[JackSpratts]

How-to

BitTorrent: Bypass any Firewall or Throttling ISP with SSH
Ernesto

On some networks it’s impossible to use BitTorrent. For example, if you’re at work, school, or connected to Comcast or a public hotspot. But there’s an easy solution to overcome this problem. By using a secure connection (SSH), you can bypass almost every firewall or traffic shaping application.

Here’s a relatively simple 3-step guide that will show you how to set it up.
1. Get an SSH account.

You need an SSH account in order to get this working. You can try one of these free shell providers from this list. I currently use silenceisdefeat which requires a small $1 donation. However, the account is immediately activated and works fine for me.
2. Download, Install and Configure Putty

Download Putty, store it somewhere on your computer and run it. In the session screen enter the host name (I use ssh.silenceisdefeat.org), the port number (22), and tick the connection type box (SSH).

Next, go to SSH –> Tunnels, enter a source port and tick the dynamic box. I’m using port 23456, but you are free to choose any post you like as long as it’s available.

When you’re done, it might be a good idea to save the session so you don’t have to enter the info next time you run Putty. If you’re ready, hit the “open” button in the session screen. A command-line interface will pop-up so enter your username and password that you received from your shell-provider, and you’re done.
3. Configure your BitTorrent client.

The last step is to configure your BitTorrent client. I will show you how it’s done in uTorrent and Azureus but other BitTorrent clients use a similar setup.

uTorrent: go to Options > Preferences > Connection. Enter your port number (I use 23456), socks 4 or 5 as type, and localhost in the proxy field.

Azureus: go to Tools > Options > Connection > Proxy Options. Tick the “Enable proxying of tracker communications” and “I have a SOCKS proxy” box. Next, enter your port number in the port field (I use 23456) and localhost in the host field.

When you’re done, restart your BitTorrent client and you’re ready to go. BitTorrent over SSH tends to be a bit slower than your normal connection, but it’s a great solution when BitTorrent connections are blocked or throttled.

For those on a Mac OSX, please check out this great tutorial (which in part inspired this article) for more details. It includes instructions on how to do this on a Mac, using Azureus.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-over-ssh-071014/





BitTorrent to be Pimped by Nobel Prize Winning Theory
Ernesto

P2P researchers are working with the Harvard mechanism design group on implementing the “Nobel prize winning” mechanism design theory into their BitTorrent client. The ultimate goal is to keep people sharing as much as possible without imposing share ratio sanctions.

Last week the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Hurwicz, Maskin and Myerson for laying the foundations of the mechanism design theory. Interestingly, a practical implementation of this theory being worked on by P2P researchers. They believe that the principles from the mechanism design theory can be used to motivate people to share.

TorrentFreak spoke to Dr. Ir. Johan Pouwelse, researcher on P2P technology at Delft University of Technology, who is currently working with the Harvard mechanism design group. He told us: “We use the Nobel prize winning theory as a recipe for improving BitTorrent.”

A lot of people probably wonder how an economical theory can improve the performance of a BitTorrent client, Pouwelse explains: “A structured scientific advancement of P2P file sharing was really lacking. With Mechanism Design we can go beyond the current trial-and-error methodology. We are working on a mechanism design based solution for all 9 elementary actions in P2P by using a distributed reputation system and mechanism that does not degrade to a single shot prisoners dilemma, such as BitTorrent tit-fot-tat”

What Pouwelse is basically saying is that the mechanism design theory will be used to improve download speed and to make sure that content will be available for the long run, even when it’s not really popular. This is especially useful in BitTorrent streaming solutions where the incentive to keep sharing is relatively low.

The Nobel-powered BitTorrent/P2P client supports both regular .torrent downloads, but can also be used to stream videos from YouTube and Liveleak. As we reported earlier, the client also enhances the standard tit-for-tat BitTorrent algorithms with a so called give-to-get algorithm where bandwidth is used as a currency.

It is good to see that - unlike what others claim - p2p innovation is still alive and kicking, even in the land of the free and the home of the RIAA/MPAA.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-t...-prize-071019/





DRM is Killing the PC Gaming Market
Mark C. Barlet

Digital Rights management, also known as DRM, is single handedly destroying PC Gaming as we know it. In the industry there is an ongoing battle between the gaming makers and the pirates, and the casualty in this battle is the end user. Take the latest in the gigantic Sims 2 expansion, Bon Voyage, the disk that contains your game also contains Sony's SecuROM, reportedly this has been crippling computers all over the place. SecuROM has been reported to disabled your CD/DVD Burner software, your optical drive itself, printers, cameras, and even crashes the PC outright. The theory is that ANYTHING that can get media off your PC is the enemy of this DRM. Now here is the kicker, and here is why we, the consumer lose. In less than 24 hours after the game was released, pirates had cracked the SecuROM and offered it online for all to download.

AbleGamers is in no way condoning the theft of software, we want you to go out and buy it so that the makers of great PC games keep making great PC games.
Let that sink in for a second, thousands of users all over the world are having DRM software destroy their computers, they are being punished by the game publisher for honestly paying for the software, and those that waited less than a day could go and download it for free with no issues what so ever. Can someone tell me how this is a win for the gaming industry, can someone tell me how this encourages the end user to go to the store and buy the game vs just stealing it?
How is the an issue of the disabled gamers?

There are many great peripherals on the market for the disabled gamers. Many of them use on board memory used to store things like what key strokes you assign to what button. Some DRM software see these peripherals as an enemy, and can disabled them.

EA, the makers of the current title in question released a statement, and according to the responses EA may not be forthcoming with the truth of the matter. EA states that they have only received 41 calls on issues from the DRM software, out of 100,000 copies of the game. A few responses to the post by EA shows that they may be selectively picking the source of their numbers, omitting the 4,146 posts from 883 people on the Sims Forum.

This is not a story about The Sims, or EA, it is an example of how DRM is a failure, it does nothing to stop those that want to pirate the game (less than 24 hours), and only harms those that legally bought the game.
http://ablegamers.com/content/view/119/





Revealed: the Man Behind Court Attack on Gore Film

Fuel and mining magnate backed UK challenge to An Inconvenient Truth
Jamie Doward

The school governor who challenged the screening of Al Gore's climate change documentary in secondary schools was funded by a Scottish quarrying magnate who established a controversial lobbying group to attack environmentalists' claims about global warming.

Stewart Dimmock's high-profile fight to ban the film being shown in schools was depicted as a David and Goliath battle, with the Kent school governor taking on the state by arguing that the government was 'brainwashing' pupils.

A High Court ruling last week that the Oscar-winning documentary would have to be screened with guidance notes to balance its claims was welcomed by climate-change sceptics.

The Observer has established that Dimmock's case was supported by a powerful network of business interests with close links to the fuel and mining lobbies. He was also supported by a Conservative councillor in Hampshire, Derek Tipp.

Dimmock credited the little-known New Party with supporting him in the test case but did not elaborate on its involvement. The obscure Scotland-based party calls itself 'centre right' and campaigns for lower taxes and expanding nuclear power.

Records filed at the Electoral Commission show the New Party has received nearly all of its money - almost £1m between 2004 and 2006 - from Cloburn Quarry Limited, based in Lanarkshire.

The company's owner and chairman of the New Party, Robert Durward, is a long-time critic of environmentalists. With Mark Adams, a former private secretary to Tony Blair, he set up the Scientific Alliance, a not-for-profit body comprising scientists and non-scientists, which aims to challenge many of the claims about global warming.

The alliance issued a press release welcoming last week's court ruling and helped publicise Dimmock's case on its website. It also advised Channel 4 on the Great Global Warming Swindle, a controversial documentary screened earlier this year that attempted to challenge claims made about climate change.

In 2004 the alliance co-authored a report with the George C Marshall Institute, a US body funded by Exxon Mobil, that attacked climate change claims. 'Climate change science has fallen victim to heated political and media rhetoric ... the result is extensive misunderstanding,' the report's authors said.

Martin Livermore, director of the alliance, confirmed Durward continued to support its work. 'He provides funds with other members,' Livermore said.

In the Nineties, Durward established the British Aggregates Association to campaign against a tax on sand, gravel and rock extracted from quarries. Durward does not talk to the media and calls to the association requesting an interview were not returned last week. However, he has written letters to newspapers setting out his personal philosophy. One letter claimed: 'It is time for Tony Blair to try the "fourth way", declare martial law and let the army sort out our schools, hospitals and roads.'

He later clarified his comments saying he was merely pointing out that the army had done a 'fantastic job' in dealing with the foot and mouth crisis. He has also asked whether there has been a 'witch-hunt against drunk drivers'.

Dimmock also received support from a new organisation, Straightteaching.com, which calls for politics to be left out of the classroom. The organisation, which established an online payment system for people to make contributions to Dimmock's campaign, was set up by Tipp and several others. Its website was registered last month to an anonymous Arizona-based internet company.

Tipp, who is described on the website as having been a science teacher in the Seventies and Eighties, declines to talk about who else is backing it. 'There are other people involved but I don't think they want to be revealed,' he said.

He said he thought his organisation could bring more cases against the government. 'There are a lot of people who feel the climate change debate is being hyped up,' Tipp said. 'To try to scare people into believing the end is nigh is not helpful. We've been contacted by other teachers who raised concerns. There's a lot of interest, especially from people in the US.'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_ne...190770,00.html





Calling All Bloggers: Are You ‘Covered’ Under House ‘Reporter’s Shield Law’?
Margie Burns

Yesterday the House passed by a substantial margin its version of the “reporter’s shield law,” titled the Free Flow of Information Act of 2007. The House version differs from the Senate bill of the same title in its definition of “covered person,” basically the definition of who is a journalist.

The House version reads,
“(2) COVERED PERSON- The term `covered person' means a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person's livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.”

The Senate version reads,

“(2) COVERED PERSON- The term `covered person' means a person who is engaged in journalism and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such person.”

For many reasons, the Senate version looks better.

First, a disclaimer: so far as I know, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t foresee having this kind of problem. Anyone who tried to force me to say something I didn’t want to say, a remote possibility, would be crossing a line; and anyway I tend to favor disclosure in the public interest. Administration ‘sources’ do not call me up to toss Lawrence Lindsey overboard, or Tom DeLay, or Alberto Gonzales, or any other public official, career or appointee. Nobody tells me anything. Or to put it more precisely, people tell me things, but I usually cite by name unless there’s a general-information kind of paraphrase involved, or just gossip, or some other good reason not to. And while I have been quasi-mugged on the street – by some guy who knocked me down & hit me, etc w/out taking my bags -- and have gotten a certain amount of nasty mail – though the letters of praise by far outnumber the other kind – I have never had anyone lean on me to pry confidential information out of me. It is unlikely to happen, since I’m not what they used to call “easy.” Insiders who call up some ‘journalist’ to plant a smear under cover of ‘confidentiality’ are contemptible (that's the real story), and journalists should not be serving as our contemporary substitute for the Lion’s Mouth in Renaissance Venice in a behind-the-scenes system of anonymous denunciation.

But a rational observer, evaluating this ‘reporter’s shield,’ would have to look at who IS ‘covered’ under the House definition, and who is NOT. A key passage, as readers may already know, is that bit about “a substantial portion of the person's livelihood or for substantial financial gain.” Admittedly, this passage takes a certain amount of guesswork, since the terms “substantial portion” and “substantial financial gain” do not come with dollar amounts. Still --

Here, in all likelihood, are some of the people NOT COVERED under this definition:

• Most bloggers, except for reportedly Matt Drudge
• Many web site editors and producers, especially of left-leaning, ‘liberal,’ green or progressive web sites
• Almost all web site editors and producers of small web sites across the Net
• Many or most columnists for small community newspapers such as the Prince George’s Journal, where I published articles from 1996 to 2004, and the Prince George’s Sentinel, where I published articles 2004-2006
• Many reporters for small community newspapers
• Many editors for small community newspapers
• Many publishers of small community newspapers: producing them may involve expense but not necessarily profit, income
• Any journalist contributing to a periodical on a volunteer basis
• Many or most freelancers, depending on the time frame for defining finances
• Retired journalists who weigh in with an occasional column or article at, e.g., the WashPost’s op-ed page
• Interns who perform journalistic duties at recognized media outlets but without much pay or a job guarantee

Here, on the other hand, are some of the people COVERED under this definition:

• Almost everyone who works for Fox News
• Matt Drudge
• Almost everyone who works for any of the major media outlets – CNN, the three original networks, their subsidiaries; the large daily newspapers; etc – as long as that person has a good regular salary; see interns and retirees, above
• Salaried writers and editors working for any of the trade periodicals – insurance, trucking, pharmaceuticals, etc
• Talk radio hosts, their writers and producers, if their income comes mostly from the gig

In other words, a 'covered person' is basically anyone Bob Novak could tolerate, and not covered is everyone who might hypothetically or even accidentally be perceived as a threat to the Novaks of this world. What could be sweeter? -- for Robert Novak. Is it any wonder that this bill was introduced by the GOP and that it has passed by a whopping margin, in a House full of terrified incumbents? Or that it is supported by the same mediocre media outlets that facilitated GWBush in the White House, the non-investigation of 9/11, and the Iraq war?

John Conyers (D-Mich.) is one of my personal heroes, one of the best people in Congress, ever, not just for our time but a man for all seasons. I am absolutely confident that he supported this measure for the best of reasons. But the more I look at this language, the more it looks as though opinion makers hired by Richard Mellon Scaife and rewarded by the Bradley Foundation would be covered, and the homeless who write for Street Sense -- D.C.'s homeless newspaper -- would not be covered. It also looks as though the overpaid would, to a man, be covered, while any underpaid blogger, freelancer or reporter-editor who has to combine income sources would not be -- a cohort disproportionately comprising women, the underemployed, members of poor fundamentalist or other 'fringe' groups from right to left, and simply people of modest means.

Too bad about the way it breaks down into people on one side, money on the other. It will be interesting to see what happens in conference, if the Senate passes its version. I’m not too optimistic; good thing I never looked to Congress for protection anyway. More the other way around, as I see it.
http://www.margieburns.com/blog/_arc...7/3296526.html





How Politicians Weakened a Legal Shield for Bloggers
Declan McCullagh

The House of Representatives' vote on Tuesday for a journalist shield bill is a timely example of how legislation can be watered down surprisingly quickly.

Originally the proposed shield law gave a broad immunization to journalists, including bloggers who acted as journalists. But eventually it morphed into a far less protective form.

Here's the progression:

#1 Original version:

The term "covered person" means a person engaged in journalism and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.

#2 Second version approved by a House committee:

The term "covered person" means a person who, for financial gain or livelihood, is engaged in journalism and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.

#3 Third version as approved by the full House:

The term "covered person" means a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person's livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.

The original version was reasonably protective, and the term "engaged in journalism" was reasonably well-defined. But by the time our esteemed elected representatives got finished with it, a serious blogger who breaks news (but doesn't have Google Ads on his site) would not benefit from the shield. It requires "substantial" income, even though not all good journalism is done for significant financial gain.

By the way, all versions of the shield legislation are pretty milquetoast when it comes to actually protecting journalists. They say that journalists can be ordered to the witness stand as long as a judge thinks their testimony may be "essential to the investigation or prosecution or to the defense against the prosecution," which is not that significant a hurdle in practice.

I know this firsthand. The U.S. Department of Justice served me with a subpoena to testify in a criminal case in Tacoma, Wash., and then demanded that the judge declare me a hostile witness when I refused to answer certain questions. Even the weakened, final version of the House bill is better than nothing, but I fear it'll prove to be a very thin and easily circumvented shield in practice.
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9799178-38.html





Blog Action Day - Individual Action is Not Enough October 15, 2007
Andy Roberts

Today is Blog Action Day which means that lots of bloggers will be writing on one general topic for one day in an attempt to see what might be achieved through coordinated posting, and I am one of them so my humble contribution amongst the hundreds of thousands is entitled “individual action is not enough”.

The topic for this year’s blog action day is “the environment”.

The idea of bloggers mass action as a concept is not yet proven by any means, but it’s certainly worth participating if only for the “blog carnival” effect but it’s also quite possible that a critical mass of blog posts on one single day will have some sort of lasting effect which cannot be exactly anticipated in nature, but will almost certainly be different to the normal flow of conversations in the blogosphere.

The aim is to push an issue onto the table for discussion, the issue being “the environment”.

If I have time, I shall attempt to synthesise between the idea of thousands of bloggers uniting to take visible action for one day, and the type of uncoordinated individual action which is most usually promoted as the best means to deal with environmental issues. I’m not sure I’ll be able to pull that off though, and I may just end up quoting from a book review which I read recently which puts it very well:

He criticises Tim Flannery for his emphasis on individual action to stop global warming.

Pearse writes: “The reality is that even if every Australian totally eliminated their residential emissions it would not result in significant absolute cuts in Australia’s emissions; by 2050 emissions might rise by 60% instead of by 70%…the changes we make at the personal level would account for at best 20% of the change required.”
…
High and Dry is the best book yet written on the climate change debate in Australia – especially because of its emphasis on the dominant role of industry in doing the polluting. Strongly recommended

So apart from the odd personal post about the song thrush in my own garden, how does ‘distributed research’ relate to the environment? Well I can think of many ways, not least of which is the subject of home working which I have been writing about for some time. Home working or telecommuting is hugely beneficial to the environment in terms of energy, materials, carbon emissions and congestion but of course it will take a major transformation in the economy before homeworking can become an option for more than a small minority of people who happen to work in the “information” industries. The technology already exists for a low impact economy to be viable without loss of quality of life, indeed it will be greatly improved, but first there is a mountain of vested interest in the status quo which needs to be shifted and for that, individual action is not enough. There needs to be a fundamental policy change, which in turn requires a thorough regime change on all political and economic levels. Taking steps towards bringing about these political changes are the only actions which will actually make any progress towards the eventual rescue of the planet. Changing the bathroom light bulb, all by yourself, and then feeling better about it may on the other hand, be a step towards allowing the present system to continue on its path of anarchic destruction of everything.

Blog action day is a form of collaborative mass action, even if it only consists of writing. The important thing is that the mass action can become self-conscious. The online equivalent to being able to feel the strength of a quarter of a million people in Trafalgar Square will be the results of tracking thousands of posts tagged with the words “blog action day”, the recognition and mutual commenting which will go on between bloggers, and the continuation of the developing conversation for days and weeks after Bog Action Day is over.
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/...-is-not-enough





Group Plans to Provide Investigative Journalism
Richard Pérez-Peña

As struggling newspapers across the country cut back on investigative reporting, a new kind of journalism venture is hoping to fill the gap.

Paul E. Steiger, who was the top editor of The Wall Street Journal for 16 years, and a pair of wealthy Californians are assembling a group of investigative journalists who will give away their work to media outlets.

The nonprofit group, called Pro Publica, will pitch each project to a newspaper or magazine (and occasionally to other media) where the group hopes the work will make the strongest impression. The plan is to do long-term projects, uncovering misdeeds in government, business and organizations.

Nothing quite like it has been attempted, and despite having a lot going for it, Pro Publica will be something of an experiment, inventing its practices by trial and error. It remains to be seen how well it can attract talent and win the cooperation of the mainstream media.

“It is the deep-dive stuff and the aggressive follow-up that is most challenged in the budget process,” said Mr. Steiger, who will be Pro Publica’s president and editor in chief. He gave up the title of managing editor of The Journal in May, but is staying on through the end of the year as editor at large; during his tenure, the newsroom won 16 Pulitzer Prizes.

Pro Publica is the creation of Herbert M. and Marion O. Sandler, the former chief executives of the Golden West Financial Corporation, based in California, which was one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders and savings and loans. They have committed $10 million a year to the project, while various foundations have provided smaller amounts. Mr. Sandler will serve as chairman of the group, which will begin operations early next year.

The Sandlers are also major Democratic political donors and critics of President Bush. Last year, they sold Golden West to the Wachovia Corporation for about $26 billion, a deal which valued their personal shares at about $2.4 billion.

Pro Publica plans to establish a newsroom in New York City and have 24 journalists, one of the biggest investigative staffs in any medium, along with about a dozen other employees. Mr. Steiger said he envisions a mix of accomplished reporters and editors, including some hired from major publications, and talented people with only a few years’ experience, so that the group will become a training ground for investigative reporters. He would not say specifically where he is shopping for talent, but did not rule out The Journal.

Richard J. Tofel, a former assistant publisher and assistant managing editor of The Journal, has been hired as general manager. Board members will include Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar of African and African-American studies; Alberto Ibarguen, a former publisher of The Miami Herald, who is currently president and chief executive of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; James A. Leach, a former congressman from Iowa who directs Harvard’s Institute of Politics; and Rebecca Rimel, president and chief executive of the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The nearest parallels to Pro Publica may be the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, groups that support in-depth work and have had considerable success getting it published or broadcast in mainstream media. But their budgets are a fraction of Pro Publica’s, and they do not actually employ most of the journalists whose work they help finance.

Pro Publica will provide salaries and benefits comparable to the biggest newspapers, Mr. Steiger said. “I won’t be offering somebody 50 grand or 100 grand more than they’re making to jump ship, nor will I ask them to take a pay cut,” he said.

Newspapers routinely publish articles from wire services, and many of them also subscribe to the major papers’ news services and reprint their articles. But except for fairly routine news wire service articles, the largest newspapers have generally been reluctant to use reporting from other organizations.

But experts say that resistance is breaking down as the business is squeezed financially, and newspapers make greater use of freelance journalists.

“They’re looking for alternative means of paying for ambitious journalism,” said Stephen B. Shepard, dean of the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism and a former editor of BusinessWeek. “Steiger has the credibility and judgment to bring this off, and if they do good work, it will get picked up.”

Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, said The Times would be open to using work from an outside source, “assuming we were confident of its quality,” but that “we’ll always have a preference for work we can vouch for ourselves.”

Mr. Steiger said that relationships with publications could be tricky, requiring the flexibility to make each comfortable.

In most cases, he said, Pro Publica will appeal to a newspaper or magazine while a project is under way, to gauge interest and how much oversight the publication wants. In others, he said, his group might present more or less finished products to other outlets.

If Pro Publica and a publication cannot agree on how to approach a topic, or what can be written about it, he said, his group will look for another outlet, or publish its reporting on its own Web site.

Mr. Sandler said his interest in investigative journalism has been abetted by friendships with reporters in the field.

“Both my father and my older brother always focused on the underdog, justice, ethics, what’s right,” Mr. Sandler said. “All of my life I’ve been driven crazy whenever I encounter corruption, malfeasance, mendacity, but particularly where those in power take advantage of those who have few resources.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/bu...15publica.html





Sheriff’s Fight With Paper Flares Up Again
Richard Pérez-Peña

A long-running dispute between a weekly newspaper in Phoenix and law enforcement officials took a series of sharp turns over the last two days, including the arrest of the newspaper owners, followed by the dismissal of charges against them and an investigation into their paper.

For years, prosecutors in Maricopa County weighed whether to take the rare step of charging the leaders of the paper, The Phoenix New Times, with a crime for publishing an article with the home address of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County. This week, that conflict abruptly escalated.

On Thursday, the newspaper accused the authorities of abuses of power in their investigation into The New Times, reporting that a prosecutor had obtained a subpoena for the Internet browsing records on thousands of its readers.

On Thursday night, the two principal owners, Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, were arrested and charged with illegally disclosing the inner workings of a grand jury, a misdemeanor.

But by late afternoon yesterday, it was all over. The owners were free, the charges against them were dropped, and the underlying investigation ended.

“It has become clear to me the investigation has gone in a direction I would not have authorized,” County Attorney Andrew P. Thomas said.

Mr. Thomas dismissed the new charges, the original investigation and the special prosecutor who was working on the case.

Mr. Lacey said he was stunned by the turnabout.

“I thought when I first heard this from one of our reporters that he was pulling my leg,” he said.

Mr. Larkin and Mr. Lacey have run The Phoenix New Times since the 1970s, and they control its parent company, now called Village Voice Media, which also owns The Village Voice in New York and other papers. Mr. Lacey is the executive editor and Mr. Larkin is the publisher.

In 2004, The New Times reported on the real-estate holdings of Sheriff Arpaio. The paper said he had concealed his ownership of some properties and questioned how he could have afforded them on his salary. One article included, in print and online, Sheriff Arpaio’s home address.

A state law makes it a felony to disclose the home address of a law enforcement figure on the Internet — though not in print. Allies of the sheriff said the publication had endangered him because he has been the subject of death threats.

The New Times said the address was available through multiple public sources, including government Web sites.

Mr. Thomas is a political ally of Sheriff Arpaio who has also clashed with The New Times. He recused himself from the question of whether the newspaper had committed a crime.

Last summer, Dennis I. Wilenchik, a lawyer who had done extensive work for Sheriff Arpaio and Mr. Thomas, was named a special prosecutor to handle the investigation, working under Mr. Thomas.

On Thursday, the paper published an article by Mr. Lacey and Mr. Larkin reporting the existence of Mr. Wilenchik’s grand jury investigation and of the subpoena he had obtained for the paper’s records.

The subpoena, reproduced on The New Times Web site, sought the names and Internet addresses of all people who have viewed the site since Jan. 1, 2004, whether or not they had read about the sheriff’s real-estate holdings.

The subpoena also demanded information on readers’ “cookies,” which would show what other Web sites they had visited.

“That subpoena is grossly, shockingly, breathtakingly overbroad,” said James Weinstein, a professor of constitutional law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. “This is a case of harassment of the press.”

Professor Weinstein also questioned whether any charges brought in the original case, for publishing the sheriff’s address, would stand up to a legal challenge.

Clint Bolick, litigation director at the Goldwater Institute, a conservative policy study group, said The New Times was correct that the subpoena was an abuse of power and right to risk prosecution by exposing it.

“This is the most sweeping deprivation of privacy and First Amendment rights I’ve ever seen in a subpoena, on the basis of what appears to be a relatively slight legal infraction, the publication of the sheriff’s address,” Mr. Bolick said.

The New Times article also described an effort by Mr. Wilenchik to set up a private conversation with the judge overseeing the case that the judge disclosed and criticized as improper in a closed hearing.

The Arizona State Bar said yesterday that it had begun an investigation into Mr. Wilenchik’s conduct.

The bar is already investigating him and Mr. Thomas for publicly criticizing Maricopa County judges this month. That incident drew a rebuke of the prosecutors from the editorial page of The Arizona Republic, the largest newspaper in the region.

Calls to Mr. Wilenchik’s office yesterday were not returned. A spokesman for Sheriff Arpaio said he would not comment.

Mr. Thomas said yesterday that he had not been aware of the extent of the subpoena and other elements of the case until the last two days.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/bu...20arizona.html





Big Holder Sells Stake in Times Co.
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Geraldine Fabrikant

Morgan Stanley has sold its 7.2 percent stake in The New York Times Company, people close to the matter said yesterday, bringing an end to a bitter fight between one of the bank’s asset managers and the company.

Over the last two years, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, led by the fund’s manager, Hassan Elmasry, had been conducting a campaign to press the company to change its dual-class share structure, which allows the members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to control the company through a special class of stock.

Mr. Elmasry, through a series of letters and conversations with directors, management and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and chairman, criticized the company’s capital structure, compensation and strategy as well as its decision to build its new headquarters.

While Mr. Elmasry’s exit may represent a victory for the Sulzberger family, it did nothing to turn around the stock’s fortunes. The shares stock closed at $18.48, down 2.27 percent for the day, and down from a peak of $53 in 2002. The last time the stock closed this low was in January 1997.

Morgan Stanley began buying Times stock in 1996, before Mr. Elmasry was running the fund. A spokeswoman for Morgan Stanley said the company lost money on its Times holdings, but she could not quantify the losses.

A spokesman for Mr. Elmasry said he was traveling overseas and could not be reached for comment. In a statement, Morgan Stanley said: “As a matter of policy, Morgan Stanley Investment Management does not publicly comment on changes in its portfolio.”

The New York Times Company, through a spokeswoman, also declined to comment.

Now that Mr. Elmasry is out of the picture, it is unclear how much pressure other large shareholders might exert on the company. Executives at T. Rowe Price and Private Capital Management, two other major investors, declined to comment.

But whatever their sentiments may be, investors have little leverage to bring about change as long as the Sulzberger family continues to support the status quo. Class B shareholders at the Times Company have the power to elect 70 percent of the company’s directors and the Sulzberger family controls 89 percent of Class B shares. Class A investors can elect only 30 percent of the board.

Such structures have been hotly debated in the last few years, as the entire newspaper industry has been hit by a series of seismic shocks. Last year, Knight Ridder was bought by the McClatchy Company and broken up. Earlier this year, the Tribune Company was taken private in a complicated deal engineered by the real estate developer Samuel Zell. In August, Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, accepted a bid from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

More recently, both the Belo Corporation and E.W. Scripps & Company announced they were splitting off their newspapers from their more profitable television assets.

In July, the Times Company announced it would seek to cut operating costs by $230 million over the next two years. But the company has steadfastly rejected making any drastic changes to its corporate structure.

Peter Appert, a media analyst at Goldman Sachs, said that “you can’t do battle with a company that has dual classes of stock and family ownership structure.”

“The dual class ownership structure of The New York Times Company gives the family solid control of the company. And while Mr. Elmasry raised some very good points in terms of what he would like to see changed, the reality was that he has no leverage.”

Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, said the Morgan Stanley sale was a victory for the company’s efforts to stay independent and under family control. He said Mr. Elmasry “has given up on trying to change the fundamental governance of The New York Times Company, which preserves The Times’s traditional focus on journalism ahead of profit.”

Morgan Stanley Investment Management had been a shareholder since 1996 through its Global Franchise fund. The fund, based in London, takes large positions in a small number of companies that it believes are undervalued and have singular global brands.

The first time that Morgan Stanley owned more than 5 percent of Times Company stock, requiring a public filing, was in April 2006, when filings showed that it owned 6.9 million shares, or 5.5 percent of the company. Three months later, its stake had risen to 8.9 million shares; by October 2006, Morgan owned 7.62 percent of the company, or 10.9 million shares. From April and July, the stock traded in the range of $22.77 a share to $25.42.

At the annual meeting n April, in a protest led by Mr. Elmasry, shareholders representing 42 percent of the Class A shares withheld votes for directors. The votes withheld represented more than half the investors who are not part of the Ochs-Sulzberger family, and were a significant increase from the 30 percent withheld at the annual meeting last year.

In an unrelated development that underscored the difficulties facing the newspaper industry, Morgan Stanley confirmed that it had dismissed Lisa Monaco, a newspaper analyst, as part of yesterday’s layoff of 300 employees worldwide. Several people familiar with the company’s thinking said that Morgan Stanley did not plan to continue its coverage of the newspaper industry.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/bu...a/18paper.html





Plan Would Ease F.C.C. Restriction on Media Owners
Stephen LaBaton

The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the commission, wants to repeal the rule in the next two months — a plan that, if successful, would be a big victory for some executives of media conglomerates.

Among them are Samuel Zell, the Chicago investor who is seeking to complete a buyout of the Tribune Company, and Rupert Murdoch, who has lobbied against the rule for years so that he can continue controlling both The New York Post and a Fox television station in New York.

The proposal appears to have the support of a majority of the five commission members, agency officials said, although it is not clear that Mr. Martin would proceed with a sweeping deregulatory approach on a vote of 3 to 2 — something his predecessor tried without success. In interviews on Wednesday, the agency’s two Democratic members raised questions about Mr. Martin’s approach.

Mr. Martin said he was striving to reach a consensus with his fellow commissioners, both on the schedule and on the underlying rule changes, although he would not say whether he would move the measures forward if he were able to muster only three votes.

“We’ve had six hearings around the country already; we’ve done numerous studies; we’ve been collecting data for the last 18 months; and the issues have been pending for years,” Mr. Martin said in an interview. “I think it is an appropriate time to begin a discussion to complete this rule-making and complete these media ownership issues.”

Officials said the commission would consider loosening the restrictions on the number of radio and television stations a company could own in the same city.

Currently, a company can own two television stations in the larger markets only if at least one is not among the four largest stations and if there are at least eight local stations. The rules also limit the number of radio stations that a company can own to no more than eight in each of the largest markets.

The deregulatory proposal is likely to put the agency once again at the center of a debate between the media companies, which view the restrictions as anachronistic, and civil rights, labor, religious and other groups that maintain the government has let media conglomerates grow too large.

As advertising increasingly migrates from newspapers to the Internet, the newspaper industry has undergone a wave of upheaval and consolidation. That has put new pressure on regulators to loosen ownership rules. But deregulation in the media is difficult politically, because many Republican and Democratic lawmakers are concerned about news outlets in their districts being too tightly controlled by too few companies.

In recent months, industry executives had all but abandoned the hope that regulators would try to modify the ownership rules in the waning days of the Bush administration.

“This is a big deal because we have way too much concentration of media ownership in the United States,” Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, said at a hearing on Wednesday called to examine the digital transition of the television industry.

“If the chairman intends to do something by the end of the year,” Mr. Dorgan added, his voice rising, “then there will be a firestorm of protest and I’m going to be carrying the wood.”

Supporters of the changes say that the rules are outdated and that there is ample empirical evidence to support their repeal. A small number of media companies, including The New York Times Company, are able to own both a newspaper and a radio station in the same city because the cross-ownership restrictions, which went into effect in 1974, were not applied retroactively.

Mr. Martin faces obstacles within the agency to overhauling the rules. One Democrat on the commission, Michael J. Copps, is adamantly opposed to loosening the rules. The other, Jonathan S. Adelstein, has said that the agency first needs to address other media issues, including encouraging improved coverage of local events and greater ownership of stations by companies controlled by women and minorities.

Advisers to Mr. Martin said he hoped to gain the support of at least one of the Democrats, probably Mr. Adelstein, but Mr. Adelstein said in an interview on Wednesday that Mr. Martin’s proposed timetable was “awfully aggressive.”

Three years ago, the commission lost a major court challenge to its last effort, led by Michael K. Powell, its chairman at the time, to relax the media ownership rules. The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, concluded that the commission had failed to adequately justify the new rules. Mr. Martin’s proposal would presumably include new evidence aimed at fending off similar legal challenges.

Mr. Powell’s effort, which had been supported by lobbyists for broadcasters, newspapers and major media conglomerates, provoked a wave of criticism from a broad coalition of opponents. Among them were the National Organization for Women, the National Rifle Association, the Parents Television Council and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The agency was flooded with nearly three million comments against changing the rules, the most it has ever received in a rule-making process.

Since the appeals court struck down the deregulatory changes, the commission has continued to study the issues at a leisurely pace, and it held a series of hearings around the nation. It had not made any new proposals, and industry executives had not expected the agency to move again so soon.

But in recent days, Mr. Martin has proposed to expedite the rule-making and hold a final vote in December. In part, he has told commission officials, he was reacting to criticism by Mr. Copps about temporary waivers that have allowed companies to own newspapers and stations in the same market.

Mr. Zell has said he wants to complete his $8.2 billion buyout of Tribune Company by the end of the year. Tribune had been granted what were supposed to be temporary waivers to the rule to allow it to control newspapers and television stations in five cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Hartford and the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area.

Mr. Copps, who for years has waged a campaign against media consolidation, said that it would be hard for the commission to proceed during an election year because media consolidation has provoked deep public skepticism in the past.

He said Mr. Martin’s proposal to complete a relaxation of the rules in December would require procedural shortcuts, giving the public too little time to comment on the proposals and industry experts too little time to weigh their impact on news operations.

“We shouldn’t be doing anything without having a credible process and nothing should be done to get in the way of Congressional oversight and more importantly, public oversight,” Mr. Copps said in a telephone interview from London. “We’ve got to have that public scrutiny. That was one of the big mistakes that Mr. Powell made, and he was taken to the woodshed by the Third Circuit. I fear it is déjà vu all over again.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/bu...adcast.html?hp





3rd Circuit Upholds FCC's Deregulation of High-Speed Internet Access
Shannon P. Duffy

In a victory for big telephone companies, a federal appeals court has upheld a ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that effectively deregulated high-speed Internet access service provided over traditional telephone lines.

In its September 2005 ruling, the FCC relieved telephone companies of decades-old regulations that required them to grant competing Internet service providers "nondiscriminatory" access to their wirelines in order to reach consumers.

Challenging the ruling in the three consolidated appeals, captioned Time Warner Telecom Inc. v. FCC, were independent Internet service providers, competing telecommunications service providers, cable modem providers and several public interest organizations.

The FCC's order now allows telephone companies to enter into individually negotiated arrangements with companies that seek access to their broadband wireline facilities.

In the appeals, the independent providers argued that the FCC's order effectively allows telephone companies to deny competitors access to their wirelines, thereby resulting in decreased competition and consumer choice in the market for broadband Internet service.

Time Warner's lawyer, David P. Murray of Wilkie Farr & Gallagher in Washington, D.C., argued that if the dominant telephone companies were not forced to make their transmission lines available to competitive providers of Internet access, they would be free to target their investments in network upgrades so that they would be available only to their own Internet access services.

The result, Murray argued, would be a disparity in service between the broadband Internet access service offered by telephone companies and their competitors, giving the telephone companies "the ability to raise prices unilaterally on their higher-quality services without fear of losing market share."

But lawyers for the FCC argued that the agency properly decided to abandon the regulations because they "imposed significant costs" on telephone companies, "thereby impeding innovation and investment in new broadband technologies and services."

Now a unanimous three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the FCC's decision simply extended the logic of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 ruling in National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services.
In Brand X, the justices upheld a previous FCC ruling that said cable companies provide an "information service" rather than a "telecommunications service" and therefore should not be forced to share their infrastructure with Internet service providers.

Soon after, the FCC handed down its "Wireline Broadband Order" to extend the same rules to telephone companies.

In the order, the FCC said it had determined that "like cable modem service (which is usually provided over the provider's own facilities), wireline broadband Internet access service combines computer processing, information provision, and data transport, enabling end users to run a variety of applications" such as e-mail and surfing the Internet.

The FCC concluded that, due to the similarity between how end users perceive Internet access -- whether provided by wireline or cable modem providers -- its decision to classify wireline broadband Internet access service as an "information service" logically flowed from the Supreme Court's Brand X decision.

The 3rd Circuit agreed, finding that the FCC's decision was entitled to deference.

"In our view, the record adequately supports the FCC's conclusion that, from the perspective of the end-user, wireline broadband service and cable modem service are functionally similar and, therefore, that they should be subject to the same regulatory classification under the Communications Act," U.S. Circuit Judge Julio M. Fuentes wrote.

Fuentes, in an opinion joined by 3rd Circuit Senior Judge Morton I. Greenberg and visiting Judge Alan D. Lourie of the Federal Circuit, also rejected the argument that the FCC's ruling was improper because it conflicted with past agency decisions.

"The FCC candidly admitted in the Wireline Broadband Order that past agency statements concerning the regulatory treatment of wireline broadband Internet access service had not been 'entirely consistent,' but nevertheless found that there was ample basis in its prior rulings to support its classification of wireline broadband Internet access service as a functionally integrated information service," Fuentes wrote.

Merely showing that an agency's ruling is in conflict with its prior decisions is not enough to invalidate it, Fuentes found.

"To the extent that the FCC's current classification of wireline broadband Internet access service conflicts with past agency rulings," Fuentes said, "Brand X makes clear that an 'an initial agency interpretation is not instantly carved in stone. On the contrary, the agency ... must consider varying interpretations and the wisdom of its policy on a continuing basis.'"

Fuentes also rejected the argument that the FCC's decision-making process was flawed because it failed to conduct a "full market analysis."

Attorney James M. Carr of the FCC's office of general counsel argued that the agency properly opted not to do a market analysis because it wanted to "avoid making highly dubious and premature conclusions about a nascent and dynamic market that is rapidly changing."

In its order, Carr said, the FCC explained that only 20 percent of consumers who have access to advanced telecommunications capability currently subscribe to services providing such capability, and that about 50 percent of U.S. households subscribe to either broadband or narrowband Internet access service.

Alternative broadband platforms are developing and emerging, Carr said, such as satellite, wireless and powerline, in both the residential and business markets.

By comparison, Carr said, the FCC found that the market for telephone services has had a market penetration rate of roughly 90 percent for more than 20 years.

As a result, Carr argued, in the FCC's view, "snapshot data" of the broadband service market "may quickly and predictably be rendered obsolete as the market continues to evolve."

Fuentes agreed, saying the FCC had properly considered "how the market for broadband services is likely to develop" and had predicted that "market penetration of cable modem and wireline broadband service will grow dramatically in the future and that the two services will compete head-to-head."

The FCC also predicted that both cable and wireline services will continue to invest in and expand the reach of their services, Fuentes noted, and that emerging broadband platforms will exert competitive pressure and gain market share.

As a result, Fuentes said, "We agree with the FCC that these reasons justified its decision to refrain from a traditional market analysis and to rely instead on larger trends and predictions concerning the future of the broadband services market."
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1192525413109





Sending Up Satellites and Closing the Digital Divide
William J. Holstein

SATELLITES have not proved as important to high-speed communications as telephone and cable lines have. But they do have an important role in helping close the digital divide between people who have access to broadband communications and those who do not, says Pradman P. Kaul, chief executive of Hughes Communications, based in Germantown, Md. Mr. Kaul’s company recently launched a $310 million satellite to improve its service in the American market. He has been involved in satellite communications for nearly four decades, since earning a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968.

Here are excerpts from a conversation:

Q. It seems that Americans communicate more via high-speed cable and digital subscriber telephone lines than via satellites, suggesting that satellites have not lived up to their promise. Do you agree?

A. No, each technology has its place, and its advantages in terms of applications and when it’s used. Clearly, significantly more bits of data are transmitted on cable and DSL than satellite, but what satellites do well is broadcast and multicast applications, as in the case of DirecTV and EchoStar broadcasting television. They have close to 30 million subscribers. In almost every country in the world, direct-to-home television is going great guns.

A second thing satellites are very good at is, once you put a bit up on a satellite it reaches anywhere in the region that the satellite is serving. There is no place in North America that you can’t reach. The ubiquitous coverage that satellites offer is a major advantage. For broadband Internet access capabilities, there are probably 15 million households in the United States who don’t get it and will not get it for a long time. So satellites play a great role in bridging the digital divide.

Q. Why aren’t cable and telephone companies making a stronger effort to reach all Americans?

A. It’s an economic issue. The cost of running a piece of wire or a piece of optic fiber is high, and it requires a density of subscribers to give them an economic return on the investment. In rural areas, the economics just don’t pay out. With satellites, it doesn’t cost any more to reach the one guy sitting on top of the mountain in the state of Washington than it does the guy in downtown Manhattan.

Q. Can you offer as fast and as robust communications as the cable and telephone companies?

A. The service is robust and in some cases offers a higher level of reliability than you get from cable and DSL. In terms of speed, that’s an economic issue. We just launched a new satellite called Spaceway 3 that will be in service in the United States by January of next year. The speeds that satellite offers can match any speed that is available terrestrially. The question is what you charge for it?

Q. Did the failure of Motorola’s Iridium project, which was supposed to provide worldwide voice and data service for anyone with a handset, cast a pall over the broader field of satellite communications?

A. It obviously did not do what it was supposed to do. There were a whole bunch of issues that caused it not to reach its original objectives. That was a different application from ours. It was for mobile phones. What they did was build a constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit, so they were constantly moving to be able to handle the mobility. It was a much more complex, difficult market. What we’re trying to do is different. We’re using fixed satellites. We don’t rely on 60 satellites working together in unison.

Q. Why have satellites been more useful for entertainment than for sending data like e-mail messages?

A. If you are broadcasting a football game, you’re sending the same football game to every home. With a satellite, you only send it up once and 200 million homes in the United States can receive it. The economics of that are incredible as opposed to sending the football game individually to each home via wires. You’d be sending it 200 million times.

Q. What is the divide between those who have access to high-speed communications versus those who don’t? Is it an urban-rural split?

A. It’s actually rural and suburban where people don’t have it. It amazes me sometimes when I look at it. Even in major Washington, D.C., suburbs, which is our neighborhood, there are big pockets where you can’t get DSL or cable.

Q. How will satellite compete against cable and telephone companies as those companies seek to offer all three forms of communication, meaning voice, data and entertainment?

A. You’re talking about the triple play concept. The cable guys are now beginning to offer people not only television entertainment, but also broadband data and telephone service. The phone companies are beginning to put fiber to the homes so in addition to the voice and data, they can offer the entertainment channels. So yes, I think you’re going to see the triple plays, but there’s still a big market for people to offer single services but offer them well and offer them economically.

Q. How fast can your company grow?

A. In the United States, we have more than 350,000 residential subscribers. In the next two or three years, we hope to get to one million residential subscriptions. In addition, we have a strong enterprise business. We have hundreds of Fortune 2000 customers and their whole data networks.

Q. Why did you have a French company, Ariane, launch your satellite from the South Pacific?

A. Launching is a very small industry. There are only three or four companies that launch satellites of the size that we built.

Q. Did you go to watch it being launched into space?

A. Yes, it was exciting, especially when it’s your own satellite. It’s a unique thrill. It was a great day for all of us.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/te...interview.html





U.N. Agency Gives Boost to WiMax
Victoria Shannon

The United Nations telecommunications agency in Geneva gave the upstart technology called WiMax a vote of approval, providing a sizable victory for Intel and something of a defeat for competing technologies from Qualcomm and Ericsson.

The International Telecommunication Union’s radio assembly agreed late Thursday to include WiMax, a wireless technology that allows Internet and other data connections across much broader areas than Wi-Fi, as part of what is called the third-generation family of mobile standards.

That endorsement opens the way for many of the union’s member countries to devote a part of the public radio spectrum to WiMax, and receivers for it could be built into laptop computers, phones, music players and other portable devices.

Unlike Wi-Fi, this mobile Internet technology can hand off a signal from antenna to antenna, thus allowing a device to hold a connection while in motion. WiMax potentially can move data at 70 megabits a second across 65 kilometers, or 40 miles. Current fixed-line broadband connections have speeds of about 2 megabits a second.

The approval, which came in the form of a consensus of the radio assembly ahead of the World Radiocommunication Conference next week in Geneva, gives WiMax a leg up on Ultra Mobile Broadband, an alternative technology from Qualcomm, and Long-Term Evolution, an equivalent from Ericsson.

Intel has been promoting and investing in WiMax for the last three years and led “a pretty substantial amount of lobbying” to prove its case and get the union’s stamp on the technology, said Sriram Viswanathan, vice president of Intel Capital, the company’s strategic investment program, and general manager of its WiMax business.

The radio technology is the first to be added to the specifications for third-generation radio standards since the union approved them a decade ago.

Even before the union’s endorsement, WiMax had been gathering momentum with Intel’s weight behind it. Lenovo, Acer and a few other makers of personal computers recently committed to using Intel’s WiMax chips, which are expected to reach the market in May. Nokia said last month that it would make its N-series of tablet devices with WiMax when they go on sale next year.

Japan, Britain and Switzerland have scheduled auctions in the coming months to allocate licenses in the radio frequency in which WiMax operates, 2.5 to 2.69 gigahertz.

But WiMax is not universally cheered. Gary D. Forsee resigned as chief executive of Sprint Nextel last week amid doubts about his strategy, which includes $5 billion to roll out a commercially unproven WiMax network. Sprint Nextel’s WiMax partner, Clearwire, introduced an access card this week for laptops for its high-speed network.

Qualcomm said Friday that it "remains dedicated" to providing the technologies, including WiMax, that its operators choose.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/te...y/20wimax.html





In Search of Wireless Wiggle Room
Judith Chevalier

I RECENTLY watched a YouTube clip of a young man removing the memory chip from his iPhone with his teeth, in an attempt to “unlock” the device for use on a network other than the AT&T system for which the phone was exclusively sold. His gyrations were a particularly vivid reminder of the limits imposed on cellphones by the companies that run national wireless networks in the United States.

But there are signs that the existing order in the wireless world may finally be changing.

This month, despite the opposition of companies like Verizon, the Federal Communications Commission reiterated that its coming auction of wireless spectrum would include rules intended to give consumers more choices in the phones they can use. These “open access” auction rules have already received considerable attention, but the commission also faces other decisions that will significantly affect the availability and the price of wireless service.

For decades, the F.C.C. has allocated almost all the prime frequencies available for communication for the exclusive use of licensees and since the 1990s, it has emphasized auctions for allocating that spectrum. Economists mostly applauded the move to the auction system, because it subjected prospective licenses to a market test: the F.C.C. no longer had to try to divine who would make the most productive use of the spectrum; the companies that were willing to pay the most at auction would win.

Not all of the spectrum is auctioned, however. Some of it is left “unlicensed” — meaning that no one has exclusive rights to it. Baby monitors, garage door openers and Wi-Fi all work on unlicensed parts of the spectrum, in a kind of free-for-all. As technology improves to prevent these devices from stumbling over one another’s signals, the argument for leaving part of the spectrum unlicensed grows stronger as well.

In the past, when the F.C.C. auctioned spectrum for cellular service, it allowed the winners to determine the equipment and applications that would run on their networks. That created the current status quo, in which a vast majority of American consumers buy a handset from a wireless service provider.

The open-access rules, which will apply to about one-third of the spectrum being sold at the auction, represent a significant departure from past practice. They require the winners to let consumers use any tested, safe and compatible device or application on its network. Entrepreneurs could sell handsets with capabilities that are unavailable — or unavailable at affordable prices — from current carriers. As long as a manufacturer offered a product compatible with a network, the consumer could use that product — without needing to take measures like unlocking it with his teeth.

The spectrum in the coming auction is low frequency, which means that a signal using it could travel long distances and penetrate walls, making it very appealing for a national wireless network. Because the signal travels well, for example, fewer towers would be needed. Thus, it is possible that a new network could emerge from the auction to compete with the four existing national carriers.

Although the open-access rules could lead to innovation in devices and applications, they might not do much to increase competition among carriers. Preventing an influx of additional competition would be valuable for the big existing carriers, so they may bid aggressively enough that no new carriers will win significant licenses at the auction.

Both Google and Frontline Wireless — a start-up whose vice chairman is Reed E. Hundt, a former F.C.C. chairman — lobbied the commission to effectively force new entry into the market by imposing added restrictions on auction winners. They argued that winners should be forced to resell use of the spectrum at wholesale rates, a provision the F.C.C. did not adopt. The idea was that this spectrum could support multiple services, creating competition and driving down prices.

Having missed the opportunity to include these provisions in the coming auction, the F.C.C. will have another chance this year to create cheaper wireless broadband services. Google and other technology companies, including Dell, Philips and Microsoft, are part of a group called the White Space Coalition that is asking the F.C.C. to open up the empty space between assigned TV channels to unlicensed users and devices.

The idea would work like this: In many areas, not all broadcast channels are in use. The unused channels are “white spaces” of high-quality spectrum that could be made available to local Internet service providers. Unlike the much higher frequency of Wi-Fi, television broadcast frequencies can travel for miles and penetrate walls, providing a much broader range for Internet service. Because the unused channels vary across the country, the group proposes that consumers be able to buy generic devices, like PC cards for Wi-Fi, that would search for open frequencies and connect to a service.

Big cities tend to have many TV stations. That means there would be more white-space opportunity in rural areas, which also tend to be underserved by wired broadband services. If the plan worked, rural America could be dotted with high-speed wireless Internet service providers — like having a Starbucks on every corner, minus the coffee.

The catch? Television broadcasters argue that these services would interfere with digital television reception. The National Association of Broadcasters has run TV spots depicting doomsday — an increasingly irritated woman banging on her TV because, “if Microsoft and other high-tech companies have their way, your TV could freeze up and become unwatchable.”

Interference with broadcast television wouldn’t affect the more than 80 percent of television-viewing households who don’t watch over-the-air TV anyway. And it wouldn’t be a problem if the white-space gadgets work as intended, avoiding frequencies where there is any conflict. Unfortunately, that is not a given: a Microsoft device failed F.C.C. engineering tests earlier this year.

The F.C.C. has shown some bravery in maintaining the open-access auction rules, despite efforts to dismantle them. Now the commission needs to deal with the arguments of the broadcasters.

While there is certainly a risk that white-space Internet devices could interfere with some television signals, the potential for cheap, accessible wireless broadband is too great to pass up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/bu...ia/21view.html





Politeness and Authority at a Hilltop College in Minnesota
Verlyn Klinkenborg

Last week I spent a couple of days in western Minnesota, giving a talk and visiting some classes at Gustavus Adolphus College. The campus covers a hill above the small town of St. Peter, and the wind cuts across it like old news from the west. Gustavus Adolphus is a Lutheran college. I asked a couple of students how it differs from St. Olaf College — another Lutheran institution in a small Minnesota town, where I once taught — and they said, “They’re Norwegian. We’re Swedish.”

Once, a town like St. Peter would have seemed like destination enough. After all, small farm towns with good colleges are not that common. But now, more and more of the faculty live in the Twin Cities, an hour and a half away, and, as one professor told me, the college describes itself to new recruits in terms of its distance from a city, not its presence in a town.

I sat in on four classes, which were marred only by politeness — the deep-keeled Minnesotan politeness that states, as a life proposition, that you should not put yourself forward, not even to the raising of a hand in class.

Things always warmed up, but those first lingering notes of hesitation were something to behold. I tried to think of it as modesty, consideration for others and reluctance in the presence of a guest — from New York nonetheless. And yet I kept wondering just how such bright, personable students had become acculturated to their own silence. I had grown up in a similar place and knew a little how they felt, but that was a long time ago.

Midway through lunch one day a young woman asked me if I noticed a difference between the writing of men and the writing of women. The answer is no, but it’s a good question. A writer’s fundamental problem, once her prose is under control, is shaping and understanding her own authority. I’ve often noticed a habit of polite self-negation among my female students, a self-deprecatory way of talking that is meant, I suppose, to help create a sense of shared space, a shared social connection. It sounds like the language of constant apology, and the form I often hear is the sentence that begins, “My problem is ...”

Even though this way of talking is conventional, and perhaps socially placating, it has a way of defining a young writer — a young woman — in negative terms, as if she were basically incapable and always giving offense. You simply cannot pretend that the words you use about yourself have no meaning. Why not, I asked, be as smart and perceptive as you really are? Why not accept what you’re capable of? Why not believe that what you notice matters?

Another young woman at the table asked — this is a bald translation — won’t that make us seem too tough, too masculine? I could see the subtext in her face: who will love us if we’re like that? I’ve heard other young women, with more experience, ask this question in a way that means, Won’t the world punish us for being too sure of ourselves? This is the kind of thing that happens when you talk about writing. You always end up talking about life.

These are poignant questions, and they always give me pause, because they allow me to see, as nothing else does, the cultural frame these young women have grown up in. I can hear them questioning the very nature of their perceptions, doubting the evidence of their senses, distrusting the clarity of their thoughts.

And yet that is the writer’s work — to notice and question the act of noticing, to clarify again and again, to sift one’s perceptions. I’m always struck by how well fitted these young women are to be writers, if only there weren’t also something within them saying, Who cares what you notice? Who authorized you? Don’t you owe someone an apology?

Every young writer, male or female, Minnesotan or otherwise, faces questions like these at first. It’s a delicate thing, coming to the moment when you realize that your perceptions do count and that your writing can encompass them. You begin to understand how quiet, how subtle the writer’s authority really is, how little it has to do with “authority” as we usually use the word.

Young men have a way of coasting right past that point of realization without even noticing it, which is one of the reasons the world is full of male writers. But for young women, it often means a real transposition of self, a new knowledge of who they are and, in some cases, a forbidding understanding of whom they’ve been taught to be.

Perhaps the world will punish them for this confidence. Perhaps their self-possession will chase away everyone who can’t accept it for what it is, which may not be a terrible thing. But whenever I see this transformation — a young woman suddenly understanding the power of her perceptions, ready to look at the world unapologetically — I realize how much has been lost because of the culture of polite, self-negating silence in which they were raised.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/opinion/15mon4.html





Xerox Document Security Blocks Access to Sensitive Data
Layer 8

Xerox today touted software it says can scan documents, understand their meaning and block access to those sensitive or secure areas so that prying eyes cannot read, copy or forward the information.

Xerox and researchers from its Palo Alto Research Center debuted "Intelligent Redaction," new software that automates the process of removing confidential information from any document. The software includes a detection tool that uses content analysis and an intelligent user interface to protect sensitive information. It can encrypt only the sensitive sections or paragraphs of a document, a capability previously not available, Xerox said. The software also creates an audit trail for tracking access.

After information has been classified, that same information will be automatically redacted if it appears in other documents. the "intelligence" ensures a consistent level of security, saves time and increases redaction accuracy, Xerox said. Redaction is the ability to control what someone sees. For example, redaction traditionally has been used in legal documents to limit access to information protected by client-attorney privilege. The result is a document that has been censored; certain information within the document is blocked out, Xerox said in a statement.

Traditional redaction has two big drawbacks. It requires a labor-intensive manual process to identify sections to censor, and management of different versions of the same document is cumbersome and difficult, Xeros said. Current software encrypts whole documents, while Intelligent redaction understands document context so it can perform partial encryption. Only sensitive sections or paragraphs are encrypted, while the rest of the document is not.

Researcher see a ton of applications for the software. For example, in a hospital where security of medical record transfer needs to be ensured. Financial services and government dat transfers also depend heavily on secure documents.

Researchers said the software was still in development and did not release the cost of the package.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/20602





What’s Really Broken with Windows Update – Trust
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

On Friday I posted briefly about yet another potential problem with Windows Update. Initial investigations of PCs at the PC Doc HQ have turned up no leads but I have discovered something else that broken about Microsoft Windows Update mechanism - trust.

See, here’s the problem. To feel comfortable with having an open channel that allows your OS to be updated at the whim of a third party (even/especially* Microsoft … * delete as applicable) requires that the user trusts the third party not to screw around with the system in question. This means no fiddling on the sly, being clear about what the updates do and trying not to release updates that hose systems. While any and all updates have the potential to hose a system, there’s no excuse for hiding the true nature of updates and absolutely no excuse for pushing sneaky updates down the tubes. Over the months vigilant Windows users have caught Microsoft betraying user trust on several separate occasions and this behavior is eroding customer confidence in the entire update mechanism.

I have no doubt that an automatic update mechanism is an important feature of any modern operating system. Windows isn’t alone in having this kind of mechanism - both Mac OS X and Linux distros ship with similar features. Having the ability to automatically push critical security updates to vulnerable PCs keeps us all that little bit safer. Problem is, each time an incident that erodes confidence in the mechanism is reported, more people decide to pull the plug on updates and decide that it’s better to take their chances against the hackers and cyber criminals. This is a bad thing all round.

What bothers me more than the specific issues themselves is the attitude that Microsoft seems to take to reported issues. The overall impression that I get as someone who deals directly with the company is that Microsoft believes that it is right and anyone making a fuss is ultimately wrong. This doesn’t give me any confidence that the message that change is needed has been received and understood. I’ve had reassurances that there will be greater transparency in future, but I’ve yet to see any progress made here. Let’s have a little less conversation and a little more action people.

Some people feel that stealth updates and pushing WGA to users under the guise of a security update is paving the way for all sorts of nasty and restrictive DRM mechanisms to be pushed down the system. While I personally don’t take this view, it’s easy to see where these extreme ideas come from.

Personally, given the critical role that Windows Update plays in keeping the Windows ecosystem safer, I think it’s time for someone to come forward and claim responsibility for the mechanism, what’s pushed through it and how this is done. Something needs to be done to rebuild user confidence in the system.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=855





Looking for Napster 2.0

Nearly a decade after the now-bankrupt file-sharing company shook up the music business, entertainment companies are still eyeing peer-to-peer businesses warily.
Jon Healey

Eight years after the debut of Napster, the pioneering song-swapping service, file-sharing programs remain hugely popular among consumers -- and equally unpopular among the major record companies and movie studios. This disparity raises the question: If peer-to-peer networks are so good at distributing valuable content to audiences of millions, why hasn't anyone figured out a way to make money off of them?

It's not for lack of trying. Executives at the original Napster planned to convert the network into a subscription service, but the company went bankrupt before it could obtain licenses from all the major labels. One of Napster's contemporaries in the illegal file-sharing world, iMesh, got the licenses that Napster could not, but it hasn't shown the ability to convert masses of free downloaders into paying subscribers (the privately held company hasn't disclosed any data yet on its subscriptions). The former head of Grokster, Wayne Rosso, won the labels' support long ago for a p2p network called Mashboxx that blocked illegal downloads, but he's still in development and looking for cash.

The latest approaches pay less heed to selling downloads, focusing instead on hooking users with free content that can be monetized through advertising. These include Qtrax and the latest iteration of Mashboxx. Meanwhile, other p2p ventures, including Grooveshark, are supplementing downloads with on-demand streams. Whether any of them will succeed -- or, in several cases, whether they even get off the ground -- remains to be seen. But their business models reflect a shift in thinking about content online and how to make money off it.

The most conventional of the new breed of monetized p2p is Grooveshark, which is a throwback in a couple of ways. First, it features many of the annoyances of an unfiltered file-sharing network, most notably files with inconsistent or incomplete labels. That can turn searching for specific tracks into a chore. More significantly, Grooveshark has been talking to the labels and music publishers, but it launched without a full set of licenses. Therefore, much of what's happening on the network is, technically, copyright infringement. That doesn't bode well.

What's different about Grooveshark is its blend of Kazaa's try-before-you-buy capabilities with the iTunes Store's pricing. People can play songs from other users' collections for free -- that's the try-before-you-buy aspect -- but it costs 99 cents a track to download a permanent copy that can be burned onto CD or loaded onto an MP3 player. It also has a number of social-media features. Users can share playlists and browse through one another's collections, and they collect a commission on every track sold from their computer. That social layer, along with the software's ability to recommend artists similar to the ones being searched for, make for a richer experience than most p2p networks.

The company faces some non-trivial hurdles, starting with its reliance on unlocked MP3 files. That might be a market imperative from the consumer's point of view, but it has been a nonstarter for two of the four major record companies -- Warner Music Group and Sony BMG. And from a business model point of view, Grooveshark faces thin margins on the 99-cent downloads, and yet it has to pay royalties to the labels and music publishers every time a song is downloaded or streamed. (Company executives say they plan to pay the standard royalty rate for the downloads, plus a negotiated royalty on the streams.) If users do a lot of trying but not a lot of buying, the company will soon be bleeding cash.

Unlike Grooveshark, the as-yet unlaunched Qtrax won't try to build a file-sharing community from scratch. Instead, it wants to build its service on top of Gnutella and other existing p2p networks, giving its users access to the millions of files already shared there. And it isn't terribly interested in selling music; instead, it wants to sell ads and build ad campaigns around its users' downloading habits.

Qtrax uses audio fingerprints to identify the songs available through p2p networks, making them much easier to use and more reliable. Just as important, the fingerprint technology enables Qtrax to enforce the terms set by copyright owners. Examples include allowing songs to be downloaded freely, attaching electronic locks to disable them after a limited number of plays, or blocking them outright. The middle option is the one chosen by the major record companies, which have agreed to permit Qtrax users a handful of free plays before instructing them to buy a permanent copy.

The locks could prevent the service from working with Apple's iPod, by far the world's most popular MP3 player, because Apple hasn't agreed to let any other companies use its proprietary anti-piracy technology. But according to Qtrax CEO Allan Klepfisz, that sort of control is essential to unlocking the pent-up demand from advertisers to get into the p2p scene. Major advertisers stayed away from networks such as Kazaa because of the rampant piracy there. "Advertisers, because of fear, were sort of the last bastion of respect for copyrights," Klepfisz said in a recent interview. "Now that they can go into a legal arena, they're suggesting all sorts of creative campaigns," which should generate more revenue than the typical online ad.

Similarly, Rosso said Mashboxx isn't as concerned about selling music as it is "monetizing the activity around it." Borrowing a page from Google, Mashboxx wants to sell ads tied to the searches people conduct for music on p2p networks. In addition to making p2p networks easier to navigate, its software has two basic purposes: impose the restrictions on shared files that copyright holders demand and match advertisers to the users to whom they want to market. The hope is that the improved reliability and the added features, combined with the labels' blessing, will draw users in spite of the trade-offs. Like Qtrax, Mashboxx won't give users a free way to fill their iPods, but it will provide a legal way to play songs on demand for free at least a few times.

Qtrax hasn't launched yet, despite more than three years of work on the technology and the licenses. Until it does, it's hard to predict just how much advertising the company will be able to attract or how much it will need to satisfy the labels' royalty demands. Klepfisz said the U.S. debut will come before Christmas, with the service opening to the rest of the world shortly thereafter.

Rosso said Mashboxx is still looking for backers and needs cash to finish work on its software. Its business model faces the same challenges as Qtrax's, but in an era of rampant free downloading, Rosso would rather be selling ads aimed at music fans than the music itself. "Record companies can't make money selling it, why do they think anybody else can?" Rosso asked, adding that "the way to compete with free is to make [music] free. It has to be sponsored. It has to be subsidized."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...opinion-center





Shawn Fanning’s Snocap Prepares for Fire Sale
Saul Hansell

Shawn Fanning has been close to the ideas that have changed the music business, but he never got them exactly right. In large part because he was too early.

The latest frustration is that Snocap, a company that Mr. Fanning started, laid off 31 of its 57 employees yesterday. The reason, said Ali Aydar is that the company has received several acquisition offers.

“We are doing what we can to package the company and put it up for sale,” he said. As a result, it will serve its existing clients but stop developing new products.

(Word of the layoffs and possible sale was first reported on Vallywag.)

Mr. Fanning, of course, was hacking around in his dorm room and created Napster, which went on to raise venture capital, attract tens of millions of users and ultimately die at the hands of the courts. Snocap was an attempt to build the business side of file-sharing networks. It was designed to monitor what songs were downloaded, blocking some and collecting payments for others. (I wrote a profile of Mr. Fanning and Snocap two years ago.)

The company could never get this to work in the music world. The concept required file-sharing networks to cooperate and users, in turn, to decide that they indeed will have to pay for music. In fact, faced with lawsuits, file-sharing services essentially were driven underground, where they thrive more than ever.

Mr. Fanning withdrew several years ago, and started a social network for gamers (Rupture.com). Snocap changed plans and set up a system to help indie bands sell their own music on MySpace and other sites. It also supported Imeem, an advertiser supported streaming music service.

Mr. Aydar said that Snocap’s system may still play an important role in the music business. But with the users split between paying for music from Apple or downloading it free from file sharing services, there wasn’t much revenue available for Snocap. He said the company needs the support of a larger company that can invest in technology and marketing.

Meanwhile, the idea of a registry of copyrighted content, combined with technology to identify it, thrives in the video world. Indeed, Google is preparing a system that will identify copyrighted clips on its YouTube site. And other video-sharing sites do much the same.

Right now, these systems are meant to block copyrighted material. But over time they may also identify copyrighted material and facilitate clearing payments, for advertisements, licensing or purchases.

Shawn Fanning and Snocap, however, won’t be a part of this.

A Snocap spokeswoman sent this statement:

SNOCAP’s end-to-end digital media licensing and distribution infrastructure (Digital Registry) has scaled to contain close to six million sound recordings (including content from all major record labels). SNOCAP MyStores are growing at an impressive pace, attracting over 175,000 registered consumers, and over 80,000 artists who have live SNOCAP MyStores. In September, SNOCAP MyStores received nearly 20 million unique visitors and 140 million+ monthly impressions. The company is focusing its resources to maximize performance in these areas and on its key partnerships with MySpace, imeem, and the artists, labels, and other media properties that use SNOCAP’s Digital Registry. During the last few months the company has also received increased strategic interest from several corporations. As such, the company will continue to pursue all strategic alternatives to maximize the value of its core assets.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...for-fire-sale/





New Law Bars Forced Implants of ID Chips
John Woolfolk

Bosses will probably find other ways to get under your skin, but thanks to California lawmakers they won't be allowed to stick little electronic ID badges into your flesh.

A bill by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, which Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Friday, bars California employers and others from forcing people to have radio frequency identification (RFID) devices implanted under their skin. The bill goes into effect Jan. 1.

"It's the ultimate invasion of privacy," Simitian said. "They should find other ways to keep track of employees."

Wisconsin and North Dakota have enacted similar laws. While Simitian was unaware of any California companies requiring workers to get implanted with RFID chips, it has happened elsewhere.

In 2006, a Cincinnati video surveillance company called Citywatcher.com raised eyebrows when it required employees who work in its secure data center to be implanted with a chip. Simitian figured it wouldn't be long before others followed suit.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2004 approved an RFID tag for humans called VeriChip, which allows health care workers to access a person's medical history in the event the person couldn't communicate. Those tags reportedly have been implanted in 2,000 people.

VeriChip also has clients around the world that want to use human implantation as a form of identification, Simitian said. The attorney general of Mexico and 18 of his staff members were implanted with chips to allow them to get into high-security areas, he said.

The technology industry refused to support the bill, SB 362, contending it was unnecessary.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_7168354





The Sinister Truth About What They Do with Our Children's Fingerprints
Sue Reid

Fionna Elliot does not look like a firebrand. A hard-working mother, she has never had the time or the interest to dabble in politics.

Yet when the local primary school wrote to her saying they were about to fingerprint her son Alexander, eight, and daughter Jessica, only six, she was furious.

The 29-year-old housewife from Balby in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, saw it as a dangerous step towards a Big Brother society.

She didn't want her children fingerprinted and she marched off to Waverley School, five minutes from the family's home, to protest to the headmistress.

"The school said they were taking the thumb print of every child," Fiona explained at her neat, semi-detached home this week.

"The new electronic mapping system would allow children to borrow books from the library.

"The headmistress said it would be exciting for the pupils and help them develop a love of books and reading."

Each child's fingerprint would replace their library card.

Placing their fingerprint on a scanner would open their computer file with records of the books they had borrowed.

The argument is that this would dramatically simplify record-keeping.

But Fiona Elliott is not prepared to accept it.

"I told the headmistress that the biometric data could easily be stolen by identity thieves or used by the State for some dubious purpose," she says.

"My children are not terrorists or criminals and their fingerprints should not be collected at such a young age."

If some choose to write this off as alarmist, she doesn't care.

For she is one of many parents appalled by what they see as another deeply worrying inroad by the State into our personal liberty.

Britain is already the most snooped-on society in the world.

It has more than a fifth of the world's CCTV cameras.

One day all our NHS records may be on a national computer accessible by thousands of health workers.

Ministers have suggested that every British subject should have their DNA placed on a national database.

And already, the State has the DNA records of nearly a million children, some as young as five.

Now the Government is actively encouraging cash-strapped schools - short of teachers, sports facilities and even books - to spend £20,000 or more on fingerprinting systems.

In the short time since the practice began unannounced in 2001, nearly 6,000 pupils have had their 'dabs' taken throughout the country.

Every week another 20 schools join the list.

So concerned are parents that, backed by academics and experts on privacy, they have launched a campaign against the fingerprinting of children in schools.

The parents say the fingerprinting is 'softening up' children to prepare them for the national introduction of ID cards and to encourage them to hand over precious biometric details without a second thought.

They point out that no other country in Europe routinely fingerprints children and that even communist China has abandoned plans for fingerprinting school pupils because it breaches human rights.

They quote the Minister for Schools and Learning, Jim Knight, who this summer admitted that the police can simply help themselves to the children's fingerprints if they are trying to solve a crime.

How many others, the parents ask, will have access to the fingerprint databases?

But those schools that have introduced the practice say there is nothing to worry about.

The data, unique to every pupil, will never be stolen or spied on, they argue.

This is simply a safe, easy and fun way for the children to take home library books or buy lunch at the school canteen. It does away with pieces of paper and dinner vouchers.

It saves time.

Parents are unconvinced. Some, among them a Suffolk filmmaker called Jonathan Adams, are considering legal action to stop schools in their tracks.

"Litigation may be the only way forward," he says.

"We fear they are in breach of the Human Rights Act, the Data Protection Act and the European Commission laws that safeguard the child.

"We have sought initial advice from lawyers.

"If we won, the individual schools would have to pay a hefty price for ignoring parents' wishes.

"Many have introduced the fingerprinting of pupils without even asking permission from families."

He adds: "The law says the collection of personal biometric data must be proportionate to the issue for which it is being used.

"How can it be proportionate to fingerprint a child so he can borrow a library book or order a hot lunch?

"The other question is what is happening to the fingerprints after the child leaves the school.

"The schools insist the data is wiped from the system.

"But you can't just press the delete button.

"It has to be professionally cleansed and none of the teachers seem to know that."

Mr Adams's concern is similar to many others heard by the Mail during an investigation into the growth of fingerprinting in schools, which was sparked when a reader wrote in with an alarming tale.

She said 11-year- old children were being told to place their thumbs in a biometric mapping machine at a school in Carmarthenshire, Wales.

When parents objected and began to ask questions of the teachers, they were told that children could not use the library if they did not use the mapping system and the permission of parents was not needed anyway.

Furthermore, the teachers insisted that the fingerprint data would be absolutely safe in the school system.

But just how secure is the data from abuse? The schools claim that encrypting technology makes it completely inaccessible to outsiders.

When a child places his thumb or finger on the electronic mapping pad which scans his print, it is transformed into what is called an unintelligible algorithm.

This is a string of numbers, stored on a biometric template, which is held as a code for the child's actual fingerprint.

Crucially, the schools, the education authorities and the Government say it is very difficult to convert this code back to the original thumb or fingerprint.

But not impossible.

So if the right computer geek gets hold of the code for a child's fingerprint, he should be able to create the original fingerprint from it.

So what are the dangers if a child's finger or thumb print is recreated by a hacker?

The simple answer is identity theft. Biometric information such as fingerprints cannot be changed like a PIN number, which is why, in the future, they will be used to authenticate passports or bank accounts.

The print of a seven-year-old boy, for instance, could be pinched from a school computer and then sold to someone who wanted to have the fake identity of a British citizen.

The boy grows up and, at 19, tries to open a bank account.

But he is told he already has one and he is in the red so the answer is no.

At 22, he applies for a mortgage only to be refused because he already has a 20-year loan.

At the register office he asks for a marriage licence, but then finds he already has a wife.

The identity thief has been there first.

Even more perturbing, perhaps, is the potential for mix-ups between innocent people and criminals - for the police, the security services and governments all over the world use such coded algorithms to keep the fingerprints of criminals.

As one IT security consultant in Britain, Brian Drury, said recently: "If a child has never touched a fingerprint scanner, there is zero probability of being incorrectly investigated for a crime.

"Once a child has touched a scanner they will be at the mercy of the algorithm [stored in the school computer] for the rest of their lives."

It is these issues that worry the parents. Jonathan Adams explains how his son started secondary school in Hadley, Suffolk, a year ago.

Within a week he had been fingerprinted.

"It turned out that the school had been using biometric fingerprinting for five years," says Mr Adams.

"They have never considered asking the parents for permission.

"When I objected to what had happened to my son, they sent out a consent form saying it was all fine and dandy and if you want to be awkward you can say no.

"In theory my son's fingerprints have now been removed from the system. But these are ordinary computers.

"They are networked with other schools, they are linked with the local authority, and in turn they are connected with the wider internet.

"I know about IT. Any geek in a backroom with cutting-edge software or hardware can get in to copy the biometric data of any child or all of them."

One of the fiercest campaigners against child fingerprinting is David Clouter.

He has set up a website called Leave Them Kids Alone which is pressing schools to ask permission-from parents before they take the biometric details of pupils.

The businessman acted after his 11-year-old daughter announced one evening that her school, St Matthews in Cambridge, was planning to use fingerprint scans instead of library cards.

David and his wife Katarzyna didn't believe it.

They found the letter confirming the new library system in their daughter Marysia's bag - and discovered they had no say in the matter of whether or not the system was introduced.

"Schools send out consent slips for just about anything, from allowing popcorn during cinema trips to whether we can take pictures of the school play at the end of term," Mr Clouter says, "but they didn't plan to ask the parents about taking their children's fingerprints."

Up to now, the Government has refused to say if the fingerprinting of children is legal and this is what parents may now test in the courts.

Roberta Smart is a housewife and mother of two girls, Kelsey, aged nine, and Harley, six.

They go to a primary school in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, which has introduced a thumb scanner so children can use the library.

She and her partner, Alistair, have written to the school forbidding their daughters' participation.

"I believe that this is part of a Government plan to soften up children for ID cards,' says Roberta, who is reading for a university degree.

"It is grooming the pupils at a very young age to accept that taking their personal biometric details and storing them on computers is normal.

"The school says it is doing nothing wrong and there is nothing to hide. But we are moving closer and closer to a Big Brother State.

"What could a child's fingerprints be used for in ten years' time?"

Her views are shared by Dr Sandra Leaton Gray, director of studies in sociology of education at Homerton College, Cambridge University.

She believes the fingerprinting is dangerous.

"Children are being encouraged to become compliant and passive about giving out their biometric details," she says.

"Essentially, they are being softened up for later life.

"People mix up everyday ID, such as drivers' licences, with this kind of information. It is very different.

"Some of the companies supplying the finger mapping systems in our schools have connections with the American intelligence services and military operating at Guantanamo Bay and should not be allowed access to our pupils."

Professor Ross Anderson, a Cambridge University professor and expert on privacy, agrees.

He told the Mail this week: "Britain is out of line with the rest of Europe, where the fingerprinting of schoolchildren does not happen.

"It is a slippery slope. Certainly, the pupils are being softened up and led to believe that giving their personal biometric data to the authorities is normal behaviour."

Few are more sure of that than Fiona Elliott, the mother of Alexander and Jessica in Doncaster.

She is just relieved that her children have escaped being fingerprinted by a whisker.

"Our primary school's motto is "Living, Learning and Laughing Together",' she said ruefully this week.

"Yet this is the same place that they tried to fingerprint my son and daughter. How can that be right?"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...news/news.html





Mukasey Vows Independence and Denounces Use of Torture
David Stout

President Bush’s nominee for attorney general signaled today that he would try for a collegial relationship with Congress as he pledged to run the Justice Department in an independent, nonpartisan way, and said the president did not have the authority to override laws banning the torture of terrorism suspects.

“We are parties to a treaty that outlaws torture,” the nominee, Michael B. Mukasey, told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Torture is unlawful under the laws of this country. The president has said that in an executive order.”

“But beyond all of those legal restrictions, we don’t torture — not simply because it’s against this or that law or against this or that treaty,” Mr. Mukasey added. “It is not what this country is about. It is not what this country stands for. It’s antithetical to everything this country stands for.”

While Mr. Mukasey’s testimony was consistent with the stated views of President Bush and other administration officials, his denunciation of torture and his commitment to review legal opinions authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques seemed to contrast with the position of Alberto R. Gonzales, who recently stepped down as attorney general.

The nominee also said he hoped for a new, more cooperative approach with Congress. “I think it’s been obvious from events of the last several years that everybody is better off — the president is better off, the Congress is better off, the country is better off — when everybody’s rolling in the same direction,” he said. “When the president acts pursuant to his authority with help from the Congress, with the tools that the Congress provides, then we don’t have to get into butting heads over who can and who can’t.”

As for any notion that politics should intrude into the administration of justice — a situation that many administration critics say existed under Mr. Gonzales — Mr. Mukasey, a former federal judge, said that “partisan politics plays no part in either the bringing of charges or the timing of charges.”

Responding to questions from the panel’s chairman, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, Mr. Mukasey noted that a 2002 memorandum by Jay S. Bybee, an assistant attorney general at the time, stating that the president had the power to circumvent the Geneva Conventions as well as laws banning torture, was later disavowed and superseded.

“Would it be a safe characterization of what you’ve just said that you repudiate this memo as not only being contrary to law, but also contrary to the values America stands for?” Mr. Leahy asked.

“I do,” the nominee replied.

“Thank you,” Mr. Leahy said. “Is there such a thing as a commander-in-chief override that would allow the immunization of acts of torture that violate the law?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Mr. Mukasey said.

The nomination of Mr. Mukasey has been welcomed by senators from both parties, partly because they believe he is likely to be more independent of the White House than Mr. Gonzales was.

From the outset today, the exchanges between the senators and Mr. Mukasey bolstered the impression that his confirmation is all but certain. The committee members said the Justice Department desperately needs an attorney general who will tell the president things he may not want to hear, instead of functioning as an in-house counsel.

Mr. Mukasey said that, if he found himself at odds with the president on a fundamental legal or ethical issue, “I would try to talk him out of it, or leave.”

The panel’s ranking Republican, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said he hoped the next attorney general would restore integrity to the Justice Department. And while confirmation seems assured, Mr. Specter said the hearing was “likely to be longer than most” because of the broad range of issues to be addressed.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who was a persistent critic of Mr. Gonzales, said the nominee had “earned a reputation for efficiency, fairness and integrity” in 18 years as a federal judge in New York City.

And Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said he was pleased to report that Mr. Mukasey was the same hard-working, thoughtful and intelligent person he knew as a classmate at Yale Law School four decades ago. Moreover, the senator said, “this is a man of the law, not a man of politics.”

Mr. Mukasey has signaled to senators that he is likely to impose new rules to protect the Justice Department from future complaints of political meddling. Mr. Gonzales left office last month after resigning in the wake of criticism that he fired several United States attorneys last year for political reasons.

Asked by Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, to comment on how he would keep political considerations out of deliberations on which cases to pursue, Mr. Mukasey said, “Any attempt to interfere with a case is not to be countenanced.”

“Any call to a line assistant or to a United States attorney from a political person relating to a case is to be cut and curtailed,” he said. “And that person, that caller, is to be referred to the few, the very few people at the Justice Department who can take calls from elected officials.”

Moreover, the nominee said, “Hiring is going to be based solely on competence and ability and dedication and not based on whether somebody’s got an ‘R’ or a ‘D’ next to their name.”

After meeting with Mr. Mukasey on Tuesday, Senator Leahy said he expected Mr. Mukasey to be confirmed. “I want him to succeed,” Mr. Leahy said.

Mr. Schumer also predicted easy confirmation for Mr. Mukasey. “I don’t know of a single Democrat inclined not to support him,” Mr. Schumer said.

Democrats made clear in advance that they would question Mr. Mukasey about whether he supported the administration’s antiterrorism policies, especially its use of harsh interrogation techniques for terrorist suspects and its domestic eavesdropping program.

In his court rulings and other writings, Mr. Mukasey has suggested that he endorses the administration’s views on its wide-ranging authority in battling terrorist threats.

The nominee pledged to recuse himself in any matters involving Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Republican candidate for president, who has been a close friend. Federal prosecutors have been weighing corruption charges against Bernard B. Kerik, who was Mr. Giuliani’s police commissioner.

In a letter to Mr. Mukasey on Oct. 2, Senator Leahy said Mr. Mukasey would be asked about a variety of legal issues that some senators have said the White House has refused to address in detail.

“Regrettably the White House has chosen not to clear the decisions of past concerns and not to produce the information and material it should have and could have about the ongoing scandals that have shaken the Department of Justice and led to the exodus of its former leadership,” Mr. Leahy wrote. “Those matters now encumber your nomination and, if confirmed, your tenure.”

Philip Shenon and David Johnston contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/wa...torney.html?hp





China's Net Controls Tightened Ahead of Sensitive Political Congress
AP

At first, Liu Xiaoyuan just fumed when his online journal postings disappeared with no explanation. Then he decided to do something few if any of China's censored bloggers had tried. He sued his service provider.

"Each time I would see one of my entries blocked, I'd feel so furious and indignant," said Liu, a 43-year-old Beijing lawyer. "It was just so disrespectful."

Liu's frustration is hardly unique. For China's 162 million Web users, surfing the Internet can be like running an obstacle course with blocked Web sites, partial search results, and posts disappearing at every turn.

Blog entries like Liu's, which mused on sensitive topics such as the death penalty, corruption and legal reform, are often automatically rejected if they trigger a keyword filter. Sometimes, they're deleted by human censors employed by Internet companies.
In the lead-up to the sensitive Communist Party Congress, which convenes Monday to approve top leaders who will serve under President Hu Jintao through 2012, authorities have been casting an even wider net than usual in their search for Web content they deem to be politically threatening or potentially destabilizing.

"What you see now is unprecedented," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. "They are forcing most of the interactive sites to simply close down and have unplugged Internet data centers. These are things they haven't done before."

Thousands of sites suddenly went offline in August and September when Internet data centers, which host Web servers, were shut down. In three cities, some services were temporarily cut off, while some interactive Web sites remain unplugged - until after the congress.

It's not uncommon for authorities to crack down on public opinion before party congresses, which are held every five years.

In an increasingly wired China, political rumors and speculation that used to end up in Hong Kong's more liberal media are now often found circulating first in Chinese cyberspace.

At the party congress, there's plenty of opportunity for commentary, speculation and gossip. "Who's going to be up and who's going to be down? Who's going to retire and who's going to be in the Politburo? The losers in the Internet age aren't necessarily going to go down quietly," said Xiao.

The government has built a patchwork system of controls that include software to root out offensive keywords and block blacklisted web sites. Government censors, known as Net nannies, surf the web looking for pornography, subversive political content or other illegal material. Major Internet portals like Sohu.com Inc. and Sina Corp. employ their own censors to make sure nothing runs afoul of government restrictions.

China is among a handful of countries that have extensive filters for political sites. Iran, Myanmar, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam also strictly block political content, according to the OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration between researchers at Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Toronto.

In a report this week, Reporters Without Borders said China's Internet censorship system "is unparalleled anywhere in the world and is an insult to the spirit of online freedom."

Commercial sites that don't comply with censorship orders are criticized, fined, forced to fire the employee responsible for the error, or closed down, the Paris-based group said. A point system is also used to keep track of compliance, with sites that rack up a certain number of demerits at risk of losing their business licenses, it said.

To underscore its determination, the government also imprisons people who mail, post online, or access politically sensitive content within China. Reporters Without Borders says 50 Chinese "cyber dissidents" are currently in prison.

All the controls reinforce a climate of fear and obedience that keep most Internet users in line, experts said.

But if self-censorship fails, "Sohu will protect you from yourself," said Rebecca MacKinnon, a new media expert at Hong Kong University.

Liu, the Beijing lawyer, did not want to be protected. He has tried to sue Sohu for breach of contract for blocking nine of his blog entries.

Yang Bei, a Sohu spokeswoman in Beijing, said the company had no comment on the case.

Liu insists the postings conformed with Sohu's user guidelines as well as Chinese law. He said that identical material posted to his Sina blog was not blocked. He is not asking for compensation, only to have his entries restored.

A Beijing district court dismissed his suit in August, saying that it did not meet unspecified criteria. His appeal is pending with the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate Court.

Despite the controls, Chinese cyberspace is also a surprisingly dynamic environment with online auctions, film and music downloads, social networks, huge virtual gaming populations and even spirited debate on social and political issues - though often conducted in protective double speak.

"You don't say 'tanks in Tiananmen,"' explains Xiao, referring to the 1989 military crackdown on democracy protesters. "You say 'the tractors that came into the city.' You don't say 'press freedom,' you say 'press professionalism."'

Anxiety over such veiled conversations likely prompted the closure of several data centers last month, a move that affected thousands of small personal and commercial sites and warned millions of others. The centers were told the shutdown was part of a larger campaign to clean up the Web ahead of the congress.

MacKinnon said the government appears afraid that something from one of those smaller sites will "jump out and bite the regime."

An employee with the Zitian Internet Data Center in the central city of Luoyang who would only give his surname, Feng, said its servers were unplugged on Aug. 23 and resumed on Sept. 5. But interactive sites, such as bulletin boards and blogs, were closed until after the congress, which is expected to last about 10 days, on orders from state-run China Telecom, he said.

Shanghai's Waigaoqiao Internet Data Center was shut down Sept. 3-14 on orders from a China Telecom subsidiary, said an employee named Tang. Again, customers were told their interactive sites could reopen after the congress. Another in the southeastern city of Shantou was also shuttered around the same time.

A Chinese blogger writing in English under the name Moonlight, catalogued the shutdowns in a post titled "Chinese Internet censorship goes crazy."

Xiao from Berkeley said the measures were intentionally heavy-handed.

"It's overkill to scare other people. Now the other IDCs are shaking," he said.

China's Ministry of Information Industry, which is the main government body in charge of the Internet, and China Telecom did not respond to a request for comment about the Internet data center shut downs.

Meanwhile, Chinese bloggers who have been censored say they've been "harmonized," a nod to President Hu's goal of creating a "harmonious society."

One sarcastic Chinese blogger called Xiucai - or the Scholar - mockingly posted a banner to his or her site on Sept. 4 saying: "Joyfully welcome the 17th Party Congress, building a harmonious society together. The Scholar is a good comrade. This site has temporarily shut down comments and forum features."

Within two weeks, Xiucai took the banner down too.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_7160176





Dartmouth Researchers Confirm the Power of Altruism in Wikipedia
Press Release

The beauty of open-source applications is that they are continually improved and updated by those who use them and care about them. Dartmouth researchers looked at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to determine if the anonymous, infrequent contributors, the Good Samaritans, are as reliable as the people who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain.

The answer is, surprisingly, yes. The researchers discovered that Good Samaritans contribute high-quality content, as do the active, registered users. They examined Wikipedia authors and the quality of Wikipedia content as measured by how long and how much of it persisted before being changed or corrected.

"This finding was both novel and unexpected," says Denise Anthony, associate professor of sociology. "In traditional laboratory studies of collective goods, we don't include Good Samaritans, those people who just happen to pass by and contribute, because those carefully designed studies don't allow for outside actors. It took a real-life situation for us to recognize and appreciate the contributions of Good Samaritans to web content."

Anthony worked with co-authors Sean Smith, associate professor of computer science, and Tim Williamson, a member of the Dartmouth Class of 2005 who worked on the project as an undergraduate. They set out to examine the reputation and reliability of contributors to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has an archive of the history of changes and edits to its entries, which allowed the researchers access to analyze the perceived quality of content.

By subdividing their analysis by registered versus anonymous contributors, the researchers found that among those who contribute often, registered users are more reliable. And they discovered that among those who contribute only a little, the anonymous users are more reliable. The researchers were most surprised to find that the reliability of Good Samaritans' contributions were at least as high as that of the more reputable registered users' contributions.

"Wikipedia is a great example of how open-source contributions work for the greater good," says co-author Smith. "And because it welcomes input from anyone, not just programmers and geeks, it is a great research tool. We can mine information from Wikipedia that helps us understand human behavior."

According to Anthony, Wikipedia now requires that anonymous contributors who make numerous edits must register.

"This will probably limit the number of low-quality contributions we find among high-use anonymous contributors, because in exposing their identity, they will have their reputation to consider," says Anthony. "I don't foresee this new policy affecting the quality of those Good Samaritans, though. Their presence should continue to be valuable."

Their study has been presented at academic conferences, and it is available online.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2007/10/17.html





Google, Random House Move Closer on Book Search

Random House, the world's biggest book publisher, is considering joining a book-search project run by Google, once considered an archenemy by the paper publishing industry.

The two parties are talking to one another about the less controversial part of Google's book-scanning project--its partner program--sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters at this week's Frankfurt Book Fair.

Google has agreements with more than 10,000 publishers, large and small, who give their books to Google to be scanned in full. Google then makes them partially available--according to agreements with each publisher--for online readers.

It also works with 27 academic and reference library partners to gain access to out-of-print works.

But part of the library project has proved controversial and thrown Google into legal dispute with U.S. publishers as Google also scans works from its U.S. library partners that are still in copyright without asking the publishers first.

Random House, a unit of German media group Bertelsmann, has until now held out and not joined the publisher partner program, which can help boost book sales, especially of publishers' so-called backlists of older titles.

When asked this week whether the parties were close to an agreement, a Random House spokesman said: "Random House continues to have periodic constructive conversations with Google on issues of mutual relevance."

Google declined to comment.

Random House, as a member of the American Association of Publishers, says it continues to support a U.S. copyright case filed against Google in 2005 and funded by the association.

The lawsuit--brought by Penguin, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Wiley and Simon & Schuster--aims to stop Google from scanning in-copyright works it gets from its library partners without explicit permission from publishers.

The Bookseller trade magazine reported on Thursday that Random House was "close to healing its rift with Google."

Culture Monopoly

Google has so far digitized the full texts of more than one million books. The total number of books in the world is unknown but global library collective WorldCat has more than 91 million bibliographic records in its database, the largest of its kind.

Google has come some way toward pacifying its critics since causing a furor after it launched the project in 2004 amid fears, most vociferous in Europe, that Google would gain something close to a monopoly of world culture.

Google now works with 27 libraries worldwide, up from seven a year ago, and its book search is available in 11 languages.

The company, which does not charge or pay its publisher partners, gains depth and authority for its Internet search engine by making both Web pages and books searchable.

It has already integrated book results into its U.S. search engine and is beginning to do so in Europe.

Google does include advertising on its partner program book-search pages, with its publisher partners getting most of the advertising revenue.

It has no current plans to do so on its library search pages while it is still improving them, for example by including links to Google Maps to show where the action in a book is taking place or adding braille layers for the visually impaired.
http://www.news.com/Google%2C-Random...3-6213282.html





Shadowy Russian Firm Seen as Conduit for Cybercrime
Brian Krebs

An Internet business based in St. Petersburg has become a world hub for Web sites devoted to child pornography, spamming and identity theft, according to computer security experts. They say Russian authorities have provided little help in efforts to shut down the company.

The Russian Business Network sells Web site hosting to people engaged in criminal activity, the security experts say.

Groups operating through the company's computers are thought to be responsible for about half of last year's incidents of "phishing" -- ID-theft scams in which cybercrooks use e-mail to lure people into entering personal and financial data at fake commerce and banking sites.

One group of phishers, known as the Rock Group, used the company's network to steal about $150 million from bank accounts last year, according to a report by VeriSign of Mountain View, Calif., one of the world's largest Internet security firms.

In another recent report, the Cupertino, Calif.-based security firm Symantec said that the Russian Business Network is responsible for hosting Web sites that carry out a major portion of the world's cybercrime and profiteering.

The company "is literally a shelter for all illegal activities, be it child pornography, online scams, piracy or other illicit operations," Symantec analysts wrote in a report. "It is alleged that this organized cyber crime syndicate has strong links with the Russian criminal underground as well as the government, probably accomplished by bribing officials."

The Russian Business Network did not respond to requests for comment e-mailed to an address listed on its Internet address records. Other efforts to communicate with its organizers through third parties were not successful.

Law enforcement agencies say these kinds of Internet companies are able to thrive in countries where the rule of law is poorly established. "It is clear that organized cybercrime has taken root in countries that don't have response mechanisms, laws, infrastructure and investigative support set up to respond to the threat quickly," said Ronald K. Noble, secretary general of Interpol, an organization that facilitates transnational law enforcement cooperation. He declined to discuss the Russian Business Network specifically.

The company isn't a mainstream Internet service provider, as Comcast and Verizon are. Rather, it specializes in offering Web sites that will remain reachable on the Internet regardless of efforts to shut them down by law enforcement officials -- so-called bulletproof hosting.

Though there are thousands of Web sites that bear the Russian Business Network name on registration records, the company is unchartered and has no legal identity, computer security firms say.

The network has no official Web site of its own; those who want to buy its services must contact its operators via instant-messaging services or obscure, Russian-language online forums, said Don Jackson, a researcher at Atlanta-based SecureWorks.

Potential customers also must prove that they are not law enforcement investigators pretending to be criminals, Jackson said. Most often, he said, this "proof" takes the form of demonstrating active involvement in the theft of consumers' financial and personal data.

According to VeriSign, a cyber-criminal who clears these hurdles can rent a dedicated Web site from the Russian Business Network for about $600 a month, or roughly 10 times the monthly fee for a regular dedicated Web site at most legitimate Internet companies.

According to several private-sector security experts, U.S. federal law enforcement agencies have tried unsuccessfully to gain the cooperation of Russian officials in arresting the individuals behind the company and shutting it down.

Officials at Russia's Interior Ministry said last week that they could not discuss the network.

But Alexander Gostev, an analyst with Kaspersky Lab, a Russian antivirus and computer security firm, said the Russian Business Network has structured itself in ways that make prosecution difficult.

"They make money on the services they provide," he said -- the illegal activities are all carried out by groups that buy hosting services. "That's the main problem, because RBN, in fact, does not violate the law. From a legal point of view, they are clean."

In addition, Gostev said, criminals using the Russian Business Network tend to target non-Russian companies and consumers rather than Russians, who might contact local authorities. "In order to start an investigation, there should be a complaint from a victim. If your computer was infected, you should go to the police and write a complaint and then they can launch an investigation," Gostev said. Now, he added, his company and the police both have information, but no victim has filed a complaint.

Thomas V. Fuentes, the FBI's assistant director of international operations, declined to answer questions about the Russian Business Network but said the United States has had great success with other countries in investigating cybercrime.

Fuentes added that his agency's requests for law enforcement assistance from foreign governments sometimes conflict with domestic intelligence investigations that may be underway.

"There are times when it appears that action is not happening when in fact the other country is conducting a very sensitive investigation, and we have to take it on the chin," he said. "But that works both ways. That happens with us for requests we sometimes receive where we'd rather not go public with certain information at the time of the request."

Without a diplomatic or legal solution to the Russian Business Network, some Internet service providers have begun walling off their customers from the company.

One security administrator, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that within a few months of blocking the Russian company, his employer found it was saving significant amounts of money by spending less time helping customers clean viruses originating from the Russian Business Network off computers or taking down online scam sites or spam-spewing PCs. "Our instances of spam and infected machines dropped exponentially," he said.

Danny McPherson, chief research officer at Arbor Networks, a Lexington, Mass.-based company that provides network security services to some of the world's largest Internet providers, said most providers shy away from blocking whole networks. Instead, they choose to temporarily block specific problem sites.

"Who decides what the acceptable threshold is for stopping connectivity to an entire network? Also, if you're an AT&T or Verizon and you block access to a sizable portion of the Internet, it's very likely that some consumer rights advocacy group is going to come after you."

The unusually clear-cut case of Russian Business Network, McPherson said, has generated debate between the service providers and the security research community. Many researchers see blocking purely illegal networks as a no-brainer. But blocking problematic networks typically means they merely go to a new place on the Internet, McPherson said.

"At the end of the day," he said, "it only moves the problem somewhere else, when what we really need is for political and regulatory law enforcement to step in."

Growing numbers of security specialists for several U.S. Internet providers and telecommunications companies say they are done waiting for the cavalry to arrive. "There is never going to be an easy and painless way to combat this problem, mainly because it's been ignored for far too long and been allowed to fester," said the security administrator who did not want to be identified.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...61.html?sub=AR





Man Accused of Hacking Into 911

Washington man accused of faking emergency call that sent armed response to unsuspecting Lake Forest family's home.
Salvador Hernandez

SWAT officers expected to find a victim shot to death, drugs and a belligerent armed suspect when they surrounded the home of an unsuspecting couple, but found they were only a part of a false emergency call caused by a teenager who hacked into the county’s emergency response system, authorities said.

As officers swarmed the home with assault rifles, dogs and a helicopter, a Lake Forest couple and their two toddlers inside their home slept unsuspectingly.

On March 29 at 11:30 p.m., authorities allege, Randall Ellis, a 19-year-old from Mukilteo, Wash., hacked into the county’s 911 system from his home and placed a false emergency call, prompting a fully armed response to the home of an unsuspecting couple that could have ended tragically.

Thinking that a prowler was roaming his back yard, a resident of the home, identified only as Doug B. in the district attorney’s complaint filed in court, walked outside with a kitchen knife as SWAT officers from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department waited with assault rifles.

“It was just a horrifying experience,” said Doug B., who requested not to be identified further. “You think you feel safe in your own home. We had no idea what was going on.”

Doug B. and his wife did not feel safe in their home for weeks after the incident and wondered why their home was the one selected.

Doug B. was not able to go back to sleep for hours that night, and he rigged the doors and windows before he was able to go to bed.

“I thought someone was in my back yard, and they were going to get my family,” he said. “It was terrifying for months afterward.”

Officers apprehended and cuffed the resident and his wife, identified as Stacy B. It was moments later they learned the call was false, said Lt. Mike McHenry of the South County Investigations Bureau.

“The danger is significant,” said Lt. Don Barnes, chief of police services for Lake Forest. “That (situation) played out OK, although it scared the victims significantly.”

Ellis is expected to appear in an Orange County courtroom Monday to face charges of computer access and fraud, false imprisonment by violence, falsely reporting a crime and assault with an assault weapon by proxy.

“It’s not a prank,” Emami said. “People’s lives were in danger.”

Farrah Emami, spokeswoman for the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, said Ellis selected the couple’s name and address at random and electronically transferred false information into the 911 system.

Authorities believe this is not the only time that Ellis has done this. As part of their investigation, authorities believe Ellis created similar false SWAT responses in Bullhead, Ariz.; Millcreek Township, Pa.; and in his hometown of Mukilteo, Wash.

False 911 calls are placed all the time, McHenry said, but he said this is the first time someone has hacked into Orange County’s system and created a false call in this way.

“We’ve seen nothing like this,” McHenry said. “This was unique. This was pretty serious.”

Other law enforcement agencies have seen similar breaches into their 911 systems as part of a trend picked up by computer hackers in the nation called “SWATting”, Barnes said.

The purpose is to create a false 911 call that appears to be coming from the residence in question and prompt a SWAT response from local law enforcement agencies, Barnes said.

Authorities would not divulge details on how Ellis hacked into the system, stating that doing so would jeopardize the investigation and possibly create copycats. But the call that prompted a full response to the Lake Forest home started as a call to the Orange County Fire Authority as a drug overdose and progressed into a possible murder, McHenry said.

A supposed teenager stated someone had overdosed on cocaine. The teenager then stated he had been shot in the shoulder and that attackers were going to go shoot and kill his sister, he said.

Canines, a helicopter and SWAT officers responded to the false call.

“It was a pretty large response,” McHenry said.

Through electronic forensics, investigators were able to link Ellis to the false call, Emami said.

Ellis does not appear to have a criminal record, Emami said, but it looks like he’s done this before. He was taken into custody by authorities in Mukilteo on Friday. He waived extradition Monday in court and is expected to appear in Orange County Superior Court on Oct. 22 for an arraignment hearing.

Now Doug B. said he is hoping that the upcoming court proceedings can shed some light into why this happened and why his family was targeted.

“My family is my life and to feel like its being threatened is horrifying,” he said.
http://www.ocregister.com/news/home-...1-ellis-system





Scam Czars

What’s Russian for ‘Hacker’?
Clifford J. Levy

PERHAPS the most famous con artist of the Soviet era was a fast-talking, eye-winking, nimble-fingered, double-dealing journeyman named Ostap Bender. He was fictional, the antihero of a satirical novel about a quest for lost jewels called “The 12 Chairs,” but his casual disdain for the law reflected a widely held cynicism here.

“This misdeed, though it does come under the penal code, is as innocent as a children’s game,” Bender says of a scheme to use a purloined document to steal another man’s identity.

Were Bender to ply his trade these days, he would undoubtedly be sitting in front of a computer, spewing out e-mails that slyly ask for credit card information or hawk sexual aids and other flimflam. Russia has become a leading source of Internet ills, home to legions of high-tech rogues who operate with seeming impunity from the anonymous living rooms of Novosibirsk or the shadowy cybercafes of St. Petersburg.

The hackers go by names like ZOMBiE and the Hell Knights Crew, and they inhabit such a robust netherworld that Internet-security firms in places like Silicon Valley have had to acquire an expertise in Russian hacking culture half a world away. The security firms have not received much assistance from the Russian government, which seems to show little interest in a crackdown, as if officials privately take some pleasure in knowing that their compatriots are tormenting millions of people in the West.

In fact, Russian hackers became something akin to national heroes last spring when a wave of Internet attacks was launched from Russia against Web sites in Estonia, the former Soviet republic. The incidents began after the Estonians angered the Kremlin by moving a Soviet-era war monument.

The motive for most wrongdoing, though, tends to be greed. In 2005, Russians broke into the State of Rhode Island Web site and then brazenly proclaimed that they had swiped credit card information from 53,000 transactions. Officials acknowledged the theft, though they said the scope was smaller.

The perpetrators in these affairs are rarely if ever caught, but it is not hard to deduce their backgrounds. Russia has long had a strong system of math and science education, and until the relatively recent upturn in the economy, the multitudes of whiz kids who graduated from its schools often had poor job prospects.

At the same time, they were entering a society that for decades had built up a deep skepticism about the virtues of following the rules. Under Communism, the thicket of strictures that governed almost every aspect of life was considered so inane that only fools were thought to abide by them.

“The law in Soviet times had a different function,” said Georgy Satarov, president of the Indem Foundation, an independent watchdog group in Moscow. “The law was not oriented toward protecting the interests of citizens. It’s the party that protects the citizens, and that’s all.”

One result was that corruption was rampant in Soviet times, and has endured, if not gotten worse. Russia ranked 143 out of 180 countries and territories — on a level with Gambia, Togo and Indonesia — in a recent survey of government corruption conducted by Transparency International, a nonprofit group. (The higher the number, the more corrupt.)

The ethos has often been that if provincial governors and traffic cops and everyone else have their hands out, why should I play it straight?

This penchant has not stayed rooted to Russian soil. In the United States, a center for health care fraud is Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, which has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of Russian immigrants. In other words, the neighborhood has a number of people who grew up in a society where everyone finagled to get by, and few saw anything wrong with putting one over on a callous government.

“This is a country where everybody used to moonlight,” said Gary Shteyngart, the Russian-American author. “It’s a country where there was never enough money, the money that the government paid was kind of a token, and you had to make your way by hook or by crook. There was always a great entrepreneurial spirit in Russia, but it has always been directed at things that not only help people, but also hurt people.”

Of course, Russia is not the only generator of Internet havoc. For similar historical and social reasons, such problems have cropped up across the sphere of Soviet influence, from the Czech Republic to Ukraine to Kazakhstan.

Internet security experts say that only the United States and China rival Russia in hacker activity. But Russia has only 28 million Internet users, according to rough estimates, compared with 210 million in the United States and 150 million in China, meaning that Russia has a higher percentage of scammers.

VeriSign, the Internet services company, considers Russian hackers to be the worst, in part because they tend to have ties to organized crime outfits that embezzle money with stolen bank and credit card information.

While the West has complained about Russian laws and enforcement, some Russian officials take issue with the criticism. Aleksei Likhachev, a member of Parliament, acknowledged that there had been fewer criminal cases in Russia than elsewhere, but said officials were still learning how to conduct such inquiries. “It is just that this work is much younger and much less developed in Russia,” he said.

Still, executives at technology companies in Russia said the Kremlin under President Vladimir V. Putin has demonstrated that when it wants action, it gets it. “The problem is that you have got a very educated mass of a population, but you have got completely ignorant, stupid lawmakers,” said Anton Nossik, a senior executive in Moscow at the company that oversees Livejournal.ru, the Russian version of the blogging and discussion portal.

“Law enforcement has no incentive and no motivation to prosecute,” he said. “They say, ‘We are not receiving complaints,’ or ‘The complaints that we are seeing are not well formed.’ They find pretexts not to prosecute.” Russian Livejournal blogs are regularly hijacked, typically by people who have stolen passwords.

Even so, there remains a sense here that Russian hackers afflict the West far more than Russia, so why bother with them.

On a Livejournal Russian forum last week, The New York Times asked participants why Russians have a reputation for Internet crime.

“I don’t see in this a big tragedy,” said a respondent who used the name Lightwatch. “Western countries played not the smallest role in the fall of the Soviet Union. But the Russians have a very amusing feature — they are able to get up from their knees, under any conditions or under any circumstances.”

As for the West? “You are getting what you deserve.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/we...ew/21levy.html





Just trying to make a buck

Woman 'Found Killer on Internet'
Justin McCurry

Police in Japan have arrested a man on suspicion of carrying out a woman's request to kill her after she contacted him via the internet.

Kazunari Saito was allegedly paid to feed sleeping pills to Sayaka Nishizawa before suffocating her at her apartment in April, local media said. Ms Nishizawa, 21, had contacted her alleged killer days earlier via his mobile phone website, which he had set up to sell sleeping pills to people contemplating suicide.

Ms Nishizawa reportedly paid Mr Saito 200,000 yen (£835) to kill her, imploring him to stay with her until he was certain she was dead. Police initially attributed her death to suicide, but launched a criminal investigation after noticing that her keys and mobile phone were missing. They tracked down Mr Saito after examining Ms Nishizawa's email correspondence.

Reports said she had sent a message to Mr Saito's website saying: "I want to die. How can I die?" He replied: "I will give you lots of sleeping pills. I will help you."

The electrician, 33, allegedly visited her apartment in Kawasaki, near Tokyo, and fed her 20-30 sleeping pills before suffocating her with a plastic bag. Her father found her body four days later.

Mr Saito confessed to the killing while being questioned about supplying sleeping pills to visitors to his website, on which he offered to "do anything" for money, including murder.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/japan/stor...189375,00.html





SOL, as they say

Senator On-Line is Australia's only Internet Based Democratic Political Party
WebBlurb

Senator On-Line is not aligned to any other political party… it is neither Liberal nor Labor.

Senator On-Line (‘SOL’) is a truly democratic party which will allow everyone on the Australian Electoral roll who has access to the internet to vote on every Bill put to Parliament and have its Senators vote in accordance with a clear majority view.

We will be running candidates for the upcoming federal Upper House (Senate) elections.

When a SOL senator is elected a web site will be developed which will provide:

• Accurate information and balanced argument on each Bill and important issues
• The vast majority of those registered on the Australian Electoral roll the chance to have their say by voting on bills and issues facing our country
• A tally of all votes which will then count in Parliament

Each person on the Australian Electoral roll will be entitled to one vote and only be allowed to vote once on each bill or issue.

SOL senators will have committed in writing to voting in line with the clear majority view of the SOL on-line voters.

Senator On-Line will enable broader community involvement in the political process and the shaping of our country.

If you like the concept, please register your details and tell others about SOL.
http://senatoronline.com.au/





Ignoring Diversity, Runways Fade to White
Guy Trebay

IN the days of blithe racial assumptions, flesh crayons were the color of white people. “Invisible” makeup and nude pantyhose were colored in the hues of Caucasian skin. The decision by manufacturers to ignore whole segments of humanity went unchallenged for decades before the civil rights movement came along and nonwhite consumers started demanding their place on the color wheel.

Nowadays the cultural landscape is well populated with actors, musicians, media moguls and candidates for the American presidency drawn from the 30 percent of the American population that is not white. Yet, if there is one area where the lessons of chromatic and racial diversity have gone largely unheeded, it is fashion. This reality was never plainer than during the recent showings of the women’s spring 2008 collections in New York and Europe.

Although black women in the United States spend more than $20 billion on apparel each year, according to estimates by TargetMarketNews.com, it was hard to discern an awareness of this fact on the part of designers showing in New York, where black faces were more absent from runways than they have been in years.

Of the 101 shows and presentations posted on Style.com during the New York runway season, which ended a month ago, more than a third employed no black models, according to Women’s Wear Daily. Most of the others used just one or two. When the fashion caravan moved to London, Paris and Milan, the most influential shows — from Prada to Jil Sander to Balenciaga to Chloé and Chanel — made it appear as if someone had hung out a sign reading: No Blacks Need Apply.



“It’s the worst it’s ever been,” said Bethann Hardison, a former model who went on to start a successful model agency in the 1980s that promoted racial diversity.

AMONG the people she represented were Naomi Campbell and Tyson Beckford, the chiseled hunk who broke barriers in the 1990s by becoming the unexpected symbol of the country-club fantasia that is a Ralph Lauren Polo campaign.

“It’s heartbreaking for me now because the agents send the girls out there to castings and nobody wants to see them,” said Ms. Hardison, referring to black models. “And if they do, they’ll call afterward and say, ‘Well, you know, black girls do much better in Europe, or else black girls do much better in New York, or we already have our black girl.’”

Last month in New York, Ms. Hardison convened a panel of fashion experts at the Bryant Park Hotel to discuss “The Lack of the Black Image in Fashion Today,” an event she will reprise Monday at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. “Modeling is probably the one industry where you have the freedom to refer to people by their color and reject them in their work,” she said.

The exclusion is rarely subtle. An agent for the modeling firm Marilyn once told Time magazine of receiving requests from fashion clients that baldly specified “Caucasians only.”

The message is not always so blatant these days, but it is no less clear. Take for example the case of two young models, one white, one black, both captivating beauties at the start of their careers. Irina Kulikova, a feline 17-year-old Russian, appeared on no fewer than 24 runways in New York last month, a success she went on to repeat in Milan with 14 shows, and in Paris with 24 more. Honorine Uwera, a young Canadian of Rwandan heritage, was hired during the New York season for just five runway shows.

While Ms. Uwera’s showing was respectable, it was not enough to justify the cost to her agency of sending her to Europe, where most modeling careers are solidified.

“We represent a lot of ethnic girls,” said Ivan Bart, the senior vice president of IMG Models, which represents a roster of the commercially successful models of the moment, among them black superstars like Alek Wek, Ms. Campbell and Liya Kebede.

“We have new girls, too,” Mr. Bart added, young comers like Ms. Uwera, Quiana Grant and Mimi Roche. “We include them in our show package, give them the same promotion as any other girl, and get the same responses: ‘She’s lovely, but she’s not right for the show.’”

Although, in fact, Ms. Roche and Ms. Grant, both black, were seen on runways in the last five weeks, the reality was that only one black model worked at anything like the frequency of her white counterparts: Chanel Iman Robinson, 17, who is African-American and Korean. Particularly in Milan and Paris, Ms. Robinson’s was often the only nonwhite face amid a blizzard of Eastern European blondes.

It is not just a handful of genetically gifted young women who are hurt by this exclusion. Vast numbers of consumers draw their information about fashion and identity from runways, along with cues about what, at any given moment, the culture decrees are the new contours of beauty and style.

“Years ago, runways were almost dominated by black girls,” said J. Alexander, a judge on “America’s Next Top Model,” referring to the gorgeous mosaic runway shows staged by Hubert de Givenchy or Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970s. “Now some people are not interested in the vision of the black girl unless they’re doing a jungle theme and they can put her in a grass skirt and diamonds and hand her a spear.”

And some people, said Diane Von Furstenberg, the designer and president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, “just don’t think about it at all.” Ms. Von Furstenberg herself has always employed models of all ethnicities on her runways. (This September, she hired seven black women, more perhaps than any single label except Baby Phat and Heatherette.) Yet she is increasingly the exception to an unspoken industry rule.

“I always want to do that,” she said, referring to the casting of women of color. “I can make a difference. We all can. But so much is about education and to talk about this is an important beginning.”

But isn’t it strange, she was asked, that she would have to invoke the rhetoric of racial inclusiveness at a time when Oprah Winfrey is the most powerful woman in media, and Barack Obama is running for president?

“Why did we go backward?” Ms. Von Furstenberg asked.

Agents blame designers for the current state of affairs. Designers insist agents send them nothing but skinny blondes. Magazine editors bemoan the lack of black women with the ineffable attributes necessary to put across the looks of a given season.

The current taste in models is for blank-featured “androids,” whose looks don’t offer much competition to the clothes, pointed out James Scully, a seasoned agent who made his mark casting the richly diverse Gucci shows in the heyday of Tom Ford. In today’s climate, it is far more difficult to promote a black woman than her white counterpart.

“You want to sell the model on the basis of her beauty, not her race,” said Kyle Hagler, an agent at IMG. Yet when he sends models out on casting calls based on what he terms a “beauty perspective,” omitting any mention to potential clients of race, “You always get a call back saying, ‘You didn’t tell me she was black.’”

THE reasons for this may seem obvious, and yet the unconscious bigotry is tricky to pin down.

“I’m not pointing a finger and saying people are racist,” said Ms. Hardison, who nevertheless recounted a recent exchange with the creative director of a major fashion label: “She said to me, ‘I have to be honest with you, when a girl walks in, I just don’t see color.’ Meanwhile, they have one girl, or more likely, none in their show.”

Ms. Hardison explained: “‘I don’t see color?’ Does that mean, you don’t want to see?”

There is something illustrative of the entire issue, and the state of the industry, to be found in this September’s Italian Vogue.

Just one image of a black model appears in the issue, midway through a 17-page article photographed by Miles Aldridge and titled the “Vagaries of Fashion.” In it, the glacial blond Anja Rubik portrays an indolent, overdressed Park Avenue princess with a gilded apartment, a couture wardrobe, two towhead children and a collection of heavy rocks. The sole black model in the pictorial is more modestly attired, in an aproned pinafore.

She plays the maid.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/fa...ws/14race.html





School Apologizes for Rap Song
AP

Officials at Milford's Jonathan Law High school have apologized for the use of a rap song with racial lyrics over the loudspeakers before a football game.

The lyrics blaring out over the loudspeakers before Friday's game made reference to the Ku Klux Klan and had racial slurs.

The lyrics were from Public Enemy's "Shut'em Down."

Athletic Director Frank Luysterborghs says a member of the coaching staff played the song from an iPod and the lyrics were contained on a "hidden track" at the end of the rap album, recorded in 1991, and no one knew it was there.

Luysterborghs says all coaches are being instructed to be especially careful when playing music before games, especially rap music.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/ci_7192172





Still Punk, Still Proud, Still Breaking the Rules
Melena Ryzik

About 20 years ago Debbie Harry was a regular on the Chelsea docks. Along with Chris Stein, Ms. Harry — the peroxide-blond frontwoman of Blondie, the pioneering punk-new wave group that she and Mr. Stein founded — would prowl the decrepit waterfront late at night.

“There were just a few old fishermen out there, and signs forbidding you to go out,” she recalled. “We used to always climb out on the piers. Enter at your own risk in New York style, you know. It was romantic.”

Now, of course, that area is home to the sports complexes of Chelsea Piers, jogger paths and gaping tourists. But Ms. Harry still comes by. “It’s great to meditate on the Hudson,” she said recently, looking at it from a bench behind Chelsea Piers just before sunset. “Sometimes at night if you come here and it’s really quiet, it’s just magnificent.”

Does that mean she’s still breaking the rules, sneaking in where’s she’s not supposed to be?

“I guess I am,” she said. “I didn’t notice anymore.”

Well, why would she? For more than 30 years Ms. Harry, 62, has carved a path of rebellious downtown cool, providing a template for countless female rockers who followed. Along with Patti Smith and David Byrne she is one of the few survivors of the 1970s New York punk scene, often eulogized after the closing of its locus, CBGB, last October, and the death of that club’s owner, Hilly Kristal, in August.

And at a time when some of her other remaining contemporaries are retro acts, she is still moving forward. Last week she released “Necessary Evil” (Eleven Seven Music), her first solo album in 14 years. A nationwide tour begins on Nov. 8 at the Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza.

“I never wanted to be in an oldies band; I just didn’t,” she said. “I was just ready to do something new, and I needed to be creative.”

Mr. Stein said Ms. Harry’s longevity was due in part to her downtown sensibility. “I think she wanted to do an independent, under-the-radar thing,” he said of the new album.

The 17 songs on “Necessary Evil” are mostly ’80s-tinged electro-pop, with a few full-voiced ballads; the title track is a homage to Jimi Hendrix, sung-spoken with a bit of a growl. Ms. Harry wrote the album over a year and a half, on breaks from Blondie’s world tours. She paid to record it herself, in a small studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a neighborhood she rarely visits otherwise. (Sorry, hipsters.) Though she collaborated with, among others, the production team Super Buddha — Barbara Morrison and Charles Nieland, known for their work with the Scissor Sisters and Rufus Wainwright — a lot of the sound came from her.

“Much more than ever before I really would come in with a melody line or a hook line or a complete song sung out,” Ms. Harry said. That was a change from the Blondie songwriting format, in which she mostly contributed lyrics to Mr. Stein’s music.

So did she enjoy being the boss?

“Yes and no,” she said. “You know, I’ve been in a band for over 30 years. I’m good at bending.”

Though her romantic partnership with Mr. Stein ended long ago, they continue to work together. He produced several tracks on her album, and Ms. Harry said everyone in the band was interested in doing another Blondie record. (The group disbanded in 1982, but reunited in 1997 and has released two albums of new material since.) She is single now, but the “Necessary Evil” album doesn’t reflect that.

“Like most pop songs it’s about relationships, it’s about sex,” she said. “I’m in love with love — sometimes.”

For now she’s devoted to her little dog, Ki-Suki, a Japanese Chin in a leopard-print harness who panted under the bench. In slim black pants and a sleeveless Dresden Dolls T-shirt (she performed with that punk cabaret duo on Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors Tour this summer), accessorized with red bra straps, a gold skull pendant, black wraparound sunglasses and her much-blonded hair, Ms. Harry still looks sexy-punk. Last year she was named a spokesmodel for MAC Cosmetics’ Viva Glam line of lipstick, proceeds from which go to charity.

And legions of downtown girls imitate her Blondie-era style, from the shaggy dyed hair and red lips to the vampy shredded dresses. “Those bitches!” she joked. But she follows her progeny, counting M.I.A., Lily Allen and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs among her current favorites.

“She just never stopped being cool,” said another descendant, Johanna Fateman of the post-riot-grrrl band Le Tigre.

Ms. Harry demurred. “It’s hard for me to think that Blondie was so completely original,” she said. “I don’t really think that I’m an icon. I think an icon is a statue, something that’s frozen, you know. I don’t feel like that.” And she added, “I don’t really love walking down memory lane.”

Though Ms. Harry is no longer climbing around the crumbling piers, she is still finding inspiration in the city, combing the galleries near her Chelsea home (she paints portraits) and going to rock shows (the Gossip, Justin Timberlake). And then there’s the river.

“Did you ever go on the Screamer?” she asked, referring to the thrill-ride harbor boat tour. “The Screamer’s fun. You just have to tell the guy who’s telling the story of New York that you know the story, that you don’t want to hear it. You just want to go fast.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/ar...ic/16harr.html





Google Takes Step on Video Copyrights
Miguel Helft

Google is seeking to put an end to the copyright wars over online video.

On Monday, the company unveiled a long-anticipated system that, if effective, would allow media companies to prevent their clips from being uploaded to YouTube without permission.

Whether the system will work well enough to satisfy media companies who have been irked by the proliferation of unauthorized copyrighted clips on YouTube is not yet clear. But if successful, the system, which Google is offering to all media companies, could usher in a détente between them and Google.

“We are delighted that Google appears to be stepping up to its responsibility and ending the practice of profiting from infringement,” said Michael Fricklas, general counsel of Viacom, which filed a $1 billion copyright infringement suit against YouTube and Google in March. “We’ll be watching to ensure that the system is reasonably effective and sufficiently robust to address the issue.”

Google said it had been testing the system with nine media companies, including Time Warner, CBS and Disney. Others involved include NBC Universal and Viacom, according to people with knowledge of the tests.

Google called the tests “promising” but would not say how effective the system was. Just last week, its chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said that developing a system that could identify video clips with 100 percent accuracy was virtually impossible.

“The question is, Can we get to 80 or 90 percent?” Mr. Schmidt said in an interview with a group of reporters.

It is not known if the system has reached that level of accuracy. At least one of Google’s testing partners said that it was a work in progress.

“They still have a ways to go with the system before we could call it totally sufficient,” said Edward Adler, executive vice president for communications at Time Warner.

Google said that its video identification service, which was developed by its own engineers, required media companies to submit their digital video files to Google, which would then create what technologists call a digital “fingerprint” for each file. That fingerprint would then be uploaded to a large database. Once a user uploaded a new clip, the same technology would determine whether that clip’s fingerprint matched a fingerprint in the database.

Content owners could instruct Google to block clips whose fingerprints matched their copyrighted clips. Alternatively, they could ask Google to promote the clip and even place advertising around it, to share revenue from the ads.

“We really need the content community to work with us,” said David King, a YouTube product manager. “What really drives this whole thing is having access to the reference material.”

Clips that content owners want blocked may be posted on YouTube for a few minutes before they are taken down, but over time, the company hopes to speed up the identification mechanism so that unauthorized uploads can be prevented altogether.

YouTube representatives said the system was able to identify clips that were identical to those in its database, as well as those that had been slightly modified by users to escape detection. To demonstrate, they showed a positive identification of a clip that had been captured by a camera filming a television set as the clip was being shown.

Google has been using fingerprints to recognize audio files for some time. Others, like MySpace and Microsoft, also use audio fingerprints to identify, and sometimes block, uploads of certain videos.

Google introduced the video identification system as a group of media and technology companies, including Microsoft, Viacom, Disney and others, are set to unveil a framework for how the two sides should cooperate to stamp out copyright infringement online, said a senior executive at a media company.

The executive said the group would make public that framework later this week and that, along with Google’s announcement Monday, it represented a “potential recipe for working relationships between content companies and digital distributors of all kinds.”
But not all media companies agree that Google’s identification system is enough.

“I think this is a completely inadequate solution,” said Louis Solomon, a partner in Proskauer Rose, which represents the Football Association Premier League of England, a lead plaintiff in a class-action copyright suit against Google. “It is too late in coming; it offers too little protection; it gives YouTube and Google content that they don’t need and shouldn’t have.”

Some consumer groups, meanwhile, worry that Google’s new system could prevent uploads of video clips that were authorized under “fair use” provisions of copyright law.

For its part, Viacom said it was too early to say what impact Google’s new system would have on its suit.

“We obviously have suffered significant past damages, but beyond that it is premature to tell what the effect would be on the litigation,” Mr. Fricklas said.

Google has long insisted that YouTube has always operated in compliance with copyright law, in part because it takes down unauthorized copyrighted clips when asked to by content owners. The new system would help content owners by automating that process, the company said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/business/16video.html





New DVDs
Dave Kehr

THE JAZZ SINGER

“The Jazz Singer,” which Warner Home Video is releasing today in a glittering new restoration, has long been fixed in the American imagination as the movie that touched off the sound revolution. When Al Jolson, as the cantor’s son who has abandoned tradition for a career as a Broadway belter, turns to his audience between numbers to promise, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” the silent cinema immediately keeled over and died. Or so the story goes, greatly aided by that spoken line, so seemingly full of portent.

But the truth is more complicated and a bit less poetic. When “The Jazz Singer” opened in a single theater on Broadway on Oct. 6, 1927 — the day before Yom Kippur, the High Holy Day that figures prominently in the plot — filmgoers had been hearing synchronized music, sound effects and even dialogue in commercial theaters for more than a year.

“Don Juan,” the first film to be presented in the Vitaphone process, as Warner Brothers called the sound-on-disc technology it had licensed from Western Electric, made its premiere in New York on Aug. 6, 1926. A lively costume romance starring John Barrymore and directed by Alan Crosland (who would direct “The Jazz Singer” too), “Don Juan” didn’t have synchronized dialogue, but it had a full orchestral score augmented by sound effects. More important, the first half of the program consisted of a selection of musical shorts, introduced in a three-and-a-half-minute speech by Will H. Hays, the former postmaster general selected to be president of the industry’s lobbying group, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.

If anything, it was Hays’s flat Midwestern voice that touched off the initial sensation, not Jolson’s wildly emotive blackface balladeering. Warner Brothers made three more Vitaphone features before “The Jazz Singer”; one, “The Better ’Ole” (showing on Turner Classic Movies tonight at 12:45 a.m.), was preceded by a Vitaphone short called “Al Jolson in ‘A Plantation Act,’ ” in which he performed three blackface numbers standing in front of a painted backdrop of a cotton field. He speaks almost as much in that 10-minute short as he does in the whole of “The Jazz Singer” and uses the “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” line twice. It was not the improvised exclamation that studio publicists later made it out to be, but his standard tag line.

Box office figures for early films are hard to come by and notoriously unreliable. But the film historian Donald Crafton, in his splendid history of the period, “The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931” (University of California Press), devised a formula based on the earning power per seat of Broadway movie theaters. It suggests that while “The Jazz Singer” was a substantial hit, it was outgrossed in New York by the real sensation of the season, William A. Wellman’s “Wings” (a synchronized sound film from Paramount that went on to win the first Academy Award for best picture), as well as by Edmund Goulding’s “Love,” with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert; a “sonorized” reissue of Raoul Walsh’s “What Price Glory”; and Frank Borzage’s romantic drama “Seventh Heaven.” (The season’s big flop was a film now widely regarded as one of silent film’s greatest achievements, F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise,” which itself had a synchronized music and effects track courtesy of Fox’s rival sound system, Movietone.)

If “The Jazz Singer” heralded a revolution, few if any contemporary observers noticed it. The critic for The New York Times, Mordaunt Hall, predicted that “the future of this new contrivance is boundless” in his “Don Juan” review. But he seemed less impressed by the talking sequences in “The Jazz Singer”: “The dialogue is not so effective, for it does not always catch the nuances of speech or the inflections of the voice so that one is not aware of the mechanical features.”

But “The Jazz Singer” will always have its place in history, if only because, as Mr. Crafton suggests, it is easier to put a name and a face to an innovation than to trace a slow and complicated transformation, which wasn’t really complete in America until 1930. (Silent film hung on in other countries, notably Japan, until the mid -’30s.) The picture remains one of the crown jewels of Warner Brothers, and the new version does it royal honors. The images shine, and the sound — which for decades has been heard only through a poorly re-recorded optical soundtrack — has been taken from the original Vitaphone discs. Though presumably some electronic twiddling has been done, the audio is now deep and clear, presenting Jolson’s performances of both “Mammy” and the Kol Nidre prayer with a new immediacy.

And Warner Home Video hasn’t skimped on the extras. The three-disc set includes a new documentary, “The Dawn of Sound: How the Movies Learned to Talk,” produced by Turner Classic Movies, as well as a number of promotional shorts from the period; examples of two-color Technicolor (a process that flourished along with the early talkies); a brilliant Tex Avery cartoon parody, “I Love to Singa,” starring a feathered crooner named Owl Jolson; and a surprising rarity: a 1938 short, “Hollywood Handicap,” that features a brief appearance by Jolson but is more notable as the next to last directing credit of one of the medium’s fallen giants, Buster Keaton.

The third disc is devoted to Vitaphone shorts, many recovered with the help of the nonprofit Vitaphone Project. (A detailed account of the group’s activity can be found at vitaphoneproject.com.) The two dozen titles included here — from the nearly 2,000 shorts produced by Warners between 1926 and 1930 — are the results of patient detective work, involving tracking down long-separated silent prints and sound discs and putting them back together.

These fascinating documents may belong more to the history of American theater than of American film: perfect records of some of the most celebrated vaudeville performers, nightclub singers and opera stars of the day, performing exactly as they would before a live audience. To watch George Burns and Gracie Allen soft-shoe their way through “Lambchops,” the turn that had sustained them as vaudeville headliners for years, is to be transported back to an orchestra seat at the Palace. The fixed camera and proscenium framing are throwbacks to the earliest years of the movies, but here the outdated technique enhances the illusion: an evening’s entertainment on the Great White Way in the days when the bulbs burned most brightly.

Also Out Today

TRANSFORMERS Michael Bay’s summer blockbuster about unassuming automobiles that turn into scary robots and save the world is available as a single disc ($29.99), a double-disc special edition ($36.99) and in HD-DVD ($39.99). (DreamWorks, PG-13)

PLANET TERROR Zombies attack a small town in Robert Rodriguez’s contribution to the “Grindhouse” double feature, here released as a stand-alone film with some added unrated footage and a bonus disc of documentaries. (The Weinstein Company, $29.95, unrated)

MY BEST FRIEND An overworked executive (Daniel Auteuil) hires a taxi driver (Dany Boon) to pose as the buddy he doesn’t have in Patrice Leconte’s French comedy. (IFC, $24.95, PG-13)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/mo...deo/16dvd.html





Amazon One-Click Patent Rejected by the US Patent Office as a Result of My Request
Igdmlgd

In a recent office action, the USPTO has rejected the claims of the Amazon.com one-click patent following the re-examination request that I filed on 16 February 2006.

My review resulted in the broadest claims of the patent being ruled invalid.

In its Office Action released 9 October 2007, the Patent Office found that the prior art I found and submitted completely anticipated the broadest claims of the patent, U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411.

I had only requested the USPTO look at claims 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21 and 22 but the Office Action rejects claims 11-26 and claims 1-5 as well!

Amazon has the opportunity to respond to the Patent Office's rejection, but third party requests for reexamination, like the one I filed, result in having the subject patent either modified or completely revoked about 2/3 of the time.

To read the original document, go to USPTO PAIR access site, choose the "Control Number" radio button, enter 90/007,946 and press the "Submit" button.

Huge thanks to everyone who helped out with the re-examination fee. You know who you are.

BTW we won the movie-making competition below too :-)
http://igdmlgd.blogspot.com/2007/10/...ted-by-us.html





Critic of Software Patents Wins Nobel Prize in Economics
doom

You've probably already heard that the Nobel Prize for Economics was given to three gents who were working on advances in mechanism design theory. What you may not have heard is what one of those recipients was using that theory to study: "One recent subject of Professor Maskin's wide-ranging research has been on the value of software patents. He determined that software was a market where innovations tended to be sequential, in that they were built closely on the work of predecessors, and innovators could take many different paths to the same goal. In such markets, he said, patents might serve as a wall that inhibited innovation rather than stimulating progress." Here's one of Maskin's papers on the subject: Sequential Innovation, Patents, limitation (pdf).
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/16/1230201





IBM Seeking 'Patent-Protection-Racket' Patent
theodp

Wikipedia defines a protection racket as an extortion scheme whereby a powerful non-governmental organization coerces businesses to pay protection money which allegedly serves to purchase the organization's "protection" services against various external threats. Compare this to IBM's just-published patent application for "Extracting Value from a Portfolio of Assets", which describes a process by which "very large corporations" impress upon smaller businesses that paying for "the protection of a large defensive patent portfolio" would be "a prudent business decision" for them to make, "just like purchasing a fire insurance policy. " Sounds like Fat Tony's been to Law School, eh? Time for IBM to put-their-money-where-their-patent-reform-mouth-is and deep-six this business method patent claim!
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/20/1031236





Backlog, Quotas Overwhelm Patent Examiners
Stephen Barr

Here's how bad it is at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

If the agency could shut its doors to catch up on its work, its 5,500 patent examiners would take at least two years to clear the backlog of pending applications. When the agency reopened, there would be more than 1 million new applications piled up on the doorstep.

In the global economy, innovation, technological progress and the protection of intellectual property rights are keys to U.S. competitiveness. Keeping up with the demand for patents is critical to the nation's health.

But the patent office is suffering from troublesome turnover. One patent examiner leaves for nearly every two the agency hires, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress.

About two-thirds of patent examiners surveyed by the GAO said the patent office's production quotas are one of the biggest reasons for quitting. To meet their quotas, 70 percent of examiners surveyed by the GAO said they had to work substantial unpaid overtime in the previous 12 months. Others said they caught up with their work while on vacation.

The production quotas are based on the number of applications that examiners must review and complete biweekly and have not been adjusted since 1976. Since then, patent applications have become more complex, which means it takes longer to review them.

The GAO concluded that "the root of this high level of attrition appears to be the stress resulting from the agency's outdated production goals."

Shortly after the GAO released the report last week, the Patent and Trademark Office issued a statement saying "it will review the assumptions the agency uses to establish production goals for patent examiners."

In an interview, Jon W. Dudas, the agency's director, said reducing the backlog of applications for patents involves more than hiring and keeping examiners. "A good part of this solution is saying that, 'Applicants, if you give us better information, we can do a better job,' " he said.

A quarter of applications arrive with no supporting materials and another quarter carry more than 25 references to supporting data, he said. Although an extreme example, Dudas said the agency once received an application that came in 28 boxes, with 2,600 pages per box.

"We need the best material. Not the kitchen sink. And not nothing," Dudas said.

To make the job of an examiner easier, the patent office will require inventors and others to file applications with fewer legal descriptions, known as claims, starting Nov. 1. If applications arrive with more than 25 claims, the agency will expect better supporting data, which should help relieve stress and time pressures on examiners as they research cases, Dudas said.

But whittling down the backlog of 760,000 pending applications is difficult when there is a high level of attrition in the patent office workforce (many examiners are engineers and science and technical professionals).

In the 2002-2006 period studied by the GAO, about 70 percent of the 1,643 examiners who left had been with the agency for less than five years, and nearly 33 percent had been there for less than one year.

Because it takes from four to six years of experience for patent examiners to become fully proficient, the staff churning results in "years upon years of wasted training," said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), who requested the GAO study.

"PTO has been unable to effectively combat its brain drain," Davis said.

The GAO review found that agency management and examiners have different opinions of what is causing the turnover.

In the GAO survey of patent examiners, 67 percent said production quotas were among the top reasons they would consider leaving.

The GAO estimated that 62 percent of examiners are dissatisfied with the time allowed by the agency to meet production goals, and 50 percent are dissatisfied with the methods used to calculate the goals. (Representatives of the Patent Office Professional Association, the union that represents examiners, did not return telephone calls seeking comment.)

The agency's managers, in contrast, said examiners leave the agency because of the nature of the work, the high cost of living in the Washington area and because of the stiff competition to get into the area's graduate and postgraduate programs. Many examiners come to the agency out of college and are looking to polish their resumes before moving on to other jobs, the managers said.

To retain employees, the agency offers "special pay rates" above regular federal scales, pays recruitment and retention bonuses, offers flexible work schedules, a telecommuting program and reimbursement for law school. At its Alexandria building, the agency provides examiners with a fitness center and a child-care center.

Patent officials are looking at hiring back retirees to work on the patent backlog and at revising "duty station" requirements so the agency can expand into a nationwide workforce.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...701199_pf.html





Rights and Wrongs in the Antipiracy Struggle
Cary Sherman

Why Jammie Thomas?

That question was posed in a CNET News.com story last week, as well as in other commentaries regarding a copyright lawsuit won by the RIAA. It's worth revisiting why we, the Recording Industry Association of America, do what we do and how we got to this place.

From the moment we announced in June 2003 that we would be gathering evidence for the purpose of bringing lawsuits against end users, the program has generated attention and debate. We welcome that national conversation.

This was never a step we wanted to take, and we recognized that it would generate criticism in some quarters. It's tough love--for the first time, despite years of educational efforts and the availability of plentiful legal alternatives, we are holding people personally and financially accountable for the theft of creative works.

But the backdrop was a community hemorrhaging jobs, careers and investment in new music, amid a pervasive culture of looting in which there was little understanding of the law or the negative consequences of breaking it.
What have our antipiracy efforts yielded? A legal marketplace that is far better because of what we've done.

The process of bringing lawsuits has changed slightly since the program's inception, but one constant has been the process of identifying people who are stealing music online.

When we target an infringer, we do not know who that person is or any demographic information about the computer user. We know the songs that are being illegally "shared" (with millions of anonymous people) and the time and date of that copyright violation, nothing more. We do not have the ability to screen defendants based on their perceived sympathy or anything else.

No doubt, if we selectively enforced our rights against those deemed less sympathetic, the fringe copyright critics would call us arbitrary and capricious. We target theft. Period.

What have our antipiracy efforts yielded? A legal marketplace that is far better because of what we've done: Digital revenues doubled as a percentage of the market in 2006, from 8 percent in 2005 to more than 16 percent. An illegal marketplace which, prior to the initiation of our deterrence program, experienced exponential illicit P2P use has now mostly stabilized--the average number of households downloading music illegally on a monthly basis was roughly 7 million in 2003 and is now 7.8 million. Compare that with the growth in broadband access to the Internet, which grew from 38 million home users in 2003 to at least 80 million today.

Can there be any doubt that a whole lot more of those broadband subscribers would be illegally downloading but for the lawsuits? Surveys confirm that fact: People who have stopped illegal downloading cite the fear of being sued as the first or second reason for changing their behavior. And, lastly, there is a fundamentally different understanding of what you can and can't do on the Internet--37 percent of those surveyed in 2003 thought it was illegal to distribute music for free over the Internet; now that number has grown to 73 percent.

Think about it. What would the online music world look like had we done nothing? It's not a pretty picture: skyrocketing illegal peer-to-peer downloading without even a second thought about its legality or morality, and a small handful of legitimate businesses struggling to gain traction in a marketplace overwhelmingly dominated by piracy.

Four years into this program, the first trial of our end-user lawsuits finally happened. The fact that it took so long speaks to the clarity of the law and the clarity of the courts' various rulings on our legal program. Even the Supreme Court called illegal downloading "garden-variety theft."

Some defense lawyers, with an ax to grind and an agenda to advance, have posited a variety of bizarre legal theories about our cases. Yes, there have been a handful of procedural motions where the courts have asked us to proceed in a different manner.

But the underlying facts and the overwhelming court affirmations are irrefutable. The legal process we follow has been consistently upheld. And creative counterclaims on such theories as invasion of privacy, trespass and intentional infliction of emotional distress have been regularly dismissed by courts as improper.

Which brings us to the case of Ms. Thomas. Let's be clear. We did not choose Ms. Thomas to be the defendant in the first end-user lawsuit to go to trial. We repeatedly extended a generous settlement offer, a tiny fraction of which a jury later imposed upon her, but for whatever reason, Ms. Thomas turned us down. She and her lawyer chose this fight, not us.

That said, we will not--and cannot--hesitate to defend our rights. What's the alternative? Are we supposed to say "never mind" and concede the rights of artists, songwriters, producers, publishers and labels every time a defendant who may be sympathetic to some refuses to accept responsibility? What kind of deterrence message would that send?

A jury of Ms. Thomas' peers--12 ordinary Americans from the defendant's home state--found her liable for copyright theft. In fact, some wanted to assign even a harsher penalty, according to news reports. We purposefully did not ask for any specific amount in damages. We asked the jury to decide what was appropriate--and after carefully reviewing all the evidence, they determined that $222,000 was the appropriate amount.

None of this, though, is about being in court or winning monetary judgments. We would rather be in the record studios helping artists make great music that we can distribute in lots of exciting new ways that music fans want. Because that's what this program is ultimately about--creating a marketplace that rewards investment in creativity and compensates those who make the best music in the world.
http://www.news.com/Rights-and-wrong...3-6213649.html





All Criticism of This Website Is Hereby Forbidden
Greg Beck

Inventor-link is a company that promises to help inventors get their inventions to the marketplace. A link at the bottom of the company's home page leads to the site's "Privacy and User Agreement," which includes the the following terms:

By using this site you agree and understand that the HTML code, look, feel, content, company name, logo, text, and any likeness or derivative of such content is the sole property of Inventor-Link LLC and may not be used in any manner without the expressed written permission of Inventor-Link LLC. Furthermore, we strictly prohibit any links and or other unauthorized references to our web site without our permission.

With these terms, Inventor-link purports to prohibit visitors to the site from using the company's name, linking to the site, or even "refer[ring]" to it without permission. Although the enforceability of these terms is extremely dubious, the company is nevertheless invoking them in an attempt to stop criticism of the company that appears on InventorEd.org, a website that provides information about invention promotion businesses and scams.

Inventor-link is represented by Dozier Internet Law -- the same law firm that threatened to sue for copyright infringement if one of its demand letters were posted on the Internet. Once again, Dozier sent a strongly worded demand letter identifying a bunch of statements that it alleged to be defamatory, most of which appear to be statements of opinion. The letter goes on to invoke the website's user agreement:

You have not received permission to use text from our client’s website, and yet you have republished the following text:

“Official Site of Inventor-Link LLC - Your Link to Success for Your... We know how to get your idea from a rough sketch to a finished product in the marketplace. If your idea has what it takes, we can help you get the results you want. ...www.inventor-link.com”

You have associated your disparaging remarks with bona fide text from our client’s website with the purpose of harming our client’s business and diverting actual and potential customers. By using legitimate text that rightfully belongs to our client you are in violation of its website User Agreement.

Presumably, the author realizes that copying such a small amount of text for purposes of criticism is a pretty obvious case of fair use and could not support a claim for copyright infringement. But, by framing the issue as one of contract law, Direct-link's lawyer is able to assert that all use of its website, fair or otherwise, is prohibited.

Dozier apparently believes in the enforceability of this kind of agreement, because the firm's own website includes similar terms. The firm's "User Agreement" prohibits linking to its website, using the firm's name "in any manner" without permission (the license specifically provides that even clients cannot say they are represented by the firm without asking), or making "any copies of any part of this website in any way since we do not want anyone copying us." These terms would appear to prevent even criticizing the terms themselves, as this post does, by linking to and quoting from them. And, very strangely, the terms prohibit even looking at the website's HTML code:

We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so.

Inventor-link's and Dozier's "User Agreements" are known as "browse-wrap" agreements, a derivation of the "shrinkwrap" licensing terms that appear inside packaged software. Browse-wrap agreements are the legalese contained in a website's terms of use, usually buried behind a link on a company's home page. The theory behind these agreements is that, just by reading a website, a consumer becomes bound by the company's contractual terms. These contracts often include forum-selection or arbitration clauses that visitors to the site have never read.

Depending on the circumstances of the case, browse-wrap agreements may or may not be enforceable. Where a company has included a provision prohibiting fair use for purposes of criticism, however, it is hard to see how any court would enforce the agreement. Readers of a site have little opportunity to review and agree to such terms, and a reasonable consumer who had reviewed the terms would be unlikely to agree to them.

Nevertheless, terms of use like these are commonly used by companies. AT&T was recently subjected to a round of harsh commentary on the Internet when it amended its terms of service to provide that it could terminate customers' accounts for conduct that "tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries." After a widespread backlash in the blogosphere, the company claimed that it would not use the clause to against critics, and eventually removed the offending terms altogether. And in 2002, the New York Attorney General filed suit against McAfee, the maker of anti-virus software, for including terms in its software license agreements that prohibited "product reviews" or "benchmark tests." The lawsuit claimed that the terms constituted a deceptive act or practice under New York law, and a court eventually enjoined further use of the provisions.

No matter how unlikely these kinds of terms are to be enforced, however, they are often successful in accomplishing their intended result. Consumers who receive threats of litigation over purportedly binding contractual terms are often more likely to shut up than to bear the expense of retaining an attorney and defending their rights.
http://pubcit.typepad.com/clpblog/20...reby-agre.html





'Die Hard' with a Bonus

DVD will include computer file
Thomas K. Arnold

In an industry first, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment is expected to announce Tuesday that the special-edition DVD of "Live Free or Die Hard" will come with an electronic copy of the movie that can be played on a computer and select portable video players.

"This may be the killer app, where you have physical media that allows you to have a big-screen experience and at the same time move the file around to other devices and have a great experience there as well," said Mike Dunn, the division's worldwide president.

The summer theatrical hit, the fourth in the "Die Hard" franchise and first since 1995, comes to DVD on Nov. 20 after a boxoffice run that yielded $134.4 million in domestic ticket receipts. The release precedes by nearly a month Warner Home Video's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," which also will let DVD buyers download a copy of the movie to a PC or portable video device.

The Digital Copy feature also will be included on select other Fox DVDs down the road, though no titles have been announced. The DRM-free feature allows consumers to quickly and easily transfer the movie file to Windows-based computers or portable video players equipped with Microsoft Windows' PlaysForSure feature, available from such manufacturers as Archos, Toshiba, Samsung, RCA, Dell and Creative Labs.

"The industry has sold nearly 12 billion DVDs to date, and the release of 'Live Free or Die Hard' is the first one that allows consumers to move their content to other devices," Dunn said. "With the myriad of viewing options available to consumers in our rapidly evolving digital world, a DVD with Digital Copy offers a simple way for consumers to satisfy their growing desire to watch what they want, when they want and, most importantly, how and where they want."

To utilize the Digital Copy feature, consumers can insert Disc 2 of the "Live Free" DVD into their computer. A menu will pop up, giving users the choice of either executing the Digital Copy application or launching the DVD special features. If the Digital Copy application is selected, the computer will verify the proper requirements and ask the user to enter a 16-digit serial code, found inside the DVD case. After selecting a destination -- either the computer's hard drive or a connected PlaysForSure video player -- the transfer will begin, and the program will be ready for playback after about five minutes.

"We're looking at this as giving the consumer a whole other experience, with an emphasis on choice and ease of use," Dunn said. "There's downloading, which takes 45 minutes to an hour, and managed copy, which I never liked because it involves moving the movie off the disc and onto something else, which also takes forever. With Digital Copy, the file is formatted to go across and onto your computer and mobile device, so it's already a small file -- a rocket file that plays beautifully."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...fbebd74af313d9





What Do You Do After Nothing?
Dave Itzkoff

IN the dressing room of an Atlantic City nightclub, furnished by the request of its current occupant with cheese steaks from the White House Sub Shop and a full array of Tastykake snacks, Jerry Seinfeld was explaining the stand-up comedy ritual of “getting in the bubble”: a state of mind that a performer seeks before show time, a few final moments of calm before the tumult of an unpredictable live audience.

And make no mistake. When Mr. Seinfeld faces his crowd, he is usually thinking of the exchange in raw, physical terms: a competition to be won or lost. “I want to get ’em bad,” he said.

Minutes later he emerged from the bubble and onto a stage at Resorts Atlantic City, to riff about the banalities of bachelorhood and marriage, Cinnabons and iPhones, burials and cremations, and relentlessly to mock an indiscreet heckler who had made the mistake of announcing that his nickname was Potato Head.

The hourlong routine was a crucial opportunity for Mr. Seinfeld to practice his act at a time when he feels, as he often does, that he’s not performing enough. “No matter how many times you’ve done it in the past, it’s got to be polished or it goes away,” he had said backstage. “The act just packs up and starts walking away.”

More important, the show was a warm-up for Mr. Seinfeld’s biggest leap yet out of his bubble, onto a national platform he has not occupied in nearly a decade, and into a medium he has never attempted before.

On Nov. 2 Paramount will release “Bee Movie,” a DreamWorks Animation comedy that is by far the most substantial project that this 53-year-old comedian has taken on since pulling the plug on his “Seinfeld” television sitcom in 1998.

In the ensuing years Mr. Seinfeld has starred in an HBO comedy special, “I’m Telling You for the Last Time,” and a low-budget documentary, “Comedian,” and written a children’s book, “Halloween.” He was also married and fathered three children, and, in whatever spare time remains, continues to perform his stand-up act with a triathlete’s zeal.

Yet none of these endeavors — the professional ones at least — has demanded as much of Mr. Seinfeld as “Bee Movie,” a studio feature with a budget of about $150 million for which he not only supplied the voice of the lead character, a wisecracking honeybee named Barry B. Benson, but also helped write the script and spent nearly four years overseeing every element of the production.

He is also a central component of the film’s marketing campaign, showing up in television commercials and at live appearances (occasionally dressed in an oversized bee costume), suggesting that this cartoon movie about talking insects is just another part of his indomitable comedic continuum.

But to many fans, and to many people who worked on “Bee Movie,” the film represents the first real return of Mr. Seinfeld since the end of his television show, a welcoming back after what appeared to be a self-imposed absence. “When you watch this movie, it feels like you’ve found your best friend who you haven’t seen in ages,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation. “It’s like, where have you been the last 10 years?”

Just don’t mention this to the man whose name appears atop the movie poster.

TWO days after his Atlantic City appearance Mr. Seinfeld was walking through Central Park, on his way to lunch at the Central Park Boathouse. He was dressed in blue jeans and wore a pair of John Lennonesque spectacles, offering pointed analysis about anyone who entered his field of vision, whether it was a pedestrian wearing too much makeup (“I think that was a mime”), or Dean Poll, the well-tanned owner of the restaurant, who paid a visit to Mr. Seinfeld’s table. (“I think he just wants to show people his nice skin,” Mr. Seinfeld said.)

Much of Mr. Seinfeld’s success is predicated on the nonchalant persona he cultivated in his comedy act and on his television show, and the apparent accessibility that comes from his insightful observations of the quotidian and the ordinary.

The rewards that he has reaped have been substantial: Forbes recently estimated that he makes $60 million a year, primarily from his share of the syndication revenue “Seinfeld” still generates. (A representative for Mr. Seinfeld declined to confirm this figure.) His live touring and royalties from “Seinfeld” DVD sales also contribute to this sum.

Though Mr. Seinfeld may wear Nikes, he also lives in an exclusive residence on Central Park West, maintains a fabled collection of Porsches and travels to and from his stand-up dates by helicopter. In person he can be affable, but he doesn’t hide a certain earned arrogance. When one stunned onlooker at the Boathouse asked for his autograph, Mr. Seinfeld said, “Sure,” then kept walking straight to his table.

While attending the United States Open tennis tournament, Mr. Seinfeld recalled, he was approached by a well-attired fan who handed him a business card and invited Mr. Seinfeld to visit his brokerage house. Both men became noticeably perplexed when the offer was declined.

“I said: ‘We don’t know each other. You’re a total stranger,’” Mr. Seinfeld recounted. “He says, ‘But we really like you.’ I said, ‘Thank you so much, but this is as far as we go.’”

Mr. Seinfeld added: “This is a sophisticated guy that doesn’t understand the TV only works one way.”

On this afternoon Mr. Seinfeld was playful but also perturbed about a short article he had read over the weekend in this newspaper, 69 words about “Bee Movie” that described the film as his effort at “gingerly” re-entering mainstream entertainment.

“Gingerly,” he said with emphasis. “If they only knew. There was nothing gingerly about this.”

Mr. Seinfeld likes to tell a story of the film’s spontaneous origins, about four years ago, at a dinner on Long Island with Steven Spielberg, at which Mr. Seinfeld joked that “Bee Movie” would be a fitting title for a movie about bees, and Mr. Spielberg concluded this would actually be a good idea for a film. “I wasn’t pitching him,” Mr. Seinfeld recalled, “but then he started pitching me: ‘You gotta make this.’”

“Bee Movie” represents the culmination of a campaign more than 13 years long, waged by Mr. Katzenberg to recruit Mr. Seinfeld into animated movies. Dating to his tenure at the Walt Disney Company, Mr. Katzenberg had frequently tried to persuade Mr. Seinfeld to lend his voice to a cartoon project to no avail. “He was always amazingly open and accessible,” Mr. Katzenberg said, “and incredibly polite and definitely not interested.”

At first the reason for Mr. Seinfeld’s refusals were fairly straightforward: He was still fully invested in his sitcom, whose Studio City offices he all but lived in during the show’s nine-season run.

But after ending the show his rationale became more complicated. The unprecedented success that “Seinfeld” enjoyed had left him without a clear road map of what to do next, as some of Mr. Seinfeld’s comedic confidants acknowledge.

“Hey, if I had that money?” said Chris Rock, a longtime friend. “Please. Puh-leeze. It’d be nothing but charity work, babe.”

What persuaded Mr. Seinfeld to take on “Bee Movie” were the assurances by Mr. Spielberg and his DreamWorks partner Mr. Katzenberg that he would have free rein to make the film his way (as well as access to a videoconferencing system so he could work from New York when necessary), and his naïve assumption that it would take three to four months to write a script, record his tracks and finish the job.

“I could not have been more wrong,” he said.

Mr. Seinfeld estimates that it took him and three hand-picked writers nearly two and a half years just to complete the script for “Bee Movie,” the story of a talking bee who falls in love with a human florist and discovers, to his horror, that mankind has been stealing his community’s honey.

As Mr. Seinfeld became further entrenched in the film’s preproduction process, he was in for a rude awakening about how he was really perceived in the entertainment industry.

Working with a casting director to recruit voice talent for the film, Mr. Seinfeld was given two lists that supposedly represented all the A-list male and female stars in Hollywood. When he looked at the lineup of male performers, he was surprised to find his own name missing from the roster.

“I said, ‘How come?’” Mr. Seinfeld recalled. “She said, ‘Because everybody knows you only do your own thing.’”

To the extent that Mr. Seinfeld engages with Hollywood anymore, these interactions are often fraught with ambivalence. “I never get offered things that I think I could really bring something special to,” he said, though it is hard to imagine what kind of project he would deem a good fit. Over the years he has turned down his share of offers — most recently, a comedic caper written by David Mamet — often because he cannot find the time, and sometimes because he doesn’t have an interest. “I could just take parts to act in movies,” he said, “but they don’t need me.”

Nor can Mr. Seinfeld understand why the industry seems to believe he has spent his post-sitcom career in a cushy exile of his own design, when he continues to appear at clubs and theaters as much as possible. “That’s what I do,” he said. “That’s all I can do. That’s what a comedian is. Our thing is not disappearing into other characters. It’s being this character that you are.”

Friends who have known Mr. Seinfeld for years say that he has always been sharply attuned to the fitness of his stand-up act, and eager to perform it no matter what else was occupying him in his personal or professional life.

“When he wasn’t out there for a period of time, he would start to get antsy and feel like he was losing his edge,” said Larry David, the co-creator of “Seinfeld” and star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “The phrase he would use was ‘out of shape.’ I never looked at it like that.”

That Mr. Seinfeld has, since 1999, been married to the former Jessica Sklar, the founder of the charitable organization Baby Buggy, and has a 6-year-old daughter, Sascha, and two sons, Julian, 4, and Shepherd, 2, does not seem to have diminished his fervor for hitting the road.

After finishing his Atlantic City show, he said, he took a helicopter home to New York, returning around 3 a.m. to his apartment, where he was so wired that he spent another hour watching a surfing documentary on the Discovery Channel. By the time he got to bed, Mr. Seinfeld said, “My wife goes, ‘What are you doing?’” His answer: “Acting wild.”

Still, the rarity with which Mr. Seinfeld applies his full creative energies to a project like “Bee Movie” would seem to add pressure on the film’s critical and box-office results, if only to prove that its star remains a powerful draw.

But Mr. Rock, who plays a mosquito named Mooseblood in “Bee Movie,” argued that the film should not be judged against Mr. Seinfeld’s larger body of work. “If he was doing a movie that wasn’t animated, where he was dating Scarlett Johansson, his version of ‘Manhattan,’ then maybe yes,” he said. “But this is a movie about cartoon bees.”

Mr. Seinfeld’s colleagues agreed with his assessment that it was unfair to categorize “Bee Movie” as a comeback project. “It’s not like he’s been hurt or injured or anything,” Mr. David said. “It’s not like he tried something and failed, and now has to come back from it. He’s just been doing what he wants to do.”

Some “Bee Movie” collaborators are already wondering if Mr. Seinfeld’s experience on the film could be parlayed into a larger producing career. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it,” Mr. Katzenberg said. “I think about it every day.”

But Mr. Seinfeld quickly snuffs such pipe dreams. “So I would have an office, I guess,” he said, “and people would come in and pitch me something, and I’d go, ‘Yeah, that sounds good.’

“Oh my God, I’d kill myself. Give me a gun.”

When his promotional duties for “Bee Movie” are over, Mr. Seinfeld said, he has no concrete plans, except perhaps allowing his daughter to see his stand-up act for the first time and proving to his two sons that their father is more than just a guy who makes films about bees for a living.

He said he took a certain pride in measuring his life against those of other stars — he declined to name names — who have achieved comparable success, but who haven’t found the time or the will to settle down and raise a family. “There’s certain celebrities,” he said, “where I see where they’re at, and I know how old they are, and I know what they’re doing, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, what are you going to do now, Potato Head?’”

Mr. Seinfeld understands that these same people might derive a similar schadenfreude from seeing him — formerly the quintessential single guy — made over as a happily married man, or in secretly wishing that his remarkable streak of good fortune comes to an end. “I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t,” he said. “I sure would. ‘Enough of this guy, it’s about time he fell on his face.’”

Then the man who has almost everything considered what he might need most of all. “I think it might be time for that big, juicy flop,” he said — as long as it isn’t “Bee Movie.” “Not something that takes this long. I don’t want to spend that much time on a flop.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/movies/21itzk.html





Movie Gallery Files for Chapter 11
AP

Video-rental chain Movie Gallery Inc. filed for bankruptcy Tuesday, succumbing to a mountain of debt incurred when it bought rival Hollywood Entertainment for $1 billion in 2005.

Movie Gallery, under severe competition from online rental services, said it filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

"Movie Gallery needs to realign its cost structure due to the ongoing changes in our industry," Joe Malugen, chairman and chief executive of Movie Gallery, said in a statement.

The company also said private investment fund Sopris Capital Advisors LLC agreed to finance a reorganization of the company's debt under the bankruptcy supervision. The plan, which requires court approval, would refinance Movie Gallery's debt. It also would cancel outstanding shares in the company, but give existing equity holders the chance to receive about 2% of the company's new equity.

Movie Gallery is also seeking permission to receive $150 million from Goldman Sachs to finance operations during the bankruptcy proceedings.

The company, under heavy competition from online rental companies, said in August it could not make timely interest payments and would likely receive default notices from lenders. Standard & Poor's Ratings Services cut the company's corporate credit rating to junk-bond status in September.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...c1eec94a1f9d65





Analyst Sees Sparkle in Media Stocks
Georg Szalai

Are Lionsgate, Marvel Entertainment and Crown Media Holdings among the more attractive but overlooked media and entertainment stocks?

Investment bank Natixis Bleichroeder thinks so, and it put the spotlight on these and other small- and mid-cap stocks this week at its annual "Hidden Gems" conference in New York.

Natixis analyst Alan Gould last month raised his rating on stand-alone studio Lionsgate from "hold" to "buy" while maintaining his $12.50 price target, which provides more upside from current trading levels.

"It's one of my favorites in the smaller cap universe," he said.

In his recent upgrade report, the analyst argued: "Lionsgate's theatrical cold streak has begun to turn" thanks to "3:10 to Yuma" and other recent releases, with "Saw IV" also expected to do well when it launches Oct. 26. He added that the firm continues to grow its TV business, something that often gets overlooked, and "faces little risk from a potential economic downturn" thanks to its pure content focus.

The Natixis analyst also likes superhero powerhouse Marvel, citing the company's first two self-financed films next year as "the next major catalysts" for the stock, on which he has a $30 price target -- again providing more upside but only a "hold" as it has moved "already too close" to his target, Gould said.

But boxoffice success for "Iron Man," "The Incredible Hulk" and other self-financed movies "could result in higher earnings, sequel value and a film library for a recurring revenue stream and bolster toy and licensing sales in 2008 and 2009," Gould argued in the report.

Beyond film players Lionsgate and Marvel, Gould and his Natixis colleagues also put the spotlight on sports entertainment firm WWE, TV network firm Crown Media Holdings, TiVo, Liberty Global and Liberty Interactive as well as News Corp.-controlled set-top box technology firm NDS Group and video rental and VOD service firm Rentrak Corp. Gould owns shares in the latter two stocks.

Crown Media is "one of the last indie cable networks with Oxygen sold this week" to NBC Universal, Gould said in explaining why that stock could have upside. "But it doesn't make sense to run an independent network, so we expect a sale" to a big media company down the line.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...c96383438d952f





Vista “Out of Memory” Errors
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

You just can’t seem to throw enough memory at Vista.

There have been a number of issues that Vista users have reported relating to copying and moving data, especially large numbers of files. Often there can be multiple errors at play making it difficult for Vista users to track down the problem, in fact very often there is little indication that file copy operations haven’t completed correctly. It’s only when the user checks the number of files in source and destination that they realize they have a problem.

The “Out of Memory” error (which is affectionately known at the PC Doc HQ as the “Out of Cheese” error … don’t ask why …) is one of the biggest and most baffling of Vista’s file handling problems has been occurs when a Vista user (running Kaspersky Anti Virus 6 or 7) tries to copy a large number of files (~16,400). I know, copying that many files is crazy and not something that people do every day, I’d expect a modern OS to be able to cope with this (am I asking too much???).

These don’t have to be large files and the problem can also occur when copying smaller groups of files that in total exceed 16,400 files between reboots. Following the “Out of Memory” message a range of other errors can occur such as menus and tabs disappearing within the Windows environment and even reboots and BSODs are reported.

Although the problem occurs where users are running Kaspersky security products, it’s a kernel leak that lies at the root of problem (the problem’s not confined to systems running Kaspersky software, that just that this application seems to exacerbate the issue). This issue which has been known about for some months by both Kaspersky and Microsoft was reportedly due to be fixed in SP1, however the current beta of Vista SP1 does not contain a patch. Microsoft have now released a hotfix for the issue (you have to ask for it) which we tried out and can report that it works well to cure the out of memory problem on Vista installations, at least the ones that we could replicate (although the fix cannot be installed on the Vista SP1 Beta).

While there are still other file handling problems in Vista, such as selecting large numbers of files (~1,500) cause serious spiking in memory usage (that is not released until reboot), hopefully one by one these issues will be addressed (SP1 maybe … the current beta doesn’t fix these issues). Maybe then Vista users can feel as confident handling their data as when they were XP users.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=829





Spam Reaches All-Time High of 95% of All Email

Commtouch released its Email Threats Trend Report for the third quarter of 2007, based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly.

The report examines the appearance of new kinds of attachment spam such as PDF spam and Excel spam together with the decline of image spam, as well as the growing threat of innocent appearing spam containing links to malicious web sites.

According to the report:

• Global spam levels reached an all-time high of 95% of all emails at its peak during the quarter.
• Blended threat messages -- or spam messages with links to malicious URLs -- accounted for up to 8% of all global email traffic during the peaks of various attacks during the quarter.
• One massive outbreak mid-quarter utilized over 11,000 dynamic zombie IP addresses to host malicious web sites. Leading zombie locations included the United States (36%) and Russia (8%).
• Image spam declined to a level of less than 5% of all spam, down from 30% in the first quarter of 2007; also, image pump-and-dump spam has all but disappeared, with pornographic images taking its place.
• PDF Spam represented 10-15% of all spam in early July and then dropped significantly, however a steady stream of PDF spam is still being maintained at 3-5% of all spam messages.
• Pharmaceuticals and sexual enhancers were the most popular spam topics, at 30% and 23%, respectively.

Blended Threats

Spam with malware hyperlinks inside one technique which reached a new high during the quarter was innocent-appearing spam messages that contained hyperlinks to malware-sites. This type of spam utilizes vast zombie botnets to launch 'drive-by downloads' and evade detection by most anti-virus engines. Several blended spam attacks of this type focused on leisure-time activities, such as sports and video games. Messages invited consumers to download "fun" software such as NFL game-tracking and video games from what appeared to be legitimate websites. Instead, consumers voluntarily downloaded malware onto their computers.

New Spam Tricks

Spammers experimented with several new techniques to slip past anti-spam engines and into inboxes throughout the quarter. For example, they disguised messages in PDF, Excel, and other popular file formats. This simple trick fools many anti-spam technologies and end users alike, whose guards may be down when they see the popular file attachment ending.

More details, including samples of PDF spam and spam messages containing malware, are presented in the report available here.





Spammers Leave Users 'All Shook Up'

Fake Elvis downloads tout bogus stock tips
Ian Williams

Spammers have launched a pump-and-dump campaign that attempts to manipulate share prices by delivering a message in an MP3 music file.

IT security firm Sophos said that emails are arriving with an attached MP3 file purporting to be a song from well-known artists such as Elvis Presley, Fergie and Carrie Underwood.

The files actually contain a monotone voice encouraging people to buy shares in an obscure Canadian company.

The subject line and body of the emails are usually blank, and typically contain an attachment called 'hurricanechris.mp3', 'allforone.mp3', 'carrieunderwood.mp3', 'elvis.mp3', 'baby.mp3', 'fergie.mp3' or 'bbrown.mp3'.

The voice on the MP3 file, which is randomly altered in an attempt to avoid detection by anti-spam filters, says the following:

'Hello, this is an investor alert. Exit Only Incorporated has announced it is ready to launch its new [obscured].com website, already a huge success in Canada, we are expecting amazing results in the USA. Go read the news and [obscured] on EXTO. That symbol again is EXTO. Thank you.'

Exit Only is a Canadian company that runs a website marketplace for new and used motor vehicles.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said: "Users may click on the MP3 file expecting to hear Elvis, but they'll be all shook up when they discover it's actually a voice resembling Marvin the Paranoid Android droning on about a stock that is set to be the next big thing.

"The spammers are already likely to have purchased stock on the cheap, and are now trying to artificially inflate its price by encouraging others to purchase more.

"Once the stock rises, they'll quickly sell up, leaving the duped investors crying in the chapel. Thankfully though, it's hard to believe that many internet users will fall for such an amateurish presentation of an 'investor alert'."

Cluley advised companies to consider banning these sorts of file by default, as they can create legal as well as security headaches.

"Although the spammers seem to have a fair bit to learn about machine-generated sales patter, some companies might consider blocking all MP3s in email as a matter of course," he said.

"So many music files infringe copyright, and it can be hard for a company to establish which ones are legal and which are not after they have arrived.

"Blocking MP3s, or at least quarantining until requested by the user, can be a good way for a company to take a proactive stance against the use of email for illegal file sharing. It also has the benefit of neutralising this sort of spam at the same time."

Pump-and-dump stock campaigns account for approximately 25 per cent of all spam, according to Sophos, an increase of just 0.8 per cent since January 2005.
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/22...ers-tell-users





Research Shows Image-Based Threat on the Rise

New Purdue University research shows steganography, long considered a minor threat, may be on the rise
Kelly Jackson Higgins

Until recently, steganography, the stealth technique of hiding text or images within image files, has mostly been considered too complex -- and conspicuous -- to be much of a threat. But some forensics experts now worry that the bad guys are starting to use the tactic more frequently, especially in child pornography and identity theft trafficking.

There are an estimated 800 or so steganography tools available online, many of them free and with user-friendly graphical user interfaces and point-and-click features. This broad availability making steganography more accessible and easier to use for hiding and moving stolen or illicit payloads, experts say.

Security experts to date have mostly dismissed steganography as a mainstream threat, relegating it to the domain of spooks and the feds. Their skepticism has been well-founded: The few studies that have searched for images hiding steganographic messages have come up empty-handed.

But now, preliminary data from a new steganography study underway at Purdue University indicates that some criminals indeed may be using steganography tools, mainly in child pornography and financial fraud cases.

Although the Purdue survey is in its early phases, researchers have found proof of steganography tools installed on convicted criminals' computers.

"Our results are very preliminary, but exciting -- with the little data we have so far, we are finding that there's a strong correlation between criminal activity and at least the installation of steganography programs on those [confiscated] computers" from closed cases provided by law enforcement officials, says James Goldman, professor and associate department head of Purdue's Department of Computer and Information Technology.

Even if a criminal removes the program to cover his tracks, steganography tools leave behind "footprints," so researchers can find evidence that the tools were once on the system.

This is Purdue's second pass at investigating whether steganography is really being used by bad guys. In its first study, which concluded last year, Purdue crawled through over one million URLs on the Web, looking for files hidden within other files or images, but found none.

Goldman says the university researchers in that study did a recursive Web crawl and downloaded each image or file that could potentially be an image, and ran a steganography signature-detection tool against it. "We did not detect anything. But it's not all that surprising, because we only had 20 to 25 known signatures for detection, and there are [around] 600 to 800 programs that do steganography," he says.

Goldman says he later realized that they had been going at the research all wrong. "The probability of finding anything wasn't that high, and I started to feel like we were looking in the wrong place, and jumping too far into it. Trying to find these steganographic files in the wild seemed impossible."

Instead, the Purdue researchers decided to first try to prove whether criminals were using steganography tools at all. "Never mind finding the evidence of what they are sharing or the secret message, but just proving they use it," he says. "This is the first time this has been done, I think."

And so far, Goldman says it seems that there's more than meets the eye. "It [steganography] hasn't been something on the radar screen. Mostly, it's been anecdotal evidence, although I suspect the classified intelligence community knows a lot more," he says. Purdue is using Backbone Security's steganalysis tools, which were provided to the university by the National White Collar Crime Center.

James Wingate, director of the steganography analysis & research center at Backbone Security, and a vice president there, says the use of steganography is on the rise, and it could be used for things like transporting malware.

"Some would call me 'Chicken Little,' but I fervently and passionately believe criminal activity is being conducted with steganography... We do know it's being used to conceal child pornography," Wingate says.

He says steganography could also be a handy tool for corporate theft, where an insider could sneak sensitive data or intellectual property in and out in hidden image or other files. "Over time and as [law enforcement] countermeasures get better... [Criminals] will naturally be forced to migrate to more technically sophisticated information-hiding techniques," he says. "If it's there, they will use it."

But Bruce Schneier, CTO of BT Counterpane, disagrees. He says steganography doesn't make sense as an insider threat. It's much easier to just suck the data off onto a USB thumb drive and walk out of the building.

"It doesn't make sense that someone selling out the company can't just leave with a USB," Schneier says. "The one scenario would be an insider who is strip-searched every single time he leaves his office... These are the [far-fetched] types of scenarios you have to invent to make it work."

Schneier says steganographic images are just too obvious, anyway, which renders the technique useless. "If I'm in Burma and trying to send out human rights documentation and hide it in a picture of a giraffe," it's going to look suspicious, he says. "For it to work, you need to have a plausible cover story."

It may, however, be applicable for hiding pornographic images, he notes.

Meanwhile, Purdue's Goldman says he's hoping the university's study will gather information on which steganography tools are the "most popular." That way, the researchers can then do more granular research on specific steganography programs, with more specific information -- such as which are more popular among child pornographers, or identity thieves, he says. He hopes to have all of the scanning completed by the end of this year, and next summer, to conduct another, more focused study on steganographic images.

He says he's also noticed in his research that steganography tools tend to come and go, he says. "It occurred to me that it may be by design... that it goes away when authorities start detecting it. Then a new tool comes out, just like new viruses" emerge, he says.

But critics aren't convinced that IT security needs to start deciphering its image traffic. "Steganography is cool," Schneier says, "but I don't see it [being used]."
http://www.darkreading.com/document....WT.svl=news1_1





Canadian Post Office Upset by Sex Party

A small political party in Canada is suing the government because the state-owned postal monopoly refused to distribute information on the party. Called the Sex Party the party advocates relaxation of laws on sexuality.

The government said that the brochure of the party included the word “penis” which is offensive, had a photo of penis sculpture and and a painting which SUGGESTED that the people might be having sex. Suggested?

The flyer was an attempt to recruit members and the party did run three candidates. But the post office would not deliver the pamphlet. They say they are obligated to protect people from anything they might find offensive. But they did deliver an anti-gay brochure by a Christian group that was very aggressive in its tone and dislike of gay people.

The head of the post office said they delivered the anti-gay brochure, which she said was vile, because they aren’t in the business of censoring the mail. But when it came to the Sex Party they were in the business of censoring the mail. And since the post office is a legal monopoly the ability to send one’s message another way is very limited indeed.

So individuals offended by sex are protect. Individuals offended by anti-gay hate mail are not protected.

This very idea that one should be protect from offense is absurd. Applied consistently it would ban all speech and activity as one is likely to be able to find some moron offended by something no matter what it is.

An inconsistent application of this principle would give some groups superior rights to others. In this case sexaphobic people have superior rights to everyone else. Individuals who might be interested in this party are not allowed to receive the brochure because other people are offended by it. There can be no such right as the right to be unoffended. If you are living then you will be offended at some point in time. If you are a particularly fragile person psychologically you may be offended most of the time. Sorry, but get used to it.

Photos: The illustrations in question posted here are the brochure that the Canadian post office worried some people would find offensive. If you are one of those people --- tough. If you want to enlarge it (oh, boy do the puns flow here) please just click on the image. If you are from the Canadian post office, bend over, locate anal cavity, insert head. Oh, never mind, that would be redundant.
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/200...sex-party.html





Spice Girls Team Up with Victoria's Secret
UPI

U.S. lingerie giant Victoria's Secret will be the exclusive retailer of a Spice Girls greatest hits CD this holiday season, the Wall Street Journal said.

The British girl group's U.S. label, Capitol Records, has arranged for Victoria's Secret to accept 500,000 to 600,000 copies of the CD that it has ordered on a "one-way" basis, which means unsold merchandise won't get returned, greatly reducing the label's financial risk, the newspaper said.

The disc is expected to be priced at $10 to $12 when it goes on sale next month.

The album also will be available for download from Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store and other online music outlets.

Selling the album at Victoria's Secret stores means consumers "don't have to go proactively to a record store," Jason Flom, chairman of EMI Group Limited's Capitol Records, told the Journal. "It's an impulse buy."

Phil Sandhaus, the music-marketing consultant who brokered the deal between Capitol and Victoria's Secret, said selling music in places other than record stores is critical these days. "

"I don't care if it's superstar artists or developing baby bands," Sandhaus said. "It should always be part of the mix."
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Enterta...s_secret/2808/





Macedonian Pop Singer Dies in Car Crash
UPI

Macedonian pop singer Tose Proeski died Tuesday in a car crash on a central Croatian highway when his sports utility vehicle collided with a truck, police said.

Proeski, 26, was one of the most popular singers in the Balkan states of the former Yugoslavia. He sang for the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia at the Eurovision song contest in 2004.

The collision occurred at Nova Gradiska, 80 miles southeast of Zagreb, on the main highway leading to Belgrade, in Serbia, Croatian police said.

Proeski was declared dead at the scene and his driver and a manager were slightly injured in the crash, Croatia’s NOVA TV station reported.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Enterta...ar_crash/3021/





Music Industry Needs Innovation not Intervention
Michael Geist

In the weeks leading up to tomorrow's Speech from the Throne, several music industry lobby groups have urged the government to prioritize intellectual property protection.

Led by the Canadian Recording Industry Association, these groups blame government inaction for recent sales declines, arguing that legal reforms are needed to support Canadian music industry innovation.

While the data suggest that peer-to-peer file sharing is at best only a minor reason for the decline (more significant is competition from DVD and video game sales and the emergence of big box retailers such as Wal-Mart who have pushed down retail prices and decimated sales of older titles), the past month has provided the clearest indication yet that musicians and music sellers are charting a new course that is leaving the major record labels behind.

In the mid-1990s, the industry focused on retaining its core business model by emphasizing two strategies:

First, it relied on copy-control technologies, supported by additional legal measures, to curtail unauthorized copying.

Second, it lobbied for the establishment of a private copying levy on blank media to compensate for the copying that technology could not control.

Ten years later, that strategy is in tatters. The use of copy-controls has proven to be an abject failure. Moreover, despite generating more than $200 million in revenue for the industry and artists, CRIA has abandoned support for the private copying levy.

Last month, it asked the Federal Court of Appeal to allow it to intervene in the current fight over the application of the levy to Apple iPods. Rather than supporting the extension of the levy, it surprisingly wants the court to strike it down, thereby reducing revenues to artists.

Why the change of heart? CRIA now admits in court documents that the extension "broadens the scope of the private copying exception to avoid making illegal file sharers liable for infringement." In other words, the levy creates a compensation system that legalizes peer-to-peer music downloads.

As the industry dithers with its failed strategy, musicians have begun to take matters into their own hands. Last year, the Canadian Music Creators Coalition, which includes some of Canada's most acclaimed musicians, spoke out openly against suing fans and the use of copy-controls.

A growing number of international stars are following suit. Last week, Radiohead released its latest CD without copy-controls on its website under a pay-as-you-like system.

The Radiohead announcement has unleashed a stunning series of follow-up moves – reports indicate that Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Jamiroquai, the Charlatans, and Madonna have either left or are ready to leave their record labels in search of greater commercial success through live performances, merchandise sales and other online innovation that might even include free distribution of their music.

Other artists are exploring new distribution partnerships – the Eagles are selling their latest CD directly to Wal-Mart, Prince distributed millions of copies of his latest CD for free in Britain in a newspaper promotion, and Nettwerk Records, one of Canada's leading independent labels, combined with a newspaper to offer free downloads of some of its most popular artists.

The rapid pace of innovation highlights the fact that artists and consumers are responding to the new digital reality. As Canada's digital music market continues to grow (last year it outpaced both the U.S. and Europe), Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Canadian Heritage Minister Josée Verner ought to remind lobby groups that it is the lack of innovation – not government intervention – that lies at the heart of their tales of woe.
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/266737





Internet Music's 3rd Revolution
Michael J. Miller

Just as music formats evolved from 45s to LPs to CDs to MP3s, music on the Internet has evolved as well. The first great popular success of Internet music was characterized by the original Napster peer-to-peer service. Much of the music available on Napster was illegal, and the record companies soon sued Napster out of existence, though its legacy survives in services like BitTorrent. The second big phase was characterized by iTunes and the iPod, as Apple created a service focused on buying individual songs in a proprietary format designed for Apple's iPod players. The latest iPods look great, and the iPod/iTunes combination continues to be a quite elegant solution, but it looks to be like the time is finally right for another revolution in Internet Music.
It seems to be there are two basic directions in which this could go: DRM-free downloads that can work on any player, without the restrictions that today's sites offer; or the "Jukebox in the Sky," a subscription service that gives you all the music you want, wherever you are. Recent events have pushed both concepts, but I'm convinced that the winner will not only change how we consumer music, but will impact the music itself.

Let's look at what's happening with per-song music services. For a long time, many people have wanted music downloads without the digital rights management (DRM) restriction typically required by most songs on iTunes or the Windows Media services. Even Apple's Steve Jobs has been pushing for a change, noting that the music companies have offered unprotected music on CDs for years but have insisted on protecting music on download sites.

While some people have turned to illegal downloading services, there are now many more legal sources of DRM-free downloads. eMusic, in particular, has made a nice little business selling subscriptions to a certain number of downloads a month, and does a very nice job of helping its subscribers find music on independent labels. And many indie bands actually host a limited number of DRM-free downloads on their sites, just to get some promotion. But of course, most of us, also want music from the major labels.

Universal music took the lead in this, first letting iTunes offer DRM-free versions of its music, albeit for more money and still in a format that isn't widely supported outside of Apple's players.

But for me, the biggest change has been Amazon's new MP3 service, which has a good-sized library of songs from Universal, EMI, and the independent labels, and offers the top 100 songs for 89 cents each. PC Magazine's review is here, but all I can say it that it works well, and that the music of course works on any player, which to me is a big plus. Of course, to be really successful, it will need to add the music from Warner Music and Sony BMG. People typically don't care about the record label - they care about artists.

The other big option is the "Jukebox In The Sky" subscription concept that Rhapsody and the reconstituted Napster have been pushing for years. Basically the way this works is that for a set monthly fee, you get all the music you can listen to, but it is yours only as long as you continue to subscribe. Personally, I like to listen to new music, so every Tuesday I download a couple of new albums - many of which I never would have tried without a service like Rhapsody.

But these services have never attracted large numbers of subscribers, and the services seem to be consolidating. MTV folded its Urge service and invested in Rhapsody instead. Virgin closed its Virgin Digital service and redirected subscribers to Napster.
Subscription music has had its issues ranging from getting competitive libraries to making the services work right (I used to call it "PlaysForPrettySure"), but these issues are mostly solved now. Rhapsody just did a deal with Tivo that lets you get subscription music through your Tivo box and your TV; it's not how I listed to music (I'd rather listen on a portable device, not my TV), but adds one more layer of promotion to the concept.

Microsoft has entered with its Zune service, but it seems as proprietary a solution as Apple's. At least the new Zunes expected new month look better. And the idea of syncing via Wi-Fi is a good one.

Still, subscription music faces a big issue in gaining a large audience. First, most people don't even know about it, and those who do aren't sure about the concept to begin with. That's going to take some convincing.

Second, the pricing needs to be very clear, and most of the sites just don't make it clear: Rhapsody recently raised its "unlimited" price to $12.99 a month, but to me, the real offering is the $14.99 "to-go" price, which lets you take your music on a portable player (though not the iPod now, because of Apple's restrictions). Napster is less expensive at $9.99 for the computer-only solution, but again $14.99 for the Napster-To-Go offer. Microsoft just offers the To-Go service at $14.99. Yahoo! Music has the best deal at $71.88 per year, but doesn't seem to offer the portable device service.

Indeed, Yahoo! Music seems to hanging on, but barely. The company recently dropped its Musicmatch service, and comments on the blog of Yahoo Music head Ian Rogers express the frustration many in the business have said privately.

I'm here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I'm not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I'll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won't let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don't have any more time to give and can't bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life's too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

Sounds about right.

Meanwhile, BusinessWeek is reporting that Universal Music, Song BMG, and possible Warner are pushing a plan called "Total Music" in which a subscription service (which they are said to be valuing at $5 a month or $90 a player) would be bundled into the cost of portable players.

The Total Music concept is an interesting one: would I pay $90 more for an MP3 player that had all the music I want on it? I'm a fan of subscription music, so my answer would be yes. Would the rest of you? Let me know.

With all these developments, both DRM-free individual song purchases and subscription music services look like they are on there way to becoming more popular. (Of course, iTunes looks like it's here to stay, as are peer-to-peer services, like it or not. Meanwhile, CD sales look like they are in a one-way decline.)

But the choice between them may impact music a lot as well. If individual song purchases become even more popular, the music business is likely to focus more and more on singles. But if subscription music takes hold, there's more of an incentive to focus back on longer collections - the equivalents of CDs or Albums. Indeed, one reason many people give for the decline in CD sales is how few CDs are really good all the way through.
http://blogs.pcmag.com/miller/2007/1...revolution.php





BBC Widens Access to iPlayer
Jonathan Webdale

The BBC is increasing the availability of its iPlayer broadband console so that it is compatible with Apple Macs and accessible for free via Wi-Fi hotspots in public places across the UK.

The Corporation has partnered with software firm Adobe, enabling it to offer the iPlayer as a streamed catch-up programming platform for Apple computers as well as for PCs using the Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

The BBC was criticised earlier this year because the initial version of the iPlayer was accessible only to owners of Windows XP-powered PCs.

The deal with Adobe sees the BBC using the firm's Flash Player to offer the iPlayer as a streaming service, rather than using the original peer-to-peer download model with which it debuted.

A separate deal with Wi-Fi hotspot operator The Cloud means the BBC becomes the first UK broadcaster to make all its online content available for free via the technology.

The arrangement makes all bbc.co.uk material accessible for free at 7,500 hotspots spanning locations including branches of McDonald's and Coffee Republic, and Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports.

The iPlayer is in soft-launch phase at the moment but will get a major marketing push at Christmas. It currently enables viewers to download and view around 400 hours of programmes from the past seven days and store them for up to 30 days.

"It is important to ensure that BBC iPlayer is available on as many platforms as possible," said Erik Huggers, controller of the BBC Future Media and Technology group, adding that the Adobe deal would "revolutionise" how the pubcaster created and delivered content to audiences in the digital age.

The BBC's director of Future Media and Technology Ashley Highfield said he hoped the deal with The Cloud would be the first of many such partnerships and would allow UK citizens to "catch up on Strictly Come Dancing while having a café latte in Coffee Republic."
http://www.c21media.net/resources/de...&article=38094





Universal Eyeing iTunes Alternative
FMQB

Universal Music Group (UMG) chief Doug Morris is aiming to take on the power of iTunes by joining forces with other record companies to launch a new, industry-owned music subscription service. Morris has already enlisted Sony BMG Music Entertainment as a potential partner and is also talking to Warner Music Group about the venture, which would be called Total Music, according to Business Week. While the details are still being ironed out, sources say that Morris' new business model is intriguing. The idea is to get the makers of MP3 players and cell phones to absorb the cost of a roughly $5-per-month subscription fee so consumers get a device with all-you-can-eat music from participating record labels that's essentially free. Music companies would collect the subscription fee, while hardware makers theoretically would sell more players.

With the Total Music service, Morris and his allies are basically telling consumers that music comes free with the device. The subscriber would pay only for the player, and would never have to shell out a penny for the music. "You know that it's there, and it costs something," one tech company executive who has seen Morris' presentation told Business Week. "But you never write a check for it."

It remains to be seen whether the makers of music players and phones can charge enough to cover the cost of absorbing the subscription price. Under one scenario, insiders figure the cost per player would amount to about $90, assuming people hang on to a music player or phone for 18 months before upgrading (18 times a $5 subscription fee equals $90).

Morris has long felt that music companies give too much control to Apple and iTunes when it comes to music pricing and profits. His boss at UMG parent company Vivendi, Jean-Bernard Levy, told reporters last month that, "The split between Apple and [music] producers is indecent. Our contracts give too good a share to Apple." He also repeated the call for new music to be priced higher than older catalog songs, rather than Apple's 99 cents per song model. "We should have a differentiated price system," Levy said.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=494276





Canada to Tax Legal Digital Music Downloads

Canadians may soon pay a small tax on every legal music store download, says a new measure (PDF) sanctioned by the Copyright Board of Canada. Requested by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), the tax would apply at least 2.1 cents to every individual song download and 1.5 cents per track for complete albums. Subscription download and streaming services would themselves be charged between 5.7 and 6.8 percent of a user's monthly fees. Minimum fees would also apply for every larger download or subscription.

The surcharge would help compensate artists for piracy, according to SOCAN's reasoning. The publishing group draws similarities between this and a 21-cent fee already applied to blank CDs in the country; the right to copy a song from an online store demands the same sort of levy applied to copying a retail CD, SOCAN argues.

The tax may have a significant impact for online stores such as iTunes and Canada-based Puretracks, which will have to factor the amount both into future and past sales. The new tax would be retroactive to January 1st, 1996 and would effectively cover all sales and subscriptions from such services since their beginnings, which typically followed shortly after those in the US. Free services are not currently subject to the added cost.

While no public responses have been made, the Copyright Board report notes that both Apple and the RIAA-equivalent Canadian Recording Industry Association were heavily involved in resisting proposed rates. Higher rates that had been initially suggested, as well as minimum fees, would "handicap" a digital music business that already has to compete with pirated tracks that users can find for free, both Apple and the CRIA said.

The decision has not set a fixed date for when stores would begin paying the fee, but said it would roll out any tariffs "gradually" to soften the immediate blow.

This decision follows a related move in July, in which the Copyright Board had tentatively approved a media player and memory levy that would add to the price of iPods and removable flash storage under the assumption that the devices were being used to carry copyrighted material.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/10/...g.music.sales/





Storm Worm Botnet Up for Sale
Matt Greenop

Security specialists believe the far-reaching Storm Worm botnet is for sale to spammers. Photo / Darryl May

The Storm worm botnet - responsible for plenty of global IT misery - seems to be getting chopped up for sale to cyber-dodgies.

Joe Stewart, a blogger at security specialist SecureWorks and expert on Storm, says the new variants are using a 40-byte key to encrypt their Overnet peer-to-peer traffic.

Each node can only communicate with nodes using the same key.

This, he wrote in a blog today, allows the Storm author to divide the botnet into smaller networks.

Stewart believes that this could be move towards selling Storm to other spammers as an 'end-to-end spam botnet system, complete with fast-flux DNS and hosting capabilities'.

"If that's the case, we might see a lot more of storm in the future," he wrote.

The new approach does make distinguishing Storm nodes on networks that allow P2P traffic an easier task for network admins.

The Storm Worm, according to best guesstimates based on results from Microsoft's malicious software removal tool's latest deployment, indicate there could be between one and 10 million infected PCs worldwide.

The recent MSRT, which is updated on a monthly basis, removed Storm-related malware from nearly 275,000 computers out of 2.6 million scanned.

Security specialists have been surprised at the relentless progress of Storm, which preys on P2P users and others, tricking them into clicking infected .exe files.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/st...ectid=10470172





N.Y. Reaches Safeguard Agreement with Facebook
Karen Matthews

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday announced an agreement with Facebook to enforce safeguards against sexual predators and obscene content.

The agreement calls for Facebook to respond and begin addressing complaints of nudity or pornography or unwelcome contact within 24 hours of receiving them, and reporting to the complainant what steps it has taken within 72 hours.

It also calls for the popular social networking Web site to allow an independent party - approved by Cuomo's office - to report on its compliance to the new safeguards for two years.

"These social networking sites are attractive. We want to make sure they're safe," Cuomo said at a news conference.

"Facebook will have the safest interactions of its kind on the Internet," the attorney general added.

Under the agreement, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which has about 47 million users, will have to post the safety procedures on its Web site.

"We care deeply about our Facebook users and today we pledge a solution," said Chris Kelly, the chief privacy officer for Facebook, who joined Cuomo. "We believe that safety is an ongoing process."

In response to a question, Kelly said Facebook receives tens of thousands of complaints a day, not all of them about inappropriate content. With the agreement, he said, complaints about unwelcome content will be pushed to the top of the queue.

Cuomo said he hoped that other social networking sites would follow Facebook's lead. He added that his office was in discussions with other sites but he declined to name them.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/ci_7193318





MySpace Platform Opening Up. Finally
Rafe Needleman

Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, on stage with his boss of two years, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, finally announced to the world at the Web 2.0 Summit tonight that MySpace will have an open platform "within a couple of months."

After the platform opens to developers, it will open to a subset of users, about two million, to see if the "sandbox" that keeps that platform safe is reliable.

Before we all get MySpace apps, we'll get a catalog of widgets that we can add to your pages. Widgets aren't apps, though.

Of course, there are platforms and there are platforms. It wasn't clear at all how much of the MySpace social database will be exposed to developers, nor what data MySpace will let developers export to non-MySpace pages.

DeWolfe did say, however, that developers will be able to monetize their apps, and that MySpace perhaps will help them sell advertising
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9799561-2.html





Skype Purchase Cost eBay
Rachel Konrad

EBay Inc. reported Wednesday a third-quarter net loss of more than $936 million — a rare plunge into the red for the e-commerce juggernaut caused by previously announced charges to its Skype telecommunications division.

But San Jose-based eBay still easily exceeded Wall Street's expectations for the quarter ended Sept. 30, thanks to record revenue of $1.89 billion, up 30 percent from the year-ago quarter.

Executives credited record revenue at the PayPal electronic payment division, and brisk sales outside of the United States and at ticket broker StubHub.com.

Early this month, eBay announced it would take a $900 million write-down in the value of Skype. That charge, for what accountants call impairment, essentially acknowledged that eBay executives drastically overvalued the $2.6 billion Skype acquisition, completed in October 2005.

EBay also said on Oct. 1 that it paid certain Skype shareholders $530 million to settle future obligations — a one-time payment known as an "earn-out."

Including the Skype charges, eBay lost $936.6 million, or 69 cents per share in the third quarter. In the year-ago quarter, the online auction company earned $280.9 million, or 20 cents per share.

It was the first time the company reported a loss since the second quarter of 1999, eBay President and CEO Meg Whitman said.

Not counting Skype charges, stock-based compensation expenses and other one-time costs, eBay earned $563.8 million, or 41 cents per share, up 53 percent from $367.4 million, or 26 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter.

On that basis, which does not comply with generally accepted accounting principles, analysts polled by Thomson Financial expected eBay to earn $456.26 million, or 33 cents per share, on revenue of $1.83 billion.

EBay bought back 14.8 million shares of its stock for $500 million last quarter, part of a $2 billion repurchase program continuing through January 2009.

The company expects fourth-quarter revenue of between $2.1 billion and $2.15 billion. After one-time charges, it expects earnings between 39 cents and 41 cents per share.

The company expects 2007 revenue of $7.6 billion to $7.65 billion and non-GAAP earnings between $1.47 to $1.49 per share, though that could vary greatly depending on the dollar-euro exchange rate.

EBay's stock closed Wednesday at $40.60, up $2, or 5 percent. The stock has surged 43 percent in the past year. In after-hours trading after the quarterly results were announced, it gained another $2.12.

Whitman characterized the quarter as "strong" but was quick to acknowledge problems with Skype.

Skype co-founder and chief executive, Niklas Zennstrom, stepped down Oct. 1, when eBay announced the impairment charges. EBay chief strategy officer Michael van Swaaij, formerly vice president for European operations, is acting Skype CEO.

"We are disappointed — obviously — by the write-down, and we're behind in terms of some financial metrics we had originally anticipated," Whitman told The Associated Press in a phone interview. "But the steps we took ... and moving to new management was completely the right thing to do. I actually feel confident in the business longer term."

Whitman said, however, there was little she or other executives could have done differently in 2005 to offer an acquisition price that more accurately reflected the company's value.

This was the company's first write-down.

"We put together a set of projections based on what we believed at the time," she said. "It's always hard to forecast growth of a 2-year-old. It's now a 4-year-old and it's almost the fastest startup in the Internet. It didn't hit the internal milestones we had hoped for, but I do hope the ability to get the earn-out out of the way and reorient the strategy may be back on track."

Whitman said the company is working to integrate Skype into eBay's core products more tightly, and it will expand Skype's reach with partnerships.

Skype announced a deal Tuesday with News Corp.'s MySpace, which will offer free Internet phone calls to members of the social network starting next month.

EBay said Wednesday that revenue from the electronic payment service PayPal was a record $470 million in the third quarter, up 35 percent from a year ago.

The Skype division reported record revenue of $98 million, up 96 percent from a year ago. Of that, 82 percent came from outside of the United States, and eBay is increasingly focused on promoting Skype domestically.

It's the third consecutive quarter of profitability for Skype, which had 246 million registered user accounts at the end of the third quarter — up 81 percent from a year ago.

Ebay, which ended last quarter with $4.4 billion cash, took in $1.32 billion in sales from ebay.com, shopping.com, StubHub.com and other e-commerce sites — up 26 percent from a year ago. Of that, 51 percent came from outside the United States.

Despite healthy growth in each of the three divisions, the company hasn't been able to maintain the number of listings on its e-commerce sites. Instead, it's wringing more money out of a shrinking number of listings.

The number of individual listings dropped 3 percent from a year ago, and eBay store listings plunged 14 percent from a year ago. Individuals and "power sellers" who operate eBay stores listed 556 million items last quarter, down 5 percent from a year ago.
But those goods sold for a total value of $14.4 billion, up 14 percent from a year ago.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...IwpSQD8SB7EBG4





Will Apple Open the iPhone?

An official software-development kit may finally be announced at January's Macworld. Why the wait? It may have something to do with Leopard
Arik Hesseldahl and Olga Kharif

William Hurley loves his iPhone. But he'd love it even more if he could write software for it.

He's not alone. Hundreds of programmers showed up at an iPhone event organized by Hurley, an executive at software maker BMC, even though Apple hasn't released the source code they need to exploit the device. That was in July, and the criticism of Apple's refusal to open the iPhone hasn't died down.

Now it appears Apple will soon answer those pleas. Sources familiar with the company's plans tell BusinessWeek.com that Apple will release a software-development kit for the iPhone in early 2008, enabling programmers to create games, business-productivity tools, and countless other applications for the device. Few details are known, but sources say an announcement will come in January, which suggests it may be slated for Jan. 15, when Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs takes the stage at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

Why the wait? Some analysts suggest the delay has little to do with frustrating developers or Apple's official position about bugs from third-party software posing a threat to cellular networks. Instead, the timing may have more to do with Apple wanting to wait at least until the launch of the new operating system for its Macintosh computers. Known as Leopard, it was originally planned for June, 2007, but is now set for release on Oct. 26. Since the iPhone was built with the current Mac OS, the thinking is that Leopard's new capabilities will enable more robust features on the iPhone as well.

Cat-and-Mouse Game

Meanwhile, writing and installing individual programs that run on the phone remain officially forbidden, extremely difficult, and somewhat pointless given Apple's heavy-handed response to such efforts thus far. The only way to do it is to break the iPhone's software locks, as some hackers have managed to do, only to see Apple cripple such devices with a software upgrade. Not surprisingly, some iPhone owners have responded with lawsuits seeking as much as $2.6 billion in damages.

Naturally, hackers quickly broke through the new set of software locks, suggesting that a cat-and-mouse battle may be under way. But the persistence also demonstrates just how eager programmers—both hobbyists and companies—are to build software for a device that Apple promises will be in the hands of 8 million people by the end of next year. "It's clear what the user community wants," Hurley says. "They're not hacking around with it for fun as much as they are because they want other features on the iPhone."

Such features might range far and wide, from video and Internet calling to voice recording and instant messaging. But until Apple changes its policy, most developers will have to settle for the next best thing, as they did at Hurley's event in San Francisco, where they created Web-based applications that can be accessed through the iPhone's browser, Safari. Despite widespread frustration over the limitations, such events are planned for London and Germany in the coming months.

Those familiar with the process of hacking an iPhone and installing unauthorized applications say doing so requires obtaining "root" access to the device's underlying software code. In the world of computers that run on Unix-based operating systems—which includes Apple's Macintosh computers and the iPhone—users with root access have no limitations as to which files and features they can tinker with.

It Pays to Be Picky

In theory this means that root access on an iPhone could be exploited for malicious purposes, such as hijacking a user's contact list, eavesdropping on calls, or worse. "You can do anything you want, including many things that Apple and AT&T don't want you to do," says Rik Farrow, an independent security consultant who has worked on Unix-based cell-phone projects for other companies, but not Apple.

Concerns like that will probably lead Apple to be careful in selecting which programmers are given the tools to build iPhone software. It isn't clear yet how Apple plans to go about vetting programmers or to what extent it will open the platform to them. Despite the purported risks, Apple's wireless partner, AT&T, isn't likely to stand in the way. "It's up to Apple to decide whether third-party applications will go on the iPhone," says AT&T spokesman Michael Coe. "We have embraced third-party applications on other devices."

Analysts expect that instead of equipping anyone who wants to build iPhone software, Apple will handpick the companies and individual programmers to be given the software-development kit, much as it already does with development of third-party applications for the iPod. Similarly, iPhone programming tools might be distributed via the iTunes store, which Apple already uses to distribute simple games that run on the iPod. "The real pragmatic way to look at it is, no operator would want to ship a handset that's completely open," says Benoit Schillings, chief technology officer at Trolltech, a wireless-software company. "They would want to pick and choose applications to run on it."

Early VIP Access?

It's rumored that some major players already have been given the iPhone development kit. The list is said to include gaming software maker Electronic Arts and Google, which has already built versions of Google Maps and its YouTube video site for the iPhone. Electronic Arts declined to comment, while a source at Google indicated that the search company hasn't been give early access to the iPhone kit.

Meanwhile, companies that specialize in software for wireless phones are jockeying for Apple's attention. "We've been working with the Web interface for some time but would love to embed our technology on the iPhone itself," says Brian Bogosian, CEO of Visto, a privately held software outfit that specializes in e-mail software for mobile phones. Similarly, a startup named iSkoot, which offers an application for making Skype phone calls on mobile devices, says it's eager to adapt its software for the iPhone platform.

Interestingly, despite all the consternation about hackers, Apple may eventually decide to embrace some of the unauthorized applications now circulating if they prove especially popular. "We think Apple is welcoming these mild hacker attacks [on the iPhone] to discover weaknesses and to see if they should be hiring some people," says Richard Doherty, head of Envisioneering Group, a technology consulting firm. "There's a reason why there's an empty row" on the iPhone's screen, he says. "It's for additional applications."
http://www.digg.com/apple/OMG_Apple_to_Open_the_iPhone





Orange to Sell Unlocked iPhones in France
Thomas Ricker

Well, well... looks like Apple has been backed into a corner by French law and will be releasing an unlocked iPhone in France after all. While no one will say precisely how much the unlocked iPhone will cost (the locked Orange-network iPhone will cost €399) those details are expected to be announced sometime before the November 29 launch. Of course, laws forbidding the exclusive bundling of cellphones to carriers are not unique to France. As such, we can expect a glut of unlocked iPhones in the coming months as deals are struck throughout Europe and Asia. Hear that AT&T, O2 and T-Mobile haters? Your nefarious unlocking efforts are about to get a whole lot easier (and more expensive).
http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/17/o...one-in-france/





Apple Will Offer Outside Developers Access to iPhone
John Boudreau

Apple announced Wednesday it will provide a development kit to let independent programmers create new applications for the iPhone, a move that could eventually open the music player-phone to new games and link it to corporate e-mail systems.

But code writers will have to wait until February to get the software tools, Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in a statement posted on Apple's Web site.

"We are excited about creating a vibrant third-party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users," Jobs said. "We believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers."

The company, though, has delayed offering the tools to developers for fear it would expose iPhone users to piracy and viruses, he said. In September, an iPhone software update shut down, or at least created problems, for iPhones rejiggered to work with a cellular carrier other than AT&T or loaded with other non-Apple applications.

The move angered some users and triggered two class-action lawsuits filed earlier this month in federal and state courts in San Jose. Apple and its telecom partner AT&T were charged with illegal monopolistic actions.

"Having a smartphone that you can't develop applications for is kind of like having a pickup truck you can't put stuff in the bed of," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. Apple's iPhone development kit "helps finish the solution," he added. "It makes it into a true smartphone."

The delay in opening up the iPhone was as much a business decision as it was a technical one, Enderle said. "In the mad rush to get to the market, there were a lot of things that weren't done," he said. "This was one of them. Now they are comfortable that this is stable. They got through the initial set of patches."

Eventually, the move could make the iPhone even more popular, particularly among corporate customers, Enderle added. Independent software writers are sure to write applications allowing the iPhone to sync with corporate e-mail systems.

Jim Grossman, an equity analyst at Thrivent Asset Management in Minneapolis, said opening up the iPhone platform will only enhance what he calls "one of the coolest hardware devices to come out."

He expects game writers and other software developers to zero in on the iPhone. "If I'm a software guy, I want to design applications for this product," said Grossman, whose firm owns Apple stock.

Jobs said it will take Apple a few months "to do two diametrically opposed things at once - provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones - this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network."
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_7211089





Click click bang

Man Texting While Driving Hits Train
AP

When Robert Gillespie looked up from his text message, he saw a freight train. EOM. (''End of message,'' that is, for non-texters.) Eugene police say Gillespie's car crashed into the side of the Union Pacific freight train about 2 a.m. Tuesday.

When officers arrived, they found him alert and talking, but trapped in the car. They learned about the cell phone and text message as they worked to rescue him.

Gillespie, who had turned 38 the day before, was charged with drunken driving and careless driving, police spokeswoman Kerry Delf said. His injuries were described as not life threatening, and no members of the train crew were hurt.

Delf said officers believe he was driving faster than the 35 mph speed limit as well as using his cell phone to send a text message. She said he tried to brake for the train, but it was too close.

''There are all kinds of ways to get distracted these days,'' said police spokeswoman Kerry Delf. ''We don't recommend any of them while you're driving.''
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/nation...ml?source=mypi





Library of Congress Advances 2 Digital Projects Abroad
Doreen Carvajal

The Library of Congress announced an ambitious plan on Wednesday to digitize a collection of the world’s rare cultural materials — artifacts ranging from a photo collection of a 19th-century Brazilian empress to a crackly recording of the 101-year-old grandson of a slave.

The library also signed an agreement with Unesco in Paris to move ahead with the World Digital Library project, which is in the testing phase and will not be available for public use until next year.

Other national libraries appear poised to cooperate in the venture, which is modeled after the Library of Congress’s vast American Memory project that has posted millions of original items on the Web, including Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

“The vision is simply that this is a means for promoting far better intercultural understanding in the world,” said James Billington, the librarian of Congress for more than 20 years and the driving force behind the project, which aims to overcome the digital divide in developing countries by offering the collection free online.

The World Digital Library is proceeding as European libraries develop their own digital collections. The European Digital Library will release its prototype next year, and is a response to Google’s efforts to digitize libraries in the United States and Britain.

The French National Library has already developed a test project, Europeana, for the European library and is in the process of digitizing 300,000 books. Bruno Racine, the president of the French library, said there was no competition between that project and the World Digital Library.

“The multilingual dimension seems to be a very ambitious challenge, and if we can contribute usefully, we will be happy to do so,” Mr. Racine said of the World Digital Library.

The world library started two years ago with a $3 million grant from Google and technical assistance by Apple. Initially, five other libraries contributed material for the prototype, including the national libraries of Egypt, Brazil and Russia.

The digital library is searchable in seven languages, with video commentaries from curators alongside material including original maps, manuscripts, photographs and recordings.

The aim is that the material will ultimately be available on personal computers, hand-held devices and some of the basic, inexpensive laptops that are being developed for use in emerging economies.

When library officials displayed their new handiwork, though, the high technology was overshadowed by the ancient treasures it could show off: an elaborate 17th century map of the world with California depicted as a sliced-off island; a 1903 Thomas Edison film of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island; and a 17th century Arabic manuscript on the fundamentals of geometry.

“My name is Fountain Hughes,” declared a firm Southern voice in one of the recordings posted on the site dating to the 1940s. “My grandfather belonged to Thomas Jefferson. My grandfather was 115 years old when he died. And now I am 101 years old.”

The project’s organizers, according to Laura Campbell, an associate librarian at the Library of Congress, are working to raise money, discussing alliances with Nokia and the Vodafone Group and gathering commitments from countries to participate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/te...y/18world.html





A Times Square Pedestrian Is Giving No Ground
Nicholas Confessore

Millions of people have paused to stand amid the hustle, bustle and neon of Times Square.

And sure, those who pause — to gawk, talk or eat a gyro — can slow the progress of pedestrians around them.

But when Matthew Jones of Brooklyn lingered on the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue in the early morning of June 12, 2004, gabbing with friends as other pedestrians tried to get by, something unusual happened: He was arrested for it.

A police officer said Mr. Jones was impeding other pedestrians and charged him with disorderly conduct.

Mr. Jones is not taking the charges lying down (so to speak). After trying twice to get the charges dismissed, he has taken his case to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, which heard arguments here on Wednesday.

In the prosecution’s view, it appears, the innocent do not dawdle. According to the original complaint against Mr. Jones, the officer “observed defendant along with a number of other individuals standing around” on a public sidewalk in June 2004. Mr. Jones was “not moving, and that as a result of defendants’ behavior, numerous pedestrians in the area had to walk around defendants.”

Mr. Jones refused to move when asked, said the officer, Momen Attia, and then tried to run away. When Officer Attia tried to handcuff him, he “flailed his arms,” earning a second charge for resisting arrest.

After spending the night in jail, Mr. Jones contested the main charge and asked that it be dismissed. When the judge demurred, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor violation the next day and received no further sentence. But he soon filed an appeal, arguing that there had been no basis for the arrest in the first place.

Nancy E. Little, Mr. Jones’s lawyer, said that neither the police nor the prosecutors claimed that he was doing anything other than standing on the sidewalk with friends — an activity, she said, that is not entirely without precedent in Manhattan.

“You need something more,” she said, citing past Court of Appeals decisions. “You need to be being verbally abusive, or really blocking lots of people, or lying down on the sidewalk.”

The complaint, she added, did not allege that any other pedestrians had been seriously inconvenienced or that Mr. Jones had shouted at or shoved anyone or even that the alleged obstruction was more than temporary. Prosecutors did not say how big Mr. Jones’s group of friends was, or how many people were forced to walk around them.

“Let’s face it — no allegations were presented that anything was about to happen,” said Ms. Little. (Mr. Jones himself could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.)

Paula-Rose Stark, a Manhattan assistant district attorney, argued that the facts in the complaint were sufficient for the charge of disorderly conduct. Mr. Jones’s reckless intent, Ms. Stark said, was evident from the fact that his behavior was noticeable in the first place “amid the inevitable hustle and bustle of Times Square, the construction, the vehicular traffic.”

As for other details, she said — well, perhaps Mr. Jones should not have pleaded guilty, depriving himself of a jury trial.

“Those are all matters left to be pursued at trial,” Ms. Stark said.

A lower court came to a similar conclusion last year, and by a vote of 2 to 1 upheld the arrest. But, in a glimmer of hope for Mr. Jones, the dissenting judge wrote that standing and talking with friends on the sidewalk, “even if it requires other pedestrians to walk around him, is commonplace in New York and not disorderly conduct.”

And on Wednesday, Mr. Jones’s circumstances appeared to reach a friendly audience before the Court of Appeals.

“Isn’t that lawful conduct?” wondered Judge Robert S. Smith. Later he added, “Your conduct can’t be illegal just because an officer noticed it.”

His colleague Judge Eugene F. Pigott Jr. questioned what other violations might attract law enforcement attention.

“All I could think of was a bunch of lawyers from the New York City Bar Association standing around trying to figure out where to have lunch,” Judge Pigott said. (The association has offices a block and a half from Times Square.)

Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye seemed likewise nonplused. “This is at 2 a.m.?” she asked, wondering how many pedestrians it would have been possible to inconvenience at that hour. “I guess I’m not in Times Square at 2 a.m. very often.”

The court is likely to rule on the case next month. Should it rule against Mr. Jones, the available evidence on the scene on Wednesday suggested that the police would soon have their hands full.

Just before 5 p.m., near the corner where Mr. Jones was arrested, stood the following assemblage: a man eating clams out of a Styrofoam container; two men smoking cigarettes together; a man waiting for a woman to finish a phone call; a guy looking at a map; a young woman sending a text message; two men handing out tour brochures; and a family of five, including an infant in a stroller, who stopped to look at the brochures.

Across the street stood Chaya Coppersmith, 18. “That’s just completely ridiculous,” Ms. Coppersmith said when told of Mr. Jones’s case. “Nobody can walk in Times Square. Everyone’s standing around in Times Square. That’s what it’s for.”

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/ny...movealong.html





The Truth About Telecom Amnesty

An interview with the lead counsel in the AT&T case reveals how much misinformation is being disseminated about telecom amnesty.
Glenn Greenwald

Today I interviewed Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the lead counsel in the pending litigation against AT&T, alleging that AT&T violated multiple federal laws by providing (without warrants) unfettered access for the Bush administration to all telephone and Internet data concerning its customers. The Bush administration intervened in that lawsuit to argue that the "state secrets" doctrine compelled dismissal of the lawsuit, but the presiding judge, Bush 41-appointee Vaughn Walker, last year rejected that argument and ordered the case to proceed (Oral Argument on the administration's appeal of that ruling was heard by the 9th Circuit earlier this year).

The EFF/AT&T lawsuit -- based in part on the testimony and documentation of Mark Klein, a former AT&T employee -- will entail an investigation into the extent to which AT&T and other telecoms enabled the Bush administration to spy illegally on their customers. As of now, these telecom lawsuits are the best (arguably, the only real) hope for obtaining a judicial ruling as to whether these surveillance programs were illegal. Precisely for these reasons, the Bush administration is demanding "telecom amnesty" -- to bring a halt to EFF's lawsuit and thus ensure that no investigation of its spying activities on Americans ever occurs, and that no ruling is ever obtained as to whether it broke the law.

I found this interview extremely illuminating, and it reveals just how much misinformation is being disseminated by amnesty advocates. I will post the entire podcast and transcript when it is available, but wanted to post some key excerpts now:

* * * * *

GG: The lawsuit you originally brought was against only AT&T and not against the Bush administration or any government officials. Is that correct?

CC: Yes. We brought the case only against AT&T because AT&T has an independent duty to you, its customers, to protect your privacy. This is a very old duty, and if you know the history of the FISA law, you'll know that it was adopted as a result of some very deep work done by the Church Committee in Congress, that revealed that Western Union and the telegraph companies were making a copy of all telegraphs going into and outside the U.S. and delivering them to the Government.

So this was one of the big outrages uncovered by the Church Committee -- in addition to the rampant surveillance of people like Martin Luther King.

As a result of this, Congress very wisely decided that it wasn't sufficient to simply prevent the Government from listening in on your calls - they had to create an independent duty for the telecom carries not to participate in illegal surveillance.

So they are strictly forbidden from handing over your communications and communications records to the Government without proper legal process.

* * * * * *

Regarding the 9th Circuit appeal and what is at stake in these cases:

GG: If you were a Bush administration lawyer coming out of that Oral Argument, you would be far from confident that the 9th Circuit is going to dismiss the case?

CC: I think that's a fair characterization.

GG: And so, as we sit here now, with the Bush administration demanding amnesty for telecoms -- including AT&T and the other telecom defendants in these various lawsuits - there is a very real prospect, as of this moment, that the case you brought against these telecoms will go forward, and will entail an investigation into what these telecoms have been doing vis-a-vis surveillance of Americans -- is that true?

CC: I think that's true. . . . The courts will be able to look pretty deeply into what the phone companies have been doing. It may not be the case that the rest of us will know all of it. But what we will know at the end -- and what I think is critically important -- is whether it was legal or not.

GG: There will be a judicial ruling, assuming your case goes forward, as to whether or not the activities the telecoms engaged in, in concert with the Bush administration, actually broke the law?

CC: Yes - and that I think is tremendously important even if we don't end up knowing every nook and cranny of what the Government has been doing.

The FISA law really makes it illegal for the phone companies to give this information to the Government, and what the Government does with it afterwards isn't really relevant to our claim.

We have evidence of an NSA-controlled room in the Folsom Street AT&T facilities in San Francisco. We have evidence that AT&T diverted copies of everyone's Internet traffic into that room. And we know that there's very sophisticated equipment in that room that is capable of doing real-time analysis of the Internet traffic that is getting routed into there.

For most of our legal claims, that's enough to win, and we're done.

GG: Let's talk about those allegations. Your lawsuit, if it proceeded, would necesarily require an investigaiton into those allegations -- namely, into whether there was a secret room built, whether AT&T was providing unfettered access to the NSA, whether they were turning over this data. You would have to prove those allegations in order to prevail, right?

CC: Yes. . . . in that regard we already have AT&T internal documents that lay out the schematics of how this is happening and AT&T has authenticated these documents. They filed a motion with Judge Walker saying that those documents are their trade secrets and to say that, they had to say they were true. . . . The evidence we already presented and the fact that AT&T authenticated them takes us, if not all the way there, pretty darn close.

* * * * *

The impact of amnesty on these investigations:

GG: So, if Congress were to enact a law providing amnesty to telecoms -- something like the Bush administration is demanding, whereby the telecoms would receive retroactive amnesty -- that would essentially put a halt to your lawsuit?

CC: We would certainly argue that it didn't, but it's fair to say that it would put a pretty large hurdle in front of us for going forward. . . .

GG: But you would expect AT&T's lawyers and the telecom industry to argue that the amnesty they got from Congress does in fact bar those claims as well?

CC: Yes. Their goal is plainly to get rid of these litigations full stop. They don't want the courts to ever rule on whether this is legal or not. That's their goal. . . .

It's certainly the goal of the administration and the phone companies to ensure that there's never a decision about what's been going on is legal or not. The telecom cases are the last, best hope.

GG: In all of these cases that might result in an adjudication as to whether the surveillance programs were illegal, the Bush administration has been actively invovled in trying to block these cases from proceeding at all?

CC: That's right - they made the same "states secrets" argument as they made in our case in all these other cases as well.

GG: And having lost the "state secrets" argument in your case, and also in the ACLU case originally, they're now attempting to put a stop to these cases through the amnesty law that they're seeking?

CC: I think that's right. They're afraid. I think it's fair to say that they're worried they're not going to win with the rules of the game as they were set up at the time they started spying on everyone. They're running to Congress to try to change the rules of the game going forward, and trying to cover up what's happened in the past. And the question is - - is Congress going to go for this?

* * * * *

The passivity of Congress:

GG: The claims by Mark Klein about what AT&T was doing - do you know, has he ever testified before any Congressional hearings or spoken with any Congressional Committee as part of any investigations that they've done into these claims?

CC: I know he hasn't ever been asked to testify in front of Congress. I know he would be willing to testify, I know he'd be very eager to tell his story to Congress.

GG: Well that's why I'm asking. These are pretty extraordinary claims that he's making, and yet -- not only during the time that the Republicans were in control of the Congress, but even for the 9 months that Democrats were in control -- there have been no formal Congressional hearings, Committee investigations, in which they asked him to come and testify about what he knows. Is that right?

CC: I think that's right. And I think that as we've been talking to members of Congress about the immunity provision, as the amnesty provision has been moving to Congress, it's shocking to me that they don't know what Mr. Klein has told a federal judge.

It's been on Frontline, and it was on a whole bunch of things -- you've been talking about it -- but there's a sense that members of Congress don't understand the kind of wholesale dragnet surveillance that Mr. Klein's evidence demonstrates . . . It's undisputed, this evidence. They have never said that Mr. Klein is lying or that the documents are phony.

To the contrary, AT&T itself said they were all true and were trying to argue that they were their trade secrets and we should have to give them all back. It's undisputed evidence and it is surprising that Congressional members still don't know about it and haven't asked Mr. Klein to come tell them himself.

* * * * * * *

Claims of telecoms' "good faith":

GG: One of the arguments that the telecom industry is making, and that advocates of telecom immunity or amnesty are making, is that these telecoms acted in good faith when they did what they did, and so it's unfair to punish these companies -- even if they technically broke the law -- because they were acting in good faith, acting as what the Washington Post Editorial Page described as good "patriotic corporate citizens" trying to protect the country. I have two questions about that:

(1) is it true that under the law, if they can prove they acted in good faith, then at least for the statutory claims, there won't be any liability?; and,

(2) aren't those claims, those arguments, that they're making now [about their supposed "good faith"] ones that they made before Judge Walker, that he rejected, when he refused to dismiss the case against them?

CC: Yes and yes. To answer your first question: the FISA law already has very broad immunities for the telecoms, and if it was the case that they were acting in good faith with an honest belief that what they were being asked to do was legal, then they would already have immunity, and they don't need an additional immunity from Congress for that.

And it's also the case that they made all these arguments to Judge Walker and Judge Walker's decision on this addresses those arguments very directly -- he said no reasonable phone company in the position of AT&T could have thought that what they were being asked to do was legal. It is not the case that this phone company could have believed that the wholesale surveillance of millions of its customers for five years, six years and counting, could be legal under the law.

Remember, these phone companies are very sophisticated about these FISA laws and the other laws that explain how and when they can cooperate with law enforcement. These aren't some rouges. This isn't Joe's Phone Company. They are very sophisticated and know the law better than almost everyone.

But even if they didn't, I don't think it takes a lot of thought to wonder: "huh, the FISA law says that the exclusive means by which the Government can get information is either by a warrant or a short-term certification from the Attorney General in an emergency situation. Huh - do either of these two things justify ongoing wholesale surveillance of all of our customers for five years and counting?"

The answer to that has to be "no." I don't think you even need a law degree to figure that one out.

* * * * * * *

The motives for the telecom lawsuits:

GG: John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, was on Fox News on Sunday arguing for telecom immunity, and this is one of the things he said in explaining why he believed in amnesty: "I believe that they deserve immunity from lawsuits out there from typical trial lawyers trying to find a way to get into the pockets of the American companies."

Is that an accurate description of your lawsuit and your organization?

CC: No, we are not plaintiff's attorneys. . . . He's welcome to come and visit our offices and if he still thinks that we're rich plaintiffs' attorneys after he's visited our little tiny Mission Street offices, then I have a bridge to sell him. We're a small, struggling non-profit with a very tiny budget - and we're doing this because we're committed to protecting people's privacy in the digital age.

GG: I don't know the salaries of EFF lawyers and I'm not asking that, but I assume it's true that there are all kinds of private sector opportunities and large corporate law firms in San Francisco where lawyers working in those places are making a lot more money, and if EFF lawyers were motivated by the desire for profit -- as Mr. Bohener dishonestly suggested -- there are a lot of other jobs that you could get that would pay a lot more money.

CC: Oh yeah, absolutely. And in fact, our lawyers are just the opposite. Most of the EFF lawyers worked in those big fancy firms for big fancy salaries, and took big paycuts to join us, because they wanted to do personally fulfilling work and feel like they were making the world a better place.

What I tell young lawyers who come to me and say: "I really want to work for EFF - you have such great lawyers," I say: "take your current paycheck, rip it in three pieces, take any third, and that's about what you'll get working for EFF." The lawyers who work for EFF are making some of the biggest contributions to this organization, because they are making far less than they could on the open market in exchange for being able to work on things they believe in every day.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...sty/index.html





Sex, Nazi, Burrito And Viagra: Who Googles What?

Internet users in Egypt, India and Turkey are the world's most frequent searchers for Web sites using the keyword "sex" on Google search engines, according to statistics provided by Google Inc.

Germany, Mexico and Austria were world's top three searchers of the word "Hitler" while "Nazi" scored the most hits in Chile, Australia and the United Kingdom, data from 2004 to the present retrievable on the "Google Trends" Web site showed.

Chile also came in first place searching for the word "gay," followed by Mexico and Colombia.

The top searchers for other keywords were as follows (in order from first to third place):

"Jihad" - Morocco, Indonesia, Pakistan

"Terrorism" - Pakistan, Philippines, Australia

"Hangover" - Ireland, United Kingdom, United States

"Burrito" - United States, Argentina, Canada

"Iraq" - United States, Australia, Canada

"Taliban" - Pakistan, Australia, Canada

"Tom Cruise" - Canada, United States, Australia

"Britney Spears" - Mexico, Venezuela, Canada

"Homosexual" - Philippines, Chile, Venezuela

"Love" - Philippines, Australia, United States

"Botox" - Australia, United States, United Kingdom

"Viagra" - Italy, United Kingdom, Germany

"David Beckham" - Venezuela, United Kingdom, Mexico

"Kate Moss" - Ireland, United Kingdom, Sweden

"Dolly Buster" - Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia

"Car bomb" - Australia, United States, Canada

"Marijuana" - Canada, United States, Australia

"IAEA" - Austria, Pakistan, Iran
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...75016820071017





Made in China: Dodging the Internet Censor
Lisa Vaas

Independent-minded Internet users are trying to foil China's censors, who themselves seem to be increasing in sophistication.

According to a report by an anonymous technician working for an Internet company in China, the world's most populous country employs tens of thousands of cyber-censors and cyber-police whose mission is to purge the Internet of anything that might embarrass the government. This network of apparatchiks has been responsible for the arrests of hundreds of Internet users and cyber-dissidents over the past 10 years.

The technician, writing under the pen name of "Mr. Tao," published the investigative report—entitled "Journey to the Heart of Internet Censorship"— under the aegis of the nonprofit organizations Reporters Without Borders and Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

The report describes pervasive, and sometimes self-generated, censorship, abetted by ample manpower and funding that Mr. Tao estimates has grown to some $27 billion in U.S. dollars.

The report also notes that there are ways to resist censorship and plenty of Chinese freethinkers are eager to make use of those techniques.

Mr. Tao notes the use of proxy servers—be they HTTP, POP3, FTP or SOCKS—to hide a user's IP address. In theory, proxy servers could also be used to reach blocked foreign sites, he says. But in practice, China's censorship "is so well developed in this respect that it prevents this."

"You have to access sites such as dongtaiwang.com, wujie.net and huayuannetworks.com, which have been dubbed 'The Three Musketeers,'" he writes. "They provide many technical tools and services of excellent quality."

Other services to get around censorship that Mr. Tao recommends are ziyoumen, huofenghuang, shijietong, hanfeng, wujie liulan, SafeWeb and Tor, a tool set that provides anonymous browsing, publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol.

Mr. Tao also recommends exploiting varying levels of censorship between provinces or between levels in the administration. For example, an author might get away with posting a critical article in the online media in certain provinces, with Beijing being the most restrictive province. Also, smaller news sites often escape sharp scrutiny, he said in the report.

Other than that, Chinese Web surfers should adopt a wide array of Internet technologies, he says, such as blogs, discussion forums, Internet telephony, discussion groups, grouped calls, instant messaging, webmail, P2P (peer to peer) and VPN.

Web-based feed aggregators such as NewsGator Online reportedly help regain access to RSS feeds. Other tricks to scaling the great firewall of China include an SSH connection to somewhere outside of China or the use of Firefox's gladder extension, a proxy tool whose motto is, "Get over Great Firewall with Great Ladder!"

But such advice is getting staler by the minute, as China's censors are getting more technically savvy. For example, at one point, RSS feeds were a simple way for China's Internet users to get their hands on forbidden information. China's censorship machinery seems to have finally caught on to RSS, however, with reports coming in as early as August of Chinese telecoms blocking FeedBurner RSS feeds.

More recently, the Chinese government apparently has extended the block to all URLs that begin with the words "feeds," "rss" and "blog."

Censorship and cyber-policing flows down directly from top government levels: specifically, it starts at the seat of government in Zhongnanhai, a complex of buildings in Beijing adjacent to Tiananmen Square which serve as the central headquarters for the Communist Party of China and the government of the People's Republic of China.

Orders are issued from Zhongnanhai on down to a host of state-run agencies.

Employees in China's censorship apparatus work in special sections that have been set up in every one of the government's Public Security Bureaus—agencies that handle policing, security and social order.

Internet company employees also practice self-censorship and keyword filtering. However, sometimes forbidden material slips in advertently. In such cases, the government may react by criticizing the site, imposing a fine, ordering that the site fire whatever employee is responsible, or forcing a site's section or an entire site to shut down.

Ideological control is enforced through certificate-awarding classes on how to fine-tune the skill of the censor as well as through field trips for online companies that include Yahoo and a slew of Chinese companies including search engine makers Baidu and Sohu and the portal companies Sina.com, NetEase, TOM, and Xilu, among others. After their return, the companies' executives and editors are expected to write patriotic articles about the field trips, which happen yearly and target locations such as "the place where communism was born."

The censors use a host of established communication technologies to constantly give orders about what such companies can publish or what events or issues are off limits, including phone, e-mail, SMS text messages, MSN, Tencent QQ and RTX (Real Time eXchange) instant messaging, Web platforms and a weekly meeting. They expect their orders to be carried out fast, with three levels of urgency that require action within either five, 10 or 30 minutes.

China's censors prefer to communicate via SMS text messages and MSN instant messaging. Mr. Tao gave the example of two journalists who wrote a series of articles criticizing how an iPod subcontractor—Foxconn of Taiwan—was treating plant workers. Censors sent SMS messages to private sites with instructions that they avoid disseminating reports about the case "so that it is not exploited by those who want independence to advance their cause."

The administration prefers that censors eschew MSN, however, given that it's run by a foreign country and its orders could come to light. Instead, RTX, which is run by a Chinese company called Tengxun, is the preferred platform for instant messaging.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2198093,00.asp





A Host of Confusion
Tobin Harshaw

If we’re lucky, someday a media scholar or, better yet, a cultural anthropologist might devote a dissertation to the great Randi Rhodes kerfuffle of Oct. 16, 2007.

Since it was never front page news, here is this morning’s initial report, from Barooosk at the Talking Radio blog:

“According to Air America Radio late night host Jon Elliott, Rhodes was beaten up pretty badly, losing several teeth and will probably be off the air for at least the rest of the week … Pointing out that Rhodes was wearing a jogging suit and displayed no purse or jewelry, Elliott speculated that ‘this does not appear to me to be a standard grab the money and run mugging.’

“ ‘Is this an attempt by the right wing hate machine to silence one of our own,” he asked. “Are we threatening them. Are they afraid that we’re winning. Are they trying to silence intimidate us.’ ”

Now, according to The Daily News, such fears were apparently misplaced:

“Air America radio host Randi Rhodes is temporarily off the air, but claims she was brutally attacked near her Manhattan apartment are bogus, her lawyer and a police source said today … Rhodes’ lawyer told the Daily News she was injured in a fall while walking her dog. He said she’s not sure what happened, and only knows that she fell down and is in a lot of pain. The lawyer said Rhodes expects to be back on the air Thursday. He stressed there is no indication she was targeted or that she was the victim of a ‘hate crime.’ “

Obviously, the snark from the right is now pretty much deafening, and there are more than a few liberal bloggers who might be tempted to delete their morning posts. Some on the left, however, aren’t going to let any news get in the way of the argument: “It sounds like Air America’s Jon Elliott sure stirred things up needlessly,” writes Kevin Hayden at American street.

“However, since [Air America personality] Thom Hartmann’s car was hit with bullets in the past week, I can understand why talk hosts get nervous. And since Rhodes doesn’t know what made her fall, I understand how easy one can jump to paranoid conclusions.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...-of-confusion/





Woof

Artist Defiantly Draws Prophet Mohammed


Lars Vilks

Paula Newton

Swedish artist Lars Vilks says all he's doing is taking a stand in the name of artistic expression. But because of that stand, on this afternoon he's lying low -- on the ground, in fact -- looking for bombs under his car.

Al Qaeda has put a $100,000 price on his head and offered an extra $50,000 for anyone who murders him by slitting his throat after the eccentric artist and sculptor drew a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a dog.

"I don't think it should not be a problem to insult a religion, because it should be possible to insult all religions in a democratic way, " says Vilks from his home in rural Sweden.

"If you insult one, then you should insult the other ones."

His crude, sketched caricature shows the head of Prophet Mohammed on the body of a dog. Dogs are considered unclean by conservative Muslims, and any depiction of the prophet is strictly forbidden.

Vilks, who has been a controversial artist for more than three decades in Sweden, says his drawing was a calculated move, and he wanted it to elicit a reaction. Watch "I should slaughter you" »

"That's a way of expressing things. If you don't like it, don't look at it. And if you look at it, don't take it too seriously. No harm done, really," he says.

When it's suggested that might prove an arrogant -- if not insulting -- way to engage Muslims, he is unrelenting, even defiant.

"No one actually loves the truth, but someone has to say it," he says.

Vilks, a self-described atheist, points out he's an equal opportunity offender who in the past sketched a depiction of Jesus as a pedophile.

Still one could argue Vilks should have known better because of what happened in Denmark in 2005, when a cartoonist's depictions of the prophet sparked violent protests in the Muslim world and prompted death threats against that cartoonist's life.

Vilks' cartoon, which was published in August by the Swedish newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, hasn't reached that level of global protests, although it has stoked plenty of outrage.

Muslims in Sweden demanded an apology from the newspaper, which has stood by Vilks on his freedom of expression stand. Pakistan and Iran also lodged formal protests with Sweden.

One Swedish Muslim woman who lives just an hour-and-a-half drive from Vilks said she hopes to make good on the al Qaeda threat and slaughter Vilks like a lamb.

"I can do this in the name of Allah, and I will not fail. I could slaughter him in the name of Allah," says the woman who identified herself only as Amatullah.

She adds, "If I get the opportunity."

Dressed in a black burqa from head to toe and uttering death threat after death threat, the woman -- a wife and mother -- says she is defending her religion and her prophet if she manages to kill Vilks.

Amatullah has already been fined for issuing death threats. Still, she claims she will never stop taunting him.

Swedish police, who declined CNN's request for an interview, have advised Vilks to abandon his home.

But the artist still works there by day and travels to a safe house by night. Vilks knows his defiance could get him killed, but he says his art is worth dying for.

As he sits at his computer, his phone buzzes with a text message. Another death threat has just come in, this one from Pakistan.

"I will kill you, you son a bitch," he reads.

There are hundreds of threats just like this one on his mobile phone, on his answering machine and in his e-mail inbox.

"You get used to it," he says. "It's a bit of hide and seek. It's like living in a film."
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe...rsy/index.html


















Until next week,

- js.



















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