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Old 18-04-07, 09:20 AM   #2
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Shades of Napster

Schmidt Says YouTube 'Very Close' to Filtering System
Greg Sandoval

Google is very near enacting a filtering service that would prevent copyright content from being uploaded to video-sharing site YouTube, CEO Eric Schmidt said Monday.

Schmidt made the comments to about 300 people here at the National Association of Broadcasters conference during a one-on-one interview with John Seigenthaler, a former reporter with NBC's Nightly News.

The new system, which Schmidt called Claim Your Content, will automatically identify copyright material so that it can be removed, Schmidt said.

"We are very close to turning this on," Schmidt said.

The filtering system was supposed to have launched last year at YouTube, which Google acquired for $1.6 billion in October 2006. Delays in rolling it out have angered movie and television executives. Executives at NBC and Viacom have accused Google of dragging its feet on preventing YouTube users from uploading clips from hit shows and movies.

Network executives accused Google of stalling so YouTube could reap the big traffic that professionally-created shows generate. Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google last month and accused Google of massive intentional copyright infringement.

"Ah Viacom," Schmidt said. "You're either doing business with them or being sued by them...we chose the former, but ended up the latter."

Schmidt took the opportunity to poke fun at Microsoft's assertion that Google's pending acquisition of DoubleClick may be a threat to fair competition. Other companies, including Yahoo and AT&T have also asked regulators to review the transaction closely.

Seigenthaler asked Schmidt what he thought of Microsoft's concerns and Schmidt responded as if he hadn't heard previously about them.

"Microsoft?" Schmidt said.

When Seigenthaler said Microsoft also expressed concern about Google's size and the safety of privacy on the Web, Schmidt played to the crowd and responded once again: "Microsoft?"

"The specific complaints Microsoft has made are clearly false," a more serious Schmidt said. "I think a more likely scenario is that they are making those arguments because they are a competitor of ours."

Earlier Seigenthaler noted that many in the crowd were in radio and television and many may fear that Google has its sites set on their advertising market.

Google said Sunday that it will begin selling advertisements on all of the radio stations owned by Clear Channel Communications, the nation's largest station owner.

Google has been working to extend its reach into traditional media ad sales, but Schmidt denied that Google is a threat to radio, television or newspapers. He noted that ad revenues for TV and radio have been relatively flat and implored the audience to realize that they need to bring in new advertisers. His message of course is that Google can help them do that.

"Google is new phenomenon that isn't going to replace radio or TV," he said. "It seems to me that Google has an ad business that can add to the success of radio and TV."
http://news.com.com/Schmidt+says+You...3-6176601.html





Dept. of Irony

Microsoft Urges Antitrust Officials to Scuttle DoubleClick Deal
Steve Lohr

Microsoft, a veteran defendant of epic antitrust battles in the United States and Europe, is urging antitrust officials to consider scuttling Google’s plan to buy DoubleClick, an online advertising company.

Microsoft contends that the $3.1 billion deal, announced last Friday, would hurt competition in the fast-growing market for advertising on the Web and raise questions about how much personal information would be collected by Google, which is already a dominant player in online advertising.

In an interview today, Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said that the purchase of DoubleClick by Google would “combine the two largest distributors of online advertising” and thus “substantially reduce competition in the advertising market on the Web.”

Google dismissed Microsoft’s assertions. “We’ve studied this closely, and their claims, as stated, are not true,” Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, said in an interview last night.

Google and DoubleClick, according to Mr. Smith, would be in a position to “observe and capture consumer information on an unprecedented scale.”

Google tracks the interests and preferences among the millions of people who use its search engine. DoubleClick is the leader among companies that specialize in placing, or “serving,” the graphical and video ads that appear on Web sites. Ad-serving networks like DoubleClick place tiny programs on personal computers, called cookies, that monitor where an individual user goes online.

Microsoft was joined today by AT&T, a company that traces its lineage to the Ma Bell monopoly that was broken up in the mid-1980s. “We think antitrust authorities should take a hard look at this deal and the implications,” said Jim Cicconi, senior executive vice president for external affairs at AT&T. “If any one company gets a hammerlock on the online advertising space, as Google seems to be trying to do, that is worrisome.”

Microsoft was one the companies, along with Yahoo and Time Warner, that lost out to Google in the bidding for DoubleClick. Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T, by contrast, would be affected by a Google-DoubleClick combination because AT&T distributes services over the Internet like digital television, known as IPTV.

“For many of these new Web services, it could be that the advertising-supported model is the predominant business model,” he said. “The danger here is that Google could be in a position to pick winners and losers.”

This is not the first time that Microsoft, the biggest winner of the personal computer era, and Google, the emerging Internet powerhouse, have been on opposite sides of an anticompetitive claim. Early last year, Google complained to regulators that the design of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser steered users to Microsoft’s MSN search engine instead of rival search offerings from Google and Yahoo.

After reviewing the matter, the Justice Department said last May that Microsoft’s browser allowed users a fairly easy way to switch to non-Microsoft search services. So Microsoft’s product design, the department said, did not pose an anticompetitive threat.

In that case, Google did talk to antitrust officials in Europe and the United States about its concerns.

Mr. Smith said Microsoft had not yet approached antitrust officials in the United States about its worries about Google’s purchase of DoubleClick.

Mr. Smith said that based on conversations with several media and other companies over the weekend, he expected that many would soon come forward to express similar concerns.

The initial antitrust review of mergers lasts 30 days. It is not yet clear whether the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission, which share antitrust duties, will review the Google-DoubleClick deal.

Any review of a merger on antitrust grounds begins with a determination of the “relevant market” in which the two companies operate. “That is the first hurdle in case like this,” said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University, “and it looks as if DoubleClick may well be in a nearby, or complementary, market instead of the same market as Google. And then the question will be how easy it is for new entrants to compete in the online advertising markets.”

The Microsoft analysis, Mr. Smith said, is that the combined companies will hold 85 percent of the market for distributing ads to Web publishers.

Mr. Schmidt replied that Google and DoubleClick are each “small components of a much larger advertising market,” and each faces considerable competition. He added that it is easy to switch to offerings from rivals of Google and DoubleClick.

“We understand that we will go through a regulatory process in the United States and Europe now,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Along the way, all these questions will be discussed and debated. And we welcome that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/te...16softcnd.html





Google-DoubleClick Deal Seen Spurring Web Ad M&A
Paul Thomasch

Google Inc.'s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick Inc. will create a new powerhouse in digital advertising that could spur a wave of takeovers in the online marketing sector.

The planned acquisition, unveiled late on Friday, prompted a rally in shares of digital advertising companies on Monday, with aQuantive Inc. jumping 12.2 percent, Real Media Inc. up 10.6 percent and ValueClick Inc. gaining 2.3 percent.

The surge in stock prices suggests investors are more excited about the prospect of further takeovers in the digital marketing industry than the threat that the Google-DoubleClick combination could steal business away from smaller rivals.

Up and down Wall Street, analysts predicted another deal to follow Google's acquisition of privately held DoubleClick, which itself follows Publicis' $1.3 billion purchase of interactive agency Digitas Inc. four months ago.

"We expect that Google's deal for Doubleclick will benefit public assets such as aQuantive, ValueClick, and possibly even Akamai, as there is a scarcity of high-quality assets combined with an aggressively consolidating sector," Scott Devitt, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus, said in a research note.

AQuantive, ValueClick and Real Media specialize in different digital advertising areas, ranging from online media buying, campaign design and tracking services, to providing search and display marketing. Akamai Technolgies Inc. helps speed up the delivery of digital content via the Web.

One of the most talked about potential pairings is Microsoft Corp. and aQuantive, a full service online ad agency that has a creative division, buys and sell ad space, offers direct marketing services and tracks online campaigns.

AQuantive is based in Seattle, near Microsoft's campus headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Shares of aQuantive hit a new 52-week high of $32.78 on the Nasdaq before closing at $32.01.

JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan raised his rating on aQuantive to "overweight" from "neutral" and said, "The recent Google acquisition of DoubleClick could potentially lead to more acquisitions in the space."

But other Microsoft watchers said the world's largest software maker, while lagging in the Web search market, would not necessarily benefit from buying an online ad company.

"In terms of Microsoft's advertising -- they already have a fairly stable, strong and well-established banner business," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "What they are not keeping up with is search.

"But their search engine is actually good -- what they need to do is get more users," he said, meaning the acquisition of a digital agency may not help.

Morningstar analyst Toan Tran said: "I don't think buying someone like aQuantive would help Microsoft."

Pivotal Step

With DoubleClick, Google vastly expands its Web display advertising business, which includes richer graphic and online banner ads for corporate brands, and represents half of all online marketing. Until now, display advertising has been dominated by rival Yahoo Inc..

"This may prove to be a pivotal step for Google in its quest to create something of an operating system for the entire advertising industry," Derek Brown, an analyst with Cantor Fitzgerald, said in a research note.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft had bid for DoubleClick, while Time Warner Inc.'s AOL online unit had considered a bid earlier in the process, sources have said.

Yahoo, like Microsoft, has deep pockets for an acquisition but some analysts also say Yahoo has fortified its advertising capabilities with a new ad system known as Project Panama.

Even if there are no suitors, aQuantive and others could benefit from the Google-DoubleClick deal since marketers are often wary of putting too much control in the hands of one advertising company, analysts said.

"We believe that Google's acquisition of DoubleClick could lead to a backlash from ad agencies and some publishers due to conflicts of interest," Richard Fetyko, an analyst with Merriman Curhan Ford, said in a research note. "If acquired by the largest online media company, DoubleClick loses the independency that ad agencies seek."

(Additional reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston)
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv...32468320070417





Google Says Not Encroaching on Broadcasters
Rachelle Younglai

Google moved to reassure broadcasters on Monday that the Internet company was not encroaching on their turf after announcing two major deals that widen its scope in the advertising industry.

``Google is a new phenomena. It does not replace radio and television,'' Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told delegates at the National Association of Broadcasters' annual conference.

Over the weekend, the Web search leader announced a multi-year advertising sales agreement with the largest U.S. broadcaster, Clear Channel Radio. That announcement came just days after it said it would gobble up web ad supplier DoubleClick, beating out competitors Microsoft Corp.and Yahoo Inc. (YHOO.O) in the process.

``It seems to me that Google has an advertising business that can add to the success of radio and television worldwide,'' Schmidt said.

Clear Channel (CCU.N) said it has agreed for Google to sell a guaranteed portion of the 30-second spots available on its 675 radio stations in top U.S. markets, in a bid to expand the universe of local radio advertisers to Google's online buyers.

Earlier, the Mountain View, California-based company revealed a similar deal to supply satellite TV broadcaster EchoStar (DISH.O) and its 13 million viewers.

Schmidt said it looks like advertising in radio and television has been relatively flat in revenue growth. ``If our technology can bring more advertisers to radio, I think that is a good thing,'' he said.

Google's pay-per-click Web search ad system has transformed the effectiveness of online advertising.

``Advertisers care about efficiency, measurability, targetability,'' said Schmidt. ``The tools that Google are developing are simply better tools than the previous generation of technology.''

Schmidt brushed aside concerns that Google was taking away ad revenue from broadcasters and said that advertising as an industry is growing. ``The money is there,'' he said. ``It makes good sense to have an ad that is targeted to you. It is more important to have an ad that is more relevant to you.''

Schmidt appeared amused at Microsoft's allegations that Google was anti-competitive by buying DoubleClick.

``A more likely scenario is that they were unhappy because they are competitors of ours,'' he said.

Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, said the deal would allow Google to corner the online advertising market and provide them access to a huge amount of information on consumer behavior on the Internet.

AT&T (T.N) and Time Warner Inc. (TWX.N) said they hoped regulators would scrutinize Google's DoubleClick deal.

The importance of Google was not lost on the thousands of delegates at the broadcasters' convention. The line to hear Schmidt speak wound out the door.
http://www.reuters.com/article/busin...35565920070417





Google, Clear Channel in Broad U.S. Radio Ads Deal
Eric Auchard

Web search leader Google Inc. has broken into radio with a multi-year advertising sales agreement with the largest U.S. broadcaster, Clear Channel Radio, the companies said on Sunday.

The deal, long anticipated by the radio industry, marks the progress Google is making as it expands into offline media, not just in radio, but also television and newspapers -- even in the face of resistance from some traditional media players.

Last week, it revealed a parallel deal to supply satellite TV broadcaster EchoStar and its 13 million viewers.

Clear Channel said it has agreed for Google to sell a guaranteed portion of the 30-second spots available on its 675 radio stations in top U.S. markets, in a bid to expand the universe of local radio advertisers to Google's online buyers.

Financial terms were not disclosed. A Clear Channel executive said Google has access to less than 5 percent of the radio broadcaster's overall inventory of advertising air time. The U.S. radio industry generates $20 billion in annual sales.

Through Clear Channel, Google Audio Ads promises to offer advertisers national distribution across all top 100 U.S. radio markets, enabling them to reach specific audiences, throughout the day, including prized "morning drive-time" slots, in targeted local markets.

Clear Channel attracts up to 20 percent of U.S. radio sales and draws 110 million listeners. Formats range from rock to all-talk to easy-listening, 24-hour news, Christian and jazz.

In a joint statement, Clear Channel Radio said its national and local sales forces will continue to focus on the company's most lucrative advertiser relationships, and on advertisers who seek specialized ad packages. Google will focus on advertisers who run ads online but who do not yet run ads on radio.

"By making radio more efficient and measurable for online marketers, this is a way to further activate their marketing efforts," said Charlie Rahilly, Clear Channel's executive vice president of operations and negotiator of the Google ad deal.

A year ago, Google telegraphed its ambitions in radio when it agreed to pay more than $1 billion for dMarc Broadcasting, which links advertisers to radio stations through an automated ad buying system. DMarc is the foundation of Google Audio Ads.

Google counts hundreds of thousands of Web-search advertising customers, many of which have never used radio for marketing, according to Drew Hilles, the former head of advertising sales at dMarc, who now runs Google radio sales.

Mountain View, California-based Google is also talking to other radio broadcasters, but Hilles declined to comment on whether they included CBS, another big U.S. radio player, or satellite radio broadcasters. "Clear Channel is the benchmark relationship in radio," he said before adding that: "We are in conversations with lots of other companies."

For Clear Channel, of San Antonio, Texas, the deal opens up an additional sales channel online for its 5,200-strong sales force and potentially new revenue by reaching advertisers who previously have not marketed on radio. By expanding its base of advertisers, Clear Channel said its sees Google Audio Ads boosting the average amount advertisers pay for spots, as measured in CPM, or costs-per-thousand ad impressions.

The deal comes ahead of a hotly contested vote this Thursday by Clear Channel stockholders on a plan by management to sell the company for $19 billion to a private equity group made up of Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain Capital.

At the time the proposed private equity buyout was announced in November, the company said it planned to sell 448 of its 1,150 radio stations -- mostly in small markets -- as well as Clear Channel's 42-station television group.

The Google deal covers the remaining 675 or so stations that represent the lion's share of the U.S. radio market.

The partners said the internal ad-buying system used by Clear Channel's sales force now fully works with Google's radio-ad-buying service. This complements an online ad partnership where Google already provides a way for Clear Channel advertisers to place text ads on station Web sites.
http://www.reuters.com/article/busin...23862920070416





Google Achieves Behavioral Targeting Nirvana
Rich Tehrani

Imagine a world where advertisers would be able to predict your detailed behavior online. They would know when you are about to buy a song, a car, a present for your spouse – they would know virtually everything you are thinking.

If you believe this is impossible then you would be wrong as there are a few companies who have access to enough Internet data to make this privacy lover’s nightmare a reality and believe it or not a relatively new science called behavioral targeting is taking the online advertising world by storm.

In an March 2007 article in Business 2.0 titled The Quest For The Perfect Online Ad, the author points out that Yahoo is one of the leading companies in the behavioral targeting space. A candid interview with Yahoo’s Dr. Usama Fayyad the company’s Executive Vice President of Research & Strategic Data Solutions shows Fayyad thinks showing ads based on behavioral targeting is much more powerful than simply showing ads based on simple search queries.

A salient quote from Fayyad in fact is “I know more about your intent than any 1,000 keywords you could type.

Yahoo has 12 terabytes of user data flowing through it everyday and to put this in perspective, this amount represents more data than the entire Library of Congress! Fayyad proudly says he can predict with 75% certainty which of the 300,000 monthly visitors to Yahoo! Autos will purchase a new car within the next three months.

In addition Fayyad points out there are times when advertising works best out of context. In other words once the computer knows what your intentions are… Let’s say trading stocks -- it can display a highly effective ad for a trading company while you are tracking your fantasy football team.

But Yahoo is not the only company with massive amounts of users and data… Google too is in the position of tracking their customer’s behavior in Gmail, search, Froogle and a cornucopia of other sites which have chosen to run Google Adsense ads.

In addition Google has an extremely popular search toolbar installed on millions of computers allowing the company to keep track of what users do on a variety of sites.

Last week however the game of behavioral targeting got even more competitive as Google announced they are purchasing DoubleClick (News - Alert).

DoubleClick is the leading company in the business of displaying advertising online. Large web publishers often use DoubleClick as a way to track advertising on their own sites. For example DoubleClick could be set to allow an advertisement – let’s say a banner ad at the top of TMCnet to be displayed every 5th time the page is displayed. In addition the ad could be shown only on nights and/or weekends or to European visitors.

DoubleClick like many websites uses cookies which are files placed on user’s computers to track their browsing history.

With the acquisition of DoubleClick, Google now has access to the cookies and subsequently browsing history of vast numbers of web users. It would be fair to say that greater than 85% of Internet users frequently come into contact with ads served by DoubleClick. In addition there are a vast number of sites serving up Google’s ads and running Google Analytics. Google perhaps now has access to the behavioral information of over 90% of web users.

One can expect Google to start mining DoubleClick’s databases immediately and in the process, cross reference this data with its own vast databases of search history and perhaps even Gmail content.

The point is, Google now has access to not only it’s own army of sites but it also owns much of the browsing history of sites like Yahoo and MSN. In other words the competitive advantage Yahoo was recently touting could fade away rather quickly if Google not only knows what Yahoo! knows but much, much more.

I had a chance to interview Tim Vanderhook, CEO and founder of Specific Media about the Google/DoubleClick merger. Tim’s company specializes in behavioral targeting of advertising via its own advertising network.

Vanderhook believes this merger is partially fueled by Google’s concern about the limited value of text-based search ads and moreover he expects Google to perhaps provide some paid DoubleClick services for free.

Tim raises an alarm bell when he says, “This acquisition is not plug-and-play for Google like Advertising.com was for AOL (News - Alert). They are attempting to get into the market by purchasing an ad serving technology, they still need to forge relationships with major publishers on the display side of the business to get inventory to resell.” He continues, “This strategy will prove to be an uphill battle and for $3.1 billion in cash that hill just got a lot bigger.”

Tim sees this purchase as challenging Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra. And he may have a point. The firestorm ignited by privacy advocates over Google’s Gmail program where the search engine giant decided to show ads related to e-mail content could be dwarfed by the concern over the vast quantity of data Google now owns.

Google could potentially have access to not only the majority of the world’s search history but its browsing and e-commerce history as well. The company could know more about web surfers than they know about themselves.

While this is a nightmare scenario for privacy advocates everywhere, it should scare Google’s competition even more. After all, it will be difficult for any other company to challenge the vast warehouse of user data Google now owns.

If applied correctly, Google becomes the ultimate behavioral targeting advertising engine and in the long run Google shareholder’s behavior could be easiest of all to predict… Big smiling faces and a 75% likelihood to be purchasing a shiny new car in the next three months. :-)
http://www.tmcnet.com/news/2007/04/16/2510402.htm





Is Google Reading Your Mail?!

Read this carefully:

[0044] References to the blog document by other sources may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. For example, content of emails or chat transcripts can contain URLs of blog documents. Email or chat discussions that include references to the blog document is a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?! Google has a massively popular hosted email service - GMail. They also have Google Talk, a chat service. You probably knew that. But did you know Google has intentions of crawling the content of your GMail emails and Google Talk chat sessions?! Now, I don’t know if they actually do that or not, and I haven’t gone hunting thru their terms of service seeking clarity, but their stated aim is clear: to find URLs in two key forms of personal online communications (email and chats), and to use these discoveries to further rank blogs and blog posts.
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2...eir-own-words/





Updating e-Mail Rights
Victoria Shannon

The European Convention on Human Rights has just been updated for the Internet age to include the basic right to keep your personal e-mail messages and Web surfing private.

That, at least, is the precedent set by a court ruling earlier this month in Strasbourg in a case involving a Welsh college employee. The decision, coming out of the European Court of Human Rights, will affect subsequent human rights cases emerging from any of the 30 countries that have signed on to the convention.

In particular, the case applied to an employer's monitoring, collecting and storing a worker's personal Internet communications without ever saying that personal use of the Web was not permitted, or that personal use would be watched by the employer.

Cedric Manara, a law professor at the Edhec business school in Nice, said the ruling answered a theoretical question that had never been established by the court before: Do we have a right to privacy for our personal e-mail messages and Web visits at work?

That question as it relates to phone communications had already been dealt with by various courts (personal phone calls made from business premises are private), but not so with our digital activity.

"The court said yes, Internet communications falls under Article 8," Manara said. That part of the convention says, "Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence."

But, Manara emphasized, "This ruling will not bar employers from watching what their employees do. The court suggests it may be legitimate to control employees, but they must be made aware that they are subject to monitoring."

Presumably, then, if an employer gives adequate notice, that occasional note to the folks back home could be intercepted and read by the boss. On the other hand, if you're told ahead of time that could happen, it is up to you to keep your personal use on the up and up - or to stop that personal use at work.

What will constitute adequate notice remains for other precedent-setting court cases to establish.

And, while this ruling will apply to the human rights convention signatories - which includes all of the European Union, as well as Sweden and others - the United States operates under different privacy and employment rules.

For Americans, the employer is pretty much entitled to know everything they do at work, and spying on e-mail and Web surfing is common, Manara said. "Whatever is in your work contract applies," he said.

In the Welsh case, the personal assistant to the principal of Carmarthenshire College in Wales became suspicious that her e-mail messages were being monitored starting in 1999.

The British government, defendants in the case as the administrator of the college, admitted that the monitoring took place, but said that it was legitimate in order to ascertain whether the employee was making excessive use of college facilities for personal use.

An April 3 court decision said that since phone calls are considered private under case law, "It follows logically that e-mails sent from work should be similarly protected under Article 8, as should information derived from the monitoring of personal Internet usage."

Since the college had no policy at the time regarding the monitoring of telephone, e-mail or Internet use by employees, the plaintiff "had a reasonable expectation as to the privacy" in her digital communications, the court said.

But, the ruling also said, "The court would not exclude that the monitoring of an employee's use of a telephone, e-mail or Internet at the place of work may be considered 'necessary in a democratic society' in certain situations in pursuit of a legitimate aim."

The court awarded Lynette Copland, the personal assistant who started the case and who still works at the college, £3,000, or $4,100, in damages and £6,000 in legal costs.

"I felt like I was being stalked, and at the time I believed it was the right thing to fight for my rights to privacy," she told The Western Mail newspaper in Cardiff last week. "I am glad to hear the European Court agreed with me on that. It was an extremely unpleasant time for me."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/...gy/ptend19.php





Yahoo Strikes Ad Deal With More Papers
Miguel Helft

After a flurry of deal making over the last few days, Google and Yahoo, two giants of the online advertising business, are set to encroach on each other’s turf even more aggressively than before.

On Monday, Yahoo announced a broad deal with publishers representing 264 newspapers to sell national advertising across their Web sites. It may be the clearest sign to date of the company’s efforts to extend its advertising platform beyond the panoply of Yahoo sites.

The move follows Google’s announcement on Friday of its plans to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, a bold move into the market to deliver display and graphical advertising to Web sites. It is a business that Yahoo dominates, and one in which Google — the leader in search-based text advertisements — has failed to gain much traction.

“They are both trying to extend their influence and business opportunities beyond their own properties,” said Stewart Barry, an analyst at ThinkEquity Partners.

Yahoo’s deal with newspapers is an extension of an agreement announced in November with a smaller group of publishers. It also represents a vote of confidence for Yahoo’s revamped search advertising technology, which the company unveiled earlier this year.

Under the deal, newspapers will use Yahoo’s search technology on their Web sites and share revenue generated from the ads that Yahoo places alongside search results. Both Yahoo officials and outsiders have said recently that the technology, referred to internally as Project Panama, has improved Yahoo’s ability to place relevant ads in front of users, and therefore generate more revenue from search advertising.

Additionally, newspapers will be able to sell local advertisements on certain Yahoo properties, and their articles will appear on Yahoo’s news, finance and sports Web sites.

Those newspapers in the consortium that currently use DoubleClick’s technology to deliver graphical ads on their sites will gradually move to Yahoo’s system.

The earlier agreement was largely limited to cross-selling employment classified advertisements.

And in recent months, members of the newspaper consortium, which initially included the MediaNews Group, Hearst, Belo, E. W. Scripps and others, have recruited other chains, including the McClatchy Company and Media General. They are hoping that the broader alliance with Yahoo will help struggling newspaper companies increase online revenues.

“It’s an important step in the transformation of the newspaper industry,” said Robert W. Decherd, chairman and chief executive of Belo.

Yahoo made its first significant foray into the business of selling graphical ads outside its own network in an alliance with eBay last May. The company described the new agreement as the next step in that strategy.

“We are very interested in aligning not with everyone, but on a selective basis with publishers that have a quality audience where there is an alignment with Yahoo’s audience,” said Hilary Schneider, a Yahoo senior vice president.

Google’s planned acquisition of DoubleClick and Yahoo’s deal with newspapers place the two companies increasingly at the nexus between advertisers and online publishers.

“Both companies are looking to get to as large a scale as they can so their advertisers have the broadest reach possible,” said Bill Gross, chairman and chief executive of Idealab, which incubates and finances new technology ventures and was a pioneer in the search advertising business. “And everyone is looking to lock up as many publishers as possible.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/te.../17search.html





Yahoo’s Earnings Are Down 11 Percent
Miguel Helft

Yahoo’s top executives have been focused this year on an effort nicknamed Panama, after the vast canal project undertaken in the face of adversity. It is a major overhaul of the company’s search advertising system, intended to increase revenue and close a growing gap with Google, the leader in Internet search.

But it looks as if the good news that investors expected from the project has yet to flow.

The company said Tuesday that net income for the first quarter fell 11 percent from a year earlier, while revenue, excluding certain payments made to partners, was up 9 percent.

The results, announced after the close of trading, were in line with the company’s own forecasts but they fell short of analysts’ expectations and disappointed investors, who sent Yahoo shares tumbling nearly 8 percent in after-hours trading.

“All in all, there didn’t seem to be a lot to get excited about,” said Derek Brown, an analyst with Cantor Fitzgerald. “There was no tangible proof that Panama is working well or better than expected. There was reference to it, but no concrete evidence in the numbers.”

During a conference call with analysts, Yahoo executives made several upbeat pronouncements about Panama’s early performance. And they repeated guidance that the positive effects of Panama on Yahoo’s bottom line would begin to be felt in the second quarter and more significantly later this year as the system is rolled out in overseas markets.

Despite investors’ reaction, Terry S. Semel, Yahoo’s chairman and chief executive, said he was pleased with the company’s performance. “The results we put out today were exactly what we expected,” he said in an interview. “To us it is a very strong performance.”

Project Panama is Yahoo’s attempt to make the ads placed alongside search results more likely to bebe clicked by users. Because an advertiser pays only when a user clicks on its ad to visit its site, more clicks translate into more revenue.

Yahoo began rolling out the system in the United States on Feb. 5, and company executives have said it is performing well. At an investor conference this year, Mr. Semel said he was “all smiles” about Panama.

Perhaps as a result, investors were hoping that the financial benefits of the system would begin to be felt sooner rather than later. Since the beginning of the year, shares of Yahoo have risen about 25 percent, far outpacing gains by Google and most other major Internet companies. Yahoo shares closed at $32.09 on Tuesday, up 48 cents, or 1.5 percent, but dropped more than $2.53 in after-hours trading.

“You had so much hype and optimism about Panama around the quarter,” said Douglas Anmuth, an analyst with Lehman Brothers. Mr. Anmuth said Panama seemed to be on track to deliver on its promise. “It is going to be on a schedule that Yahoo suggested and not on what investors had come to expect in the last few months,” he said.

To reap the full benefits of Panama, some analysts say Yahoo needs to increase its share of searches conducted online, which has remained relatively steady over the last year, while Google’s has been inching up. During the first quarter, Yahoo accounted for 27.9 percent of all searches in the United States and Google for 48 percent, according to comScore Networks.

On Monday, Yahoo announced a broad agreement with newspaper companies that could help bolster use of its search technology. Under the deal, more than 260 newspapers in 44 states will carry the Yahoo search box on their Web sites. The announcement comes after other recent distribution deals, including an agreement for Viacom to use Yahoo as the search engine on several of its online sites.

Yahoo’s net income for the quarter was $142.4 million, or 10 cents a share, down from $159.9 million, or 11 cents a share, a year earlier.

Revenue excluding certain payments to partners was $1.18 billion, compared with $1.09 billion a year earlier, a 9 percent increase.

Total revenue was $1.67 billion, a 7 percent increase over the previous year. Yahoo said its forecasts for the remainder of the year remained unchanged.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had expected the company to report a profit of 11 cents a share and revenue of $1.2 billion, excluding the partner payments.

On Tuesday, Mr. Semel also said that Yahoo had expanded its advertising partnership with eBay to include eBay’s payment service, PayPal. Under the deal, merchants accepting PayPal will be highlighted with a special icon when they appear in ads alongside search results, perhaps giving consumers an incentive to click on the ads. The strategy mirrors one that Google has used successfully with its payment system, Checkout.

Mr. Semel said that Google’s planned acquisition of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, which was announced last week and represents a move by Google into the graphical advertising business dominated by Yahoo, “does validate Yahoo’s strategy for the last few years.”

Mr. Semel said he had heard and understood concerns from some publishers among DoubleClick’s customers that the deal put the company into the hands of a potential competitor. “My guess is that some will be fine and others won’t be fine,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/business/18yahoo.html





Intel Earnings Jump Sharply in the Quarter, but Sales Dip
Laurie J. Flynn

Intel’s first-quarter earnings appeared to reassure investors Tuesday that the company’s profit margins were finally starting to improve after a period of price cutting and heavy spending.

The company, the world’s largest chip maker and a closely watched indicator of the health of the technology industry, said that first-quarter profit rose 19 percent partly as a result of a one-time tax benefit and the company’s move to a more efficient production process, while sales fell slightly.

“We certainly continue to see a competitive pricing environment,” Andy D. Bryant, the chief financial officer, said in a conference call Tuesday with analysts. “But we find ourselves in a better position than we were in a year ago.”

On the critical measurement of gross profit margin, the company surprised Wall Street by surpassing its own projections for the first quarter. Gross margin was 50.1 percent, higher than the 49.6 percent recorded in the previous quarter and above the 49 percent Intel projected for the quarter in January.

The company attributed the good news to lower microprocessor unit costs and the selling off of reserved inventory, which helped offset lower revenue and the high start-up costs of moving to 45-nanometer production, a more advanced chip-making process.

Similarly, the company projected that gross margin for the year would be about 51 percent, higher than its earlier forecast of about 50 percent.

Investors applauded the prospect that margin pressure was finally easing. The report was released after the market’s close Tuesday, and Intel’s shares rose 47 cents, or 2.24 percent, in after-hours trading. In regular trading, Intel’s stock increased 29 cents, to close at $20.98 a share.

The company, had “strong momentum and relatively stable pricing” during the first quarter, said Paul S. Otellini, Intel’s chief executive.

Intel reported a profit of $1.61 billion, or 27 cents a share, compared with $1.36 billion, or 23 cents a share, a year earlier. Intel executives said a tax benefit of $300 million raised earnings by 5 cents a share. Intel’s first-quarter sales declined 1 percent, to $8.85 billion, from $8.94 billion.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial forecast earnings of 22 cents a share, excluding the tax benefit, and sales of $8.9 billion.

Mr. Bryant said Intel’s profit improved in large part because average selling prices stayed relatively stable. New microprocessor products for notebook computers and servers helped Intel keep prices up.

For the last several years Intel has been locked in a price war with Advanced Micro Devices, a battle that has taken its toll on profit margins at both companies. But while Intel appears to be reviving, A.M.D. surprised investors last week by announcing that it would report revenue in the first quarter of $1.23 billion, far below the $1.53 billion analysts had forecast.

A.M.D. blamed lower selling prices for its processors, as well as lower unit sales, and said it would make cutbacks in hiring and spending to further reduce operating costs. The company said it would reduce 2007 capital spending by about $500 million from $2.5 billion. A.M.D. is scheduled to release its earnings report Thursday.

Cody Acree, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus, called Intel’s quarter “encouraging,” and said it appeared Intel was gaining back lost market share in virtually all categories. “In a challenging environment we think Intel is executing well, especially when you look at the poor executing of its nearest competitor,” he said.

Looking ahead to the second quarter, Intel expects revenue of $8.2 billion to $8.8 billion, below analysts’ forecast for revenue of $8.86 billion. But Mr. Bryant told analysts that the slowdown was in part a normal seasonal pattern.

Intel executives Tuesday pointed to developments in chip-making that are enabling it to pack more features into its processors. That, in turn, is helping keep costs down and prices stable. At a developer conference in Beijing on Monday, Intel described plans to feature a “system on a chip” in the coming quarters, a move that leads to increased efficiency, lower prices and less energy use.

The company also said Tuesday that its corporate restructuring was a quarter ahead of schedule, and that it had already reduced its headcount by 6,000 workers, to about 92,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/te...gy/18chip.html





I.B.M. Profit Is Up, Despite Slow U.S. Sales
Steve Lohr

I.B.M. reported solid gains in quarterly profit and modest growth in revenue yesterday, as the company’s strategic shift toward higher-margin software and services makes gradual progress.

The largest information technology services company, International Business Machines is also a major global supplier of software and hardware to corporations. So its results are closely watched as a barometer of corporate spending on technology.

The results paint a picture of dynamic markets in the Asia-Pacific region, notably China and India; a rebound in Europe, with the big German market especially strong; a continuing recovery in Japan; and sluggishness in the United States.

Sales in the Americas grew only 1 percent, to $9.1 billion. Within that geographic market, which is the company’s largest, business in Canada and South America held up fairly well, but the United States was the source of weakness.

In a conference call yesterday afternoon, Mark Loughridge, I.B.M.’s chief financial officer, said the falloff in the United States was most pronounced in March, particularly among large corporations.

Based on customer prospects and field reports, Mr. Loughridge expressed confidence that I.B.M. would see “some improvement” in the current quarter in the United States.

Still, at a time when economists are concerned about whether softness in business investment will slow the American economy this year, the I.B.M. results suggest there is cause for concern.

“The one surprise here was the weakness in the U.S.,” said David Grossman, an analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners in San Francisco.

I.B.M. shares closed slightly higher, up 94 cents at $97.12 a share. In after-hours trading, shares slipped 63 cents, to $96.49. In contrast to the sluggish performance in the United States, the company’s sales in China rose 31 percent from a year ago, and sales in India increased 24 percent.

I.B.M.’s quarterly revenue rose 7 percent, to $22 billion, but the increase was only 4 percent in constant currency after adjusting for the weakness of the dollar. Earnings per share rose 12 percent, to $1.21.

That performance matched the consensus estimates of Wall Street analysts for profit and slightly exceeded their projections for revenue, as compiled by Thomson Financial.

The company’s global services business grew by 8 percent, to $12.4 billion. Within the overall services business, the unit that handles high-end consulting work — helping companies use technology to streamline their procurement, manufacturing and marketing — grew 9 percent, to $4.2 billion.

Profit margins in that unit, called global business services, have improved for eight consecutive quarters to 10.5 percent, or 2 percentage points higher than a year ago.

That is crucial to I.B.M.’s strategy to move further up the ladder in the services business to work that requires more specialized skills.

Revenue at I.B.M.’s other services unit, which includes managing data centers for corporate customers and maintenance, rose 7 percent, to $8.3 billion, but its profit margins fell 2.5 percentage points in the past year, to 7.8 percent, which the company attributed to high costs in the United States.

I.B.M.’s big services business is under pressure from rivals, especially Indian outsourcing specialists, who contend that they will do to the technology services industry what the Japanese did in autos: compete first on price and later with superior quality and products.

Though far smaller than I.B.M., the Indian services companies are growing rapidly. Within the last few days, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, for example, each reported that its most recent quarterly revenue rose more than 40 percent from the year-earlier quarter.

I.B.M.’s software sales rose 9 percent, to $4.3 billion, helped by particularly strong growth products like its Websphere line, which uses Internet software standards to link a company’s programs, and its Tivoli data center management software.

Hardware revenue increased only 2 percent, to $4.5 billion. Within the division, results were mixed. Mainframe sales increased 12 percent and big Unix server computers rose 14 percent, but minicomputer sales fell 13 percent.

I.B.M.’s computer chip business fell 7 percent from a year ago, but the company said that was mainly because last year was a peak period of demand for video-game chips used in the Microsoft Xbox, the Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo Wii machines in the long run-up to product introductions last holiday season.

The company’s storage systems business was also a disappointment, with sales falling 1 percent. Earlier yesterday, EMC, the leader in storage systems, reported that its quarterly revenue rose 17 percent, to $2.98 billion, and its earnings per share rose 36 percent, to 15 cents a share.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/te...gy/18blue.html





Britain Reviews Phrase 'War on Terror'
Jill Lawless

A member of Tony Blair's Cabinet on Monday brought out into the open a quiet shift away from the U.S. view on combatting extremist groups, acknowledging that British officials have stopped using the expression "war on terror" favored by President Bush.

International Development Secretary Hilary Benn, a rising star of the governing Labour Party, said the phrase strengthens terrorists by making them feel part of a bigger struggle.

"In the U.K., we do not use the phrase 'war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organized enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives," Benn told a meeting in New York organized by the Center on International Cooperation think tank.

He said the real struggle pits the "vast majority" of the world's people "against a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger."

"What these groups want is to force their individual and narrow values on others without dialogue, without debate, through violence," Benn said. "And by letting them feel part of something bigger, we give them strength."

Bush first used the expression "war on terror" shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington; it still appears frequently in his speeches.

Many officials in Britain, the United States' closest ally, feel the phrase is vague and simplistic, encouraging people to think that only military means are needed to overcome extremism. But Benn was the first official to go public with the British view.
In December, The Observer newspaper reported that Britain's Foreign Office had asked politicians and diplomats to avoid the phrase because it is "counterproductive" and could alienate British Muslims.

The Foreign Office would not confirm that report Monday, but a spokesman said Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett did not use the phrase "war on terror," preferring to emphasize that the fight against extremists is "not a clash or a war of civilizations."

Blair's official spokesman said he was unsure when the prime minister had last used the phrase "war on terror."

"We all use our own phraseology, and we talk about terrorism, we talk about the fight against terrorism, but we also talk about trying to find political solutions to political problems," the spokesman said on condition of anonymity, in line with government policy.

Garry Hindle, a terrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, said the terrorist threat facing Britain _ starkly revealed by the July 7, 2005, transit attacks that killed 52 London commuters _ made officials realize the limitations of an abstract phrase like "war on terror."

"In the U.K. we can't consider the domestic problem with terrorism to be a war where you must be on one side or another," he said. "It requires a much deeper sensitivity than that."

Benn's speech is the latest sign that the British government is distancing itself from the Bush administration as Blair's decade in power ends. Blair will step down in the next few months, likely to be replaced by Treasury chief Gordon Brown.

Blair has been Bush's closest international ally since the Sept. 11 attacks, committing thousands of British soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq. But the unpopular Iraq war, in which more than 140 British soldiers have died, has strained his popularity.

"I think as Tony Blair's stranglehold has gradually declined we are seeing increasing movements from other elements in the government, drawing away from the Americans," Hindle said.

In his speech, Benn urged Americans to use the "soft power" of values and ideas as well as military strength to defeat extremism.

Benn's comments were at least partly directed at his own Labour Party, which is uneasy about Blair's close alliance with Bush and overwhelmingly opposed to British involvement in Iraq.

Benn currently is the bookies' favorite to become Labour's deputy leader once Blair steps down.
http://www.lompocrecord.com/articles.../d8ohru000.txt





Watching the War and Acknowledging the Dead
Noam Cohen

ON Tuesday morning, Daniel K. Ropkin booted up his computer and confronted a list that was “getting longer,” he said by telephone from his home outside Sacramento. Mr. Ropkin operates “Spread the Word: Iraq-Nam” (iraqnam.blogspot.com), a Web site tracking military deaths in Iraq, and the Defense Department press releases that had accumulated over the last two days announced 18 new fatalities.

“It’s kind of freaking me out,” he said.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the first with significant United States military casualties to take place in the Internet age. And while there have been debates over how much public attention to give members of the military who have been killed in combat, a string of Web sites has plunged ahead.

Mr. Ropkin’s self-appointed task involves “looking for the best story, the one that really tells that person’s life, finding a picture,” he said.

For Pfc. Walter Freeman Jr., it was an article from The Colorado Springs Gazette that said: “Three days before he died, 20-year-old Pfc. Walter Freeman Jr. sent a simple online message to the woman he considered his mother: ‘Mom, pray hard.’ ”

For Chief Petty Officer Gregory J. Billiter, from Villa Hills, Ky., it was the writeup in The Cincinnati Post, which ended: “He will be buried in Kentucky, his aunt said, but as of Monday evening, it wasn’t clear where. ‘As you can imagine, nobody has a grave for a 36-year-old man,’ she said.”

Using a few basic Web publishing tools and a broadband connection, sites like Mr. Ropkin’s can keep track of and recognize the dead with a depth that the Pentagon, with its billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of employees, hasn’t nearly matched at its Military Casualty Information page (siadapp.dior.whs.mil/personnel/CASUALTY/castop.htm.

Of a different purpose is the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (icasualties.org), created by a database designer, Michael S. White, from Stone Mountain, Ga. His doggedness in tracking down the specific details of each death, using government press releases and news accounts, allows a visitor to analyze the material in complex and highly specific ways: for instance, how many service members from New York State over 50 have died in hostile actions in Iraq? (One: Sgt. First Class Ramon A. Acevedoaponte, 51, of Watertown, killed when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Humvee in 2005.)

The site, which Mr. White spends 15 to 20 hours a week updating, often at the expense of time with his family, has one million to two million hits a week, he said, and is regularly used by journalists from The Associated Press, The New York Times and others.

He said some have complained that “it is not personal enough, it’s cold,” and have asked why there aren’t any pictures. “That’s what it is,” he says. “It’s cold, analytical,” adding, “it’s like you put gloves on and are going into an analytical room.”



The Iraq Page (iraq.pigstye.net) is the obsession of Tom Willett, a software developer from Bloomington, Ind. The site includes a single news account for each United States service member killed in combat, with a fluttering American flag next to a photograph, and room for comments. At last count, there were 3,579 individuals memorialized from the coalition forces, 3,313 from the United States.

“I copy most of the articles, because I know the articles won’t be there in a few months,” he said. “I don’t have the copyright. I steal it from everybody, and I don’t care who knows about it.” The site, which Mr. Willett said had 2,000 to 3,000 unique visitors a day and 20 to 30 new comments a day, has never been asked to take down an article.

There are few negative comments, he said. “I get about as much negative comments from liberals — ‘Why don’t you put the deaths of the civilians in Iraq?’ I said if you could give me the names, I would; and if you don’t like it the way I do it, you can do it yourself.”

The few “military supporters” who criticize, he said, accuse him “politicizing the deaths — I say, no, even someone who opposes the war can honor the dead.”

The creator of the Iraq War Heroes site (IraqWarHeroes.org) is from Portland, Ore., who goes by the name Q Madp and repairs computers. He said he created it “two days before the war started, to make sure all these guys are recognized — I don’t want them to be trashed like they were in Vietnam.”

Iraq War Heroes may be considered a local Web site, if that it isn’t an oxymoron. On either side of the names of the fallen are picture links that take a visitor to photographs made by Q Madp at funerals that he could drive to. So far that is more than 150 ceremonies, he said.



He said he works with the casualty assistance officer and always obtains the family’s permission in advance. He said the site costs him about $300 to $400 a month, not including his time. “I don’t get a lot of donations, but if I show up for a funeral, people help me cover my gas sometimes,” he said.

He said that recently at a military funeral he ran into the mother of a soldier whose funeral he had photographed three years earlier who had never contacted him about the photographs.

“Way back then she didn’t want the pictures,” he said. “Now she did.”

Leonard Wong, a research professor at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., who has studied the efforts of the United States military in recent years to recover the remains of service members killed in combat, said that the need to memorialize nationally, even globally, each and every service member is a relatively recent concern.

“The Vietnam memorial put every name on the wall,” he said. “I think with the Internet, it’s not just their name on a wall; we have a life.”

Recalling how inWorld Wars I and II soldiers were often buried near where they fell, Dr. Wong said: “We as a society, back then, were content to be more anonymous. We weren’t a global society. There was no expectation that you would be known beyond your town.” Now, he says, we hear the call, “Don’t forget me.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/te...gy/16link.html





Advocate of the War Explores Its Impact
Alessandra Stanley

Richard N. Perle can sleep at night.

If “The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom” is any guide, this former chairman of the Defense Policy Board who so fiercely lobbied for the invasion of Iraq enjoys the deep, flannelly slumber of infants and the well medicated.

In an hourlong, first-person tour of his thinking, Mr. Perle admits neither mistakes nor regrets. The war is not even his main concern. Instead, Mr. Perle, a leading neo-conservative, uses much of tonight’s segment of the weeklong PBS series “America at a Crossroads” to argue that the United States should foment regime change in Iran, regardless of what Iran and other nations think.

“There’s got to be some advantage to being a superpower,” Mr. Perle tells Patrick J. Buchanan, the conservative columnist who worked with Mr. Perle in the Reagan administration.

“This sounds like the Neo-Comintern,” Mr. Buchanan replies, looking more than a little aghast. “I mean, the Soviet Union, that was their idea.”

Viewers worried that a video diary by Mr. Perle could be too one-sided and self-serving should relax. Like the unreliable narrator in a novel, Mr. Perle exposes himself by omission and indirection. “The Case for War” is not very persuasive about American policy. Instead it is a fascinating study in rationalization, a lighter, less repentant version of “The Fog of War,” Errol Morris’s documentary about Robert S. McNamara.

As Elizabeth Jensen reported in The New York Times earlier this month, Bush administration critics were suspicious of the entire 11-part series about the world after 9/11, especially the portion turned over to Mr. Perle. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which administers federal money to public television and radio, has long been under pressure by the White House to include more conservative voices. (The corporation’s chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, was forced to resign in November 2005 after it was revealed that he had monitored the political leanings of some guests on PBS.)

It didn’t help that Brian Lapping, the British producer who first proposed a film about Mr. Perle, turned out to be his friend. Mr. Lapping later recused himself from the project.

Mr. Perle’s journey is a tour of the world as he sees it. It includes a trip to a girls’ school in Kabul, Afghanistan, and an outdoor market, the kind of blinkered V.I.P. visit usually reserved for first ladies. (Mr. Perle notes that the Taliban is still active in southern Afghanistan without acknowledging that it is also on the rise.) In Moscow he reminisces about his days in the Reagan administration battling the “evil empire” during a visit with the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky outside Lefortovo Prison, where Mr. Sharansky was interrogated 30 years ago.

And Mr. Perle takes an even more remote skip down memory lane to Los Angeles and his alma mater, Hollywood High, where the halls are lined with the names of famous students like Tuesday Weld, and where Mr. Perle says he first learned to distrust Hollywood liberals.

Mr. Perle links today’s antiwar demonstrators — the film includes snippets of Martin Sheen and Jessica Lange speaking out against the president — to the Hollywood leftists who were soft on Stalinism in his youth.

He leaves out any discussion of the Vietnam War, perhaps because he didn’t serve in it.

Iraq also has little room on his agenda, which could explain why the producers insisted that Mr. Perle attend an antiwar demonstration at the Washington Monument and face his most impassioned critics.

Mr. Perle is shown in a tweed jacket, weaving his way confidently through the crowd, debating veterans and angry mothers of dead servicemen. When a march organizer calmly argues that the Iraq war is neither just nor necessary and should be ended, Mr. Perle listens, then waves his hand toward the rows and rows of boots placed on the ground to represent each fallen soldier. “I don’t believe that’s fair to them,” he says.

Afterward, Mr. Perle says he sympathizes with the mourning relatives, adding, “But I believe the case for intervening in Iraq was and remains valid.”

Mr. Perle was less adamant in a Vanity Fair article in November titled “Neo Culpa.” Mr. Perle blamed the administration’s incompetence for the mismanagement of the occupation, but admitted, in hindsight, that the rush to topple Saddam Hussein was too hasty. “Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention?” Mr. Perle said in the article. “Well, maybe we could have.”

Mr. Perle makes no such admission in “The Case for War,” and nothing and no one can shake him of his complacency, not Richard C. Holbrooke, former American ambassador to the United Nations, nor Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of Al Quds al Arabi, a London-based newspaper, who angrily says that the occupation of Iraq has revived and empowered Al Qaeda.

When Simon Jenkins, a former editor of The Times of London, warns about British and Soviet failures in Afghanistan, Mr. Perle looks heavy-lidded and even a bit bored.

Mr. Perle comes alive in a hotel room in Dubai, beaming as he listens to a young Iranian dissident who recently escaped and wants the West to help overthrow the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mr. Perle listens and nods intently, even though the young man speaks in Farsi. Mr. Perle doesn’t need the translator to know that his protégé is speaking of freedom, tyranny and insurrection.

At that moment Mr. Perle is as rapt as an opera buff at the opening night of “Parsifal.” He may not understand the words, but he loves the music.

AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS

The Case for War:

In Defense of Freedom

On most PBS stations tonight (check local listings).

Phil Craig and Brook Lapping Productions, executive producers; Mick Gold, producer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/ar...on/17free.html





Protesters Burn Effigies after Gere Kisses Shilpa
Prithwish Ganguly

Richard Gere's repeated kisses on the cheeks of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty in an event to promote AIDS awareness sparked protests in India on Monday with demonstrators burning effigies of the actors.

Footage of the Hollywood star sweeping Shetty backwards in a dramatic embrace at the Sunday night event in New Delhi was repeatedly aired on news channels on Monday.

Many saw the act as an outrage against Shetty's modesty and Indian culture, though Shetty herself angrily dismissed the protests as an "over-reaction" that made India look silly.

Groups of men burned and kicked effigies of the actors in protests across India, including in the northern Indian cities of New Delhi, Kanpur, Meerut and Varanasi as well as in the central city of Indore.

Some called for the actors' deaths. Others wanted public apologies.

But Shetty, the winner of the "Celebrity Big Brother" reality TV show in Britain this year, said the reaction to the kiss made India look "regressive".

"I admit it went a little overboard but that was not the intention," she said to a crowd of journalists and protesters that had besieged her film set in Mumbai on Monday evening.

"He did not do anything obscene," she said of Gere, adding that they had since spoken on the phone. "He apologized to me and told me to tell the media that he apologized."

She said Gere was only re-enacting his moves from the film "Shall We Dance" to entertain the audience and communicate in a Bollywood style as he did not speak Hindi.

The clinch between the two stars had originally gone down well when it happened onstage at an event on Sunday night to encourage truckers -- seen as a high-risk group in India's fight against AIDS -- to wear condoms during sex.

They whooped with delight and whistled loudly as Gere swooped down on a visibly delighted Shetty to kiss her on her hand and a number of times on one side of her face.

"No condom, no sex," an ebullient 58-year-old Gere shouted in Hindi to thousands of truck drivers who roared his words back in unison at a dusty fairground in New Delhi.

Indian authorities have been focusing on high-risk groups such as truckers, who have helped spread the virus across the country as many of them have sex with prostitutes during their journeys and infect their wives back home.

(Additional reporting by Onkar Pandey and Krittivas Mukherjee)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...22460520070416





Flirting With Dystopia, Experimenting With Noise
Kelefa Sanneh

Miniature hard drives stashed in bathrooms. Unlisted phone numbers that lead to ominous messages. A small constellation of mysterious Web sites chronicling a grim future 15 years away. This is how Trent Reznor is letting the world — or some fanatical portion thereof — know about “Year Zero” (Nothing Records/Interscope), the new Nine Inch Nails album, which arrives in shops today. Open the packaging and you’ll find another secret message: the disc itself changes color with heat, turning white to display the copyright information and a long string of ones and zeroes. In this paranoid world, everything worth knowing is a secret.

Mr. Reznor has been making aggressive computer music under the name Nine Inch Nails for about two decades, but it was “The Downward Spiral,” his bilious but elegant 1994 blockbuster, that confirmed his position as a true rock star in an era largely devoid of them. He released a colder-blooded double album, “The Fragile,” in 1999, then laid low for half a decade. His seething 2005 CD, “With Teeth,” felt like a comeback, a reminder to his fans — and maybe to himself — that he hadn’t retired after all.

Apparently the follow-up came quickly: Mr. Reznor has said the new album “began as an experiment with noise on a laptop in a bus on tour somewhere.” (A sticker on the cover bears a promise, or a warning: “16 noisy new songs.”) But “Year Zero” is much more seductive than “With Teeth,” partly because of all the so-called noise. Hard beats are softened with distortion, static cushions the tantrums, sneaky bass lines float beneath the surface. And as usual the music is packed with details: “Meet Your Master” goes through at least three cycles of decay and rebirth; part of the fun of “The Warning” is tracking the ever-mutating timbres.

If all these sounds often distract listeners from Mr. Reznor’s lyrics, well, so much the better. In the year 2022, apparently, clumsy sloganeering is all the rage. The album’s first single, “Survivalism,” includes the phrase “Mother Nature is a whore,” a sarcastic expression of anti-environmentalism. And “Capital G,” which sounds a lot like an anti-Bush diatribe, has another deluded narrator we’re supposed to hate: “I pushed a button and elected him to office and a/He pushed a button and it dropped a bomb.”

Some will enjoy finding connections between these songs and the narrative that unfolds on the cryptic “Year Zero” Web sites; fans have had to figure out the URL addresses on their own. (“Another Version of the Truth” is an instrumental track; anotherversionofthetruth.com is one of the sites.) But even listeners who don’t know their Parepin (a sinister panacea of the future) from their Opal (an illegal drug of the future) may find that this fictional world serves a useful purpose.

It’s a pretty neat trick: just knowing there’s a hidden story makes those generically disaffected words sound less generic. If the songs share the same sonic palette, and if the lyrics sometimes overlap (“Down on your knees” in one song, “On hands and knees we crawl” in another; “Can it go any faster?” in one, “Make it come faster” in another), that’s because they are all artifacts of the same fictional world.

Hidden messages, hidden Web sites, a hidden world: all this secrecy is supposed to tell us something ominous about the future. So why does Mr. Reznor’s dystopia seem so familiar? His paranoid vision evokes nothing so much as the 1990s, the decade that gave us Heaven’s Gate suicides, the militia movement, the first President Bush’s New World Order, the Y2K scare, “The X-Files.” It’s hard to spend much time in Mr. Reznor’s world without thinking of that show’s famous slogan: “The truth is out there.”

In the 1990s, when online culture was young, it was tempting to believe that the Internet was full of secret sites and furtive e-mail messages and clandestine information; back then all those mysterious “Year Zero” Web sites might have seemed pretty spooky. Nowadays everyone knows that the Internet is a spectacularly bad place to store secrets, and e-mail is even worse; it keeps getting harder to make information disappear.

Last week Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, inadvertently summed up our archive- obsessed culture when he scoffed at a claim that sensitive White House e-mail messages had been lost: “You can’t erase e-mails, not today. They’ve gone through too many servers!” The truth isn’t out there, it’s right there: on Google or YouTube or Wikipedia. People used to worry that the world was full of secrets; now it’s possible to wonder whether there are any secrets left.

Certainly the secrets of “Year Zero” didn’t stay that way very long. Nine Inch Nails fans who lack the time or inclination to puzzle out the story can simply look it up: a few minutes on Wikipedia will answer all your questions. (The game continues. On Friday “Year Zero” obsessives were summoned by e-mail to a secret meeting on a Los Angeles street corner.) But again, solving the riddle isn’t really the point. Although it claims to be an ominous portrait of a fictional future, “Year Zero” seems more like an affectionate tribute to our recent past.

Surely it’s not a coincidence that the 1990s were the heyday of Nine Inch Nails, the decade when Mr. Reznor went from cult hero to mainstream rock star. And perhaps he misses his days as an underground favorite. (Now that just about any kind of music is, literally, accessible, it’s no longer clear what “underground” means.) Even the electronic noises on “Year Zero” sound a bit old-fashioned: a throwback to the days when computer-generated music was full of static and blips. If “Year Zero” feels warm and, for better and worse, familiar, this is why. It’s not really a cautionary tale: it’s a reminiscence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/ar...ic/17nine.html





Ink

In a Troubled Time, a New Business Magazine
Katharine Q. Seelye

Joanne Lipman, the editor of Portfolio, the new business magazine from Condé Nast, tapped gently last Monday on the door of David Carey, the publisher, and then burst into his bright Midtown corner office.

“It’s here!” she said, grinning and handing him a copy of the much-anticipated debut issue of Portfolio. Lush, photo-rich and thick with ads (185 ad pages in a 332-page issue), it’s an unmistakable stablemate of Condé Nast’s Vogue and Vanity Fair.

The cover photograph isn’t of John F. Welch Jr. or Bill Gates but a rooftop view of Manhattan, golden lights glowing in anonymous office cubicles — a homage to Berenice Abbott, who documented New York’s changing cityscape in the 1930s.

Mr. Carey beamed back. He then reached over to a side table and picked up a recent issue of Fortune, one of Portfolio’s chief competitors. The Fortune cover was particularly busy, with a crowd of anonymous Google workers in casual dress and a cover line announcing “The 100 Best Companies to Work For.” He held them side by side. His glow said no contest.

“We’re not giving you peas and carrots,” he said. “We want to capture the glamour.”

Between all those ad pages, readers will find business executives treated like celebrities and the kind of matching of writer and subject they might find in Vanity Fair: Tom Wolfe on hedge funds (with photographs by Annie Leibovitz); Betsey Morris on the Ford family; and Michael Lewis on “jock exchanges,” which trade in athletes.

Sheelah Kolhatkar writes about the handful of women who actually do private equity deals. Gabriel Sherman interviews Bruce Sherman, the reclusive Florida money manager who has invested heavily in newspapers.

“Business is about power,” Ms. Lipman writes in her first editor’s letter. “And guts. And passion. Business coverage should be too.”

Business is also about brains, and Condé Nast’s were certainly questioned when the company announced in September 2005 that it was putting out a business magazine — its biggest single investment in a start-up — at a time when many others were foundering.
Readers were still reeling from the bursting of the Internet bubble and corporate scandals, and investors were looking at constantly updated Web sites — not biweekly glossies — for an edge. And some sizable advertisers, like the Detroit automakers, were mired in slumps of their own.

Some of the big magazines remain troubled: ad pages for the first three months of this year were down for BusinessWeek (3 percent), Forbes (9 percent) and Fortune (13 percent), compared with the same period a year ago, according to Publishers Information Bureau. Circulation at the big three has been flat or falling for the last few years, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

But Portfolio would not be the first business magazine introduced during trying times. Henry Luce founded Fortune just months after the Wall Street crash of 1929, for example.

S. I. Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast, said in an interview that he had no patience with Portfolio skeptics.

“Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to trample on Forbes or Fortune. I think we’re going to help the whole field. We’re going to bring excitement to it, and we’re going to bring luxury and fashion advertisers into it.”

Mr. Newhouse said that Portfolio had been inspired by a positive response to business articles in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, although he could not recall precisely which ones. He also said he had not made the final decision to proceed until Ms. Lipman agreed in August 2005 to leave The Wall Street Journal, where she had overseen its Weekend Journal and Personal Journal sections and its Saturday paper.

Mr. Newhouse said that his reported commitment to the magazine of more than $100 million over the next five years was “something of a myth” because “we’re going to stay with Portfolio.”

Portfolio has hired more than 75 editorial people for the magazine, 40 for its Web site, www.portfolio.com, and more than 45 on the business side.

The business side, under Mr. Carey, the former publisher of The New Yorker, has been working Madison Avenue hard. After all, he has a reputation to uphold. During his tenure at The New Yorker, between 1998 and 2005, advertising revenue almost doubled and the magazine broke the 1 million mark in circulation. In 1996, Mr. Carey brought 210 ad pages to the first issue of the restarted House and Garden, one of the highest levels ever for a new magazine.

Portfolio’s first issue has drawn 53 business advertisers, 30 of which had rarely if ever advertised in a Condé Nast publication. The newcomers include Barclays and Pitney Bowes.

“Job No. 1 was to deepen the company’s penetration in the business advertising category, which the May issue achieved,” Mr. Carey said. Bringing more business advertisers in the door could get them interested in advertising in some of the company’s other magazines; at the same time, Portfolio provides a new outlet, and another affluent readership, for advertisers who already appear in those other magazines.

Portfolio was nearly two years in the making, a long time for journalists to go without ink. At least one who was hired has already left, sowing rumors of sagging morale. During the start-up period, competing publications have written articles that were rumored to be appearing in Portfolio, trying to steal its thunder, and articles at Portfolio were commissioned and killed.

Mr. Wolfe added some drama of his own, sweeping through Portfolio’s hushed glassy offices with a black cape over his white suit. His narrative was supposed to run 2,500 words but he submitted 11,000, since honed to 7,500 words. His is the longest piece in the magazine.

One of Portfolio’s most celebrated hires, Kurt Eichenwald, a former reporter for The New York Times, was to have been featured in the premiere issue. But his article, on terrorism, was held, according to people involved with the magazine, because Mr. Eichenwald deluged the magazine’s fact-checking department with thousands of pages of documents just before the article was to go to press last month. It is expected to appear in a later issue.

Holding it, these people said, was unrelated to a controversy involving Mr. Eichenwald that emerged earlier in March: the revelation that in 2005, while at The Times, he had sent $2,000 to someone who later became the subject of an article. (Mr. Eichenwald, who has said the money was repaid long before the article appeared, declined to comment for this article.)

Ms. Lipman declined to discuss the article but called Mr. Eichenwald “one of the finest investigative reporters there is.”

James Impoco, deputy editor at the magazine and a former Sunday Business editor at The New York Times, said that Ms. Lipman had “exacting standards.”

He said that “she knows what she wants and is pretty strong-willed.”

Mr. Impoco added: “I have to admit that I was a little worried after she saw ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ and told me she sympathized with the Meryl Streep character. But she turned out to be a pretty thoughtful boss.”

Ms. Lipman was almost giddy last week as she showed off a display of the magazine’s pages on the walls of a secured room. Portfolio’s goal, she said, was to “connect the dots” between life inside the boardroom and out.

“I love this kind of story,” she said, gesturing to a profile of Boone Pickens, the Texas oil tycoon whose son pleaded guilty last year to securities fraud. “It’s a great ‘King Lear’ tale,” she said. “He’s in his second act and his family’s disintegrating.”

The magazine is priced at $4.99 on the newsstand and is testing subscription prices from $12 to $22 for 12 issues. Its next issue is scheduled for late August, and it will appear monthly after that.

The magazine’s Web site, which will be free, will contain all the articles in the magazine and report breaking news, much of it by Portfolio writers. Chris Jones, the site’s managing editor, said its bloggers would post three and five times a day. The site has elaborately produced videos and various interactive features.

In conjunction with Condé Nast Traveler, the Web site will also tell readers things like the best place to make a deal in various cities, and which company’s employees like to stay in which hotels (in San Francisco, Yahoo likes the Clift, Mr. Jones said). For those readers headed to jail, portfolio.com offers prison advice: get dental work done in advance and don’t talk to the press.

Still, the magazine is at the heart of the Portfolio enterprise and while some skeptics remain, they acknowledge that Portfolio is well positioned.

“I don’t think they would make the same decision to launch a business magazine now because the climate has changed since they announced,” said Martin Walker, a magazine consultant.

But, he added, “you’re talking about a powerhouse publishing company, and they have a terrific database to get subscribers, they have all kinds of ad connections and they are spending enormous amounts of money.”

And there are signs of life elsewhere in business magazines. Fortune is putting out a redesign of its venerable Fortune 500 issue today with heavier paper stock (not as heavy as Portfolio’s) and may redesign the whole magazine. Forbes is planning a new business magazine, geared toward women. Portfolio has been raiding business publications for writers and editors, setting off an intense competition for marquee names.

Robert Safian, former executive editor of Fortune and now editor and managing director of Fast Company (circulation 755,000), said the entire business category was undergoing a reinvention.

“Business remains at the heart of our culture, nationally and globally,” he said. “The traditional business magazines have had trouble capturing and expressing that excitement in recent years, and the ad market has reflected that, but I think the tide is turning.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/bu...portfolio.html





Personal Portals Show the Web World What You Watch
Eric Auchard

Netvibes, one of Europe's hottest Internet companies, has put the power to create all-you-need-to-know Web portals in the hands of individuals on Monday, challenging the decade-old strategies of online giants.

Eighteen months ago, the Paris-based company pioneered the creation of personalized home pages with live news feeds that update instantly instead of the static, occasionally updated pages common on blogs, social networks and older Web portals.

In its new incarnation, Netvibes is giving users, for free, the power to publish their home pages as personal Web portals.

"The portal is dead. Long live the portal," Tariq Krim, Netvibes' founder and chief executive, said in an interview.

While scores of companies allow Web users to create personalized pages, most rotate in the orbit of one of the major Internet players, such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, or Time Warner's AOL.

By contrast, Netvibes lets users pull in information from almost any modern Web site -- Microsoft e-mail can sit next to Yahoo photos and Google search on a user's home page, alongside the latest cool features from tiny start-ups.

The company has just several dozen employees but more than 10 million users worldwide since launching in late 2005 to give people drowning in newly published information an easy way to track their favorite sites on one basic home page.

Google and Microsoft have incorporated Netvibes features in their own personalized home pages, launched subsequently.

Netvibes works more like a desktop computer application than typical Web site, allowing people without any programming skills to add, drop or move features around the home page.

Users of the new service, Netvibes Universe, can design a page and publish it in minutes. Such pages can feature videos and photos, news, e-mail, podcasts, eBay auction notifications and thousands of other online information sources.

"Netvibes provides open access to the world of Web 2.0 content," said Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. "Traditionally, you had to ask each company permission to do this on any Web site. Now you can read Gmail alongside Hotmail and Yahoo Mail."

Even inside Google and Yahoo, Li said there are supporters of the view that the big companies can no longer afford to keep people from using competing products. The new Web logic is that every service needs to live side-by-side with competitors.

"With Web 2.0, no one can own the whole space. In the past you wanted everyone to come to your site. Right now you need to figure out how to distribute your content to the widest number of platforms," Krim said. "We try to be the glue between all these Web services."

The new service has signed up 100 media companies, Web businesses, non-profit groups, movie stars and celebrities to create their own Universes -- a cosmic sounding term which simply refers to one's personal view of the world at large.

They include music acts like Mandy Moore, Snoop Dog, Kanye West and Korn, as well as media companies CBS, CNN, Forbes, Los Angeles Times, Time, The Washington Post, USA Today, Les Echos, Elle France and Swiss television station TSR.

Netvibes plans to open up Universe to all comers by June, Krim said. Details can be found at http://www.netvibes.com/.

The difference between Universes and media companies' own sites is that users can control what parts of these sites they see, or choose to incorporate aspects of the sites in their own Universes. "People can decompose their newspapers and take the pieces for themselves," Krim said.

Netvibes released the new software on Monday at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, where several thousand are gathered this week to debate the direction of the latest generation of Web software and services.
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...36177620070417





Vonage: No Tech 'Workaround'
Leslie Cauley

Vonage has finally confirmed what many had feared: The embattled Internet phone company has no "workaround" in hand to sidestep Verizon's patented Internet phone technology.

Moreover, Vonage (VG) isn't sure that such a plan is even "feasible," given the expansiveness of Verizon's (VZ) patents, which set out methods for passing calls between the Web and conventional phone networks. Vonage's chilly assessment, contained in a filing submitted to a federal court Friday, marks the first time it has admitted that it doesn't have a plan for getting around Verizon's technology. Vonage couldn't be reached for comment.

A federal court recently ruled that Vonage had infringed on Verizon's patented technology. As punishment, Vonage was barred from using the disputed technology to support new customers. Existing customers are not affected.

The company immediately requested — and received — an emergency stay. Meanwhile, Vonage told investors and customers not to worry because a "workaround" was in development.

In its Friday filing, Vonage, which is now trying to get a permanent stay, painted a far different picture.

"Vonage currently has no workarounds that moot the need for a stay," the company said.

"While Vonage has studied methods for designing around the patents, removal of the allegedly infringing technology, if even feasible, could take many months to fully study and implement."

For investors, the lack of a viable workaround anytime soon is the latest in a string of bad-news events.

Vonage, a pioneer in Internet telephony, has seen its shares plunge more than 80% since it went public last year. This year alone, its shares are down more than 45%.

Last week, Vonage CEO Mike Snyder abruptly resigned. Chairman and chief strategist Jeffrey Citron is serving as interim-CEO until a permanent replacement can be found.

Of more concern immediately is the outcome of the Verizon lawsuit. The disputed technology goes to the heart of Vonage's business, making a workaround critical if Vonage does not get a permanent stay.

In its Friday filing, Vonage offered its appraisal of the potential consequences if it does not get the stay.

Even if Vonage "was somehow able to implement a design around, and was able to ultimately prevail on appeal, it would have no hope of regaining its lost customers, or its lost goodwill, and its loss of revenue would be permanent and …"

It's unknown how the statement ends. Vonage redacted the rest of the sentence, citing "confidential material." But the tone of the passage suggests that these losses, in the aggregate, could help drive the company out of business.

"Current Vonage customers will not wait that long for restored service," the company writes. "Likewise, potential new customers will not even consider Vonage."

Vonage, which has around 2.2 million customers, says that it loses about 2.5% of its customers a month, or about 650,000 a year. That's why it is imperative to add new customers constantly, the company has argued.

While the 20-page document offers a rare peek into the company's thinking, it can hardly be considered a complete record because portions of it are redacted. Vonage submitted the filing in response to a court order to prepare a public version of its sealed comments.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/indust...age-usat_N.htm





AT&T Drops Offer to Invest in Italian Phone Company
Eric Sylvers

AT&T on Monday withdrew its offer to buy a stake in the company that controls Telecom Italia, the largest Italian telecommunications company, for about two billion euros, or $2.7 billion.

In a terse statement, AT&T did not give any reason for the decision to pull back its offer to buy a third of the controlling company, Olimpia.

But a person who had been briefed on the negotiations but was not authorized to comment on them publicly said AT&T had been dissuaded by the intense political pressure in Italy against a sale to a foreign company.

AT&T’s withdrawal came against the backdrop of an extended Telecom Italia shareholders’ meeting on Monday, called to elect a new board and approve last year’s financial results. The meeting ran late into the evening as investors lined up for a chance to question management.

Pirelli, which controls Olimpia, had been in exclusive talks with AT&T and America Móvil, which was also negotiating to buy a one-third stake in Olimpia.

AT&T will now be able to negotiate with other companies while it tries to work out an accord with America Móvil, the largest cellphone company in Latin America.

America Móvil said it had not yet decided whether to follow AT&T or continue talking with Pirelli, Reuters reported.

Telecom Italia has attracted several potential buyers in the last six months, but the only concrete offer came on April 1 from AT&T and America Móvil, which announced their offer to Olimpia at the same time though they were formally acting separately. AT&T owns 9 percent of America Móvil.

The announcement that the two foreign companies were negotiating to buy control of Telecom Italia set off a wave of objections in Italy by politicians who said the company had strategic importance to the country and should not fall into foreign hands. Although Prime Minister Romano Prodi said he would not step in to block the sale, he and several of his ministers said they hoped that an “Italian solution” could be found.

Had its offer been accepted and approved, AT&T could have gotten, for a relatively modest investment, a strong foothold in Italy’s corporate market and an expanded presence in Germany, France and the Netherlands — countries where Telecom Italia has been building broadband Internet businesses.

AT&T already sells telecommunications services to some of Europe’s largest companies and provides services in Europe for American-based companies.

Intesa Sanpaolo, a leading Italian bank, said Monday that it might buy a stake in Olimpia.

The Telecom Italia shareholders’ meeting gained particular attention because of the sale negotiations and also because the former chairman, Guido Rossi, resigned two weeks ago after clashing with Pirelli’s chairman, Marco Tronchetti Provera, over strategy.

More than 350 shareholders registered for the meeting, compared with 75 last year, a Telecom Italia spokesman said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/bu...ss/17tele.html





Copyright: Fair Use Is Your Friend
David DeJean,

Nine out of 10 people would probably tell you copyright is all about big companies maximizing their revenue from the content they own at the expense of the consumer. (The 10th person would tell you copyright is a cornerstone of our American way of life, but he'd turn out to be lawyer for the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America). In fact, copyright is as much about your right to make fair use of copyrighted content as it is about the "intellectual property" of corporations. For 11 minutes of quiet, reassuring good sense on the subject I recommend a podcast interview with Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University.

The file is on the Web site of IMN, a company that provides Web-based communications like e-mail-newsletter software-as-a-service. The podcast is an interview by Rodney Green, who's IMN's VP of corporate development

Falzone does most of the talking and he makes refreshingly good sense. He offers a definition of fair use and provides some examples from the latest fair-use case law. He outlines four factors that help determine whether a use of copyrighted material is fair, and emphasizes the transformative nature of the use, which was a concept that was new to me. What he says is that if your use of a copyrighted work doesn't serve a substantially different purpose that its original use, then you're probably violating its copyright: if you intend to criticize something on a TV news program, for example, but merely rerun the entire program and add a comment at the end, you haven't transformed it sufficiently to defend against copyright violation.

His comments got me thinking about what's going to fill up the unlimited storage being offered by Yahoo and other software-as-a-service sellers. There are going to be big databases built that move content from behind fences like subscription requirements and put them out in the open. I expect companies from The Wall Street Journal to eBay will build whole departments of people dedicated to enforcing their "intellectual property" rights similar to the efforts the record companies have made to root out sampling by rappers.

(Tangential thought: Wouldn't it be interesting to have the defendant in one of the RIAA's anti-piracy "intellectual property" cases offer, as a defense, the claim that the music in question was so dumb that it couldn't be protected by any definition of the word "intellectual"?)

The podcast is aimed at IMN customers who use content, some of it copyrighted, for commercial purposes. If you're in that category, do yourself a favor and give Falzone 11 minutes. You'll be smarter about copyright, and more confident about using copyrighted materials correctly.
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/...ight_fair.html





Fast-Track Laws to Target Terror DVDs

CENSORSHIP laws could be widened within three weeks to include a ban on pro-terrorism films, Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said today.

Mr Ruddock has instructed officials to seek agreement from the states as soon as possible to change the censorship laws so that hate films praising terrorists could be banned.

The move follows revelations that children can gain access to a race hate DVD which urges them to martyr themselves.

The film, contained in a package of DVDs prepared by exiled Australian-born Islamic cleric Sheik Feiz Mohammed, also calls for the murder of “infidels” and describes Jews as “pigs”.

It received a PG rating from the Office of Film and Literature Classification, making it suitable for viewing by children.

Mr Ruddock said today the states had previously delayed the censorship matter until July but agreed on Friday to deal with it.

“In my view we've got to deal with this urgently,” Mr Ruddock told Macquarie Radio.

“The officials could meet this week, we could go through the consultation that's necessary and we could endorse this within three weeks and have the code in place, if they're prepared to co-operate.”

He said he had spoken to some of the censors, who were required to work within the law, about why they had given the film a PG classification.

“I asked them why they came to this view and they said 'we've looked at the these (Sheik Feiz Mohammed's) sermons and we thought they were just ranting',” Mr Ruddock said.

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies chief executive Vic Alhadeff has called for a review of the film and literature classification system.

“One has to ask serious questions about classification guidelines which deem it acceptable for such grotesque material to be brought into our country and made publicly available,” he said today.

“Even if this particular issue is resolved and the material is proscribed, there is a glaring need for a review of the film and literature classification system.”

NSW Christian Democrats MP Fred Nile says he has introduced a Bill into State Parliament calling for the censorship of material which incites terrorism.

“Any public distribution of this offensive material has the potential for immense harm, including loss of life,” he said today.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/s...-29277,00.html





Governor Signs Bill Defying U.S. ID Law
AP

Gov. Brian Schweitzer said "no, nope, no way, hell no" Tuesday to national driver's licenses, signing into law a bill supporters say is one of the strongest rejections to the federal plan.

The move means the state won't comply with the Real ID Act, a federal law that sets a national standard for driver's licenses and requires states to link their record-keeping systems to national databases.

Though several states have either passed or are considering resolutions or bills against the act, Montana is the first state to outright deny its implementation, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

"This is the first one saying, 'We're not doing it,' " said Scott Crichton of the Montana ACLU.

The federal law says the federally approved identification cards eventually would be necessary to board airplanes or enter federal buildings.

"We also don't think that bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., ought to tell us that if we're going to get on a plane we have to carry their card, so when it's scanned through they know where you went, when you got there and when you came home," said Schweitzer, a Democrat.

"This is still a free country and there are no freer people than the people that we have in Montana."

The federal government has never been popular with Montanans. The federal Patriot Act was a common whipping boy on the campaign trail last year, and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle lined up this year against the Real ID Act.

Montana's lawmakers had two bills opposed to the Real ID Act to consider this session: one opposing it, another to nullify it.

The one opposing the act, sponsored by Rep. Brady Wiseman, D-Bozeman, and signed by the governor, was unanimously approved by both chambers, while the other bill was seen as unconstitutional and was rejected by a Senate committee.

Wiseman said getting support for his bill was an easy sale.

"Nobody in Montana thinks we should have this thing, so it became easy. There was never an argument, and I never had to persuade anybody," he said.

He said he's been urging members of the state's congressional delegation to support efforts to repeal the Real ID Act.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said he is pushing national legislation to repeal the Real ID Act.

"Montanans are speaking loud and clear on this issue and its time for Capitol Hill to listen," Tester said in a statement.

Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., originally supported the federal legislation, but said Tuesday that he is now against it.

Rehberg said he originally supported the act because it was recommended by the Sept. 11 Commission as a way to strengthen national security, and he thought it was what most Montanans wanted.

"The Legislature has disagreed, the governor has disagreed and I will accept and support their position," Rehberg said.
http://www.billingsgazette.net/artic.../54-legiid.txt





Conservative MP Introduces 'Clean Internet Act'
Michael Geist

Conservative MP Joy Smith yesterday introduced the Clean Internet Act (Bill C-427). The private member's bill would establish an Internet service provider licensing system to be administered by the CRTC along with "know your subscriber" requirements and content blocking powers. Just about everything associated with this bill is (to be charitable) rather odd. Smith introduced it by warning against the use of the Internet to support human trafficking and added that "the bill would address the fact that child pornography is not okay to put on the Internet throughout our nation," though the Criminal Code already does that.

The bill itself includes (and I am not making this up):

• an ISP licensing system to be administered by the CRTC that is defined so broadly that it would seemingly capture anyone offering a wifi connection
• a "know your subscriber" requirement where ISPs would be required to deny service to past offenders (though the ISP would escape liability if upon learning of an offending customer, it terminated service and notified the Minister of Industry)
• a new power that would allow the Minister of Industry to order an ISP to block access to content that promotes violence against women, promotes hatred, or contains child pornography. ISPs that fail to block face possible jail time for the company's directors and officers.
• the Minister of Industry can prescribe special powers to facilitate searches of electronic data systems (ie. lawful access)

Given that this is a private member's bill, it is very unlikely to become law. That said, this bill would not look out-of-place in countries that aggressively censor the Internet and it makes the dangerous Jennings lawful access bill look positively harmless by comparison.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1884/125/





Digital Cinema

Eyes-On the Red Camera: Real and Beautiful, But 4K Launch Support in Question
Stephen Schleicher

For a while, Gizmodo had been wondering if the $17K Red On 4K camcorder was genuine or just another piece of vaporware. That's why we're glad to see the camera at NAB 07 in front of our faces, with support from Apple, Peter Jackson, and others. We had a chance to talk with Red One "Leader of the Rebellion" Ted Schilowitz, allowing him to calm our worries about the historically problematic shipping dates and 4k support that may or may not be available at launch.

We had a chance to see three working Red One cameras in the company booth. One was connected to a 720p monitor to show the live output. The other two had working LCD viewfinders as well as film-style video eyepiece finders that potential fan boys could get all touchy-feely with, and there were plenty of those wonks getting their mitts on the camera.

With all the talk of 4K, we were very surprised the live video was only being shown on a 720p monitor. The response? There aren't any 4K monitors to show the full output.

According to Schilowitz the first batch of cameras that go out may indeed be lacking certain features and functions, but he didn't know (i.e. wouldn't say) what features those might be.

When asked if 4K works, he said yes, but didn't know if 4K would be available in the first cameras.

Will early adopters be screwed? Schilowitz did say that when the camera starts shipping, owners can follow two option paths; take the camera as-is and get a free upgrade when all of the features have been enabled, or simply wait until the features are ready and pick up the camera then. If they can upgrade a camera from non 4k to 4k for free, more power to em.

When asked when the camera would ship, Schilowitz emphasized the company's spin on shipping. In his words, Red is an engineering company that would rather rely on "target dates" than ship dates. When asked the "target date," he responded the Red One camera has a target range between the end of April and the middle part of May of 2007.

Even if the company makes this target, those eager to purchase one may still have to wait as the company has been able to convince 1500 individuals and companies to plunk down a hefty down payment to reserve one of these beauties.

In an effort to put to rest the doubt that this camera is actually working or simply a pyramid scheme to bilk old ladies from their fortune, Jim Jannard ushered visitors into a small movie theatre to show them an 11-minute film shot entirely with two Red One alpha prototypes he named "Boris" and "Natasha".

Sure anyone can crank out 11 minutes of beauty shots and call it a film, but it is an entirely different matter when that 11-minute film is an original narrative piece, written and directed by Peter Jackson. Yes, that Peter Jackson. Jackson invited the Red crew to Masterton, New Zealand for a two day shoot to capture a WWI story involving a doughboy on the ground, an ace pilot, a picture of a loved one, a teddy bear, and those accursed Nazis.

We were able to learn the two cameras only had Run/Stop triggers, 180-degree shutters running at 24fps, recorded to a Red Drive at 27Mbps and encoded in Red Raw. Not a lot of fancy schmancy at all. The short was projected using Sony's 4K projector, but as previously announced, Red is working on its own line of 4K projectors and monitors. Jackson decided to skip using the Red lenses in favor of the Cooke S4 24-90mm lenses with which he was more familiar.

This film was full of action and drama as only Jackson can deliver, and throughout the piece, we watched closely for telltale signs of artifacting, blown highlights, or false colors. While a lot of the story takes place on bare dirt, scenes in the air presented a full range of colors that proved this camera can capture some very dynamic images.

We noticed some jumpiness during some of the high-action fast-moving shots, but didn't know if that was a fault of the camera, the digital projection, or our hypersensitivity to digital projection. Regardless, those instances were very few, and after, we had a chance to talk for a moment with two cinematographers sitting next to us who were accustomed to shooting on Viper and Genesis cameras. They were both impressed with the results and had no complaints with the technology.

So for now, the Red One camera has moved from vaporware to reality, but with the "target date" still a month off and the long line for delivery, you aren't going to be able to pick one up anytime soon, let alone at the local Best Buy. But good tech always trickles down, and we're moving in the right direction with these cameras.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/e...ion-252798.php





Not looking hard enough

Porn Found On One In Four Corporate PCs

Think there aren't any pornographic images on your users' desktops or laptops? Think again. A new study shows that they're being downloaded and sent via e-mail through the office.
Sharon Gaudin

A new study found pornography on one in four PCs despite the use of content filtering technology at the gateway.

PixAlert, a company that focuses on keeping illicit images out of corporate networks, audited 10,000 PCs on 125 business and public sector networks over the last nine months. The study found that one-quarter of the computers contained pornography or "other inappropriate images." The same audit found that 12.4% of the 12,000 e-mail accounts and 5.4% of 26,000 file server shares scanned were similarly affected.

"With over a third of all images found created in the last 12 months, it is clear that a significant number of employees continue to ignore corporate policies and in some cases are going to extraordinary lengths to bypass protection systems in order to obtain and distribute inappropriate material," said Andy Churley, a director at PixAlert, in a written statement. "Corporate officers wrongly assume that boundary protection systems stop all digital pornography from entering the organization but, in PixAlert's experience, almost all corporations will have a significant amount of pornography on their networks."

The study found that 46.8% of the images showed full nudity or sexual activity and 0.3% of all the images were determined to be illegal. While 35% were downloaded online images, 45.2% of the images detected came from e-mails. The study also found that 35.5% were sent internally. "While all organizations actively discourage access to inappropriate images at work, our audits show that the reality is that all establishments have a lot of digital pornography residing on their networks that they don't know about," said Churley. "Companies are particularly concerned when they have visibility of the number of pornographic images being distributed by e-mail internally or sent out to other organizations using a corporate e-mail address."

Last month, Maryland authorities nabbed 22 state employees who were visiting pornographic Web sites -- sometimes a few thousand times a week -- on the job. Investigating officials reported that the number of employees involved was understated, and a wider investigation is being called for.

Pornographic images aren't the only problem in business settings. In February, forensic investigators announced that they went over 70 used hard drives bought from 14 sources and recovered "private information" on 62% of them. While they did indeed find pornographic images, they also found one man's will and a man's personal fan letter to a female celebrity.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=199100333





Putting a New Spin on Vinyl Records
John Sepulvado

CD sales are declining, but there has been a resurgence in vinyl. Audiophiles are drawn to records because there aren't any anti-piracy restrictions and people claim they just sound better than their digital counterparts.

John Sepulvado reports for member station WUSF in Tampa.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=9598796





Remaking Old Hits to Earn New Money
Jeff Leeds

In 1986, the pop band Wang Chung released the ludicrous but catchy party anthem “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” Now two of the musicians behind the band have hatched a plan that might seem even more absurd than the lyric “everybody Wang Chung tonight.” More than two decades after the song became a smash hit, they are recording it again.

But they have their reasons. In the decade and a half since Wang Chung dissolved, the licensing of music to advertisers, television and movies has become more acceptable — and much more lucrative — for performers from the past. And by remaking their own hits, these artists can keep a much bigger share of the proceeds. “To re-record our back catalog is a way of empowering ourselves,” said Nick Feldman of Wang Chung. “We can be much more selective about where these songs end up and how much we charge for them.”

Under the typical record contract, money paid to license a song is split between the record label that owns the recording and the artist who performed it. But if a band remakes the song after it has ended its contract, it can retain ownership of the new version and license it itself without having to share the rewards with the record label. (Music executives typically insist on contract provisions that prohibit artists from re-recording their work for up to five years after their deal expires.)

Recently, a number of aging pop and rock stars has returned to the studio to recreate their signature tunes and pitch them to Madison Avenue and Hollywood. Attentive fans may notice remakes by bands including Twisted Sister, Foreigner and Simply Red in commercials, movie trailers and television programs.

But for some singers, recapturing the flair of their younger selves is no easy trick. “It’s 22 years on,” said Jack Hues of Wang Chung. “My voice is really quite different. You have to almost get into character, which is an interesting experience.” His partner, Mr. Feldman, wondered, “Should we just mimic and do a literal replica, or should we go for that spirited performance that reflects how we are now?”

In the case of Twisted Sister, a loose plan to recut some songs from the band’s 1984 breakthrough album “Stay Hungry” and package them with a DVD turned into a more serious affair. The band re-recorded the entire album, said the co-founder and guitarist Jay Jay French.

Since 2004 several advertisers, including 7Up and Wendy’s, have licensed the new versions, he said. In one instance, a television program paid $10,000 to use 10 seconds of a musical bridge from one of the newly recorded versions. Licenses for full Twisted Sister songs can be in the “six-figure” range, he said.

While the concept of musicians re-recording their hits is not new, there has been something of a gold rush unfolding in the licensing world since the mid-1990s. Pop songs have replaced jingles or musical scores as the preferred backdrop for commercials and TV shows, particularly those appealing to savvy young adults and baby boomers.

That trend has coincided with a shift in the way some artists view the licensing of their music. While many still consider using their songs to sell products as compromising, a number of rock legends, including Led Zeppelin, have allowed their work to be used in recent years. Indeed, the recent surge of re-recorded hits may have been presaged in 1999 by Aerosmith, which offered a newly re-made version of “Sweet Emotion” for a General Motors ad.

Such efforts spell more trouble for big music companies, which stand to lose licensing money if more artists recreate their best-known songs. These days, the issue of when superstars can begin to re-record their catalog is becoming a frequent bone of contention in contract negotiations. Donald S. Passman, a music lawyer, said that some music companies are trying to rewrite the terms to, in effect, block an artist from any re-recording that sounds similar to the original; other deal-makers say artists are trying to shave years off the usual moratorium on re-making their songs.

That sort of fight is becoming more important as traditional CD sales continue their lengthy slide. A big label with a strong catalog can generate as much as $20 million a year from licensing its recordings before paying the artists their share, music executives estimate.

Recently, some artists’ plans to re-record have been encouraged by music publishers, who represent songwriters and who control separate copyrights that must be licensed when an advertiser or TV show wants to use a particular tune. Publishers say they can strike deals more efficiently when they can represent songwriters with their own recordings and avoid waiting for an advertiser to negotiate separately with the label that controls the original.

Still, advertisers caution that they are wary of shoddy attempts at recapturing the past. “I’ve heard a lot of really bad re-creations on the air. It just makes my hair stand up,” said Ira Antelis, director of music for the ad agency Leo Burnett.

At the other end of the spectrum are solo artists who produced their own original recordings. Prince, for example, has re-recorded significant portions of his catalog that — thanks partly to technological advances — may rival the original versions, according to one person close to him. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. A handful of artists have tried to package their new versions as a CD, in effect competing against their old record label and their own songs. Twisted Sister’s “Still Hungry,” a re-recording of 1984’s “Stay Hungry,” has sold an estimated 25,000 copies since it came out three years ago, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.

Irving Azoff, the talent manager behind bands like the Eagles and Earth, Wind & Fire, said he is encouraging clients to recreate their biggest hits and perhaps sell the new versions directly to retail chains. Mr. Azoff said that in many cases, these bands “play these songs differently, and I think better, than the original” versions. For fans, the old hits form “the fabric of their memories. These songs have stood the test of time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/arts/music/18old.html





'Pipe Organ' Plays Above the Sun
Paul Rincon

Immense coils of hot, electrified gas in the Sun's atmosphere behave like a musical instrument, scientists say.

These "coronal loops" carry acoustic waves in much the same way that sound is carried through a pipe organ.

Solar explosions called micro-flares generate sound booms which are then propagated along the coronal loops.

"The effect is much like plucking a guitar string," Professor Robert von Fay-Siebenbuergen told BBC News at the National Astronomy Meeting in Preston.

The corona is an atmosphere of hot, electrically-charged gas - or plasma - that surrounds the Sun. The temperature of the corona should drop the further one moves from the Sun.

But, in fact, the coronal temperature is up to 300 times hotter than the Sun's visible surface, or photosphere. And no one can explain why.

Fiery fountains

The coronal loops arch hundreds of thousands of kilometres above the Sun's surface like huge fiery fountains, and are generated by the Sun's magnetic field.

As solar plasma travels from the photosphere into the loops, it is heated from about 6,000 Kelvin (5,700C) to upwards of one million Kelvin.

Solar explosions called micro-flares can release energy equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs.

These blasts can send immensely powerful acoustic waves hurtling through the loops at tens of kilometres per second, creating cosmic "organ music".

"These loops can be up to 100 million kilometres long and guide waves and oscillations in a similar way to a pipe organ," said Dr Youra Taroyan, from the Solar Physics and Space Plasma Research Centre (SP2RC) at the University of Sheffield.

The sound booms decay in less than an hour and dissipate in the very hot solar corona.

Professor von Fay-Siebenbuergen, who is director of SP2RC, said that studying how plasma is heated to such high temperatures in coronal loops could speed up the technological development of industrial-scale nuclear fusion on Earth.

'Star on Earth'

Nuclear fusion is the same process which powers the Sun and other stars. Unlike the burning of fossil fuels, fusion reactions produce no carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas blamed by scientists for warming the planet.

Fusion works on the principle that energy can be released by forcing together atomic nuclei rather than by splitting them, as in the case of the fission reactions that drive existing nuclear power stations.

In the core of the Sun, huge gravitational pressure allows this to happen at temperatures of around 10 million Celsius.

At the much lower pressure that is possible on Earth, temperatures to produce fusion need to be much higher - above 100 million Celsius

In nuclear fusion experiments, powerful magnetic fields can be used to isolate hot plasma from the walls of a containment vessel.

This reduces the conductive heat loss, allowing the electrified gas to be heated to high temperatures.

The most promising magnetic confinement systems are ring-shaped; called a torus.

Professor von Fay-Siebenbuergen said a coronal loop could give clues to improving nuclear fusion because it could be regarded as a half-torus.

The Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Preston runs from 16-20 April.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...re/6574059.stm





Turbo Tax Melts Down on Tax Day
Raven17

Turbo Tax by Intuit completely melted down under the load from last minute filers. Some people have been having problems as long as 24 hours already. I surrendered 2 hours before the East Coast deadline and schlepped on down to the Post Office.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/18/1240225





BlackBerry Service Hit by Widespread Outage in U.S.

Problems began last night on the West Coast
John Blau

The BlackBerry wireless e-mail service from Research In Motion Ltd. appears to have suffered a widespread outage that started last night in the U.S.

Customers on the BlackBerry Forums discussion board complained of having no service starting at about 5:15 p.m. PST yesterday.

Callers to the BlackBerry U.S. technical support line were still greeted with the following message early this morning: "We are currently experiencing a service interruption that is causing delays in sending or receiving messages. We apologize for the inconvenience and will provide updates as soon as they become available."

New York television news channel NewsChannel4 reported last night that the problem affected "all users in the Western Hemisphere."

However, comments from operators in Asia and Europe, as well as postings to the BlackBerry Forums, suggested that the problem may be limited to North America.

"Officials with RIM said they are trying to reset the system and told NewsChannel4 that they are concerned that the backlog of data, which will rush through when it comes back on line, could cause a bigger problem," the news channel reported on its Web site.

RIM officials advised people who use BlackBerry as a major way of communications to make backup plans, the channel reported.

A RIM official contacted in France was unaware of the problems, and said she had received messages sent to her BlackBerry as normal. Other RIM officials did not return calls seeking comment.

The outage may have been caused by one of RIM's Network Operating Centers (NOC) going down, according to Emma Mohr-McClune, an analyst at Current Analysis Inc. "This has happened before," she said.

RIM operates two NOCs, both located in Canada, according to Mohr-McClune. The company has considered locating additional NOCs outside of Canada, she said.

Companies that provide BlackBerry service connect their mail servers to a BlackBerry Enterprise Solution (BES) server located on their premises, which in turn is linked to one of RIM's NOCs, according to Mohr-McClune. "All data slides to Canada and back," she said.

RIM may have been fortunate that the outage began at about 5 p.m. Pacific Time, because it would have been after the busiest part of the U.S. workday. Engineers were likely scrambling through the night to bring the service back online before the start of the U.S. workday today.

Other parts of the world appeared to have been unaffected. A representative for Taiwan Mobile Ltd., RIM's BlackBerry partner for the island, said the problem is limited to North America, and that users would not be affected unless they are sending or receiving e-mail through a BlackBerry server there.

"RIM has not communicated with Taiwan Mobile about when this problem might be fixed," said the representative, April Hong.

NTT DoCoMo Inc. in Tokyo said its BlackBerry users in Japan were also unaffected. And in Europe, a spokesman for T-Mobile Deutschland GmbH was unaware of any problems, and BlackBerry users in Germany and France reported no interruption of service.

The problems come at a time of continued rapid growth for the Waterloo, Ontario-based company. It added 1.02 million subscribers in the quarter ended March 3, for a total of approximately 8 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide. Revenue for the quarter was $930.4 million, up 66% from a year earlier. Net income for the quarter before adjustments was $187,928, the company said.

Peter Sayer, James Niccolai, Dan Nystedt and Martyn Williams of the IDG News Service contributed to this report.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9016981





Bereft of BlackBerrys, the Untethered Make Do
Brad Stone

Where were you when the BlackBerrys went out?

On Tuesday night at 8 p.m. Eastern time, technical problems cut off more than five million BlackBerry users in the United States from their cherished wireless e-mail. Service was restored 10 long, data-starved hours later.

The BlackBerry blackout was grueling to many — and revealed just how professionally and emotionally dependent so many people had become on their pocket-size electronic lifelines.

Stuart Gold was in Phoenix on a business trip when the service went down. Mr. Gold, the marketing director for Omniture, a software firm, noticed ominous red X’s next to his outgoing e-mails.

He is not proud of what happened next.

“I started freaking out,” he said. “I started taking it apart. Turning it off. Turning it on. I took the battery out and cleaned it on my shirt. I was running around my hotel like a freak. It’s very sad. I love this thing.”

At 6 a.m. Wednesday morning, full of anxiety about the prospect of spending a traveling day untethered, Mr. Gold awoke and made a beeline for his still motionless phone. At 7 a.m., it started vibrating with activity. “I breathed a sigh of relief,” he said. “Life was good.”

Many people thought they were suffering alone.

Lynn Moffat believed she had administered a fatal blow to her BlackBerry by dropping it early Tuesday in Grand Central Terminal. When Ms. Moffat, the managing director of the New York Theater Workshop, learned on the radio that the service disruption was widespread, “I was so relieved it wasn’t just me, but all my BlackBerry brothers and sisters,” she said.

Others cycled through complex waves of emotion, including a bit of paranoia. Zach Nelson, chief executive of NetSuite, a software firm, was entertaining his top sales representatives in Barbados when e-mail from his 600 other employees suddenly stopped arriving on his BlackBerry. “I started thinking people hadn’t shown up for work as a revolt for us going to the Caribbean,” he said.

Research in Motion, the Canadian company that makes the BlackBerry devices, shed little light yesterday on what went wrong, releasing a statement that said the “root cause is currently under review.”

Part of the problem, though, could be the service’s rapid growth: R.I.M. says it has added three million subscribers in the last 12 months, for a total of eight million, in part because of the popularity of its superslim BlackBerry Pearl.

BlackBerry users have had scares before. Last June, technical problems twice interrupted service, though both failures lasted only a few hours and were confined to specific wireless carriers that sell the devices.

A patent dispute also threatened to shut the BlackBerry service altogether more than a year ago. Though R.I.M. denied any patent violations, it avoided a crisis by settling for $612.5 million. At the time, the BlackBerry faithful could only speculate what deprivation might feel like.

Now they know. Symptoms include feelings of isolation, a strong temptation to lash out at company I.T. workers, and severe longing, not unlike drug withdrawal.

Elaine Del Rossi, chief sales officer for HTH Worldwide, an insurance company, reacted to the severed electronic leash with several panicked calls to her office in the belief that the company e-mail system was down.

“I quit smoking 28 years ago,” she said, “and that was easier than being without my BlackBerry.”

Even at the White House, officials complained that the blackout had badly disrupted their morning routines, and a spokesman, Tony Fratto, pleaded with reporters to be patient with him.

“We’ve already started a 12-step program,” he said, then joked that the White House counsel, Fred Fielding, had ordered the stoppage— a reference to the dispute over missing e-mail messages concerning the controversial firing of several United States attorneys.

Rob Whitehouse, vice president for communication of University Hospitals in Cleveland, was brought face to face with his powerful addiction at 11 p.m. on Tuesday night, when he realized he was “jonesing” for a message on his inexplicably silent device.

“I have reached the point where I get phantom vibrations, even when I’m not carrying the thing,” he said. “That sure doesn’t sound too healthy, does it?”

But some BlackBerry users looked at this week’s episode differently, treating the silence as a reprieve. Barry Frey, a senior vice president at Cablevision, stepped off an airplane on Tuesday night to find that his in-flight e-mail exile had been extended.

His reaction was BlackBerry blasphemy. “I took a deep breath and finally enjoyed the feeling,” he said.

The less frenetic world he describes may not only be saner, but safer. Peter Crist, an executive recruiter in Chicago, admits to occasionally steering his car with his knees while he thumbs his BlackBerry. Tuesday night, he put both hands on the wheel and said he had a quiet, uninterrupted dinner with his wife and son — for a change.

Other BlackBerry users were also forced to reconsider some bad habits. At the annual meeting of the National Venture Capital Association in Washington, venture capitalists said that the interruption meant one less distraction, allowing them to pay closer attention to the presentations.

In offices, employees had to speak with colleagues over the phone and in actual face-to-face conversations.

The BlackBerry blackout, just like the power failures of yore, could have even helped in the romance department — if couples could actually connect. Robert Friedman, president of the media and entertainment division of @radical.media, a production company, said the disruption gave him “a lot of free time on my hands to spend with my wife, although I couldn’t find her since her BlackBerry was off.”

When service was restored yesterday morning, most BlackBerry users were happy to dive back in and start sending e-mail. R.I.M. was under pressure to make sure the failure would not happen again. BlackBerry e-mail is more costly than alternative services offered by Motorola and Microsoft, but in the past R.I.M. had justified the premium by claiming it had a more reliable service with a higher level of security.

Stuart Gold, the software executive, speculated that the blackout would create opportunities for other wireless e-mail companies, a view shared by others.

If one of R.I.M.’s rivals were able to guarantee its service, he said, he would want his company to explore switching.

Others took the inconvenience more in stride, including David Plouffe, the campaign manager for Senator Barack Obama.

Mr. Plouffe said his eerily empty in-box brought back a time in politics when there were no such things as mobile phones, thumb-typing and a never-ending flood of e-mail.

Yet, “everything seemed to work O.K.,” he said. “Quite frankly people have to talk more in that situation. That’s probably a good thing.”

Ian Austen, Matt Richtel, Louise Story, Joan Raymond, Jeff Bailey, Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/te...lackberry.html





Blackberry Reveals Failure Cause

The maker of the Blackberry wireless e-mail device says an insufficiently tested software upgrade was the cause of this week's network failure.

Blackberry's US and North American users lost their service on Tuesday and Wednesday as a result of the problem.

Research In Motion (RIM) said it was now looking to improve its testing and recovery processes to prevent such an outage happening again.

There are about eight million Blackberry users around the world.

'Below expectations'

Blackberry said in a statement that the failure was trigged by "the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine" designed to increase the system's e-mail holding space.

It admitted that "the pre-testing of the system routine proved to be insufficient".

RIM added that the process designed to maintain the service in the event of a failure "did not fully perform to its expectations", causing a longer delay before the system was restored.

Analysts said they did not expect the outage to affect the Blackberry's popularity.

"So long as RIM solves whatever went wrong and communicates it well enough to customers, we foresee no lasting impact," said D Newcrest analyst Chris Umiastowski.

It is estimated that RIM has around 45% of the market for smart phones.

Preliminary figures recently showed that the firm's profits jumped tenfold to $187m (£94m) in the three months to 3 March.

The network disruption comes as RIM faces a formal probe by the US financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, over its stock options.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ss/6574767.stm





Campus Goes Online for Information and Comfort
Sarah Wheaton

For the Virginia Tech community, changing information created emotional roller coasters both during and after Monday’s attack by a gunman who killed 32 people and then himself.

Initial warnings of caution belied the ultimate massacre. Likewise, the search for missing people left friends and loved ones relying on gossip and speculation.

Fueled by technology, the level of available information — just enough to cause fear, but not enough to really know — has been contributing to both false hope and unnecessary anguish among those involved.

Lauren McCain, a freshman majoring in international studies, according to her MySpace profile, was among those unaccounted for in the immediate wake of the shootings. Her friends’ efforts to figure out what happened to her are heart-wrenching, and outsiders can go along for the rollercoaster ride, eavesdropping through Facebook and other forums.

Courtney Treon, a high school student, started a thread within a Facebook group called Prayers for VT” asking for “any kind of information on Lauren McCain.” Posting at around 11 p.m. on Monday, she added, “It is believed that she was at Norris Hall at the time of the shooting and she is missing at the moment.”

Over the next 14 hours, friends and acquaintances responded with bits of information from various sources. Shortly after the original posting, someone reported that she was either dead or at the hospital. Then she was in critical condition. People posted expressions of relief, and the discussion seemed to subside.

But before noon on Tuesday, Alex Grant posted a conversation indicating that unidentified bodies remained in Norris Hall, and that Ms. McCain was neither in the hospital nor the morgue. By around 1 p.m., Rachael Leach wrote in: “My roommate is her friend, and she called me this morning to tell me Lauren was identifiable and dead. Pray for that situation.”

At 4:37 p.m. Ms. Treon posted at a different Facebook group that she started, VT Victim Information: Lauren McCain is not alive. She was not found at the hospital or the morgue. Since Norris Hall was locked down for the night, her parents are not able to identify her body...

Tuesday evening, Ms. McCain was listed among those confirmed dead on the Web site of The Collegiate Times, the student newspaper at Virginia Tech.

For other families, worst fears turned out not to be warranted.

“When I looked at the map of where our daughter is staying and where her dorm lies in the path of the shootings — where the gunman may have traveled to get to Norris Hall, my wife and I were just torn emotionally during the news casts like other Virginia Tech parents,” wrote William S. on an “Online Vigil” run by The Virginian-Pilot. “But now that she is safe, we can only feel sadness for those victims of this senseless act and the pain their families are going through.”

Paul, a Virginia Tech student, blogged about searching for his girlfriend, Katelyn Carney:

“I try calling Kate but she isn’t answering her phone. I am assuming she is in Mcbride because I have had a few German classes in that building but I’m not sure. We check her schedule to find out that she in fact had her German class in Norris Hall. Now I’m freaked out, and franticly try to call her, but she isn’t picking up.

“Fast forward a couple minutes, I get a call from Montgomery Hospital. A very kind nurse wanted to give me a message from Katelyn Carney. I obviously oblige and ask what the message is. She says, ok, the message is ‘I’ve got red on me.’ Of course I instantly think, what a hilarious thing to say in a situation like this, but at the same time, I’m now MORE worried than I was before, and ask the nurse if she is able to patch me through to Kate.

“Right as she picks up the phone she tells me, ‘I got red on me.’ I laugh, and immediately try to find out if she’s hurt or what to expect, and she lets me know that she’s fine, stable, good, not hurt ... only slightly. ”Technology failed some students at key moments. On a forum at FARK.com, user WhenWillThenBeNow wrote at 12:47 p.m. on Monday, “But I live on campus ... we are getting nothing, and just as they had announced that there were 20+ dead, everyone on campus lost cable ... just saying.”

The university’s failure to keep students updated during the two hours between shootings has drawn considerable criticism. “Ironic,” writes RonJ, a Virginia Tech employee, “that we’ve been having meetings about redesigning our emergency notification systems, to be able to include mass-blasting cell phones and stuff. I suspect that will be made a higher priority.”

But while technology failures left some on campus in the dark, it did help Ms. Treon, who attends Loudon Valley High School, over 200 miles away, feel connected. She said that after she created her victim-search Facebook group, a relative of Ms. McCain asked for her help.

“Throughout the night, I kept saying, ‘This is amazing, just amazing’ at the outpour of love and support that I was receiving from strangers,” she wrote in a Facebook message to NYTimes.com. “My heart aches at” the most recent information about Ms. McCain, she said, “because throughout the hours last night, I came to a real connection with her, and I felt like I was one of her friends.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/us/18bloggerscnd.html


















Until next week,

- js.



















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