[JackSpratts]

Beaming Up 3-D Objects on a Budget
Peter Wayner

OVER the last few decades, the electronics industry has worked magic with documents by building gadgets that copy, e-mail, print or fax flat images. Now it is building boxes that do something similar with three-dimensional objects.

These tools are not news to the industrial designers of the world, who have been able to buy 3-D printers and scanners with prices in the tens of thousands of dollars. But now hobbyists and small businesses are starting to benefit from low-cost versions of the tools.

Laser scanners with arrays of cameras can create digital models of objects that encode all the significant bumps, cracks, corners and facets of real things. Computers can enhance, morph or tweak the models before shipping them to 3-D “printers” that may be halfway around the world. The result is a new version of the thing itself, but built from some resin or starch.

For instance, $2,495 could buy a desktop laser scanner from NextEngine (www.nextengine.com) of Santa Monica, Calif., that can digitize small objects that fit on its 6-inch-wide turntable. Older scanners that are also more capable and up to the task of scanning something like a car cost much more. The Z Corporation (www.zcorp.com) sells a hand-held scanner that works much like a big camera for $39,900.

But scanning is only half the task. A three-dimensional version of the local copy shop is appearing as those scans are uploaded to companies that offer printing priced by the job. It is an attractive option, since the commercial machines that do the printing can be the size of small refrigerators and cost $40,000 or more.

Great Eastern Technology (www.get.com), for instance, will make small multicolored copies from a starch-based powder for about $70 using a printer from the Z Corporation. Larger objects that could fill up the printing bed, which measures 10 inches by 10 inches by 8 inches, might cost about $700. Minico Industries (www.minicoindustries.com) uses printers from a company called Dimension that use a different process to build things out of pure monochrome ABS plastic. It charges about $50 a cubic inch.

The Dimension printers are usually chosen by people who need stronger and more durable models created with a bit more precision, while the Z Corporation printers are often favored by those who need multiple colors. The prices are estimates, and most shops will compute a full price from the digital model after measuring the exact amount of raw material needed. The digital models can be enlarged or recolored before printing.

The world is just beginning to grapple with the implications of this relatively low-cost duplicating method, often called rapid prototyping. Hearing aid companies, for instance, are producing some custom-fitted ear pieces from scanned molds of patients. Custom car companies produce new parts for classic cars or modified parts for hot rods. Consumer product makers create fully functional designs before committing themselves to big production runs.

Tom Clay, chief executive of the Z Corporation, says he is constantly amazed by the uses people find for his products. Doctors use them to build practice models, and museums build replicas so people can feel the object without damaging the real artifact. He thinks one big potential market will be three-dimensional portraiture, so people can create busts for immortality.

The legal landscape, though, may not be ready for the Napsterization of three-dimensional things. Most of the cute, small tchotchkes in my house that fit on the turntable of the NextEngine scanner I tested are copyrighted. Zapping up a new version might run afoul of the same laws being used to fight the piracy of songs.

Jessica Litman, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and the author of the book “Digital Copyright,” said, “The rules for running it through your 3-D scanner are pretty much the same as running it through your photocopier.”

I tried to avoid that issue by creating my own objects from a set of Legos. With the scanner connected to my PC, software went to work to construct a three-dimensional model.

The demands taxed my one-year-old system. NextEngine recommends using a PC with plenty of disk space, at least two gigabytes of memory and a high-end video card, although I was able to limp along with only 1.5 gigabytes of RAM. Each model I produced chewed up 50 to 100 megabytes of the disk, something that can be reduced by scanning with less precision.

The process is surprisingly simple and yet fraught with glitches. I pushed one button and the NextEngine scanner took a complete set of pictures from various angles. Every two minutes it completed a scan, rotated the object on its turntable a few degrees, and began again. After I aligned the different scans by identifying the same point in different images, it turned the pictures into a 3-D model ready for printing. Adopters must be ready to develop the same skill as the early photographers who juggled glass plates and egg white emulsions in total darkness. I spent several hours on the phone with a customer-support technician from NextEngine who offered some tips.

When I first put the objects on the turntable and just pressed the button, the results were covered with holes where the scanner could not get a reasonable image. Light-colored matte surfaces are easier for the laser range-finder to measure, and one trick for making models of dark shiny objects is to coat them with a cloud of white powder. Some even paint the object.

NextEngine is working hard to help people over this hurdle. Customer-support connections are built directly into the software so you can easily ask for help. The company is also building another generation of its tools to eliminate some common errors, like segments that escaped the view of the scanner. They touched up my models with this software to make sure there were no gaps that might confound the printer.

I shipped a file (about 45 megabytes) to the two printer manufacturers, the Z Corporation and Minico, to print sample facsimiles. The results were good, although both companies pointed out that they could do a better job with a cleaner scan produced with better resolution — something requiring more care, better lighting and more powder.

I tried scanning my face in a NextEngine scanner, and it wasn’t as easy as scanning a Lego device. It was hard to hold still for several minutes, and it was not simple to align multiple shots. Mr. Clay says that it is vastly simpler to produce what he calls a Mount Rushmore bust from only one angle.

Brad Porter, the president of Great Eastern Technologies, says he has printed a number of busts. “The biggest issue is hair,” he warned. “Hair doesn’t scan well.” Many people will start with direct scans of the faces, he says, but use 3-D modeling software to reconstruct the hair. That is a big advantage for those with cowlicks.

The ability to retouch or modify the scanned objects is surprisingly useful. The printed versions of the Lego spaceship I scanned were enlargements, and retouched before printing. One has a tie-dye look; another has new holes and additions.

The three-dimensional printers that generate the products are also getting cheaper. A Cornell University project called Fab@Home is sharing open-source versions of a design that is being manufactured by an Albuquerque-based company, Koba, at prices of about $3,000.

And the most adventurous are branching out from standard resins. Evan Malone, a Cornell graduate student working with Fab@Home, posted pictures of hors d’oeuvres built by “printing” the school logo on some crackers with Cheez Whiz they loaded into a print head that usually holds plastic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/business/05scan.html





Burning Rubber Cross-Country, in the Studio
Edward Wyatt

A secret, illegal cross-country auto race is under way, and much of it is taking place in a barn-size building on a windswept hilltop here, some 35 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

“Drive,” a new drama scheduled to have its premiere on Fox on April 15, portrays a dozen characters who are forced into a race for reasons they don’t understand, sent on a journey from Key West, Fla., to points as yet unknown.

Yet despite the premise of a cross-country race, most of the actors in the new series will rarely get behind the wheel of a car outside the studio. Much of the audience could be none the wiser, thanks to advances in digital special effects that have recently made the leap from feature films to television.

“This could not have been done last year,” said Loni Peristere, a founder of Zoic Studios and a special-effects guru for “Drive.” “We’re able to do this because of advances in hardware, advances in software, advances in technique.”

A recent visit to the set of “Drive” showed the unusual nature of this project. Most of the recording of actors in cars takes place on a specially designed stage that has no sets, just a giant green curtain draped around three-quarters of the inside of the building.

When the actors are behind the wheel of a car, it is likely to be in one perched atop a three-foot-high pedestal that rides on thin bladders filled with compressed air. The apparatus allows the cars to slide easily across the specially coated floor, much like a puck on an air hockey table. A camera mounted on a crane allows the viewer to swoop over the hood of a car and into the front seat, then travel out a side widow and into another car in the race.

“The reason for all this elaborate technical equipment,” said Greg Yaitanes, an executive producer of the series and the director of the pilot episode, “is to achieve what should be a simple effect: moving from car to car while you’re tearing down the road.”

But it is a process that has not been tried before for television, he said. Movie and television fans are used to seeing scenes shot inside a car. From journeys that wind through the Italian hills in “Roman Holiday” to trips down the streets of Manhattan inside Jerry’s car on “Seinfeld,” most of those scenes have been filmed in one of two ways.

In one, a car is placed on a trailer and pulled along the road, as cameras mounted outside the car film the action. In another, a stationary car is placed inside a studio, and the actors are filmed as various backgrounds are placed outside the car or, more recently, street scenes are digitally placed in the car’s windows.

Both of those techniques are fairly easy to spot, because actors riding on a trailer frequently spend little time looking at the road, and — as the film “Airplane!” spoofed so well — placing backgrounds behind cars can look vividly unrealistic.

Now, however, digital effects have advanced to the point where viewers are more often left wondering, “How did they do that?”

In the case of “Drive,” the effects are “a combination of techniques that are out there in different forms,” Mr. Yaitanes said. “People had used the air casters, and some people had used the raising of the cars, and some people had used the crane stuff. But nobody had really put all of the elements together into one sequence like this.”

The use of green-screen technology, where a fake background is electronically substituted for a real one, is not new. Local television weathermen have been using the technique for years, standing in front of a green curtain while pretending to point at a map.

Movies have made great use of green screens as well, especially in films laden with acrobatic special effects, like “The Matrix” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” where actors are suspended from cables to make them appear to be flying.

But the use of green screens in series television has been limited, mainly because the cheap versions tended to look unconvincing and the good-looking versions were too expensive.

Recently, however, green-screen work has been showing up more often in television series. On “Ugly Betty,” the ABC comedy-drama set at a high-fashion magazine in New York, many of the street scenes near Betty’s home in Queens are shot in Hollywood using green-screen technology. The NBC hit “Heroes” will soon feature on its Web site a behind-the-scenes look at how it produces its special effects.

The inspiration for the race sequences in “Drive,” Mr. Yaitanes said, was a scene from Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” in which Tom Cruise is driving his family on a jammed highway in a minivan. In the scene, the camera darts around and through the car as if it is mounted on the back of a humming bird.

But in the film, the cars that are traveling alongside Mr. Cruise’s minivan are digitally generated. In “Drive,” the surrounding cars needed to be real, because they were carrying actors who were racing against one another, and who would need to interact.
“The rig we would need to accomplish all of this on the actual road would be so elaborate that it wouldn’t even work,” Mr. Yaitanes said. The solution was to record a choreographed race sequence using stunt drivers on the open road.

Then the cars were moved into the studio, where the actors got in. The cars were placed on the pedestals and slid into place on the set, which has a green curtain. A camera on a crane then zoomed along the hood of the car, over its top and around the side, capturing facial expressions, body movements and dialogue.

The two sets of images were then merged, with a seamless jump from real drivers on the road to actors pretending to be drivers in the studio.

For the actors, the process required some mental gymnastics.

Kevin Alejandro, who plays Winston Salazar, who joins the race when he gets out of jail, said he was excited by the prospect of a lead role in a drama about a cross-country auto race. With a love of cars engendered by a father who rebuilt Camaros, he said, he was shocked when the producers told him that he probably would not be doing any road driving.

“It takes a certain kind of concentration and you have to believe in yourself doing it,” he said of the studio driving. “It was intimidating being told I wasn’t going to be able to drive,” particularly because his character has one of the sweeter cars in the race: a low-riding 1964 Chevy Impala.

For all of the high-technology effects going into “Drive,” there can be some rather low-tech moments, as when seven men spent much of two hours pushing two cars around the set, trying to perfect the effect of one car pulling up next to another so the passengers could look at each other across the road.

In one scene, four men pushed a Ford Taurus roughly 50 feet, up next to a Land Rover, which was then pushed back the same distance by a group of three men. They did this for 19 takes before Mr. Yaitanes got the look he wanted.

“Next time you’re in a car going 50 miles an hour, look in the car next to you,” he explained. “Everything’s moving relative to you, so it’s those little movements we’re trying to recreate. So, in the middle of using the cutting-edge technology, just pushing a car across the floor is the best way to do it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/ar...on/07driv.html





Back to the (Double) Feature
A. O. Scott



The essence of “Grindhouse,” Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s exuberant, uneven tribute to the spirit of trash cinema, is distilled in a scene from “Death Proof,” Mr. Tarantino’s feature-length contribution to the project. Two vintage American muscle cars, already scuffed and dented from chasing each other along back roads and two-lane blacktops, descend, engines whining and tires squealing, onto a highway full of late-model minivans, S.U.V.’s and family sedans, all of them driving safely within the lines and the speed limit.

It’s a great car chase, but it’s also a metaphor. “Grindhouse,” soaked in bloody nostalgia for the cheesy, disreputable pleasures of an older form of movie entertainment, can also be seen as a passionate protest against the present state of the entertainment industry. Those Detroit relics, modified with loving care in someone’s garage or backyard, may waste gas and burn oil, but they seem to have an individuality — a soul — that the homogeneous new vehicles, with their G.P.S. and their cruise control, their computer chips and their air bags, can never hope to match.

And “Grindhouse” argues, with more enthusiasm than coherence, for the integrity of a certain kind of old movie. Not the stuff that finds its way into the Classics section of the video store, but the kind that the guys behind the counter are always talking about: cheap, nasty slasher films, sleazy sexploitation pictures, gimcrack sci-fi epics starring people you never heard of. Just about anything, in short, with the right combination of topless women, gory, pointless violence and inspired amateurism. Also car chases.

Really, though, what Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Tarantino try to evoke is less a particular style or genre of moviemaking than a lost ambience of moviegoing. “Grindhouse” consists of a double feature (“Death Proof” preceded by Mr. Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror”) accompanied by trailers for nonexistent coming attractions (with titles like “Machete” and “Werewolf Women of the SS”) and beset by technical difficulties. Each of the features is missing a reel — the management apologizes for the inconvenience — and of course it’s the reel with the sex in it, which the projectionist probably stole for his own amusement. The prints are full of scratches, bad splices and busted sprocket holes, and the images are not always in focus.

It’s all a pretty good joke, especially since most of these glitches, artifacts of an earlier technological era, have been produced digitally. (Unfortunately the software application has not yet been developed that can simulate clouds of stale cigarette smoke in the projector beam, broken seats and sticky, smelly floors at your local multiplex.) The filmmakers are at once bad boys and grumpy old men, effortlessly adept at manipulating new-fangled gadgets even as they sigh over the way things were in the good old days.

Their approach is both broadly populist and fussily esoteric. It doesn’t take a cinephile to appreciate, say, the sight of Rose McGowan in skimpy go-go dancer get-up, or to be repulsed by the spectacle of zombies with melting, pustulant faces feasting on human flesh. But the obsessive crosshatching of allusion, spoof and homage that gives “Grindhouse” its texture is the product of a highly refined generational sensibility.

Young people who see this movie — in the spirit of the thing, they should ideally sneak in during school hours — might do well to seek out a 45-year-old underemployed bachelor with a large DVD and comic book collection who can help them parse the basics (“What’s a reel, Uncle Quentin?”) and the more advanced material as well.

That Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Tarantino are motivated by a sincere love of the movies they send up can hardly be doubted, but the affection is expressed in different ways. Mr. Rodriguez revels in badness for its own sake. “Planet Terror” is intoxicated by its own absurdity; it tries to raise incompetence to the level of craft, if not art. The random close-ups, the lurching cuts, the off-kilter framing — all of this is obviously intentional. So is the hodgepodge story, which is like a stew made of the contents of every can in the cupboard.

Ms. McGowan plays Cherry Darling, a hard-luck go-go dancer. She reunites with an old boyfriend (Freddy Rodriguez), who turns out to be a notorious gunslinger. They team up with a bunch of other townspeople — we’re somewhere in Texas — to fight off rampaging zombies (including Bruce Willis and Mr. Tarantino, who also has a small role in “Death Proof”). The zombies have been infected by a virus, and the only hope for a cure is. ...

But that’s enough of that. Sensation trumps sense in “Planet Terror,” especially once Ms. McGowan, who has lost a leg in a car accident, has been outfitted with a machine-gun prosthesis. It’s certainly eye-catching, but “Planet Terror” is a joke that goes on for too long without much purpose beyond its own frantic inventiveness.

Its sloppiness is a trait it shares not only with obscure horror movies (many of which were much more rigorously executed), but also with some of Mr. Rodriguez’s other films. His energy, in movies like “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” and the later “Spy Kids” installments, has often outstripped his taste. Not only does he like bad movies, he has a habit of making them too.

Mr. Tarantino is another story — a connoisseur, a scholar and a bit of a highbrow. Not a snob though. Quite the opposite: He combs through trash in search of art and has done a lot to teach American audiences (and critics) to appreciate the formal seriousness and aesthetic sophistication of, for example, Asian action movies. “Death Proof” is in part a sincere tribute to the work of Monte Hellman, whose films have ascended from the fetor of their low-rent origins into the purer air of art houses and museum retrospectives, which is where they belong. Mr. Hellman was always a serious filmmaker, and Mr. Tarantino is too.

At a certain point in “Death Proof” the scratches and bad splices disappear, and you find yourself watching not an arch, clever pastiche of old movies and movie theaters but an actual movie. You are not laughing at deliberately clumsy camera work but rather admiring the grace and artistry of the shots — in particular a long take in which the camera circles around a group of women talking in a diner. At his best — in parts of “Pulp Fiction,” in “Jackie Brown,” in sections of “Kill Bill, Vol. 2” — Mr. Tarantino strips away the quotation marks and finds a route through his formal virtuosity and his encyclopedic knowledge of film history back to the basics of character, action and story.

“Death Proof” is a decidedly modest picture, fittingly enough given its second billing in this double feature. But its scaled-down ambition is part of its appeal. It consists of long stretches of talk — the rambling, profane banter that is Mr. Tarantino’s hallmark as a writer — interrupted by kinetic bouts of automotive mayhem.

The verbal and visceral elements have no organic connection, and the plot is booby-trapped with surprises. I’m hesitant to risk giving away too much, but I will say that Kurt Russell is awfully good, and that I could listen to Sydney Tamiia Poitier and Tracie Thoms, two of the movie’s motor-mouthed heroines, talk through the whole three hours of “Grindhouse,” read the phone book or recite “The Faerie Queene” on tape in my Volvo in the middle of a traffic jam.

I’m not sure I’d sit through “Planet Terror” again to get to them in “Death Proof” though. Of course, in the old days, true grindhouse devotees would wander in and out of the theater all day long. I guess DVD’s serve a similar function in our own time. In any case be sure not to miss the trailer for “Thanksgiving” — not for the squeamish or the humor impaired, and not that you’d necessarily want to see the movie, if it existed. Also, when viewing “Grindhouse” at home skip the commentary track and bring in a few drunks off the street to mutter and snore. It’ll be just like the old days.

“Grindhouse” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Tell your mother you were over at your friend’s house doing homework, and be sure to tell your friends at school about the severed limbs, the exploding heads and the naked you-know-whats.

GRINDHOUSE

Opens today nationwide.

“Planet Terror” written and directed by Robert Rodriguez; director of photography, Mr. Rodriguez; edited by Mr. Rodriguez and Sally Menke; production designers, Steve Joyner and Caylah Eddleblute; produced by Mr. Rodriguez and Elizabeth Avellan. “Death Proof” produced, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino; director of photography, Mr. Tarantino; edited by Ms. Menke; production designers, Mr. Joyner and Ms. Eddleblute. Released by Dimension Films. Running time: 180 minutes.

“PLANET TERROR” WITH: Rose McGowan (Cherry), Marley Shelton (Dr. Dakota Block), Freddy Rodriguez (Wray), Josh Brolin (Block), Jeff Fahey (JT), Michael Biehn (Sherriff Hague), Naveen Andrews (Abby) and Stacy Ferguson (Tammy).

“DEATH PROOF” WITH: Kurt Russell (Stuntman Mike), Sydney Tamiia Poitier (Jungle Julia), Vanessa Ferlito (Arlene), Jordan Ladd (Shanna), Tracie Thoms (Kim), Rosario Dawson (Abernathy), Zoë Bell (Zoë), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Lee), Rose McGowan (Pam), Eli Roth (Dov) and Omar Doom (Nate).
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/mo...grin.html?8dpc





Wrestling With Songs Tougher Than the Rest
Nate Chinen

Bruce Springsteen, finally taking the stage at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night, started out by assuring the crowd that he was still alive. Or maybe he was reassuring himself. The evening had felt, he said, “a little bit like that dream everybody has, where you’re invisible and you’re floating above a room, and all these people are talking about you.” The kicker, of course, is that it turns out to be your funeral.

Mr. Springsteen was the surprise twist in “The Music of Bruce Springsteen,” and the only logical conclusion. He had observed roughly a third of the concert’s 20 performances from the vantage of a mezzanine box: floating above the room, if hardly invisible. What he heard was a raft of artists grappling with his songs and, a bit more arduously, his style.

Some of them managed the task brilliantly; nobody made it seem easy. Mr. Springsteen’s songs occupy various stations in the emotional expanse between defiant and defeated, and they don’t take kindly to revision. Robin Holcomb’s piano-and- vocal take on “Brilliant Disguise,” with its cloak of strange new tonalities, was among the concert’s most inventive turns; that it wasn’t too enjoyable was only partly Ms. Holcomb’s fault. Another pianist, Uri Caine, devised a jazz abstraction of “New York City Serenade.”

The Holmes Brothers saw no need to tweak the gospel lilt of “My City of Ruins,” which they performed with the Young People’s Chorus of New York City. The choir was a reminder of the concert’s cause, music education. Proceeds — a net of $150,000, by the tally of the producer, Michael Dorf — benefited the nonprofit initiative Music for Youth.

Many of the other artists went for extreme simplicity, reining in the atmosphere of the songs. This could be deadly, as a band called Low Stars proved with an earnest four-part vocal harmony on “One Step Up.” (It wasn’t half as spirited as the sha-la-las warbled by Bobby Valli, and an entourage he called the Jersey Guys, on “Jersey Girl” — actually a Tom Waits song.) Earlier the singer-songwriter Josh Ritter had played “The River” as a coffeehouse standard, and the Bacon Brothers had made “Streets of Philadelphia” into a folk ballad. Both acts sounded sincere, and too polite.

That wasn’t the case in the haunting solo acoustic work of Steve Earle (convincingly morbid on “Nebraska”) and Joseph Arthur (deliberate and brooding on “Born in the U.S.A.”). Juliana Hatfield, alone with an electric guitar, made “Cover Me” sound a bit more like a desperate plea. And Pete Yorn played a “Dancing in the Dark” that stressed the darkness over the dancing; he was after the restless twinge already lurking in the song.

Had Jewel appeared as advertised, she presumably would have played in an acoustic vein as well. Her unbilled replacement was Patti Smith — a serious upgrade — singing “Because the Night,” the song jointly written by Ms. Smith and Mr. Springsteen that remains her biggest hit. Backed at the piano by Tony Shanahan, Ms. Smith delivered the anthem with clarity and cool intensity; she punctuated the end of one chorus by nonchalantly spitting on the stage.

It was a hard act to follow, as Dave Bielanko pointed out when his band, Marah, walked onstage. They met the challenge with a spirited version of “The Rising,” one of several numbers in the concert that faithfully echoed the sound of Mr. Springsteen’s E Street Band. Results in this area were occasionally messy. The singer M. Ward barely got through “I’m Goin’ Down” with Elysian Fields; “Hungry Heart,” as rendered by the punk striver Jesse Malin and the Ronette survivor Ronnie Spector, was a shambles.

But Damon Gough, the British singer-songwriter known as Badly Drawn Boy, pumped “Thunder Road” with a bright and goofy exuberance. Later, the Hold Steady — the last scheduled act, appearing after Odetta’s magisterial and wry “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)” — managed to turn Springsteen emulation into an act of operatic dimensions.

“There’s gonna be a rumble out there on that promenade,” snarled the band’s lead singer, Craig Finn, on “Atlantic City,” making the line his own. A moment later, guitars and drums kicked in heavily, and Mr. Finn ratcheted up with them.

There was nowhere to go from there except to the source: Mr. Springsteen, with his harmonica and acoustic guitar. “The Promised Land,” his first song, was stark and grim; on “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” he slipped in a self-referential aside. Then he beckoned the full cast onstage for a “Rosalita” reprise, offering the verses to any takers. Mr. Finn took up the gauntlet, barely able to contain himself: he seemed about to burst. Beside him, Mr. Springsteen grinned widely. A guy could get used to funerals like these.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/ar...ic/07bruc.html





Scottish Cop Isn’t Fazed by Protests or Bagpipes
Janet Maslin


The Naming of The Dead

By Ian Rankin.

452 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $24.99.

It’s been 20 years since Ian Rankin started writing about Inspector John Rebus, the lone-wolf Scottish police detective who lives by his own set of rules. Rebus has a preferred way of conducting himself: any way he wants, and too bad if his superiors don’t like it. Over time this attitude has brought Rebus exactly nothing, unless you count the satisfaction he takes in settling scores, one criminal miscreant at a time. He is now a year from retirement and not exactly resting on his laurels.

“Rebus knew his place in the food chain: somewhere down among the plankton, the price for years of insubordination and reckless conduct,” Mr. Rankin writes in “The Naming of the Dead.” This seems a fair assessment. So Rebus tends to be treated dismissively, but sooner or later those who underestimate him wind up sorry. The man is relentless once he shakes off his doldrums and gets into high gear.

Since Mr. Rankin has his Rebus-like side (“Often I’m not sure where I end and he begins,” he has said), the warm-up stages of these novels are deliberately, stubbornly wayward. Mr. Rankin incorporates many minor characters and is never in a hurry to dispense with their small talk.

That’s especially true in this new crime story, which has the temerity to treat the July 2005 G-8 conference in Edinburgh as the backdrop for a case involving sex offenders and a serial killer (or serial kilter, as a Scottish newspaper accidentally misprints it). Eventually it will all click, but not until Rebus and Mr. Rankin have taken their sweet time.

These dilatory tactics aren’t a drawback; they are among the most likeable features of this top-flight, enduring series. The books use a deceptively casual tone to worm their way into Rebus’s thoughts. Although it is de rigueur to know what music a crime-novel star likes to listen to, what a shambles his private life has become, what he eats for breakfast and drinks for dinner, Mr. Rankin gets just as much mileage out of showing how Rebus circles around and around a problem. He meanders very slyly until he’s ready to pounce.

During the preliminaries the events in a Rebus book can appear even more deceptively unrelated than those in most crime stories. Consider that Rebus and his younger and fresher partner, Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke, happen to be investigating a relatively stale case when a brand-new bit of mayhem occurs: One of the dignitaries visiting for the G-8 falls out of a window in Edinburgh Castle during an official dinner.

Is this sheer coincidence? At the very least, it’s an occasional for a Rebus wisecrack. “Could be there was bagpipe music between courses,” he suggests. “Might’ve broken his will to live.”

The officer in charge of G-8 security decides to get rid of Rebus before he becomes annoying. Rebus winds up suspended. “End of game,” says the security chief. “Sayonara. Finito.” With his usual respect for authority, Rebus replies: “Picked up a few words at the dinner, eh, sir?”

So Rebus and Siobhan wind up out on the fringes of G-8-inspired chaos. That turns out to be the most interesting place to be. “The Naming of the Dead” describes a roiling circus atmosphere that seems benign at first, attracting a tent city of protesters who include Siobhan’s parents, but eventually escalates into rioting (and coincides with terrorist bombings in London). “Nice day out for all concerned,” Rebus says after learning that 200,000 protestors have shown up for a demonstration. “Doesn’t change the world I’m living in.”

But it does. “The Naming of the Dead” begins with the funeral of Rebus’s brother and gives him this and other reasons to mourn. Even as Mr. Rankin distributes a trail of breadcrumbs that runs sneakily through the book’s many subplots and encounters, he suffuses this story with a sense of loss, not least because Rebus is made mindful of his own youthful rebelliousness. There’s only so much of his past he can cling to by quoting the Who and educating Siobhan about rock trivia (like how Steely Dan got its name).

“The Naming of the Dead” is filled with family relationships that threaten to come undone. Siobhan defied her parents to become a cop, but now she starts wanting to feel more like a daughter. The victims of those sex crimes have aggrieved, protective relatives, and at least one marriage is headed for the rocks. A couple of menacing paternal types, a councilman and a much less dangerous mobster, manipulate their underlings and expect the kind of fealty they can no longer command. The title suggests a way of honoring the lost when all else has failed.

A book with this many plot elements risks becoming amorphous and overcomplicated. But Mr. Rankin doesn’t get lost that way. In his backhanded, reluctant way Rebus winds up uniting all the book’s loose ends, and seeing how he accomplishes this is a pleasure. Besides, “The Naming of the Dead” isn’t really about its detective plot. It’s about Rebus’s taking stock, not only of his own past but also of the world around him.

The sight of Edinburgh overtaken by an angry public spectacle winds up stirring his memories in a profound, melancholy way. But it’s not Mr. Rankin’s style to say so. Far better and more typical to put it this way: “Funny to think it’ll be back to old clothes and porridge next week.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/books/02masl.html





Maybe She’s Reappeared; Definitely She’s a Mystery
Janet Maslin


What The Dead Know

By Laura Lippman

376 pages. William Morrow. $24.95.

Laura Lippman’s “What the Dead Know” is an uncommonly clever impostor story, so cagily constructed that it easily fulfills the genre’s two basic demands. First, Ms. Lippman is able to keep her reader guessing about the main character’s disputed identity until the very end of this book. Second, when the revelation comes, it makes perfect sense, and it has been hiding in plain sight. This is not one of those mysteries with a denouement that feels tacked on, half baked or pulled out of thin air.

Here’s the premise: A woman involved in a Baltimore highway accident comes forth with a bizarre revelation. Out of the blue she claims to be Heather Bethany, one of two adolescent sisters who were last seen at a mall in 1975. She knows a lot about Heather, and her claim is plausible, but there’s also something about her that prompts incredulity. Ms. Lippman’s well-drawn cast of supporting characters — including a police officer, a social worker, a lawyer and a dapper retired detective who studied the case closely when the girls vanished — are left to study her closely and try to figure out what game she’s playing.

It’s fair to assume that Ms. Lippman would not be leading her readers through nearly 400 serpentine, carefully nuanced pages if Heather Bethany were Heather Bethany, pure and simple. It’s a sure thing that something is amiss. But what? This book is so well larded with small, potentially troubling details that any of its characters might be hiding something. Starting with the so-called Heather: Ms. Lippman quickly lets the reader know that this woman has lived under a series of assumed names. She also lets it slip that the tricky part of being Heather is “not knowing what she should know but remembering what she wouldn’t know.”

Ms. Lippman usually writes installments of a series about Tess Monaghan, reporter turned detective. (Ms. Lippman is a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun.) These books are dependably solid, but the stand-alone “What the Dead Know” is in a different league. Even in comparison with her “Every Secret Thing” (2003), another stand-alone that overlaps slightly with this one in their plots about missing girls, the new book is exceptionally well executed.

This time Ms. Lippman writes like a warmer-blooded American Ruth Rendell, keenly observant and giving a faintly spooky charge to every stray detail. Even as she expertly summons the minutiae of teenage girlhood circa 1975, it’s gratifying to know that the contents of Heather’s favorite purse will have something to do with Heather’s destiny.

“What the Dead Know” takes its title from Ecclesiastes and is divided into several different time periods. The book starts in the present, flashes back to the disappearance and then reveals what happened to the parents of Heather and her sister, Sunny, after the girls went missing. This structure allows Ms. Lippman to dispense information sparingly, with the precision that is one of this book’s most satisfying features.

First we see the Bethany family as a unit. Then we learn that the mother, Miriam, is having an affair, and that the father, Dave, is a rigidly spiritual ex-hippie whose joyless quest for enlightenment hangs heavily over the rest of his family. Only later is it revealed that the girls were adopted (under highly fraught circumstances), so that even if a parent can identify Heather, there will be no corroborating DNA proof. And only later is it clear that one of the parents has died and will never learn the truth about the daughters’ fate.

Similarly, Ms. Lippman teases the reader with Heather’s memories of a troubled sexual history. She seems to have been held prisoner. When she went to high school and played kissing games with classmates, she was the only teenager who secretly had an abusive husband at home. With information that sketchy, it’s possible to jump to all the wrong conclusions, which is precisely what Ms. Lippman wants to encourage. The book’s clues are indistinguishable from its red herrings until the final pages.

For a novel steeped in such elaborate gamesmanship, “What the Dead Know” is unusually three-dimensional. Its characters are credibly and movingly drawn — particularly Miriam, who has relocated and shape-shifted several different times since the disappearances, just as Heather claims to have done. Miriam winds up hiding in Mexico, driven there by the relentless publicity surrounding the Bethany case and not brought back to Baltimore until the book is ready for its aha! moment. Miriam returns as if from another planet, amazed at the doll-like, interchangeable young women on the covers of American celebrity magazines, creatures who contrast so sharply with her real, lost daughters.

The sisters are equally well evoked, right down to the most seemingly mundane touches. In detailing their last known day together, Ms. Lippman presents a mall visit that is a superb feat of covert trickery. Their itinerary seems so banal, and yet it holds the key to their future. They look at clothes and dress patterns. They run into an oddball music teacher they know from school. They sneak into an R-rated movie, which happens to be “Chinatown.” They have the usual kind of petty, sisterly spat. Then they are grabbed by a policeman, and there’s no one but Heather to explain what happened next. Thirty-two years later all the remaining witnesses are either incapacitated or dead.

This presents a mystery writer’s classic challenge to the reader: Here are the facts, now put them together. It’s a cerebral tactic buried within a very human story, and that makes for an unusual combination. And “What the Dead Know,” like the best books in this tradition, is doubly satisfying. You read it once just to move breathlessly toward the finale. Then you revisit it to marvel at how well Ms. Lippman pulled the wool over your eyes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/books/05masl.html





Pushing a New Writer Upstream
Julie Bosman

At a table with a half-dozen enraptured Borders executives in a private room at the French bistro Mon Amí Gabi, between sips of Côtes du Rhône, the fledgling British novelist Steven Hall began telling the Nicole Kidman story.

“I had Nicole Kidman call me at home,” he said, in his Manchester accent. “She wanted to know if I’d change the main character of my book from a man to a woman, so she could play her. But I didn’t give it to Nicole in the end.”

Over the next three days, the story would be retold to Barnes & Noble employees over dinner in Minneapolis, and to dozens of independent booksellers in Portland, Ore. With any luck, the story would ensure that Mr. Hall’s unfamiliar name, and more important, his new book, stuck in their memory. And that they then would sell, sell, sell.

This is the pre-publication book tour, a ritual an increasing number of authors are enduring so that their books can have a fighting chance in an industry that issues, by some estimates, more than 175,000 titles a year.

Unlike the postpublication book tour, which focuses on publicity and public appearances, the pre-publication tour is meant to win the hearts of the front-line soldiers in the bookselling trenches, and more and more publishers are finding it an indispensable part of their marketing plan.

While major decisions are left to the bookstore chains’ influential buyers, the people out in the field — the store managers and the clerks — can wield considerable power over how long books continue to be displayed on prime tables at the front of the store, and therefore over the what their customers choose to buy and read.

In January, about two months before Mr. Hall’s novel, “The Raw Shark Texts,” was scheduled to hit the shelves, Canongate U.S., Mr. Hall’s publisher, footed the bill for four days of wining and dining, with Mr. Hall pitching his book in person to people who can help determine whether it sinks or swims.

Like a novice politician, Mr. Hall shook hands and talked patiently with booksellers both small and powerful, from an assistant store manager in Minneapolis to the head buyer at City Lights, the renowned San Francisco independent.

There were four long dinners on his schedule, plus a handful of media interviews, a book signing, three photo shoots and a meet-and-greet at Powell’s Books in Portland.

It was heady stuff for Mr. Hall, who before this had never left Europe. He was born in Derbyshire, England, outside Manchester, and now lives in Hull, a “tiny, deprived, poor little city,” he said.

He is cheerful, apple-cheeked, often ebullient, even while traveling without a heavy winter coat in Chicago and Minneapolis at the end of January. “I thought, ‘Oh, it’s America, there are beaches there,’ ” he said, shrugging.

The trip is the kind of socializing opportunity that most unknown authors would relish. For first-time novelists like Mr. Hall, the odds of scoring a best seller are practically nonexistent.

But Canongate U.S., an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, is betting the ranch on “The Raw Shark Texts,” a postmodern psychological thriller and love story. (Mark Haddon, the author of the best-seller “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” contributed a blurb, calling it “the bastard love-child of ‘The Matrix,’ ‘Jaws’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ ”)

It goes on sale in the United States today, and the publisher has already printed 100,000 copies, a huge run for a relatively small independent publisher. Canongate has vowed to spend $150,000 on a marketing campaign to promote the book.

The film rights were sold to Film Four in London for a sum in the mid- to high six figures, in a frenzied auction involving Warner Brothers and New Line. The book is to be translated into 24 languages, including Mandarin, Bulgarian and Slovak.

And the novel has already received admiring reviews in The Los Angeles Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly, along with a mention in GQ.

None of that guarantees a best seller, of course. So publishers like Grove/Atlantic have turned to the so-called pre-pub tour, laying the groundwork early and telling prized booksellers in person that this is the big book they are pushing this season.

Mr. Hall was not depending entirely on the pre-pub tour to start word of mouth. He had been doing his own promotional work long before the book went on sale, regularly updating a MySpace page (myspace.com/stevenhallbooks). Powell’s Books in Portland invited him to write a Web log on the bookstore’s site for a week in March.

“I’m like a parent,” Mr. Hall said. “It needs my attention right now. I’m doing everything I can to help it until it can stand on its own two feet.”

Indeed, by the time the book is on the shelves, the promotional work is almost over.

Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, is credited with inventing the pre-publication tour a decade ago when he circled the country with Charles Frazier, the author of “Cold Mountain.” The book was a smash, selling 1.6 million copies in hardcover and spending 61 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list in hardcover and 33 in paperback.

In a business that is becoming increasingly driven by online retailing and corporate buying decisions, booksellers are all too eager to meet authors and publishers in person.

After leaving Chicago, Mr. Hall and his publishers were off to Minneapolis for an interview at Minnesota Public Radio (his second interview ever), a quick photo shoot and, later that night, another dinner with Barnes & Noble executives.

“I can go back to 70 employees in my store and say I talked to the publisher, and that will motivate them to hard sell,” said Russ Wilbur, the store manager of the Barnes & Noble in downtown Minneapolis, at a dinner where he was seated next to Mr. Hall. “I’m telling you, that’s the book business. That’s how it works.”

In Portland, the visit was timed with the annual Winter Institute, a two-day conference of hundreds of independent booksellers sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, a trade group representing independently owned bookstores. Each publisher was allowed to bring only two authors, creating an exclusivity that BookExpo America, the major industry event of the year, lacks.

At dinner there one night, Mr. Entrekin stood up, wineglass in hand, for a speech in which he called Mr. Hall’s book “the most original novel I’ve read in 10 years.”

In attendance were some of the biggest names in the tightly knit world of independent bookstores, who are still not accustomed to being wooed over fancy dinners. “This is a new thing,” said Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla. “Only three times a year do we network like this with publishers and authors. We’re reading it before the hype hits.”

Nancy Rutland, the owner of Bookworks in Albuquerque, met Mr. Hall in Portland. “It makes a huge difference,” she said. “Now I’ll want to read the book, and then we’ll try to get him to Albuquerque.”

Booksellers usually view the dinners as a grand gesture by the publisher, said Paul Yamazaki, the chief book buyer at City Lights.

“What they’re trying to do is make a statement about the book,” he said. “They want you to go read it, and it gives them another five minutes. But you can’t manufacture these things. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and the book has to deliver,” he said. “Ultimately it’s about the book.”

But the effects of meeting an author in a social setting are undeniable. “The back story with Steven is that he’s from where he’s from — he’s a working-class guy,” Mr. Yamazaki added.

“I wasn’t going to read it,” another bookseller said, “Until he said that Paul Auster of ‘City of Glass’ was one of his major influences.”

By Thursday night in Portland, a group of authors was busily signing books in a ballroom at the Doubletree Hotel. Mr. Hall was looking bleary-eyed, taking slugs from a bottle of Budweiser between signing books. He was eager for this trip, to be followed by months of the real book tour, to be over.

“It’s a bit of an odd system,” he said. “You take a writer, the kind of person who wants to sit on his own for three years at a time, and then make them go to a bunch of dinner parties.”

Friday morning, on Feb. 2, he was on a plane back to England.

“It’s quite weird to be hyped-up and talking to a couple hundred people about the book,” he said, “to going home and sitting with my Xbox.”

All the pre-pub hoopla had Mr. Hall hoping for a best seller, he said, and if that did not happen, he was bracing himself for a “world of pain.”

“There’s a big part of me that’s saying, careful — not a single book has been sold,” he said. “Everyone loves me now, but if the book doesn’t sell, I’ll never be able to show my face in America again.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/bu...a/02shark.html





Missing Child: Another Magazine Gone, Though Still on Web
Louise Story

As goes Life, so goes Child.

Meredith Corp., a book and magazine publisher, said Tuesday that Child magazine would be printed for the last time this spring, although the magazine's Web site would continue to post original content. The company announced the move as part of a broader restructuring that would eliminate 60 jobs, 30 of them at Child.

The strategy is starting to sound familiar in the magazine industry. This month, Hachette Filipacchi said it would stop printing the U.S. version of Premiere, the movie magazine, but keep its Web site. And Time said Monday that it would cease publication of Life, though it would make the magazine's photograph archive available free online.

Meredith said that Child's Web site would become part of a parenting portal that is expected to be operational in July and include Parents, American Baby and Family Circle, three of the company's other titles.

"We continuously review our business activities with the objective of maximizing our performance and growth potential," said Stephen Lacy, chief executive for Meredith, in a statement.

Child lost a substantial number of readers last year and faced competition from new titles like Cookie, an upscale parenting magazine introduced by Condé Nast in late 2005. Child's circulation fell 18.5 percent last year to 740,534 paid subscribers in the second half of the year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, a nonprofit association that tracks the industry.

"Cookie's going after the same market that Child was always trying to go after, and they're doing it better," said Kelly Foster, senior partner and print director for MindShare, a media-buying agency in the WPP Group.

Parenting magazines, like wedding magazines, have the perennial challenge of finding new readers once the target audience stops feeling the need to subscribe. These days such magazines must also compete with the Internet; in the case of Child, some readers now go to sites like BabyCenter.com for information.

Child's advertising revenue, mostly derived from companies producing baby food, clothes and diapers, has also weakened over the past year.

Subscribers to Child will be able to choose whether they want to receive a refund or Parents magazine instead, said Patrick Taylor, a spokesman for Meredith. Meredith bought Child and other titles from Gruner + Jahr in 2005.

Meredith, which is based in Des Moines, Iowa, also owns Better Homes and Gardens.

The company said it would incur an exceptional $3 million charge from the closure of Child, mostly to cover severance expenses. Another $7 million charge would apply to write off unrecoverable assets from Child, including deferred costs from subscription acquisitions.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/28/news/child.php





Illusory Characters With Startling Stage Presence
Steven McElroy

To the average moviegoer the sight of Eddie Murphy portraying several characters in the same scene is no longer a shock. Such special-effects trickery has become commonplace: a good makeup artist, a few carefully placed cameras, some digital tweaking and presto.

In live theater an actor standing alongside himself would still be a jarring sight — but perhaps not for long.

When “Losing Something,” written and directed by Kevin Cunningham, opens on the 3LD Art & Technology Center in Lower Manhattan, the production will mark the first use by an American theater company of a high-definition video projection system called Eyeliner. Using Eyeliner together with Isadora — new software that controls digital video — Mr. Cunningham and the creative team at 3LD (or 3-Legged Dog) are hoping to produce some dazzling, perhaps even shocking, effects.

“We don’t have to obey the laws of physics anymore,” Mr. Cunningham, also 3LD’s executive artistic director, said before a recent rehearsal. During a subsequent run-through of the show — an oblique ghost play told from the point of view of a middle-aged man drifting into the oblivion of memory loss — actors routinely floated in space or appeared out of nowhere.

The Eyeliner system makes use of an old stage trick called Pepper’s Ghost that by most accounts was first seen onstage in an 1862 production of Charles Dickens’s “Haunted Man,” at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London. John Henry Pepper (1821-1900) is usually credited with discovering the illusion, though an engineer named Henry Dircks was really first to suggest placing an angled piece of plate glass between audience and actors, allowing off-stage objects or people to “appear” reflected on the glass as if they were onstage. When the off-stage lights were turned off, the ghosts seemed to vanish.

With Eyeliner, the unwieldy glass pane is replaced with a lighter, nearly invisible screen invented by Uwe Maass, the managing director of Event Works, a company in Dubai. Another company, Vision4, from Denmark, holds the licensing rights for New York.

“We believe that new ground will be found in the symbiosis between art and technology,” Mikael Fock, the director of Vision4, wrote in an e-mail message. “That is why we are enthusiastic to collaborate with the 3-Legged Dog, who share the very same aspirations.” Vision4 will even bring two productions of their own to the 3LD space next year in what is intended to be a continuing partnership between the two companies.

Mr. Maass’s invention has been gaining a higher profile for a while now: many of the millions who saw Madonna sing with the animated rock band the Gorillaz at last year’s Grammy Awards probably did not know that, for part of that performance, they were watching a virtual Madonna — courtesy of Eyeliner. Only now are the possibilities for live theater beginning to be explored.

Early in “Losing Something” the lead character, X (Aldo Perez), contemplates his existence in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center. His older self, also played by Mr. Perez, enters from upstage, crosses to stand beside X, and the two face each other and talk. One is the real Mr. Perez, the other a recorded video image projected onto an offstage mirror and reflected onto the Eyeliner screen.

“Video is often used as a sophisticated set element or backdrop,” Mr. Cunningham said. “But it’s flat, and no other element onstage is flat. Here we’re trying to make all elements fully dimensional — to manipulate time, light and image the same way I would manipulate clay as a sculptor.”

To do this, “Losing Something” employs both recorded video images and traditional Pepper’s Ghost effects — actors hidden offstage are reflected onto the screen, where they appear to be floating. Additional video images, projected from the rear, help to create a sort of three-dimensional movie box.

Then Isadora takes over. The software, invented by Mark Coniglio, a composer and media artist who is a director of the dance company Troika Ranch, gives its user real-time control over the digital video. An operator can make a recorded video character stop, look and listen, as if reacting to a real person onstage.

All of this new technology means that when “Losing Something” is firing on all cylinders, it can be a challenge to distinguish the real actors from the projected images.

Jeff Morey, the video designer, ran Isadora at a recent rehearsal, monitoring two Macintosh computers and making the complex program sound simple. “When you see it onstage with the actors, it’s clear what you need to do,” he said. “But making it work in a way that’s transparent is a different animal.” Mr. Morey said he was trying to create the illusion of depth and distance. “There’s a sense of magic to it,” he said.

Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Morey both said their experimentation with Eyeliner and Isadora was just beginning and would probably continue to reveal surprises.

“We’re babies at this,” Mr. Cunningham said. “We’re really looking forward to the next production because we’re learning so much. Our whole process is turned on its head in a way.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/th...02eyel.html?hp





P2P: Introduction and Real World Applications

Written by Can Erten and edited by Richard MacManus. This is the first in a 2-part series on Read/WriteWeb, exploring the world of P2P on the Web. Part 1 (this post) is a general introduction to P2P, along with some real-world applications of P2P. Part 2 will discuss future applications.

As the connection speed of the internet has increased, the demand for web related services has also increased. After the Web revolution, peer-to-peer networks evolved and currently have a number of different usages - instant messaging, file sharing, etc. Some other revolutionary ideas are still in research. People want to use peer-to-peer in many different applications including e-commerce, education, collaborative work, search, file storage, high performance computing. In this series of posts, we will look at different peer-to-peer ideas and applications.
Introduction

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have been receiving increasing demand from users and are now accepted as a standard way of distributing information, because its architecture enables scalability, efficiency and performance as key concepts. A peer-to-peer network is decentralized, self-organized, and dynamic in its pure sense, and offers an alternative to the traditional client-server model of computing. Client-server architecture enables individuals to connect to a server - but although servers are scalable, there is a limit to what they can do. P2P networks are almost unlimited in their scalability.

In "pure" P2P systems, every node acts as a server and client - and they share resources without any centralized control. However most P2P applications have some degree of centralization. These are called "hybrid" P2P networks and they centralize at least the list of users. This is how instant messengers or file sharing programs work - the system keeps a list of users with their IP addresses.

Different applications of P2P networks enable users to share the computation power (distributed systems), data (file-sharing), and bandwidth (using many nodes for transferring data). P2P uses an individual's computer power and resources, instead of powerful centralized servers. The shared resources guarantee high availability among peers. P2P is a really important area to research, because it has a huge potential in distributed computing. It is also important for the industry as well, as new business models are being created around P2P.

P2P Standards

The key thing for the architecture of P2P networks is to achieve reliability, efficiency, scalability and portability.

For the moment there are no standards for P2P application development, but standards are needed to enable interoperability. Sun has tried to implement a framework basis called JXTA, which is a network programming and computing platform for distributed computing. Sun was the first company to try and develop standards for P2P, but surely other companies will also try to implement their own standards. Microsoft, Intel and IBM are investing and working in their research laboratories on P2P supported application frameworks or systems. It is an open area where no standards are accepted yet.

Gnutella

Gnutella has been used in many applications to allow connecting to the same network and searching files in a centralized manner. It's an open, decentralized search protocol for finding files through the peers. Gnutella is a pure P2P network, without any centralized servers.

Using the same search protocol, such as Gnutella, forms a compatible network for different applications. Anybody who implements the Gnutella protocol is able to search and locate files on that network. Here's how it works. At start up, Gnutella will try to find at least one node to connect to. After the connection, the client requests a list of working addresses and proceeds to connect to other nodes until it reaches a quota. When the client searches for files, it sends the request to each node it is connected to, which then forwards the request to the other nodes it is connected, until a number of "hops" occurs from the sender.

According to Wikipedia, as of December 2005 Gnutella is the third-most-popular file sharing network on the Internet - following eDonkey 2000 and FastTrack. Gnutella is thought to host on an average of approximately 2.2 million users, although around 750,000-1,000,000 are online at any given moment.

The industry use P2P networks in many different ways, each with different business model and different infrastructure. So now let's look at some real world applications for P2P...

Instant Messaging

The first adopted usage of P2P applications was instant messengers. Back in the early days of the internet, people used gopher and IRC servers for communication. These technologies could only handle a certain number of users online at the same time, so there were delays for communicating whenever the server was approaching its limits. However the use of P2P changed the whole idea of IM. The bandwidth was shared between users, enabling faster and more scalable communication.

File Sharing

The peer-to-peer file sharing era started with Napster and continued with much more powerful applications such as Kazaa, Gnutella. These programs brought P2P into the mainstream. Although some P2P file-sharing applications have stopped because of legal issues, there is still a high demand in the industry. Now Napster has gone 'legit' and there are new media P2P apps like Joost (P2P TV) arriving on the scene. We will discuss this more in the next post.
Collaborative Community

Document sharing and collaboration is really important for a company. This issue has tried to be solved by internal portals and collaboration servers. However the information has to be up to date and with portals this wasn't always possible. Collaboration with P2P broke that barrier, by using peoples computer resources instead of a centralized server.

Groove is a software with P2P capabilities which was acquired by Microsoft in April 2005. Groove is now offering Microsoft Office based solutions, mainly using P2P for document collaboration. It also allows the usage of instant messaging and integration with some video conferencing solutions. It provides user and role based security, which is one of the most important aspects of P2P for an organization. Groove is also a “relay server” to enable offline usage.

IP Telephony

Another major usage of P2P is IP telephony. IP telephony revolutionaries the way we use the internet, enabling us to call anywhere in the world for free using our computers.

Skype is a good example of P2P usage in VoIP. It was acquired by eBay in 2005. Skype was built on top of the infrastructure of P2P file-sharing system, Kazaa. The bandwidth is shared and the sound or video in real-time are shared as resources. The main server exists only for the presence information and billing users of the system whenever they make a call that has charges (e.g. SkypeOut).

High Performance Computing - Grid Computing

High performance computing is important for scientific research or for large companies. P2P plays a role in enabling high performance computing. Sharing of resources like computation power, network bandwidth, and disk space will benefit from P2P.

Hive computing is similar - it is where millions of computers connecting to the internet can form a super computer, if it is successfully managed. One of the popular projects is SETI@HOME (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which enables users to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It is a voluntary project with more than 3.3 million users in 226 countries - it has used 796,000 years of CPU time and analyzed 45 terabytes of data in just two and a half years of operation.

Some industrial projects also exist in this area. Datasynapse is charging users for the CPU cycles they use. Open Source projects also exist, like Globus and Globus Grid Forum.
http://www.personalbee.com/227/11969633





Solving the Phone Number Blues
David Pogue

Review

If you only use one telephone with one phone number, this column will not be of any interest to you. Skip to another article, you eccentric, you.

But first, count your blessings. Millions of people have more than one phone number these days — home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht — and with great complexity comes great hassle.

You miss calls when people try to reach you on your cellphone when you are at home (or the other way around).

And when you switch your job, cellphone carrier or home city, you have to notify everyone you know that you have new phone numbers.

A new service called GrandCentral, now in its final weeks of public beta testing, nips all of these problems right in the bud. It is a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.

Its motto, "One number for life," pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, asking them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes.

From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uni-number, all of your phones ring simultaneously.

No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you are home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

As a bonus, all messages now land in a single voice mail box. You can listen to them in any of three ways. First, you can dial in from any phone (a text message arrives on your cellphone to let you know when you have voice mail).

You can also play your messages at GrandCentral.com, and even download them as audio files to preserve for posterity. You can even have messages sent to you by e-mail, as sound files that you can play through your e-mail program.

All of this, incredibly, is free if you have only two phone numbers to consolidate. A $15-per-month premium plan offers more of everything: up to six phone numbers unified, voice messages preserved forever instead of a limited time, and so on, along with a Web site free of ads.

There are some substantial downsides to getting involved with GrandCentral. First, GrandCentral offers you a choice of about 20 uni-numbers, but it does not yet offer phone numbers in every area code, so your next-door neighbor may wind up having to dial an out-of-town number to reach you. In 14 central American states, GrandCentral offers no numbers at all, and it is not available outside Canada and the United States. You can see what is available at GrandCentral.com.

For an annual fee, you can request a specific, vanity phone number.

Second, while you're publicizing your new number, there will be an awkward period when some people are still dialing your old numbers.

You will have to check all your old voice mail boxes plus your new GrandCentral one. Otherwise, this unification of all your phones and answering machines makes life less complicated.

Be warned, however: GrandCentral offers a huge list of additional features that are not so simple. If you are not careful, GrandCentral can turn into a full-blown hobby.

For example:

Caller naming. Every GrandCentral caller is announced by name — "Call from Ethel Murgatroid" — when you answer the phone

How does it know the name? Sometimes Caller ID supplies it. GrandCentral also knows every name in your online address book, which can import your contacts from any e-mail program.

Callers not in these categories are asked to state their names the first time they call. On subsequent calls, GrandCentral recognizes them.

Listen in. For the first time in cellphone history, you can listen to a message someone is leaving, just the way you can on a home answering machine.

Your phone rings and displays the usual Caller ID information. You answer it. But before you can even say "Hello," GrandCentral's recording lady tells you the caller's name, and then offers you four ways to handle the call: "Press 1 to accept, 2 to send to voice mail, 3 to listen in on voice mail, or 4 to accept and record the call."

If you press 3, the call goes directly to voice mail, but you get to listen in. If you feel that the caller deserves your immediate attention, you can press * to "pick up" and join the call.

This subtle feature can save you time, cellular minutes and, in certain cases of conflict-avoidance, emotional distress.

Record the call. Hitting 4 during a call begins recording it. GrandCentral then treats the recording as a voice mail message. Here again, you can immortalize the historic calls of your life, or just create a replayable record of driving directions.

Ringback music. This little feature lets you replace the ringing sounds the caller hears while waiting for you to answer (what Lily Tomlin used to describe as "one ringie-dingie, two ringie-dingies") with music, in GrandCentral's case, any MP3 file of your choice.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/.../PTpogue15.php





France Caters to Market for the Most Simple of Computers
Thomas Crampton

The Minitel, a French government-sponsored minicomputer that was wired into 14 million French homes at its peak in the mid-1990s, had a limited service offering, a black-and-white screen and slow connection speeds that doomed it to near-extinction in the face of the Internet.

Now, a French Internet service provider, Neuf Cegetel, has taken inspiration from the Minitel to develop a computer based on a similar low-cost model, aimed at people who are unable or unwilling to buy a computer. In a gesture to high-technology enthusiasts, however, the system uses the open-source software beloved by many engineers and programmers.

"We wanted to create something as simple and cheap as the Minitel to reach technophobes and people without much money," said Frédéric Charrier, manager of the Easy Neuf project, which started its first national advertising campaign last week. "For a slightly higher subscription, customers get a simplified computer with all services they might need."

For €39.90, or $53.30 - a €10 premium over the price of most broadband subscriptions in France - customers get a white computer roughly the size and shape of a toaster. A one-time payment of €29 buys a keyboard, mouse and camera; for €99 more, the customer can get a 14-inch color monitor.

French Internet service providers have compelling reasons to push people to buy computers, said Ian Fogg, an analyst in London at the research firm Jupiter.

Household ownership of computers in France, which stands at 61 percent according to Jupiter, is lower than the European average of 64 percent and significantly below countries like Denmark and Sweden, where more than 80 percent of homes have computers. At the same time, rapid deregulation has made France one of the most competitive markets in Europe for Internet providers.

"People talk about the Nordic markets, but Europe's most dynamic Internet markets are the Netherlands and France," Fogg said. In France, three major private companies are competing to lay fiber cable to homes. "France is leading Europe toward the mass-market use of fiber-based broadband, he said."

Faced with financing this costly infrastructure investment, those laying fiber to the home - Neuf, Free and Orange - have to maximize the number of customers using those lines.

"If one-third of the people in a building do not own a computer and see no reason to get broadband, it becomes a serious financial issue," Fogg said. "Some Internet companies have offered incentives for people to buy computers, but Neuf has taken it to the ultimate level in offering the computer themselves."

To Neuf, the issue came down to the difficulty that first-time computer users experience in dealing with Windows.

"Nearly 80 percent of all current customer calls relate to problems with Microsoft Windows," Charrier said. "We decided it was easier to build our own platform to limit potential problems."

"Our promise of customer service forced us to conceive everything from the consumer perspective in order to reduce calls," Charrier said. "This starts with the instruction book containing many photos, goes as far as the simplified computer interface and goes down to a redesign of the keyboard."

The keyboard uses color codes to indicate the characters that appear by pressing the Shift or Alt keys and has separate keys for the @ and € symbols. Customers can ask that the computer itself be inspected and operated remotely by Neuf technicians to resolve problems. The computer will also notify Neuf of problems like overheating, which the customer may not detect.

For the operating system, the computer uses a version of Linux with a graphic overlay designed by Neuf.

"The choice of open source was both for price and motivation," Charrier said. "We pay no licensing fee for the software, and engineers feel motivated to work on a new kind of project that helps the open-source community."

The choice has been hailed by April, an advocacy group for free and open-source software. "This is the first time that a company offers open-source software in a mass consumption product that has a help desk to assist customers," said Benjamin Drieu, treasurer of April, who also works for a company involved in the Neuf project.

"Normally, only programmers have the confidence to use open source, so this could change the perception of free software."

The suite of open-source software on the Easy Neuf includes the Firefox browser, Abiword word processor and the Gnumeric spreadsheet program.

The built-in memory is a fairly limited 512-kilobyte flash disk, but the device is compatible with external hard drives and a range of peripherals like printers, Internet phone headsets and digital cameras. As new peripherals become popular, the necessary software will be available for download onto the Neuf computers via regular software updates.

The operating system displays icons along the bottom of the screen, and offers several versions, depending on the needs of the user. At the simplest level, the computer offers menus based on a theme. The screen button "search," for example, has a submenu offering a telephone (which links to a yellow pages Web site), an encyclopedia (which links to Wikipedia) and another option that links to search engines.

"We have found that many people like to have the Internet edited back to what they find essential," Charrier said.

"The customer we are aiming for prefers a limited and stable offering."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/...ology/neuf.php





Microsoft Office Sheds Features for Simplicity's Sake
David Pogue

Life has a funny symmetry, don't you think? When you're born, you're short, toothless and bald. You spend the first part of your life gaining height, teeth and hair — and the last part losing them again.

Believe it or not, Microsoft Office is following the same trajectory. (This might sound like the stretched analogy of the year, but bear with me.)

Microsoft spent the first dozen years of Office's life piling on new features. Over time, the humble word processor called Word became a photo editor, a Web-design program and dessert topping. Not one person in a hundred used those extra features. Still, we kept buying the upgrades, thanks to our innate fondness for unnecessary power (see also: SUVs).

Eventually, however, Microsoft Office developed a reputation for bloat and complexity. It was fully grown: tall, hairy and toothy.

So what did Microsoft do? It began shrinking Microsoft Office. In fact, the chief sales point of Office 2007 (for Windows XP or Vista), which makes its debut on Jan. 30, is that it is simpler, more streamlined and creates much smaller documents.

Thanks to a radical redesign, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are practically totally new programs. There are no more floating toolbars; very few tasks require opening dialog boxes, and even the menu bar itself is gone.

Instead, almost the entire world of formatting options has been dug out of Office's guts and artfully arranged on a top-mounted strip of controls called the Ribbon.

You no longer have to spend 20 minutes hunting through menus for Page Numbering or whatever. It's all right there on the Ribbon. What was once buried four layers deep is now arrayed before you in a big software smorgasbord.

Better yet, you can see how each formatting choice will affect your document — a font, style or color change, let's say — just by pointing to a control without clicking. No Apply button, no thumbnail preview; your actual document changes temporarily and automatically. (Unfortunately, this doesn't work with chart styles in Excel.)

The bad news, of course, is that this Office bears very little resemblance to the one you may have spent years learning. Virtually everything has been moved around or renamed. Count on a couple of weeks of frustration as you play a game you could call Find the Feature.

The game is so challenging because the Ribbon changes. Its controls change depending on which of the seven permanent tabs you click at the top of the screen (Home, Insert, View, and so on). Still other Ribbons appear only when needed; a graphics Ribbon appears, for example, when you click a picture in the document.

You're stuck with the tabs Microsoft gives you. You can't rearrange them or hide the ones you never use. Even if you never create form letters or write academic dissertations, the Mailings and References tabs will be there on the Ribbon forever, wasting space.

Nor is that the only loss of customizability. Microsoft has also removed the ability to design custom toolbars stocked with the features, fonts or style sheets you use most. In Office 2007, the only thing you can customize is something called the Quick Bar: a tiny row of unlabeled icons, awkwardly jammed in above or below the Ribbon.

The second big disruptive change is the new file format. Microsoft, to its credit, has not touched the standard Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats for 10 years. You never had to worry that your colleagues' Macs or PCs would not be able to open your documents.

Now you do. The new file formats (.docx for Word, for example) are much more compact than the old ones, and they're also easier to recover from data corruption. But older versions of Office for Windows can't open them without a free converter (available at microsoftoffice.com). Office 2004 for Macintosh can't open them at all, although shareware and Web conversion utilities are available.

Fortunately, you can easily instruct your copy of Office 2007 to save its documents in the older format. In these turbulent transitional times, that might be a good idea.

The Ribbon reorganization and new document formats are by far the most important changes in Office 2007. There are, of course, some other new features, especially in Word.

Word has always let you define style sheets: memorized sets of formatting characteristics — for headings and captions, for example — that you can apply with one click. Now, however, there are sets of coordinated styles. One click on Elegant or Formal, for example, impressively reformats all styles in an entire document.

What used to be called the File menu is still present in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, although it's now represented by the Office logo. Its submenus offer Quick Print, which prints one copy on your main printer — no dialog boxes required. Excellent; how often, really, does the average person switch printers?

Other improvements: A zoom in/ zoom out slider appears at the bottom of the window. The spelling checker now flags right spelling/wrong usage errors, as in, "I need to loose ten pounds." A Translation tool gives you instant, if imperfect, foreign-language translations.

You can now export a document as a PDF file. You can write blog entries that you then post directly to Blogger, TypePad or WordPress servers. A Document Inspector window lets you purge hidden text, comments or other elements that might give away corporate secrets in a document you're about to transmit. And something called Smart Art lets you drop canned business graphics into your memos.

In Excel, the world's most popular spreadsheet, you can now handle ridiculously large matrices of numbers (one million rows, 16,000 columns). Charts are fancier, and "conditional formatting" automatically applies color to cells whose numbers meet certain criteria. For example, cells in a temperature-tracking spreadsheet could show shades of blue for cold days, or reds and yellows for warmer ones.

As for Outlook, Microsoft's flagship e-mail/calendar program, the most significant change is Instant Search, which lets you pluck one informational needle from the haystack of e-mail, attachments, calendar appointments, addresses and to-do items — fast. (The horribly sluggish Search from the old Outlook has, at long last, been taken out behind the barn and shot.)

Outlook can now subscribe to RSS newsfeeds (free bulletins from blogs and news Web sites). A new To Do bar consolidates everything you have to worry about: tasks, appointments and e-mails you've flagged. And — praise be — attached documents appear right in the body of your e-mail messages.

In PowerPoint, the presentation software, there's not much new apart from the Office-wide improvements. There is, however, a new tool for creating diagrams and flow charts, and slide libraries let you "publish" self-updating slides that you or other people may want to use in other presentations.

Now then: If Office over all is simpler to use, its version matrix is not. There are eight versions. All include Word, Excel and PowerPoint; they differ only in the extras.

The $150 Home and Student edition, for example, also includes OneNote (a note-taking program). The Ultimate package ($680 — ouch) includes Access (database), Accounting Express, InfoPath (electronic forms), Groove (collaboration "workspaces"), Outlook, and Publisher (page layout). You can also buy programs à la carte.

Over all, Office 2007 is much more pleasant to use than previous versions. It seems to be the work of the New Microsoft, a company that is far more concerned with elegance, beauty and simplicity than the Old Microsoft. Little things like typography, choice of wording and on-screen feedback get much more consideration in Office 2007 (and Windows Vista, which goes on sale to consumers the same day).

Still, switching will be a headache for Office veterans for weeks. You may gain productivity once you've made peace with the Ribbon, but in the meantime, you'll spend a lot of time stumbling through the new layout.

Handy hint: Don't upgrade right before diving into an important project on deadline. In fact, for best results, don't buy until you've spent some time at microsoftoffice.com watching the tutorials and downloading the free trial versions.

By then, you'll have realized that the news, over all, is good. Microsoft Office may not be quite as big and hairy as it once was — but it's still got teeth.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/.../ptpogue18.php





The Accidental Publicist: Wippit and the Beatles
Victoria Shannon

Even when pressed, Paul Myers will not lay claim to teasing the public about the Beatles on the Internet.

"It was purely accidental," he said with a laugh when asked about the phantom press release posted this month on his London-based digital music Web site with the headline, "The Beatles available for download on Wippit."

Problem was, the full text of the press release - dated March 14 even though it was posted on March 9 - was not to be found under the headline.

The mystery got a mild bump in attention across the blogosphere and generated a news story on BBC.com. No surprise: The Beatles are among the last Top 10 bands, along with Led Zeppelin and Radiohead, that have not licensed their songs for sale digitally to outfits like Wippit and iTunes.

And when Apple (the computer company) settled its long-running trademark dispute last month with Apple (the Beatles' old record label), both analysts and ordinary fans speculated that a digital deal could at last be struck. So Wippit's press release was at least plausible.

In the end - that is, on March 14, the date of the press release - Wippit disclosed that it was offering collections of video clips of the Beatles for sale by download or as part of its subscription service. And even then, Wippit did not secure the rights for North American sales, so downloads from the United States are prohibited.

Myers, who founded Wippit seven years ago, before the age of the iPod, has no regrets about his incomplete, if not downright misleading, publicity lure. For a company that signs its press e-mails with the Oscar Wilde quotation, "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about," the stunt was not completely out of the blue.

Whether you see Myers as a marketing maestro or madman, he is still a pioneer in the digital music market. Wippit - named for the dog, not the Devo song "Whip It" - started as a peer-to-peer music site that, unlike its peers of the day, paid musicians and record labels royalty fees.

Today, Wippit is a subscription and download service that costs £50 per year or 29 pence per download. At various times, it has been the second-ranked digital music store in Britain, behind iTunes and ahead of Napster and eMusic, Myers said. While more than 50 percent of its business is in Britain, North America accounts for a good 17 percent; it also does business in continental Europe.

Myers believes digital music stores will not be able to compete on price or music catalogue for long because the differences among them just won't be that big.

Instead, they will need draws like old Beatles' videos or, as with a separate Wippit offering, unique services like converting tunes into cellphone ring tones, he said.

Another Wippit hallmark is that it offers half of its music selections for purchase in the unrestricted MP3 format, which can be played on virtually any digital music device, including the iPod.

Wippit subscribers choose MP3 over the alternative - the WMA format from Microsoft that is more difficult to copy on other media - by a ratio of four to one, Myers said, proving that something as techie as format can be a sales draw.

At the same time, he predicted, government noises, especially in Europe, about forcing music hardware and software to be compatible across brands will pressure the major record labels to free their digital sales from copying constraints and other digital rights management.

"They've got to look at the numbers and say, 'We want to sell more - forget about protecting the catalogue,' " Myers said. He expects at least one of the labels to make that move before the end of the year.

In the meantime, Wippit's Beatles release got worldwide attention, Myers said with relish.

And the British press is still speculating that EMI is on the verge of releasing The Beatles' back catalogue as digital downloads.

But don't hold your breath: EMI surely knows a thing or two about manipulating publicity to its advantage, too.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/.../ptend29.3.php





From February

Kodak's Cartridges: A a First Step
Victoria Shannon

It has long been a mystery and irritation to consumers: Why are ink-jet printer cartridges so expensive?

You can buy an entire printer for the price of three or four ink refills. For people who print a lot of photos at home, it feels like punishment for being a fan. For people who might be tempted to custom- print their own, it is a real barrier to even starting.

Mostly, the out-of-kilter pricing is a quirk of how the printer business evolved. It's the razor-and- blade model: The razor comes at an incredible value, but you are stuck buying expensive, proprietary razor blades for as long as you shave.

Kodak, struggling for a way to reclaim its past glory in the digital age, has decided to up-end the approach. This week, it got into the home ink-jet printer business, but it was the printers' replacement cartridges that got all the attention. The more expensive color ink is priced at $15, while the black ink cartridges go for $10.

For those of us paying $30 and up each time the printer runs dry, this is a godsend. Of course, Kodak's printers will not come at the dirt- cheap prices that we are now used to, but at around $200, the all-in- one printer-scanner-copiers are not completely out of reach, either.

Hewlett-Packard, the biggest seller of ink-jet printers, hasn't officially responded to Kodak's tactic. Nor have Canon, Lexmark and the others.

The inevitable result of competition like this can only be good for the consumer, right?

You might think so. But it may be too little, too late. Most of the printing of photos from digital cameras is not done at home, but through either Internet services or retail kiosks. Self-printing accounts for only about 30 percent of the snapshots that end up on paper, relegating us home-printing types to nearly the same niche status as home darkroom developers of the film age.

O.K., so if Kodak can make printer cartridges at a profit for $10, why can't the others? My brilliant suggestion to Jaime Cohen Szulc, the chairman of Eastman Kodak Europe, was for Kodak to make $10 cartridges for the other printer manufacturers.

Ah, but there's a catch: One of the reasons Kodak can cut the price and still claim to maintain high printing quality is that it moved the "print head," the mechanical device that actually does the spraying of the ink, from the ink-jet cartridge to the printer itself.

The conventional approach of the other printer makers is to craft the print head, at some expense, onto the cartridge. So Kodak's cartridges, even if they were slightly rejiggered to fit a Canon printer, would still need to be re-engineered to include the print head. Szulc said that this just was not going to happen.

Besides, the disgruntlement over ink prices isn't just about the $30. It is also about being locked into an HP replacement, for instance, if you have an HP printer, and Kodak has not changed that part of the equation. The existing printer manufacturers have made it difficult, if not impossible, for outside companies to make knock-off (i.e., cheaper) generic replacements.

Szulc said the Kodak's research has repeatedly shown that dissatisfaction with the price of ink cartridges is consumers' No. 1 complaint about home printing. Most also say they would print more if the cost were more reasonable.

"We're late to the market," he admitted. "That's why we couldn't come in with something that's only slightly better than what already exists."

Although Szulc called his company's tactic a "breakthrough" on pricing, he also said, "We're not doing this because we're nice people. We intend to make money on each printer and cartridge." Kodak aims to be among the top three printer makers in the world within three years, he said.

Still, Kodak is to be applauded for the move to cheaper cartridges, which will roll out globally in stages. (Two of its new printer models will be sold in Europe this spring before broader availability later in the year; no specific plans have been announced for Asia.) It may yet change the dynamics of the printer market.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...ss/ptend08.php





Google’s Chief Gets $1 in Pay; His Security Costs $532,755
Miguel Helft

It is not common for the salary of an American chief executive to be dwarfed by the cost of keeping that executive safe. But then, Google is an unconventional company.

The Internet search giant paid its top executive, Eric E. Schmidt, a salary of $1 and a holiday bonus of $1,723 in 2006, according to a regulatory filing Wednesday. But Mr. Schmidt’s personal security cost shareholders $532,755, representing the bulk of his compensation. Mr. Schmidt also received $22,456 to offset taxes due on a perk: the use of a Google-chartered aircraft by family members and friends.

Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin, president of technology, and Larry Page, president of products, earned the same salary and bonus as Mr. Schmidt. Mr. Page received an additional $36,795 for transportation, logistics and personal security.

The token salaries represent a sacrifice that Google’s top executives can afford to make. As of March 1, according to the filing, Mr. Schmidt owned more than 10.7 million shares, worth more than $5 billion at Wednesday’s closing price of $471.02. Mr. Brin owned 28.6 million shares worth about $13.5 billion, and Mr. Page owned nearly 29.2 million shares worth about $13.7 billion. Each sold shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the 12 months since the previous proxy filing.

The salary and bonuses paid to Mr. Schmidt, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page reflect little change from 2005, when they each earned a salary of $1 and bonuses of $1,630 to $1,723.

For the latest filings, guidance by the Securities and Exchange Commission included personal security as a perk that should be listed as compensation, said Jon Murchinson, a Google spokesman. He would not give further details about Mr. Schmidt’s security expenses.

Four other Google executives — the chief financial officer, George Reyes; the senior vice president for business operations, Shona Brown; the chief legal officer, David Drummond; and the senior vice president for product management, Jonathan Rosenberg — earned salaries of $250,000 each.

Adding other compensation, including stock option awards and incentives, they earned $1.7 million to $2.8 million. They also held unvested stock options with an estimated worth as of Dec. 31, 2006, that ranged from $21 million for Ms. Brown to $30 million for Mr. Drummond.

The company’s filing also includes a shareholder proposal to be voted on at the company’s May 10 annual meeting that would require Google to resist demands for censorship by all legal means and would prevent it from holding data that could be used to identify individuals in countries that restrict freedom of speech.

In recent years, Google has been criticized for its decision to create a search engine for the Chinese market that censors certain results. And its rival Yahoo has come under fire from human rights groups for handing over personal information to the Chinese authorities about users who were later imprisoned for criticizing the government.

Google’s board recommended that shareholders vote against the proposal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/te.../05google.html





Master of Search Seeks Mastery of the TV Dial
Miguel Helft

Following its conquest of YouTube last year, Google is now aiming for a piece of the old-fashioned tube.

The Internet search giant is announcing Tuesday that it will begin selling television ads on the 125 national satellite programming channels distributed by EchoStar Communications’ DISH Network.

The agreement is Google’s latest foray into offline media, and it underscores the company’s ambition to bring its wildly successful online advertising technology and auction-based pricing to new markets to continue fueling the company’s rapid growth.

Google’s online advertising technology has appealed to advertisers in large part because it allows them to aim ads effectively at specific audiences and users, and to measure the performance of those ads quickly. The company hopes it can bring those forces to old-line media.

“We think we can add value to this important medium by delivering more relevant ads to viewers, providing better accountability for advertisers and better monetize inventory for TV operators and programmers,” Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said in a statement announcing the EchoStar partnership.

Last year, Google began tests to sell radio spots and newspaper ads. Those tests have been inconclusive so far, and some analysts say the company needs to show investors that it can succeed in a market other than Internet search and advertising, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue.

“For Google to maintain its current momentum, it needs to become the king of something else beyond search, or play a meaningful role in a market that is much larger than the $16 billion online advertising market,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets.

For Google, the $70 billion television advertising market offers a potentially lucrative payoff. But Google is likely to encounter some resistance from cable operators with established sales forces, and competition from technology start-ups that also hope to broker TV ads.

Google’s official entry into television advertising has been widely anticipated, and it follows a limited test the company has been conducting since last year with a small Northern California cable system. The agreement with EchoStar, which has about 13 million subscribers, will allow Google to test its system nationwide.

Google will begin to place ads on the DISH Network in the next few months. A few dozen advertisers are expected to take part in the system initially, and Google says it hopes to open the program eventually to its entire base of advertisers.

“The EchoStar partnership allows us to take this to a national TV audience in all of their networks,” said Keval Desai, Google’s director of product management for TV.

Mr. Desai said the television ad system would work much like Google’s existing online and offline advertising systems. EchoStar would make some unspecified amount of air time available to Google’s advertisers. Advertisers or agencies would upload video spots to the system along with their desired target audience or network and would specify the price they are willing to bid for the air time.

Google’s ad system would then select the winning ads and play them on the air. Using information collected by EchoStar’s set-top satellite boxes, it will be able to give advertisers a report showing how many people viewed any ad and whether users tuned it out in the first few seconds.

Google will also use information collected by EchoStar to deliver the ads to their target audiences more precisely, the companies said.

Advertisers will not be able to designate specific households, but will be able to choose individual networks like ESPN or MTV and a time of day. Alternatively, they could choose a demographic group or geographic region, and Google’s system would schedule the ads across a variety of networks.

“Through this groundbreaking partnership with Google, we are confident we will be able to bring increased efficiencies to DISH Network’s advertising sales and more accurate, up-to-date viewer measurement with easily accessible online reporting to advertisers,” Charles W. Ergen, EchoStar’s chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Advertisers and agencies testing the system with Google said they were hopeful that it would prove compelling.

“The Internet is very effective for our clients,” said David Kenny, chief executive of the online marketing agency Digitas.

Mr. Kenny, who is also responsible for the digital strategy of the Publicis Groupe, the parent company of Digitas, added, “If we can do the same on the television screen with video assets, it has tremendous potential.”

But Mr. Kenny noted that the inventory available through Google’s system would most likely represent only a small slice of the overall television advertising market.

“This test is not a test that is going to change the future of television,” Mr. Kenny said.

One of Google’s biggest challenges in selling radio advertising has been its inability to obtain sufficient amounts of air time during prime-time hours and from top radio networks. Mr. Desai said that the EchoStar partnership included air time during all hours of the day and that Google was actively seeking other partners, including cable operators, satellite providers, television networks and local stations.

Michael Kelly, EchoStar’s executive vice president for advertising, said the advertising air time available through the system would be a “small percentage of EchoStar’s overall inventory.”

But he said Google’s ability to deliver ads that are more relevant to viewers, its auction model for selling ads and its expected ability to bring new advertisers to television would be good for EchoStar.

“I think it will have a positive impact on prices,” Mr. Kelly said.

Delivering more relevant ads may also allay fears among advertisers that viewers will increasingly use digital video recorders to skip ads, Mr. Kelly said.

Neither Google nor EchoStar would discuss how revenue from ads would be split between them. When Google sells ads on other companies’ Web sites, it gives the majority of the advertising revenue to those companies and keeps only a small portion.

Some analysts believe that if successful, Google’s technology could invigorate television advertising.

“It is very timely that TV can catch up and even surpass the Internet in terms of accountability,” said Bill Harvey, a media researcher and president of Bill Harvey Consulting.

But Mr. Harvey said Google might encounter resistance as it tries to sign up more partners.

“From the ad sales standpoint, Google competes with the networks’ own sales forces,” he said. “That could slow the adoption.”

Spot Runner, a start-up company that offers an automated online system to broker television ads, is already placing spots from large companies and small local businesses on most major cable networks, said Nick Grouf, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.

Mr. Grouf also said cable technology provides more interactivity and is better suited for precise ad delivery than satellite television.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/bu...ia/03adco.html





Google Enters DoubleClick Sweepstakes; Microsoft Must be Annoyed
Larry Dignan

Google is reportedly entering the DoubleClick sweepstakes in an effort to keep Microsoft from buying the ad network. It is almost as if Google is playing the how-annoying-can-we-be-to-Microsoft game.

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reported that Google is now interested in DoubleClick (see Techmeme discussion.) Sure, Google could build its own DoubleClick-ish network, but why not just buy it for a few billion if only to annoy Microsoft. After all, Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube, which had nearly zilch for revenue. Google could surely pay the $2 billion DoubleClick's owners want for something that resembles a real business.

For those keeping score at home the DoubleClick sales process shapes up like this: Microsoft is annoyed; Google is like the wealthy kid that giggles as he keeps poking you; and the private equity firm that owns DoubleClick is downright giddy.

Just imagine if you're the owner of DoubleClick right now. Hellman & Friedman bought DoubleClick, which had a spotty track record as a public company, for $1 billion, did some tinkering in the background and now is sitting on a potential bidding war between Google and Microsoft. With any luck–and a few more leaks to the Journal–Hellman & Friedman could more than double its money. Gotta love the private equity game right now.

Meanwhile, the Journal notes that Microsoft is likely to win as the bidding for DoubleClick surpasses $2 billion. That's a shame because Microsoft can't afford to let Google acquire DoubleClick. As noted before, Microsoft should buy DoubleClick to bolster its online advertising services. Microsoft employee Don Dodge has a nice rebuttal to my idea, but Google's entry may change things a bit.

Let's assume Google is serious about DoubleClick. If you combine Google and DoubleClick Microsoft will really have to play catch-up. And I'd argue we're beyond the point where Microsoft could build its way to parity. Take DoubleClick off the market and Yahoo becomes one of the few options for Microsoft's online advertising aspirations. And that's really going to be pricey.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4769#comments





DoubleClick to Host Ad Exchange
Louise Story

DoubleClick, which delivers marketing messages to Web sites and monitors how many clicks they get, is setting up a Nasdaq-like exchange for the buying and selling of digital advertisements.

The service, which was to be introduced Wednesday, could make DoubleClick a more attractive acquisition target, according to advertising industry executives.

DoubleClick, which opened in 1996 as a pioneer in the placement of banner ads online, has evolved into a company that serves - separately - both buyers and sellers of digital advertisements.

For advertising agencies and media buyers, it helps place ads online and gauge the effectiveness of campaigns. For Web publishers - companies that publish Web content and accept ads on their sites - DoubleClick delivers the ads to the Web sites and sells software that helps make the most of available space.

The new DoubleClick advertising exchange will bring Web publishers and advertising buyers together on a Web site where they can participate in auctions for ad space.

DoubleClick, based in New York, views the exchange as the centerpiece of a growth plan, David Rosenblatt, the company's chief executive, said in an interview Tuesday. "We already have the largest sellers and the largest buyers," he said. "This will link them for the first time."

He described the exchange as a mix of eBay and Sabre, the airline-reservations system that travel agents use. The service will let advertisers see information about what competitors bid for particular ads, in the same way that eBay shows previous bids. And it will let publishers try to ensure that they sell their ad spots at the highest possible price, the way that airlines try to do with the seats they sell.

"The value of our company depends completely on our ability to maximize our customers' revenue," Rosenblatt said.

Some of the biggest names on the Internet appear to have already seen the value in DoubleClick's service - or its potential. Google and Microsoft are pursuing bids to buy the company, according to The Wall Street Journal, which said that DoubleClick's owner, the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, has priced DoubleClick at more than $2 billion.

Hellman & Friedman, which paid $1.1 billion for the company in July 2005, did not return a call for comment on Tuesday night.

The online advertisement exchange will make DoubleClick more attractive to a potential acquirer because there is much demand for such a service and little supply, industry executives said. One of the few companies that runs this kind of auction, Right Media, took in $40 million in October when it sold a 20 percent stake to Yahoo.

"If you want to be a network in this kind of market, the biggest challenge you face is access to publisher-side supply," said Michael Walrath, the chief executive of Right Media. "So ad management - providing the trafficking and delivery services to publishers - is a really nice foot in the door to gaining access to those publishers' supply."

Historically, ads in traditional media like television and magazines have been purchased through human negotiation. But the auctions introduced by Internet companies like Google and Yahoo for search advertising have forced some advertising executives to look for more efficient ways to sell ads. Now some of the biggest names on the Internet, including Google and eBay, are seeking to participate more broadly in advertising auctions.

DoubleClick's revenue in 2006 was about $300 million, but some industry executives said that the auction service the company was introducing made it worth much more.

"Whoever gets them can immediately turn into an ad-exchange business overnight," said Dave Morgan, the chief executive of Tacoda, an online advertising network. "Two billion dollars will not be a stretch for that."

DoubleClick has signed up 35 Web publishers, advertising networks, agencies and advertisers to test the system, which should be up and running in the third quarter. Two of the testers are Advertising.com, a large ad network, and Media Contacts, an interactive media buyer that is part of Havas. DoubleClick will charge a commission for each ad impression traded on its exchange.

DoubleClick serves - or delivers - the display ads on many large Web sites, including AOL and MySpace. It is those relationships with Web publishers that industry executives see as vital to the success of the exchange and to the courtship by companies like Google and Microsoft, which are trying for a broader foothold in online advertising.

Google has reportedly offered Web publishers free ad-management services - like those that DoubleClick charges for - in exchange for the ability to sell premium ads on their sites.

Most of the ads for sale on existing exchanges are leftover space that big advertisers are not interested in, said Shelby Saville, a senior vice president at StarLink, a media buying firm within the Publicis Groupe.

But exchanges help add transparency, Saville said. Advertisers often do not know exactly which sites their ads run on with ad networks, and an exchange could remove some of that unknown factor, she said.

DoubleClick will allow Web publishers to sell ad space on their sites without identifying themselves. Some Web publishers may want their spaces sold along with the name of their sites, but others may not want advertisers to see that they sell ads at a lower price on the exchange than they do in traditional negotiations. And DoubleClick will let Web publishers hold private auctions in which they invite only select ad agencies or advertisers to bid on their ads.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/...iness/adco.php





Firefox OS: Why My Hard Drive & Software are Obsolete
Leo Babauta

While the debate of Windows v. Mac v. Linux rages on, at times rising to a roar in certain circles, I meekly raise my hand and offer a newly emerging fourth choice: none of these operating systems really matter anymore.

Why not? Because for writers like me, and for many others, all the software and storage space you really need is now online. All that matters is that you have your browser — and at the risk of sparking another flame war, I recommend Firefox.

Need a word processor, spreadsheet, photo program, or really most anything useful? Old-fashioned desktop applications aren’t necessary anymore, for the most part. You can fire up your browser on any computer, and given a decent internet connection, you’ve got your entire OS and hard drive right there, from anywhere you log in.

Now, before people start chiming in with “But I need X Application in order to do my work!” I have a disclaimer: my needs are relatively simple, so you may not be able to do what I’ve done. But I’ve intentionally simplified my needs, and for many people, this simplification can not only work, but be better than what’s offered on the desktop.

Here’s my Firefox OS, with an intentionally heavy reliance on the Google suite of software:

Word processor. I use Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I used its predecessor, Writely, in the past, and it works well. I’ve never been a fan of the bloated MS Word … until recently, I used the much smaller and faster open-source word processor, AbiWord. But when I would forget to email myself a text file from work to home, I cursed myself and made the switch to Google Docs. I haven’t regretted it yet.

Spreadsheet. Again, Google Docs & Spreadsheets. It isn’t as feature-rich as Excel or OpenOffice yet, but it does the job for most of my needs. In fact, it’s rare that I ever need anything more, and I suspect that’s the case for most people. And I expect the software to improve over time.

Email. This is a no-brainer. Gmail, all the time. It’s so much better than desktop email apps, and better than its competing webmail apps too. Fast, easy to use, powerful searches and features … enough can’t be said about Gmail. It’s my No. 1 app for work and personal use.

Feed reader. I’ve tried a lot of blog readers, including some good desktop and online readers. But Google Reader is by far the most efficient. I read it 2-3 times a day, and crank through my feeds. I can get through 100+ posts a day very quickly.

Blogging software. For my main blog at Zen Habits, I’ve tried various software, but so far the best for my needs is WordPress. It has everything I need, and is very extensible with lots of great plugins.

Photo software. One of the biggest reasons I need a hard drive is for all my photos, at work and home. I’ve solved that with Picasa Web Albums — another Google solution. I tried Flickr, but their free account is too flimsy, and Picasa just works better. Plus, if you like their great desktop software, it’s so perfectly integrated. I just uploaded all my thousands of photos from home, and it’s nicely organized online.

Hard drive. What do you need a hard drive for? Besides the space needed to run your system, and software such as your browser, we use hard drives for file storage — for our word processing and spreadsheet documents, photos, music files, PDFs, etc. Well, for the most part, all my files are now saved online. Between Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail, and Picasa, everything I save is stored on the internet. The one thing I haven’t found a perfect solution for is mp3s, but I haven’t been using those much, and I’m sure a solution will turn up soon (let me know in the comments!). Another great solution is online storage such as Box.net, MediaMax (25 GB for free!), Gmail Drive and the like.

File management. The main reason for an OS is to manage your files. Well, since all my files are online, that’s now a moot point. How do I manage my files now? Well, as I use mostly Google software, I use Google’s philosophy: tag and archive everything, and use the tags or Google’s fast and powerful searches to find anything you need. This takes a bit of an adjustment on the user’s part, trusting this new paradigm to work, but trust me, it’s much better than filing stuff in folders. You save a heck of a lot of time filing and finding stuff. It’s not hierarchical, so that’s difficult for many people — but it works.

Backup system. One of the big problems with a hard drive is the very real possibility that it will crash sometime during its lifetime. And unless you’ve been good at backing up your files, you will lose that data. With all my files saved online, there’s no need to back up these files, which can be time-consuming and troublesome. Good news: most of these services do a good job of backing up your data for you.

Calendar. For its ease-of-use and simplicity, Google Calendar (of course). It doesn’t have all the functionality of certain desktop calendar programs, but it works great for me.

Bringing it all together. I use a lot of Google apps, but Google’s main problem (for me) so far is that it doesn’t integrate these services well. Well, enter another Google solution: the Google Personalize Homepage. It’s now my home page. But I don’t use it like many others do, with all kinds of fun and distracting widgets, or to read all my blogs. No, I just have all my Google services on this page for easy access, along with quick bookmarks for all the other stuff I use for work and for my blogging, and some stickies for taking quick notes. One page to rule them all.

Miscellaneous. I’m a fan of GTD, so I use Tracks for my to-do lists. I use other online software, such as Backpack for keeping other lists, but the ones above are the main apps. I also use AutoHotkey to quickly bring up the pages I use a lot, like Gmail, my to-do lists, my story ideas file, and the like, as well as to type my different signatures and other shortcuts.

Firefox, of course. All of this is possible with Internet Explorer or the very good Safari or Opera browsers, but Firefox just makes it that much better. It’s so easy and fast to use, plus there are certain extensions I can’t live without — Foxmarks, Gmail Manager, FireFTP, Download Statusbar and Web Developer among them. Give me Firefox, and I don’t care what brand of OS I’m using.

Is online software as feature-rich as desktop software? Not yet. But it’s good enough for my simple needs, and it’s getting better all the time.

Have I really gotten rid of my hard drive and software? Not yet. I still have all my old files on the hard drive, but they’re collecting dust. I no longer store my new files on my hard drive, and I rarely use my old desktop software. I keep them on my computer just in case I need to open up a specially formatted file, but for my nitty-gritty daily work, I don’t need that old software anymore.


Someday, none of us will, and the decades-old OS debate will be a thing of the past.
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/tec...-obsolete.html





Hackers Dissect Apple TV to Create the Cheapest Mac Ever
Rob Beschizza

Apple TV is dead, long live the Mac Nano. Sort of.

Just two weeks after Apple released its streaming media box to the public, hackers successfully installed OS X, Apple's desktop operating system, on the $300 device, making it the cheapest PC Cupertino has ever sold.

"The breakthrough is done, OS X runs on Apple TV!" wrote "Semthex," the anonymous hacker responsible for the mod, at his website. "Now we got (the) low-budget Mac we ever wanted."

The add-on may be of limited appeal to everyday users. It involves a laborious 13-step procedure, and the resulting installation is unable to take advantage of all the Apple TV's hardware. Without video acceleration, games can't floor the graphic chip's throttle. There's no audio or ethernet support either, making the box useless for its original purpose as a media hub.

Over the past week, however, enthusiasts worked to solve these problems, exchanging ideas over IRC and testing new versions of specially tailored system software Semthex created, which is necessary to bypass built-in restrictions on installing the full version of OS X.

"This hack seriously opens up the doors with what the Apple TV could be used for," said Tom Anthony, administrator of Apple TV Hacks, in an e-mail.

Released March 21, Apple TV won praise for its compact design and usable interface, and criticism for its limited utility and poor-quality video content. Early hacks included adding the popular Xvid video codec and installing a larger hard drive. Some hackers enabled SSH to permit secure command-line access to the box, and USB keyboards and mice soon followed. Other unauthorized add-ons include the Apache web server, early attempts at a Linux port and the VNC remote desktop system.

The hacks are not for the faint-hearted. Gaining the system access required to accomplish these modifications usually requires owners to get their hands dirty, opening the box and following complex instructions that might deter the casual user.

With OS X on board, however, almost anything might soon be running on Apple TV, even the Media Center edition of Microsoft Windows.

The reasons behind this assault are found in the box itself: Despite being fitted with a Pentium M processor, as much RAM as Sony's PlayStation 3 and a faster graphics chip than a Nintendo Wii, Apple TV doesn't replace other devices under the TV set. While some people are happy to stream media from iTunes libraries to their televisions, many want to put that hardware to other uses. More, perhaps, than anyone suspected.

Anthony's site was briefly unavailable earlier this week, battered by hordes of visitors.

"I wasn't quite prepared for how big it would be; in the first week I had half a million visitors, and I had to purchase additional bandwidth to the site," Anthony said. "The biggest problem with the site has been (that) I have been receiving so many e-mails ... I haven't been able to keep up with my day job."

If Apple objects to this kind of interference, it has yet to say so openly, though unlikely sounding (and unconfirmed) rumors circulated late last week that Apple was remotely disabling add-ons through a remote internet connection.
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/new...letvhacks_0406





Flashy Wrestling Shows Grab the World by the Neck and Flex
Seth Schiesel



Quick, name the biggest events in global pop culture during the last week.

College basketball’s Final Four? Hoops makes for nice water-cooler talk in the United States, but do you think Florida vs. Ohio State was news in Japan? Hardly. And the start of the baseball season gets Americans excited, but did thousands of Europeans fly over to watch the Rockies play the Diamondbacks? Uh, no.

Meanwhile, the eyes and wallets of millions around the world were fixed on this unglamorous city for what is becoming a star-studded entertainment happening: WrestleMania. On Sunday 80,103 people from 24 countries and 50 states packed the cavernous Ford Field stadium here while the program was delivered via satellite to 110 countries.

Two decades after stars like Hulk Hogan and Sgt. Slaughter propelled professional wrestling from the dank beer halls of its infancy onto screens around the globe, this smorgasbord of hairspray, cleavage and monster body slams remains as popular as ever, even if it usually escapes the notice of coastal tastemakers.

In recent years World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., the company based in Stamford, Conn., that dominates the pastime, has turned pro wrestling into a sort of modern-day Chautauqua, a perpetual traveling roadshow that crisscrosses the nation while broadcasting from packed arenas 52 weeks a year. Every year more than two million fans pass through W.W.E. turnstiles worldwide. Every week, wrestling shows attract more than 15 million television viewers, making them a fixture among the top-rated cable programs.

Yet WrestleMania remains the pinnacle. An annual event that began at Madison Square Garden in 1985, WrestleMania is now an almost weeklong celebration of everything wrestling, from a black-tie induction into the W.W.E. Hall of Fame to Aretha Franklin singing “America the Beautiful” before the final night’s matches. No wrestler is a true star until performing at WrestleMania (yes, the fights are scripted), and any true fan must make the pilgrimage at least once. Here are some voices and scenes from a profoundly American event that now speaks to a global audience.

Wednesday, March 28

The final round of hype begins not in Detroit but at the Trump World Tower in Midtown Manhattan, where thousands of fans mob the atrium, hanging off at least four levels of escalators to watch a noon “press conference” at which no questions are taken. The big twist at WrestleMania 23 is that Donald Trump will face off against Vince McMahon, the W.W.E. chairman, via proxies in Detroit in a “Hair vs. Hair” match, which means the winner shaves the head of the loser.

Mr. Trump’s champion is Bobby Lashley, an affable former all-American in (real) wrestling. Mr. McMahon is represented by Umaga, a wild-haired Samoan with tattoos covering his face. Mr. Lashley’s slogan is “I’m living my dream.” Umaga alternately growls and bellows incoherently over a pounding soundtrack of tribal drums. There is no confusion about who the good guy is.

That night, in a bar in the Greektown neighborhood of Detroit, Ray Paige, 51, a local lawyer, explains why even in the town that produced Joe Louis and Thomas Hearns, wrestling has become more popular than boxing.

“They have marketed the product better in terms of providing a morality-based story line,” Mr. Paige says. “Kids like good guys, and wrestling provides them. Boxing doesn’t.”

Thursday, March 29

Around 6 p.m. hundreds of fans throng the sidewalk for blocks down the street from the Gem Theater in Detroit. THQ, a big video game publisher, is holding the Superstar Challenge to promote its SmackDown vs. Raw game franchise, which has sold more than 30 million copies since 2000. The doors won’t open for another hour, but fans hoping to watch wrestlers play the video game started lining up around 2 p.m.

Fourth in line is Jon Palmar, a tall, thin 18-year-old with a spiky haircut who is soon to graduate from high school in Miami. As an early graduation present, his family paid $750 for a seventh-row ticket to WrestleMania, and he has personally paid a scalper $100 for a ticket with a face value of $18 to this THQ event. “It’s the combination of the athleticism, the showmanship and the stories that just hooks you,” he says. “And I want to become a wrestler myself. You know, some steroids and I’ll be able to do it.”

Is he serious about the steroids?

“To accomplish my dreams I’m willing to do whatever it takes,” he says. Inside, an up-and-coming wrestling star called C. M. Punk has “Drug Free” tattooed across his fingers.

“Wrestlers, even more so than athletes in the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or baseball, we’re closer to being superheroes to a lot of people, especially kids,” he says. “Look at me: I’m covered in tattoos, and you might not think just by appearance I’m a good role model. But I don’t do drugs, I’m straight, I abstain from all that stuff, and it’s the perfect ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover,’ and I think a lot of people can relate to that.”

Friday, March 30

The W.W.E. has rented the Fox Theater, a 1920s movie palace, for the world premiere of “The Condemned,” an action-adventure film starring the hulking wrestler known as Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Before it starts, Nigel Doughty, 26, an accountant from Manchester, England, explains why he and a friend each paid $1,400 for a platinum WrestleMania travel package.

“For a wrestling fan this is the World Cup, the Super Bowl, the World Series all in one,” he says. “We had to save up for 18 months to be able to get here, but from the first day I started watching years ago I was like, ‘One day I’ll make it to WrestleMania,’ so this is a lifelong dream come true.”

What makes wrestling so compelling? “As a kid watching wrestling it’s about the costumes and colors,” he says, “but as you get older it becomes about the story lines and the characters. It really is a soap opera for men.”

Saturday, March 31

It is shortly after noon at Midday Madness 3, a chance for fans to get autographs and have their pictures taken with W.W.E. stars.

In the line that winds through a hotel lobby, Jackie Fairbairn and Rebecca Richards, both 22, stand out in their “Aussie WWE Divas” T-shirts. These women from Sydney, Australia, are accompanied by other members of their international fan crew, Tim Wood, 23, of Nottingham, England, and Kim Mattson, 24, who works at an investment firm in Norwalk, Conn.

“I met Tim at WrestleMania 21 in Los Angeles, and we met the Australian girls at WrestleMania 22 last year in Chicago,” Ms. Mattson says. Now they stay in touch through e-mail messages and get together at least once a year.

“Meeting these guys is more important than the actual show now,” Mr. Wood says. “It’s like a social occasion with friends from all over the world.”

And like the Deadheads who followed the Grateful Dead, the crew is hitting the road after WrestleMania. “We’re going to ‘Raw’ in Dayton, Ohio, on Monday, and then we’ll be in Fort Wayne on Tuesday for ‘SmackDown,’ and then we’ll be back in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on April 9 for ‘Raw,’ ” Ms. Mattson explains, referring to various W.W.E. series. “Really the show never stops.”

Sunday, April 1

The big night is finally here. An hour before doors open, thousands crowd the stadium loading dock, hoping for a glimpse of the stars. Inside, the physical production puts even the biggest rock concerts to shame. A stage and proscenium the height of a small office tower loom over the west end of the stadium, feeding a runway to the ring in the center of the floor.

Randall Godfrey, 33, middle linebacker for the San Diego Chargers, is sitting just a few rows from the ring. “Wrestling is definitely more punishing than playing football,” he says. “I mean, we wear pads. They don’t. Football is hard, but it can’t compare to the physical punishment these guys take in the ring.”

Before the hair showdown, the biggest match is a heavyweight title fight between Batista and the Undertaker, an immense, legendary figure who has a 14-0 record at WrestleMania.

From the very last row of the very highest tier of the stadium, each wrestler is the size of a fingernail held at arm’s length. But John Berkeypile Jr., 13, from Jackson, Mich., barely glances at the huge video screens by the stage. Standing on his chair, his eyes glued to the Lilliputian figures in the ring, he delivers a running commentary as he cheers on “ ’Taker.”

“ ’Taker’s doing a little old-school, coming off the ropes,” cries John Jr., who is at WrestleMania with his father. “Here comes the leg drop, now trying a choke-slam, but Batista gets out of it. Uh-oh, here comes another leg drop!”

The Undertaker ends up defending his WrestleMania record as he pile-drives Batista on his head. And then, to the surprise of few, Mr. Lashley defeats the ogrelike Umaga in the hair match. Mr. McMahon hams up his defeat, cringing and wailing suitably as Mr. Trump shaves his head. Stone Cold Steve Austin is the guest referee. In keeping with his slogan — “Arrive. Raise hell. Leave.” — he decks Mr. Trump on his way out, just because.

After all, it’s WrestleMania.

On Monday World Wrestling Entertainment presents “Raw” at the Arena at Harbor Yard in Bridgeport, Conn.; on Tuesday it presents “SmackDown” and “ECW” at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence, R.I.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/ar...n/04mania.html





Russia Challenges the U.S. Monopoly on Satellite Navigation
Andrew E. Kramer

The days of their cold war may have passed, but Russia and the United States are in the midst of another battle — this one a technological fight over the United States monopoly on satellite navigation.

By the end of the year, the authorities here say, the Russian space agency plans to launch eight navigation satellites that would nearly complete the country’s own system, called Glonass, for Global Navigation Satellite System.

The system is expected to begin operating over Russian territory and parts of adjacent Europe and Asia, and then go global in 2009 to compete with the Global Positioning System of the United States.

Nor is Russia the only country trying to break the American monopoly on navigation technology. China has already sent up satellites to create its own system, called Baidu after the Chinese word for the Big Dipper. And the European Union has also begun developing a rival system, Galileo, although work has been halted because of doubts among the private contractors over its potential for profits. Russia’s system is furthest along, paid for with government oil revenue.

What is driving the technological battle is, in part, the potential for many more uses for satellite navigation than the one most people know it for — giving driving instructions to travelers. Businesses as disparate as agriculture and banking are integrating it into their operations. Satellite navigation may provide the platform for services like site-specific advertising, with directions that appear on cellphone screens when a user is walking, for example, near a Starbucks coffee shop or a McDonald’s restaurant.

Sales of G.P.S. devices are already booming. The global market for the devices hit $15 billion in 2006, according to the GPS Industry Council, a Washington trade group, and is expanding at a rate of 25 to 30 percent annually.

But what is also behind the battle for control of navigation technology is a fear that the United States could use its monopoly — the system was developed and is controlled by the military, after all — to switch off signals in a time of crisis.

“In a few years, business without a navigation signal will become inconceivable,” said Andrei G. Ionin, an aerospace analyst with the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, which is linked to the Russian defense ministry. “Everything that moves will use a navigation signal — airplanes, trains, yachts, people, rockets, valuable animals and favorite pets.”

When that happens, countries that choose to rely only on G.P.S., he said, will be falling into “a geopolitical trap” of American dominance of an important Internet-age infrastructure. The United States could theoretically deny navigation signals to countries like Iran and North Korea, not just in time of war, but as a high-tech form of economic sanction that could disrupt power grids, banking systems and other industries, he said. The United States government’s stated policy is to provide uninterrupted signals globally.

G.P.S. devices, in fact, are at the center of the dispute over the Iranian seizure of 15 British sailors and marines. The British maintain that the devices on their boats showed they were in Iraqi waters; the Iranians have countered with map coordinates that it said showed they had been in Iranian waters.

Russia’s project, of course, carries wide implications for armies around the world by providing a navigation system not controlled by the Pentagon, complementing Moscow’s increasingly assertive foreign policy stance.

The United States formally opened G.P.S. to civilian users in 1993 by promising to provide it continually, at no cost, around the world.

The Russian system is also calculated to send ripples through the fast-expanding industry for consumer navigation devices by promising a slight technical advantage over G.P.S. alone, analysts and industry executives say. Devices receiving signals from both systems would presumably be more reliable.

President Vladimir V. Putin, who speaks often about Glonass and its possibilities, has prodded his scientists to make the product consumer friendly.

“The network must be impeccable, better than G.P.S., and cheaper if we want clients to choose Glonass,” Mr. Putin said last month at a Russian government meeting on the system, according to the Interfax news agency.

“You know how much I care about Glonass,” Mr. Putin told his ministers.

G.P.S. has its roots in the American military in the 1960s. In 1983, before the system was fully functional, President Ronald Reagan suggested making it available to civilian users around the world after a Korean Air flight strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down.

G.P.S. got its first military test in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and was seen as a big reason for the success of the precision bombing campaign, which helped spur its adoption in commercial applications in the 1990s.

The Russian system, like America’s G.P.S., has roots in the cold war technology to guide strategic bombers and missiles. It was briefly operational in the mid-1990s, but fell into disrepair. The Russian satellites send signals that are usable now but work only intermittently.

To operate globally, a system needs a minimum of 24 satellites, the number in the G.P.S. constellation, not counting spares in orbit.

A receiver must be in line of sight of no fewer than three satellites at any time to triangulate an accurate position. A fourth satellite is needed to calculate altitude. As other countries introduce competing systems, devices capable of receiving foreign signals along with G.P.S. will more often be in line of sight of three or more satellites.

Within the United States, Western Europe and Japan, ground-based transmissions hone the accuracy of signals to within a few feet of a location — better than what could be achieved with satellite signals alone. The Russian and eventual European or Chinese systems, therefore, would make receivers more reliable in preventing signal loss when there are obstructions, like steep canyons, tall buildings or even trees.

Still, a Glonass-capable G.P.S. receiver in the United States, Western Europe or Japan would not be more accurate than a G.P.S. system alone, because of the ground-based correction signals. In other parts of the world, a Glonass-capable G.P.S. receiver would be more reliable and slightly more accurate.

American manufacturers that are dominant in the industry could be confronted with pressure to offer these advantages to customers by making devices compatible with the Russian system, inevitably undermining the American monopoly on navigation signals used in commerce.

In this sense, the Russians are setting off the first salvo in a battle for an infrastructure in the skies. Russia sees a great deal at stake in influencing the standards that will be used in civilian consumer devices.

The market for satellite navigators is growing rapidly. Garmin, the largest American manufacturer, more than doubled sales of automobile navigators in 2006, for example, and in February it showed a Super Bowl ad that was seen as a coming of age for G.P.S. navigators as a mass market product.

Jeremy D. Ludwig was one consumer who said he would be willing to pay a slight premium for a device equipped with a chip capable of processing Russian navigation signals.

He recounted a recent trip on Interstate 25 in Colorado, when, he said, he was dismayed to discover the G.P.S. device on his BlackBerry had inexplicably lost its signal, just as he was trying to decide which exit to take into Denver.

“If you don’t know which exit to take, you’re already lost,” Mr. Ludwig, an art student, said in a recent telephone interview from Colorado Springs.

That kind of attitude is what Russia is banking on even as it also takes a stab at making consumer receivers — so far without much success. But the Russian goal of diversifying navigation signals used in commerce will be achieved, Mr. Ionin said, even if foreign manufacturers simply adopt the Russian standard, and even if Russia’s own attempt to make consumer devices fails.

To encourage wide acceptance, Mr. Putin has been pitching the system during foreign visits, asking for collaboration and financial support.

Now, only makers of high-end surveying and professional navigation receivers have adopted dual-system capability.

Topcon Positioning Systems of Livermore, Calif., for example, offers a Glonass and G.P.S. receiver for surveyors and heavy-equipment operators. Javad Navigation Systems is built around making dual-system receivers, with offices in San Jose and Moscow.

Javad Ashjaee, the president of Javad, said in an interview that wide adoption was inevitable because more satellites provided an inherently better service. “If you have G.P.S., you have 90 percent of what you need,” he said. Russia’s system will succeed, he said, “for that extra 10 percent.”

Adding Glonass to low-end consumer devices would require a new chip, with associated design costs, but probably not much in the way of additional manufacturing expenses, he said.

Already this year, in a sign of growing acceptance of Glonass, another high-end manufacturer, Trimble, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., introduced a Russian-compatible device for agricultural navigators, used for applying pesticides, for example.

Whether consumer goods manufacturers will follow is an open question, John R. Bucher, a wireless equipment analyst at BMO Capital Markets, said in a telephone interview.

Garmin, which has more than 50 percent of the American market, has not yet taken a position on Glonass. “We are waiting,” Jessica Myers, a spokeswoman for Garmin, said in a telephone interview.

For most consumers, she said, devices are reliable enough already. Growth in the industry is driven instead by better digital mapping and software, making what already exists more useful. Garmin’s latest car navigator, for example, alerts drivers to traffic jams on the road ahead and the price of gas at nearby stations.

At home at least, the Kremlin is guaranteeing a market by requiring ships, airplanes and trucks carrying hazardous materials to operate with Glonass receivers, while providing grants to half a dozen Russian manufacturers of navigators.

Technically precise they may be, but even by Russian standards, some of the Russian-made products coming to market now are noticeably lacking in convenience features.

At the Russian Institute of Radionavigation and Time in St. Petersburg, for example, scientists have developed the M-103 dual system receiver. The precision device theoretically operates more reliably than a G.P.S. unit under tough conditions, like the urban canyons of Manhattan.

With its boxy appearance, the M-103 resembles a Korean War-era military walkie-talkie. It weighs about one pound and sells for $1,000, display screen not included. To operate, a user must unfurl a cable linking the set to an external antenna mounted on a spiked stick, intended to be jabbed into a field.

“Unfortunately, we haven’t developed a hand-held version yet,” said Vadim S. Zholnerov, a deputy director of the institute.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/03/business/gps.php





'Planet Earth' Viewers Get Close to Nature

The 11-part hi-def epic was filmed with a camera system that provides startling high-quality perspectives.
David Sarno

A thousand feet above Van Nuys, J.T. Alpaugh sat in the rear seat of a news copter, joystick in hand, ready to show off the high-definition video camera that hung orb-like from the front of the aircraft.

"OK, see that car up there?" Alpaugh asked. "Next to the white truck?"

Two miles down Ventura Boulevard, a white speck crept across an intersection. Next to it was another, smaller white speck.

"Sort of," said a reporter along for the ride.

"Right. Now watch the monitor," said Alpaugh.

The helicopter's high-definition video screen showed the same unremarkable view of Tarzana that could be seen outside the windshield. The long ribbon of Ventura Boulevard stretched into the distance, and the two white specks inched along. But as Alpaugh pressed a switch on his controller, the specks began to grow. And grow. And grow, until the smaller one had bloomed into an obviously alabaster white Mercedes E-class, featuring a blue California license plate whose letters and numbers were so vivid that both passengers read it aloud.

This camera system — called the Cineflex V14 — was designed by engineers at Cineflex, LLC, a division of the Van Nuys-based Helinet Group. The Cineflex takes a $90,000 high-definition camera and fits it with a telephoto lens capable of magnifying images to 84 times their actual size. But more than resolution or zoom length, what defines the Cineflex is its preternatural stability. The lens and sensor float inside a kind of gyro-stabilized bubble that does not move, no matter what the helicopter does. So even if the pilot drops into a steep turn through bumpy, stormy air, the image of that license plate won't so much as flitter.

One of the first filmmakers to see the Cineflex's potential was BBC nature producer Alistair Fothergill, the man behind "Planet Earth," the 11-part, hi-def nature epic that premiered Sunday on the Discovery Channel. Fothergill saw that Cineflex's tremendous range, resolution and stability could allow aerial teams to capture gorgeous, high-quality close-ups of animals without disturbing them. Moreover, using high-definition video meant air crews could finally ditch burdensome film cameras. No longer would helicopters have to land and reload every time a 10-minute film magazine ran out; now crews could stay aloft for hours, filming continuously.

"We suddenly saw, hang on, there are a series of animal behaviors out there which have not been filmable because [the old] cameras cannot keep up," said Fothergill. But Cineflex could. "And that was clearly going to be revolutionary."

The first episode of "Planet Earth" featured an extended hunting sequence in northern Canada. Helinet cinematographer Michael Kelem and his crew used a Cineflex to track wolves as they stalked migrating caribou. "As soon as they start running, you're on them," said Kelem, "You're like a police helicopter in a car chase."

Kelem was able to capture four wolf hunts in his first two hours, including one that ended in a prized "pull-down" — or kill. "The [camera] guys on the ground were going, 'That's better than we can do in two weeks!' "

Although filming wolf kills is a blast, it turns out not to pay much. So Helinet does a lot of work in Hollywood. Founder Alan Purwin — who for a while in the '80s was the guy who flew "Airwolf" — is a respected aerial coordinator who enjoys fruitful relationships with directors like Steven Spielberg, Tony Scott and Michael Bay. Cineflex-equipped copters are a filmmaker favorite because at some level, they can do just about anything. Helinet pilots can "park" in midair for static shots — Cineflex's stability makes it look like the shot is taken from a steel crane — and perform dangerous and intricate stunt sequences, like the one Purwin did for the upcoming movie "Transformers" that involved flying four helicopters in tandem under the bridge on Cesar Chavez Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Back up above Tarzana, Alpaugh trained the camera on a poor sap speeding down the Ventura Freeway in an F-150 pickup.

"He has no idea we're looking at him," said Alpaugh, offering a comment on Cineflex's other, more ominous application: surveillance. In the monitor, the driver's face was so well defined you could tell he didn't shave that morning.

It's clear that aerial photography has come a long way since the days of the white Ford Bronco, when a momentary glimpse of shoulder was enough to keep viewers watching.

Law enforcement is a growing market. Helinet has partnerships with federal, state and local authorities as well as the work it's done with "three-letter agencies."

When it comes to Cineflex's potential as a law-enforcement tool, though, Alpaugh and Purwin prefer to accentuate the positive. "Let's say there's an event with a lot of crowds," explained Alpaugh. "An event that may be attractive as a terrorist target."

Law-enforcement officials can then "look at people, look at expressions, look at clothing, look at backpacks — things you would normally look at if you were on the ground walking among these people."

Kelem, the Helinet cinematographer who shot the wolf hunt, has an idea for a documentary: "I'd like to cut a tape where it's animals chasing animals and police chasing criminals," he said. "It's like the same."

Which is either amusing or insensitive — depending on your angle.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...ck=3&cset=true





Surveillance

8-Month Jail Term Ends as Maker of Video Turns Over a Copy
Jesse McKinley

Eight months after he went to jail for refusing to turn over a videotape of a violent protest to federal authorities, a freelance videographer and blogger was released on Tuesday, ending what has been called the longest incarceration ever of an American journalist.

The videographer, Josh Wolf, was released after appearing before a federal judge here on Monday and turning over a copy of the video he had shot of a July 2005 anticapitalist protest in which a police officer was injured and someone tried to set a police car on fire.

Mr. Wolf answered two questions about the protest here, which coincided with a meeting of the Group of Eight economic leaders in Scotland, said his lawyer, Martin Garbus. Mr. Wolf denied seeing anything regarding the attack on the officer or the police car, Mr. Garbus said, and also posted all the video on his Web site, www.joshwolf.net.

Mr. Wolf, 24, was jailed in August for refusing to hand over the video or testify despite a grand jury subpoena. While Mr. Wolf never testified in front of a grand jury, the judge, William Alsup of Federal District Court, said in the release order on Tuesday that the United States attorney now had “all the materials sought in the subpoena.”

While some critics, including Judge Alsup, had questioned whether Mr. Wolf, who was unaffiliated with any news organization, actually qualified as a journalist, advocates for press freedom hailed his release.

“Josh gave up his freedom for 224 days because he believes that a free and independent press cannot exist without a trusting relationship between a journalist and his information sources,” said Lucie Morillon of Reporters Without Borders, an international freedom-of-the-press group.

Mr. Garbus also characterized Mr. Wolf’s release as a victory because he did not testify or identify people on the video, sentiments echoed in a brief statement released by Mr. Wolf.

“The government met Mr. Wolf’s demands: release him without appearing before the grand jury and without having to testify,” the statement read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/us/04wolf.html





Misfired Memo Reveals Tabs Kept on Journalist
Angela Macropoulos

Journalists have an uneasy awareness that public relations professionals keep tabs on them, the better to hone the way that the lobbyists pitch and spin ideas for articles. While the extent of this practice normally is not aired in public, Wired magazine posted on its Web site a long e-mail memo about one of its reporters that was accidentally sent to the reporter by Microsoft.

In February, during the course of reporting on a video blogging initiative at Microsoft called Channel 9, the Wired journalist, Fred Vogelstein, received a 13-page, 5,500-word internal memo from Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, a firm that represents Microsoft.

The document, which was meant to prepare Microsoft executives for interviews, contained frank details, including some less-than-flattering observations like "Fred's stories tend to be a bit sensational, though he would consider them to be balanced and fair," scripted responses to questions and a strong-arm list of the points the agency expected to see in the piece.

Vogelstein, a contributing editor at Wired, was described as "tricky" during interviews. "He looks deeply for any dirt around whatever topic he is focused on and generally is tight-lipped about the direction he will take for his stories, sometimes even misleading you to throw you off," the memo said. "It takes him a bit to get thoughts across, so try to be patient."

The memo also said that the Microsoft publicity team would get a chance to review the article: "We should have a look at it in early March and it should run late March for the April issue." But that is a practice shunned by journalists. Both Wired and Waggener Edstrom say that the review did not happen.

Frank Shaw, the president of Waggener Edstrom in charge of the Microsoft account, said that the person who made the blunder felt "awful, and there was no action. It was the kind of mistake anyone could make." Microsoft, he said, "was not upset with Waggener Edstrom for the contents of the mail."

The article Vogelstein wrote was about a Microsoft project that permitted employees to blog about the company's corporate doings - a concept called "radical transparency." Shaw said, "In a lot of ways, it was irresistible to Wired to bring attention to it. To show it as the polar opposite of the transparency piece they were working on."

Vogelstein said that the memo, which made its way into an e-mail message about appointment scheduling, gave him a weird sense of voyeurism.

"We all want to know what everybody thinks about us, but I think most of us, if we found out, would be sorry," he said. "Some of the stuff I was totally fine with, but I objected to being called 'tricky' and I thought, 'Wow - they really think that?' "

Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, wrote in his personal blog that the memo's command-and-control message showed that Microsoft's "old company culture" lingered.

Evan Cornog, associate dean for academic affairs at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and publisher of The Columbia Journalism Review, said that the memo gave the public a useful glimpse of how journalism works. "Readers need to know the kind of terrain reporters have to negotiate to get a story," he said. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. One comment on Anderson's blog said the most striking thing was that Waggener Edstrom spent hundreds of hours on controlling the message, but that one wrong keystroke seemed to have trumped the agency's efforts. "On one hand, you have 3,500 rank-and-file bloggers creating good will for an embattled company. On the other, you have a few highly paid PR guys burning that good will as fast as their retainer." The New York Times
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/...iness/memo.php





'Talking' CCTV Scolds Offenders
BBC

"Talking" CCTV cameras that tell off people dropping litter or committing anti-social behaviour are to be extended to 20 areas across England.

They are already used in Middlesbrough where people seen misbehaving can be told to stop via a loudspeaker, controlled by control centre staff.

About £500,000 will be spent adding speaker facilities to existing cameras.

Shadow home affairs minister James Brokenshire said the government should be "very careful" over the cameras.

Home Secretary John Reid told BBC News there would be some people, "in the minority who will be more concerned about what they claim are civil liberties intrusions".

"But the vast majority of people find that their life is more upset by people who make their life a misery in the inner cities because they can't go out and feel safe and secure in a healthy, clean environment because of a minority of people," he added.

The talking cameras did not constitute "secret surveillance", he said.

"It's very public, it's interactive."

Competitions would also be held at schools in many of the areas for children to become the voice of the cameras, Mr Reid said.

Downing Street's "respect tsar", Louise Casey, said the cameras "nipped problems in the bud" and reduced bureaucracy.

"It gets across the message, 'please don't litter our streets because someone else will have to pay to pick up that litter again'," she told BBC News.

"Half a billion pounds a year is spent picking up litter."

'Scarecrow policing'

Mr Brokenshire told the BBC he had a number of concerns about the use of the talking cameras.

"Whether this is moving down a track of almost 'scarecrow' policing rather than real policing - actually insuring that we have more bobbies on the beat - I think that's what we really want to see, albeit that an initiative like this may be an effective tool in certain circumstances.

"We need to be very careful about applying this more generally."

The talking cameras will be installed in Southwark, Barking and Dagenham, in London, Reading, Harlow, Norwich, Ipswich, Plymouth, Gloucester, Derby, Northampton, Mansfield, Nottingham, Coventry, Sandwell, Wirral, Blackpool, Salford, South Tyneside and Darlington.

In Middlesbrough, staff in a control centre monitor pictures from 12 talking cameras and can communicate directly with people on the street.

Local councillor Barry Coppinger says the scheme has prevented fights and criminal damage and cut litter levels.

"Generally, I think it has raised awareness that the town centre is a safe place to visit and also that we are keeping an eye open to make sure it is safe," he said.

But opponent and campaigner Steve Hills said: "Apart from being absurd, I think it's rather sad that we should have faceless cameras barking at us on orders from who? Who sets these cameras up?"

There are an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain.

A recent study by the government's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner, warned that Britain was becoming a "surveillance society".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nd/6524495.stm





ACID Scans Web for Pirated Multimedia

The Virage division of Autonomy has developed search technology that can scan the Web for pirated video and multimedia clips.

Broadcasters, movie producers and media publishers of all types have access to a new search technology that can scan the Internet to discover Web sites that are illegally distributing copyrighted video and images.

ACID (Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection), developed by the Virage division of Autonomy, can detect illegally posted rich media in any format wherever it is posted, according to Autonomy founder and CEO Michael Lynch. Autonomy officially introduced the ACID technology in a press conference here on April 4.

"Acid watches very large amounts of video and it can spot video that is owned by someone else," in a highly automated process, Lynch said.

It could be used to detect movies, television clips or any copyrighted media posted, for example, on YouTube, on personal Web sites or on any other Web site, according to company officials.

The technology is equally useful to these file-sharing sites, because it gives them the means to scan their sites for infringing media before it's posted, or at least before it results in a lawsuit. The technology allows these scans to be performed quickly to avoid lengthy delays in posting new content online.

The automated search technology will free copyright owners from having to spend hours manually searching through files on video-sharing sites, company officials said.

With the current explosion of interest in video distribution and video sharing over the Internet, the technology will give media producers the means to try to stay ahead of the increasing volume of illegally distributed multimedia content, Lynch said.

Furthermore, it doesn't rely on tagging technology or video watermarking to locate copyright-infringing media. These techniques can be thwarted by changing formats or by video codec changes, according to Lynch.

Instead, ACID uses Autonomy's "meaning-based computing" technology, which allows computers to find relationships within many different types of unstructured data, including text, word processing documents, e-mails, audio and multimedia. Acid uses patented image and audio analysis technology to look for known examples of copyrighted material no matter what format it's stored in.

ACID is also based on Autonomy's IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer), a basic search platform that can analyze information in more than 1,000 formats including text, voice and video.

Since ACID works with all media formats, it can detect whether a portion of a copyrighted video or audio tract has been overlaid or stored as part of a new and original media file.

Meaning-based computing is Autonomy's overall strategy for helping organizations mine useful information from unstructured data. It is based on search technology that goes beyond keyword-based search engines to enable organizations to locate data within the organization that would otherwise go undiscovered, according to Lynch.

Autonomy's search technology uses automatic hyperlinking and link clustering that the company claims isn't built into keyword search engines. According to the company, this technology allows computers to perform searches with greater context, so it finds a wider range of related documents or research citations than is possible from keyword searches.

The computer industry, Lynch maintains, has to turn to technology like meaning-based computing because, "We are going to see less and less structure in data because there is going to be more and more data and it is going to be unstructured."

The computer industry's current "obsession with structure and - keyword - tagging is fundamentally wrong" as a way to bring order to unstructured data, Lynch said.

Global defense and aerospace company BAE Systems is implementing IDOL to make it easier for the company to find documents and information scattered across a multitude of offices and information systems, according to Scott Petrie, a knowledge engineer with BAE's San Diego-based National Security Solutions group.

Petrie said he was recruited by the company to help find ways for the company to mine more value from its unstructured data resources. BAE chose IDOL because it provided the best technology for finding relationships within the vast store of unstructured data in repositories of all types within the company, Petrie said.
http://www.physorg.com/news94982094.html





A Lyrical Approach to a Subject That Shocks
Dennis Lim

ZOO,” the new film by the Seattle director Robinson Devor, arrived at this year’s Sundance Film Festival better known as “the horse sex documentary.” But as festival audiences discovered, this description, while not incorrect, was also misleading. The film revisits the true story of a man who died in July 2005 after a sexual encounter with a horse in rural Washington State but does so with a lyricism startlingly at odds with the sensational content.

“This topic is not something people want to think about,” Mr. Devor said in an interview at Sundance, summing up both the challenge of marketing the film and the reason he and his writing partner, Charles Mudede, were compelled to make it.

Speaking at the premiere Mr. Mudede called “Zoo” a “thought experiment.” He added, “If someone can go there physically, I can go there mentally.”

Contemplating an unorthodox merging of man and beast, “Zoo” (which is set to open in New York on April 25) is itself an exotic hybrid: a fact-based film combining audio testimony with speculative re-enactments that feature a mix of actors and actual subjects. (The title is the subcultural term for a zoophile, a person whose affinity for animals sometimes extends to the carnal.)

“Zoo” obliquely recreates the events of the fateful night that caused a media frenzy in the Seattle area two summers ago. Shortly after being dropped off at an emergency room in Enumclaw, Wash., a 45-year-old Boeing engineer named Kenneth Pinyan — known in the film only by his Internet handle, Mr. Hands — died of internal injuries resulting from a perforated colon. The police investigation led to a farm and turned up videotapes and DVDs that showed several men engaging in sexual acts with the resident Arabian stallions. Bestiality was not illegal in Washington at the time, but in response to the Pinyan incident the State Senate voted last year to criminalize it.

Mr. Devor and Mr. Mudede, a columnist for the Seattle weekly The Stranger, noticed a disturbing uniformity in news coverage and public opinion surrounding the case.

“There seemed to be two responses: repulsion or laughter,” Mr. Mudede said. “People didn’t want to have any connection or identification with these men. Early on Rob and I said to each other, ‘We’re going to revive their humanity.’ ”

“Zoo” strives to liberate Mr. Hands from his posthumous fate as tabloid punch line. It allows the friends of the dead man a means for disclosure and dares to find, in their candid accounts of their desires and the hidden worlds where they were fulfilled, something strangely beautiful and even recognizable.

“It was fascinating that there was a community of close friends, that there were basic human interactions happening alongside things that seemed completely alien,” Mr. Mudede said. “Zoo” minimizes its freak show aspect by emphasizing the coexistence of the mundane and the bizarre, a strategy it shares with the pair’s 2005 Sundance entry, “Police Beat,” an enigmatic reverie inspired by Mr. Mudede’s crime-blotter column. What emerges here is a sad, even tender portrait of a group of men who met from time to time at a farm, where they would drink slushy cocktails, watch some television and repair to the barn to have sex with horses.

The film’s nonzoophile perspective is provided by Jenny Edwards, the founder of a local rescue organization called Hope for Horses, who helped investigate potential animal abuse in the Enumclaw case. “I don’t yet quite know how I feel about that,” she says in the film, referring to the intense feelings that zoophiles claim to have for animals, “but I’m right at the edge of being able to understand it.”

“Zoo” invites the viewer out onto that ledge of near comprehension. That it does so with neither squeamishness nor prurience owes much to Mr. Devor’s sidelong approach, one that was born of necessity. The story’s central figure was dead, and his family wanted nothing to do with the film. Only one of the three zoophiles interviewed agreed to appear in the re-enactments. All are identified simply by their online names: Coyote, H and the Happy Horseman.

“I’m glad we weren’t able to depend on the talking-head approach,” Mr. Devor said. Mr. Mudede concurred. “It was a chance to really make a film instead of a ‘60 Minutes’-style documentary,” he said.

Driving for the first time into Enumclaw, a town at the base of snow-capped Mount Rainier, the filmmakers immediately grasped the cinematic potential. “Talk about a mythic place,” Mr. Devor said. “This happened in the shadow of a volcano, in these verdant fields. You had beautiful animals, private gatherings, secret societies.”

“Zoo” makes the most of its Edenic setting. Sean Kirby’s Super-16 cinematography reinforces the sense of a prelapsarian idyll, with lush images of rhododendrons in bloom, Mount Rainier perfectly framed in a picture window, men walking through the woods at night in dreamy slow motion.

Unabashed aesthetes, Mr. Devor and Mr. Mudede are anomalies in the grungy landscape of American indie film. Given the off-putting subject matter “Zoo” might even be accused of using beauty as a salve, as some reviewers grumbled at Sundance.

Responding to this critique Mr. Mudede said: “I don’t think the aesthetic element is deceiving. It’s not that we’re making something difficult more accessible through beauty. That’s exactly the situation in which these men experienced their friendship.”

But he added, laughing, “I admit if this had happened on an ugly pig farm we wouldn’t have made the film.”

Mr. Devor said it was tricky trying to communicate the movie he had in mind to his wary subjects: “They would be like, ‘What do you mean impressionistic images?’ ”

As it happened, it was a zoo, as the participants call themselves, who initiated contact, sending an e-mail message to Mr. Mudede in response to an article he had written about the case. “I think there was a desperate need to talk,” Mr. Mudede said.

Coyote, the only zoo who appears in the film, said in a recent e-mail interview that he came to trust Mr. Devor after meeting him a few times. “I felt in my gut he was not going to make an exploitive type of movie,” he wrote.

Despite an instinctive suspicion of publicity, it was evidently important to the zoos that their stories be heard. H, the farmhand who was the host of the get-togethers, called Mr. Devor in mid-December after “Zoo” had been selected for Sundance and consented to an audio interview (leaving Mr. Devor just a few weeks to frantically re-edit the film).

Coyote, for his part, remains conflicted about his involvement. “I do not think a higher profile is good at all,” he said. “We have no torch to bear or cause to defend. We just want to be.”

According to Mr. Devor the biggest challenge was not getting the zoos to talk but finding a location to shoot the film.

“We went to every single horse farm within two hours of Seattle and came up empty,” he said. “Owners would say things like: ‘We have Microsoft picnics here. They’re going to think it happened in my barn.’ ” He finally found a sympathetic farmer in Canada, who helped pull some strings with a landowner in Washington.

The overwhelming aversion to zoophilia is bound up in established taboos and moral codes. The debate, if it would come to that, tends to concern the welfare of the animal and the murky issue of consent. The men in “Zoo” attest to the fulfilling completeness of zoophile relationships and claim not to resort to coercion. On the latter count they have an unlikely ally in Rush Limbaugh, who can be heard in the film weighing in on Mr. Pinyan’s death: “How in the world could this happen without consent?”

But the apparent arousal of the horses is beside the point for many animal advocates, including Ms. Edwards. “Horses have an incredible sense memory and are unbelievably willing to learn,” she said in an e-mail message. “They want to do what is asked of them. But I’m not convinced they want to have sex with us.”

Mr. Devor interviewed the zoos and is more inclined to term the sex consensual. He spoke to them one-on-one, in hotel rooms, and his subjects sometimes illustrated their points by showing him homemade pornography. “It was in my face, really graphic stuff,” he said. “It’s a strange way to get to know someone.” But some of what he saw did change his outlook.

The sex in “Zoo” is merely glimpsed and barely discernible in a few seconds of a video that the police had confiscated and that was circulated on the Internet after Mr. Pinyan’s death.

“The film is extreme more in its formalism than in terms of graphic content,” said Mark Urman, an executive producer of “Zoo” and the head of theatrical releasing at ThinkFilm, which is distributing it. “One really worries if there’s a significant population looking for the tabloid version.”

But Mr. Devor has detected among audiences a curiosity, if not an appetite, to see more. “So many people have said to me there’s not enough sex,” he said. “I think there’s a need to see the mechanics.”

Those viewers should be careful what they wish for. “Maybe we can find some things to put on the DVD,” Mr. Devor said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/movies/01lim.html





Fashion Ads Touch a Nerve in Gender-Conscious Spain
Victoria Burnett

Two cute little girls in designer clothes - or a pair of nymphets selling sex? A beautiful woman in stiletto heels surrounded by glistening, muscular men - or a glamorization of rape?

Advertisements by the Italian fashion houses Dolce & Gabbana and Giorgio Armani have shocked some Spanish consumers and fallen foul this month of the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose hallmark has become the promotion of women's rights.

Dolce & Gabbana announced March 12 that it was suspending all advertising in Spain after the government's Institute of Women and the Spanish Association of Media Users called for the withdrawal of an ad it deemed sexist. The ad, which appeared in the Spanish press, showed a man pinning a woman to the ground by her wrist while four other men looked on.

The same week, the ombudsman for children's rights for the Madrid region called for the withdrawal of an ad by Giorgio Armani that depicted two young girls wearing makeup, one of them in a bikini top.

"If you take the Armani logo off that picture, it's not dissimilar to the pictures that circulate on the Internet promoting sex tourism," said the ombudsman, Arturo Canalda.

Armani said March 12 that it was "extremely surprised and greatly concerned" by the reaction to its ad, but the company declined requests for further comment. The ad, which appears on the company's Web site, ran in only one Spanish daily newspaper but has not been officially banned or withdrawn.

Dolce & Gabbana said Spain had recently "demonstrated a strong censorship feeling," adding later that the country was behind the times, according to local news media.

The fashion houses are not the first companies to be caught in the cross hairs of Spain's drive for gender equality. In December, Maribel Montaño, the governing Socialist party's secretary general for gender equality called on the fast-food chain Burger King to withdraw a television ad for its Whopper XXL, in which a horde of men march through the streets brandishing hamburgers, rip off their underwear and toss it into a burning oil drum, and push a luxury car off a bridge. Montaño said that the ad portrayed men as "cavemen" and sent a "dangerous message" about the male image that would reinforce macho culture.

Complaints about risqué ads are not unique to Spain. The outcry over the Dolce & Gabbana ad has spread to Italy, where the company also withdrew it.

Simon Silvester, an executive planning director in Europe for the agency Young & Rubicam, noted that the fashion industry has a long tradition of producing ads with a shock factor.

But the recent cases touched a nerve in Spain, where 68 women died last year at the hands of their partners or former partners, despite a 2004 law against gender-related violence, according to government data. Academics, advertising executives and pro-government officials said that the reaction to the ads reflected a heightened public sensitivity to gender issues, an awareness that they said was at least partly the result of Zapatero's campaign to promote sexual equality and defend minority rights.

Public mood and the response to advertising were shaped by legislation, said Marie Laver, a senior strategist at Initiative, a London-based media agency.

"There are certain trigger points that you find around legislation concerning issues, like child obesity or sexuality," she said. "It's the sexuality button in Spain that is the trigger."

Since Zapatero came to power in April 2004, his government has intervened in public and commercial life to try to change Spain's macho culture and do away with outdated female stereotypes. The Spanish Congress approved a bill on March 15 that requires 40 percent of all candidates in national and regional elections to be women, and creates incentives for companies to employ more women than men. According to government statistics, unemployment among women is 14.4 percent, double the level among men.

In January, the Spanish Health Ministry announced a campaign to measure 8,500 women in order to get a more accurate picture of the average female's shape and size, which would be used to design clothes that fit them better. The ministry has also forged an agreement with top Spanish fashion companies, including Inditex, owner of the Zara chain, to standardize women's clothing sizes and phase in the use of mannequins that are a European size 38. The move followed a decision in September by the main Madrid fashion show to ban models with body mass indexes that were under a certain level.

Of course, different issues pushed buttons in different markets, advertising executives and representatives of several European regulatory bodies said. The Dolce & Gabbana ad that caused outrage in Spain and Italy had run in some glossy magazines in France and prompted no complaints, according to the European Advertising Standards Alliance.

Two other ads by D&G, which featured men and women brandishing knives, were banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority in January. The complaints said that the ads glamorized knife violence just as the country was struggling to cope with an epidemic of knife-related crime.

On the other hand, the advertising authority dismissed complaints in July 2005 that billboard ads for "The L Word," a television series on the Living Channel about a group of lesbian friends, were degrading to women. The ads showed the oiled midsections of semi-naked women, one of them tugging down underwear emblazoned with the words "Hello Girls."

Zapatero's critics, and even some of his supporters, say that the government has created an oversensitive climate in which the Spanish are having their values dictated to them. Some point out that while provocative ads may be banned, even the most conservative newspapers have pages of classified ads offering paid sex and mainstream television channels routinely air what critics consider soft pornography.

"It's good to be conscious of these sensitivities in a country that has a domestic violence problem like ours," said Josep Ramoneda, director of the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona. "But it's another thing to treat women as if they were defenseless children. On a Friday night, anywhere on Spanish TV you'll find soft porn, and yet we get completely overwrought about an advertisement."

Spanish officials dismissed such criticism this week.

Montaño, the Socialist Party's equality chief, said that, far from being behind the times, as Dolce & Gabbana had suggested, Zapatero was much more modern than those who criticized his policies and "much more in line with the rights of homosexuals, maltreated women, people who cannot fend for themselves."

"Modernity is about defending people's rights," she said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/.../fashion26.php





Censorware Not Good, Just Better Than COPA
Bennett Haselton

On March 22nd, District Court Judge Lowell Reed ruled that the Child Online Protection Act was unconstitutional, partly because the judge called it "vague and overbroad," and partly because less restrictive means existed, such as Internet blocking software. I'll leave others to comment on the legal issues, but blocking software is something that I've studied, and it's important to make sure this decision is not seen as some kind of vindication for the "censorware" industry.

The thrust of the judge's findings about blocking software was that it blocks a high proportion of pornography, blocks a low proportion of non-pornographic Web sites, and that it is difficult for most kids get around. I think that these conclusions are correct for the purpose of the decision he was making -- in other words, blocking software blocks a high proportion of pornography compared to the law in question, and is difficult to get around compared to the law in question. But let's not get carried away -- blocking software is not that accurate, and not that hard to defeat.

Consider first the accuracy rates cited by the judge. Citing expert witness reports, he wrote, "I find that filters generally block about 95% of sexually explicit material", and then quoted several different rates for overblocking provided by expert witness reports, ranging from about 4% to 11%. I wrote earlier about the different ways to interpret overblocking error rates -- the gist was that if you care about the constitutional issues with filter use, then you look at the percentage of blocked sites that are non-pornographic (i.e. for every porn site that gets blocked, how many research sites get canned along with it), and that number tends to be high. On the other hand, if you simply care about the effectiveness of blocking software in a home setting where there is no constitutional issue raised, then you look at the percentage of non-pornographic sites that are blocked, and that number tends to be low.

For example, suppose for the sake of argument that 1% of Web sites in a given sample are sexually explicit, or 100 Web sites out of 10,000. To use Judge Reed's numbers, suppose that 95% of those porn sites, or exactly 95 in this sample, are blocked, whereas of the other 9,900 sites, 5%, or exactly 495 of them, are not blocked. Then the percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked is only 5%, but the percentage of blocked sites that are non-porn is actually 83% (495 blocked non-porn sites, out of a total of 495+95=590 blocked sites). One of our past studies of blocking software did indeed sometimes find error rates of about 80%, due to errors caused by IP address blocking and filters being tripped up by keywords (even when "keyword blocking" features were supposedly turned off -- because in that case the program still blocked sites on its master blacklist, and those blacklists are frequently built by scanning the Web for keywords).

Another portion of the judge's ruling dealt with the difficulty of getting around blocking software:

Filtering companies actively take steps to make sure that children are not able to come up with ways to circumvent their filters. Filtering companies monitor the Web to identify any methods for circumventing filters, and when such methods are found, the filtering companies respond by putting in extra protections in an attempt to make sure that those methods do not succeed with their products... It is difficult for children to circumvent filters because of the technical ability and expertise necessary to do so by disabling the product on the actual computer or by accessing the Web through a proxy or intermediary computer and successfully avoiding a filter on the minor's computer... Accessing the Web through a proxy or intermediary computer will not enable a minor to avoid a filtering product that analyzes the content of the Web page requested, in addition to where the page is coming from. Any product that contains a real-time, dynamic filtering component cannot be avoided by use of a proxy, whether the filter is located on the network or on the user's computer.

After the ruling came out, I tried some of the best-known blocking software programs to see how easily they could be defeated: Net Nanny, SurfControl, CyberSitter, and AOL Parental Controls. Net Nanny and SurfControl apparently could not block https:// sites at all, so I was able to get to https://www.StupidCensorship.com/ and access anything I wanted from there, despite the fact that that site had been public for over a year. Apparently I do have the "technical ability and expertise necessary" to "access the Web through a proxy", but then again I'm not a minor, so, kids, don't hurt yourself trying that.

CyberSitter did intercept the https:// request so it did block StupidCensorship.com, but it didn't know about some of the other proxy sites that we had mailed out to our users recently. One of those did however get blocked because the word "hacking" appeared on the page -- as in,

This site is a tool for circumventing Internet censorship to promote free speech. It does not enable any hacking, cracking or any illegal activities (since it doesn't let you to access any sites that you couldn't access from home anyway).

so it's probably safe to say that if the CyberSitter filter is that paranoid, it would result in a good deal of overblocking as well. AOL Parental Controls also did not block the latest proxies, although it wouldn't let me load sites like Playboy through the proxy, presumably because it recognized the contents of the page and blocked it (so on that point, Judge Reed was right).

But none of the products could stop the doomsday weapon, which is to burn an Ubuntu Linux CD and boot from that, bypassing any security software installed under Windows. I can see your eyes glazing over at the thought of kids attempting to do that, but it's merely an unfamiliar process to most people, not actually difficult. (I've been saying for years, that with the greater difficulty of using Linux over Windows, there's nothing cool or clever about running it just for its own sake so you can feel badass, and the only time you need it is if you want to do something that only Linux lets you do. Well, here's something!)

But in spite of everything, I think the judge's conclusions about blocking software were still broadly correct, because he was comparing the merits of blocking software against the merits of a law that would have prohibited commercial pornography from being published on the Web in the United States. In talking about the "effectiveness" of such a law, the judge and lawyers cited the fact that as many as 75% of adult sites were hosted overseas anyway. But even that high number understates the situation, because hypothetically if all the porn on the Web in the U.S. did get outlawed, it would be easy for anyone to spend all their time looking at porn from outside the country. When you're talking about a supply of content that is so large that nobody could finish looking at it all if they spent the rest of their life trying, it doesn't really matter if 25% or 50% or 75% is located within your legal jurisdiction. I never stop hoping that a judge will say, "Look, pictures of naked people don't hurt anyone, no, not even people under 18. Shoot, when I was 13 and president of Future Lawyers of America, my friend gave me a copy of Playboy as a down payment for my unsuccessful attempts to defend him on curfew-breaking charges in Foot v. Ass, and look how I turned out." But even a judge who firmly believed that people under 18 were harmed by pornographic images, would have found little reason to uphold this law.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/04/1330219





P2P: Potential Future Applications

Written by Can Erten and edited by Richard MacManus. This is the second in a 2-part series exploring the world of P2P on the Web. Part 1 was a general introduction to P2P, along with some real-world applications of P2P. Part 2 (this post) discusses future applications.

As we mentioned in Part 1, broadband speeds are ever increasing and so the demand for peer-to-peer networks is also increasing. However many things that could be accomplished by P2P networks are still in development or research. There is huge potential that at least some of the resulting applications will go mainstream, just as Napster did in the late 90's or Skype in the early part of this century. In Part 2 of our series, we look at some of these potential future applications for P2P on the Internet.

Search Engines

Starting in the late 90's, a search engine company called Google changed the way we search the internet. Their idea was to index the web and get the top results, using their now famous Page Rank algorithm. However nowadays, indexing the web accurately has become a huge and seemingly impossible job to complete. So P2P search engines could be the next solution - where every node (user) is a crawler itself.

In P2P search (a.k.a. distributed search), each individual connected to the network serves its local index as a source of search. Instead of having a central company and a central server, each participant of the network is a search repository. Since we are talking about web indexing and web searching, a user's internet cache might be their contribution to the search database. When they execute a query, firstly their local system is queried; than if the results are not satisfactory, the next peer is queried, and so on. The difficulty is the selection of good peers to provide satisfactory results. P2P search may well be a long shot, but one possible solution in this area to check out is the Minerva Project. It is described as follows:

"Each peer is considered autonomous and has its own local search engine with a crawler and a corresponding local index. Peers share their local indexes (or specific fragments of local indexes) by posting meta-information into the P2P network. This meta-information contains compact statistics and quality-of-service information, and effectively forms a global directory. However, this directory is implemented in a completely decentralized and largely self-organizing manner."

Video and Audio Casting

The impact of video and audio web sites on the Internet has been very large over the last couple of years - and will only increase. Therefore there has been talk of moving video streaming to P2P networks, to lessen the load on the Internet. A P2P approach for video streaming would be to hold a copy of a file in different parts of the world and serve it from multiple points to users.

The creators and entrepreneurs of Kazaa and Skype, Zennstrom and Friis, are working on such a project - called Joost, a.k.a. the Venice Project. It will be like a TV on demand service, but based on P2P where clients connect to the network and download TV programs. Joost also features social networking aspects - you can rate and discuss TV programs with other people. At the moment Joost does not provide a lot of channels, but the potential is there once more content is added. See also Read/WriteWeb's earlier review of Joost and other IPTV services.

Mobile P2P Applications

Many popular web applications have been ported to mobile platforms already. Likewise there is huge potential for P2P mobile applications, at least when wireless network enabled mobile phones become more popular. I think it will follow the same trend as for PC P2P applications - i.e. it will start from instant messaging, followed by file-sharing and IP telephony, then video and other media. Already Skype uses P2P for its VoIP, as we explained in Part 1. Also back in 2001 Swedish software maker Pocit Labs developed a mobile file sharing client called BlueTalk. It enabled file sharing over Bluetooth for up to 54 people - for example to trade files or play networked games.

A more recent example is PeerBox, reviewed earlier this year by ThinkMobile. PeerBox allows you to search and download music, videos and pictures; among other things.

E-commerce

Consumer to Consumer e-commerce is one of the most popular services on the Internet. A centralized trading platform (such as eBay) enables consumers to trade, buy or sell their goods. However in a centralized system, there is always a possibility of a failure - such as the server goes down or is busy. P2P enabled e-commerce can remove the centralized system and so lessen the possibility of failures. However there are many things that have to be implemented for a P2P system for e-commerce to work - it has to be secure, transactional and workflow-based to track different stages of the sales process. It also has to support detailed search, e-commerce advertisements and location awareness of the peers.

One early example perhaps is Tamago, a P2P marketplace that has been reviewed before on Read/WriteWeb.

Conclusion

In this two-part series, we've examined different types of P2P systems and their applications - past, present and future. We've covered just a few areas (check the comments on our previous post for other exciting applications).
http://www.personalbee.com/227/11969633





A Blogger Infiltrates Academe

Cory Doctorow has no college degree, just a busy Web site and some provocative views on copyright
Brock Read

It was on an airplane not quite a decade ago that Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the wildly popular blog Boing Boing, became a copyright crusader. Mr. Doctorow calls the moment his "conversion experience at 30,000 feet."

Chatting with lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he came to the conclusion that the entire copyright system was badly broken. As the co-founder of a company that sold peer-to-peer software, Mr. Doctorow had tried working within that system. But shortly after his airborne epiphany, he joined the foundation and began to fight for a whole new interpretation of copyright law.

For the next five years, Mr. Doctorow spent a good deal of time on airplanes, flying off to conferences, colloquia, and legal hearings. As the foundation's director of European affairs, he traveled, by his estimation, more than three weeks out of every month.

So when Mr. Doctorow sits on a lonely bench here at the University of Southern California discussing his latest move, a foray into academe, he exudes the nervous energy of someone who is not used to sitting in one place — or, at the least, someone who hardly expected to find himself in this particular place.

Mr. Doctorow has been at the university's Center for Public Diplomacy since last summer, working as a scholar and, for the most part, staying put. This spring he has taken his first stab at life as a lecturer, teaching a graduate-level course in which he guides students through an irreverent history of copyright law.

The visiting professor mentions that he recently invited a representative from Warner Brothers, one of the entertainment companies he often criticizes on his blog, to speak to the class. The industry official's appearance was a dispatch from the other side of what Mr. Doctorow sees as a continuing war over copyright law, digital rights, and the very meaning of intellectual property.

Mr. Doctorow has little taste for what he calls the "maximalist" view of intellectual property — the notion that copyright is something to be enforced strictly rather than something that should strive to be as invisible and as flexible as possible — and the subtitle of his course is meant as a bit of a provocation. "Is everyone on campus a copyright criminal?" the syllabus asks, alluding to the overwhelming majority of college students who have swapped music, movies, and software on peer-to-peer networks. If the answer is yes, he suggests, then something has clearly gone wrong.

With his new course, Mr. Doctorow has joined the growing ranks of scholars preaching that copyright law needs a makeover. Professors like Lawrence Lessig, of Stanford University; Siva Vaidhyanathan, of New York University; and Edward W. Felten, of Princeton University, have taught courses that sought to poke holes in traditional views of copyright. But while those professors made their names in large part through academic books and research projects, Mr. Doctorow has taken a decidedly different route. He doesn't hold a college degree, and he earned his reputation not through scholarly work but through a blog.

Mr. Doctorow has no interest in playing down his role as a blogger who has infiltrated the ranks of academe. Even the name of his course, "Pwned," is a nod to the medium that made his name. A neologism with varying pronunciations coined by online gamers and made popular by bloggers and discussion-board posters, it refers to the act of being thoroughly bested. The theme of domination, Mr. Doctorow argues, is all too appropriate for a branch of law that has favored corporate interests over individual ones.

Mr. Doctorow's supporters at the university say his unorthodox path to academe is an asset, not a cause for concern. "The academy needs to have people come in and redefine the rules, to push the traditional precepts of how things are done," says Joshua S. Fouts, director of the public-diplomacy center, which brought Mr. Doctorow to the campus as its first Canadian Fulbright chair in public diplomacy. "What Cory does here is basically what he does at Boing Boing: He thinks about technology on a global scale."

Tech Start-Up

Mr. Doctorow traces his activist streak to his parents, a pair of Toronto schoolteachers whom he describes as "Trotskyist." But his own career in advocacy got off to a slow start. As a young man he enrolled in four different colleges, including the University of Waterloo and Michigan State University, but he dropped out of each one.

In the late 1990s, he and two friends founded OpenCola, a company that developed a piece of open-source peer-to-peer software. Mr. Doctorow soon found himself hobnobbing with entertainment-industry executives and copyright activists like those at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that has opposed copyright holders in court and in public debate.

Mr. Doctorow had not considered himself militant on matters of copyright, but his encounters with entertainment-industry officials left him jaundiced. "It was clear this wasn't an industry that was working with technology," he says, recalling an afternoon when he watched representatives of one record company trade high-fives after buying out a lesser peer-to-peer firm that they had saddled with lawsuits. "It was only interested in suing technology."

After joining the EFF, Mr. Doctorow was quick to put his money where his mouth was. In 2003 he finished his first science-fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which became the first novel published under Mr. Lessig's nascent Creative Commons license. The license allowed readers to pass the book around freely online, provided they neither made money from it nor used to it to create "derivative works" of their own. (Mr. Doctorow later relaxed his stance on derivative works and amended the license.)

But Mr. Doctorow's most influential role came as a writer and editor of Boing Boing — a job that started, he says, as something of a happy accident.

Boing Boing began life in the late 1980s as a print publication that billed itself as "the world's greatest neurozine." The print edition faded away, but in 2000 its founder, Mark Frauenfelder, recast the project as a one-man blog. Mr. Doctorow started writing for the site early the next year.

At first Boing Boing was content trying to live up to its subtitle: "a directory of wonderful things." In short, unceremonious posts, Mr. Frauenfelder and Mr. Doctorow charted the Web's blossoming at the turn of the century, dispensing links to sites they found clever and articles they deemed worthy.

But the blog got its big break when a post rounding up theories on the closely guarded identity of a much-hyped invention called "IT" made it onto CNN. The invention — which turned out to be the Segway scooter — was something of an anticlimax. But Boing Boing's popularity snowballed, and it is still increasing steadily. The site regularly tops a list of the Web's most popular blogs kept by Technorati, an online monitoring service. (Technorati reports that more than 20,000 other blogs have linked to posts on Boing Boing in the past three months.)

The site now has four contributing editors, but Mr. Doctorow remains its most passionate commentator on policy issues. He posts frequently about copyright law, intellectual property, and digital-rights management, and his condemnations of "maximalist" copyright holders are acid-tongued. When Sony was caught selling music CD's that surreptitiously installed software on users' computers, he accused company executives of "jaw-dropping contempt for their customers."

A Fertile Field

The site has turned Mr. Doctorow into an influential figure in the copyright wars, but he says Boing Boing is as much a scratchpad as it is a soapbox. "I use it to keep a running track of stuff that seems to be pieces of the puzzle," he says. "Most of the pieces are just blue sky, but every now and again you find a corner."

That philosophy carries over to Mr. Doctorow's course at the University of Southern California. Intellectual property is, at the moment, a fertile field of study. Almost every day, it seems, has its breaking-news story: Viacom sues YouTube for copyright infringement. The recording industry sues college students for music piracy. Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, waxes hopeful about a world without digital-rights-management tools.

Mr. Doctorow requires students to sift through such stories and write about them on a class blog (http://uscpwned.blogspot.com) that, stylistically and philosophically, could be Boing Boing's wonkier little brother. By class-project standards, the blog is robust and readable, and for good reason. Students are not just writing for Mr. Doctorow but also to impress each other: At the beginning of each weekly class session, student bloggers run through their recent posts and lead a free-form discussion of current events in copyright.

Students also edit articles on Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia, of which Mr. Doctorow is quite fond. Many professors try desperately to steer their students away from the site, but Mr. Doctorow has required students in "Pwned" to browse Wikipedia in search of articles on copyright and technology that could use improvement.

In the meantime, Mr. Doctorow uses his weekly lectures to cover the history of intellectual property "from Augustus Caesar to Alan Turing," as the course syllabus puts it. Like Mr. Lessig and Mr. Vaidhyanathan, he speaks of a longstanding battle between corporations — who, in his eyes, typically use copyright as a cudgel to support their financial interests — and consumers, who rely on copyright to preserve their own stake in the process of cultural production.

In Mr. Doctorow's view, copyright law should strive to preserve people's freedom to consume works as they see fit, and it should encourage consumers to adapt copyrighted works so long as they are not making money off the result. "What readers do with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors, is not a fit subject for copyright regulation or oversight," he wrote in an essay published last year.

So Mr. Doctorow advocates licensing schemes, like Creative Commons, that let copyright holders authorize noncommercial uses of their work. And he argues that fair-use doctrine should be interpreted liberally.

A Different View

What Mr. Doctorow tells his 17 students about copyright is strikingly different from the official position that the rest of USC's thousands of students hear.

In August university officials sent an e-mail message to undergraduates, warning them that the university — and, possibly, the recording industry — would punish them for file-sharing infractions. To Mr. Doctorow the letter was a sign that the university was failing to educate students about the underpinnings of intellectual-property law.

So the visiting professor made his own sharply critical annotations to the message and posted them online. Showing a flair for drama, he called one statement made in the letter — a claim that "as an academic institution, USC's purpose is to promote and foster the creation and lawful use of intellectual property" — "the single most shocking thing I have ever read from a university."

"The purpose of a university is to promote learning and scholarship," he wrote. "To say otherwise is just jaw-dropping."

Mr. Doctorow says no one from the university ever contacted him to complain about the annotation. (Campus officials say they did not send the letter out again this semester.) But if administrators had registered objections, Mr. Doctorow would not have listened too closely. His fellowship at USC ends in the spring, and he says he is glad to be unconcerned with tenure and other issues full-time professors face. "I'm not a career academic, so none of that stuff matters to me," he says.

That also means Mr. Doctorow can devote his time away from the classroom to writing for Boing Boing, and to his science-fiction novels (he has now published three, along with two collections of short fiction), even though that kind of work would not be much help in a tenure review. He views the university, it seems, with a sort of detached bemusement.

Gray Areas

Of course, bemusement can work both ways. Mr. Doctorow says some students have had difficulty persuading their academic advisers that a course on copyright law — especially one with a title like "Pwned" — is a worthy elective.

Mr. Doctorow's course might be a hard sell to vocation-minded advisers, but it has managed to attract students from a broad swath of disciplines. The course's enrollees include students in pre-law and sports management, students who see themselves as budding activists, students who plan to start record labels, and one who told Mr. Doctorow he joined the course simply because he had downloaded a lot of music illegally.

Mr. Doctorow says his goal is not to train a generation of "copyleft" advocates but rather to give students the sense that intellectual property is, at the very least, a field with plenty of gray areas.

"There's a pre-law kid in the class who wants to be a lawyer for video-game companies," he says, pointing out that the gaming industry has a much stricter take on copyright than groups like the EFF would advocate. "I would prefer for that kid to do progressive things in his job than for him to have a one-sided, maximalist view of copyright."

There are times when he can't help but engage in a bit of Boing Boing-style rabble-rousing — as when he pauses to consider USC's "free-speech zone." The university established the zone to keep student protesters from spreading out across the campus, and it is clear that Mr. Doctorow is unimpressed with the idea. He is especially upset that the student-run Free Culture club, which he advises, was fined for posting flyers elsewhere on the campus, informing readers that they were not standing in a free-speech zone.

Today he decides to wander over to the zone and try to get a sense of what kinds of speech are allowed only within its borders. A security officer tells him the zone is for large gatherings and speakers using megaphones, but another campus official gives him a different interpretation: Any speech accompanied by props that could be dangerous, like picket signs, must be restricted to the zone, the official says. Mr. Doctorow presses forward with a series of increasingly absurdist questions — Do balloons count as dangerous props? What about costumes? — and then he leaves, smiling as he shakes his head.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i31/31a03001.htm





Is iTunes Changing the Way 20-Somethings Watch TV?
Dr. Macenstein

A quick look at the top TV programs sold on iTunes shows quite a disparity between America’s top shows according to Nielsen and what the average iTunes user is watching. For instance, the TV show LOST, once a media darling, has struggled this season, and often does not make it into the top 20 shows of the week. However, LOST does consistently well in the iTunes rankings, and this week occupies slots 1, 4, and 17 as of this writing. Battlestar Galactica (iTunes ranked 3, and 11) and South Park (iTunes ranked 7, 8, and 12) both fail to crack the Top 20 cable shows each week, and consistently lose out to shows such as The Fairly Odd Parents and reruns of House and Spongebob Squarepants. The FOX shows 24 (iTunes ranked 2, and 10) and Prison Break (iTunes ranked 6) do not appear in Nielsen’s Top 10 either.

So why are these shows huge hits on iTunes at $1.99 an episode when many of these shows can’t attract viewers for FREE on broadcast TV? Simple. Younger viewers, college students, largely, are finding iTunes’ “On-Demand” style of television viewing fits their hectic schedule better than appointment television. 20-year-old Jeff, a full time college student at Illinois State University, explains his situation; “Most of my friends and I actually end up waiting for the DVD box sets of a show to come out, and then we watch them in marathon sit-down sessions. We don’t have the kind of schedules where we can dedicate a specific block of time every week and say we’ll be there [to watch a show]”.

Perhaps this is the reason why so many of the highly rated shows sold on iTunes are of the LOST, Heroes, 24, and Prison Break variety, where there is one long-reaching story arc that needs to be followed. People with hectic schedules who are likely to miss an episode of such a show will be “Lost” when they try to watch the next week’s episode. By purchasing an episode on iTunes, they don’t have to be back in their dorm room at 10 PM on a Wednesday, they can watch it on the way to (or even IN) class.

“At home my parents have Tivo,” says Mark, also at Illinois. “We kind of use iTunes as a Tivo substitute here, we all put in money towards a season, and then we watch the shows together when we get a chance.”

What will be interesting to see is how the iTunes model will eventually affect these 20-somethings’ viewing habits as they get older. Software and computer makers like Apple and Microsoft constantly vie to get their products into as many school classrooms as possible, as early as possible in a child’s development. They know that the more comfortable children get using a specific brand of technology, the more likely they are to continue to seek out that familiar brand as they get older. The same thing applies to this new generation of On-Demand TV watchers. Whether through the “low-tech”method of waiting for DVD box sets to be released, or the instant gratification of the iTunes Store, it looks like viewing habits are being molded.

“Almost all of my friends have a video iPod now,” says Sara, a Sophomore at Rutgers University in NJ. “We have a thing now where each of us on our floor chooses a show we want, and then we share it. I’ve gotten used to watching shows on the tiny screen in bed or even walking between classes. It’s pretty cool.”
http://macenstein.com/default/archives/573





Radio

KDND Staff Will Not Face Charges In Water Intoxication Death
FMQB

No criminal charges will be filed against the staff of KDND/Sacramento in the case of the woman who died in January after participating in the station's water drinking contest, Hold Your Wee For a Wii. The district attorney's office determined that the behavior of the KDND morning team, which ran the contest, did not rise to the level of criminal activity. The premise of the contest was that contestants had to drink as much water as possible without vomiting or urinating, and the one who drank the most earned a Nintendo Wii gaming console. One contestant, Jennifer Strange, died hours after the contest from water intoxication.

"There were no observable indications or symptoms that Jennifer Strange was experiencing a serious medical emergency which would have required station employees to seek or administer medical aid to her," the district attorney's office said in a statement. Prosecutors also noted that Strange participated willingly and could have left at any time, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Entercom spokesman Charles Sipkins released a statement after hearing of the prosecutors' decision, saying, "This was an unfortunate accident, and we continue to extend our deepest sympathy to the Strange family." The station fired 10 employees after the contest, including the Morning Rave team and other staffers.

Meanwhile, Strange's family is moving forward with a wrongful death lawsuit against KDND. The family's suit claims that the station failed to consult with appropriate health authorities regarding the potential health risks of the contest, that they "failed to take any steps to identify prospective participants who might be at risk of injury," and that they "failed to secure any medical professional or para-professional services during the contest, even after the contestants begin feeling ill." The family is seeking funeral and other expenses incurred plus undisclosed punitive damages.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=381242





Web Music: On the Threshold of a Stream
Wilson Rothman

For all the talk about satellite radio, the most vibrant frontier in radio may be the Web. Many traditional AM and FM stations have begun streaming on the Internet, along with hundreds of smaller online-only operators. Even subscription download services like Napster, Rhapsody and MTV's Urge have pre-programmed radio for users who are not in the mood to hunt for tracks.

Currently, the most compelling online radio is interactive. Services like Pandora, Last.fm and Slacker evaluate your musical tastes, then serve up a continuous stream of programming to match. They mix familiar songs with new material you might like. They all do it by harnessing the technological forces of social networking, data mining and music analysis, though each uses a slightly different technique.

Despite so much momentum, there are still plenty of bumps. The Copyright Royalty Board of the U.S. Library of Congress recently announced a Web-radio royalty payment plan that has caused many free Internet broadcasters to fear for their fragile business models.

Some new interactive music services choose not to stream anything. Instead, they rely strictly on music the listener already owns or new tracks donated by publicity-hungry independent artists and labels. Others are becoming as creative with the way they license content as they are with the way they personalize it for you.

On its surface, Pandora is the simplest option. When you visit www.pandora.com, enter the name of a song or artist you enjoy. Immediately you will hear music from a "station" based on that initial choice. You can refine your station by naming other artists and songs, and Pandora picks music from those artists but more importantly, it chooses other songs you might like based on your suggestions.

Pandora makes recommendations based on songs analysis by musicologists in Pandora's Music Genome Project. They listen for up to 400 different characteristics in every song, from musical genre to the presence of a particular instrument. Songs with the most similarities naturally make their way to the same radio stream.

If you do not like one of Pandora's suggestions, you can click on the "thumbs down" sign and it is never heard from again. If, on the other hand, you do like a song, you can give it the "thumbs up," and that particular preference will be used in later suggestions.

Now that the free ad-supported service has been operational for 15 months, it can use the behavioral data of its six million listeners to add a new layer of suggestion. For instance, even if, on paper, the musicologists think it logical to pair a song by the "American Idol" superstar Clay Aiken with one by the Canadian folk balladeer Ron Sexsmith, several hundred listeners may give the juxtaposition a vote of no confidence. Tim Westergren, a Pandora co-founder, says the database now contains half a billion useful points of "contextual feedback."

Last.fm (www.last.fm), an interactive radio service started in 2003, does not use a musicologist. Instead, it bases its suggestions primarily on the wisdom of the crowd. A Last.fm co-founder, Martin Stiksel, refers to it as "collaborative filtering applied on a massive scale."

The service asks users to download software - available for Macs and PCs - that tracks music playing on their computers. The song counting process, called "scrobbling" by Last.fm's chief software developer, lets the company observe shifts in popularity, spot unexpected correlations between songs, and even discover new artists - or new tracks by known artists.

To date, Last.fm has "scrobbled" 65 million tracks by 8 million artists, in over 200 different countries. As with Pandora, you can identify songs you love, which helps to tailor your radio experience. The result is a stream of music that, statistically speaking, you ought to enjoy.

An important byproduct is the identification of musical "neighbors." As the Last.fm community grows to over 15 million active users, it also promotes itself as a social networking site, like MySpace. You can see and contact others whose musical tastes correspond significantly with your own.

"This is community-driven," Stiksel said. "Interest in new music flags when you don't have an infrastructure of informers around you."

The most ambitious free service is Slacker, which started this month. The ad-driven beta program at www.slacker.com resembles Pandora. But when the full-fledged release becomes available in early summer, Slacker will have several components. Slacker was founded by former chief executives of Musicmatch and Rio, so it is only fitting that Slacker will offer a free software player, like the once popular Musicmatch Jukebox, and a portable iPod-like device, like those Rio made.

One twist is that, like Last.fm, the Slacker jukebox will enhance the radio stream by paying attention to the songs you choose. (DJs will aid in programming as well.) Another twist is that, in addition to MP3s, the portable player will carry personalized radio streams that will be automatically freshened from time to time. Paying $7.50 per month will give you access to more features, but even if you do not pay, you will be able to buy the portable player and have access to free - though ad-rich - radio streams.

Slacker says it will introduce a satellite receiver dock this year for the portable player. The Slacker team plans to blast individual song files to listeners from a satellite several times per hour. As each song is sent, the player itself will determine whether the song is a good fit for its particular user. If so, it will be saved. If not, it will be rejected.

Because of the controversy over royalty rates, and because of its unique portable properties, Slacker made its own licensing deals directly with the four major music groups plus several hundred independent labels. Last.fm recently announced content deals with Warner Music Group and EMI for tracks on its new, ad-free $3-per-month premium radio service.

The royalty issue is explicitly why services like Soundflavor, Goombah and Mog do not offer true streaming radio. Soundflavor DJ, a free player available at www.soundflavor.com, uses a collaborative filtering technique, but instead of streaming new songs, it lets you cue up songs on iTunes or Windows Media Player, then takes over DJ responsibility, matching your initial choices with other tracks from your own collection. It is especially effective if you have a library with thousands of tracks. After every few songs, Soundflavor offers you a free track download from an independent artist, or the opportunity to buy a song that its filter suggests you might like.

Goombah (www.goombah.com), another new service, asks you to download software that analyzes your entire music library. You can, however, select artists or albums that you do not want included in this holistic evaluation. After the analysis, Goombah offers free track downloads and connects you to music fans with similar tastes.

Mog (www.mog.com) is a bustling new online community of music fans. Like Goombah, it uses software to examine your whole library, but it gives you the opportunity to prioritize songs that have been played most recently. The result is not streaming radio, but a lively community of music lovers who talk about concerts, post MP3s and share video.

Mog's most inspired development is starting Thursday: Mog TV, a personalized stream of YouTube video posts. Mog says there are 400,000 videos there now, plenty to personalize for everyone's tastes. "Imagine if YouTube knew what songs were in your music collection," said Mog's chief executive, David Hyman. "It's the ultimate mash-up." As for artist royalties, that currently appears to be YouTube's problem.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...29ptbasics.php





WiFi in the Sky: Airlines Prepare Cabin Hotspots

BlackBerrying, web surfing expected aloft within a year; cellphone service may follow
Scott McCartney

The days when airplanes offer a hiatus from being connected to the office are numbered.

After years of discussion and delay, U.S. airlines will start offering in-flight Internet connections, instant messaging and wireless email within 12 months, turning the cabin into a WiFi "hotspot." Carriers are expected to start making announcements around the end of the summer, with service beginning early next year.

Like it or not, airborne cellphone chatter still has a flying chance in U.S. airplane cabins, as well, despite a recent indication that the Federal Communications Commission will keep a ban in place.

The FCC has already auctioned off radio spectrum for cellphone use on airplanes, and telecommunications companies partnering with airlines have successfully tested several systems. But no company made a firm proposal. Facing high costs and opposition from fliers, U.S. airline customers weren't interested. Yet with airlines in Europe and the Middle East to begin offering cellphone service aboard airplanes later this year, that could change.

If the technology proves safe, popular and profitable, U.S. airlines and telecommunications companies may be more interested, under pressure to keep up competitively. In-flight phone calls may not be as popular as lie-flat beds in business class, an innovation that started in Europe and spread, but air travel is a copycat business. Success in Europe could prompt action in the U.S., and bring the FCC back to possibly dropping its ban.

"The likelihood of cellphone service on airplanes coming into play is still very high," said Jack Blumenstein, chief executive of AirCell Inc., a major player in airplane cabin communications.

That may not be what road warriors want to hear as they dread listening to a blathering seatmate.

Still, with current technology, capacity would be limited, so the entire cabin wouldn't be able to chat at the same time. Indeed, only about 14 calls or fewer would be able to take place simultaneously.

For now, the preferred cabin technology in the U.S. is Internet service, which will launch early next year. If broadband connections at 35,000 feet are as popular as they have been at hotels, airports, homes, schools and coffee shops, airplanes will likely be fitted with the relatively inexpensive technology rapidly.

AirCell paid $31.3 million at an FCC auction last year to take over radio frequency once used for expensive air-phone service and reallocate it to Internet and cellphone service. The Internet service already has the approval of both the FCC and the Federal Aviation Administration. Mr. Blumenstein says AirCell, a closely held Colorado company that provides communications for private jets, is building out its network of 80 to 100 ground towers and talking to multiple airlines. No customers have been named yet.

"It can't happen soon enough," said Henry Harteveldt, a travel technology analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

AirCell will install equipment on airliners that will act as a WiFi hotspot in the cabin and connect to laptop computers and devices like BlackBerrys that have WiFi chips. In all, it will cost about $100,000 to outfit a plane with less than 100 pounds of equipment, and the work can be done overnight by airline maintenance workers, AirCell says.

What makes the service particularly attractive to airlines is that they will share revenue with AirCell. The service will cost about the same as existing WiFi offerings. Mr. Blumenstein says it will charge no more than $10 a day to passengers. It will also offer discounted options for customers and tie into existing service programs like T-Mobile, iPass and Boingo. Speeds will be equivalent to WiFi service on the ground.

AirCell will block voice calls over the Internet with services like Skype -- except for pilots, flight attendants and air marshals, who will be allowed to talk to people on the ground for scheduling, safety and security issues.

While WiFi is preferred in the U.S., cellular service is the top priority in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, where social objections to cellphones on airplanes appear to be more muted.

Ryanair Holdings PLC signed a deal to equip all of its 200 planes with a system from OnAir, a joint venture of airplane maker Airbus and SITA, an aviation technology provider. Installation is likely to take place in the third quarter of this year, an OnAir spokesman says. Dubai-based Emirates hopes to begin offering service from AeroMobile Ltd., a joint venture of technology firms Arinc Inc. and Telenor ASA, on flights to Asia starting in late summer. Qantas Airways will start a trial of the AeroMobile system in Australia before June.

Some 30 countries have approved the service from a telecommunications perspective, convinced cellphones on planes with the equipment installed won't tie up large chunks of capacity at towers on the ground. But both companies still need approval from air-safety regulators who have been studying whether cellphones might interfere with aircraft navigation equipment. So far, regulatory approval has been slower than they expected.

OnAir and AeroMobile both install "pico cell" receivers on planes that connect to cellular phones, allowing them to operate at low power to minimize technical problems. The pico cell then routes calls to cellular networks through a satellite link.

Only about 14 calls or fewer can be successfully made at a time per flight, and airline crews can turn the system off during takeoff and landing. If you make the 15th call, you'll get some kind of indication of "no service."

Pico-cell technology has been successfully tested in the U.S., but deployment would be complicated and costly. While Europe has migrated heavily to GSM phone technology, the U.S. still has lots of older phones around more likely to cause ground problems. With the public lining up firmly against cellphones, airlines have been reluctant to sign on and telecom companies were reluctant to invest millions in a potentially unpopular product.

On March 22, FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin said he would recommend ending consideration of lifting the ban on cellphone use aboard planes because a two-year investigation into possible interference with ground towers had proven inconclusive. It also drew more than 8,000 consumer complaints.

But if systems prove they work in other parts of the world, airborne cellphone service likely will migrate to the U.S. -- perhaps within just a couple of years. AirCell says it can expand its service to include cellular voice calls a year or two after its data launch, if U.S. airlines ever have the stomach for it. Already, LiveTV, the satellite television arm of JetBlue Airways Corp., paid $7 million at an FCC auction for a more-limited frequency that could be used for cellular phones. JetBlue hasn't said what its plans for the frequency will be.

Someday, many more travelers may be donning noise-canceling headphones.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





"’Tweren’t me Your Honor – l33t haX0rz stole my Wi-Fi."

Aircrack-PTW

WEP is a protocol for securing wireless LANs. WEP stands for "Wired Equivalent Privacy" which means it should provide the level of protection a wired LAN has. WEP therefore uses the RC4 stream to encrypt data which is transmitted over the air, using usually a single secret key (called the root key or WEP key) of a length of 40 or 104 bit.

A history of WEP and RC4

WEP was previously known to be insecure. In 2001 Scott Fluhrer, Itsik Mantin, and Adi Shamir published an analysis of the RC4 stream cipher. Some time later, it was shown that this attack can be applied to WEP and the secret key can be recovered from about 4,000,000 to 6,000,000 captured data packets. In 2004 a hacker named KoReK improved the attack: the complexity of recovering a 104 bit secret key was reduced to 500,000 to 2,000,000 captured packets. In 2005, Andreas Klein presented another analysis of the RC4 stream cipher. Klein showed that there are more correlations between the RC4 keystream and the key than the ones found by Fluhrer, Mantin, and Shamir which can additionally be used to break WEP in WEP like usage modes.

Our attack

We were able to extend Klein's attack and optimize it for usage against WEP. Using our version, it is possible to recover a 104 bit WEP key with probability 50% using just 40,000 captured packets. For 60,000 available data packets, the success probability is about 80% and for 85,000 data packets about 95%. Using active techniques like deauth and ARP re-injection, 40,000 packets can be captured in less than one minute under good condition. The actual computation takes about 3 seconds and 3 MB main memory on a Pentium-M 1.7 GHz and can additionally be optimized for devices with slower CPUs. The same attack can be used for 40 bit keys too with an even higher success probability.

Countermeasures

We believe that WEP should not be used anymore in sensitive environments. Most wireless equipment vendors provide support for TKIP (as known as WPA1) and CCMP (also known as WPA2) which provides a much higher security level. All users should switch to WPA1 or even better WPA2.

How the attack works

A paper describing the details and methods we used in our attack is available on the IACR ePrint server.

Implementation

We implemented a proof-of-concept of our attack in a tool called aircrack-ptw. It should be used together with the aircrack-ng toolsuite.

Reproduction of our results

Our tool is quite similar to aircrack-ng. You can find a very good tutorial on the aircrack-ng homepage. For usage with our tool, you need to make some little changes.

In Step 3, you MUST NOT use the parameter -ivs. Just skip this parameter, the other command line arguments still apply.
In Step 5, you should use aircrack-ptw instead of aircrack-ng. ls -la output*.cap will give you a list of capture files airodump-ng has created. Usually, if you did not interrupt airodump-ng, there should be only one file named output-01.cap. Just start aircrack-ptw output-01.cap to get the key. If aircrack-ptw was not successfull, wait a few seconds and start it again.

Questions and answers

Does aircrack-ptw work with arbitrary packets?

No, aircrack-ptw currently only works with ARP requests and ARP responses. Using methods like ARP re-injection, it is usually not a problem to generate a sufficient amount of ARP traffic.

In a future version, aircrack-ptw could be extended to work with other packets too.

Does aircrack-ptw work with 256 bit keys?

Currently, aircrack-ptw does not support 256 bit WEP.

Does aircrack-ptw work on WPA1 or WPA2 too?

No. WPA is a complete redesign. Although the TKIP specified for WPA still uses RC4 as encryption algorithm, related-key attacks are not possible in this case since the per-packet keys do not share a common suffix. Furthermore, re-injection attacks on WPA protected networks will not work: WPA requires multiple packets with the same IV to be discarded. Although no cryptographic attacks against WPA1 are known, we recommend WPA2 over WPA1 if you have the choice.

Does aircrack-ptw work against WEPplus?

This has not been tested due to lack of equipment supporting WEPplus. Since WEPplus only avoids the weak IVs of the original FMS attack, we foresee no problems in applying the attack against WEPplus.

Does aircrack-ptw work against Dynamic WEP?

This has not been tested as well. In principle we expect our attack to work on networks protected by Dynamic WEP. Since Dynamic WEP allows for re-keying, the attack will provide a key that may only be valid for a certain time frame. After the key has expired, the attack needs to be performed again.

Any additional information?

We are going to give a talk about aircrack-ptw at the easterhegg 2007 event in Hamburg.

Who we are
We (Erik Tews, Andrei Pychkine and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann) are cryptographic researchers at the cryptography and computer algebra group at the technical university Darmstadt in Germany. Head of the group is Prof. Dr. Dr. Johannes Buchmann.

Contact
Please send questions to aircrack-ptw@cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de
http://www.cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/aircrack-ptw/





UK Hacker Loses Extradition Fight

A British man has lost his High Court fight against extradition to the US for allegedly carrying out the "biggest military computer hack of all time".

Glasgow-born Gary McKinnon, of north London, is accused of gaining access to 97 US military and Nasa computers.

Home Secretary John Reid granted the US request to extradite him for trial.

At the High Court in London, his lawyers argued the 41-year-old had been subjected to "improper threats" and the move would breach his human rights.

His lawyers had argued that, if extradited, he would face an unknown length of time in pre-trial detention, with no likelihood of bail.

He would also face a long prison sentence - "in the region of 45 years" - and may not be allowed to serve part of the sentence at home in the UK, his lawyers had said.

But, on Tuesday, Lord Justice Maurice Kay and Mr Justice Goldring dismissed his legal challenge, saying they could not find any grounds for appeal.

Ben Cooper, for Mr McKinnon, said his client would now seek to make an appeal against his extradition at the House of Lords.

"We will certainly be applying for this court to certify a point of law of public importance and to grant leave," he said.

Speaking later, solicitor Jeffrey Anderson said alleged threats by US authorities, including one from New Jersey prosecutors that Mr McKinnon "would fry", would be among issues raised.

That had been a "chilling and intimidating" reference to capital punishment by the electric chair, he added.

It now looked as though the US would try to prosecute Mr McKinnon as a cyber-terrorist, Mr Anderson said.

"This could lead to him spending the rest of his life in prison in the US, with repatriation to serve his sentence in his home country denied as punishment for contesting his extradition."

Mr McKinnon has never denied that he accessed the computer networks of a wide number of US military institutions between February 2001 and March 2002.

Mr McKinnon, arrested in November 2002, has always maintained that he was motivated by curiosity and that he only managed to get into the networks because of lax security.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ws/6521255.stm





Inspectors: IRS Lost 490 Laptops, Many with Unencrypted Data
Nate Anderson

Every large organization loses laptops, but when those laptops contain the personal tax information of millions of Americans, it's a big deal. Big enough that the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration looked into the problem, and released a report on the Internal Revenue Service's penchant for losing machines filled with unencrypted tax data. "As a result," writes the report's author, Michael Phillips, "it is likely that sensitive data for a significant number of taxpayers have been unnecessarily exposed to potential identity theft and/or other fraudulent schemes."

How bad is the situation? When inspectors looked into the matter, they found that 490 laptops had been reported stolen between January 2, 2003 and June 13, 2006. Unfortunately, because reporting procedures for stolen laptops were often not followed, there isn't a real way to know whether this number is accurate.

490 laptops sounds like a lot, but the IRS currently has more than 47,000 in operation, and has no doubt used many more than that over the last few years. The report does not suggest that the agency try to cut losses to zero, but instead that it take better precautions. When thefts do occur, taxpayer data should be protected. Instead, inspectors found that "a large number of the lost or stolen IRS computers contain similar unencrypted data," and that employees routinely used flash drives, CDs, and DVDs to cart unencrypted data around with them.

The report also points out that physical security is important. 111 laptops were stolen right out of IRS facilities; if these were stored in lockable cabinets while employees were out, theft could be reduced significantly. Many of the remaining laptops were stolen out of vehicles or employee homes, suggesting that "employees may not have secured their laptop computers in the trunks of their vehicles or locked their laptop computers at home."

The problems even extended to off-site data backups, where backup media were often unsealed and open to anyone in the building. In one case, "one employee who retired in March 2006 had full access rights to the non-IRS off-site facility when we visited in July 2006."

IRS management has agreed with the findings of the Inspector General and has pledged to implement the report's recommendations. The report does note, however, that the IRS was warned about unencrypted data back in 2003 but did not take "adequate corrective actions." Here's hoping that more is done this time around. Actually paying my taxes is painful enough; having my identity stolen because of it would be rage-inducing.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...pted-data.html





Authorities Say Parents Can't Name Their Baby Metallica
Jack McGoughey

A Swedish couple has run into trouble with the law after trying to name their baby girl Metallica.

Michael and Karolina Tomaro are embroiled in a court battle with Swedish authorities who denied their application to name their six month old child after the legendary rock band.

"It suits her," Karolina Tomaro, 27, said Tuesday. "She's decisive and she knows what she wants."

The six month old has already been baptized as Metallica, but Swedish tax officials have declared the name as inappropriate. Swedish law declares that both first names and surnames must be approved by government authorities before they can be used.

The reason given by the Swedish National Tax Board for the refusal to allow the name to be registered is that the name is associated with the rock group and the word "metal."

According to Tomaro, the official handling the case also said the name was "ugly."

The couple was backed last month by Goteburg's County Administrative Court that ruled that there was no reason to block the name. The court also mentioned that a Swedish woman already has the middle name Metallica.

Once the Tamaro's tried to register the name with the tax autority before applying for a passport, they ran into their trouble. That is when tax officials objected to the name and appealed to a higher court. The ordeal frustrated the family's travel plans.

"We've had to cancel trips and can't get anywhere because we can't get her a passport without an approved name," Tomaro said.

Baby Metallica is not the first Swedish child to have their name denied under Swedish name laws. The names Veranda and Ikea have also been denied in the past.

Another name, Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116, was also rejected by Swedish authorities in 1996. The name is not as big of a mouthful as it looks- the name is pronounced Albin. The boy's parents chose the name at the time as a protest against the seemingly ridiculous Swedish naming laws.

One name that did get approved in 2005 was Google. Oliver Google Kai was named so by his parents, the search engine expert Kelias Kai, and his wife Carol.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/art...ame_their.html





April 7, 1969: Birth of That Thing We Call the Internet
Tony Long

1969: The publication of the first “request for comments,” or RFC, documents paves the way for the birth of the internet.

April 7 is often cited as a symbolic birth date of the net because the RFC memoranda contain research, proposals and methodologies applicable to internet technology. RFC documents provide a way for engineers and others to kick around new ideas in a public forum; sometimes, these ideas are adopted as new standards by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

One interesting aspect of the RFC is that each document is issued a unique serial number. An individual paper cannot be overwritten; rather, updates or corrections are submitted on a separate RFC. The result is an ongoing historical record of the evolution of internet standards.

When it comes to the birth of the net, Jan. 1, 1983, also has its supporters. On that date, the National Science Foundation’s university network backbone, a precursor to the World Wide Web, became operational.
http://www.wired.com/science/discove...dayintech_0407


















Until next week,

- js.



















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