Internet Killed The Television Star
Josh Catone
Reviews of Joost, Babelgum, Zattoo, and More
Edited by Richard MacManus
Television is big business. No, let's not understate it: television is very big business. The global broadcast and cable television industry generates billions of dollars worldwide annually from subscription, equipment, advertising, and service fees; and is dominated by huge media conglomerates like General Electric, Viacom, News Corp., and Disney. The new kid on the block is Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), which sends television signals over the Internet - and the early forecasts are bright. Research firm iSupply predicts that IPTV will be a $26 billion industry in 2010, while Gartner says that 3 years from now IPTV will have the attention of 48 million pairs of eyeballs.
This post looks at 3 new IPTV startups (plus a couple of "sort of IPTV" websites) that have been gaining steam over the past few months. Analysts and pundits view these companies as competitors to the cable industry, far more so than video sharing sites like YouTube.
Joost
Joost, which is currently in closed beta and was initially known as The Venice Project, is the big new kid on the block. They got the most media coverage of all the startups profiled here (26,527 mentions on Technorati -- none of the other sites here crack 1,000) and they have deep pockets by virtue of their founders, Kazaa and Skype creators Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom.
Joost is a software product that uses peer-to-peer streaming technology to deliver data in encrypted packets, which are then cached the way your browser caches web content. The cached content is then sent along to other users. Joost differs from traditional TV in that its content is all 'on demand', meaning you can download and watch video whenever you want - not only when its 'on.'
Content
While the content on the Joost network right now isn't very extensive, content is one area where the product should excel. Friis and Zennstrom are aggressively pursuing content distribution deals with major media companies. In February, they announced a partnership with Viacom that will put content from MTV Networks, BET, and Paramount Pictures on Joost.
Currently, Joost's content is strong - but limited. Joost boasts 23 channels, including a lot of commercial content - although each channel only seems to have a handful of programs. They have a number of music channels, some dedicated to specific artists, such as, 'Green Day,' 'Red Hot Chili Peppers,' 'The Diddy Channel,' 'Atlantic Street,' and 'Warner Bros. Records.' These channels show mostly music videos, documentaries, and live performances. 'Fifth Gear' is a channel on automobiles and shows short clips about expensive cars, while 'Saturday Morning' shows old cartoons (mainly 'Rocky and Bullwinkle') and the 'World's Strongest Man' channel shows clips of events from the Met-RX World's Strongest Man competition.
The channels that held my attention longest were probably 'National Geographic' - which showed full documentaries from the National Geographic cable channel - and 'IndieFlix Premiere Hits', which showed full length independent films.
Features/UI
The user interface of Joost is non-traditional. When you start up Joost, it opens full screen. Controls appear when you hover your mouse over any edge of the screen. On the right edge is a button that allows you to open up the channel guide, on the left is a button for 'My Joost' - which accesses your widgets (more on them below). On the bottom of the screen are video controls.
The video controls are fairly standard: play, pause, skip to next/last program, and volume controls. You can also change channels, or skip ahead to a specific program (not just the next or last), and get info about a program or channel -- not unlike the controls found on digital cable and satellite services. The video control bar also includes a search box, that allows you to search by keyword for specific programs, or programs on a certain subject (although this is fairly limited, with such a small program catalog).
Joost's channel browser is easy to use. You scroll through channels with up and down arrows, and you can get a list of specific programs prior to committing - so you can select a specific program to download.
Joost also has a fairly extensive preferences screen, allowing you to fine tune the user interface by changing things - like the delay before the toolbars reappear when you hover your mouse near the edge of the screen, and whether or not you start in full-screen mode.
Widgets
Widgets are something that only Joost has and really sets them apart from the other IPTV providers. Widgets are extensions that add extra, non-television functionality to the Joost program. Right now, Joost's selection of widgets are: Notice Board (news about Joost), Instant Message (chat with Jabber or Gmail users from within Joost), Rate (rate programs), Channel Chat (chat with other users watching the program), News Ticker (an RSS reader that you can use to track outside feeds), and Clock (uh, it tells the time). The widgets are all very easy to use and work well.
Widgets are a very smart addition to Joost. They offer a social aspect to Joost that other startups don't have, allowing users to interact with the content and each other. Further, they minimize the time you are forced to leave Joost in order to get things done.
Babelgum
Joost may be the biggest fish in the pond, but Babel Gum is a very able-bodied competitor. Founded by Italian billionaire Silvio Scaglia (of FastWeb fame), Babelgum is another on demand IPTV software program that looks and feels remarkably like Joost. While they haven't gotten nearly as much press as Joost, they have offices in 4 countries, and they don't seem worried about Joost. "When I started work on this a year and a half ago I was afraid we'd end up with five [competing IPTV services]," founder Scaglia told the Financial Times in January. "The fact it's still two probably gives us a good lead." Babelgum is currently operating in closed beta mode.
Content
Content on Babelgum right now is extremely limited. There are only 9 channels available to users. These are mostly made up of amateur or independent content. Amongst others, there is a News channel that shows news from the Associated Press, a Cartoons channel (which has some pretty neat indie cartoon shorts), a Blogs channels that shows episodes of Rocketboom, and a Trailer channel that shows movie trailers.
Babelgum is trying to entice content owners with a pitch on their site. They call Babelgum "an ideal platform for content owners to serve directly the Long Tail of viewers’ interests not addressed by today’s broadcasting television networks." They don't charge anything to distribute content and promise payment of US$5 for each 1000 unique views, of any clip put on their network. This seems like it might be a good deal for amateur content producers, but it likely won't attract the mainstream media companies (which I'm not sure Babelgum is really trying to do anyway).
Features/UI
Babelgum's interface is very much like Joost's. Video controls are on the left side, but can be moved any way. The standard volume, play, pause, forward and back are there, but unlike with Joost there is no way to scroll through channels and find the program you want before switching. You also can't rewind programs the way you can in Joost (perhaps the content on Babelgum isn't being cached?). Rather disappointingly, Babelgum only comes in two sizes : full screen, and not full screen. While in not full screen mode, you can't resize the window.
The channel browser in Babelgum is easy enough to use. You access it by pressing the "TV" button along the bottom of the screen, or on the video control bar. The browser lists channels in grid format by default, or in a scrollable one-per-page view. This is easy enough when there are only 9 channels, but when there are more, I am not sure how well this format will scale. You can, however, create custom lists of your favorite channels -- rather useless at the moment, but could be helpful if there are ever hundreds of channels. In rather annoying fashion, clicking on a channel doesn't do anything -- you have to click the green 'play' button to load up the channel, or click 'more info' to get a listing of programs and description of the channel. Babelgum's channel browser is more visually pleasing than Joost's, however, and the channel and program descriptions are far more complete.
Babelgum doesn't really offer any more features to speak of. There is a button on each program page allowing you to save it to a "Video" section (sort of a favorites lists), which is something like TiVo for IPTV. But since everything is on demand, this may have limited usefulness. You can also rate programs from the channel browser.
Zattoo
Swiss startup Zattoo is taking a different tack towards IPTV than either Joost or Babelgum. Currently only available to users in Switzerland, Zattoo is a software product that streams actual broadcast and cable television networks, rather than operating an on demand service. Though Zattoo is only available in Switzerland, they are based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Content is where Zattoo really excels, offering over 40 channels to its Swiss users. They plan to expand into other countries as they sign content distribution deals with media companies that allow them to do so. The channels they offer are mainstream broadcast and cable stations - such as BBC World, CNN International, Canale 5, Viva, and Italia 1. Many of the channels are in German, French, and Italian, making them rather hard to understand for a unilingual American like myself (though I did enjoy watching episodes of 'The Nanny' in German and 'Step by Step' in Italian), but the quality of the programming on these channels is top notch.
The interface of Zattoo is very simple and more traditional, looking a lot more like a Windows or Mac program than the others. Because Zattoo is streaming actual TV stations, there is no need for video controls. Zattoo's interface is adorned with just volume and screen size controls. The channel browser loads on the side of the application and is, like the rest of the app, very simple and easy to use; it can be hidden with a click.
Since Zattoo is showing real streaming TV, it would be a very welcome addition if they added a channel guide showing what was on, and when.
ChooseAndWatch and Free Tube
ChooseAndWatch and FreeTube are nothing like the three programs previewed above, but nonetheless they warrant a brief mention in the conversation. They are sites that aggregate streaming video channels from around the web, from a mixture of mainstream TV channels like ESPN, ABC, Al Jazeera, and the BBC; to more amateur, independent networks. FreeTube claims to have 324 channels, while ChooseAndWatch boasts "more than 250." However, due to using ActiveX controls to launch the video applets, and a mish mash of formats (i.e. some channels use QuickTime while others use Windows Media Player) the sites both suffer from browser incompatibilities and channels that just plain don't work. From a content selection standpoint, however, if legal these sites beat Joost, Babelgum, and Zattoo hands down. A word of caution: both websites offer adult content areas.
Conclusion
It's too early to say who will come out on top in the IPTV battle. From a strictly technological standpoint, Joost's offering is the best out there right now. But Babelgum offers a solid product as well, so it will ultimately come down to content.
Zattoo currently leads the game on content, but being only available in Switzerland will obviously keep them from growing very fast. Also being a strictly live streaming service (not on demand), Zattoo may not be compelling enough to divorce people from their TVs.
The IPTV marketplace is heating up and these early startups have so far impressed. That all three software startups profiled above are finalists for the Red Herring 100 Europe 2007 award is proof enough of that.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...m_zattoo.ph p
That Film’s Real Message? It Could Be: ‘Buy a Ticket’
Michael Cieply
Three weeks ago a handful of reporters at an international press junket here for the Warner Brothers movie “300,” about the battle of Thermopylae some 2,500 years ago, cornered the director Zack Snyder with an unanticipated question.
“Is George Bush Leonidas or Xerxes?” one of them asked.
The questioner, by Mr. Snyder’s recollection, insisted that Mr. Bush was Xerxes, the Persian emperor who led his force against Greek’s city states in 480 B.C., unleashing an army on a small country guarded by fanatical guerilla fighters so he could finish a job his father had left undone. More likely, another reporter chimed in, Mr. Bush was Leonidas, the Spartan king who would defend freedom at any cost.
Mr. Snyder, who said he intended neither analogy when he set out to adapt the graphic novel created by Frank Miller with Lynn Varley in 1998, suddenly knew he had the contemporary version of a water-cooler movie on his hands. And it has turned out to be one that could be construed as a thinly veiled polemic against the Bush administration, or be seen by others as slyly supporting it.
In the era of media clutter, film marketers increasingly welcome controversy as a way to get attention for their more provocative fare. The companies behind the Dixie Chicks documentary “Shut Up & Sing” and “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” for example, positively reveled in it.
But the dance can be more delicate when viewers find a potentially divisive message in big studio movies that were meant more to entertain than enlighten. The danger is that an accidental political overtone will alienate part of the potential audience for a film that needs broad appeal to succeed.
Spontaneous debate on the Internet and around the office can be a film’s best friend when, as with a picture like “The Passion of the Christ,” even potential negatives, like accusations of anti-Semitic undertones, feed curiosity.
“Whatever the question is, it’s wonderful for the movie,” said Peter Sealey, a former Columbia Pictures executive who is now an adjunct professor of marketing at Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker School of Management.
Yet studios can be wary of seeming to foster it. Walt Disney largely sidestepped arguments about whether its Pixar-created animated film “The Incredibles” was quietly channeling Ayn Rand. “We feel that the longer we either refute or debate a subject like that, the more the story will live,” said Dennis Rice, senior vice president of marketing for Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures unit. “So we chose to do nothing.”
Executives at Warner, which is releasing “300” in the United States on Friday declined to discuss the studio’s approach in marketing the film. Billboards and trailers, seeming to mirror Disney’s tack with “The Incredibles,” have focused heavily on the picture’s battle action and visual flamboyance — “Prepare for Glory!” runs the most oft-repeated advertising line — while avoiding some deeper story elements that are stirring unexpectedly heated reactions, especially abroad.
Shortly after his press-junket grilling Mr. Snyder — an established commercials director, whose best-known previous credit was a remake of George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” — ran into some surprising reactions at the Berlinale film festival in Germany. Some attendees walked out of a screening there, while others insisted on seeing its presentation of the Spartans’ defense of Western civilization in the face of a Persian horde as propaganda for America’s position vis-à-vis Iraq and Iran. (By contrast it drew applause at a Los Angeles screening last month.)
“Don’t you think it’s interesting that your movie was funded at this point?” Mr. Snyder recalled being asked in Berlin. “The implication was that funding came from the U.S. government.”
When a Feb. 22 report on Wired.com carried a brief mention of the question about Mr. Bush’s proper parallel in the film, Web commentators in the United States began to lock on its supposed political vibe. Yet attempts by both the left and the right to appropriate the lessons of Thermopylae clearly predated the movie.
Mr. Bush has been compared to Xerxes at least since his “axis of evil” speech in the wake of 9/11, for instance, while the Spartan cry “Molon labe,” or “Come and take them,” has long been a rallying call for supporters of the right to bear arms.
According to Deborah Snyder, Mr. Snyder’s wife and an executive producer of “300” (which has more than a dozen credited producers of various levels, including Mark Canton and Gianni Nunnari), some changes to Mr. Miller’s original story may have inadvertently amplified its political resonance.
In a key twist Mr. Snyder and his collaborators expanded the presence of Gorgo, the Spartan queen and Leonidas’s wife, including, among other things, a sequence in which she inspires a wavering populace and weak-willed council to resist the Eastern armies even at the cost of battle deaths. “Her story is that she is trying to rally the troops,” said Ms. Snyder, who dismissed as irrelevant a question about her and her husband’s personal political philosophies.
Mr. Snyder acknowledged that Mr. Miller — who declined to be interviewed for this article — had opened the door for contemporary comparisons with his passionate, if not entirely accurate, portrayal of the ancient Spartans as saviors of Western civilization. “He’d be on their side regardless of who they were fighting, because he just loves them,” Mr. Snyder said.
Thanks to computer-generated effects that contribute to “300’s” highly stylized look, the film’s cost, according to its makers, was considerably less than the outsized production budgets of “Troy,” which did relatively well for Warner, and “Alexander,” which did not. But Warner could use a hit after finishing last year behind several competitors at the domestic box office. (A success in the second half of 2006, like “Happy Feet,” could only do so much to make up for duds like “Poseidon.”)
And the enormous expense of making and marketing any major studio picture — the combined costs appear likely to exceed $100 million in the case of “300” — sharpens the risk in alienating a portion of the hoped-for audience.
In any case Mr. Snyder said he was pleased about the debate, though he never meant the movie to provoke it. “If that’s a by-product, that’s good,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/mo...5spartans.html
Movie Firms Working on Digital Film System
John Rogers
Tired of being turned away at the theater box office when a movie's sold out? Unhappy there's no art-house theater in your neighborhood to cater to your hoity-toity theatrical tastes?
Those days could be ending, say representatives of Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment and a company called Digital Cinema Implementation Partners.
The three are working on a new digital film delivery system that, if successful, could give theater operators the flexibility to put a popular movie on an extra screen as quickly as the demand for it arises. At the same time, theater operators could boot out a surprise stinker and even book in for a day or two an art-house film with a small but devoted audience.
"Our goal really is to have the easiest, fastest, most reliable, most cost-effective content delivery technique possible to the theaters we represent," said Travis Reid, Chief Executive of Digital Cinema Implementation Partners, which is working with Warner Bros. and Universal.
The process, still in the early stages of development, would use satellite and broadband delivery systems to beam digital films directly to theaters, rather than have them copied onto hard drives and delivered by hand, as for the most part they are now, said Darcy Antonellis, Warner Bros.' executive vice president for distribution and technology.
That kind of rapid delivery, Reid said, would allow theater operators the flexibility to economically market niche films that could be shown for just a day or two to a targeted audience. It would also allow operators to quickly find more screens for surprise hits.
"We believe that if we can make that a very efficient process, very fast, they'll be able to respond to audience demands more," he said.
Beaming an encrypted version of a digital film directly to the theater should also cut down on film piracy and bootlegging, Antonellis said, by eliminating the number of opportunities for people to get their hands on the movie as it is transit.
DCIP is owned equally by the Regal, AMC and Cinemark theater chains, which have 14,000 screens in North America. The new system would be available to those and other interested theater operators, Reid and Antonellis said. About 2,200 U.S. theater screens currently show digital films.
Officials with the venture wouldn't offer a date by which they hope to have the system in place or give a cost estimate.
"I think the latter part of this year we'll likely be doing some testing," said Antonellis. "Our hope is as things progress and ... as the projectors roll out there will be a lot more activity."
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/2007...tant-films.htm
2006 Box Office Up, But Costs Rose Too
Gregg Kilday
Domestically, boxoffice was up in 2006. Internationally, it was on a tear. But although marketing costs decreased slightly, production costs rose last year.
Delivering the MPAA's official report card on the state of the worldwide film business, chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said Tuesday: "I would state it was a bullish year for this business. Film audiences around the world reminded us that they love going to the movies, and we had a good slate of blockbusters, family movies, dramas and comedies."
The U.S. boxoffice recovered last year from its 2005 slump as it climbed to $9.49 billion in ticket sales -- a 5.5% increase over the previous year's level of $8.99 billion.
The domestic boxoffice also rebounded from a three-year decline in admissions. For 2006, according to the MPAA, admissions grew to 1.45 billion, up 3.3% from 2005's 1.4 billion. The rise in admissions combined with a slight rise in the cost of individual tickets to produce the boost in boxoffice revenue.
The average cost of a ticket rose from $6.41 in 2005 to $6.55 in 2006, or 2.2%, which the MPAA noted remained lower than the consumer price index's increase of 3.2% during the same period.
For all the upbeat news, though, there remains plenty of room for growth.
The 2006 domestic boxoffice figure was overshadowed by 2004's record $9.54 billion, while admissions remained well below the modern-day high of 1.64 billion achieved in 2002.
Noting a lineup of big-name sequels on tap for 2007, Glickman said, "The last time this happened in my memory was 2002, when there were a lot of sequels, and that was a pretty big year from a boxoffice perspective." Although declining to offer a specific prediction about how 2007's boxoffice will fare, Glickman added, "My judgment is that 2007 will be bigger than 2006, but that's just an educated guess."
On the worldwide stage, movies fared even better. Spurred by the growth of international markets in such countries as Brazil, France, Germany, Russia and South Korea, worldwide boxoffice grew to an all-time high of $25.8 billion. That represented an 11% increase over 2005's $23.27 million and topped the previous record-setting year of 2004 when worldwide boxoffice hit $25.19 billion.
Overall, costs remained relatively steady -- with a rise in production costs offset by a decline in marketing outlays.
The average cost of making and marketing a movie for the MPAA member companies stood at $100.3 million in 2006, up 0.6% from 2005, though somewhat lower than the 2003 high of $105.8 million.
Production costs rose from $63.6 million in 2005 to $65.8 million.
Two caveats, however: Negative costs, as reported by the MPAA, represent the amount each studio invests in a film but do not include investments from non-MPAA sources and therefore do not reflect the full costs of production for the average MPAA film, which actually would be higher if the rising stream of outside investment money were factored in.
Also, because MGM is no longer a member of the MPAA, the trade group readjusted its data from previous years, so that the previous-year figures represent the six studios that currently are MPAA members.
Last year, the MPAA reported avenge production costs of $60 million and marketing expenditures of $36.2 million per film. But eliminating MGM's contribution, it revised the 2005 figures so that they now reflect production costs of $63.6 million and marketing costs of $36.1 million.
Using the revised figure, the MPAA reported that marketing costs declined from $36.1 million in 2005 to $34.5 million last year.
In part, that was because MPAA companies spent more of their marketing dollars on nontraditional media, allocating almost as much for Internet advertising per film as they did on movie trailers.
In terms of marketing dollars, 2006 saw increases in spending for spot TV, online and other media. Spending for newspapers, network TV and trailers saw decreases.
Those figures include the major studios and their specialty divisions. Breaking out just the specialty division films, it was clear that even while studios held down costs on big-budget movies, the specialty divisions were spending more per film themselves.
The average negative costs on a film from the specialty divisions rose from $23.5 million in 2005 to $30.3 million in 2006. Marketing costs also rose from an average of $15.2 million in 2005 to $17.2 million in 2006.
At the same time, 11% more movies were competing for entertainment dollars.
In 2006, the MPAA companies released 203 new films, or 34% of the year's total of 599 new releases. That represented a jump from 190 films out of a total pool of 535 films in 2005. Last year also saw eight rereleases, with just one coming from an MPAA company.
At the boxoffice, 12.5% more movies grossed more than $50 million. Sixty-three films hit that mark in 2006, compared with 56 in 2005.
At the top of the heap, Buena Vista's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" crossed the $400 million mark; no movie hit that rarefied level in 2005. But at the same time, more movies were clustered between $50 million-$99 million in 2006 than in 2005. Last year saw 45 films in that category, compared with 36 in 2005.
When it came to $100 million films, though, 2005 still had the edge. It saw 20 films climb above that milestone, compared with 18 last year.
Ratings-wise, the distribution of top-grossing films remained relatively stabile. In 2006, 85% of the 20 highest-grossing movies were rated PG or PG-13, just as they were in 2005. Both years also had one G-rated movie and two R-rated movies in the top 20.
To gauge moviegoers' attitudes, the MPAA turned to a Nielsen Entertainment/NPG survey, which found that 80% of moviegoers said their trip to the multiplex was time and money well spent. Only 16% reported they would have preferred to watch a DVD. Males and females younger than 25 were most enthusiastic about their preference for a movie theater over home viewing.
The survey also found that moviegoers who own or subscribe to four or more home technologies were actually more avid moviegoers, seeing an average of three more movies per year than the moviegoer who owned or subscribed to fewer than four.
http://www.backstage.com/bso/news_re..._id=1003554752
Ouch! What?
Scientists Say Nerves Use Sound, Not Electricity
CBC News
The common view that nerves transmit impulses through electricity is wrong and they really transmit sound, according to a team of Danish scientists.
The Copenhagen University researchers argue that biology and medical textbooks that say nerves relay electrical impulses from the brain to the rest of the body are incorrect.
"For us as physicists, this cannot be the explanation," said Thomas Heimburg, an associate professor at the university's Niels Bohr Institute. "The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that no such heat is produced."
Heimburg, an expert in biophysics who received his PhD from the Max Planck Institute in Goettingen, Germany — where biologists and physicists often work together in a rare arrangement — developed the theory with Copenhagen University's Andrew Jackson, an expert in theoretical physics.
According to the traditional explanation of molecular biology, an electrical pulse is sent from one end of the nerve to the other with the help of electrically charged salts that pass through ion channels and a membrane that sheathes the nerves. That membrane is made of lipids and proteins.
Heimburg and Jackson theorize that sound propagation is a much more likely explanation. Although sound waves usually weaken as they spread out, a medium with the right physical properties could create a special kind of sound pulse or "soliton" that can propagate without spreading or losing strength.
The physicists say because the nerve membrane is made of a material similar to olive oil that can change from liquid to solid through temperature variations, they can freeze and propagate the solitons.
The scientists, whose work is in the Biophysical Society's Biophysical Journal, suggested that anesthetics change the melting point of the membrane and make it impossible for their theorized sound pulses to propagate.
The researchers could not be immediately be reached for comment.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...-20070309.html
Surveillance
Homeland Security Revives Supersnoop
Audrey Hudson
Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for investigations.
The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was banned by Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the project called ADVISE -- Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement -- was requested by Rep. David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
The investigation focuses on whether the program violates privacy laws, and the findings will be released after completion of the Iraq war supplemental spending bill, possibly as early as this week, a panel aide said.
The ADVISE and TIA data-mining projects rely on personal data to track individual behavior and consumer transactions to develop computer algorithms that create a pattern that some behavioral scientists say can predict terrorist behavior.
Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information.
Privacy concerns prompted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to introduce legislation in January to require that government agencies disclose data-mining practices in regular reports to Congress.
"A serious discussion on the implications of data-mining programs is long overdue," Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat and a sponsor of the bill, said yesterday. Sen. John E. Sununu, New Hampshire Republican, is also a bill sponsor.
"Many Americans are understandably concerned about the idea of secret government programs analyzing their personal information. Congress needs to know more about the operational aspects and privacy implications of data-mining programs before these programs are allowed to go forward," Mr. Feingold said.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security did not return a call for comment.
Congress also tucked language inside Homeland Security's spending bill in September requiring an investigation by the agency's inspector general, but allowed $40 million in funding to go forward in this year's budget.
"The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and correlations from large amounts of data to produce actionable intelligence on terrorists," the spending bill said. "A prototype is currently available to analysts in Intelligence and Analysis using departmental and other data, including some on U.S. citizens."
According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report in March 2003, TIA planned "to use data mining technologies to sift through personal transactions in electronic data to find patterns and associations connected to terrorist threats and activities."
"Recent increased awareness about the existence of the TIA project provoked expressions of concern about the potential for the invasion of privacy of law-abiding citizens by the government, and about the direction of the project by John Poindexter, a central figure in the Iran-Contra affair," the CRS report said.
"While the law enforcement and intelligence communities argue that more sophisticated information gathering techniques are essential to combat today's sophisticated terrorists, civil libertarians worry that the government's increased capability to assemble information will result in increased and unchecked government power, and the erosion of individual privacy," the report said.
ADVISE was initiated in 2003 following the demise of the TIA project.
The new system includes data-mining tools to digest "massive quantities of information from many different sources" to find "hidden relationships in the data," according to a 2004 report by Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a Homeland Security workshop that outlined this and other technology under development.
The technology is expected to analyze more than 3 million "relationships" or connections per hour, says the report, which included an example of how friends, family members, locations and workplaces can be linked by pinging the data.
http://washingtontimes.com/national/...4323-4382r.htm
The Pentagon Wants TiVo (to Watch You)
Noah Shachtman
I always love how the Pentagon, after spending billions of dollars on Rube Goldberg contraptions, suddenly discovers that useful things might actually exist in the commercial sector. And so yet another Pentagon advisory panel has picked up on this fact.
Reuters yesterday reported on a recently issued study on future technologies written by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board. More than anything, it seems these outside advisers want a surveillance system that would put Big Brother to shame, and they're looking at the commercial sector to provide it:
William Schneider, the board's chairman, said a key finding was a need to track individuals, objects and activities -- much smaller targets than the Cold War's regiments, battalions and naval battle groups.
"It's really an appeal to capture and put into military systems the know-how that's already available in the market place," Schneider said in a telephone interview.
So, after reviewing the available technology, what specific types of things do they suggest the military needs? Well, one example, is the Pentagon wants TiVo, according the report (available as a PDF here):
To counter these new threats, technology exists, or could be developed, to provide new levels of spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution and diversity. Furthermore, the ability to record terabyte and larger databases will provide an omnipresent knowledge of the present and the past that can be used to rewind battle space observations in TiVo-like fashion and to run recorded time backwards to help identify and locate even low-level enemy forces. For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data.
Much of the report comes as little surprise: the science advisers want to move away from Cold War-era weapons and toward technologies that can be used in urban conflicts. Small sensors, finding better ways to use data, and an emphasis on increasingly popular "influence operations" all figure big.
-- Sharon Weinberger
UPDATE: Noah here. While a combat TiVo may sound a little crazy, there are several firms that are closer than you think to making it happen. I wrote about one of them last year for the New York Times.
UPDATE 2: Our pals at Inside Defense, in an unusually free-to-the-public article, have more on that Defense Science Board report. It's a doozy:
The DSB, defining technology broadly to include “tools enabled by the social sciences as well as the physical and life sciences,” came up with four critical capabilities...
...The first capability area, “human terrain preparation,” is seen by the science board as “perhaps most central.” The authors want the military to understand better how people and groups, societies and states behave -- and put this information to use to improve training and education, especially of junior leaders and small units.
In the second area, “ubiquitous observation and recording,” the board sees the potential to eliminate sanctuaries where adversaries can hide and gain support and emphasizes the ability to record huge amounts of data that can be rapidly analyzed and retrieved. Keys to this capability include day/night all-weather surveillance “in areas where it is not done well today (urban areas and under foliage),” among other sensor systems and related technology.
As for “contextual exploitation,” the report again focuses on the need to quickly extract meaningful information from massive amounts of data. Here the focus is on data management and the collaboration of human operators and computer systems.
Finally, “rapidly tailored effects” revolve around the first three capabilities...
But three key areas with ramifications for current operations and threats are not well-covered by today’s systems, the authors found: U.S. forces’ ability to “conduct non-kinetic operations aimed at influencing the local populace”; delivering “conventional strikes with great precision and timeliness from afar”; and “mitigating the effects of [weapons of mass destruction] attacks.”
Influencing local populations is “strategic communication at the operational and tactical levels,” the report states -- the soldier on the ground delivering the right message through both “words and deeds,” carrying out non-lethal and lethal missions.
From afar, the task force suggests directed energy, high-energy lasers, ballistic missiles, “scalable” warheads and “hypersonic flight of either transport or launch vehicle” should be considered for the future toolkit.
UPDATE 3: The DSB's idea, of a gaining "omnipresent knowledge of the present and the past" might sound far-fetched. But its a goal that the big thinkers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have been pursuing for quite a while. Darpa-funded engineers are developing a number of different sensors designed to provide what the agency calls "persistent surveillance" and military omniscience." For years, Darpa has also been pushing to develop "Combat Zones that See" -- citywide surveillance camera networks, meant to TiVo a whole town.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/0...ntagon_wa.html
U.S. Report to Fault F.B.I. on Subpoenas
David Johnston and Eric Lipton
The Justice Department’s inspector general has prepared a scathing report criticizing how the F.B.I. uses a form of administrative subpoena to obtain thousands of telephone, business and financial records without prior judicial approval.
The report, expected to be issued on Friday, says that the bureau lacks sufficient controls to make sure the subpoenas, which do not require a judge’s prior approval, are properly issued and that it does not follow even some of the rules it does have.
Under the USA Patriot Act, the bureau each year has issued more than 20,000 of the national security letters, as the demands for information are known. The report is said to conclude that the program lacks effective management, monitoring and reporting procedures, officials who have been briefed on its contents said.
Details of the report emerged on Thursday as Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and other officials struggled to tamp down a Congressional uproar over another issue, the ousters of eight United States attorneys.
Mr. Gonzales told Democratic and Republican senators that the Justice Department would drop its opposition to a change in a one-year-old rule for replacing federal prosecutors, senators and Justice Department officials said.
Mr. Gonzales offered the concession at a private meeting on Capitol Hill with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Gonzales also agreed to let the panel question Justice Department officials involved in the removals, Congressional aides said. The officials would testify voluntarily without subpoena.
Mr. Gonzales’s willingness to give in to Senate demands appeared to underscore how the Justice Department had been put on the defensive by the criticism over the prosecutors’ ousters.
The use of national security letters since the September 2001 attacks has been a hotly debated domestic intelligence issue. They were once used only in espionage and terrorism cases, and then only against people suspected as agents of a foreign power.
With the passage of the Patriot Act, their use was greatly expanded and was allowed against Americans who were subjects of any investigation. The law also allowed other agencies like the Homeland Security Department to issue the letters.
The letters have proved contentious in part because unlike search warrants, they are issued without prior judicial approval and require only the approval of the agent in charge of a local F.B.I. office. A Supreme Court ruling in 2004 forced revisions of the Patriot Act to permit greater judicial review, without requiring advance authorization.
As problems for the Justice Department appeared to be piling up, criticism of Mr. Gonzales seemed to grow more biting as Republicans senators complained about Mr. Gonzales, some because of a letter in USA Today in which he said he had lost confidence in the ousted prosecutors and regarded the question an “overblown personnel matter.”
Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, senior Republican on the judiciary panel, said in a telephone interview that those comments were “extraordinarily insensitive” and that the prosecutors were “professionals who are going to have a cloud over them which could last a lifetime.”
“I have been trying to hold down the rhetoric and try to deal with this on a factual and analytical basis, and his letter was volcanic,” Mr. Specter said. “We don’t need that,” he added.
Earlier at the Judiciary Committee business meeting, Mr. Specter also had harsh words for Mr. Gonzales, saying, “One day, there will be a new attorney general, maybe sooner rather than later.”
Mr. Specter said later his remark did not indicate that Mr. Gonzales had any intention of stepping down.
Other Republican senators expressed strong criticism of the removals and handling by Mr. Gonzales’s aides. Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, was quoted by The Las Vegas Review-Journal as saying the prosecutors’ removals had “been completely mishandled.”
The United States attorney in Nevada, Daniel G. Bogden, was one of the eight dismissed without explanation until he was told by a senior Justice Department officials that he was being replaced to make room for other appointees. Mr. Ensign said the department fired Mr. Bogden over his objections. Mr. Ensign said last month that he was told that the change was for “performance reasons,” but said he was surprised when a Justice Department official testified at a House hearing on Tuesday that Mr. Bogden’s performance had no serious lapses.
Even staunch Republican defenders of the department expressed criticism. One ally was Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, where Paul K. Charlton was among those dismissed.
“Some people’s reputations are going to suffer needlessly,” Mr. Kyl said. “Hopefully, we can get to the point where we say, ‘These people did a great job.”’
The withdrawal of objections to changing the rules for the prosecutors appears to assure passage of a measure to restore rules changed last March, when the attorney general was given authority to appoint replacement United States attorneys indefinitely, several senators said.
“The administration has withdrawn its objections to my legislation,” the sponsor of the bill, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said. She was one of the senators who met with Mr. Gonzales. Others were Mr. Specter, Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
Ms. Feinstein said: “My concerns have been that the firing of people with strong performance reviews all at one time, a number of whom were involved in corruption cases, sends an adverse signal to the rest of the U.S. attorneys, as well as to the general public. They may be hired by the president, but they serve the people and they should not be subjected to political pressure.”
The bill would let the attorney general appoint a temporary replacement for 120 days. If the Senate confirms no one after that time, the appointment of an interim United States attorney would be left to a federal district judge.
Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said Thursday night: “The department stands by the decision to remove the U.S. attorneys. As we have acknowledged in hindsight, we should have provided the U.S. attorneys with specific reasons that led to their dismissal that would have help to avoid the rampant misinformation and wild speculation that currently exits.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/wa...orneys.html?hp
Cybercrime Treaty: What it Means to You
Larry Downes
Cybercrime is getting cheaper all the time, as shady characters sell tools to help criminals spam, phish, hack and crash. And a new treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate could wind up passing the costs of combating cybercrime directly to American businesses.
From an economic standpoint, when the cost of crime goes down, frequency goes up. How does the legal system fight back? One way is to increase enforcement and catch more people. But when it comes to cybercrime, no one really expects law enforcement to keep up technologically with criminals—it's an arms race the criminals keep winning. An alternative is to raise the penalties, in hopes of deterring criminals who weigh the benefits of committing their crimes against the risk of getting caught.
In that vein, in August the Senate ratified the Convention on Cybercrime, drafted by the Council of Europe with considerable input from the United States. So far, 43 nations have signed on. The Convention includes many sensible provisions aimed at unifying global computer-crime laws, and closes loopholes that make it possible for criminals to escape prosecution by locating their activities offshore.
But civil libertarians, along with leading telecommunications companies, strongly oppose the treaty. Civil libertarians are especially concerned about the sweeping authority given to participating countries to seize information from private parties as they investigate cybercrimes, even when the activity being investigated isn't a crime in the country where the data is located. If France is investigating a sale of Nazi memorabilia on eBay, the U.S. must cooperate, even though such transactions are not illegal in the U.S.
Telecommunications companies object to provisions that require member countries to establish and enforce potent data-retention policies for network traffic, and require any operator of a computer network to respond to requests for information from any participating country without compensation of any kind.
These are potentially serious problems, especially given that the Convention is open to any country that wants to join. But there are more practical reasons U.S. businesses should be concerned. The provisions for data retention and production apply to any operator of a computer network, not just telecoms. Worse, Article 12 attaches liability to businesses for "lack of supervision or control" of employees who commit criminal offenses covered by the Convention. Businesses must worry about employee activities that may be legal here, but illegal elsewhere, risking administrative, civil, or even criminal penalties.
These investigative and supervision costs will invariably be imposed on businesses without any real controls. Worldwide law-enforcement agencies, in other words, may now avail themselves of the opportunity to outsource their most expensive problems to you.
The Convention may improve the cybercrime-and-punishment equation in favor of deterrence. But it's also added some new variables and possibly irrational numbers. Of the economic, not mathematical, kind.
http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0...EMNL030607EOAD
'Big Brother' Surveillance Makes Waves in Sweden
A far-reaching wiretapping programme proposed by Sweden's government to defend against foreign threats, including monitoring emails and telephone calls, has stirred up a fiery debate in the past few weeks, with critics decrying the creation of a "big brother" state.
The new legislation, to be presented to parliament on Thursday, would enable the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) to tap all Internet and telephone communication in and out of Sweden.
Under current law, FRA, which cracked Nazi codes during World War II and was Sweden's ear on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, is only allowed to monitor military radio communications.
Defence Minister Mikael Odenberg insists that the new legislation is necessary in today's changed world, where communications are increasingly transmitted through fiberoptic cables and not through the ether.
"This is about collecting information for the country's foreign, security and defence policy and protecting Sweden from foreign threats," Odenberg told AFP.
"We want to be able to detect military threats at an early stage, and also map other foreign threats such as terrorism, IT (Internet technology) attacks or the spread of weapons of mass destruction ... as well as protect our troops involved in international operations," he said.
If adopted, the law would enter into force on July 1.
One of the fiercest critics of the proposed change is former justice minister Thomas Bodström.
"This is about giving permission to wiretap maybe millions of telephone calls, emails and text messages," he told the media after a draft of the bill was presented in January.
Unlike police, FRA would not be required to seek a court order to begin surveillance. A parliamentary committee on military intelligence affairs would however have to give the green light.
FRA would only be permitted to tap into communications through pattern analysis and key word searches, and would not be entitled to target specific individuals.
Among other critics are the Green and Left parties, as well as the Swedish intelligence agency Säpo.
Säpo's chief legal counsel Lars-Åke Johansson said the proposal was "completely foreign to our form of government".
"The government would have direct control over operations within areas that not even the police can follow since they are not criminal operations," he warned, adding that a broader mandate for military intelligence operations "may lead to drastic violations of personal integrity."
Another critic is Anne Ramberg, the head of the Swedish Bar Association.
"If the proposal is adopted, we are going to be among the most advanced in monitoring our citizens, the US included," she said.
Henrik von Sydow, a deputy from Odenberg's own Moderates Party, is also opposed to the proposal.
"We can't assume that those in power always mean well. It is risky to set up a system that can be used by another government, at another time, for completely other purposes than that for which it was intended," he said.
In a bid to soothe critics' fears, Thursday's proposal is expected to call for the creation within FRA of a special council to protect individuals' integrity.
Meanwhile, public opinion polls have presented varying results.
A poll commissioned by the governmental Swedish Integrity Protection Committee and published in January showed that four of five Swedes are in favour of increased surveillance of citizens, whether it be through wiretapping, DNA registers or surveillance cameras in public places.
But a Skop institute survey published in February also showed that 60 percent were opposed to authorities wiretapping all telephone and computer communication in and out of Sweden.
According to the National Post and Telecom Agency, the proposed surveillance would require an initial investment of between half a billion to a billion kronor, as well as
annual operating costs of 100 to 200 million kronor.
The bill would be footed by telecom operators, the agency said.
http://www.thelocal.se/6619/20070307/
UK Military Awaits Skynet Launch
Jonathan.Amos
The British military is set to take one of its most significant steps into the digital age with the launch of the first Skynet 5 satellite.
The spacecraft will deliver secure, high-bandwidth communications for UK and "friendly" forces across the globe.
It is part of a multi-billion-pound project that will allow the Army, Royal Navy and RAF to pass much more data, faster between command centres.
The Skynet 5A platform lifts off from Kourou, French Guiana, on Saturday.
It will fly atop an Ariane 5-ECA launcher that is scheduled to leave Earth at 1925 local time (2225 GMT).
A second and third spacecraft will be added at a later date to complete the constellation.
"It's a groundbreaking military satellite system," explained Patrick Wood, who has led the development of the spacecraft for manufacturer EADS Astrium.
"It's going to provide five times the capacity that the previous system provided, and allow the military to do things they just haven't been able to do in the past," he told BBC News.
'Information warfare'
Skynet 5 matches the capability of the best modern satellite platforms - on which the world depends for much of its telephone, TV, and internet traffic - but has been specially prepared for military use.
Four steerable antennas give it the ability to focus bandwidth on to particular locations where it is most needed - where British forces are engaged in operations.
Its technologies have also been designed to resist any interference - attempts to disable or take control of the spacecraft - and any efforts to eavesdrop on sensitive communications.
An advanced receive antenna allows the spacecraft to selectively listen to signals and filter out attempts to "jam" it.
"As far as we know, this is the most sophisticated technology of its type - certainly in Europe," said Mr Wood. "It allows you to produce peaks of reception across the surface of the Earth, and to change that antenna pattern in extremely rapid time."
Skynet 5 replaces Skynet 4. The new spacecraft system is bigger and much more powerful. The high traffic rates are in both directions.
Analysts talk increasingly of the military's "network enabled capability" - the idea that information and fast access to it are paramount.
"Modern warfare is all about information," said Bill Sweetman, the technology and aerospace editor for Jane's Information Group. "Every piece of satellite bandwidth is valuable and the military is always hungry for more.
"The practice is to offload mundane traffic on to commercial satellites and then to use a complementary, secure proprietary system for the traffic that has to be protected.
"Take for example the capability of unmanned air vehicles. These generate a lot of imagery and that has to be passed over a secure communications link. Modern warfare involves passing around a lot of data, and that puts a premium on satellite capacity."
'Physical assurance'
The whole Skynet 5 constellation has been funded through the largest Private Finance Initiative (PFI) signed by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The MoD does not own the hardware; it merely buys the services run over it.
Initially agreed in 2003, the PFI saw Paradigm Secure Communications, which is a subsidiary of EADS Astrium, take over and operate the UK's military satellite comms network.
As part of this £2.6bn deal, Paradigm agreed to loft new and more advanced spacecraft, and overhaul the ground systems needed to support them. This has included replacing and updating control centres, and major antennas and terminals on military ships, land vehicles and planes.
Paradigm gets an annual fee for providing this service. It can also earn money by selling excess bandwidth - expected to be about 50% on each spacecraft - to Nato and other friendly countries.
The cost to the British taxpayer of the PFI jumped by several hundred million pounds in 2005, principally because of a decision to go for the "physical assurance" of building a spare spacecraft rather than a straightforward insurance policy that would pay out in the event of a launch failure or breakdown in orbit.
Even so, the MoD says, the Paradigm contract should save many millions of pounds over the 18 years of the deal, compared with a more conventional procurement arrangement.
After launch, it will take about a week to put Skynet 5A in its final geostationary orbit.
The 5B platform will be launched towards the end of this year, with 5C due in orbit in 2008.
Skynet 5A has a co-passenger for Saturday's flight: the Indian TV satellite Insat 4B.
THE SKYNET 5 MILITARY SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM
· The satellites are 'hardened' against interference. A special receive antenna (1) can resist attempts at jamming
· Each spacecraft has four steerable antennas (2) that can concentrate bandwidth on to particular regions
· The system gives global coverage (3), providing five times the capacity afforded by the previous system
· Improved technologies, including a solar 'sail' (4), lengthen the platforms' operational lives to at least 15 years
· Each spacecraft (5) is a 2x2x2m box and weighs just under 5 tonnes; the solar wings once unfurled measure 34m tip to tip
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...re/6434773.stm
Scientists Claim First in Using Brain Scans to Predict Intentions
Maria Cheng
At a laboratory in Germany, volunteers slide into a donut-shaped MRI machine and perform simple tasks, such as deciding whether to add or subtract two numbers, or choosing which of two buttons to press.
They have no inkling that scientists in the next room are trying to read their minds _ using a brain scan to figure out their intention before it is turned into action.
In the past, experts had been able to detect decisions about making physical movements in advance. But researchers at Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people's decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity _ in this case, adding versus subtracting.
While still in its initial stages, the techniques may eventually have wide-ranging implications for everything from criminal interrogations to airline security checks. And that alarms some ethicists who fear the technology could one day be abused by authorities, marketers or employers.
Tanja Steinbach, a 21-year-old student in Leipzig who participated in the experiment, found it a bit spooky but wasn't overly concerned about the civil liberties implications.
"It's really weird," she said. "But since I know they're only able to do this if they have certain machines, I'm not worried that everybody else on the street can read my mind."
Researchers have long used MRI machines to identify different types of brain activity, and scientists in the United States have recently developed brain scans designed for lie detection.
But outside experts say the work led by Dr. John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center is groundbreaking.
"The fact that we can determine what intention a person is holding in their mind pushes the level of our understanding of subjective thought to a whole new level," said Dr. Paul Wolpe, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not connected to the study.
The research, which began in July 2005, has been of limited scope: only 21 people have been tested. And the 71 percent accuracy rate is only about 20 percent more successful than random selection.
Still, the research conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, about 90 miles southwest of Berlin, has generated strong interest in the scientific community.
"Haynes' experiment strikes at the heart of how good we will get at predicting behaviors," said Dr. Todd Braver, an associate professor in the department of psychology at Washington University, who also was not connected with the research.
"The barriers that we assumed existed in reading our minds keep getting breached."
In one study, participants were told to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers a few seconds before the numbers were flashed on a screen. In the interim, a computer captured images of their brain waves to predict the subject's decision _ with one pattern suggesting addition, and another subtraction.
Haynes' team began its research by trying to identify which part of the mind was storing intentions. They discovered it was found in the prefrontal cortex region by scanning the brain to look for bursts of activity when subjects were given choices.
Then they studied which type of patterns were associated with different intentions.
"If you knew which thought signatures to look for, you could theoretically predict in more detail what people were going to do in the future," said Haynes.
For the moment, reading minds is a cumbersome process and there is no chance scientists could spy on decision-making surreptitiously. Haynes' studies focus on people who choose between just two alternatives, not the infinite number present in everyday life.
But scientists are making enough progress to make ethicists nervous, since the research already has progressed from identifying the regions of the brain where certain thoughts occur to identifying the very content of those thoughts.
"These technologies, for the first time, give us a real possibility of going straight to the source to see what somebody is thinking or feeling, without them having any ability to stop us," said Dr. Hank Greely, director of Stanford University's Center for Law and the Biosciences.
"The concept of keeping your thoughts private could be profoundly altered in the future," he said.
Civil libertarians are concerned that mind-reading technology may fit into a trend of pre-emptive security measures in which authorities could take action against individuals before they commit a crime _ a scenario explored in the 2002 science fiction film "Minority Report."
Britain is creating a national DNA database that would allow authorities to track people with violent predispositions. In addition, the government has floated the idea of locking up people with personality disorders that could lead to criminal behavior.
"We need to start thinking about how far we are going to allow these technologies to be used," said Wolpe.
Despite the fears, Haynes believes his research has more benign practical applications.
For example, he says it will contribute to the development of machines already in existence that respond to brain signals and allow the paralyzed to change TV channels, surf the Internet, and operate small robotic devices.
For now, the practical applications of Haynes' research are years if not decades away.
"We are making the first steps in reading out what the specific contents of people's thoughts are by trying to understand the language of the brain," Haynes said. "But it's not like we are going to have a machine tomorrow."
http://www.nwfdailynews.com/article/2277
Book Review: The Lie Detectors
The History of an American Obsession
By Ken Alder
334 pages. $27. Free Press.
William Grimes
Its inventor called it the cardio- pneumo-psychograph. To a clutch of coeds in Berkeley, California, in 1921, it was a newfangled magic box that was somehow going to look into their minds and find out who was pilfering cash and jewelry at their college boardinghouse. To the newspaper- reading public and future generations, it was the lie detector, a contraption with dubious scientific credentials, a shady ethical aura and, as it turned out, amazing longevity.
In "The Measure of All Things," Ken Alder, a professor of history and the humanities at Northwestern University, chronicled the quest of two French scientists to calibrate the meter. In "The Lie Detectors" he tells a similar tale of obsession and self-delusion.
In an era that gave birth to scientific industrial management, time-motion studies and the IQ test, a small group of American scientists, inventors and social reformers pursued the dream of a mechanical device that would separate truth from deception by recording involuntary bodily responses like blood pressure and pulse rate.
The lie detector would in theory replace traditional police interrogations and jury deliberations. It would allow private companies and the government to weed out thieves and spies. It would shine a high-intensity beam into the recesses of the psyche, advancing the work of psychologists and psychiatrists. That was the promise. But toward the end of his life, John Larson, inventor of the machine, despaired. He called his work "a Frankenstein's monster."
The lie detector and its strange, persistent grip on the American imagination offers rich material for Alder. How many stories require William James, Gertrude Stein and Dick Tracy for the telling, not to mention criminals like the Torso Murderer of Cleveland? Stir into the mix a mutually hostile coterie of inventors, scientific visionaries and outright hucksters, and you have the ingredients for a heady brew.
It is perhaps a little too potent. Alder never seems sure whether he is writing serious history or indulging in a pop cultural romp, with a pulp flavor. It's hard to blame him. The lie detector, in its infancy, offers a whirlwind tour of Jazz Age America, making stops at college sorority houses, prisons, Chicago police stations and the fledgling crime labs operated by reformers keen to put policing on a scientific footing.
August Vollmer, the moral center of Alder's story, saw the lie detector as yet another instrument in his campaign to clean up police corruption and create a professional police force that relied on scientific methods rather than brute force to fight crime. As Berkeley's police chief, he gave the green light to Larson and his invention in the early 1920s and assigned a young researcher, Leonarde Keeler, to make technical improvements to the machine.
Larson and Keeler would become Vollmer's delinquent sons, at each other's throats in a bitter struggle to control the future of the lie detector. The more reflective Larson saw the machine as an aid to scientific research and penal reform. Keeler saw it as a crime-fighting tool and promoted it accordingly.
He was not alone. Imitators entered the field. Orlando Scott, a doctor, promoted the "Thought-Wave Detector," a machine that, he claimed, tapped into the brain's electrical currents.
Despite charlatans like Scott, the lie detector made headway in its search for acceptance and respect. A landmark legal decision in 1923 barred lie- detector tests from being introduced as evidence in the courtroom, but elsewhere — in banks, factories and departments of government — the magic machine carved out a role for itself, offering a clean technological solution to messy human problems.
Amazingly the lie detector, largely spurned by the rest of the world, lives on in the United States, although new technologies have appeared on the horizon: machines that measure minute changes in facial expression, vocal pitch or heat around the eyes. None of them, Alder notes, address a central problem pointed out by Montaigne four centuries ago, the inconvenient fact that "the reverse side of the truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...es/bookmar.php
Payment for Lost Privacy
Thomas Crampton
I wrote today on Norwich Union’s cut-price insurance for drivers who agree to allow satellite tracking of their movements.
Intended for those who use their cars infrequently, the insurance is only charged for actual miles driven - and is ranked according to road dangers. (Interestingly, insurance charges for major highways are seven times lower than the rate per mile for small slow-speed roads) Click here for a graphic of the costs.
The concept - surrender privacy in exchange for a service - is an ongoing theme in our digitizing world.
Other examples:
- Gmail’s advertisements based on the content of emails.
- Mobile phone operators sending advertisements based on my location.
Given this trend, shouldn’t there be a consumer-focused business that figures out how to gather groups of people to auction off their privacy to the highest bidder? If we are all losing our privacy, the least we can do is maximize the financial return!
How much are a person’s private details worth?
http://blogs.iht.com/tribtalk/techno...etamedia/?p=50
How to Clone a Biometric Passport While it's Still in the Bag
Mail exposes the postal vulnerability
John Lettice
In an investigation for the Daily Mail, security consultant Adam Laurie has demonstrated how a new UK biometric passport can be cloned without even being removed from its delivery envelope.
The Mail exploit draws on previous work by Laurie and others, and puts together vulnerabilities in the chip technology, and in the chip security and logistics systems used by the Identity & Passport Service.
The data in the chip is essentially a digital version of what is printed inside the passport itself. The printed data can be read if the passport is presented and opened, and the chip's security system attempts to duplicate this process. The chip data can be read wirelessly, but it is encrypted, with the key printed inside the passport. So in theory, although the chip can be read without the passport (or indeed the delivery envelope) being opened, the data is meaningless without the key.
But the key in this first generation of biometric passport is relatively easy to identify/crack. It is not random, but consists of passport number, the passport holder's date of birth and the passport expiry date. The Mail found it relatively easy to identify the holder's date of birth, while the expiry date is 10 years from the issue date, which for a newly-delivered passport would clearly fall within a few days. The passport number consists of a number of predictable elements, including an identifier for the issuing office, so effectively a significant part of the key can be reconstructed from the envelope and its address label.
Laurie established the theory of this last year, but the Mail report puts it into practice. With the cooperation of the applicant, the newly-delivered passport envelope was rerouted, and a working key was identified within four hours. Once this has been done, a fraudster would have all of the information needed to copy the chip, and therefore would be some considerable distance closer to being able to produce an identical copy of the entire passport.
The Mail notes that no proof of identity was required when the passport was delivered, but the vulnerabilities exposed mean that the problem goes far beyond the occasional passport being cloned after its delivery has been intercepted. Because it's feasible to steal the data without detection, it's perfectly possible that insiders could intercept large numbers of the millions of new passports delivered every year.
If, that is, there is a point to doing so. At the moment the value of the data is limited because the chip can only be copied, not changed, so it can only be used as an aid in the forgery of a copy of an existing passport (although some possible exploits based on this are described here). Passport forgers would still have to produce a viable copy of the passport book itself, and the resulting document could only be used by someone of similar appearance to the original owner.
That, however, is the current state of play, not necessarily the end of the story. One of the primary reasons the chip is being introduced is because historically, passport forgers have been able to forge successive generations of book passports, with each new iteration of security eventually being matched by the bad guys.
Once biometric passports are commonplace the forgers will need to be able to deal with the chips in them, and if they want to stay in business they'll need to be able to change the data, not just copy it.
Without access to the digital signature used by the passport issuing authority to protect the integrity of the data, this can't be done. The forgers could therefore attempt to crack the signature for the passport variety of their choice, but simply gaining access to the key via corrupt officials or espionage could turn out to be a quicker route. With this in mind, it's worth noting that ICAO, which devised the system, anticipates that keys will be compromised, and puts forward steps that should be taken to protect the system when this happens.
If, however, this turns out to happen a lot (how many of the world's passport issuing authorities would you trust?), then chip security will quite possible turn out to be just one more increment in the passport forgery arms race.
http://www.theregister.com/2007/03/0...assport_clone/
France Bans Citizen Journalists From Reporting Violence
Peter Sayer
The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.
The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday on the night of March 3, 1991. The officers’ acquittal at the end on April 29, 1992 sparked riots in Los Angeles.
If Holliday were to film a similar scene of violence in France today, he could end up in prison as a result of the new law, said Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi. And anyone publishing such images could face up to five years in prison and a fine of €75,000 (US$98,537), potentially a harsher sentence than that for committing the violent act.
Senators and members of the National Assembly had asked the council to rule on the constitutionality of six articles of the Law relating to the prevention of delinquency. The articles dealt with information sharing by social workers, and reduced sentences for minors. The council recommended one minor change, to reconcile conflicting amendments voted in parliament. The law, proposed by Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, is intended to clamp down on a wide range of public order offenses. During parliamentary debate of the law, government representatives said the offense of filming or distributing films of acts of violence targets the practice of “happy slapping,” in which a violent attack is filmed by an accomplice, typically with a camera phone, for the amusement of the attacker’s friends.
The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet.
The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists’ organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/03...eban/index.php
Journalists Face Increased Danger off the Battlefield
Doreen Carvajal
Murder has emerged as one of the most efficient tools for silencing journalists who face more dangers in peacetime than on the battlefield, according to a new global study tracking fatalities of journalists and press staff over the last 10 years.
The victims, overwhelmingly men, are more likely to be shot and killed while investigating local stories rather than covering war, according to a survey completed by the International News Safety Institute. They found that more than 1,000 people have died, the majority of them while covering local stories in their home countries.
Since 2000, the annual toll has steadily increased with 147 perishing in 2005, followed by a record number of 167 fatalities last year, with the three deadliest countries Iraq, Russia and Colombia where last month gunmen literally fired shots into the offices of a Cali-based magazine that was investigating local corruption.
In most cases, killers are never identified or punished, according to the INSI, which spent two years tracking the death statistics and holding hearings on the issue around the world to examine the trends.
"The figures show that killing a journalist is virtually risk free. Nine out of 10 murderers in the past decade have never been prosecuted," said Richard Sambrook, the chair of the special INSI inquiry and global news director for the BBC World.
Two years ago, the institute – a Brussels-based coalition of media organizations – decided to track the deaths to create a central authority for monitoring casualties. Other groups like the World Association of Newspapers and the International Federation of Journalists also track fatalities, but use different reporting methods and definitions for journalists.
INSI counts anyone involved in news gathering from journalists as well as support employees such as translators, drivers and office personnel.
Rodney Pinder, director of INSI, said that with the findings the group intends to begin pressuring international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to consider a country's record on the killings of journalists when evaluating aid grants.
"This report is only the begging of the process because we are going to continue tracking on a monthly basis," Pinder said. "Governments should be held to account. How can societies that give aid be pumping money into countries that are clamping down on freedom of expression by killing journalists."
The toll of killings, disappearances and suspicious deaths has continued to mount even as the INSI was preparing its final report. The latest to die Friday in Moscow was a Russian journalist Ivan Safronov, 51, a former officer in the armed forces who covered military affairs for the Kommersant newspaper. He was found dead after falling from the fifth floor of his apartment and prosecutors theorized that he committed suicide.
But newspaper colleagues remained deeply suspicious and planned their own investigation in country, which the INSI ranked as the number two deadliest country for journalists behind Iraq with almost 100 fatalities over the last 10 years.
Typically reporters who lost their lives in peacetime in Russia, Colombia or Mexico were working on stories about corruption, drug trafficking and other criminal activities, according to the report, which noted that nearly a third of the dead were attacked near their home, office, or hotel.
For that reason, the group is also recommending that news organizations should take more responsibility to increase safety training for journalists so they can detect when they are being followed or possess the psychological tools to cope with ambush or kidnapping scenarios.
According to the report, an African radio reporter kidnapped in the Congo in 2005 said she was helped by behavior training she received earlier to avoid antagonizing kidnappers through passive behavior. Ultimately, her captors let their guard down, allowing her and others with her the opportunity to escape.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...306-journo.php
Anchor in a Desert War: Brian Williams, Reporting
Alessandra Stanley
There was no better illustration of the special difficulties network news anchors face in Iraq than Brian Williams standing alone earlier this week, surrounded by sandbags, describing the situation on the ground secondhand.
This NBC anchor is at a military base called Camp Victory in Baghdad this week to assess how the American-led occupation is faring. On Monday he toured what he described as “pockets of relative peace” at military outposts in Ramadi and Hit, unaware that elsewhere in Iraq, nine American soldiers had been killed by roadside bombs. The next night Mr. Williams described it as “the deadliest single day for Americans in a month’s time.”
Mr. Williams is the first network anchor to visit Iraq since Bob Woodruff of ABC was gravely injured by a roadside bomb in January 2006, but he couldn’t have picked a worse time to be there. The secretly planned trip came the week after ABC’s evening news beat NBC’s in the February sweeps for the first time since 1996, prodding some to accuse NBC of staging a ratings stunt (unfairly, since any anchor trip of this nature requires weeks of preparation).
Mr. Williams said he delayed his journey by a week to avoid diverting attention from Mr. Woodruff’s near-miraculous return to television — with a documentary and a memoir — after months of painful rehabilitation. Mr. Woodruff, who mixed his own experiences with reporting on the quality of care in local Veterans Administration hospitals, dovetailed his comeback with the growing scandal over neglect and mistreatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Even on NBC, that sizzling story somewhat overshadowed Mr. Williams’s bold sally into the world’s most dangerous war zone.
His reasons for going, despite all the risks, are legitimate: anchors can and arguably should put their personal stamps on the most important news stories of the times — if only to draw more time and public attention to those issues. And it would be understandable if Mr. Williams, who set a personal best with his on-the-spot reporting on Hurricane Katrina, would also want to make a mark in Iraq.
Mr. Williams was taken by Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno by helicopter to see signs of progress, but mostly they listened to American officers telling them that things were improving. “And this is what the general heard today about how warmly the locals now view the Americans,” Mr. Williams told his viewers before showing tape of a colonel telling the general, “They do not want us to leave.”
Later Mr. Williams described a scene that contradicted such optimistic reports, but he didn’t have any videotape to underscore the point. “We watched a gunnery sergeant wave at a group of children,” he said. “They turned their backs rather than wave back because that would show them as sympathizers in some way.”
He made a point of trying to convey the sense of duty and commitment of front-line troops, whom he called “mission-focused.” That could also have been partly a response to Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, who has lately accused NBC of undermining troop morale by using an analyst he says is biased. (Those digs, however, could be prompted by Mr. O’Reilly’s desire to undermine the network that employs his archenemy, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC.)
To Mr. Williams’s credit, once he hit the ground, he did not take reckless risks, swan around or showboat. Of his far-from-safe helicopter ride with General Odierno, Mr. Williams said, “If you are looking, as we were, for the safest possible passage into a dangerous place in a dangerous country, this is it.”
He was also generous in sharing the spotlight with his young Baghdad-based colleague Richard Engel. “U.S. commanders have said, ‘We’re at a turning point,’ in the past,” Mr. Engel told Mr. Williams in a live stand-up on Tuesday. “And unfortunately, it hasn’t been the case.
On “Today” on Tuesday, Meredith Vieira somewhat tactlessly asked Mr. Williams via satellite, “Have you spoken to any Iraqi people yourself?” Mr. Williams explained why not.
“The notion of dismounting, getting out of an armored vehicle and walking around and talking to Iraqis is still more or less a dangerous business,” he said. “Our veteran combat correspondents, like Richard Engel, who’s lived in Baghdad each year since this conflict began, can get out a little more easily, especially with his command of Arabic, and mix with local people. But for us, that’s proven a little bit more difficult.”
Mr. Williams has shown grace as well as courage in Iraq, but if there is a lesson in the sudden ratings rise of Charles Gibson at ABC, it is that in the post-Rather/Jennings/Brokaw era, all three networks overestimate what viewers expect from an anchor.
CBS gambled on personality, hoping that Katie Couric’s sparkle would attract women and younger viewers, but the “CBS Evening News” remains in third place. NBC stuck with polish, grooming the precociously poised Mr. Williams for years before Tom Brokaw retired.
And ABC stumbled on Mr. Gibson by default. At first the network sought to outflank its rivals with youth and beauty, pairing Mr. Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas as co-anchors. After Mr. Woodruff was incapacitated, ABC settled on Mr. Gibson, the co-anchor of “Good Morning America,” who, in the pantheon of network superstars, seemed like a likable, reliable also-ran.
Mr. Gibson hasn’t exactly overexerted himself in his new job. He covered the State of the Union address from his desk in New York, and also stayed put when tornadoes devastated Florida in early February. This week, while Mr. Williams is in Iraq, Mr. Gibson is on vacation.
It doesn’t seem to matter. Viewers apparently trust his seniority, rumpled air of competence and low-key style; they are content to have him read the news, not live it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/ar...on/08watc.html
CBS Makes Change at Struggling Newscast
David Bauder
CBS News on Thursday is expected to fire the executive producer of Katie Couric's struggling "CBS Evening News" broadcast and appoint former CNN and MSNBC president Rick Kaplan to the job.
Kaplan will replace Rome Hartman, who has been doing the job since before Couric began at CBS last September, according to sources with knowledge of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity.
A spokeswoman for CBS News declined comment on Wednesday evening. Kaplan, reached at home, also declined to comment.
The newscast has been a distant third in the ratings behind ABC and NBC. During last month's pivotal ratings "sweeps" period, Couric's average of 7.6 million viewers was 6 percent down from what Bob Schieffer recorded in February 2006.
More troubling to many who watched it was the newscast's apparent confusion in direction, driving viewers away from an anchor given a multi-million dollar commitment to jump from NBC's "Today" show.
CBS' shift comes less than a week after NBC News announced that the executive producer of "Nightly News," John Reiss, was leaving. Longtime ratings leader NBC and anchor Brian Williams have been sliding in the ratings as ABC's "World News" with Charles Gibson has won for three of the past four weeks.
Before moving into senior management, Kaplan won 34 Emmy Awards as a producer at ABC News. He worked there with Paul Friedman, currently a key deputy to CBS News President Sean McManus. A large, opinionated man with a booming voice, Kaplan was also a good friend of President Clinton.
He led CNN's domestic operations from 1997 to 2000 as the cable network began to lose audience to the growing Fox News Channel. After teaching at Harvard and briefly returning to ABC, he ran MSNBC from 2004 until leaving last summer, sharpening its programming and setting the stage for modest ratings gains.
Couric took over from Schieffer shortly after Labor Day last year and came in with a mandate to try and shake up an evening news format that differs only slightly among the three networks and hasn't changed dramatically in years. For her first two weeks, Couric led in the ratings. But she hasn't returned there since.
At first, the broadcast emphasized longer, prepared pieces with less focus on breaking news; Hartman came to the evening news from "60 Minutes." Couric's talent as an interviewer was showcased and a regular feature, "Free Speech," invited outside commentary from well-known people like Rush Limbaugh as well as average Americans.
But the commentary bombed and was shelved after two months. Couric's interviews have also been de-emphasized after some were criticized for running too long.
The show has gradually shifted more toward a traditional breaking newscast, but critics say it would often miss stories. Many in the industry believed too many people were offering input and there wasn't a clear sense of who was in charge.
"The lesson of the last six months is that it's very difficult to reinvent the wheel," said Andrew Tyndall, a consultant who monitors the content of broadcast evening newscasts.
CBS News is owned by CBS Corp.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...ertainmentnews
After Libby Trial, New Era for Government and Press
Adam Liptak
The investigation and trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, will have many legacies and lessons — for government officials, for supporters and critics of special prosecutors and for historians of the events leading to the war in Iraq.
But the institution most transformed by the prosecution, and the one that took the most collateral damage from Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s relentless pursuit of obstruction and perjury charges against Mr. Libby, may have been the press, forced in the end to play a major role in his trial.
After Mr. Libby’s conviction Tuesday, it is possible to start assessing that damage to the legal protections available to the news organizations, to relationships between journalists and their sources and to the informal but longstanding understanding in Washington, now shattered, that leak investigations should be pressed only so hard.
Ten out of 19 of the witnesses in Mr. Libby’s trial were journalists, a spectacle that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.
Even more unusual, three of them played a central role in securing the conviction of Mr. Libby, their former source, by testifying about conversations they had once fought to keep secret by invoking the majesty of the First Amendment and the crucial role that confidential informers play in informing citizens in a free society.
“Every tenet and every pact that existed between the government and the press has been broken,” said Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a media lawyer who represented Time magazine and one of its reporters in their unsuccessful efforts to fight subpoenas from Mr. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the Libby case.
Others say that sort of talk is alarmism tinged with self-importance. Mr. Fitzgerald’s subpoenas to reporters were appropriate, based on settled legal principles and in the service of a significant investigation, said Randall D. Eliason, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches criminal law at American and George Washington Universities.
“It doesn’t strike me as pathbreaking,” Mr. Eliason said of the Libby case. “This is a case where the leak itself was the potential crime. In those cases, you don’t have a lot of choices but to talk to the reporters involved.”
But others say that Mr. Fitzgerald, who was initially asked to look into the disclosure of a Central Intelligence Agency operative’s identity, introduced new tools, tactics and pressures against the press.
In the 35 years since the United States Supreme Court ruled, in Branzburg v. Hayes, that reporters have no right under the First Amendment to refuse to answer questions from a grand jury, press protections against Justice Department subpoenas have existed largely as a matter of prosecutorial grace. That is over.
“We had this truce for a generation since Branzburg,” said Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at George Washington University. “Nobody really pushed it. The virginity is lost now.”
A decision of the federal appeals court in Washington in 2005 that ordered two reporters jailed for refusing to cooperate with Mr. Fitzgerald destroyed the fragile peace between the government and the press.
Since then, federal prosecutors have pursued two reporters for The San Francisco Chronicle for a source who provided them with information about steroid use in baseball. That case recently ended when the source was uncovered without help from the reporters.
A freelance videographer, on the other hand, has spent some six months in prison for refusing to turn over videotapes of a 2005 demonstration in San Francisco.
Other prosecutors have learned from Mr. Fitzgerald, said Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
“They’re seeing that Pat Fitzgerald’s tactics seem to work,” Ms. Dalglish said. “They’re going to use these cases sort of as a guide about how to put these reporters on the stand.”
Mr. Fitzgerald, for his part, cautioned against that.
“Resorting to questioning reporters should be a last resort in the very unusual case,” Mr. Fitzgerald said at a news conference on Tuesday.
The Libby case also split the united front that news organizations had long presented. Some news organizations hired criminal lawyers and made quiet deals with Mr. Fitzgerald. Others, notably The New York Times, relied on their longtime First Amendment counsel and waged a public war against Mr. Fitzgerald’s subpoenas, one ending in defeat at the United States Supreme Court. A reporter for The Times, Judith Miller, spent 85 days in jail before she agreed to testify to a grand jury about her interviews with Mr. Libby, with his permission. She has since left The Times.
An earlier generation of reporters had maintained that there were no circumstances under which they would testify against their sources and that the flow of important information to the public could only be guaranteed by taking an absolutist position.
What the public learned from the Libby trial, said Jane Kirtley, who teaches media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, is that the modern journalist is not nearly as tough.
“Under sufficient pressure,” Professor Kirtley said, “journalists will testify for the prosecution against their source. I don’t think that was a given before all of this began. Maybe the time has come when reporters should be giving their sources Miranda warnings.”
Earl Caldwell, a reporter for The Times who was involved in the Branzburg case, would not cooperate even after the Supreme Court’s decision, and the government never pressed the point. In 1978, another Times reporter, Myron Farber, spent 40 days in jail rather than identify his source.
“I wonder,” Professor Kirtley said, “if part of it is that Caldwell and Farber were proudly outsiders.” By contrast, the journalists who testified at the Libby trial were Washington insiders, and they gave the public a master class in access journalism. It was not always a pretty sight.
“They’re not fearless advocates,” Professor Feldstein said of the reporters involved, “but supplicants, willing and even eager to be manipulated.”
Charles D. Tobin, a Washington lawyer who often represents news organizations, saw a silver lining. The jury had, he said, generally credited the reporters’ testimony over Mr. Libby’s statements.
“This can only help the credibility of journalists in the face of an administration that is doing everything it can to paint journalists as liars,” Mr. Tobin said.
But saying that the jury believed the reporters is small comfort, Ms. Dalglish said. “Reporters are supposed to be believable,” she said. “We’ve come to the point that it’s a surprise.”
Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation introduced a new tool to pressure journalists. Prosecutors asked possible sources for reporters to sign waivers instructing journalists to disregard confidentiality deals, and most of the sources did, perhaps in earnest and perhaps in fear of the consequences of refusing.
The journalists involved in the Libby case mostly said they had not relied solely on such waivers in deciding to testify, as they were wary of potential coercion. But in the end, on one rationale or another, journalists ended up testifying nonetheless.
“This is a calamity,” said Edward Wasserman, a journalism professor at Washington and Lee University. “It’s a high-profile prosecution that would never have happened if not for the willingness of some of the most respected journalists in the country to wriggle free of confidentiality agreements.”
Walter Pincus, a reporter for The Washington Post who testified at the Libby trial, disagreed.
“I didn’t testify until my source came forward,” Mr. Pincus said, referring to Ari Fleischer, the former White House spokesman. “You can still protect your sources.”
It is hard to know, though, precisely what the practical impact of Mr. Libby’s conviction will be on other sources’ willingness to confide in the press. Mr. Fitzgerald told reporters on Tuesday that his prosecution was unusual in that Mr. Libby’s motives were not pure. “The reporters involved here were not just people who got whistle-blowing tips,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.
But Professor Feldstein said nothing would turn on that distinction.
“We can debate about the motives of these sources,” Professor Feldstein said, “but the chill is as real for the idealistic whistle-blower as it is for the vindictive or malicious political operative.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/wa...itzgerald.html
We Have Put-Back: Super Bowl Warnings Back Online
Wendy
At least in this case, YouTube seems to be following the DMCA's notice-takedown-counter-repost dance. Fourteen business days (512(g)'s outer limit) from my counter-notification, I received this email from YouTube:
Dear Wendy,
In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we've completed processing your counter-notification regarding your video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4uC2H10uIo. This content has been restored and your account will not be penalized. For technical reasons, it may take a day for the video to be available again.
The NFL has apparently chosen not to sue to keep the video offline. Once again, therefore, viewers can see the NFL's copyright threats in all their glory.
I'm left wondering how many other fair users have gone through this process. On Chilling Effects we see many DMCA takedowns, some right and some wrong, but very few counter-notifications. Part of the problem is that the counter-notifier has to swear to much more than the original notifier. While NFL merely had to affirm that it was or was authorized to act on behalf of a rights-holder to take-down, I had to affirm in response that I had "good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled." A non-lawyer might be chilled from making that statement, under penalty of perjury, even with a strong good faith belief.
http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archiv...ck_online.html
Turkey Blocks YouTube
FM Reader writes
After a controversial mock-up video reportedly submitted by a Greek member about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, Turkish courts ordered the national ISPs to ban the online video service, YouTube. YouTube hostnames are currently redirected at the DNS level to a page that announces the court order.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/07/1417237
P2P-Zone unblocked
The Great Firewall of China
You there! Yes you. Do you take your freedom to surf the web for granted? I’m sure we all do and I’m sure most of us have tasted what it is to be blocked when viewing innocent web sites at work. It’s sort of sour with a bitter after taste.
Well then you can imagine what it must be like for Internet savvy surfers in China; a country notorious for censoring the Internet. Touted as having some of the most sophisticated firewalls in the world, greatfirewallofchina.org lets you check if you can pass China’s strict IP monitors. Apparently Next Lust is blocked. Yes, we here are nothing but hordes of anti-socialistic tech journalists with a hidden anti-red agenda.
What about your site? Are you blocked? Sound off!
http://nextlust.com/the-great-firewall-of-china
A People's Sexual Revolution in China
David Barboza
A Chinese edition of Esquire magazine. The censors aren't as zealous as they used to be.
WHEN Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue hit the newsstands last week in China for the first time, with the sexy singer Beyoncé on the cover, the competition was fierce.
Readers here had already seen the February issue of For Him Magazine, which features a Chinese singer named A Duo on its cover wearing a white V-neck leotard that reveals every other inch of her rather substantial figure.
Inside, A Duo poses like a dominatrix, clutching her breasts, wrapping her naked body in celluloid and bending, sweat-drenched, over a submissive man.
The racy For Him Magazine also offers tips on "how to do it in five minutes" (because a "sex break is the same as a coffee break") and features stories with titles like "The Dangerous Sex Journey of QiQi."
The images and text would hardly be shocking to American or European readers. And the magazine's photographs are tame compared with what appears in magazines in Japan and other parts of Asia.
But in China, where sex is still a taboo subject and pornography is outlawed by the ruling Communist Party, the images are not only highly provocative but perhaps the latest sign that sex and sexuality are infiltrating the mainstream media.
And this powerful burst of sexual energy seems both a symbol of how rapidly China's transformation is unfolding and, to some, a harbinger of the troubles ahead for a nation that will inevitably struggle to absorb its newfound freedoms. "There is a fine line between the open mind and sexual indulgence," said Xie Xialing, a professor of sociology at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Even five years ago, Chinese books and magazines were censored or banned from showing pictures of scantily clad models or publishing content that was deemed offensive or morally corrupt. The only sexual content to be found was in sex education pamphlets or books of nude Chinese women sold as "art works" at big city airports.
Today, however, with China's economy booming and the government loosening its hold on the personal lives of everyday citizens, magazines are beginning to publish soft-core pornographic photographs, sexual fantasies, even clues about where to pick up call girls.
Popular Chinese Web sites are going further, posting erotic videos and creating forums for women eager to market their sex appeal and post their photographs on the Internet: images of traveling with friends, undressing at home, even striking erotic poses.
"This is a kind of grass-roots sexual revolution," said Annie Wang, author of "The People's Republic of Desire," a satirical novel about the country's mad race to modernization.
The government announces periodic crackdowns on pornography and often censors sexual content in magazines and on the Web. But since about 2000, the censors have started to look the other way. Political activism is still a no-no in New China. Entertainment is a different matter. Even the Web site of Xinhua, the state-run news agency, offers slide shows of the "10 Hottest Babes of 2006" and "Rarely Seen Photos of Sexy Men."
Many say the trend is being driven by the market, and by entrepreneurs eager to cash in on the country's freer lifestyles.
"The market is the No. 1 driving force behind the boom of such magazines," said Pan Suiming, a professor of sociology at Renmin University in Beijing.Western luxury brands entering the Chinese market want to advertise in popular magazines and on Web sites that draw consumers. And in China right now, pictures of sex kittens draw.
For Him Magazine is one of the success stories of this genre, with a circulation of about 480,000. (It probably helps that the magazine is published by a government agency, the National Tourism Administration, an indication of official interest in investing in the phenomenon.) Jacky Jin, the editor in chief, says he wanted to affirm a new kind of lifestyle for readers that he calls China's new metrosexuals, guys who love cars, gadgets and girls.
"We're opening a new window for Chinese men," he says, noting that he's been criticized by government censors on several occasions.
A decade ago, the private lives of people in China were still quite restricted. Whom you married, where you lived and what was considered permissible were tightly controlled or closely monitored by the government, employers and parental authorities.
But urbanization, greater mobility and the power of the World Wide Web have challenged all that.
Now, experts say, China is going through a period of enormous personal and sexual freedom. Young people — most of whom grew up without siblings under the country's one-child policy — are wearing more hip and provocative clothing. And they're growing addicted to entertainment online, where they can also search for love and indulge their lust.
Professor Pan said he thought one reason for the cultural change was a change in women's attitudes.
"Today's women, especially young women in the cities, no longer think it's a bad thing to expose their bodies," he said. "Five or six years ago, when some women started to wear clothes that exposed their midriff, most people couldn't understand why belly buttons should be regarded as beautiful and deserve public exposure. Today, young women think it is natural to bare their midriff."
Zha Jianying, a Beijing writer and author of "China Pop," says the growing openness is actually a good thing.
"This trend of being more open about sex is definitely healthy, coming after all those years of puritanism and Maoist suppression," Ms. Zha says. "Now, maybe we're seeing the pendulum swing in the other direction."
But Professor Xie at Fudan University says things have gone too far.
"In certain periods in history, such as the decadent Ming Dynasty, sex was not a taboo and even intellectuals would talk about their sex skills casually over tea," he said. "Today's society is still better than that. But I do find that people care less about dignity."
He went on to call for limits on how much skin can be shown publicly, and said: "Human beings should have a sense of shame." Other critics say the new freedoms have brought degeneracy, a boom in prostitution, and what Ms. Wang, the author, called "the concubine mentality." Hard-core pornography, of course, is under assault by the government, which can exact heavy fines on trespassers. One pornography kingpin was recently sentenced to life in prison.
And censors are wary of influences from the West, like "Sex and the City," which has a huge following here, mostly on pirated DVDs. Even "The Vagina Monologues" show was canceled here recently, apparently because of the title.
But in a country that also happens to be the largest manufacturer of sex toys, being naughty is catching on.
In November a man here in Shanghai was selling condoms in packages bearing the likeness of Chairman Mao.
His shop was closed, of course, for selling condoms in "inappropriate packages."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...304barboza.php
Schoolgirls Suspended for Using Word 'Vagina' During Reading of Feminist Play
AP
A public high school has suspended three girls who disobeyed officials by saying the word "vagina" during a reading from a well-known feminist play.
The students, Megan Reback, Elan Stahl and Hannah Levinson, included the word during their reading of "The Vagina Monologues" because, "It wasn't crude and it wasn't inappropriate and it was very real and very pure," Reback said.
Their defiant stand is being applauded by the play's author, who said Tuesday that the school should be celebrating, rather than punishing, the three juniors.
"Don't we want our children to resist authority when it's not appropriate and wise?" said Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues."
The excerpt from "Monologues" was read Friday night, among various readings at an event sponsored by the literary magazine at John Jay High School in Cross River, a New York City suburb. Among the other readings was a student's original work and the football coach quoting Shakespeare.
The girls took turns reading the excerpt until they came to the word, then said it together.
"My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women's army," they read. "I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina's country."
The play, presented as various women's thoughts about sexual subjects, has become a phenomenon since its Off-Broadway opening in 1996. All-star readings are common, and on "V-Day" each year — usually Feb. 14_ it is often performed by volunteers and college students to battle violence against women.
The suspension outraged some parents, who circulated an e-mail calling the punishment a "blatant attempt at censorship."
But Principal Richard Leprine said Tuesday that the girls were punished because they disobeyed orders, not because of what they said.
The event was open to the community, including children, and the word was not appropriate, Leprine said in a statement. He said the girls had been told when they auditioned that they could not use the word.
The school "recognizes and respects student freedom of expression," Leprine said. "That right, however, is not unfettered."
"When a student is told by faculty members not to present specified material because of the composition of the audience and they agree to do so, it is expected that the commitment will be honored and the directive will be followed," he said. "When a student chooses not to follow the directive, consequences follow."
Bob Lichtenfeld, superintendent of the Katonah-Lewisboro school district, which includes John Jay, said that had the teens, who are in their third year of high school, wanted to perform the play, they would probably not have encountered opposition.
"As long as the intended audience knows what to expect, we don't have a problem with it."
Reback told The Journal News, "I think almost everyone can agree it's important to uphold the integrity of literature and not change or alter it." Ensler said the girls were right for "standing up for art and against censorship."
"The school's position is absurd, a throwback to the Dark Ages," she said. "So what, if children were to hear the word? Would that be terrible? We're not talking about plutonium here, or acid rain, a word that destroys lives. It's a body part!"
"Monologue" performances occasionally provoke controversy.
Conservative Catholics criticized the University of Notre Dame's decision to allow a performance on campus last April. This year, student planners could not get an academic sponsor.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/...-Suspended.php
Barenaked Ladies: New Album. Free. No DRM. Now.
Michael Arrington
I’ve been writing about the Amie Street music site since their launch last July. Their model has the potential to disrupt the music industry from the bottom up: Bands and labels upload music, which is downloadable in DRM-free MP3 format. The price always starts at free, and as more people download the song, the price starts to rise, eventually hitting $.98. Higher priced songs are by definition more popular, and I’ve found that anything over $.50 or so is pretty good music. 70% of proceeds go to the band/label, and Amie Street keeps the rest.
The service is now starting to make real progress with labels, too. They’ve signed a deal with Nettwerk Music Group, which will be uploading their entire library to Amie Street over the next few months. The first music to go up on the site is the new Barenaked Ladies album, Barenaked Ladies Are Men. All sixteen songs from the album
are available here.
The songs will only be free through the first few downloads, and will start to rise after that. But even at full price, listeners are getting quality music, DRM-free. Let’s hope other labels follow Nettwerk shortly. Market driven prices and no DRM = Music Nirvana.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/05...ee-no-drm-now/
Macrovision Licenses DRM to Online Video Stores
Ed Oswald
Macrovision said Tuesday that it had signed agreements with several online providers to employ the company's Analog Copy Protection (ACP) system in Internet movie and video distribution.
Deals have been struck with Netflix, BitTorrent, Movielink, and Instant Media. Macrovision claims the DRM technology will actually give consumers more choices in how, when, and where they can view content.
For example, Netflix plans to use the technology to help expand its list of films and television shows that are available for immediate viewing online. Instant Media says the deal would also make it easier for the services to collaborate with studios to protect their content.
"Macrovision's technology is a foundation for the growth of digital distribution in an open market," Macrovision president and CEO Fred Amoroso said.
"By making media content protection easier to integrate in the distribution channel, we're enabling the distributors to execute innovative business models and respond to consumer demand for more access to their favorite content online," he continued.
According to data by Parks Associates, revenues from the sales of Internet video will reach $7 billion by 2010, with downloads and rentals making up 40 percent of that total.
http://www.betanews.com/article/prin...res/1173220108
WGA Reports Back To MS Even If You Choose Not To Install
Aviran Mordo
Heise online reports on a very interesting action Microsoft is taking during the installation of WGA.
When you start WGA setup and get to the license agreement page but decided NOT to install the highly controversial WGA component and cancel the installation, the setup program will send your info and the fact that you choose not to install WGA back to their servers.
In addition to that it seems that the setup program send some information stored in your registry to
http://genuine.microsoft.com/. While it does not specifically identify the user, it looks like it does send some identification of your computer and Windows version (see picture) to Microsoft servers.
http://www.aviransplace.com/2007/03/...ot-to-install/
Lead Singer Of Boston Dies
AP
Delp Was 55
Brad Delp, the lead singer for the band Boston, was found dead Friday in his home in southern New Hampshire. He was 55.
Atkinson police responded to a call for help at 1:20 p.m. and found Delp dead. Police Lt. William Baldwin said in a statement the death was "untimely" and that there was no indication of foul play.
Delp apparently was alone at the time of his death, Baldwin said.
The cause of his death remained under investigation by the Atkinson police and the New Hampshire Medical Examiner's office. Police said an incident report would not be available until Monday.
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/ente...s=bos&psp=news
Music's New Gatekeeper
From their Silicon Valley cubicles, Apple staffers have become music's unlikely power brokers. Our reporters on the horse-trading that can turn unknowns into stars.
Nick Wingfield and Ethan Smith
Every day, the roughly one million people who visit the iTunes Store home page are presented with several dozen albums, TV shows and movie downloads to consider buying -- out of the four million such goods the Apple site offers. This prime promotion is analogous to a CD being displayed at the checkout stands of all 940 Best Buy stores or featured on the front page of Target's ad circular.
How do bands get these boosts? Who decides whether Arcade Fire is plugged at the top of the iTunes site -- or whether Nickelback gets no mention?
Apple has jettisoned some of the conventions of traditional music retailing -- notably, the practice of selling prime promotional spots to recording companies willing to pay for better visibility for their acts. But behind the scenes there's plenty of horse-trading going on that influences which songs are seen and purchased by iTunes customers.
Apple -- now one of the largest sellers of music in the U.S. -- offers home-page placement in exchange for things such as exclusive access to new songs, special discount pricing or additional material such as interviews with stars. Most other big retailers, digital and physical, also seek exclusive offerings, but Apple is especially aggressive and has outsize clout when it comes to the slightly out-of-mainstream music it often emphasizes.
The decisions by the small group of Silicon Valley and music-industry veterans running iTunes can help put an unknown band on the map, adding millions of dollars in sales, while relegating others to the obscurity of the site's virtual back bins.
Push for Exclusives
Apple's muscle-flexing has begun to rub some artists and music companies the wrong way. During a recent radio interview, outspoken British pop singer Lily Allen accused iTunes of "bullying" artists into supplying exclusive content. There's a further worry among music executives that the few spots available to promote artists on iTunes are dwindling as Apple remakes the store into a broader entertainment destination for TV shows, movies and games.
But so far, most labels comply because of the site's ability to drive sales. During a week when an album is featured on the iTunes home page it can sell about five times more copies on average through the site than it does in the three to five weeks that follow, when the album isn't featured, says one industry executive.
"The way MTV used to be the place where you had to have a video playing as one of the key legs of the stool, iTunes is now one of the key legs of the stool," says Chris Douridas, an influential deejay at public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., and a former consultant to iTunes.
Not only does securing a spot on the iTunes home page require concessions by music companies -- it also depends on having material that resonates with the tastes of iTunes staffers. Three months before Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment was gearing up to promote a handful of older Prince titles, timed to coincide with the musician's recent performance at the Super Bowl halftime show, the label entered into talks with iTunes. The result: Four albums, including "Purple Rain," received prominent positions in the store and were priced at $7.99 -- $2 less than Apple's standard album price.
"They said, 'We'd like to be able to offer it at a special price,'" says David Dorn, Rhino's senior vice president for digital strategy. "I said, 'We'd like to get in the New Music Tuesdays newsletter and home-page placement.' I gave a little, they gave a little. But no cash changed hands."
After the prime display, digital sales of "Purple Rain" rose fivefold, according to SoundScan, while sales of "The Very Best of Prince" more than doubled. Three less-known albums in the promotion saw modest increases.
In January, iTunes executives approached several record labels to set up a promotion in which they would slash the prices of 20 greatest-hits albums to $7.99, and Apple in turn would flag the entire group on the home page. The first album that came up, Queen's 34-song "Greatest Hits 1 & 2," originally released by Walt Disney's Hollywood Records in the mid 1990s and normally sold on iTunes for nearly $34, zoomed to No. 1 on the site's album-sales chart. It stayed in the top 10 for the entire 10 days of the promotion.
Groups like Gnarls Barkley have enjoyed significant boosts from iTunes. Last year, the alternative-soul duo's "Crazy" became the first song to hit No. 1 on the British pop charts based solely on digital sales. When the Shins' third album, "Wincing the Night Away," made its debut in January at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album-sales chart, nearly 30% of the first-week sales were made online -- most on iTunes.
For consumers, Apple's growing influence means exposure to a wider range of music. Apple has told some recording companies that music from independent labels accounts for about 15% of iTunes sales, compared with about 5% for physical retailers.
Mike Schiller, a management consultant in Cleveland, says the iTunes home page, along with Apple's New Music Tuesday newsletter, has frequently introduced him to music and movies that he later purchased, including an album by a British act called Guillemots and a Mark Wahlberg football movie called "Invincible." "It's pretty powerful," says Mr. Schiller, 48 years old, who worked as a record-store clerk while a teenager in Omaha, Neb. "It will give you exposure to stuff that you don't normally see."
Rare Growth Story
ITunes is housed at Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters in a cluster of nondescript cubicles that could easily be confused with a software-development group but for a smattering of music posters on the walls, according to people who have visited or worked there.
The iTunes staff includes people with music pedigrees, including Alex Luke, a longtime deejay who is the director of music programming and label relations. (Mr. Luke still sits in occasionally for stations like Los Angeles's Indie 103.1 FM.) Bruno Ybarra, who co-founded a house-music record label, manages relationships with independent music companies. Denzyl Feigelson, a South African who was a manager for singer Paul Simon's "Graceland" tour, is a music editor for iTunes in London. In all, dozens of iTunes editors and label-relations staffers collaborate in meetings and discussions throughout the week to determine what the home page of the iTunes Store will look like when it is refreshed every Tuesday.
Apple is a rare growth story in the music business. It nearly monopolizes digital-music sales, just about the only growth area for the beleaguered industry, which saw CD sales fall for seven years running. ITunes sold 1.2 billion songs last year compared with 30 million in 2003, its first year in operation, Apple says. The company says it passed Amazon.com last year to become the fourth-largest music retailer in the U.S., behind Wal-Mart Stores, Target and Best Buy, a claim that isn't disputed by music companies. At the end of last year, Apple was selling five million songs a day at 99 cents each.
Its growing clout has transformed Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs -- who kick-started online music sales several years ago with a set of breakthrough song-licensing deals with major recording companies -- into a figure music executives alternately admire and grouse about. Mr. Jobs recently caused a kerfuffle by urging music executives to consider dropping their insistence on digital copy-protection software on songs, which Mr. Jobs believes is holding back Internet music sales.
Label executives say that since Apple began selling TV shows and movies in the past year, they must begin discussions with Apple three to six months before a major music release if they want a shot at home-page promotion. In physical stores, such prime real estate is typically for sale. To secure prominent "end-cap" placement on CD racks near the ends of aisles at national retail chains, major music labels can pay as much as $5 per disc displayed in the form of discounts, "cooperative advertising" payments and other fees, according to executives. That adds up to tens of thousands of dollars for a major promotion involving 5,000 discs or more. Such hefty payments can effectively erase any profit on the CDs on display in an end-cap.
Apple says it shunned pay-for-placement -- as have online rivals including RealNetworks' Rhapsody -- to provide unbiased music recommendations. Eddy Cue, the Apple vice president who oversees iTunes, says the company hopes to recapture some of the spirit of independent record stores, when clerks would give uncompromised tips on promising performers. "That for us was kind of gone in the new retail environment," Mr. Cue says. Customers used to believe that advice on music "was coming from someone who really liked it versus someone who was paid to say they liked it."
Apple isn't under as much pressure to squeeze profits from iTunes because of the money it makes on iPods. In fact, it earns little from iTunes after paying fees for the music and credit-card processing. ITunes typically pays major labels about 72 cents a track, while it pays most independent labels around 62 cents.
Exclusive material greatly increases the likelihood that iTunes will turn up its promotion machine. In some cases, that involves getting artists such as Sting or Willie Nelson to record interviews and performances that Apple sells as a package. The company recently struck up a relationship with the Las Vegas casino the Palms to record live concerts by artists such as John Legend, for which it pays production costs.
The Orchard, an online distributor of music from independent labels, recently agreed to let Apple have an album of material by the artist G. Love one week before other Internet retailers got it. Apple ran a promotion on the front page of iTunes and the album reached No. 17 on the site's album charts, says Greg Scholl, the distributor's CEO.
Yet Ms. Allen, the young British singer behind the hit "Smile," complained during the recent radio interview about Apple's tactics. "They won't advertise your album unless you give them extra material," Ms. Allen said. She said iTunes pushed her to quickly turn out a version of a song, so she planned to give them a "rubbish remix." Ms. Allen said she would offer a better version free on her MySpace page. Apple declined to comment on Ms. Allen's remarks, and a spokeswoman for her label, EMI Group's Capitol Records, said the singer and her manager weren't available to elaborate.
And while Apple has made it a practice to seek out new artists, iTunes still has glaring gaps in its inventory. The best known is the absence of anything by the Beatles and much of the band members' subsequent solo recordings -- a situation that stemmed partially from a trademark dispute between Apple and the band's Apple Corps Ltd. record label. (Apple has said it's hopeful it will get the Beatles on iTunes following a recent settlement between the company and Apple Corps.) Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and Radiohead, too, haven't licensed their music to the service. And due to licensing issues, some albums are sold minus one or more songs. Elvis Costello's "Spike," from 1989, is missing one track, while only three songs from the J. Geils Band's 1972 "Full House 'Live'" are available on iTunes.
Still, Apple is being fawned over by much of the music industry. Digital Music Group, a Sacramento, Calif., company that handles online distribution for independent labels, has four people on staff who spend most of their time chatting up iTunes editors and sending them CDs of bands in an attempt to get promotion on the site. Tuhin Roy, the distributor's chief strategy officer, is impressed by the knowledge of the Apple staffers. "Clearly, they know the music they're dealing with," he says.
Josh Deutsch, chief executive of Downtown Records, went so far as to bring urban artist Kevin Michael to Cupertino to perform for iTunes staffers. Apparently impressed, iTunes executives committed to releasing an Apple-only collection of tracks next month, in advance of Mr. Michael's debut album. While some music executives are frustrated about what it takes to woo Apple, "The flip side is, when they do step out on a new artist, it's that much more meaningful," Mr. Deutsch says.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs
How MP3 Was Born
Karlheinz Brandenburg often is cited as the inventor of the music format. But he credits many for a discovery that has upended the music business
Jack Ewing
Karlheinz Brandenburg doesn't like being labeled the "inventor" of MP3. He points out that the most popular format for digital music on the Internet is the work of at least a half-dozen core developers and many others who made important contributions. Even folk-rock singer Suzanne Vega inadvertently played a walk-on role in the creation of MP3. "I know on whose shoulders I stand and who else contributed a lot," says Brandenburg, now director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau, Germany.
Still, there's no doubt Brandenburg was one of the crucial contributors to the technology that upended the music business and paved the way for Apple's (AAPL) immensely popular iPod media players and iTunes download service (see BusinessWeek.com, 2/26/07, "Apple's International iTunes Controversy"). In a recent interview, Brandenburg, 52, recalled how MP3 came into being. The story offers a lesson in the innovation process and a warning about how tricky it can be to sort out the intellectual property rights behind inventions that involve numerous organizations and people.
In February, a jury at the U.S. District Court in San Diego awarded Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) $1.5 billion in damages from Microsoft (MSFT) for use of some MP3 patents. Those patents stem from work done at Bell Labs, which belonged to a corporate forebear of the French-American telco-equipment maker.
"Terrible Distortion"
Brandenburg's involvement in digital music compression began in the early 1980s when he was a doctoral student at Germany's University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. A professor urged Brandenburg to work on the problem of how to transmit music over a digital ISDN phone line. It wasn't just a computer coding problem. Brandenburg had to immerse himself in the science behind how people perceive music.
That was where Suzanne Vega came in. Her song Tom's Diner, though seemingly a simple ditty, proved devilishly difficult to reproduce without annoying background noise. "Suzanne Vega was a catastrophe. Terrible distortion," Brandenburg recalls. "The a cappella version of Tom's Diner was more difficult to compress without compromising on audio quality than anything else."
When MP3 developers refined the technology to the point where Tom's Diner sounded true to the original, they had made a major breakthrough. "I've listened to this 20 seconds [of Tom's Diner] a thousand times. I still like the music," says Brandenburg, who met Vega years later when both attended an event in Cannes to mark the creation of MP3.
Fierce Competition
Brandenburg continued working on MP3—which wasn't known by that name until later—after finishing his doctoral work in 1989 and becoming an assistant professor at Erlangen-Nuremberg. He worked closely with scientists at the Fraunhofer Society, one of Germany's premiere research institutions, and joined the staff of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen in 1993 (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/12/07, "An Idea Incubator Tries to Grow Cash").
The Fraunhofer team was by no means the only group trying to solve the problem of transmitting music over the Internet. Groups at several other German universities as well as in other countries were racing to develop a standard. Researchers knew that figuring out a way to send high-fidelity sound over telecommunications lines could be important, though few suspected how immense the impact would be. "It became much bigger than we thought at the time," Brandenburg says.
Competition was fierce, and it was sometimes political as well as technical. Numerous teams lobbied for approval of the International Standards Organization, whose Motion Picture Experts Group, or MPEG, would determine which formats became industry norms. In 1993, after lengthy debate that led to consolidation of some of the competing standards, MPEG chose several formats.
Instant Fascination
MP3, based largely on the work of Fraunhofer and private partners including French electronics maker Thomson (TMS), proved to be the most efficient and popular. (Another standard to which the Fraunhofer contributed, known as Advanced Audio Coding or AAC, is the native technology used by the iPod, which also supports MP3 encoding.)
MP3 began to take off in the late 1990s when college computer geeks, aided by faster PCs, began using the format to create music files. Brandenburg says he had an inkling of the disruptive effects of the technology when he read a newspaper article about efforts by the Recording Industry Association of America to shut down student Web sites stocked with MP3 files. In 1997, Microsoft incorporated MP3 support into its Windows Media Player, and in 1998 the first portable MP3 players began appearing.
Brandenburg recalls showing an early Korean-made MP3 device to acquaintances. Even people who weren't gadget freaks were fascinated. "A lot of people said, 'I want to have it, how much does it cost?' This was when you had to pay a couple of hundred dollars for 15 to 30 minutes of music."
May We Suggest?
Since then, MP3 patents have generated tens of millions in royalty payments for the nonprofit Fraunhofer, including $143 million in 2005, when the number of companies buying MP3 licenses peaked. A Fraunhofer official says the institution was unpleasantly surprised by the San Diego court ruling against Microsoft. But a Thomson spokeswoman says the patents that generate royalties for Fraunhofer and Thomson are not affected.
Brandenburg hasn't become a dot-com zillionaire from his work on MP3, but he received a substantial cut of the royalty payments under a German law that entitles researchers to a share of the profits from their inventions. (He won't say how much.)
As director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, Brandenburg continues to be involved in the cutting edge of digital music. Researchers under his supervision are working on technology that would, for example, analyze a user's tastes based on music he or she has already downloaded, search the Internet for other tunes in the same genre, and automatically assemble a playlist. Brandenburg is also involved in research to deliver more realistic, true-to-life media than anything now available. Perhaps he'll even help touch off another revolution.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...05_707122.htm?
Companies Mine Growth of MP3 Homework
Madlen Read
Lindleigh Whetstone wears headphones as she shoves clothes into the washing machine. Her classmate, Stepheno Zollos, wears them as he shops for groceries. An onlooker might assume the teens are listening to the latest top 40 hit, but they're really learning Spanish.
Whetstone, 18, and Zollos, 17, are students in Kathy O'Connor's class at Tidewater Community College in Southeastern Virginia. O'Connor got an $11,000 grant from the school to lend her students iPods so they can practice their Spanish conversations anywhere -- not just sitting in front of a computer.
"I get a lot more listening in than I did before," said Whetstone, who estimates that it's increased from about 30 minutes a week to 4 or 5 hours.
Students are using MP3 players more to listen to downloaded books, textbook study guides and language labs on-the-go. Books and personal stereos have always been portable, of course, but audio books are easier to carry around in MP3 form. A typical 300-page novel might take up 12 CDs, but only a tiny portion of an MP3 player's memory and prices for audiobook downloads are mostly comparable to audio CDs.
The percentages are still small, according to a recent study by market research firm Harrison Group Inc. that surveyed 1,000 teens in September 2006 using a 45-minute Internet questionnaire. Music listening made up about 85 percent of MP3 use among teens, video was about 10 percent, and podcasts and audio texts fell under the remaining 5 percent.
But the actual numbers are growing, and companies that make educational materials are banking on them climbing higher.
Over half of teens owned a portable MP3 player in mid-2006, according to TEMPO, a study of digital music behavior conducted by market research firm Ipsos that surveyed over 1,000 Americans aged 12 and up.
"Students are more mobile today. Their expectations of being able to get digital content is certainly much higher than it has been in the past," said Scott Criswell, product manager of online delivery systems for the higher education unit of McGraw-Hill Cos., one of the three biggest textbook publishers. Criswell said the company now offers more than 800 digital products, most with audio, and that figure has increased by 50 percent over the past four years.
Teachers, especially at the college level, are increasingly making resources available in MP3 form: Michael Barrett, a cardiologist at Temple University, even put recordings of heart murmurs online so his medical students could download and listen to them, instead of squeezing in time with a patient.
"The iPod becomes a simulated patient, really," Barrett said.
Schools including Stanford University and University of Wisconsin-Madison now belong to iTunes U, a service launched a year ago by Apple Inc. that lets professors post lectures and students download them for free. Meanwhile, some libraries, including Swem Library at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, are lending out MP3 players to students. And for its summer assignment to incoming freshmen last year, Seton Hall University chose to assign listening, not reading: a piece by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins.
In response, new products have been popping up.
Audible Inc., the biggest audio book seller, and Pearson Education, the biggest textbook publisher, teamed up last summer to launch VangoNotes, textbook chapter summaries and reviews in MP3 form. The companies declined to give specific sales figures, but said thousands of students have downloaded the more than 100 titles, which should grow to 200 titles by fall.
"Right now it's a small part of our business, but we believe it's going to be a growing part of our overall strategy," said Sandi Kirshner, chief marketing officer of Pearson's higher education unit.
It's not just college students; grade schoolers are starting to do their reading with earphones, too.
One type of audio player called Playaway -- a two-ounce flashplayer pre-loaded with an audio book made by Follett Corp. and Findaway World -- was sold to school districts starting about 6 months ago. The players are now on loan at roughly 1,500 libraries, 15 percent of which are school libraries.
Belinda Jacks, who oversees 38 school libraries in the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie, recently ordered Playaways for her libraries, and said they've become "shockingly" popular.
She added that, contrary to some parents' concerns, listening to books encourages reading. This expands on reading out loud to kids, which studies show boosts literacy, Jacks said.
When you compare traditional books to audiobooks, however, there's a big difference in price. A new paperback copy of Charlotte's Web costs $8 on Amazon, whereas the Playaway version costs $30, and an iTunes download of it costs $17 (many other iTunes book downloads cost more -- for example, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice costs $26, and the more recent Harry Potter books cost $50.) And that doesn't even count the cost of an MP3 player, for those students who don't have them.
The key is getting schools to help out with the costs, said O'Connor, the Spanish instructor at Tidewater Community College. Of the 16 students in O'Connor's class this semester, only two had their own MP3 players at the outset.
Marketing experts point out that the audiobook industry is already one of the fastest-growing parts of publishing. And given the new technologies that will merge phones and Internet browsers with MP3 players, the market could grow even more quickly, said Jim Taylor, vice chairman of Harrison Group, which conducted the study on teen technology trends.
"It's interestingly changing the way in which people are educated. You just need to ask intelligent questions, and you can get answers anytime, anywhere, in real time," Taylor said. "Education becomes no longer a fact-based learning process, it's search-based, cognitive. It's kind of like what happened to math skills with the calculator."
But just like radio and television before, new gadgets are unlikely to replace the book as we know it. More people are buying books than ever before.
"It's like radio," Taylor said. "Radio is bigger than it ever was. It's just different."
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan...D8N4D5E84.htm?
MIT Puts Entire Curriculum at Disposal of e-Learners
Kim Thomas
The entire catalogue of information from 1,800 courses at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will be available free online by
the end of the year. Once uploaded, it will represent one of the internet’s most important resources.
By providing free access to course material such as lecture notes, assignment details, podcasts and videocasts, MIT’s Open CourseWare programme will transform the e-learning landscape.
MIT initiated the programme in 2001 and material from 1,550 MIT courses is already available. Anne Margulies, executive director of Open CourseWare, said that in January alone, the site had had 1.5 million visits, and the figure rose to two million if visits to language translated sites were included. Overseas visitors– from China and India in particular – dominate usage traffic, with 60% of visits originating outside the US.
Margulies said that MIT had seen little potential for making money from putting materials online and had decided to give them away. She said that about half of the Open CourseWare users were teaching themselves with the materials, 35% were students at other institutions, and 15% were teachers.
“MIT is eager for the material to be re-used, as long as it is for noncommercial purposes, and whoever re-uses it gives proper citation to the original MIT author as well as to MIT,” Margulies said.
An international consortium of open courseware providers has been formed (
http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ ). It has 120 members, half of whom are already providing open courseware.
http://ocw.mit.edu
http://www.iwr.co.uk/information-wor...ire-curriculum
Tamil Nadu Gets Dual-Boot Win-Linux Desktops
The Indian state of Tamil Nadu has finalized a tender for 40,000 Lenovo desktops which can be installed with both Novell's Suse Linux and Microsoft's Windows XP Starter Edition.
Aaron Tan
The Indian state of Tamil Nadu has finalized a tender for 40,000 Lenovo desktops which can be installed with both Novell's Suse Linux and Microsoft's Windows XP Starter Edition.
According to C. Umashankar, managing director of Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (Elcot), the desktops will be deployed across schools and government departments in the state. Elcot is Tamil Nadu's state-owned IT supplier.
Umashankar said the desktops will be installed with either Suse Linux or dual-boot Windows XP Starter Edition/Suse Linux configurations, depending on the needs of the organization.
For instance, schools will be provided with Suse Linux desktops, while government employees who still require Windows in their work will get dual-boot machines, he told ZDNet Asia.
Dual-boot machines will cost 22,000 rupees (US$497) each, though this was not the initial price point quoted by the vendors, Umakshankar said, adding that Chennai-based IT company Origin Infosys will supply the Lenovo desktops.
He said that Elcot was originally quoted 21,800 rupees (US$492) for each Lenovo system, whether the preloaded OS was Suse Linux or Windows XP Starter Edition. After some negotiation, Elcot secured the final price of 22,000 rupees (US$497) for dual-boot systems, Umashankar said.
Suse Linux is a full-fledged OS with no restrictions on how the platform is used, while Microsoft's Windows XP Starter Edition does not allow users to run more than three software applications at one time.
According to Umashankar, users will be "encouraged" to use Suse Linux as far as possible.
Earlier this year, Tamil Nadu announced plans for all government agencies across the state to switch from Microsoft Windows desktop to Linux and the OpenOffice productivity suite. The move is expected to slash the local government's IT cost by 15 to 25 percent.
http://www.zdnetindia.com/news/softw...es/172654.html
AMD Warns on Revenue
Advanced Micro Devices, the No. 2 microprocessor maker, warned that it will likely miss its quarterly revenue target as it loses market share among computer resellers, a traditional bulwark of its business.
It was the second quarter in a row AMD has shown signs of trouble as it wages a bruising price war with Intel, a fight that has eroded profits at both main rivals in the $30 billion processor industry.
The two Silicon Valley combatants said they expected competitive pricing to continue this year, with Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini hinting he is ready to dig in his heels to stop AMD's overall recent market share gains.
"I've always been a market share guy," Otellini said in remarks Webcast from a Morgan Stanley investment conference. "In order to generate the scale at which we operate our business, having a very significant market share is critical."
Intel's total market share among desktop, laptop and server computers fell to 74.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2006, while AMD's rose to a record 25 percent, according to market research firm Mercury Research.
However, AMD said on Monday that its first-quarter revenue would fall short of the $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion target it gave in January. Wall Street, on average, was expecting revenue of $1.65 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.
AMD Chief Executive Hector Ruiz, also speaking at the Morgan Stanley conference, said direct sales to PC makers had grown dramatically in a short time, but faulted his company for failing to focus on its traditional customers, the computer resellers -- smaller retailers and PC assemblers the industry refers to as "the channel."
"We let down our channel partners by not being able to support them as much as they wanted," Ruiz said. "I think going into second quarter that we can regain the position we had before."
Last quarter, AMD posted a surprise net loss as the price war with Intel took a heavier toll than expected.
Ruiz sounded a bullish tone on the long-term prospects for the processor industry, saying the spread of computing into the entertainment, education and health industries meant demand could grow by 20 percent a year or more.
AMD shares closed down 23 cents, or 1.6 percent, at $13.95 on the New York Stock Exchange, after falling as low as $13.53 following the revenue warning. Intel shares fell 0.6 percent to end at $19.11 on the Nasdaq.
Stifel Nicolaus analyst Cody Acree said the drop in AMD's share price may have been tempered by the fact that many investors already had low expectations.
"I think it's a continuation of share loss back to Intel and aggressive pricing in an effort to maintain share," Acree said. "I don't think anybody was expecting strength from AMD."
Also on Monday, the Semiconductor Industry Association said sales of all kinds of microchips rose more than 9 percent from a year earlier, data Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung cited as some evidence that the industry is set for a rebound.
Yeung said PC processor prices rose 4.6 percent in January, as calculated on a three-month moving average, while sales of processors rose half a percent, compared to a 5-year average decline of nearly 3 percent.
"While mix remains a main wild card, price trends we have observed do not portend a major price war," Yeung said.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2100491,00.asp
More on the Copyright Royalty Board Decision on Internet Radio Music Royalties
As we wrote on Friday, the Copyright Royalty Board released to the parties their decision setting the sound recording music royalties for Internet radio for the years 2006-2010 - and the rates will be increasing significantly (absent success on appeal or in settlement discussions). The rates and appeal process are set out in our post on Friday. The parties have until Monday, March 5 at noon, to request that the Board keep portions of the decision that contain confidential proprietary information out of the public record. Thus, the text of the decision is not yet public. Nevertheless, many parties are asking for more specific information about the decision and its impact. Certainly, when the decision is public, everyone will want to make their own judgments. But, until that time (which should be soon as the Board was careful to avoid using any significant amount of confidential information), I offer some observations about the decision (from my vantage point as a party who represented some of the webcasters involved in the proceeding), as well as thoughts on some of the questions that I have seen posted on various discussion boards this weekend.
First, it is essential to understand exactly what this decision covers. The Board’s decision covers only non-interactive webcasters operating pursuant to the statutory license. Our memo, here, discusses the statutory licensing scheme, and what a webcasting service must do to qualify to pay the royalties due under this statutory license. Essentially, a webcaster covered by this decision is one which operates like a radio station – where no listener can dictate which artists or songs he or she will hear (some limited degree of consumer influence is permitted, but a webcaster must comply with the restrictions set out in our memo). Also, the webcaster cannot notify their listeners when any specific song will play. The decision does cover the Internet transmissions of the over-the-air content of most broadcast stations.
The royalties are paid to SoundExchange – a nonprofit corporation with a Board made up of representatives of artists and the record companies. The royalties go to the copyright holders in Sound Recordings and the performers on those recordings ( the copyright holder is usually the record label. Royalties are split 50/50 – and the artist royalties are further divided 45% to the featured artist and 5% to any background musicians featured on the recording).
The decision by the Board was the result of a long proceeding – which began in 2005. A summary of the proceeding can be found in our posting, here. Satellite radio also has to pay similar royalties, as do services that provide background music to businesses ("business establishment services"). Separate proceedings are underway to determine rates for these services.
With that background – here are some more thoughts on the decision – obviously in very summary form. The Board is charged with determining the royalty rates that would be determined by a willing buyer and a willing seller in a marketplace transaction. The Board was clear in the decision that it would look simply for evidence of what such a deal would be – it would not look at policy reasons why certain groups of webcasters (including small commercial webcasters or noncommercial webcasters should get some special rate).
In setting the rate, the Board looked to proposed benchmarks by which it could determine what a hypothetical buyer and seller would agree to in the marketplace. It rejected the proposals advanced by the commercial webcasters that the appropriate benchmark was what was paid by the services for the underlying composition (i.e. the fees paid to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC). Instead, the Board adopted a benchmark rate derived by one of SoundExchange’s expert witnesses by taking the rate paid by certain interactive webcast services (ones which do not qualify for the statutory license and which thus must negotiate private deals with the record labels for use of their music), and adjusting those rates to take into account the differences in the statutory services (including the lesser value to consumers as they do not have the ability to select songs when using a service subject to the statutory license). The Board concluded that the rapidly escalating rate was justified as it brought the statutory services closer to the interactive services as the advertising market grows over the next few years.
The reliance on this benchmark lead to the numbers that we reported on Friday. In its decision, the Board also set out terms for payments. The terms are essentially those that are now in place for large webcasters, with a few changes. The Board approved an increase in the late fee on monthly payments - to a fee of 1.5% of the unpaid royalty per month. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The late fee would also be imposed on late filings of Statements of Account - the monthly reports as to how much a service owes and the computations used to reach that conclusion. The Board also concluded that copyright holders and artist could review the statements of account filed by services that played their music, though such information could not be revealed to the public.
So what does this all mean? Immediately, it creates issues for webcasters who were paying under the provisions of the Small Webcasters Settlement Act. While the law is very confusing as the effective date of the decision, one reading is that the rates go into effect immediately, even while an appeal is pending. Thus, services would be obligated to begin to pay at the rate decided by the Board (though past due amounts for 2006 and the first two months of 2007 would appear to not be due until the appeal is resolved). But, as these new fees will exceed the total revenues of many smaller webcasters (see the report in the Radio and Internet Newsletter, here), this would impose an incredible hardship - probably an impossible burden - on these services.
Larger noncommercial webcasters, who exceed the usage limitation covered by the flat $500 fee, would also face huge new royalties, as all overages would be at more than four times the rate that they pay for such overages now.
For all these services, a new obligation to track performances - how many listeners heard each and every song played by a service - is one that many small services will find difficult to meet. While some technical companies may be able to track that information, many smaller webcasters do not use services provided by those companies. And, as many Internet radio operators have been paying their royalties for 2006 and thus far in 2007 on a percentage of revenue or on Aggregate Tuning Hour basis, will they have any basis to determine their obligations for the fees that are retroactive to January 1, 2006?
The other type of service that could be hard hit by the decision would be the services that generate individual streams for each listener, or services that have many individual streams or channels. As the decision places a $500 minimum fee on each station or channel, and does not clearly define what is meant by a "channel" or "station," an argument could be made that services that generate an individual stream for each listener would have a $500 obligation for each stream they generate - even if that stream played just one song.
There are many other issues that will arise once the decision is released and reviewed by the public. But this decision is sure to have impact far beyond the streaming world. In the recently proposed XM/Sirius merger, about which we wrote here, the satellite radio services were arguing that competition from Internet Radio lessened any anticompetitive threat from the anticipated combination of the companies. Similarly, broadcasters have argued that webcasters provided competition that justified a relaxation of the multiple ownership rules. If many Internet radio stations disappear after this decision, these two proceedings may well be affected. Also, if the Internet does not provide an outlet for new broadcast entrants, will there be a greater clamor for more Low Power FM stations? These issues and other ramifications of the decision are sure to follow.
We will have more on the decision as questions arise and once the full text is made public.
http://www.broadcastlawblog.com/arch...royalties.html
The View from Paradise
Internet Radio, RIAA
Bill Goldsmith
I’m Bill Goldsmith, and my wife Rebecca and I have spent the last seven years of our lives pouring our hearts, minds, and financial resources into Radio Paradise. We are now faced with the very real possibility that all of our efforts will have been in vain, and that the thousands of people who are devoted listeners to our station will have it snatched out of their lives.
I have been in love with radio all of my life, and spent 30-odd years dealing with the conflict between my vision of radio as an art form and my FM-station employers’ vision of radio as a conduit for advertising. I have watched the medium that I love turn from an essential part of the process of connecting those who love making music with those whose lives are touched by it into a mindless background hum of advertising and disposable musical sludge.
With the advent of the Internet, we were finally able to bring to life the radio station I had always wanted to work for (and listen to): commercial-free, passionate, and embracing a wide universe of musical treasures, from the classic rock artists I grew up with to the latest indie discoveries, with a liberal sprinkling of world music, electronica, jazz, even classical. We have slowly built up a loyal audience and have been able to support ourselves while living our dream.
An Exciting - But Fragile - New Era for Radio
The Internet has changed radio in a profound way. Instead of a business that required investments so huge (millions of dollars for even a small-market FM station) that a programming focus on the lowest common denominator and an extreme aversion to risk or experimentation was an unavoidable consequence, a radio station with a global reach was now within the grasp of anyone with the talent and determination to make it happen.
Every day we hear from listeners who are profoundly touched by our efforts - by the music we play, by the way we assemble the songs into meaningful sequences that are more than the sum of their parts, by our passion for what we are doing, and our commitment to never contaminating the music with advertising. And our station is but one of many who have attracted that kind of passionate following, and provided that kind of outlet for radio artists like myself.
The Internet’s paradigm-shifting gift to radio programmers and music lovers - at least those in the US - is now in danger of being taken away by the misguided actions of the US Copyright Board. The performance royalty rates released by the Copyright Board on March 1, 2007 are not just extreme, not just burdensome. They are a death sentence for all US-based independent webcasters like Radio Paradise, SOMA-FM, Digitally Imported, and many others.
The facts and figures of the new rates are detailed in Kurt Hanson’s newsletter for 3/2/07. Kurt’s analysis of the financial impact of the new rates is entirely accurate, and chilling.
The Artificial Analog vs. Digital Divide
There has been much discussion about how unfair these rates are, but our listeners find one fact particularly apalling: while Internet stations like ours are being told they must pay royalty fees that exceed their income, sometimes by several times over, FM stations - including those owned by media conglomerates like Clear Channel - pay nothing at all!
Yes, both FM stations and Internet stations pay royalties to songwriters and/or music publishers. But the royalties in question are owed to the owners of performance copyrights, which means, in most cases, record companies - and to them, FM stations pay nothing at all.
How is it possible for such a massive disparity to exist? For the answer to that we need to go back to the 1990s, when music industry lobbyists persuaded Congress to include wording in two pieces of legislation (the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995 and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998) that drew a sharp division between analog and digital broadcasts. Their reasoning was that a digital radio transmission was not a radio broadcast at all, but a sequence of perfect digital copies of music performances provided to the user, who could then copy them rather than paying to own a CD.
This is a profoundly flawed piece of reasoning, but members of Congress (who at that time had no idea how this whole digital thing worked) accepted it at face value, and agreed that it was only fair that digital broadcasts be subject to additional copyright fees, to be determined by an impartial (in theory…) ruling by the Copyright Office.
Let’s Get Real About This
Let’s reassess that reasoning in the light of 21st-century reality. Is there, in truth, a fundamental difference in the experience of an online listener to Radio Paradise and someone who was listening to identical programming on an FM station? Every one of our listeners - indeed, anyone who has ever clicked on a webcast as background music while working - knows the answer to that question. No! There is no difference whatsoever. Radio is radio, whether it comes in digital or analog form.
As for the recording angle, I would challenge any random group of RIAA lawyers, copyright judges, or members of Congress to listen to a digital recording of our radio station and a high-quality cassette recording of an analog FM station and tell which was which. I guarantee that they could not. The differences in quality are too subtle for all but the most discerning listener to notice.
The quality jump between AM and FM broadcasts was an order of magnitude more significant, yet the music industry managed to thrive their way through that transition. The advent of decent-quality cassette recorders in the 70s, coupled with stereo FM broadcasting, made it possible for anyone who wanted to to make copies of their favorite songs from the radio, with a quality not too different from the analog LPs sold at the time. Did that spell a death-knell for the music industry? Not hardly. The 70s and 80s saw a phenominal growth in the sales of LPs and, later, CDs.
Ah, but the music industry thought that home music recording would destroy their sales, and lobbied unsuccessfully in the 1970s to cripple that technology. The same fear-based and misguided reasoning popped up again in the 90s, with the advent of digital recording and broadcasting, and this time the industry - flush with dollars earned after their earlier fears were proved groundless - succeeded in this attempt to preserve their bottom line at the expense of, well, pretty much every one else.
A Grave Disservice to The Public
Crippling an exciting, groundbreaking industry like Internet radio is certainly not in the best interests of the public, nor that of musical artists, and not even - if history is any judge - of the music industry itself. Just as they were unable to see how the advent of home music taping actually spurred the sale of LPs and CDs, they are unable to tell exactly what impact Internet radio and other forms of digital media will have on the future of their industry - and to behave as if they do know, and for Congress to go along with them, is a grave error, and public disservice, that needs to be recognized and corrected.
So, if we are building a business - even a non-commercial business like Radio Paradise - by the use of copyrighted material, isn’t it fair that we pay for its use? Perhaps it is. But the fact remains that what we are doing does not differ in any substantive way from what a company like Clear Channel is doing, and to move forward under the fiction that such a distinction exists is neither fair nor rational.
Perhaps the most equitable solution is for all broadcasters - analog or digital, terrestrial, satellite, or Internet - to pay such royalties equally, just as they all pay more or less equally for the use of music compositions. This is the situation in many other places in the world, including most of Europe. The fact that the US broadcasting lobby has successfully out-spent and out-manuevered the music industry on this issue should not be “balanced” by Internet radio royalty rates so high that they cripple that entire industry.
That kind of reform will take some time - time that people like my wife and myself just don’t have. We are hoping that we can, along with a small group of other independent webcasters, negotiate a separate settlement with the RIAA, similar to the one we negotiated in 2002. That agreement allowed us to operate by paying a royalty equal to 10% - 12% of our gross income in performance royalties. That has been enough of a burden for a struggling “mom & pop” operation like ours, but it has allowed us to survive since that point. However, that agreement has expired, and we are now liable for royalties, retroactive to the beginning of 2006, that are equal to aproximately 125% of our income.
Trust me, it has been difficult to write those checks knowing that the foundation that the entire royalty structure is based on is a lie. Perhaps we will succeed in negotiating a new deal with them. If we do, it will probably be at a significantly higher rate - creating even more of a burden on small businesses like ours.
My question is this: why should we continue to be penalized for the mistakes made by Congress back in the 1990s?
What’s The Solution
The truly fair solution is a moratorium on the collection of any fees and the imposition of any penalties until Congress has had the opportunity to revisit the decisions they made a decade ago, and see if there is not in truth a profound wrong that deserves to be righted.
We are at a fork in the road. Down one path is a radio universe populated entirely by large corporations, who can either afford the legal firepower necessary to negotiate a reasonable settlement with the music industry (such as the satellite radio companies have done) or can afford to offer Internet radio as a “loss leader” (as Yahoo and AOL do).
Down the other fork we are presented with a universe of choices, freely available to all, produced by people who truly love and value what they are doing - including user-programmed channels such as those offered by lala.com, “discovery” channels such as those available at Pandora, and who knows what else in the coming years. None of those choices are viable under the new rate structure, and that would be a tremendous loss for all involved.
http://www.saveourinternetradio.com/...from-paradise/
Skype Reveals P2P Service Downloaded 500m Times
VoIP provider Skype has revealed that its peer-to-peer service has been downloaded over 500m times by users around the world.
The figure was reached in slightly over 42 months time, counting from the first beta launch of Skype in August 2003.
Skype's services now include free voice, video, conference calling and instant messaging, as well as Skype's paid-for communication products including Skype Pro.
http://www.nma.co.uk/Articles/32218/...00m+times.html
Study: Abandoning Net Neutrality Discourages Improvements in Service
Charging online content providers such as Yahoo! and Google for preferential access to the customers of Internet service providers might not be in the best interest of the millions of Americans, despite claims to the contrary, a new University of Florida study finds.
“The conventional wisdom is that Internet service providers would have greater incentive to expand their service capabilities if they were allowed to charge,” said Kenneth Cheng, a professor in UF’s department of decision and information sciences. Cheng and his co-authors are scheduled to present the findings at the International Conference on Information, Technology and Management in New Delhi, India, next week. “That was completely the opposite of what we found.”
The research discovered that cable and telephone companies providing broadband to deliver the content of companies such as Google and Yahoo! are more likely to expand their infrastructure — resulting in quicker loading and response in a customer’s personal computer — if they don’t charge these companies for preferential treatment, Cheng said.
The findings are timely because of industry pressure on Congress to consider legislation that would allow broadband service providers to give preferential Internet service to online content providers willing to pay a fee. That would, in effect, end the current practice of “net neutrality,” he said.
“Abandoning net neutrality has far-reaching and rippling effects when you consider how the Internet has become part of our daily life experience,” said Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay, a professor in UF’s department of decision and information sciences, who did the study with Cheng. “If the broadband service providers are allowed to charge the content providers and my favorite content provider does not happen to pay my local broadband service provider, would I have to switch favorites in order to have a faster Internet experience?”
The UF researchers, who took no position on the issue, developed an analytical model based on game theory to determine the winners and losers if net neutrality were abandoned, as well as whether the practice’s demise would give broadband service providers greater incentive to expand capacity.
Not surprisingly, they found that broadband service providers were the ones to gain the most from ending net neutrality because they could collect fees from content providers. The content providers such as Yahoo! and Google, in turn, would be the biggest losers.
Consumers will “win” if their favorite online provider is the one paying a fee to the telephone or cable company because it comes with a guarantee that its site would have the opportunity to load faster than its competitors, Cheng said. But those consumers who prefer a content provider that paid no such fee will “lose” in having to endure slower service, he said.
More important, the researchers found that the incentive for broadband service providers to expand and upgrade their service actually declines if net neutrality ends. Improving the infrastructure reduces the need for online content providers to pay for preferential treatment, Bandyopadhyay said.
“The whole purpose of charging for preferential treatment to content providers is that one content provider gains some edge over the other,” he said. “But when the capacity is expanded, this advantage becomes negligible.”
He gave the analogy of the expansion of a two-lane highway where drivers willing to pay a toll to subsidize road improvements are rewarded with exclusive use of a faster lane.
“If the road is upgraded from two to four lanes, with one express lane, these drivers might say ‘Three lanes are good enough for me. I don’t want to have to pay a toll any longer,’” he said. “So the desire to pay a toll when the road is expanded gets lesser.”
The experience of other countries also suggests that better service – up to three times faster – results when there is greater competition, Cheng said.
“In Japan and Korea, where there is net neutrality and much greater competition among broadband providers than in the United States, there are also higher broadband speeds,” he said.”
Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor who is credited with popularizing the term ‘network neutrality,’ praised the study. “Kenneth Cheng is doing important research on a topic that is vital to the future of networking,” he said.
http://news.ufl.edu/2007/03/07/net-neutrality/
The Killing of Wi-Fi
The phone companies have everything to gain and nothing to lose. The same cannot be said for us.
John C. Dvorak
There is mounting evidence that the cellular service companies are going to do whatever they can to kill Wi-Fi. After all, it is a huge long-term threat to them. We've seen that the route to success in America today is via public gullibility and general ignorance. And these cell-phone–service companies are no dummies.
The always-entertaining Pew Internet & American Life Project ran a survey, and the results show that 34 percent of Internet users have gone online with a Wi-Fi connection or one of those newly popular and overpriced cell-phone services. Two years ago, this number was 22 percent. Another factoid from the survey: 19 percent of all users have Wi-Fi in the home. This number was a mere 10 percent just one year ago. The last tidbit from the survey worth noting is that only 56 percent of the people who have PDAs that hook to the Internet have actually gone on the Net via their PDA. The same goes for the people who have cell phones with Internet capability; not much more than half have actually used it.
Let's go over a few unproven, albeit obvious, facts. A good portion of the public has cell phones that can go on the Net, but these people have no clue how to do so. When asked, they will likely say their cell phone doesn't have the capability, even though it does. A good portion of the public with cell phones that can access the Net cannot grasp the concept in their brain, since going on the Net usually means sitting at a keyboard, looking at a big screen, and typing stuff.
What's more, a good portion of the public has been told that their phone can go on the Internet, and they think they are on the Internet when making calls. These folks would likely answer yes to a query about the Internet even if their phone had no Internet access whatsoever.
Heck, let's cut to the chase. A good portion of the public doesn't really know what wireless means. If a Comcast wire is coming into the house, then it's wired and that's that.
The point is that there just aren't that many people out there who have any idea what they are doing. All you have to do is sit at the airport when two people begin to discuss the Internet. Someone will have an EV-DO card and call it Wi-Fi and say how neat it will be when San Francisco goes all Wi-Fi and he can use the card for free access instead of having to pay Sprint when he boots to the network. "Won't that be great!?"
Of course, this has been made all the more confusing since the introduction of those newer EDGE and EV-DO network cards that people are using at an exorbitant price to get an e-mail connection with their laptop.
Cut to my favorite commercial. Two jokers are on a park bench with their laptops. One has a slow cell-network card, and the other has a faster network card from Sprint. One guy uploads a file and says good-bye to his hapless friend, who is left to become an ornament for pigeons. Why did the one guy leave his pal? What are these two jerks doing outside with laptops downloading and uploading files? If they are that busy, then shouldn't they still be in the office finishing up on a high-speed network?
It's all too mysterious for me. In fact, the sudden emergence of the whole cell network as your Internet connection is to show the public that there is plenty of wireless connectivity already and, golly, stop the idea of doing free Wi-Fi in municipalities.
It's not about the technology. It's about the threat of Wi-Fi overall. And I mean free Wi-Fi in particular. If you take a city the size of San Francisco and give the entire population free high-speed Wi-Fi, think of the applications that will fall into place. That includes VoIP calls galore. Move over, cell phone; hello, Wi-Fi phone.
It's no coincidence that these commercials for EV-DO and others for plug-in cell phone network cards cropped up just at the same time the market got hit with a slew of Wi-Fi phones and Wi-Fi/cell combo phones. Wi-Fi needs to die! These phone companies are going to do everything they can to trash 802.11, especially 802.11n, which may eventually be as fast as 600 megabits per second.
Here's the value proposition. Wi-Fi is currently at 54 Mbps and has been for years. Reaching 100 Mbps is easily achievable thanks to pre-n and other tricks. The cell connections run from 384 Kbps with EDGE up to maybe 2 Mbps on EV-DO, if you're lucky. These are the speeds we were playing with 10 years ago, but now they're some sort of breakthrough. Yes, it's a kind of breakthrough, considering the phone companies' old 115-Kbps GPRS clunker technologies.
For these speeds—which are capped, mind you, so you cannot actually use what you are sold—you pay $50, $60, maybe $70 a month. And for that money, you get to send files from a park bench a couple of times a week or maybe once a month from the airport. Is the public so stupid that if given the choice between that service and free municipal Wi-Fi, they'd want the slower expensive service over the free faster service?
Probably not when the extremes are that broad, but you can be sure that the local politicians will cave on this, and we can forget free municipal Wi-Fi and Skype phones. Free is, by definition, communist! And it hurts free enterprise!
Who needs progress when you have profits?
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759...079TX1K0000585
Meraki Also Plans a SF Wi-Fi Network
Katie Fehrenbacher
Tired of waiting for the San Francisco Wi-Fi network proposed by Earthlink and Google? San Francisco residents in some select neighborhoods will have another option, courtesy of Meraki, the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up that recently raised money from Sequoia Capital and Google.
Meraki will build a one-square-mile free Wi-Fi network that will span a few select San Francisco neighborhoods. The network will be built with Meraki wireless mesh gear and will cost around $50,000. The company will also pay for DSL connections to power the network. Check out the planned coverage area.
Meraki’s CEO and founder Sanjit Biswas calls the plan an experiment and a showcase of what the company’s low cost Wi-Fi equipment can do. It’s also a savvy marketing play and if the network is successful it’ll show that community-backed wide-area Wi-Fi using the right equipment doesn’t need to be a bureaucratic hassle.
The network itself has nothing to do with the current Earthlink/Google Wi-Fi deal, and on the pace of that negotiation, Biswas says “we’re frustrated . . .everyone has been frustrated.”
Remember Google is also a Meraki investor, but Biswas says Google is interested in getting behind broadband access in whatever form.
Unlike some larger Wi-Fi deployments that have to lease city spaces to put up hardware, Meraki’s network entails signing up volunteers who will place Meraki repeaters in windows and some who can host an Internet connection.
The company says because Wi-Fi sharing isn’t always kosher with service providers the company will be using sharing-friendly ISP Speakeasy for its DSL lines. Though, the signup page also asks if volunteers have an Internet connection they want to share, so it sounds like the network could possibly include already in-use connections.
On this Biswas says: “We’ll find out what they have, since this is likely to be a sensitive issue. That question is really intended to gauge what fraction of people are interested in sharing within a community. I think we’ll be able to setup enough Meraki-provided DSLs in any case, but this helps us understand what consumers are thinking.”
If a free Wi-Fi network with a certain amount of effort and tech interest involved will be successful anywhere, it’ll likely happen in that part of San Francisco. If you’re interested go sign up on Meraki’s page.
http://gigaom.com/2007/03/04/meraki-sf-wifi/
What Starbucks Can Learn From the Movie Palace
Randall Stross
WI-FI service is quickly becoming the air-conditioning of the Internet age, enticing customers into restaurants and other public spaces in the same way that cold “advertising air” deliberately blasted out the open doors of air-conditioned theaters in the early 20th century to help sell tickets.
Today, hotspots are the new cold spots.
Starbucks became the most visible Wi-Fi-equipped national chain when it began offering the service in 2002. Now, at more than 5,100 stores, Starbucks offers Internet access “from the comfort of your favorite cozy chair.”
Before you pop open your laptop, however, you need to pull out your credit card. Starbucks and its partner, T-Mobile, charge $6 an hour for the “pay as you go” plan. Day passes or monthly subscriptions are available but can be used only at Starbucks stores and other T-Mobile partners like Borders bookstores.
McDonald’s offers Wi-Fi in more than 8,000 of its 13,700 stores in the United States, giving it wider reach than even Starbucks, and it also charges for access. McDonald’s doesn’t charge as much: it asks $2.95 for two hours. You can’t apply your T-Mobile subscription there, however, because McDonald’s works with other partners.
Metering and charging for a service, of course, is the prerogative of any business owner in a free market. One will always find entrepreneurs willing to try new ways to profit by erecting tollbooths in front of facilities that had been freely accessible.
In the past, this took the form of coin-operated locks on bathroom stalls. (You may have first encountered these at a moment when you were least ready to praise the inventor’s ingenuity.)
Today, the outer frontier of pricing innovation can be found at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, where some electrical outlets are accompanied by a small sign: “To Activate Pay $2 at Kiosk.” This is an experimental service, “Power Up My Portable,” which provides chairs and outlets for laptops; $2 buys 20 minutes of juice.
But what about the many other wall outlets scattered around the terminals and originally installed for vacuum cleaners? Zenola Campbell, the airport vice president who oversees concessions, demurred last week when asked whether travelers could always count on having free access to those outlets. “I can’t tell you where we’re going to be in the future,” she said.
When Starbucks and McDonald’s decided to exact a toll from their customers as they set up their in-store Wi-Fi networks, they created a confusion of conflicting signals: how welcome can one feel when staring at a meter that is running?
The restaurants’ predecessors, the movie theater owners of almost a century ago, understood that not every amenity, every service, every offering must have a separate price tag attached. The owners and the architects sought to give theatergoers an environment that was pleasing in all aspects. Marcus Loew, the head of a nationwide chain, once said, “We sell tickets to theaters, not movies.”
Panera Bread, which has more than 900 Wi-Fi-equipped sandwich and bakery stores, has set itself apart from its contemporaries by upholding the old-fashioned spirit of those bygone theater owners who never stinted in their efforts to make public space inviting.
The grand movie palaces did not have to show the revenue-enhancing potential of an ornamental gold cornice or plaster pilaster. So, too, at Panera Bread, where its fireplaces do not have to demonstrate a monetary payback to justify their place in the stores.
Neither does Wi-Fi. Neil Yanofsky, Panera’s president, said that no cost accounting had been done on its service, which is free. The rationale relates to ambience: “We want our customers to stay and linger.”
A Panera cafe does half of its business at lunchtime — there is little lingering then. But before and after the lunch rush, the restaurant addresses what it refers to internally as “the chill-out business,” which constitutes a not-insignificant 15 to 20 percent of its revenue.
Panera has no interest in rushing these customers out — the longer they stay, the greater the likelihood that resistance to the aroma of freshly baked muffins will crumble. Free, unmetered Wi-Fi is one way the restaurant sends an unambiguous signal: Stay as long as you like.
Of course, Mr. Yanofsky is the first to point out that he is in a position to be much more welcoming than the competition across the street at Starbucks. The average Panera store has 120 seats and does about two and a half times as much business as the average Starbucks store.
Mr. Yanofsky said he could not see why Starbucks, given its more limited seating, would drop access charges so that it could match Panera’s Wi-Fi offering. “Why make it free?” he said. “They’re already full.”
Each Panera cafe averages 220 connect hours a week; Starbucks and McDonald’s declined to provide similar information about the use of their services.
In the 1920s, when air-conditioning began to be installed in movie theaters, owners had to spend a sizable sum — $50,000 (roughly equivalent to $570,000 today) — to transform the property into a “cold spot.” But it was worth it. Before the “refrigeratory process” came along, theaters could not draw customers during the summer because of the unbearable heat in confined space. With air-conditioning, patronage increased so sharply that even the largest investments were quickly repaid.
Wi-Fi does not address a similar problem of seasonal attendance. Nor will it produce a multifold increase in patronage. But, then again, it’s not nearly as costly to introduce as the cooling plants of the 1920s.
The access charges assessed at Starbucks and McDonald’s suggest that behind the scenes, their service providers have had to make huge infrastructure investments and carry burdensome operational costs. But if the stores already have business-class broadband connections for their own operations, the addition of a Wi-Fi access point is trivial.
Schlotzsky’s Deli, which offers free Wi-Fi in 82 of its restaurants, uses Internet connections that were already in place, just as Panera Bread did. And Val King, Schlotzsky’s director of information technology, said the technical demands of remotely overseeing a wireless network were minimal. “It doesn’t take rocket science to run these things,” he said.
Customers need feel no shame, however, if they need help configuring their laptops, and sandwich makers and baristas are not necessarily the ones who can solve their technical problems quickly.
A Starbucks spokeswoman, Sonja Gould, explained that her company’s Wi-Fi customers receive, in exchange for their access fees, “excellent customer service help from T-Mobile.” It should be added that businesses offering free Wi-Fi also contract with tech-support companies to help customers. One such company, HotPoint Wireless, says its network now handles five times as many sessions originating from businesses offering free access as those that charge fees.
Getting connected is one thing, but keeping one’s e-mail private is another. Wi-Fi signals, by their nature, are notoriously susceptible to electronic eavesdropping. Wi-Fi services you pay for are no better protected than free services. As T-Mobile informs customers on its support Web page, all wireless service is “inherently insecure.”
Its recommendation should be heeded by users of Wi-Fi hotspots everywhere: use a virtual private network, which provides secure industrial-strength encryption. If your employer does not provide a V.P.N. server, consider using a commercial service, like JiWire, which charges $30 a year for a V.P.N., personal firewall and other services, including a hotspot directory that can be used offline.
STARBUCKS, which has rolled out a plenitude of stores, follows the same design concept that is behind the modern multiplex: for interior space, small is beautiful. It’s unfortunate that the grand architecture of early movie theaters no longer exists to put today’s microscale retail architecture to shame.
Gail Cooper, a professor of history at Lehigh University who has written about the introduction of air-conditioning, said: “In the movie palaces, one-third of the space was devoted to the lobby so people could come and ‘promenade’ — today we would say ‘hang out.’ Welcome was built into the space, and air-conditioning was one part.”
The movie palaces are long gone, and so, too, is the novelty of air-conditioning. We now step into public space less to be chilled than to chill. The palace’s spiritual successor is the cafe that sends out a welcoming blast of free, unlimited Wi-Fi.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/bu...ey/04digi.html
Publicly Owned Networks are the Key to Universal Access and Healthy Competition
A new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance argues that a publicly owned information infrastructure is the key to healthy competition, universal access, and non-discriminatory networks.
“Localizing the Internet: Five Ways Public Ownership Solves the U.S. Broadband Problem” notes that high speed broadband is becoming ever more widespread. But, it argues, the way in which that broadband is introduced may be as important as whether it is introduced.
Many telecommunications companies are offering to build a citywide wireless or even wired network at little or no upfront cost to the city. That arrangement is especially attractive to local elected officials who fear that government lacks the expertise to manage a high tech network and who worry about the possible impact on their budget. “This is an excellent time to remember to look that gift horse in the mouth,” maintains Becca Vargo Daggett, the report’s author and the director of the Institute’s Telecommunication as Commons Project.
“Even deals framed as coming at no cost to the city require the public sector to enter into extended contracts to pay millions for their own services over the new privately owned network. Cities owe it to themselves and their citizens to carefully evaluate the costs and benefits of public ownership.”
Ms. Vargo Daggett also notes that cities that own infrastructure like roads and water pipelines should not fear owning the physical information network. “Concerns about obsolescence are overstated. Fiber optics is the gold standard, with essentially unlimited capacity and a lifespan measured in decades. Wireless technology is rapidly evolving, but its price is low and the payback period is short.”
Moreover, unlike investments in traditional infrastructure, an investment in information networks can generate a significant return. “The investment will not only pay for itself, but can generate revenue that can pay for other important municipal services.”
http://www.newrules.org/info/5ways.html
Where Artists and Inventors Plot to Save the World
Saul Hansell
“It’s starting to feel like Christmas and the family is coming in,” Chris Anderson said, in his almost whispering voice.
It’s quite a family, as it includes Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate in physics; Paul Simon, the songwriter; Richard Branson, the Virgin Group magnate; and the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The occasion is the annual TED conference, named for the convergence of technology, entertainment and design— with a dash of social activism thrown in recently as well. It is expected to draw 1,200 people to Monterey, Calif., starting Wednesday.
Mr. Anderson, a former magazine publisher, took over the TED conference from its founder, Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who presided over the stage like a vaudeville showman. He called it the “dinner party I always wanted to have but couldn’t.” He filled the program with a collection of stars from various fields, like the musician Herbie Hancock, the architect Frank Gehry and the software tycoon Bill Gates.
Mr. Anderson (not the editor of Wired of the same name who wrote the book “The Long Tail”) is as introverted and nerdy as Mr. Wurman is boisterous.
Mr. Anderson, 50, has changed TED from being a party to something blending a graduate seminar and a revival meeting. Mr. Wurman’s passions have been infused with a sense of social purpose. The art being discussed is likely to be photography of genocide victims; the architecture, environmentally sustainable AIDS clinics; and the technology, water-purification systems.
And the centerpiece of the program is now the TED Prize — an invention of Mr. Anderson’s that is designed to motivate the conference’s well-heeled audience to do something socially useful. Three winners will each reveal a “world-changing wish” and challenge those attending to help fulfill it. This year’s winners are E. O. Wilson, the Harvard evolutionary biologist; James Nachtwey, a war photographer for Time magazine; and former President Bill Clinton.
Now Mr. Anderson is taking even more risks with the TED franchise. He has started making videos of the TED sessions available to watch or download on the Web free. And he has started a biennial TED Global conference that will be held in June at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
At first some of the longtime attendees were unsure that Mr. Anderson could recreate Mr. Wurman’s magic.
“Chris does not have the same stage personality as Wurman had,” said Doug Rowan, the former chief executive of Corbis, a photo archive owned by Bill Gates. “That works to his disadvantage.” Mr. Rowan plans to attend next year’s conference, after skipping the previous last two.
Nonetheless, TED has flourished. Last month, 1,000 tickets for next year’s conference went on sale at $6,000 each, up from $4,400 this year. They sold out in a week.
“Chris absolutely, completely, totally believes that those three days at TED can change the world,” said Steve Rosenbaum, a longtime TED participant and the chief executive of Magnify Media, a Web video company. “It is quite intoxicating.”
The elite clientele and the increasing focus on development issues evoke the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. But people who have attended both events say they are very different. Unlike Davos, TED attracts few politicians. And most of the action is in the conference, not in the parties and meeting rooms nearby.
“At Davos the general sessions are nice but very superficial,” said Jay S. Walker, the founder of Priceline.com and chief executive of Walker Digital. “It allows the Arabs and the Israelis to meet quietly in a room somewhere. You’re not going to meet a Ph.D. in string theory or hear a talk about playing the lute at Davos the way you do at TED.”
If there is something evangelical about Chris Anderson, there may well be a reason. His parents were medical missionaries who performed eye surgery in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan.
Mr. Anderson wanted to be a doctor as a youth, but after attending Oxford, he wound up as a journalist, starting magazines about computers at age 28. In 1995, he sold his first publishing company, Future Network, which was based in Bath, England. He started a second company, Imagine Media, in San Francisco and then bought back Future. Merging it with Imagine, he took the whole thing public, all while starting Business 2.0, the Internet-age business magazine.
“We were pumping hot air into the bubble,” Mr. Anderson recalled. “We wrote about the new rules of the Internet. We believed in it. I still do.”
On the side, Mr. Anderson also dabbled in dot-coms, helping to start Snowball, which was meant to be an online community for youth.
The Internet crash hit Mr. Anderson and Imagine hard. “Firing 1,000 people over six months was no fun at all,” he said.
But all was not lost. Business 2.0 was sold in 2001 to Time Inc., helping to stabilize Future. Snowball, renamed IGN, was sold last year to the News Corporation and is now a site mainly for video-game enthusiasts.
Mr. Anderson ended up wealthy.
The TED conference could have been a casualty of all that turmoil. Mr. Anderson bought it from Mr. Wurman in 2000, ostensibly to pair it with Business 2.0, but actually because he had started going to the conference and fell in love with it.
“I remember watching Aimee Mullins, the paraplegic athlete, roll up her pants and unscrew her legs,” he recalled. “The way she did that gave me and the audience what I think has happened so many times at TED: a sense of possibility, that people can reach beyond where they are and do things that are surprising.”
At the end of 2001, Future sold the conference to the Sapling Foundation, a charity that Mr. Anderson had set up with proceeds from selling his first publishing company.
After an overlap with Mr. Wurman, Mr. Anderson became the host of TED in 2003. That first year, he concedes now, was “too preachy.” One session had three presentations on Africa in a row.
“A few people thought I had ruined something very beautiful, and got very grumpy,” he said.
He apologized and has worked to mix lighter and heavier subjects.
Still, Mr. Anderson said he wanted to find a way to get the audience to do more than simply watch. That is what led to the idea of the TED Prize.
Last year’s winners included Cameron Sinclair, the founder of Architecture for Humanity, which helps design housing and other buildings for victims of natural disasters and for those in poor countries. His wish was to create a database of public-domain designs for use by anyone in need. With support from Sun Microsystems and others, the Open Architecture Network will be demonstrated at the conference this week.
Even more ambitious is Mr. Anderson’s plan to turn TED into a sort of nonprofit media company. In 2005, he hired June Cohen, the former editor of the Web news site HotWired, to try to develop a television program based on the conference. She found no networks that would show it.
“When the BBC told me that it was too intellectual for them, I decided to shift strategies,” Ms. Cohen said.
So last summer, TED began making TED Talks — edited highlights from the conference presentations — available to watch online or to download. BMW signed up as a sponsor.
So far the talks have been viewed 5.5 million times by 2 million people, Ms. Cohen said.
“On the face of it, taped lectures should be boring,” Mr. Anderson said. “That’s why the TV stations reacted the way they did. But these talks can be compelling and hold the audience.”
Now Mr. Anderson and Ms. Cohen are looking to expand the TED Talks site. They want more content, like talks uploaded by TED attendees, and lectures from other events. And they are creating a social networking system that will seek to be a sort of MySpace for the change-the-world crowd. (One area will be open to anyone, and a more private section will be open only to TED attendees.)
“My foundation is all about levering the power of ideas to make a difference in the world,” Mr. Anderson said. “Suddenly we can use technology to bring some of the world’s greatest teachers eyeball to eyeball with a global audience in the millions.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05ted.html
Physicists Remember When Superconductors Were Hot
Kenneth Chang
Like the musical Woodstock, the legend of the “Woodstock of Physics” grows year after year.
Twenty years ago this month, nearly 2,000 physicists crammed into a New York Hilton ballroom to hear about a breakthrough class of materials called high-temperature superconductors, which promised amazing new technologies like magnetically levitated trains.
“It was an electrifying event,” said Philip F. Schewe, a science writer at the American Institute of Physics who runs the news conferences at the physics meetings, then and now. “You wished you were there.”
Many of the participants from the 1987 session reconvened yesterday at an American Physical Society meeting in Denver, partly to reminisce and partly to take stock of what has happened since then and what has not.
Superconductors, discovered in 1911, carry electricity with no resistance. Most work at temperatures below minus-420 degrees Fahrenheit, and by the 1970s, physicists had generally concluded that that was just a chilly limit of how nature works.
But K. Alex Müller and J. Georg Bednorz at the Zurich laboratory of I.B.M. believed that a ceramic material might be able to superconduct at warmer temperatures. In January 1986, Dr. Bednorz took measurements on one sample, and as it cooled to minus-440 degrees, its electrical resistance plunged by half, a sign that it had turned part-superconductor. “I celebrated this with one or two beers,” Dr. Bednorz said.
With tweaking, they pushed the transition temperature closer to minus-400 degrees, a sizeable jump over earlier superconductors. Dr. Müller and Dr. Bednorz published their findings in April 1986 in a German physics journal to little fanfare. Only in the fall, after a few other groups confirmed the findings and pushed the temperature up a few more degrees, did the wider physics community become intrigued.
In February 1987, a team led by Paul Chu of the University of Houston submitted a paper to Physical Review Letters describing a minus-300-degree superconductor. “That was supposed to be confidential,” said Brian B. Schwartz, who at the time worked for the American Physical Society, which publishes the journal. “It leaked out immediately.”
By then, everyone, it seemed, was experimenting with high-temperature superconductors, which are easy to make. The physical society was besieged by requests to present research findings at its March meeting — but the deadline had passed.
The society added to the meeting agenda a last-minute session, which would start at 7:30 p.m. A few key scientists like Dr. Müller and Dr. Chu got 10 minutes to present their research. Everyone else would have five minutes each.
“I remember there was a crowd of 2,000 people outside the doors,” Dr. Schwartz said. “When the doors opened, it was a riot.”
The seats filled. So did the floor space in the aisles. Others watched video monitors set up around the hotel. Each speaker tried to wow the crowd with yet another discovery. “It was like the Texas chili cook-off or the Iowa State Fair apple pie bake-off,” Dr. Schewe said. “What’s your secret ingredient? That’s what it seemed like.”
Fifty-one talks later, the session ended at 3:15 a.m. People lingered in the halls until almost sunrise. The session quickly became known as the “Woodstock of Physics.”
The following year, a flood of papers on high-temperature superconductivity were presented at the meeting. But today the heady early promises have not yet been fully filled. High-temperature superconductors can be found in some trial high-capacity power cables, but they have not made any trains levitate. The rise in transition temperatures has stalled again, well below room temperature. Theorists have yet to find a convincing explanation for why high-temperature superconductors superconduct at all.
Still, for those few days in 1987, physicists were excited, and the excitement spilled out of the Hilton into the rest of New York City.
“The stores and the bars were all ‘Physicists welcome,’ ” said Paul M. Grant, who headed the superconductivity research at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose. He recalled a discotheque in Chelsea with a long line of people waiting to get in.
“The bouncers took anybody that had a physical society badge on to the front,” Dr. Grant recalled, “and we got in gratis. Can you imagine what a culture shift? We had a hell of a good time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/science/06supe.html
Billions and Billions of Gigabytes Served
Clint Boulton
Several reports talk about how the explosion of digital information is creating new challenges for companies trying to rein in IT costs. Others tell us how to cope with these challenges. But none tells us just how big the information glut will be in the next few years. Until now.
Researcher IDC today released a report, sponsored by information management vendor EMC, forecasting that as much as 988 billion gigabytes of digital information will be created in 2010, a six-fold increase from 2006.
Last year, 161 exabytes (exabyte is a billion gigabytes) of digital information were created, representing roughly 3 million times the information in all the books ever written. Or, if you prefer, the equivalent of 12 stacks of books, each extending more than 92 million miles from the earth to the sun.
Whoa.
From now until 2010, IDC said it expects information will sport a compound annual growth rate of 57 percent to hit the 988 exabyte mark.
While IDC isn't pushing any panic buttons yet, Chief Research Officer John Gantz said all companies, from Wal-Mart to AT&T to the bicycle shop down the street, will eventually need to employ more sophisticated techniques to transport, store, secure and replicate the information.
"The diversity of information, from very small packets of info from RFID to very large video surveillance files, is different among different constituencies in an organization," Gantz told internetnews.com.
"You can't treat all data, all packets, and all bytes the same. That's where you get into interesting situations of classifying data and determining what you save and what you don't.
Whether it's putting more bytes per platter or moving direct-attached storage to storage area networks, Gantz said vendors have to keep advancing information management technology because the "digital universe" is not going to stop growing.
Thanks to the Internet, that digital universe is thriving.
Only 48 million people routinely logged onto the Internet in 1996. Last year, there were 1.1 billion users on the Internet. IDC expects another 500 million users to come online by 2010.
Those users aren't just surfing Web sites to find out whether the Yankees or Red Sox won. They're creating scores of unstructured data, including images and e-mails, and exchanging them.
Pictures are the leading usurpers of gigabytes. People love taking and sending them. IDC said images taken from digital cameras, camera phones, medical scanners and security cameras will absorb the largest number of bytes, topping 500 billion by 2010.
No surprise when you consider images captured on consumer digital cameras in 2006 exceeded 150 billion worldwide, while the number of images captured on cell phones hit almost 100 billion.
And there have been, and will continue to be, a lot of e-mail.
From 1998 to 2006, the number of e-mail mailboxes grew from 253 million to nearly 1.6 billion. During the same period, the number of e-mails sent grew three times faster than the number of people e-mailing.
Instant messaging? IDC predicts 250 million IM accounts by 2010.
What are we to make of this digital information bounty? You can say people are hungry for information, that they are gluttonous consumers for knowledge, be it trivial or profound.
But these consumers are actually also information creators, and that will only snowball with the current explosion in wikis and blogs, which provide avenues on which information travel.
IDC said that while nearly 70 percent of the digital universe will be generated by individuals by 2010, most of this content will be touched by a business.
Information will traverse telephones, Internet switches, hosting sites, storage sites, networks or datacenters, and enterprises will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of 85 percent of the information.
http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/3663641
So Much Data, Relatively Little Space
Brian Bergstein
A new study that estimates how much digital information the world is generating (hint: a lot) finds that for the first time, there's not enough storage space to hold it all. Good thing we delete some stuff.
The report, assembled by the technology research firm IDC, sought to account for all the ones and zeros that make up photos, videos, e-mails, Web pages, instant messages, phone calls and other digital content zipping around. The researchers also assumed that on average, each digital file gets replicated three times.
Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes - 161 exabytes - of digital information last year.
Oh, the equivalents! That's like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You'd need more than 2 billion of the most capacious iPods on the market to get 161 exabytes.
The previous best estimate came from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who totaled the globe's information production at 5 exabytes in 2003.
But that report followed a different trail. It included non-electronic information, such as analog radio broadcasts or printed office memos, and tallied how much space that would consume if digitized. And it counted original data only, not all the times things got copied.
In comparison, the IDC numbers were made much higher by including content as it was created and as it was reproduced - for example, as a digital TV file was made and every time it landed on a screen. If IDC tracked original data only, its result would have been 40 exabytes.
Still, even the 2003 figure of 5 exabytes is enormous - it was said at the time to be 37,000 Libraries of Congress - so why does it matter how much more enormous the number is now?
For one thing, said IDC analyst John Gantz, it's important to understand the effects of the factors behind the information explosion - such as the profusion of surveillance cameras and regulatory rules for corporate data retention.
In fact, the supply of data technically outstrips the supply of places to put it.
IDC estimates that the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes (closing in on 1 zettabyte) in 2010.
"If you had a run on the bank, you'd be in trouble," Gantz said. "If everybody stored every digital bit, there wouldn't be enough room."
Fortunately, storage space is not actually scarce and continues to get cheaper. That's because not everything gets warehoused. Not only do e-mails get deleted, but some digital signals are not made to linger, like the contents of phone calls. (Although, who's to say those conversations don't get catalogued someplace, perhaps the National Security Agency? The IDC researchers assumed the answer was no. "I don't want men in black coming to look for me," Gantz joked.)
But even if the IDC findings don't raise the prospect that disk drives will be virtually bursting at the seams, the study has intriguing implications. Among them: We'll need better technologies to help secure, parse, find and recover usable material in this universe of data.
Chuck Hollis, vice president of technology alliances at EMC Corp. (nyse: EMC - news - people ), the data-management company that sponsored the IDC research and contributed to the earlier Berkeley studies, said the new report made him wonder whether enough is being done to save the digital data for posterity.
"Someone has to make a decision about what to store and what not," Hollis said. "How do we preserve our heritage? Who's responsible for keeping all of this stuff around so our kids can look at it, so historians can look at it? It's not clear."
Two researchers who were not involved in the study said that because IDC used many of its own internal market analyses, the work will be hard to replicate and confirm. Those researchers, James Short and Roger Bohn of the University of California, San Diego, plan to follow the Berkeley methods in a follow-up report.
Bohn said it would be wise to take IDC's figures "with a certain grain of salt," but he added: "I don't think the numbers are going to turn out to be wildly off target."
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/...ap3486881.html
The Hard Drive as Eye Candy
Damon Darlin
THE hard drive, like all the parts inside a computer, is a commodity. While there may be some quality differences between the makers’ products, manufacturers generally compete on little more than price. All hard drives do pretty much the same thing: store and retrieve data.
Take the hard drive outside of the computer and it becomes a different story. The drives still do pretty much the same thing, but now the makers have to convince you of their distinctions. How? By adding a little style to these gray boxes.
Once relegated to a back shelf in the electronics store, back by the notebook bags and blank DVDs and CDs, external hard drives will soon don brushed aluminum cases, decorator colors and glowing blue or amber lights that ensure that the devices can grab attention when in public view.
LaCie has a new drive, the d2, with an aluminum alloy case designed by Neil Poulton, a Scotsman who has also created a line of Artemide lamps. Seagate will be selling Dave, a sleek 20-gigabyte drive that connects wirelessly to cellphones for carrying photos, music and video. It is no larger than a small cellphone itself.
Strong demand for external hard drives was one of the highlights in consumer electronics last year. Americans spent $600 million on external hard drives in 2006, an increase of 53 percent over 2005, according to NPD, a market research firm. Put another way, consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year, more than 11 times as much as they did in 2003.
The need to back up all the songs, photos, videos and movies Americans hold is, of course, driving the demand. The inevitable falling prices of the hard drive compels the manufacturers to gussy up the drives in order to command a premium price, much as Apple does with its PCs or iPods.
“Hard drives are the classic tech commodity product that follows the classic tech price curve,” said Stephen Baker, vice president for industry analysis at NPD. The average price for an external hard drive fell to $141 last year, from $197 in 2003, while the amount of storage space on the drives doubled.
Another way to look at it: In 2003, the retail price for a gigabyte of hard-drive storage was $2.04, according to NPD. Last year, it was 77 cents.
The emphasis on design is also a reflection that the external drive is no longer one more gadget for the tech-obsessed, but a necessary accessory for anyone with a computer. The storage device is the point at which the consumer electronics world is colliding with the information technology world, and the aesthetics of the consumer electronics world are winning in the clash.
Nowhere is the shift more apparent than at Hewlett-Packard, a company renowned for its engineers. Last year the company introduced the MediaVault, an external hard drive that connects to a home network so data on any PC in the network can be easily stored there. Its case resembles the gray and black case of a desktop PC tower.
This year, however, Hewlett-Packard will be selling a new storage device called the MediaSmart home server. The engineers added many more features. It connects to the home network to back up data on all the computers on the network automatically, and people can access data from off premises through a secure Internet connection. It can also hold up to four terabytes of storage.
But the important thing is what the engineers did not do: design the look of the drives. This device is a black lacquer box with four horizontal blue lights. It matches the finish of the black bezel that usually surrounds a big-screen high-definition TV in the living room rather than that of the old putty-colored computer in the den.
It wasn’t just about letting the H.P. engineers loosen their hold. “We gave design an equal position at the table with the marketing people,” said Satjiv Chahil, Hewlett-Packard’s senior vice president for global marketing.
Design does make a difference in sales. Western Digital sold almost 40 percent of all external hard drives last year, according to data from Current Analysis, a market research firm, thanks to its My Book device. The glossy bluish-black case resembled a dictionary-size book. Two concentric circles of blue light that glow from the binding side display the amount of storage used.
As Western Digital knocked Maxtor from its perch as the best seller in the consumer market, Maxtor and its new parent company, Seagate, took action.
The look of Seagate drives, created by Frog Design, is supposed to help remind people of the emotional ties they have to what is stored on the magnetic platters. (Maxtor’s rubbery ridged box is expected to be overhauled this year.) “When you lose your files, you lose a piece of yourself,” said James Druckrey, the senior vice president in charge of Seagate’s branding efforts.
Seagate’s new FreeAgent Go drive has a brushed anodized aluminum exterior in a color executives call “deep cappuccino,” a homey phrase that seems out of place in an industry that has been more comfortable with terms like “perpendicular magnetic recording,” “spindle speeds” and “SATA interfaces.”
Consumers should not need to know any of those terms, Mr. Druckrey said. The FreeAgent packing box, a key part of the overall Seagate product redesigns, soft-pedals any specifications. The white box, with a plastic handle on top, says that it has the capacity to store 120 “glorious gigabytes.” It is covered with comments one might utter while looking at stuff stored on a drive, like “is this obsessive” or “you promised not to laugh.”
Opening the box reveals a message printed on each flap: “It loves me,” reads the first, then “It loves me not,” and finally, “It loves me and goes wherever I go.”
Seagate is hoping its distinctive white cardboard boxes stand out among the jumble of drives on the retailers’ shelves. Everyone in the industry concedes that it is hard to sort out the external drives from the internal drives or the network-attached device from those connecting directly to a PC.
“It’s a mess,” said Philippe Spruch, the chief executive of LaCie, another hard-drive vendor. He thinks that by Christmas, volume will be high enough that retailers will have an incentive to display the drives more attractively.
But noted designers are not all they are cracked up to be with the crowd that buys hard drives, Mr. Spruch said. He should know, since the company he founded pioneered the trend almost 15 years ago with drives designed to go with Apple’s high-design Mac computers.
LaCie drives, which account for 7 percent of the external drive market, have been conceptualized by designers like Mr. Poulton, Philippe Starck, Karim Rashid, Ora Ïto and Porsche Design, known for their work on lamps, chairs and other household objects. “We’ve shipped four million hard drives, and only a small minority of the buyers know these designers,” Mr. Spruch said.
Not everyone is going for the designer look. Buffalo, which makes hard drives for the most hard-core tech enthusiast, now has a consumer line, the Tera Station Live. But Brian Verenkoff, product marketing manager, said it still looked as if it belonged in a data center. “Stylistically it is not the perfect match for the home,” he said.
Mr. Spruch is nevertheless convinced that design matters. “Design is a translation of a well-done product, and people want to feel safe about their storage,” he said. “It’s not just about the product being trendy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/te...y/08drive.html
Industry Closes Anti-Coal Website
THE mining industry has used copyright laws to close an anti-mining website launched by a small protest group in Newcastle.
The NSW Minerals Council has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a TV, print and billboard advertising campaign and launched a website extolling the virtues of mining. The campaign's slogan is "Life: brought to you by mining".
The anti-coal group Rising Tide created its own website sending up the campaign with comments such as "Rising sea levels: brought to you by mining".
The website's hosts were forced to remove it within 24 hours of its launch, after the Minerals Council issued a notice under the Copyright Regulations 1969 complaining the content and layout infringed copyright.
Rising Tide remade the website, using its own photographs and layout. However, the council lodged a second complaint.
"They are trying to silence us," said a Rising Tide member, Steve Phillips. "We have issued a counter-notice rejecting the Minerals Council's spurious claims. [It] now has 10 days in which to take the matter [to court]."
There is growing public concern about coal's contribution to climate change, and mining's threat to underground and above-ground water supplies.
The council's chief executive, Nikki Williams, said its complaint was not an attempt to silence Rising Tide. "They have to abide by the [copyright] laws," she said. However, she admitted she had not seen the revised website, and did not know if the council would take the matter to court.
Dr Williams disputed claims by Rising Tide that the council was running the campaign to counter growing concern about coal.
"It is a community awareness campaign … it is about establishing a fair voice for the mining industry; it is simply a matter of the facts," she said, referring to the benefits flowing from the industry such as jobs, cheap electricity and export revenue.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/...943275688.html
Connecticut Defends Threatened Author
State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is backing up a Westport, Conn., resident who was threatened with a lawsuit for preparing an article detailing the health risks of wood boilers.
Blumenthal said Central Boiler of Greenbush, Minn., threatened David Brown with a lawsuit if he failed to retract an article or change the article outlining the severe health dangers of outdoor wood boilers.
Brown’s article was published in the February issue of "Human and Ecological Risk Assessment."
Brown is associated with the firm Health Risk Consultants Inc.
Blumenthal said his Conn. office will intervene in any lawsuit filed against Brown because of the article, and he will encourage attorneys general in other states to also intervene.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1033370
Connecticut to Crack Down on MySpace
Bill requires parental consent, age verification
Dirk Perrefort
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal unveiled legislation Wednesday that would require age verification and parental consent before minors could post profiles on MySpace and other social networking sites.
Blumenthal announced the legislation during a press conference in the Legislative Office Building. The plan would require that social networking Web sites comply or face fines up to $5,000 per violation.
Blumenthal is leading a coalition of attorney generals from 44 states looking at similar proposals.
"These sites must verify ages and give parents the power to keep their children off these sites," Blumenthal said.
Parental permission is needed for anyone under 18 years old.
"Failing to verify age means that children are exposed to sexual predators who may be older men lying to seem younger. There is no excuse in technology or cost for refusing age verification," Blumenthal said.
The announcement came on the heels of a New Jersey man being sentenced to 14 years in prison for using MySpace to contact an 11-year-old Connecticut girl he later molested.
Sonny Szeto, 23, of Jersey City, pleaded guilty last year to using the Internet to persuade a minor to have sex and was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Bridgeport.
Emily Carney, a 15-year-old student at Danbury High School, said she doesn't like Blumenthal's proposal, but "If I were a parent I would probably think it's a good idea."
"There are a lot of predators out there," she said. "Guys have asked me to be their friend but I always deny them. I try to be cautious."
Nicole Haferl, 16, said she had a profile on MySpace for several years but stopped using the Web site because "it was boring" and her parents didn't want her to be on it.
"My parents don't like it because of all the news reports about girls getting raped," she said. "I guess it would be a good idea to require parental consent. There are girls as young as 9 who are using the site.
"Some girls even put their addresses and phone numbers in their profile. They're just asking for trouble."
Laurie Haferl, the teenager's mother, applauded the effort.
"Most teenagers aren't trying to do something wrong, they are doing it to socialize with their friends," she said. "But they don't realize that there are a lot of strange people out there and anyone can view their profile."
Lonjohnana Luna, a 16-year-old student at Danbury High School, said her parents routinely monitor the comments and photographs posted on her MySpace account. She added that kids who don't want their profile viewed by the public at large can mark it as private.
"If they require parental consent, a lot of people will stop using it," she said. "There's probably a lot of kids who have MySpace profiles and their parents don't even know about it."
While access to the Web site is banned in the high school, Vice Principal Dan Donovan said arguments that begin online often spill out into the classroom.
"Requiring parental consent would help us deal with a lot of the disciplinary problems that result from the Web site," he said. "Parents should be aware of what their kids are doing on MySpace. They would be shocked at some of the content."
Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer for MySpace, released a statement in response to Blumenthal's proposal, saying it was well-intentioned but not "the answer."
"The most effective means to protect teens online is through a combined approach involving features and tools to make our site safer, educating our users and their parents, and working collaboratively with online-safety organizations and companies," he said.
An informational session on the proposed legislation will be held this morning at 11:30 in the Legislative Office Building.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1033579
Man Who Used MySpace to Meet Underage Girl Sentenced to 14 Years
John Christoffersen
A man who used the Web site MySpace.com to set up a sexual encounter with an 11-year-old girl was sentenced Tuesday to 14 years in prison in one of the first federal sex cases involving the popular networking site.
Sonny Szeto, now 23, pleaded guilty last year to using the Internet to persuade a minor to have sex and possessing child pornography.
In sentencing Szeto, U.S. District Judge Janet Hall said she was disturbed by his actions and worried that he would commit similar crimes.
Szeto traveled from Jersey City, N.J., to Connecticut in October 2005 and molested the girl in her playroom while her parents slept upstairs, according to an FBI affidavit.
"My daughter remains traumatized by the crime," the girl's father said with a shaky voice in court Tuesday. "Knowing he is in jail will help her recover."
The father also said Szeto went so far as to call his daughter at her school, pretending to be her brother and claiming there was a family emergency.
"It made her feel no place was safe," he said.
He also criticized Szeto for not taking responsibility for his actions and blaming others.
Szeto, formerly of Nashua, N.H., and Queens, N.Y., did not speak at the hearing. His lawyer, Roger Lee Stavis, urged the judge to impose the mandatory minimum five-year prison sentence.
Stavis said Szeto grew up in an abusive home and was exposed to alcoholism and suicide attempts.
"It took its toll on Mr. Szeto," he said.
Stavis also cited a psychologist's report that said Szeto suffered from depression and a personality disorder. He said Szeto was remorseful for what happened.
In arguing for a lower prison sentence, Stavis noted that the girl had made some of the calls to Szeto, but insisted he wasn't blaming the victim.
"This particular young victim is perhaps more precocious (than others)," Stavis said.
Prosecutor James Filan questioned the psychologist's report, saying it was based only on Szeto's statements and there was no effort to corroborate his claims.
MySpace, a division of News Corp., allows its 54 million users to find online friends by searching for their school or their interests. The site prohibits minors 13 and under from joining, discourages users from posting personal information and provides special protections for those 14 and 15.
Parents, school administrators and law-enforcement authorities have been increasingly warning of online predators at sites like MySpace.
MySpace has responded by expanding educational efforts and partnerships with law enforcement. It also adopted new restrictions on how adults may contact the site's younger users and has helped design tools for identifying profiles created by convicted sex offenders.
While Internet safety advocates say the site has a good reputation for working to prevent illegal activity, they say children often lie about their age to get around those restrictions. Many profiles include suggestive photographs and lots of personal information.
MySpace.com has been developing software designed to give parents the bare-bones of what their kids are doing on the site, including whether the listed age is truthful.
Authorities have said MySpace wasn't at fault but rather is being exploited by pedophiles.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...03-06-18-45-06
Computer Profs Urge Independent Investigator in Teacher Porn Case
AP
Nearly 30 Connecticut computer science professors have signed a letter urging an independent investigation in the case of a Norwich substitute teacher convicted of exposing her students to pornography on a classroom computer.
The professors from eight Connecticut colleges and universities took out an ad in Tuesday's Hartford Courant. They wrote on behalf of Julie Amero, a 40-year-old Windham resident with no prior criminal record convicted in January of four counts of risk of injury to a minor.
She faces up to 40 years in prison when she is sentenced March 29th.
While prosecutors insist she is guilty, some experts believe that the lewd images were caused by unseen spyware and adware programs, which critics call one of the top scourges of the Internet.
The 28 professors who signed the letter want an independent investigator brought in to look at the case, and they want Amero's sentencing delayed until that investigation is complete. Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane won't say whether that's a possibility.
http://www.wtnh.com/global/story.asp?s=6187353
The Tale of Harry Potter and the Naked Role
Sarah Lyall
It was a little weird at first, Erin Tobin said, seeing Harry Potter right there on the stage without his pants, or indeed any of his clothes.
Not actually Harry Potter, of course, since he is fictional, but the next best thing: Daniel Radcliffe, who plays him in the movies. Now 17, Mr. Radcliffe has cast off his wand, his broomstick and everything else to appear in the West End revival of Peter Shaffer’s “Equus.” He stars as Alan Strang, a disturbed young man who, in a distinctly un-Harry-Potterish moment of frenzied psychosexual madness, blinds six horses with a hoof pick.
“We’re all kind of freaked out about seeing his — well, him naked,” Ms. Tobin, 20, said after a recent performance. “I still think of him as an 11-year-old boy.”
To make it clear what audiences are in for, at least in part, photographs of Mr. Radcliffe’s buff torso, stripped almost to the groin, have been used to advertise the production. It is as jarring as if, say, Anne Hathaway suddenly announced that instead of playing sweet-natured princesses and fashion-world ingénues, she wanted to appear onstage as a nude, murderous prostitute.
“Equus” opened last week, and the consensus so far is that Mr. Radcliffe has successfully extricated himself from his cinematic alter ego. Considering that playing Harry Potter is practically all he has done in his career, this is no small achievement.
“I think he’s a really good actor, and I sort of forgot about Harry Potter,” said Ophelia Oates, 14, who saw the play over the weekend. “Anyway, you can’t be Harry Potter forever.”
In The Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer said that “Daniel Radcliffe brilliantly succeeds in throwing off the mantle of Harry Potter, announcing himself as a thrilling stage actor of unexpected depth and range.”
Mr. Radcliffe told The Telegraph that “I thought it would be a bad idea to wait till the Potter films were all finished to do something else.” There are still a few to go. The fifth, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” is scheduled for release on July 13, and Mr. Radcliffe has signed on for the final two installments as well. (Meanwhile, the seventh and last book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” will hit stores on July 21.)
Harry and Alan could not be more dissimilar as characters, even if both “come from quite weird backgrounds,” as 13-year-old Ella Pitt, another recent theatergoer, put it. (And no, she declared, she was not too young for all the nakedness, swearing and sexuality.) Both characters have unresolved issues relating to their parents: Harry, because his are dead, and Alan, because his have driven him insane.
But when it comes to romance, for instance, the celluloid Harry has yet to kiss a girl; the big moment comes in the forthcoming film. Meanwhile, Alan in “Equus” not only engages in some serious equi-erotic nuzzling with an actor playing a horse, but is also onstage, fully nude, for 10 minutes, during which he nearly has sex with an equally naked young woman.
“Equus,” which also stars Richard Griffiths as the unconventional psychiatrist who helps untangle Alan’s ecstatic madness and tortured imagination, is playing to sellout audiences at the Gielgud Theater here, and there is talk of transferring the production to Broadway, perhaps next season. Some people are drawn by interest in the play itself, which won the Tony Award for best play in 1975. Some come to see Mr. Griffiths, a seasoned actor who himself won a Tony Award last year for his role in “The History Boys.”
Then there are the Radcliffe fans, who have watched the actor negotiate the rocky path of adolescence right before their eyes. They have watched his Harry Potter fly through the air, forget to do his homework, talk to snakes, smite people with his magic wand, stay up past his bedtime and suffer any number of traumatic near-death experiences. Try as they might during the performance, they cannot completely de-Potter their minds.
“I was, like, ‘I don’t want to see him poke the eyes out of horses,’ ” said Marie Aveni, 22.
Emily Bunch, 21, remarked, “I thought, ‘Harry Potter! Where are your glasses?’ ” Wendy Krekeler, 20, described her first glimpse of the shirtless Mr. Radcliffe this way: “I thought, ‘Wow, he must have been working out.’ ”
But, his admirers say, it is clear that Mr. Radcliffe is not a one-trick actor, fated to end his career playing elderly magicians in “Harry Potter” rip-offs.
“I wanted to see if he could play both a wizard boy and a psycho patient,” said Ashley Lucas, 21, “and I think he did an excellent job.”
Mr. Radcliffe’s star presence in “Equus” does not appear to have traumatized innocent “Harry Potter” aficionados, although not everyone knows what to expect. At one performance, Karoline Nordmo, an admirer from Sweden, said she was hoping to buy tickets for herself and her 12-year-old sister, Lorentine.
“We know that it has something to do with horses, and that he’s in it,” she explained.
Katelyn Gill, 20, a student from California who saw “Equus” with several friends, said the experience had not ruined the “Harry Potter” films for her; it only changed her perception of its star.
“After we saw the play, we were like, ‘Oh, my God — we’ll never be able to see Harry Potter in the same way again,’ ” she said. “We saw him naked!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/theater/07pott.html
'Her and Heather are Not Bandits'
AP
The mother of a 19-year-old arrested in a bank theft scheme said Monday that her daughter isn’t a bandit, she just fell in with the wrong crowd and made a bad choice.
Ashley Miller and Heather Johnston, both 19, were videotaped wearing sunglasses and laughing as they appeared to rob a Bank of America in upscale Acworth on
Feb. 27. Police also arrested a bank teller and another man in connection with the theft, saying the heist appeared to be an inside job. Miller and Johnston remained jailed Monday morning.
"I want (people) to know that her and Heather both are not bandits," Joy Miller told ABC’s "Good Morning America" Monday. "They’re little girls that made a bad choice."
Joy Miller said her daughter, Ashley Miller, is sorry for what she did.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1033366
Internet Lenders Could Prove Disruptive
Thomas Crampton
It is a little like Internet dating, but the objective is money.
A Web site based in Britain, Zopa.com, and another in the United States, Prosper.com, have started businesses that connect individuals eager to borrow money to other people willing to lend, offering both sides better interest rates than banks.
"We bring together people who have never met to lend and borrow," said Chris Larsen, co-founder and chief executive of the San Francisco-based Prosper, which has had 140,000 users since it started a year ago. "Somebody who has money should be able to loan it out and somebody looking to borrow should be able to find a lender."
Banking analysts suggest that these hyper-efficient operations, with few employees and no costly real estate, could force changes to established banks.
"As a researcher, these sites make me wonder if the core business model of financial institutions is changing," said Mark Meyer, an analyst at the Filene Research Institute, a Wisconsin-based group that studies credit unions. "We are talking about a potentially disruptive innovation in financial services."
Traditional banks acknowledge the challenge, but emphasize consumer preference for size and experience over low interest rates.
"The existence of Zopa shows that there is now healthy competition in offering consumers a wide range of choices for loans," said Brian Capon, spokesman for the British Bankers' Association, the lead trade association for banks and financial services in Britain.
"But banks," he said, "are considerably bigger and have been in the business of lending money and taking deposits for hundreds of years, so consumers need to go where they feel most comfortable."
Users register on the sites to either borrow or offer their money for loans. Operating with the oversight of the same regulators as regular financial institutions, the sites operate on a "peer- to-peer" basis, yet use classic credit checks to assess borrowers.
Both sites accept clients only from within their country of operation and face several layers of regulation. Zopa is regulated by the Financial Services Authority and the Office of Fair Trading, while Prosper is regulated by the Federal Reserve Board, Federal Trade Commission and laws in each U.S. state.
The sites earn money from fees paid by borrowers and lenders. Zopa, for example, charges borrowers a fee of 0.5 percent of the loan amount and lenders a 0.5 percent annual service fee.
The approaches of the sites differ, with Prosper allowing lenders access to more details about individual borrowers — including photographs — and Zopa emphasizing the rigor of its own borrower vetting process.
"We ask for people's rating on eBay and check what car they drive via the number plate," said James Alexander, chief executive of Zopa, which started in March 2005 and now has 130,000 registered users, of whom 30 percent are lenders. "Taken in isolation these may seem stupid, but they allow us to build up a wider view than just the normal information you give a bank for a loan."
This broad view of borrowers is, of course, aimed at maximizing the number of loans that will be repaid.
In their short span of activity, the sites have maintained very high rates of repayment. Zopa claims a 0.05 percent default rate while Prosper has not had a single default in its top two credit grades. This compares with a default rate of 0.4 percent for borrowers with perfect credit in the United States.
The combined value of all loans by the two sites — more than $30 million by Prosper and "many millions of pounds" by Zopa — are small compared to the £3 billion, or $5.8 billion, of new personal loans offered each month by traditional British banks.
But some banking analysts see their solidarity, simplicity and cost savings as something the banking industry may seek to emulate.
The sites operate under the same principles as credit unions, where individuals pool their money for borrowing and lending. But instead of customers who share the same employer, ethnicity or profession, the lending sites connect total strangers.
"If you close your eyes, the Zopa description sounds exactly like a local credit union of the 1950s," said Meyer, of the Filene Research Institute. "The difference is that the Internet brings borrowers and lenders together across great geographic distances."
Take John Etherington, who needed a loan, and Mauro Lazzara, who had some spare money.
Etherington, 54, a truck driver based in Newport, East Yorkshire, needed £2,000 to replace the double-glazed windows in his house. The banks offered interest rates above 9 percent for periods of at least five years, with hefty penalties for paying off loans early.
"The banks are not very sympathetic, even when you want to repay them early," Etherington said. "Even so, it used to be that you had no choice but to go through them."
By surfing the Internet, however, Etherington found Zopa, where he found a loan at 6 percent interest for three years, with no penalty for early repayment.
Getting the loan required providing Zopa with similar credit information as a bank, but approval took just four days. A bank loan would have taken weeks to clear and required several visits to the branch, Etherington said.
"Unlike the bank, I don't resent the person who loaned me the money," Etherington said. "I'm happy to pay that person, whoever it might be."
Etherington sends his loan payments to Zopa, which dispatches them to all of the lenders whose money made up the loan. Should he fail to make payments, Zopa uses similar recovery procedures to a bank, including an eventual downgrade of Etherington's consumer credit rating.
One of the people lending the money to Etherington might be Lazzara, 36, an oil engineer in Aberdeen, Scotland, who last year invested £1,000 with Zopa after reading about it in a newspaper.
"It is not just the interest I earn, but I like the idea of lending my money directly to help other people," Lazzara said.
At Zopa, lenders can select the term of the loan — from one to five years — as well as the credit rating of borrower they wish. Borrowers with a bad consumer credit rating pay more interest, but have a higher chance of default.
For all of their credit safeguards, the low lending rates could draw borrowers who do not intend to repay the loans, said Jim Bruene, editor of the Online Banking Report, a newsletter based in Seattle.
"The dirty and ugly truth is that all lending attracts scammers, even if the default rates do not yet show it," Bruene said. "Every loan business has to deal with levels of deceit."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...ness/loans.php
Peer-to-Peer User Fined £3,400 in Landmark Case
Simon Aughton
A mobile phone engineer from Essex is hit with a hefty fine after ISP data is used to identify his use of peer-to-peer file sharing software.
The clampdown on peer-to-peer file sharing services and users has taken another step forward as an Essex man was fined £3,400 for illegally sharing commercial software across the net.
Derek Butterworth, a mobile phone engineer from Epping was identified as part of the Federation Against Software Theft's (FAST) Operation Tracker investigation into p2p software sharing.
FAST successfully prosecuted Butterworth, who was using a piece of illegal software that cost £35, and as a result he's been hit with court costs and fine. "The penalty was almost 100 times more than the cost of doing the right thing and buying the software in the first place", observed Senior Legal Counsel Julian Heathcote Hobbins.
FAST secured a court order last year that compelled several ISPs to reveal details of Butterworth's p2p activity. It contacted Butterworth, warning him that illegal content had been found and made available for sharing on his PC. It asked him to pay a licence fee for the software and sign an undertaking that he would not offend again. According to FAST, Butterworth failed to respond, later claiming that he had not received the FAST letter.
Butterworth was contacted on two separate occasions, and was notified in writing that illegal content had been found and made available for sharing on his PC. The letters invited him to settle, pay a licence fee and contribution to costs, and sign an undertaking that he would not commit the offence again. Butterworth did not respond.
FAST appear to have approached the case in a different, more measured way to their counterparts in the US. Firstly, most offenders there quickly settled out of court, paying a nominal fine and signing an agreement not to reoffend. Secondly, it was only after being ignored several times that FAST took things to a more serious level.
John Lovelock, director general of FAST said that it would continue to monitor and search for shared software illegally shared.
'There is an underlying notion that the internet is an anonymous cocoon, which is simply not the case,' he said. 'When you connect to the internet and access peer-to-peer networks you are identifying yourself and your details to the millions of others on that network, including us. Tracker works, and if people think they can either hide from or ignore their liabilities, then they need to think again. Misuse of software is something individuals cannot plead ignorance to. Theft is theft and will be treated accordingly.'
FAST noted that the £3,400 costs and damages payment was almost 100 times more than the £35 licence fee for the software in question.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/106554/p...mark-case.html
Please come again
RIAA Likes Piracy
So check out what the confirmation page of the RIAA's
www.p2plawsuits.com site tells you when you finish paying them.
http://reviewlister.blogspot.com/200...es-piracy.html
Until next week,
-
js.
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