts are related to the breach at LexisNexis.
Investigators said only three of those people appeared to have been the victims of financial fraud, Sanford said.
The breach is being investigated by the FBI's cyber-crime squad in Cincinnati. FBI spokesman Mike Brooks would say only that the agency is pursuing leads.
Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., who has introduced legislation designed to increase protections of consumer data, said LexisNexis turned a blind eye to customer protection.
But Sanford said LexisNexis had initiated the review and notified potential victims.
"We're going to fix this," he said. "The congressman's statement overreaches and mischaracterizes the situation."
Reed Elsevier played down the effect of the breach on its profits, reaffirming its target of higher earnings and at least 5 percent growth in revenues excluding acquisitions.
The breach at Seisint is the second of its kind at a major information provider in recent months. Rival data broker ChoicePoint Inc. announced last month that the personal information of 145,000 Americans may have been compromised in a breach in which thieves posing as small business customers gained access to its database.
In the ChoicePoint scam, at least 750 people were defrauded, authorities say. The case fueled consumer advocates' calls for federal oversight of the loosely regulated data-brokering business, and Capitol Hill hearings on the topic were held last month and are continuing this week.
Reed Elsevier specializes in the education, legal and science sectors, publishing more than 10,000 journals, books and compact discs, as well as almost 3,000 Web sites and portals. It also organizes 430 trade exhibitions. The LexisNexis division specializes in legal and business information.
http://staging.hosted.ap.org/dynamic...04-12-12-47-26
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Some Mastercard Holders Exposed To Data Theft
Global bank HSBC Holdings is notifying at least 180,000 people who used MasterCard credit cards to make purchases at Polo Ralph Lauren that criminals may have obtained access to their credit card information, and that they should replace their cards, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The situation involves a General Motors-branded card, the Journal reported.
It is the latest in a string of high-profile incidents in which personal data were stolen from retailers or financial institutions.
More than 20 U.S. states are considering legislation after data security scandals involving ChoicePoint and LexisNexis.
HSBC's U.K. office was not immediately available to comment.
http://news.com.com/Some+MasterCard+...3-5670509.html