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Old 15-08-07, 10:58 AM   #2
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Internet is "The New Afghanistan": NY Police Commissioner
Michelle Nichols and Edith Honan

The Internet is the new battleground against Islamist extremism because it provides ideology that could radicalize Westerners who might then initiate home-grown attacks, New York police commissioner Raymond Kelly said on Wednesday.

"The Internet is the new Afghanistan," Kelly said, as he released a New York Police Department (NYPD) report on the home-grown threat of attacks by Islamist extremists. "It is the de facto training ground. It's an area of concern."

The report found that the challenge for Western authorities was to identify, pre-empt and prevent home-grown threats, which was difficult because many of those who might undertake an attack often commit no crimes along the path to extremism.

The report identified the four stages to radicalization as pre-radicalization, self-identification, indoctrination, and jihadization, and said the Internet drove and enabled the process.

Radicalization could be triggered by such things as the loss of a job, the death of a close family member, alienation, discrimination, and international conflicts involving Muslims, said the report by senior NYPD intelligence analysts.

"Much different from the Israeli-Palestinian equation, the transformation of a Western-based individual to a terrorist is not triggered by oppression, suffering, revenge or desperation," it said.

"Rather, it is a phenomenon that occurs because the individual is looking for an identity and a cause and unfortunately, often finds them in extremist Islam," said the report "Radicalization in the West: The Home-grown Threat."

While the September 11 strike on the United States by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network was planned overseas, the report said the attacks had helped proliferate and accelerate radicalization, especially in the West.

"More importantly, 9/11 established the current trend of committing an act in the name of global jihad as a natural culmination of full radicalization and the ultimate responsibility for the fully radicalized jihadist," it said.

But starting the radicalization process does not mean everyone will progress to "become a terrorist."

"Individuals who have been radicalized but are not jihadists may serve as mentors and agents of influence to those who might become terrorists of tomorrow," said the report, which analyzed five home-grown U.S. attack plots.

It says Europe's failure to integrate second and third generation immigrants into society, both economically and socially, had left young Muslims more vulnerable to extremism.

While economic opportunities in the United States are better and the country's Muslims are more resistant to Islamist extremism, they are "not immune to the radical message."

"The powerful gravitational pull of individuals' religious roots and identity sometimes supersedes the assimilating nature of American society," the report said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...24872020070815





A Gateway for Hackers

The security threat in the new wiretapping law
Susan Landau

Current administration policy is replete with examples of quickly enacted efforts whose consequences led to the opposite effect. (Beware of what you wish for . . . .) With Congress caving last week, the National Security Agency no longer needs a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to wiretap if one party is believed to be outside the United States. This change looks reasonable at first, but it could create huge long-term security risks for the United States.

The immediate problem is fiber optics. Until recently, telecommunication signals came through the air. The NSA used satellites and antennas to pick up conversations of foreigners talking to other foreigners. Modern communications, however, use fiber; since conversations don't go through the air, the NSA wants to access communications at land-based switches.

Because communications from around the world often go through the United States, the government can still get access to much of the information it seeks. But wiretapping within the United States has required a FISA search warrant, and the NSA apparently found using FISA too time-consuming, even though emergency access was permitted as long as a warrant was applied for and granted within 72 hours of surveillance.

Avoiding warrants for these cases sounds simple, though potentially invasive of Americans' civil liberties. Most calls outside the country involve foreigners talking to foreigners. Most communications within the country are constitutionally protected -- U.S. "persons" talking to U.S. "persons." To avoid wiretapping every communication, NSA will need to build massive automatic surveillance capabilities into telephone switches. Here things get tricky: Once such infrastructure is in place, others could use it to intercept communications.

Grant the NSA what it wants, and within 10 years the United States will be vulnerable to attacks from hackers across the globe, as well as the militaries of China, Russia and other nations.

Such threats are not theoretical. For almost a year beginning in April 2004, more than 100 phones belonging to members of the Greek government, including the prime minister and ministers of defense, foreign affairs, justice and public order, were spied on with wiretapping software that was misused. Exactly who placed the software and who did the listening remain unknown. But they were able to use software that was supposed to be used only with legal permission.

The United States itself has been attacked. In six hours in August 2006, remote attackers entered computers at the Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington; the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego; and the Army Space and Strategic Defense Command in Huntsville, Ala. The hackers transported more than 10 terabytes of data to South Korea, Hong Kong or Taiwan, and from there to the People's Republic of China. Each intrusion was only 10 to 30 minutes. The downloaded information included Army helicopter mission-planning-systems specifications and flight-planning software used by the Army and Air Force.

U.S. communications technology is fragile and easily penetrated. While advanced, it is not decades ahead of that of our friends or our rivals. Compounding the issue is a key facet of modern systems design: Intercept capabilities are likely to be managed remotely, and vulnerabilities are as likely to be global as local. In simplifying wiretapping for U.S. intelligence, we provide a target for foreign intelligence agencies and possibly rogue hackers. Break into one service, and you get broad access to U.S. communications.

The Greek wiretapping and Chinese thefts from U.S. military sites are warnings that entities other than the NSA could exploit the vulnerabilities of U.S. communications networks. Were the proposed wiretapping technology penetrated by foreign intelligence services, U.S. security and privacy could be quickly and severely compromised.

In its effort to provide policymakers with immediate intelligence, the NSA forgot the critical information security aspect of its mission: protecting U.S. communications against foreign interception. So did Congress. Lawmakers granted the warrantless wiretapping only for six months -- and they need to look carefully before it endangers U.S. national security for the long term.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...801961_pf.html





Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security
Noah Shachtman

For years, the military has been warning that soldiers' blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post material far more potentially harmful than anything found on a individual's blog.

The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.

The results were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after the digital rights group filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

"It's clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs," said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. "Bloggers, on the whole, have been very careful and conscientious. It's a pretty major disparity."

The findings stand in stark contrast to Army statements about the risks that blogs pose.

"Some soldiers continue to post sensitive information to internet websites and blogs," then-Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker wrote in a 2005 memo. "Such OPSEC (operational security) violations needlessly place lives at risk." That same year, commanders in Iraq ordered (.pdf) troops to register their blogs "with the unit chain of command."

Originally formed in 2002 to police official Defense Department websites (.mil), the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell, or AWRAC, expanded its mission in 2005. A handful of military bloggers, including then-Spec. Colby Buzzell, were seen as providing too many details of firefights in Iraq. Buzzell, for one, was banned from patrols and confined to base after one such incident, and AWRAC began looking for others like him on blogs and .com sites.

But AWRAC hunted for more than overly vivid battle descriptions. It scoured pages for all kinds of information: personal data, like home addresses and Social Security numbers; restricted and classified documents; even pictures of weapons. When these violations were found, AWRAC contacted the webmaster or blog editor, and asked that they change their sites.

"Big Brother is not watching you, but 10 members of a Virginia National Guard unit might be," an official Army news story warned bloggers.

Within the Army, some worried that the blog-monitoring had compromised AWRAC's original goal.

"My suspicion ... is that the AWRAC's attention is being diverted by the new mission of reviewing all the Army blogs," reads an e-mail (.pdf) from the office of the Army Chief Information Officer obtained in EFF's FOIA lawsuit. "In the past they did a good job of detecting and correcting (website policy compliance) violations, but that is currently not the case."

On one blog, AWRAC found photos showing bomb damage to a Humvee; on another, a description of a mountain near a base in Afghanistan; on a third, a video about "morale concerning incoming mortar." AWRAC discovered a secret presentation on the official, unclassified Army Knowledge Online network. It found a map of an Army training center in Texas on a second .mil site. A "colonel's wife's maiden name" was caught on a third.
http://www.wired.com/politics/online...08/milbloggers





Server with Top-Secret Data Stolen from Forensic Telecommunications Services

The Forensic Telecommunications Services (FTS) has confirmed the theft of a computer server containing thousands of top-secret mobile phone records and evidence from undercover terrorism and organised crime investigations. The company - whose clients include Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service - has assured the public that the server is security protected, and the breach will not compromise ongoing police operations.

The company announced the following: FTS can confirm that the company was recently the victim of a break-in at one of our premises in Kent. As a result, some IT equipment including a server was stolen.

The server, which is security protected, contained administrative data and details of some case files in relation to FTS’ forensic work. In the unlikely event that the server was accessed, non of the data stored on the server in any way compromises ongoing police operations.

The information is made up of either old cases that have passed through the judicial process, or cases that are already in the judicial system and so subject to full disclosure to both defence and prosecution teams.

All the data was restored within 24 hours due to FTS’ business continuity measures. As a result of this incident FTS is undertaking a full and comprehensive review of security across the whole company.

FTS are working closely with the police and assisting with their investigations. As with many other similar forensic service providers who are contracted by the police, FTS will not discuss the nature of our workload.

Jamie Cowper from PGP Corporation commented the situation:

"What this particular case highlights is that - as well as putting internal security measures in place - organisations really need to be more cautious of the third party companies that they entrust sensitive information to.

Due to the nature of its work, it is likely that the FTS has a stringent information security policy. However, any company which outsources without a thorough assessment of the threat status of all third party contractors runs the risk of rendering existing corporate security policies useless. In order to enforce an enterprise data protection strategy, organisations MUST account for every eventuality - wherever data rests.

In any case, the immediate disclosure and swift action taken by the FTS following the breach is yet another positive indication that organisations are beginning to take data protection seriously."
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=5418





How Search Engines Rate on Privacy
Declan McCullagh

Price wars are public blessings. Ask anyone who has comparison shopped between Advanced Micro Devices and Intel microprocessors or bought a cheap Harry Potter novel thanks to fierce bookseller price battles.

In the last few months, the search engine business has experienced its own version of cutthroat competition: a privacy policy war, with Google, Ask.com and Microsoft vying to outdo one another in protecting their users' personal information.

But it's been difficult to make direct comparisons, in part because privacy policies tend to be written by lawyers for lawyers. So CNET News.com did some of the work for you by surveying the five leading search companies.

Starting on August 6, we asked them eight questions, including how long they retain search data, how they eventually dispose of it, whether they engage in behavioral targeting, and whether they use information they have from user sign-ups to guide which ads are displayed. We asked follow-ups where necessary for clarification.

The verbatim results of the survey are posted in an accompanying story.

The answers suggest that, based on the questions we asked, Ask.com was the most protective of user privacy. In fact, only Ask.com said it would not record what users type into its search engine. (Smaller search engines, including ixquick, said this as well, but we limited our survey to the five largest engines.) Ask.com also said it did not engage in behavioral targeting, which refers to the practice of offering advertisements based on previous searches.

And the rest? Results were mixed. Google avoids behavioral targeting, but after 18 months it performs a partial anonymization of users' Internet Protocol addresses--an action that's not terribly privacy protective. Google dominates the search market: 53 percent of U.S. Web searches in June were performed on its site, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

Microsoft is better on the anonymization front. Peter Cullen, the company's chief privacy strategist, said users' Internet addresses and cookie values are "permanently and irreversibly" disassociated from the search terms after 18 months. But Microsoft does engage in behavioral targeting, while Google doesn't. Yahoo and AOL were similarly mixed.

These were, nevertheless, remarkable improvements. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo told News.com, in response to an earlier survey we did in February 2006, that they kept search records for as long as the data prove useful. Now they've set expiration dates, and Ask.com went further by promising to stop recording user search histories starting later this year. Google also has shortened the lifespan of its cookies from expiring in 2038 to expiring two years from the last visit.

Search privacy is important because our Googling (and Yahooing, and MSNing and so on) provides a unique glimpse into our personalities and private lives. Search terms have been used to convict a wireless hacker and lock up a man charged with killing his wife. Search engine activity is also a fertile growth area for nosy divorce lawyers and employment disputes.

One relatively simple way to protect your privacy when using search engines is to configure your browser to not permit them to place cookies on your computer. (Here's an FAQ on the topic.) Another way is to route all your connections through a proxy server such as Anonymizer, Tor or Black Box Search.

Market rivalry and regulatory threats
What all this amounts to is that the best search engine to use, from a privacy perspective, depends on what's most important to you.

Are you worried about a company publishing even anonymized search terms, as AOL did last year? Then use one that deletes your data sooner, or disable cookies for that site (at the price of not being able to use features like Web-based e-mail). Do you dislike seeing ads presented according to a computer-generated profile that was crafted based on your search terms? Then use Ask.com or Google, because the other three companies we surveyed do behavioral targeting. Worried about someone perusing your search history in person? Use software like PGP or Mac OS X's FileVault to encrypt part or all of your hard drive.

In addition to the normal forces of marketplace rivalry, another recent factor has been government regulatory threats. A group of European bureaucrats, called the Article 29 Working Party, has been pressuring search companies to store information for a shorter period of time. Last year, there was even a bill introduced in the U.S. Congress that would have forced Web sites to delete personal information if not required for "legitimate" business purposes.


Behavioral targeting is another growth area--not only for search companies, but for bureaucrats and politicians as well.

Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of the DoubleClick ad company is being investigated by U.S. regulators after the purchase was challenged on competition and privacy grounds. Microsoft has received regulatory approval to buy online ad firm Aquantive, and Yahoo acquired online ad exchange Right Media. More recently, AOL said it was planning to acquire behavioral-targeting firm Tacoda.

The companies say they're following industry standards, with both Microsoft and Yahoo noting in our survey that they perform behavioral targeting only in accordance with Network Advertising Initiative principles. But liberal groups are becoming increasingly vocal, and the Federal Trade Commission last week announced it would hold a two-day forum in November to address behavioral advertising concerns.
http://news.com.com/How+search+engin...3-6202068.html





In China, a High-Tech Plan to Track People
Keith Bradsher

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights.

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.

Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common.

“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.

Incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks — Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong — helped raise the money.

Shenzhen, a computer manufacturing center next to Hong Kong, is the first Chinese city to introduce the new residency cards. It is also taking the lead in China in the large-scale use of law enforcement surveillance cameras — a tactic that would have drawn international criticism in the years after the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989.

But rising fears of terrorism have lessened public hostility to surveillance cameras in the West. This has been particularly true in Britain, where the police already install the cameras widely on lamp poles and in subway stations and are developing face recognition software as well.

New York police announced last month that they would install more than 100 security cameras to monitor license plates in Lower Manhattan by the end of the year. Police officials also said they hoped to obtain financing to establish links to 3,000 public and private cameras in the area by the end of next year; no decision has been made on whether face recognition technology has become reliable enough to use without the risk of false arrests.

Shenzhen already has 180,000 indoor and outdoor closed-circuit television cameras owned by businesses and government agencies, and the police will have the right to link them on request into the same system as the 20,000 police cameras, according to China Public Security.

Some civil rights activists contend that the cameras in China and Britain are a violation of the right of privacy contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Large-scale surveillance in China is more threatening than surveillance in Britain, they said when told of Shenzhen’s plans.

“I don’t think they are remotely comparable, and even in Britain it’s quite controversial,” said Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel of Human Rights Watch in New York. China has fewer limits on police power, fewer restrictions on how government agencies use the information they gather and fewer legal protections for those suspected of crime, she noted.

While most countries issue identity cards, and many gather a lot of information about citizens, China also appears poised to go much further in putting personal information on identity cards, Ms. PoKempner added.

Every police officer in Shenzhen now carries global positioning satellite equipment on his or her belt. This allows senior police officers to direct their movements on large, high-resolution maps of the city that China Public Security has produced using software that runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system.

“We have a very good relationship with U.S. companies like I.B.M., Cisco, H.P., Dell,” said Robin Huang, the chief operating officer of China Public Security. “All of these U.S. companies work with us to build our system together.”

The role of American companies in helping Chinese security forces has periodically been controversial in the United States. Executives from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems testified in February 2006 at a Congressional hearing called to review whether they had deliberately designed their systems to help the Chinese state muzzle dissidents on the Internet; they denied having done so.

China Public Security proudly displays in its boardroom a certificate from I.B.M. labeling it as a partner. But Mr. Huang said that China Public Security had developed its own computer programs in China and that its suppliers had sent equipment that was not specially tailored for law enforcement purposes.

The company uses servers manufactured by Huawei Technologies of China for its own operations. But China Public Security needs to develop programs that run on I.B.M., Cisco and Hewlett-Packard servers because some Chinese police agencies have already bought these models, Mr. Huang said.

Mr. Lin said he had refrained from some transactions with the Chinese government because he is the chief executive of a company incorporated in the United States. “Of course our projects could be used by the military, but because it’s politically sensitive, I don’t want to do it,” he said.

Western security experts have suspected for several years that Chinese security agencies could track individuals based on the location of their cellphones, and the Shenzhen police tracking system confirms this.

When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system tracks the location of the officer’s cellphone, based on the three nearest cellphone towers. Mr. Huang used a real-time connection to local police dispatchers’ computers to show a detailed computer map of a Shenzhen district and the precise location of each of the 92 patrolling officers, represented by caricatures of officers in blue uniforms and the routes they had traveled in the last hour.

All Chinese citizens are required to carry national identity cards with very simple computer chips embedded, providing little more than the citizen’s name and date of birth. Since imperial times, a principal technique of social control has been for local government agencies to keep detailed records on every resident.

The system worked as long as most people spent their entire lives in their hometowns. But as ever more Chinese move in search of work, the system has eroded. This has made it easier for criminals and dissidents alike to hide from police, and it has raised questions about whether dissatisfied migrant workers could organize political protests without the knowledge of police.

Little more than a collection of duck and rice farms until the late 1970s, Shenzhen now has 10.55 million migrants from elsewhere in China, who will receive the new cards, and 1.87 million permanent residents, who will not receive cards because local agencies already have files on them. Shenzhen’s red-light districts have a nationwide reputation for murders and other crimes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/bu...curity.html?hp





One. Big. Factory.

The Forbidden City of Terry Gou

His complex in China turns out iPhones and PCs, powering the biggest exporter you've never heard of
Jason Dean

Shenzhen, China

Past a guarded gate on the outskirts of this city sits one of the world's largest factories. In dozens of squat buildings, it churns out gadgets bearing technology's household names -- Apple Inc.'s iPods and iPhones, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s personal computers, Motorola Inc. mobile phones and Nintendo Co. Wii videogame consoles.

Few people outside of the industry know of the plant's owner: Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.

With a work force of some 270,000 -- about as big as the population of Newark, N.J. -- the factory is a bustling testament to the ambition of Hon Hai's founder, Terry Gou. In an era when manufacturing has been defined by outsourcing, no one has done more to shift global electronics production to China. Little noticed by the wider world, Mr. Gou has turned his company into China's biggest exporter and the world's biggest contract manufacturer of electronics.

Hon Hai's revenue has grown more than 50% a year in the past decade to $40.6 billion last year. It is expected to add $14 billion in revenue this year. That is roughly the equivalent of Motorola's adding, within a year, the sales of CBS Corp.

Throughout his company's rise, the 56-year-old native of Taiwan has maintained a low profile. Publicity, he says, risks helping competitors and alienating customers. "I hate that I [have] become famous," Mr. Gou said in a recent three-hour interview at Hon Hai's Taiwan headquarters. It was Mr. Gou's first interview with Western media since 2002, following more than five years of requests by The Wall Street Journal. "We are so big we cannot hide anymore."

Hon Hai, and its massive Shenzhen plant, provides a window into the sometimes-secretive world of manufacturing in China. Confidentiality is a selling point for contract manufacturers, whose customers count on them to shield their products and plans from outsiders. Secrecy has also been a central issue in China's recent tainted-product scandal, with the often-quiet relationship between U.S. companies and their suppliers complicating regulators' hunt for the source of defective goods. Recently, citing ongoing investigations, Mattel Inc. took nearly a week to identify its Chinese provider of toys believed to contain lead paint.

Hon Hai hasn't been involved in such scandals, and analysts and industry insiders say Mr. Gou has combined discretion with a solid record of quality control and competitive pricing to build a booming empire. The $43 billion market capitalization of Hon Hai -- a public company listed in Taiwan, which uses the trade name Foxconn -- is equal to that of its 10 biggest global rivals combined. Mr. Gou and Hon Hai control additional affiliates that report revenue separately. Mr. Gou is currently worth about $10 billion, a Hon Hai spokesman says.

The company guards its customers' identities, although some of them are named in its Chinese-language filings to securities regulators. Hon Hai and its affiliates make products not only for Apple, Nintendo, H-P and Motorola, but also cellphones and parts for Nokia Corp., PlayStation 2 sets for Sony Corp. and computer parts for Dell Inc. Those companies did not dispute their relationship with the manufacturer. Hon Hai is also currently the exclusive supplier of Apple's iPhones and one of the few makers of iPods, Taiwan-based analysts say. Apple acknowledged that Hon Hai is a supplier but declined to comment further.

At the center of Mr. Gou's empire is his walled Shenzhen facility, the Longhua Science & Technology Park, which covers about a square mile. Aside from customers, few outsiders set foot inside. A reporter visiting Longhua was barred from viewing protected areas or taking photographs of more than a few scenes.



In addition to its dozens of assembly lines and dormitories, Longhua has a fire brigade, hospital and employee swimming pool, where Mr. Gou does early morning laps when he is there. Restaurants, banks, a grocery store and an Internet cafe line the company town's main drag. More than 500 monitors around the campus show exercise programs, worker-safety videos and company news produced by the in-house television network, Foxconn TV. Even the plant's manhole covers are stamped "Foxconn."

James Lee, a heavy-smoking former banker whom Mr. Gou tapped to run the plant in 1998, is Longhua's de facto mayor. Mr. Lee frets about how to provide more than 150,000 lunches every day in the 10 cavernous employee canteens (that's about 10.6 metric tons of dry rice per meal, at one bowl each). He oversees landscaping, uniform buying, dormitory building and hiring as many as 3,000 new workers a day during peak periods. His administration employs more than 1,000 security guards to keep order and prevent unauthorized visitors from sensitive areas. Administrators also battle what he calls new employees' tendency to litter.

GADGET MAKER

Some major customers/products of Hon Hai & its affiliates:CUSTOMER PRODUCTS
Apple iPhone, some iPod models
Dell Desktop PCs/parts
Hewlett-Packard Desktop PCs/parts
Nokia Cellphones/parts
Motorola Cellphones/parts
Sony PlayStation2 videogame console, PSP handheld game unit
Nintendo Wii videogame console DS game unit

Source: WSJ research

"I have to resolve every single small problem on this campus, with the exception of production," he says over a "Foxconn Coffee" at a company restaurant. He jokes: "Would you want this job?"

Now the plant's space is running out. "We never thought we would expand so fast," says Mr. Lee.

The founder's personality permeates the site and company. A charismatic man who inspires intense loyalty among his lieutenants, Mr. Gou runs Hon Hai with the power of a warlord. On his right wrist he wears a beaded bracelet he got from a temple dedicated to Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongolian conqueror whom he calls a personal hero.

"I always tell employees: The group's benefit is more important than your personal benefit," Mr. Gou says.

Mr. Gou has combined a competitive drive with a business model that lets the company build much of its products in-house, saving money on parts. His zeal for cost-cutting prompted a fellow executive to quip several years ago that Mr. Gou is "worth about $2 billion in nickels and dimes."

Longhua's workers tend assembly lines, in shifts, around the clock. They earn wages that seem meager by developed-world standards but are enough to keep new recruits streaming through its gates. The most basic assembly-line jobs pay about 60 cents an hour -- the legal minimum -- although workers can earn higher wages for overtime. Meals are subsidized. Most workers live rent-free in company dormitories inside the walls or off campus.

Last year, a British tabloid alleged poor treatment of Longhua's workers, specifically those who make Apple's iPods there. (At the time, Apple reported that nearly one-seventh of Longhua's workers made Apple products.) The British account was followed by criticism of the company in the Chinese press.

Apple sent a team to investigate, and found a handful of violations of its Supplier Code of Conduct, including over-crowding at three off-site dorms, according to a report the company issued last August. Apple, which asks suppliers to limit workers to 60 hours of labor a week except in emergencies, estimated that one-third of Longhua's workers exceeded the limit. It did not find evidence of forced overtime. Overall, Apple found Hon Hai to be in compliance with its guidelines "in the majority of areas," it said in the report. Apple declined to comment further.

Hon Hai executives say conditions for their workers are better than the average in China, which helps them attract new workers. They say they have built new dorms at the plant and taken other measures to address Apple's concerns. Mr. Gou angrily dismisses the critical coverage.

Mr. Gou started what would become Hon Hai in 1974. He borrowed part of the initial investment of $7,500 from his mother, who with his father had fled to Taiwan in 1949 during China's civil war. In a facility near Taipei, he began making plastic channel-changing knobs for black-and-white television sets.

In the early 1980s, he expanded into the PC industry just as it started to take off. His first products were connectors, the relatively simple but ubiquitous parts that join components in a PC. Though he spoke little English or Japanese, he soon began traveling to the U.S. and Japan, seeking out customers. During the 1980s and 1990s, he says he logged so much time driving from city to city in the U.S. that he memorized the menu at Denny's.

In 1988, with orders surging and costs soaring in Taiwan, Mr. Gou set up his first factory in China, where land and labor were cheaper. Decades-old tensions between Taipei and Beijing were starting to wane, and China was a decade into a massive economic overhaul. Mr. Gou chose Shenzhen, a city next to Hong Kong at the forefront of China's market reforms.

He used his small-but-fast-growing Shenzhen operation in his sales pitch to prospective customers. In 1995, when Michael Dell was visiting southern China, Mr. Gou offered to arrange meetings with local officials he knew in return for the chance to drive the 30-year-old American to the airport, says Max Fang, who was then Dell's head of procurement in Asia. On the way, Mr. Gou made an unscheduled detour to show off his factory.

Dell then wasn't one of the world's top five PC vendors, and Hon Hai didn't yet make parts that Dell bought directly. But Mr. Gou "knew that Michael Dell was a star of tomorrow, so he wanted to meet him," says Mr. Fang, who has known Mr. Gou since 1979. Today, Hon Hai is one of Dell's biggest suppliers, analysts and industry sources say. Mr. Gou keeps a photograph of Dell's founder on a shelf in his Taiwan office.

That same year, Mr. Gou secured a larger plot of land that would become Longhua. When Mr. Fang visited a year later, it had fewer than 1,000 workers. Executive offices were housed in 20-foot shipping containers.

But Mr. Fang was impressed. At the time, Dell and other PC companies tended to buy parts from several suppliers and ship them to their own factories for assembly. Mr. Gou had created a production line that let him do most of the process himself, from procuring the raw steel for PC casings to putting together the finished product.

GLOBAL PRESENCE

Global manufacturing locations of Hon Hai and its affiliates.

TAIWAN
Headquarters – Tucheng (greater Taipei)

CHINA
Shenyang, Liaoning Province
Yingkou, Liaoning Province
Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province
Langfang, Hebei Province
Taiyuan, Shanxi Province
Tianjin City
Yantai, Shandong Province
Shanghai City
Wuhan, Hubei Province
Nanjing, Jiangsu Province
Kunshan, Jiangsu Province
Huaian, Jiangsu Province
Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province
Shenzhen, Guangdong Province
Foshan, Guangdong Province
Zhongshan, Guangdong Province
WORLD
Czech Republic
Hungary
Mexico
Brazil
India
Vietnam
Source: The company


Over the years, Mr. Gou has expanded his portfolio to include a growing share of the PC's insides. Making its own components lets Hon Hai undercut competitors on the price of its finished products without reducing its overall margins, says Adam Pick, an analyst at iSuppli Corp., a market research firm in El Segundo, Calif.

By 2000, Hon Hai's work force neared 30,000 people and its revenue topped $3 billion. Mr. Gou was expanding his soup-to-nuts strategy to more products. That year, Hon Hai set up a subsidiary called Foxconn International Holdings Ltd., now the world's biggest independent cellphone maker. In 2003, Mr. Gou launched a company that is now a leading maker of flat-panel LCD monitors. Last year, Hon Hai bought a major producer of digital cameras.

Now, in some cases, Hon Hai builds much of a product and ships it to its client for the finishing touches. In others, it ships the final products directly to retailers or consumers.

In all, more than 450,000 workers are now employed at Mr. Gou's plants across about a dozen provinces of China. Thousands more work in facilities run by Hon Hai and its affiliates across the globe -- including Hungary, Mexico and Brazil -- as the company sets up plants closer to its customers' operations. The company is one of the biggest exporters in the Czech Republic, where Mr. Gou bought a castle several years ago. Hon Hai is also adding operations in Vietnam and India and expanding into other sectors, including auto parts.

As Hon Hai grew too large for one person to manage directly, Mr. Gou fostered a culture centered on his personality. Around Longhua, his image can be seen in large framed photos of him with Chinese officials, and on the Gou biographies stacked in the factory book store's window.

Executives say he leads by example to keep products coming out on schedule and to customer specifications. Known for his 16-hour days, the founder for years would cruise the Longhua campus late into the night in a golf cart -- modified with a large bicycle horn -- stopping to spot-check production lines or help repair equipment.

Company managers are expected to read and remember a document called "Gou's Quotations." (No. 133: "The important thing in any organization is leadership, not management. A leader must have the decisive courage to be a dictator for the common good.") At meetings, Mr. Gou often stands, and illustrates his ideas with black marker on a giant white paper pad. He encourages discussion, but if someone says something he considers foolish, he may order the person to stand at attention. "He'll say, 'I'm not punishing you, because I'm standing, too,'" says a senior Hon Hai manager.

Industry executives and analysts say customers often start outsourcing one product line to Hon Hai and then shift more there. "You get addicted," says Mr. Fang, who left Dell in 2002 and now runs a venture capital fund that has co-invested with Hon Hai in a company called Ugobe Inc., which makes robotic toys.

Competitors have struggled to keep up. Four years ago, Hon Hai was smaller by revenue than Nasdaq-listed Flextronics International Ltd., the industry's longstanding leader. Now, Hon Hai is so much larger that even after a merger announced in June between Flextronics and Solectron Corp., of Milpitas, Calif., their combined revenue will be about two-thirds that of Hon Hai.

Hon Hai has its vulnerabilities. It isn't, for example, a major producer of laptop computers, which analysts say requires product-design capabilities that Hon Hai lacks. It is exposed to the risks of contract manufacturing, an intensely competitive business with thin margins. Hon Hai relies heavily on a fairly small number of customers: In the tech industry, a single product line can make or break a company's fortunes and, in turn, the well-being of a supplier. The company also faces the challenge of increasing revenue at the rate investors have come to expect.

Hon Hai's sheer physical size also creates difficulties. Longhua was built quickly, and its layout wasn't well planned, says Mr. Lee, the plant director. With its increasing overcrowding, just moving all those workers around is a challenge. Mr. Lee says he once considered building a monorail but the idea proved too difficult. He says the ideal facility would have about one-fourth of the land area and perhaps one-third the workers.

"It's not a good idea to be this size," says Mr. Lee, who is also in charge of building other large factories for Hon Hai.

Hon Hai executives, and outside analysts, say the company has stayed nimble so far largely by splitting its operations among about a dozen smaller, semi-autonomous units. Mr. Gou says he wants to upgrade Longhua's facilities and take on more advanced work, such as research and development. That means shifting manufacturing jobs to other parts of China.

Longhua is incessantly busy, but during breaks and shift changes, the activity explodes. At lunchtime on a recent sunny day, thousands of employees poured out of their buildings. They swarmed in and out of a large cafeteria and browsed in the factory book shop. A line of dozens of new employees, carrying their few possessions, snaked along a crosswalk.

Most of the workers wear uniforms color-coded by their department. Others wear blue jeans and T-shirts. A number stroll in pairs, hand-in-hand. The workers are as young as 16.

Zhou Ruqing, an affable 20-year-old, has worked at Longhua for just over a year as a quality inspector on an assembly line. She lives in an apartment outside the factory with her boyfriend, who also works at Longhua.

Ms. Zhou came to Shenzhen in 2005 after graduating from high school in rural Sichuan province. As a mid-level assembly-line worker, she earns about $230 a month, including overtime pay. (First-year workers can make as little as $90 a month if they do not work overtime.) That doesn't include about $60 a month in housing and food subsidies, plus health insurance. In Shenzhen, that money goes far -- the rent for the small apartment she shares is less than $60 a month.

Another worker, who would identify himself only as Mr. Xiao, started as an assembly-line worker almost three years ago, just after graduating from a technical school in central China, where Hon Hai recruited him. His starting salary was $44 a month at today's exchange rate. Working up to 30 days a month, he could earn up to $157 a month. "I was really tired then, too busy to rest," he said.

Mr. Xiao has worked up to a more advanced post. His basic salary has doubled, although his total pay hasn't increased much, partly because he works fewer hours. He says conditions are better than they were at the time of last year's critical press attention, but "the change is incomplete." He currently works six days a week, spending his off day studying in hopes of landing a different position.

Mr. Gou's role at Hon Hai is changing, too. He says he works just as hard today, but is focusing more on big strategic issues than day-to-day work. He is also devoting more time to charity -- he has pledged to eventually give away one-third of his fortune -- and dealing with changes in his personal life. His wife of many years died in 2005. Last month, his younger brother, who had headed a Hon Hai affiliate, died after a long illness.

Mr. Gou has begun looking for a successor at Hon Hai, focusing on candidates in their late 30s or early 40s and asking senior managers to prove themselves by running their units assertively. There is no natural successor -- his son and daughter don't work at the company.

He says his decision to begin stepping down now is inspired by Chinese history, specifically the Qianlong Emperor, who ruled from 1736 until 1796, when he was 84 years old. Qianlong greatly expanded the Qing Dynasty, making China perhaps the wealthiest country on earth. But his judgment failed in his later years, and the Qing began a decline that led to its eventual demise. "He controlled the whole of China for 60 years," says Mr. Gou. "He stayed there too long. So I want to sit back and give young people more responsibilities, when I'm still young."

--Sue Feng in Beijing and Christopher Lawton in San Francisco contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article....html?mod=blog





China Recall Toy Factory Boss Hangs Himself

The boss of a Chinese toy manufacturing company involved in a Mattel recall after its products were found to contain excessive lead levels has hanged himself, Chinese media reported on Monday.

Zhang Shuhong, a Hong Kong businessman in his 50s and boss of the Lida Toy Company in the southern province of Guangdong, was found dead in his factory workshop on Saturday, the semi-official Southern Metropolitan Daily said.

Zhang was not a Mattel employee.

About 1.5 million preschool toys made by Lida Toy, a Foshan-based contract manufacturer for Mattel Inc.'s Fisher-Price unit, were recalled across the globe by the U.S. company last week.

The recalled toys included popular preschool characters such as Elmo and Big Bird and dozens of other items. The case was the latest in a deluge of product safety scares that have tainted the "made-in-China" brand.

The recall was Mattel's largest since 1998 when it recalled some 10 million Power Wheels vehicles made by its Fisher-Price unit.

The latest recall comes on the heels of RC2 Corp's Chinese-made wooden Thomas & Friends toy trains in June because some of them contained lead paint.

Lead paint has been linked to health problems in children, including brain damage. China's quality watchdog had banned Lida from exports.

A close friend of Zhang who was also one of the major paint suppliers for the company sold the problematic paint to Lida, the newspaper said.

"(He) was so evil-hearted to have sold the fake paint to our boss ... our boss was ruined by his best friend," a manager of the company, surname Liu, was quoted as saying.

Lida was not immediately available for comment. Calls to its factory went unanswered.

Mattel spokeswoman Jules Andres said the company was "saddened" to hear of Zhang's death, but had no further comment.

Police were investigating the case, the newspaper said.

Chinese goods have been under fire after a chemical additive in pet food caused the death of some pets in the United States, and toxic ingredients were found in Chinese toothpaste and fish exports.

Deaths of patients in Panama were blamed on improperly labelled Chinese chemicals mixed into cough syrup.

(Reporting by Vivi Lin, additional reporting by Justin Grant in New York)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/govern...35192020070813





Mattel Reportedly Plans Second Recall Over Chinese Paint
Anne D'Innocenzio

Less than two weeks after Mattel Inc. recalled 1.5 million Chinese-made toys because of lead paint, the toy industry is bracing for another blow that could give parents more reason to rethink their purchases just before the critical holiday shopping season.

Mattel is set to announce the recall of another toy involving a different Chinese supplier as early as Tuesday, according to three people close to the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Details of the latest recall were not immediately available, but one of the three people said the toy is being recalled because its paint may contain excessive amounts
of lead.

Scott Wolfson, a spokesman for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, declined to comment. Mattel officials did not immediately return phone calls.

A new Mattel action would mark the latest in a string of recalled products from China, ranging from faulty tires to tainted toothpaste. With more than 80 percent of toys sold worldwide made in China, toy sellers are nervous that shoppers will shy away from their products.

On Aug. 1, Mattel's Fisher-Price division announced the worldwide recall of 1.5 million Chinese-made preschool toys featuring characters such as Dora the Explorer, Big Bird and Elmo. About 967,000 of those toys were sold in the United States between May and August.

Mattel, based in El Segundo, Calif., apologized to customers for that recall and said the move would cut pretax operating income by $30 million. Fisher-Price "fast-tracked" the recall, which allowed the company to quarantine two-thirds of the tainted toys before they reached store shelves.

In documents filed Aug. 3 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mattel noted that additional information became available in July on "other smaller product recalls and similar charges were recorded." Those recalls involved design problems, according to company officials questioned last week.

Days after the Fisher-Price recall, Chinese officials temporarily banned the toys' manufacturer, Lee Der Industrial Co., from exporting products. A Lee Der co-owner, Cheung Shu-hung, committed suicide at a warehouse over the weekend, apparently by hanging himself, a state-run newspaper reported Monday.

Lee Der was under pressure in the global controversy over the safety of Chinese-made products, and it is common for disgraced officials to commit suicide in China.

In June, toy maker RC2 Corp. voluntarily recalled 1.5 million wooden railroad toys and set parts from its Thomas & Friends Wooden Railway product line. The company said that the surface paint on certain toys and parts made in China between January 2005 and April 2006 contain lead, affecting 26 components and 23 retailers.

In July, Hasbro Inc. recalled Chinese-made Easy Bake ovens, marking the second time the iconic toy had been recalled this year.

Before this month, Fisher-Price and parent company Mattel had never before recalled toys because of lead paint.
http://news.newstimes.com/news/updat...e=news_updates





Still for Sale: Bibs with Lead


No chew! Too spicy.

Tests by two firms show elevated lead levels in bibs sold at Toys 'R' Us, but retailer, Feds have not recalled item.

Certain vinyl baby bibs sold at Toys "R" Us stores appear to be contaminated with lead, but this latest Chinese-made product to raise safety concerns is not being recalled.

Tests conducted on the bibs for the public interest group Center for Environmental Health (CEH) as well as tests conducted separately by the New York Times showed lead as high as three times the level allowed in paint in the bibs.

CEH said it tested these two bibs from a Toy R Us store and found them to be contaminated with lead.

The CEH said Wednesday that it purchased the Vinyl bibs from Toys R Us and Babies R Us stores, including a bib with Disney's (Charts, Fortune 500) "Winnie the Pooh" characters and store brand bibs marketed as "Koala Baby" and "Especially for Baby" bibs.

The group said in a statement that the bibs tested for lead levels that are between three and four times the legal limit for lead in paint.

CEH also found a "Kidcosmic" brand vinyl bib sold in a Lisa Kline store with similarly high lead levels.

In May, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued a consumer safety alert - but not a recall - of baby bibs with cracked or peeling vinyl surfaces. The agency warned of a potential risk of lead exposure to infants from those products.

However, the agency concluded that its risk assessment found hat none of the bibs that were tested at CPSC's laboratory would pose a risk of substantial illness to children from mouthing

The CPSC recommended that parents discard bibs that were in poor condition to avoid any potential exposure to lead from swallowed vinyl.

"Lead in vinyl baby bibs poses a reckless, unnecessary hazard to children at the most vulnerable age," Caroline Cox, research director at CEH said in a statement.

"These companies have known for months that vinyl bibs could be a threat to children, yet they continued to put their profits ahead of children's health. We expect these bibs to be removed from store shelves immediately," she said.

The CEH said it found Wal-Mart (Charts, Fortune 500) selling vinyl baby bibs tainted with lead in May and asked the retailer to stop the sale of the bibs nationwide.

Regarding the CPSC's safety alert issued in May, the CEH said that the Safety Commission's report was "inaccurate and misleading."

"In fact, all of the tests on the Wal-Mart, Toys R Us, Disney and Lisa Kline bibs were on new bibs," the group said.

"CPSC has a chance to step up to the plate and order a national recall to protect children, but the recent past has shown that the agency is more concerned with protecting companies that make and sell poisonous products," Charlie Pizarro, associate director of CEH, said in a statement.

Separately, the Times reported Wednesday that Toys "R" Us said that its own independent lab test on the bibs conducted as recently as May found them to be in compliance with safety standards for lead levels.

Company spokeswoman Kathleen Waugh told the paper the bibs would be retested and held to standards tougher than federal safety rules.

"Our uncompromising commitment to safety has been, and continues to be, our highest priority," she said in a written statement.

The retailer is owned by private equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Bain Capital and real estate investment trust Vornado Realty Trust (Charts). The bibs were imported from China by Hamco Baby Products, a unit of Crown Crafts (Charts).

The paper reports that Hamco earlier this year imported bibs from China for Wal-Mart Stores (Charts, Fortune 500), but the retailer removed the bibs from its store shelves nationwide due to lead concerns. In Illinois, a strict lead law required their recall, the paper reported.

Chinese products have raised new safety concerns in recent months, prompting a series of recalls. Mattel (Charts, Fortune 500) on Tuesday recalled more than 9 million toys made in China that had been sold in the United States, the second major recall of Chinese toys by the toymaker.

There have also been recalls in recent months of Chinese-produced toothpaste, seafood, animal feed and tires for light trucks, all due to concerns about the safety of the products.

Officials from the Consumer Product Safety Commission told the paper that they would prefer that there be no elevated levels of lead in bibs, but that its own test results indicate that lead, when present, was at levels low enough that a child chewing on or rubbing the bib would not get an unhealthy dose.

The agency said the Toys "R" Us bibs pose a risk only if they are ripped or otherwise deteriorated.

"There is a potential risk of lead exposure from babies swallowing pieces of cracked vinyl on used bibs," the agency said in a statement given to the paper, after being presented with the test results on the Toys "R" Us bibs.

The lack of a recall prompted criticism by some lead safety advocates.

"All lead is bad lead," Patrick MacRoy, director of the Chicago lead poisoning prevention program, told the Times. "Why should we allow any lead to be in there?"
http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/15/news...ion=2007081507





Police Seize Phony Cigarettes in N.Y. Raid
Frank Eltman

Authorities seized nearly 60,000 cartons of cigarettes with brand names like Marlboros and Newports, half of which are suspected of being counterfeits from China, prosecutors announced Monday.

Three Chinese were arrested in the raid late last week at a warehouse in the Corona section of Queens, Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice said at a news conference. The cigarettes have an estimated street value of more than $3.4 million.

Dozens of cartons of well-known cigarette brands -- as well as piles of cash -- were arrayed on conference tables surrounding the podium. Many of the cardboard boxes holding the cartons were stamped "Made in China."

Also seized were counterfeit sneakers, as well as $350,000 in cash.

Prosecutors estimated that the potential lost tax revenue from the cigarettes was more than $1 million.

"When you couple the financial blow these crimes have on local budgets with the potential health risks the counterfeit cigarettes can pose to their consumers, it becomes imperative we crack rings like this one," Rice said.

Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown said the suspects were arraigned over the weekend on charges of forgery and trademark counterfeiting, as well as violations of state tax laws.

They were held on bail ranging from $250,000 to $500,000, Brown said. They face up to 15 years in prison if convicted on the forgery charge, and another four years on the tax violations.

Brown said the counterfeit and untaxed cigarettes are sold at a discount to "mom and pop" retail stores throughout the metropolitan region, who then resell them to customers at traditional prices.

Besides the lost tax revenue, Rice noted that the counterfeit cigarettes do not adhere to New York state law, which requires that "fire safe" cigarettes include a mechanism designed to extinguish the cigarette automatically after a brief period of time.

The raid and arrests followed a six-month investigation that began when police received a tip that illegal cigarettes were being sold on Long Island, Rice said.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/st...?id=1186568834





Toy Makers Brace for a Chill in Sales
Louise Story

For toy makers, it is beginning to look as if it may be a rough Christmas.

On Tuesday, Mattel, the world’s largest toy maker, announced its second lead-related recall this month, pulling back 436,000 toy cars fashioned after the Sarge character in the movie “Cars.”

The company also recalled 18.2 million toys with small magnets that could be swallowed by children, a design flaw that was not the fault of the toys’ Chinese makers. Still, the recalls, the latest in a series involving products from China, have focused attention on the toy industry as manufacturers like Mattel and Hasbro prepare to ship millions of toys from China for the holidays.

Industry analysts are worrying whether toy makers will be able to reassure parents and government officials that toys shipped here are safe.

“For each additional recall and each story in the news about harmful products, the risks of impacting holiday sales increases,” said Erik Kolb, a toy industry analyst for Standard and Poor’s Equity Research. “There’s no doubt that this poses a risk to the entire industry.”

Most of the dolls, electronic toys and action figures long popular with children are made in China, and pressure is mounting to increase scrutiny of imports. Chinese officials have already increased surprise inspections at toy factories there, and American regulators are considering requiring more tests in China or checking toys as they enter ports in the United States. All this extra testing has some toy makers worried that their goods might not reach store shelves on time — a delay that could cost them the bulk of their profits for the year.

“This could be a disaster,” said Jeff Holtzman, president and chief executive of the Goldberger Company, which sells dolls made in China to stores like Toys “R” Us. “Everything is planned and is very time-sensitive. There are millions and millions of dollars at stake.”

Increasingly, politicians are calling for tougher measures to check toys. This week, Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois and a presidential candidate, sent letters to President Bush and the United States trade ambassador expressing concern. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said there was a need for an import czar and federal inspections of Chinese factories that produce goods for export to the United States. Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, called on Mr. Bush yesterday to immediately freeze all imports from China.

“This is not an unprecedented action,” Mr. Dodd, who is also running for president, said in an interview. “The Koreans, Japanese and the British have all used this authority when they believed the safety of their products was in question. Parents are getting up in these forums I’m attending and saying: ‘What’s going to happen here? I have to read every label. Has this been here for years, or is this new?’ They are worried.”

The toy industry is in discussions with the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission and members of Congress about testing. Many options are being considered, including tests at United States ports, third-party testing in China and seals of approval for tested toys.

The product safety commission has asked Congress for additional power to monitor toys coming into the country. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois who is the chairman of the Senate committee that oversees financing for the commission, has urged the agency to monitor toys at the ports. And he has co-sponsored legislation to require third-party testing of all imported toys for children under 5.

“If this flood of dangerous products continues and retailers are forced to pull toy after toy from their shelves, China will become the Grinch that steals Christmas this year,” Mr. Durbin said in an e-mail message.

Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairwoman of the commission, said in a news conference after Mattel’s latest recall that she expected to announce a new testing program with the toy industry soon. Ms. Nord has also been in discussions with Chinese officials about toy safety and will be host at a meeting with them early next month over safety concerns.

Meantime, toy makers are trying to prove to lawmakers that they can handle the matter themselves. Carter Keithley, the president of the Toy Industry Association, called tests at ports of entry “belt and suspenders checks,” arguing that such a measure would be overly cautious. The Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association has gathered a coalition of toy makers to demand that all American import partners ban lead paint, so that it cannot accidentally end up on toys.

And every major toy maker has stepped up toy testing this summer, said Frederick Locker, a lawyer who works in the toy industry.

“Most toy companies are ramping up to enhance their inspections to ensure that mistakes that should not happen are not happening,” Mr. Locker said. “This is a proactive industry, not a reactive one.”

Officials at companies like Lego and Wal-Mart say they are trying to reassure customers that most toys are safe.

“We hope that consumers don’t jump to conclusions about toys in general just being unsafe for children, because that’s not true,” said Michael McNally, a spokesman for Lego, which does not have factories in China.

But some consumers have already made up their minds.

“I’m not giving my grandchild any toy that’s made in China,” said Elizabeth Noe, who lives in Ridgewood, N.J., and is expecting to become a grandmother in two months. “Do we really know who is in control over there? Do we really know who is watching those factories?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/bu...ss/16toys.html





Trouble in China Is Good News for American Toy Manufacturers
Andrew Martin

Whittle Shortline Railroad , a company in Louisiana, Mo., that makes wooden trains and trucks, posted a banner on its Web site several weeks ago: “100 percent kid-safe,” it read, “with lead-free paints.” Mike Whitworth, the company’s owner, said the recent recalls of Chinese-made toys found to contain lead in their paint has been good for his business. Very good.

“We are little bitty, but we are taking some leaps and bounds here,” said Mr. Whitworth, who sells his toys over the Internet and in neighborhood toy and train stores. “Actually, we have seen about a 40 percent jump since late June.”

With about 80 percent of the toys sold in the United States manufactured in China, the relatively few manufacturers of American-made toys who remain have relied to some extent on snob appeal and survived mostly by emphasizing the quality of their products — even if they cost more money.

But some are now pointing to another competitive advantage: you can count on them to be lead free.

After struggling for years to compete against cheaper Chinese imports, several manufacturers of American-made toys said they had been inundated with calls in recent weeks from retail chains and customers inquiring about their products.

The calls increased yesterday after Mattel announced its second major recall of Chinese-made toys that contain lead paint. In June, an Illinois toy manufacturer, RC2 Corporation, recalled 1.5 million Thomas & Friends toy train sets that were manufactured in China and contaminated with lead paint.

“It’s created a lot of buzz,” said Mike Rainville, owner of Maple Landmark toys in Middlebury, Vt., who said his company had experienced a “nudge” in sales. “We expect the impact to manifest itself more as time goes on.”

Mr. Rainville said he had become adept at answering customer inquiries about the safety of his toys. “Our brand is clearly made in Vermont,” he said. “So people understand almost inherently that what is going on in China is different from what we’re doing.”

Still, he said his company conducts third-party testing of its toys to make sure that its finishes are safe.

“People are not going to forget about this for at least this Christmas season,” he said.

Sue Dennison, co-owner of Roy Toy, which is based in East Machias, Me., said orders were up about 25 percent over the last several weeks. “I used to get probably two e-mails a week inquiring about U.S.-made toys,” she said. “Now I’m getting four or five a day.”

Ms. Dennison said her company did not use paint on its wooden toys but uses dyes that are approved for use on food.

With so many mass-produced toys being made in China, most American-made toys are sold over the Internet or in independent toy stores that tend to be more expensive than major retail chains. Indeed, many neighborhood toy stores promote the fact that their toys are not mass produced but rather handmade by American manufacturers or imported from European toy makers.

But those stores represent a small fraction of the toys that are sold. Cliff Annicelli, editor of Playthings, a toy industry trade publication, estimated that specialty toys represent about 5 percent of the overall toy business in the United States, which was $22 billion in 2006.

He pointed out that even small toy stores may carry as many Chinese-made toys as larger retailers. Store owners, however, are likely to have better knowledge about the quality and origin of their toys than employees of large retail chains.

At Kidding Around, a toy store in Manhattan, Karla Perez, the manager, said the recalls of Chinese-made toys have had little impact on the store’s business. She said her store has a loyal customer base and does not necessarily draw those who shop at retail chains like Toys “R” Us.

“The Toys ‘R’ Us toys are different from what we sell,” she said.

Diana Nelson, who owns Kazoo & Company in Denver, also sniffed at the quality of mass-produced toys. While her store includes many products from China, she said she assured customers that the toys were safe.

Ms. Nelson predicted that the recalls of Chinese-made toys would result in bigger sales at her store and on the Internet through the end of the year.

“It will be a boost for us,” she said.

While Mr. Whitworth, the train maker, is enjoying his recent success, there is at least one dark cloud on his horizon.

For years, the tracks sold by Whittle Shortline Railroad have been made by a woodworker, who decided to quit the business in May. It turns out that he could not compete with the Chinese.

Mr. Whitworth said he was searching for a new track maker. If he cannot find one soon, he said, “I’m going to have to buy offshore track.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/business/15toys.html





U.S. Requests WTO Ruling in Piracy Complaint Against China

The Bush administration has asked the World Trade Organization to rule in a complaint against China over the piracy of copyrighted movies, music, software and books, escalating a dispute that has roiled commercial relations.

The U.S. Trade Representative's office took the formal step Monday of asking the WTO to decree that China's laws fall short of international agreements, after consultations failed to resolve differences over what the United States says are weak Chinese laws to safeguard patents and copyrights.

"We still see important gaps that need to be addressed," said Sean Spicer, a spokesman for Susan Schwab, the trade representative.

China's copying of movies, music and software costs companies $2.2 billion in 2006 sales, according to an estimate by lobby groups representing Microsoft, Walt Disney and Vivendi. The WTO complaint, announced in April, is the first by the United States against China for breaching intellectual property rights.

Under WTO rules, China can block the establishment of a three-member panel this month. If it does so, then the United States will need to request another panel next month, which China can't block. The judges typically take a year or more to rule on a complaint.

The two sides held one formal consultation in June, and China has not taken any steps that address U.S. concerns, the trade representative's office said.

This is one of five WTO cases the United States has brought against China and the third of those in which the United States has requested a WTO dispute settlement panel.

China prefers to address disputes through negotiations and consultations because sanctions don't resolve disagreements, said Liao Xiaoqi, China's vice minister of commerce. "China will continue using legal and administrative means to strengthen our protection of intellectual property rights," Liao said.

In this case, the United States says that China's threshold for prosecution is so high that it effectively allows the sale of pirated or counterfeited goods on a commercial scale without violators having to face criminal charges.

Second, the United States says China allows pirated goods that are seized to be sold once the fake labels on them are removed. The United States wants those products destroyed. Third, Chinese laws do not provide copyright protection for works that are awaiting approval by censors, which allows pirates to get a head start on legitimate distributors, the United States says.

In April, the United States filed a complaint about barriers it says U.S.-based movie, music, book and other copyright industries face in selling in China.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/14/business/wto.php





China Bans Reporting on Bridge Collapse
Charles Hutzler

Communist authorities have banned most state media from reporting on the deadly collapse of a bridge in southern China, with local officials punching and chasing reporters from the scene, reporters said Friday.

The harassment and the reporting ban, issued by the Central Propaganda Department, came Thursday while reporters swarmed the tourist town of Fenghuang to report on Monday's accident.

Unidentified locals roughed up a group of five newspaper and magazine reporters as they interviewed families of those killed, according to a photographer and a reporter whose colleague was among the journalists involved.

The collapse of the bridge, which was under construction, left at least 47 people dead, making it one of the worst building accidents in China in recent years.

On Friday, rescue crews blasted massive stone and concrete columns to clear the way for a deeper search of the rubble. They uncovered six more bodies and said it unlikely any survivors would be found, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

The rough treatment given the media stands at odds with the responsible, concerned image China's Communist Party leadership has tried to convey publicly in the wake of the accident and the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Officials from President Hu Jintao on down have promised a thorough investigation into the collapse and punishment for any wrongdoing.

But the accident has raised troubling questions about shoddy building and possible corruption between the officials and contractors, and by trying to control reporting on the disaster, Beijing is fueling those suspicions.

"The local government does not want the media to uncover the collapse," said Li Datong, a veteran newspaperman forced from a top editing job two years ago for running reports that angered authorities. Li said he was told about the harassment in Fenghuang by reporters involved.

A duty officer in the Fenghuang police department, Liu Xiajun, said reporters had made an emergency call reporting the harassment Thursday, but he said he could not elaborate.

An official in the Propaganda Department's information office who declined to give his name said he was "not clear" about the ban and declined further comment.

While all media in China is state controlled, some outlets have engaged in lively, aggressive reporting in recent years, taking advantage of greater social freedoms that have accompanied economic growth and seeking higher profits. Accounts of reporters being beaten by local thugs have increased, with one reporter even being beaten to death early this year.

After the Propaganda Department issued the ban, editors soon phoned their crews in Fenghuang, ordering them to clear out. Editors "told them to disappear within 10 minutes from Fenghuang," the photographer who was having dinner with a group of reporters Thursday night wrote in an e-mail.

The photographer and the reporter asked that they and their media not be identified for fear of reprisals by the department, China's top media censor.

Under the ban, state media were ordered not to send reporters to Fenghuang or independently gather the news but to rely solely on reports by the government's Xinhua News Agency, according to the reporter.

Among the reporters roughed up Thursday was one from a Xinhua-owned magazine, Liaowang Oriental Weekly, along with colleagues from People's Daily, China Youth Daily, Southern Metropolis Daily and the Economic Observer newspaper, the reporter said.

"My colleague was kicked when he tried to stop local officials from beating Wang Weijian from the People's Daily," the reporter said in a telephone interview. He said the officials accused the group of conducting "unauthorized interviews."

Wang declined to comment. In a further sign of how the government was trying to control reporting from Fenghuang, an account of the reporters' harassment posted on a popular Internet forum http://www.tianya.cn Friday morning was removed several hours later, the reporter said.

_____

AP correspondent Alexa Olesen in Beijing contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...081700752.html





BBC Radio Ordered off Russian FM

The BBC's Russian-language service will no longer be heard on Russian FM radio, after the country's media regulator ordered that it be removed.

The broadcaster's last FM distribution partner in Russia, Bolshoye Radio, said it had been told to remove BBC content or risk being shut down.

Two other Russian FM stations have dropped BBC programming recently.

The BBC's Russian Service can still be heard online and on medium and short wave frequencies in Russia.

BBC executives said they would appeal against the decision.

'Propaganda'

"The BBC entered into the relationship with Bolshoye Radio in good faith," said Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC Global News.

"We cannot understand how the licence is now interpreted in a way that does not reflect the original and thorough concept documents."

He said the licensing agreement allowed for 18% of Bolshoye's content to be foreign-produced.

Bolshoye Radio's owners, financial group Finam, told the BBC that Russia's media regulators required that all programming be produced by the station itself.

A spokesman for the company said management had made the decision without outside prompting and that it was well known that the BBC was set up to broadcast foreign propaganda.

"Any media which is government-financed is propaganda - it's a fact, it's not negative," the spokesman, Igor Ermachenkov, told the BBC.

A BBC spokesman, Mike Gardner, said: "Although the BBC is funded by the UK government... a fundamental principle of its constitution and its regulatory regime is that it is editorially independent of the UK government."

Critics say Russia is taking measures to curb media freedom ahead of parliamentary elections in December and a presidential poll in March.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...pe/6951710.stm





Word to the wise

Girl Overdoses on Espresso Coffee
BBC

A teenager was taken to hospital after overdosing on espresso coffee.

Jasmine Willis, 17, developed a fever and began hyperventilating after drinking seven double espressos while working at her family's sandwich shop.

The student, of Stanley, County Durham, was taken to the University Hospital of North Durham, where doctors confirmed she had overdosed on caffeine.

She has since made a full recovery and is now warning others about the dangers of excessive coffee drinking.

Ms Willis, who had thought the coffees were single measures, said the effects were so severe that she began laughing and crying for no reason while serving customers at the shop.

She developed a fever and began struggling to breathe after being sent home by her father.

"My nerves were all over the place.

"I was drenched. I was burning up and hyperventilating.

"I was having palpitations, my heart was beating so fast and I thought I was going into shock.

"I did not realise this could happen to you and I only hope other people learn from my mistake."

The teenager, who was allowed home after a few hours of observation, suffered side effects for days afterwards and now says she cannot stand the sight of coffee.

Her father Gary, who runs The Sandwich Bar in Stanley, said: "She did not realise she was drinking double measures.

"I have always stressed to my children the importance of moderation but Jasmine got caught out on this occasion."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ar/6944026.stm





US Curriculum to Include Online Safety
Robert Jaques

The US National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) has called on state leaders to work with schools and colleges to ensure that cyber-security, online safety and ethics lessons are integrated into every classroom.

The call has been made with support from companies including CA, McAfee, Microsoft and Symantec, along with educational organisations such as the Consortium for School Networking and the State Education Technology Directors Association.

Recent legislation dubbed the No Child Left Behind Act requires students to be technology-literate on completion of the eighth grade (year nine in the UK), and the NCSA argues that children should also be taught about the dangers of the web.

The National School Boards Association reported that 96 per cent of school districts claim that at least some of their teachers assign homework requiring internet use.

But there is still no formal education on how to stay safe, secure and ethical online, despite the fact that the internet, like the real world, has threats and dangers which students may come across in the normal course of a day.

These include communications from identity thieves, online predators and cyber-bullies.

A recent University of Michigan national poll on children's health issues found that adults ranked 'internet safety' as the seventh most important issue affecting children today.

"As more and more children and teens grow up in an online world, it is important that they understand how to behave online," said Ron Teixeira, executive director of the NCSA.

"Their safety and security depends on whether or not they talk to strangers, place personal information on social networking sites or secure their family's computer.

"It is critical that states and schools implement internet safety, security and ethics lessons into current technology literacy education efforts in order to protect children from identity theft as well as the nation's online infrastructure."

The NCSA is proposing cyber-awareness programmes that must incorporate the 'C3 principles' of cyber-ethics, safety and security. These include:

• Cyber Ethics Lessons which teach that hacking into someone's computer and taking information is just as wrong as breaking into someone else's home
• Cyber Bullying which is just as wrong as bullying someone on the playground
• Cyber Safety Lessons which incorporate social behaviour tips to protect children from online dangers, such as cyber-predators, harassment, unwanted communications and cyber-bullies
• Cyber Security Lessons which provide information on how to secure computers, identities and financial information

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/59257,...ne-safety.aspx





You've reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the FireFox browser.

The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software. Many site owners therefore install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site. That is their right as the site owner to insist that the use of their resources accompanies the presence of the ads.

While blanket ad blocking in general is still theft, the real problem is Ad Block Plus's unwillingness to allow individual site owners the freedom to block people using their plug-in. Blocking FireFox is the only alternative. Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers..

Since the makers of Ad Block Plus as well as the filter subscriptions that accompany it refuse to allow website owners control over their own intellectual property, and since FireFox actively endorses Ad Block Plus, the sites linking to this page are now blocking FireFox until the resource theft is stopped.

Netscape users can simply set their browser to IE mode to continue to enjoy the site that sent you here. FireFox users can use Internet Explorer, Opera or Netscape (in IE mode) to access it. FireFox users also have the option of using the IE Tab plug-in which uses the IE rendering engine to display pages, but also disables the Ad Block Plus plug-in.

If you are offended by the Mozilla Corporation's endorsement of dishonesty please contact the Mozilla Foundation and ask them to stop empowering internet theft.
http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/

Or you could send them a donation for the great job they’re doing blocking distracting and dishonest advertising, and by the way if you’re like me and you use Opera as the FF hating writer suggests, right-clicking allows you to target-block any content, including ads on the above author’s pages. – Jack





Wall Street Hopes Flotation of the 'New Google' Will Help Battered Stock Market
Richard Wray

A Californian technology company US investors are already dubbing "the new Google" will this week finalise the price of its shares in one of the US market's most eagerly awaited flotations since the dotcom boom.

After just over a week of investor road shows, VMware, based in Palo Alto, has already raised the price expected in its flotation on the New York Stock Exchange to between $27 (£13.40) and $29 from its original forecast of $23 to $25. At those levels the company could be worth more than $10bn. But some analysts on Wall Street believe the stock could rise to $40 or more at its opening, which could come as early as today.

VMware is majority owned by the US data storage and security group EMC, but leading technology companies have recently been buying stakes. Last month Intel spent $218.5m buying shares that will give it a 2.5% stake in the business after the flotation. The internet networking company Cisco then bought 6m shares in the company for $150m, also giving it a small stake. The company has been cited by Microsoft as a potential competitor and at one point was seen as a possible takeover target for the software market leader.

VMware is at the forefront of a new segment of technology called virtualisation. Rather than having software installed on an individual computer or server, where it is often vulnerable to viruses and other forms of attack unless updated regularly, virtualisation separates the hardware from the software. This means one computer or server can run various different programs - even operating systems - on the same machine.

It is an updated version of the application service provider (ASP) model, which was popular in the dying days of the last dotcom boom. But while the ASP model meant merely hosting a personal computer's software on servers on the internet, virtualisation software actually sits between a computer or server's operating system and the actual hardware. As a result, sensitive parts of any system can be partitioned so that viruses and other "malware" cannot infiltrate.

The "virtual" machine that is created can then be easily transferred between different computers, letting companies provide staff who "hot desk" or travel with secure access to exactly the same programs anywhere in the world.

The technology makes it cheaper for large companies to run their IT systems as servers that may sit idle for hours or be under-utilised at specific times can be used for several different purposes at the same time.

Virtualisation is also a hot topic for companies that supply major organisations with their IT networks, as these organisations are able to shift virtual machines around the world only if they have designed their networks correctly.

VMware was founded in 1998 and bought by EMC six years later. It has more than 3,000 employees and counts all of the Fortune 100 companies among its clients. Last year it made revenues of $704m and is expected to make well over $1bn this year as sales increase.

In last month's second-quarter figures from EMC, VMware reported revenues for the three months to the end of June of $296.8m, up from $156.4m in the same period in 2006. The company reckons it will make about $870m from the flotation and will use $350m to pay off debt it owes EMC.

A successful flotation of VMware would be a major boost to the US stock market, which has been battered over the past weeks by the turmoil in the international credit market. VMware has Citigroup, JP Morgan and Lehman Brothers as the lead underwriters for the offering.
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story...eed=technology





Lawsuit: Music Publishers v. YouTube Doesn’t Solve the Problem
Shelly Palmer

The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) has joined an existing lawsuit accusing YouTube of copyright infringement. Since their purchase of YouTube, it has been open season on Google. Rights-holders know that Google is truly made-of-money and aggrieved content owners now have a target with very deep pockets to sue.

Lawsuits will not solve the problem, which is: there is no easy way to identify who owns which rights in and to most pieces of music and there is no easy way to get a quote and pay them.

If you don’t believe me, pick up the phone and call a recorded music company, publisher, performing rights society or someone else you think might administrate the rights you seek and tell the person who answers the phone you want to purchase public performance rights for a particular song. Good luck. Maybe, if you retain a special music clearance firm or seasoned entertainment attorney, you can complete the process of obtaining the rights to use a particular song in sync with a video you want to put online. But, even if you are successful, the process can take days or weeks and cost thousands in attorney’s fees (over and above the negotiated cost of the rights you seek).

While we are on the topic, what rights should you be seeking in the first place? Let’s review:

• Master Rights - the physical master recording (audio and video). These rights are usually owned by the producer, record company or movie studio that paid for the production. You must negotiate with them to use the work.
• Mechanical Rights – the 9.1 cents per cut on a CD or per download that is compulsory under the current copyright laws (it is usual and customary to only realize approximately 60 percent of this amount on any give mechanical royalty) These rights are usually negotiated for and collected by The Harry Fox Agency, although they can also be negotiated independently. These royalties are usually divided up by the record company, the publisher(s), the producers, performers, composers and other interested parties.
• Public Performance Rights – if the work is broadcast or streamed over the public Internet, you are entitled to your personally negotiated fee or, if you are so inclined, you may be non-exclusively represented in the USA by one of three performing rights societies, ASCAP, BMI or SESAC. Although the split is often the subject of negotiation, traditionally composers and their publishers split these fees 50/50. And, for the most part publishing companies administer and, therefore negotiate with people who wish to use the work.
• Sync Rights – if the work is a piece of music that is synchronized to a piece of video (title music, theme music, background music, music for a music video, music for a film or TV show, etc.) you are entitled to a fee. Although the split is often the subject of negotiation, traditionally composers and their publishers split these fees 50/50. And, for the most part, publishing companies administer and therefore negotiate with people who wish to use the work.
• Royalty Payments to Unions & Guilds – If union performers have contributed to the work (singers, musicians, etc.) there are residual payments to be made. And, even if the performers are independent, they may still be entitled to a share of the profits from their creative contributions. This depends, of course, on how egregious the terms of the non-union performers’ contracts were with the original producers of the work.

Note: The list above contains the most common types of music rights. There are others such as folio, parody, moral, etc. For a complete list, contact your favorite entertainment lawyer.

What to do? Well, it would be nice if the music publishing industry would invest in some database software, web interfaces, email and Adobe Acrobat. Most deals are done with fax machines and, to tell you the truth, it’s like working with stone axes and bear skins. I just obtained the rights to a very popular song for a client from the largest publisher in the world. The deal was done with paper faxes and the form was annotated in magic marker so you could read it after it had be sent back and forth six times. This would actually be funny if it weren’t true.

It would also be nice if the metadata associated with files on the major download sites had rights-holder information, as opposed to useless phrases like, “Copyright 1997 Warner Bros. Music.” Go ahead, call the Warner Bros. switchboard and ask for the person in charge of public performance rights for that particular song. If you’re lucky, you will get someone on the phone who will tell you that you have to call the publisher to make a public performance deal, who is … umm … errr … who? But I’m giving credit where it’s not due. There’s no way that you get that far with a call to the main switchboard of any major recorded music company.

If people don’t know what rights they need to obtain and if there’s no easy way to obtain them even if they do know, exactly what do rights-holders expect? More to the point, how does suing YouTube help solve the problem? They don’t synchronize music to video, they simply distribute other people’s works. How about spending some time and energy building the music licensing business of the present. Hey music publishers — it’s 2007! On your way to the courthouse, hop on over to Best Buy and pickup a computer or two and a book on database management and search engine optimization? That would really help.
http://www.shellypalmerblog.com/?p=500





YouTube Seeks Testimony of Comics Stewart and Colbert

Comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, whose programs were once among the most viewed on YouTube, were requested by the video site to give testimony in legal proceedings as it fights a $1 billion lawsuit by Viacom Inc, according to court filings.

The two hosts of the Viacom hits "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" were listed as numbers three and four out of 32 people called by YouTube to give a deposition in Viacom's case against it and parent Google Inc, according to a document filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York last week.

Viacom Executive Chairman Sumner Redstone is number 8 on YouTube's list. Viacom Chief Executive Philippe Dauman and general counsel Michael Fricklas top the list.

At the head of Viacom's list are Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.

Viacom sued Google and YouTube in March after failing to reach a distribution agreement. Viacom said YouTube carried the entertainment company's programs on its site without permission.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of Viacom clips, many of which feature the two comedians, have been removed from the Web's top online video service.

At the time, Viacom said its Comedy Central shows were among the most viewed video clips on YouTube's service overall, which allows users to upload material. Ahead of the suit, Colbert had even urged fans to make him a star on sites like YouTube.

Google has said it abides by existing laws that protect Internet services from the content uploaded by users, so long as it promptly takes down copyrighted materials that were placed there without permission after being notified.

(Reporting by Kenneth Li)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...41417520070814





Fine Threat Over T-Shirt Slogan
BBC

A man spotted wearing a T-shirt bearing an "offensive" slogan in a city centre has been warned he risks an £80 fine if he is caught again.

Forklift driver David Pratt was told by street wardens in Peterborough he could cause offence or incite violence.

The slogan on the garment read: "Don't piss me off! I am running out of places to hide the bodies."

Peterborough City Council said using insulting or offensive language was an offence, even if it appeared in print.

Mr Pratt, 46, an American living in Peterborough, was approached by the wardens as he waited for a bus with his wife Elly.

"It is insane. I have worn it in the city centre hundreds of times", said Mr Pratt, whose wife bought him the T-shirt in Venice Beach, California.

"Most people who see it just chuckle. Some people have even stopped me to tell me they like my T-shirt.

"We have put this incident online on several blogs and 90% of people who have commented said they found it hilarious or that I should have the right to wear it wherever I like."

Asked whether he would wear the T-shirt again, Mr Pratt replied: "I am wearing it now. If I get a written apology I will wear it in the city centre again."

He continued: "It's a bummer because I like the shirt, but I am trying to get citizenship but if I get a fine I can kiss citizenship goodbye."

He added: "I really don't see how the wording on my T-shirt could incite violence - it's humour, that's all it is."

In a statement, Peterborough City Council said: "The incident is the subject of an official complaint to the council and is currently under investigation.

"However, using offensive, abusive, or insulting language is an offence under the Public Order Act, which also applies to such language appearing in print.

"In what was an amicable conversation, the street warden advised the gentleman concerned that his T-shirt could cause offence and if he was to wear it again he could run the risk of being issued an £80 on-the-spot fine from the police."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...re/6943734.stm





Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch
John Tierney

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations.

“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real.

David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.

You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.

Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation. (For more on survival strategies in a computer simulation, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it).

Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime Designer?

If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation.

It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.

If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists who think we’ll have a computer this century with the power to simulate all the inhabitants on earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new virtual world, but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer.

It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game Over.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/sc...tier.html?8dpc





Books

A World Without Humans? It All Falls Apart
Janet Maslin


THE WORLD WITHOUT US

By Alan Weisman

324 pages. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. $24.95.

The abundant doomsday plotlines in “The World Without Us” make it a useful conversation piece, if a grim one. Traveling down many different avenues of scientific research, Alan Weisman postulates the complete disappearance of mankind from planet Earth. Then he extrapolates about what would happen without us. By his estimate most of our leavings would rot and crumble; much of our damage would take eons to undo. There’s one tiny bit of good news. Depleted sea species might recover if we would do them a favor and go away.

Over all, this book paints a punishingly bleak picture. Entries in its index indicate the scope of its pessimism. For instance: “Birds, plate glass picture windows and”; “Central Park, coyotes in”; “Earth, final days”; “Embalming, arsenic and”; “Human race, robots and computers as replacements”; “Great Britain’s shoreline, rubbish along”; “PCBs, and hermaphroditic polar bears.” “Dessication,” “Meltdowns” and “Slash-and-burn” also play their roles here.

Mr. Weisman speaks to the darkest parts of our collective imagination as well as some of the strangest. Consider the lowly exfoliant. These lotions contain tiny plastic particles that are meant to scrub. But they wind up fulfilling other purposes, like clogging the innards of the tiny sea creatures that ingest them. This book cites research on bottom-feeding lugworms, barnacles and sand fleas as evidence of the damage the particles do. All three species became terminally constipated from ingesting this man-made microlitter.

Very early in the book Mr. Weisman makes his argument personal by describing how a house would fall apart. Your house. “Back when they told you what your house would cost, nobody mentioned what you’d also be paying so that nature wouldn’t repossess it long before the bank,” he writes. As with many of the book’s other conclusions, this one is accompanied by a hint of unseemly glee. The more elaborately Mr. Weisman paints a worst possible outcome, the better he has made his case. And the more triumphant he sounds.

It is one thing to imagine one house with a leaking roof, burgeoning mold, rusting nails, broken windows and small animals gnawing on the drywall. But this book hypothesizes more avidly about decay on a grander scale.

When Mr. Weisman wonders what would happen to New York City, he foresees rewilding (the return of wolves and bears), plants forcing their ways through the sidewalk and water damage to the underground infrastructure. “Before long, streets start to crater,” he writes, with scarily apt foresight. “As Lexington Avenue caves in, it becomes a river.” Lexington Avenue has lately shown us what he means.

This book’s global-scale dismay about humanity’s environmental impact is its most important theme. But it’s Mr. Weisman’s more marginal facts that give “The World Without Us” so much curiosity value. Which would last longer in storage: a) money in a vault, or b) paintings in a museum? Bear in mind that museums might have skylights that could leak, basements that could flood and larvae of the black carpet beetle. And choose a third option: c) ceramics, since they are chemically similar to fossils. Ancient ceramics have a built-in advantage because they have already withstood the test of time.

When it comes to antiquity Mr. Weisman can draw on tangible evidence to back up his speculation. He marvels at the scope and durability of the large underground city of Derinkuyu in Cappadocia, Turkey, especially in comparison to showier monuments with less staying power. There is also hope for the endurance of Mount Rushmore and for Egypt’s Khufu pyramid, although the latter “should not look very pyramidal at all” a million years from now.

“The Panama Canal,” on the other hand, “is like a wound that humans inflicted on the Earth — one that nature is trying to heal,” according to a superintendent of its locks on the Atlantic side. And a disintegrating coral reef in the Pacific is on “the slippery slope to slime.”

From the gyre that is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the flower-growers of Kenya to the Rothamsted Research Archive in Britain, a repository for more than 300,000 soil samples, Mr. Weisman covers a huge amount of terrain. His research is prodigious and impressive. So is his persistence, even though he knows full well about the carnage our cellphone transmission towers inflict on unsuspecting birds and the ill effects that embalmed human corpses have on soil. Compared with the founder of Vhemt — the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a group with the motto “May we live long and die out” — Mr. Weisman is a veritable beam of sunshine.

“The World Without Us” has an arid, plain, what-if style and an air of relentless foreboding. The book is coaxed from subject to subject by ominous transition phrases. (“But that wouldn’t be the biggest problem” is a typical one.)

Its delivery of bad news is strangely uniform in tone, given the vast difference in scale among the catastrophes anticipated here. The threats posed by condominium-buying British retirees to the island of Cyprus, or by the “serial killers” that are common house cats, aren’t nearly as grave as what could happen to the oil fields and pipelines of Houston if they went unattended. In Houston, without man, there would be “a race to see whether their bottoms corrode first, spilling their contents into the soil,” writes Mr. Weisman, “or their grounding connectors flake away.” That is, poison or explosion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/books/13masl.html





Review

Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 Hard Drive



The Terabyte has landed
Geoff Gasior

IMAGINE ONE THOUSAND thousand thousand thousand bytes. A terabyte, if you will. But more than just that—a milestone in storage capacity that hard drive manufacturers have been chasing for years. After more than a decade of living in a world of gigabytes, the bar has finally been raised by Hitachi's terabyte-capacity Deskstar 7K1000.

Being first to the terabyte mark gives Hitachi bragging rights, and more importantly, the ability to offer single-drive storage capacity 33% greater than that of its competitors. Hitachi isn't banking on capacity alone, though. The 7K1000 is also outfitted with a whopping 32MB of cache—double what you get with other 3.5" hard drives. Couple that extra cache with 200GB platters that have the highest areal density of any drive on the market, and the 7K1000's performance could impress as much as its capacity.

Has Hitachi achieved a perfect balance of speed and storage with its Deskstar 7K1000? We've tested it against nearly 20 competitors—including its closest 750GB rivals from Seagate and Western Digital—to find out.
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/20...0/index.x?pg=1





Selling Television Sets by Turning Up the Glamour
Eric Pfanner

WHILE audiences might have to wait until autumn to see “My Blueberry Nights,” the first English-language feature from the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, they can catch a shorter film from Mr. Wong while shopping for fashionable clothing or jewelry in Paris.

The five-minute film is actually an advertisement for a new television from Philips Electronics, a high-end flat-screen model called Aurea. The film, a spy story shot in Shanghai, will be shown in the Paris boutiques of the fashion label Lanvin and the jeweler Lorenz Bäumer — on Aurea televisions, of course.

The decision to produce a short film with an art-house director like Mr. Wong shows how brands are trying to break away from their reliance on 30-second television spots, which some marketers fear have lost their effectiveness. Now, even televisions are being marketed without recourse to television.

Meanwhile, the move by Philips to involve luxury goods purveyors like Lanvin and Bäumer reflects a desire by consumer electronics companies to differentiate their products in an intensely competitive marketplace by trying to give them some of the glamour of the fashion business.

“The idea is to be more exclusive, to be very different from your traditional kind of advertising,” said Sandrine Huijgen, marketing director for consumer electronics at Philips. “We don’t see Dior advertising a lot on television.”

Philips said it might run a few television spots in markets where it cannot be avoided. But most of the $68 million that Philips expects to spend in Europe through the end of the year will be used in other media, said Rudy Provoost, chief executive of the consumer electronics division.

In early August, for instance, the Aurea campaign got under way with a seven-page insert in Vogue in Britain. The print ads, shot by a fashion photographer, Vincent Peters, show a model cozying up to a brightly lighted Aurea screen that mirrors her image. Instead of technobabble about HDTV, L.C.D. or plasma screens, the ads include only the Philips and Aurea names and the tag line: “Simplicity is a light that seduces the soul.”

“There is a lot of female coding in this advertising,” said Laura Jones, global client managing director at the advertising agency DDB, a unit of Omnicom Group, which worked on the Aurea campaign along with the media planning agency Carat. “Before, televisions have always been sold based on pixels or that sort of thing.”

Philips is not alone in moving away from a masculine approach to selling consumer devices, embracing the presumably more female world of fashion. LG, the South Korean electronics company, is selling a mobile phone under the Prada brand name. The Samsung ads for high-end televisions play up the sleek design of the products, sometimes by way of models in slinky black dresses.

Sony, meanwhile, has raised the bar for high-concept advertising in the television market with an international campaign for its Bravia flat-panel sets. The first ad in the series, which has not been shown in the United States, featured tens of thousands of colorful rubber balls bouncing through the streets of San Francisco. A second ad showed buckets of paint splattering against a housing project in Glasgow.

A new ad in the campaign was shot in early August in New York using brightly colored rabbits made out of modeling clay.

The Bravia campaign has attracted a great deal of attention on the Internet, even in the United States, where a separate television campaign has been used. While the Aurea campaign focuses on the sets’ use of light, Sony plays up the Bravia’s rendition of color.

Philips trails Sony and Samsung in the market for flat-panel L.C.D. televisions like the Bravia and the Aurea. Samsung had 16.8 percent of the market in the first quarter of 2007, compared with 12.6 percent for Sony and 12.2 percent for Philips, according to iSuppli, a market research firm.

With its unusual ad campaign for the Aurea, can Philips close the gap?

In the film by Mr. Wong, a female agent sent to kill a character named Light is instead seduced by him. Now, Philips must hope that not too many customers get similarly sidetracked — spending their money on Lanvin fashions or Bäumer jewelry instead.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/bu...ia/14adco.html





In depth

Windows Is Free

The impact of pirated software on free software
Dave Gutteridge

A recent column on Zdnet, by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, discussed the reasons why people won't change from a retail operating system to a free one. The implication is that Linux can't even give away their software.

That sounds pretty dire. Windows retails for around 200 US dollars, give or take depending on which version and where you buy. If the above statement by Mr Kingsley-Hughes was true, it means that Linux is so bad that people would gladly pay 200 dollars to avoid it. Do users really think Linux is that lame?

This article is not to defend Linux and counter the points that Mr Kingsley-Hughes made. Instead, the intention here is to simply use his article as a starting point to discuss in depth an issue which, so far as I've ever seen, is missing almost entirely from the debate over Windows versus Linux versus Mac.

Mr Kingsley-Hughes gives five essential points to explain what is so bad about Linux that it can't even succeed for free. On the whole, users aren't all that dissatisfied with Windows (I agree). Too many different versions of Linux (I sort of agree). People want certainty that hardware and software will work (I agree that's what people want, but I don't read the situation the same way that Mr Kingsley-Hughes does). As far as most people are concerned, the command line has gone the way of the dinosaur (It has for me, I love the GUIs. But, I'll get into this more below). Linux is still too geeky (Linux developers are still too geeky, sure. I totally agree that the people mainly developing and advocating Linux often don't see users' needs the way users see their needs.)

All the above reasons have some truth in them, but consider how the price comparison makes those points seem so much worse.

I Certainly Wouldn't Use Linux if it was as Bad as All That

Take the point that Linux relies too heavily on command line interface. I would probably pay 200 dollars for a nice graphical interface instead of having to run my computer at the command line all the time. But would I pay 200 dollars instead of using an interface that had nice graphics 99% of the time, and a command line for the occasional configuration? I think I'd rather spend that 200 bucks on something else, like maybe a new MP3 player. Throw in the fact that every few years I'll have to spend another hundred bucks or so on upgrades, and I'll handle the 1% of command line time. When you add in the fact that I might, just maybe, be making a one-for-one trade of blue error screens for command line issues, then I'm definitely leaning towards not spending 200 bucks.

As I type this article, I'm using OpenOffice, a free equivalent of Microsoft Office, on Ubuntu Linux, which has a very slick graphical user interface. Much like Windows Vista, I can spin around my desktop, make my windows go all wobbly when I move them. I love nice graphics and I'm no fan of obscure command line code. I certainly don't feel like I opted for a world of command line frustration.

Neither does my girlfriend, who makes a better example, since she's the type of user who all of us computer experts mean when we say "user". Her Compaq laptop, which had a pre-installed version of Windows XP, would die and go into the Blue Screen Of Death every time it tried to go into sleep mode. She asked if I could fix it. I said I could, but it would mean a change in interface. Of course, I was speaking about installing Linux. I didn't tell her about Linux or open source or free software, not because I was trying to be clever. I didn't tell her because she doesn't care. She wants to be able to log into Hotmail, transfer songs to her MP3 player, and watch Youtube. She doesn't care whether all this happens on Windows or whatever. Now she uses Ubuntu, and she never, ever, touches the command line. Of course, she comes to me if she can't do something, like change her desktop background. But she came to me for instructions on what to do with Windows too, so she's just as well off in Linux as she was in Windows.

At the same time, I'm not going to tell you that in the two years since I switched from Windows to Ubuntu that I have been able to do everything with a graphical user interface. I tend to be a lot more demanding of my computer than my girlfriend is, so I'm pushing the bleeding edge in order to make things work exactly as I want. I've had all sorts of set up issues, from my Wacom tablet to my SD card reader, to my dual monitors, and more. And personally, I don't really know much about the command line in Linux, or want to, so every time there was a problem I asked for help on my local Linux user group and they helped me get it all working in the end.

My point, however, is that while I have had my share of hassles, the vast majority of my time in front of my computer is just doing uncomplicated stuff that requires no command line. More than 99% of my time on Linux is spent in a nice graphical interface that is, in my opinion, better than Windows. Why would I pay 200 bucks, plus future fees, to save myself that 1% of hassle? Can Windows really claim to be 100% hassle-free anyway? Is it really worth 200 US dollars more?

Keep in mind that when you're saying that Windows is worth 200 dollars more than Linux, you're saying the differences are worth that much, not the whole thing. So if you can check your email on both, surf the web on both, listen to music on both, do spreadsheets on both, but only play 3D computer games on Windows, then what you're saying is that 3D computer games alone are worth 200 dollars to you. That may be fair enough in the case of playing games. I know gamers who would gladly pay 200 dollars more for the right gaming environment. But once I had someone tell me that they didn't want to switch to Linux because their printer model wasn't supported. Their printer was a little older and would have been easy to upgrade to a newer, Linux compatible model, for about 120 dollars. So, they were effectively trying to claim that they would rather pay 200 dollars in order to save themselves from paying 120 dollars. Which is obviously a claim that can only be made by a sane person if they're really bad at math, or their copy of Windows wasn't actually 200 dollars.

The Elephant in the Room

The fact is that there's a distortion in the idea that Linux can't be given away. There's something wrong in the idea the price difference between Windows and Linux is representative of the actual quality difference. There's an elephant in the room that no one is talking about.

Windows is free.

I'm not talking about the fact that Windows comes pre-installed in most computers, with its price hidden in the cost of the hardware. That contributes to the idea of Windows being free, but that's not the elephant in the room.

The elephant in the room that no one is talking about is cracked software.

People treat Windows as being free not because they didn't have to buy the copy that came with their computer. People think of Windows as free because when they need a copy, they can get it from a guy they know. Someone has a copy they can just burn to a CD for you. Or you can get it on the peer-to-peer networks.

How pervasive is cracked software? That's of course hard to quantify. No one is going to set down in any kind of public record that they use cracked software. Which is probably why it's notably absent from so much debate about operating systems. So any estimate is speculative, based on extrapolation from indirect data. Look, for instance, at the file sharing networks. You can log on almost any Bittorrent web site, at any time of the day, and there will be thousands of people participating in the sharing of Windows Vista. Or XP. Or whatever version you want. How many people are therefore using cracked copies of Windows? I have no idea, except that it's a lot.

With that in mind, let's take a little time to really explore the impact of free.

How Tempting Should Free Be?

Recently, when shopping for a portable music player, I narrowed down the possibilities to two main choices. One was the iPod Nano, the other was the iAudio player by Cowon. You may not have heard of that second brand. I certainly hadn't until I started shopping around for portable players.

The Cowon iAudio was cheaper, by about 20%. It actually played more file formats, but there was an issue of brand familiarity that made me hold back a bit. I gave it about a day to be sure I wanted to buy it. In the end, price trumped other considerations. The Cowon iAudio was good enough, and cheaper.

To arc closer towards towards my point, consider what the difference would be if the iAudio had been completely free.

I can tell you how it would have influenced my decision. I would have taken it home immediately, not even a moment's delay. Brands and design be damned, I would have taken the free option.

If one music player were free and another one expensive, the gap in quality would have to be huge to justify paying for the one with the price tag.

Is the difference between Linux and Windows really that big? Above I said that 99% of the time I use a nice graphical interface in Linux that I think is better than Windows. And in the 10 or more years I used Windows before switching, I know that Windows gave me enough of the famous Blue Screen Of Death to balance out the occasional need to go to the command line that Linux imposes on me. As far as I'm concerned, I think the two are on equal ground. When you compare all the good points of Windows, Linux, and Mac, and the bad points of blue error screens, command lines, and little bomb icons, the difference is close enough to keep the hardcore zealots arguing for hours.

But you and I aren't zealots, we just want to do stuff with our computers like look at YouTube and get email. So we won't nitpick about features. Instead, even though I think Linux is just as good as Windows, maybe even better, I'll propose for the sake of argument that Linux is 80% to 90% as good as Windows. As I said about the Cowon iAudio compared to the iPod, it's close enough for me to not want to spend the difference.

If we can agree on the concept of close enough, let's turn to other consumer products again. We expect that market forces will shape prices so that, so long as it's still profitable, a product that is slightly inferior in features or quality will be priced less than a product of more quality and features. This isn't always true, but it's an okay starting point. It's a believable idea that some companies can stay competitive by lowering their price to stay on the market alongside slightly better quality products. Consumers only have so much money to go around, and will often trade off quality for a good price.

In fact, some companies engage in a practice called "dumping" where they lower their price drastically so that they aren't even making a profit. They do that because if they can cheapen their product enough, consumers will overlook a lot of deficiencies and cast aside brand loyalties in favour of price. Then, when the company has a foothold in the marketplace, they can slowly try to increase their prices and quality, with the aim of eventually turning a profit.

The Inevitable Comparison With Cars

In around 1988, the Korean car company Hyundai gained entry into the US and Canadian car market with this practice, and although they got called on it (dumping is technically illegal), in the long run the strategy seems to have worked. It's strong evidence that price will trump differences in quality.

Imagine for a second that Hyundai had made their cars available for free. There would not have been one Hyundai left in the show rooms. Just about everyone would have one. I would have got one. Wouldn't you? I mean, a Hyundai was at the time definitely not the same quality as similar Toyota and Honda models, but would that have mattered? I mean, come on. A free car is a free car.

My contention is that if a product can gain entry into a marketplace by lowering its price to increase its appeal, then a free product that is close enough in quality to its priced competitors should spread like wildfire.

And yet, that has not happened with Windows and Linux. 200 US dollars is enough money to give most, if not all, consumers pause as to whether or not they can or should fit it into their budget. I can definitely appreciate having an extra 200 US dollars in my wallet.

Remember the concept of close enough for free. What if those free Hyundai cars came without radios, and didn't even have any dashboard space to install one? I'd still get one. Wouldn't you? Free. And close enough.

What if Hyundai had made their cars free, but didn't advertise? I imagine the rate of consumption of Hyundai cars would have started slower. Even so, it strikes me as inevitable that word of mouth would have eventually compensated until every single cash-strapped teenager with a new driver's license was out on the road with their new, free, Hyundai.

Suppose Hyundai didn't offer a warranty or service of any kind. Now would you refuse their free cars? I don't know about you, but free is still a pretty big trump card for me.

So long as the product I was picking up for free did not fail so poorly in its task as to cause harm or be completely useless, I would pick it up.

And yet, returning from the Hyundai analogy to the Linux reality, free Linux has not swept the market and become a large chunk of the marketplace. And I'm not even speculating on Linux suddenly becoming dominant. I'm just saying, it would have a big chunk of the market. Dare I say more than the Mac?

Hopefully the points I've made above have precluded the idea that Linux is not spreading faster simply because Linux falls down on some technical point. If I haven't drilled in my point enough already, here it is again. Linux is close enough to any other major operating systems that its price should have made it irresistible to a huge segment of consumers. There are enough consumers out there for whom 200 dollars is worth keeping, and whose computer needs would be easily met with Linux. But they use Windows, because they were able to do so and keep their 200 US dollars.

I'm Not Going To Name Names

Intellectually, people know Windows is not really for free, of course. And some people do actually buy the packaged Windows CDs in a box. Some even line up all night outside of the stores when the next version comes out.

But, I can't help but notice that among all my friends, all sorts of people I know from various walks of life, almost no one has paid for it. They usually know a guy who gives them a copy. They don't really ask where it's from. My friend bought a used laptop and it had Windows on it already. Not to mention it had the latest Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office. All that, for about 300 US dollars. Did that price really include the software? Did the seller need to be compensated for anything other than the laptop? I know that all that software is cracked, but whether my friend thought about it or not, he didn't go out of his way to ask.

I started to perceive this issue of Windows being for free shortly after switching to Linux. Of course, I knew cracked copies of Windows existed when I was using Windows. But the market implications didn't have any bearing on me until I started using completely legally free software that was as good or better than the costly alternatives, and wondering why more people weren't making the same choice.

It became obvious to me when I would recommend Linux to people. As that "computer guy" who friends call up for technical advice, the opportunity to suggest using Linux instead of Windows comes up often enough. Since most of my friends do very basic things like surf the web, check email, and word processing that any operating system would handle just fine, Linux would be a reasonable choice. I would talk about how they could do everything they were already doing, but for free.

But the look in their eyes at the mention of the word free was clear. They already had a free operating system, so they weren't impressed by switching to something else that was free. How do I know that's what the look in their eyes meant? Because it wasn't the look in their eyes that would have been there if I had offered them a free MP3 player or some other consumer good that can't be simply copied and shared.

Here's another example. One time, a friend called me with an offer. He would pay me 50 bucks to get his laptop working again. Specifically, what he wanted was to back up all his data, reformat his disk, re-install Windows, and then restore his data. I asked if he still had the original install disks for Windows. He stammered a bit, and asked if I might not simply have some on hand I could use. He didn't mind if it was a different version of Windows - subtle code for hoping for a more recent version. The fifty dollars was for my labor. He didn't see getting a copy of Windows as a cost-associated item. It was no big deal, either he had a copy of Windows or I did, or he figured I knew a friend who did.

I felt kind of uncomfortable about the proposition, so I said no. If he had asked me this more recently, I would have offered to put Linux on his computer. But he probably would have said no, because it would seem like a more expensive offer to him. He would have compared free, unfamiliar Linux to free, comfortable Windows. The cost of getting used to the new environment, as easy as it might be, is probably more tangible to him than the money he technically should be spending but won't.

These aren't deliberate criminals who walked into a store, looked at a box of Windows, considered the price and then figured they'd go home and get a pirated version off of the Internet. It just doesn't work that way. Windows is so ubiquitous that someone, somewhere, has a copy they can just give you. People think of getting a copy from a friend before they think of buying. Heck, someone will usually offer before you thought of buying.

I've sat at dinner tables with people who are by no means computer geeks, where one says they need to update their version of Windows. Maybe it's because their computer crashes a lot and they think upgrading might help. Maybe they bought a web cam or something that only has plug and play ability in the newer version. Someone, also not a computer geek, says they have a copy. A promise is made to hand it over later. The person with the copy to give likewise got it from someone else. It's as if Windows is just something that's around. If the value of the goods being exchanged is brought up as a concept at all, it's about the cost of the blank CDs. For example, the receiver might offer to provide a few blanks so the one doing the copying won't be out of pocket. A fifty cent CD is a cost item, but the copy of Windows on it isn't.

Freer Than Free

In fact, a free copy of Windows might even be freer than free. What I mean by that is, unlike most tangible consumer goods, pirated software is often easier to obtain and set up than making a legitimate purchase.

A friend of my father obtained a legitimate copy of Windows XP from a local guy who sells custom computers. He tried to install it but he was confused by the different serial codes, authorization keys, and verification checks to pass through. My father, who is quite good with computers, tried to help. When they finally had it all sorted out on which number went where, it turned out that the length of one of the serial codes didn't match the length of the input fields. They tried calling a customer service number, but, after working their way through 1-800 numbers and option menus, the net result was that the situation was not solvable with automated service and there were no live operators available because it was late Friday night. They tried to persist in figuring it out themselves, but were stopped cold when some maximum limit of install attempts was reached and it refused any further action. Eventually, a few days later with the help of the guy who originally provided the copy of Windows, it all got sorted out and my dad's friend can enjoy his legitimate copy of Windows.

This was an extreme case, but when you consider that he could have downloaded and installed a cracked version within hours, you start to get a sense of what I mean by "freer than free". To do it the legitimate way, say by buying online or having to trudge out to a brick-and-mortar store, he would get no more convenience than obtaining a pirated copy. At worst, getting an illegal copy would take much less time than the couple of days he actually experienced in doing things the legal way.

How to be a Pirate

Microsoft would no doubt blame the existence of pirated copies for this whole situation. And they wouldn't be wrong about the causes. But in terms of results, they then become part of a general push towards pirated software. All the security measures when one installs legitimate software makes a user feel like they're being punished for being good, the same way moviegoers who go to the theatres feel like they're not the ones who should be sitting through warnings not to download movies.

The hardest part about getting cracked software is justifying it to yourself. And when I say hard, I mean relative to the other obstacles to getting cracked software, so really it's not hard at all.

Clearly, all indications are that many people will often trade in a little morality for something that's valuable to own and free to get. To make the exchange of principles for goods, one has to cut a deal with their conscience by forming the right justification. I think most people simply wonder, what's the harm? Theft is usually distasteful not as much because of the gain of the thief but more because of the loss of the owner. In software, the guy who gave it to you didn't lose anything. And the company that originally made it? Microsoft seems to be doing all right, so surely this little individual act of sharing stuff among friends is no big deal.

But what happens when you add up all the individuals doing this? As mentioned above, it's hard to put real numbers on it. I'm going by a lot of anecdotal evidence here. And I have to admit for a while I wasn't so sure of my position.

Which Numbers Mean More?

In fact, I was shaken in my convictions by a conversation I had with my friend Ken who was considering switching from Windows to Linux. He was using Windows 2000 and was starting to feel the limitations of having less and less hardware and software available for a version that was fading into history. But he was skeptical about switching to Vista with all its DRM issues. He was really interested in Linux because he's one of the category of people that doesn't use pirated software. So for him, the prospect of saving the cost of a new operating system was worth at least some of research. As we talked about Linux, I mentioned the general points that I'm discussing here. He was shocked - shocked! - at the idea that there were that many people using cracked copies of Windows.

I left that conversation wondering if his viewpoint was wrong, or was mine? What about those people who stay up all night to buy a copy of Windows when the new version is released? What about the sales figures? But then what about the claims by software companies of revenues lost to piracy? What about the numbers of users on peer-to-peer networks? What do all the numbers mean, and which numbers mean more?

On the one hand, the fact that he was surprised by this whole idea of cracked Windows being the main reason why Linux isn't more successful even though it's free, made me realize that maybe it's not as obvious as I thought it was. That's when I thought about writing this article. But as I started writing, I was haunted a little by the fear that my perception of the ubiquity of cracked software was out of proportion.

Then, another small experience made me confident that I was firmly planted in reality. More anecdotal evidence, and I know the failings of anecdotal evidence. But I still take away from this anecdote enough conviction in my premise to stand by it.

Dancing Pirates

It was a couple months after my meeting with Ken, and I was spending a Monday afternoon sitting in a Starbucks writing on my laptop. There were three people, two women and a man, sitting at a table near to me. I couldn't help but overhear their conversation, as they were the only people really talking at the time. They were dancers, talking about making a web site for their dance troupe. One of the women was apparently both a dancer and a web designer.

The other woman was interested in doing a little web design of her own. After hearing a couple of key phrases, I abandoned my effort to be polite and not eavesdrop, and went into full listening mode.

The woman who was clearly the most computer literate of the three casually offered to give the other a copy of Dreamweaver. Just give it to her. The receiving woman didn't balk at being given a piece of proprietary software worth 400 US dollars. No, she merely said thanks and wondered if it wasn't too much trouble. The man joked something about burning software all the time, so it was no big deal. The receiving woman reciprocated by saying that she also frequently burned and shared software. This last comment was said in a way as to convey the assurance that this favour could be reciprocated.

These aren't people who would for even a second consider snatching a copy of Dreamweaver from the shelf of a software store and dashing out the door. They know what they are doing is sort of not right on some level, but it just doesn't feel that wrong. They are indifferent to the crime because the ease and pervasiveness of sharing software has obscured the value of the items they're giving away. They assure themselves they aren't really doing anything wrong because, after all, if the woman dancer wasn't offered a free copy, then she simply would never use it. She's not depriving the source company of any profit because it's not profit they would ever see from her anyway. That kind of logic, and there is some logic in it, helps obscure the cost of software in the minds of the casual cracked software user.

Consider how different the whole interaction would be if the woman receiving the pirated software was offered a 400 dollar stolen iPod.

I'm typing this as they speak, actually, and while they deviated from the topic for a bit, they're back to it. The woman receiving the software just confirmed that the version of Flash she's getting is version 8. She didn't need to know the version of Dreamweaver, just that it's the latest. Oh, and she was offered Photoshop, but she already has it. And now, as they finish up the details of the transaction, they are talking about the particulars of using the crack and how to install it. Just before they got up to leave, they described the crack as a "hassle".

If a bunch of dancers are so comfortable with the use of cracked software that they discuss circumventing authentication as being something merely in the way of using software they assume to be allowed to use for free, one can only imagine how pervasive the use and culture of cracked software is. So pervasive that the humour newspaper "The Onion" made the ironic headline "Photoshop Actually Bought", the implication being that to not purchase it was the norm.

The Mac Effect... Really?

At this point, we've gone a long way without mentioning something that Mr Kingsley-Hughes discussed in a follow up article, Three More Things That The Linux Community Doesn't Get. There he talked about "The Mac Effect". The idea was that people are capable of switching, and the fact that they chose Mac and not Linux, and paid for it, was supposed to be further evidence that Linux was not delivering a decent product.

But really, there's no difference between Windows and Mac OS. Mac has cracked software too. I know people who stay within the realm of Mac for the same reasons a lot of Windows users stay with Windows - so they can continue to have access to shared software within their circle of friends who also use Mac. Keep in mind that a lot of people think they're getting Mac OSX for free in the same way they think Windows comes with a computer for free. It just happened to be in the hardware they bought. They don't think of the computer as being potentially a couple hundred bucks less if it has Linux or no pre-installed OS. Then, when it comes time to upgrade the Mac OS, just ask that guy in your circle of friends who always has the latest Mac stuff.

Or, you could head out on any peer-to-peer network, and you'll find the latest version, no problem. Some people clearly do that. As I'm writing this right now, I'm looking at about 74 people seeding and 206 people sharing the latest Mac OSX on the infamous Pirate Bay web site. I could download it and have ready to install on a Mac in a couple of hours. I don't suppose there are many who would mind waiting a couple of hours in order to save themselves the 130 US dollar price listed on store.apple.com.

The Most Effective Form of Anti-Piracy

But here's where we should mention the real cap on the sharing of cracked software. There are some people who do the honest thing and pay for their software because they fear cracked copies. Are they worried about Microsoft or Apple anti-piracy SWAT teams bursting through their windows and dragging them off in the middle of the night? No, they just don't want to get a computer virus.

All through this I've been speaking about how people can just go online and download things. While that takes a little know-how of where and how to do that, it's clearly common knowledge. The proof is in all the people downloading TV shows, movies, and music from peer-to-peer networks, enough to make copyright infringement news become commonplace. So, knowing how to get stuff on the net is common and it's not that there is anything technically stopping your average computer user from using the same interface they use to get music in order to get software. But many don't do that. They stick to audio and video downloads knowing they can't get a computer virus from an MP3 or AVI file.

There is enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt about getting a virus through downloaded software that most people want to get it from their buddy who says "I'm running it, and it's fine". And there are clearly enough of those buddies around. (Or maybe dance troupes are particularly intent on sharing software).

As should be clear by now, computer viruses on peer-to-peer networks are nowhere near stopping people from sharing software. It just hands more focus back to the friend-to-friend network that happens face-to-face, which is as common as ever. Really I just bring it up because I believe that the threat of getting a virus is more effective than security measures in keeping people from sharing software on the Internet with complete impunity.

I have no idea how cracked software becomes available in the first place. Somewhere upstream are actual computer pirates I suppose. By "actual", I mean someone who alters the software so that it's shareable, not merely someone who shares it. Shady programmers in Russia who cleverly get new releases and reverse engineer the security out? Employees inside Microsoft who trade them in some kind of software black market? Disgruntled employees maybe? I have no idea. Don't really need to know, either. Neither do the dancers.

Whatever the source, the distribution is so widespread that software in general, including Windows, is not viewed as an expensive consumer product. It's viewed as being for free.

So when someone looks at Linux, all they see is the unfamiliarity of it, and nothing there that's so good to make them switch from Windows. After all, they're not saving anything or gaining anything by switching.

What If Windows Wasn't Free?

This raises interesting questions. If Microsoft were to somehow develop the security system that ensured every single user of Windows paid for it, then how many people would start considering the actually legal free and close enough option?

Theoretically, if everyone who had a cracked copy of Windows now switched to a legitimate copy of Linux, then the user base might be expansive enough that all sorts of things might change. Game companies might start offering their titles for Linux. Hardware manufacturers might distribute Linux drivers as often as they do Mac and Windows drivers. Then more people might find Linux even easier. Perhaps the situation might snowball. Perhaps people who had held back because of lacking features or incompatible hardware would have their concerns solved. Those same people who were about to pay for Windows would consider going for the free option. Microsoft might actually lose some sales and market share, and they'd feel it in their bottom line.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but the next logical question is, assuming I've made some sense up to now, isn't it in ultimately in Microsoft's interest to allow pirated copies of Windows to be out there?

The feasibility of that strategy would depend on how well Microsoft could balance out letting pirated copies exist for general use, so that people felt it was the operating system, while at the same time ensuring that a substantial section of the market, mainly companies probably, would not want to bother with any potential legal hassles.

Personally, I don't think that is Microsoft's strategy. It comes with some risks that I think they would deem too high. One leaked memo about acknowledging the benefit of pirated software would cause chaos in all sorts of ways.

But maybe they don't have to have any kind of official position. If cracked software helps keep Windows in business, and virus threats are more effective than security measures in keeping cracked software from eating too much into Microsoft's bottom line, then one might argue that the main mechanisms for Microsoft's success come from outside Microsoft. Just enough piracy to maintain dominance. Just enough of a virus threat to keep it from getting out of control. That can't be said with certainty, but it's food for thought.

But in any case, my point here is not about the causes of why Windows is "free", just with the results.

My contention is that Linux would win over the hearts and minds of more, maybe most, users if their wallets were actually involved in the decision to choose one or the other.

You Can Tell Who's Paying

My friend Ken, who I mentioned earlier, is evidence of that. Unlike a lot of people I know, he really does reach for his wallet when he upgrades his OS, and that's why he proactively came to me with questions about Linux. I don't know if he'll actually adopt Linux, but he's very seriously considering it, because, like most people, if he can save a couple hundred bucks, he will. What he's not doing is just casually dismissing Linux out of hand like most people who are strangely far less interested in free software than they would be in anything else for free.

Enough people feel no connection to their wallets when considering operating systems to perpetuate the unspoken assumption that Windows is free. And as a result, Linux is forced to make its case based on much more nebulous, personally biased, and complicated comparisons about which one is "better" or "worse". And that's a debate that can never be pursued objectively, with objective results. Or at least, my experience in hearing people argue about it is that it never stays objective for long.

This idea that Windows is, to most everyone, effectively free, is in my opinion the single most significant factor in explaining why Linux isn't doing better than it is.

I'm not even saying that Linux would or should necessarily dominate or wipe out Windows. I'm only saying that if the market for operating systems operated under the same rules as other consumer goods, then Linux would have a larger share of the market.

If every user who had a cracked copy of Windows had a legitimate version of Linux instead, what would the percentage of computers running Linux be? More than there are now, that's for sure.

What can be done with this information?

Perhaps one of the conclusions that can be made is that the best strategy for proponents of free operating systems is to help develop better protection for paid software.

What Microsoft can do with the information is a more interesting question. I doubt any of their payment and security schemes will ever really stop the cracked copies from being around. Vista was supposed to come with verifications that would be impossible to avoid. But you can go online right now and download copy of Vista that will appear as authenticated to the Genuine Advantage system.

In any case, the more successful their defenses become, the more people really have to reach for their wallet when considering whether or not to upgrade, the wider the door of opportunity opens for Linux to step in and say "you can still do everything you do now for free".

What if Microsoft were to recognize that and adopt a different strategy. Free copies of Windows for home use? Corporate packages that are paid? My guess is that most of their money comes from company purchases anyway. It seems possible to me that they could switch to a model that allows free personal use and paid corporate use with little to no impact on their bottom line. Because it would just be an official adoption of what may already be the reality.

I'm not anticipating that happening any time soon, because a paradigm shift of that proportion will meet resistance on many levels due to the needs of a large profit-driven organization with many employees and shareholders. However, I'm here to talk about products, not production, so the inertia Microsoft would face in making Windows more free is outside the scope of this article.

But, just supposing for a minute that they could, then by making their software at least partially free, or free to a point, they can slow down the free competition to a crawl and stay in business for a long, long time. Just like free copies of Windows are holding off free copies of Linux right now.

What Can You Do With This Information?

In closing, I'd like to just leave you with something to think about. If you're using a cracked copy of Windows, you have at least one less reason to feel guilty. After all, you may be keeping Microsoft in business in a roundabout, unintended way. You can't admit to them that's what you're doing, though, which makes it a strange position to be in. And at the same time, another thing you might be doing in a roundabout way is slowing down the development of software that you could use both for free and without any moral or legal ambiguities. How you justify all that in your mind is up to you.

For me, I've developed a policy whenever it comes to debates on Linux, Windows, and Mac.

As a long time user of Windows and Mac, who has switched to Linux, I can tell you that any debate based on feature, security, or stability comparisons between Linux, Mac, and Windows is a battle of grey perceptions, not black and white certainties. As such, they are eclipsed entirely by the issue of the market distortions of software piracy.

You can prefer one or the other for any reason you like. But to convince me that Linux isn't good enough to take for free, you'd have to not only show me side-by-side comparison where Windows did what Linux couldn't, but, more importantly, I won't even start the discussion with you unless you show me your proof of purchase (for every copy of Windows you have for personal use, and all your applications) to convince me that in your mind the features you're comparing were actually worth 200 US dollars or more.
http://tlug.jp/articles/Windows_Is_Free





Children's Reviews of OLPC XO Technology
Wayan Vota

While we can endlessly debate One Laptop Per Child on OLPC News, what really matters will be the opinions and adoption of XO technology by children. And recently children have been expressing their views on the matter.

Gabe, focused on XO activities

First up is Chris Schmidt's experience with giving an OLPC XO to a friend's young son:
I snapped a dozen pictures of Gabe (mercy_rain's son) and SJ Klein (OLPC Manager of Content) with the OLPC.

Note that Gabe had never seen one of these things before, and with practically no help from the adults, he had started painting, typing, and playing with the webcam, cackling quite evilly the whole time.

The photo set is damn cute, a visual statement to the XO's appeal.

Then twelve year old "SG" made a surprisingly well-written literary statement about the $100 laptop" on Freedom to Tinker:
My expectations for this computer were, I must admit, not very high. But it completely took me by surprise.

It was cleverly designed, imaginative, straightforward, easy to understand (I was given no instructions on how to use it. It was just, “Here. Figure it out yourself.”), useful and simple, entertaining, dependable, really a “stick to the basics” kind of computer.

It’s the perfect laptop for the job. Great for first time users, it sets the mood by offering a bunch of entertaining and easy games and a camera.
SG also sets the mood for another laptop prototype test, this time maintenance. Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC XO maintenance plan is for children to do 95% of technical support. Apparently Mitch Bradley even believes that a 10-year old could replace an XO motherboard.

To prove the concept, Joel Stanley set up a motherboard replacement challenge, with Philip (10) and his sister Sophie (8), which you can watch or read about:

Now watching that test after Gabe's and SG's reactions, you could be persuaded that One Laptop Per Child doesn't really need an implementation plan, that Negroponte's dreams can be a reality without intensive teacher training or cultural integration.

But before these privileged kids' experiences allow you discount my fears of Humpty Dumpty on a million unit scale, remember the real OLPC demographic.

Nicholas Negroponte wants poor, uneducated children in the developing world to learn learning using the OLPC XO. Children who are not intimately familiar with computers and laptops by age 12, who cannot look to Joel Stanley for help, and are not blessed with parents who know SJ Klein.

Children who will need more than just OLPC magic to eliminate poverty with education.
http://www.olpcnews.com/implementati...echnology.html





Half of Web Time Spent Viewing Content: Study

Content online is king. Internet users spend nearly half their time online viewing news or entertainment content, surpassing activities such as sending e-mails, shopping or searching for information, according to a study released by the Online Publishers Association on Monday.

The four-year study, conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings, tracked a 37 percent increase in amount of time spent viewing content such as online videos or news, surpassing a 35 percent rise in using search engines like Google Inc..

The abundance of content and faster online speeds accounted for the spike, the study said. A proliferation of social networks such as News Corps' MySpace and Facebook have helped boost content viewing as well.

Overall, viewing content accounts for 47 percent of time spent online in 2007, up from 34 percent in 2003. Web search accounted for 5 percent of time spent online in 2007 from 3 percent in 2003.

Time spent on commerce sites such as Amazon.com fell 5 percent and accounted for 15 percent of time spent in 2007.

Time spent on communications such as e-mail fell 28 percent to 33 percent of time spent online in 2007, down from 46 percent in 2003.

The popularity of instant messaging such as AOL Instant Messenger, which lets users send quick messages rather than e-mails, accounted for the drop in the amount of time spent corresponding, the study said.

(Reporting by Kenneth Li, editing by Deborah Cohen)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...35166120070813





Five Myths and Mysteries About Black Web Surfing
Mark Ontkush

You might have been following the recent debate about surfing a black web, even received a viral email or two on the topic. We have discussed some facts and figures around using a black Google, and other alternatives sites such as Blackle. In spite of all the recent press, mysteries and myths still abound, here are 5 of the most common.

1. Every monitor uses 74 watts to display a white background, and only 59 watts to display a black background.
Answer: Nope, and it's probably the biggest misconception. The original post that started this whole thing pulled these numbers from the US department of energy, but these numbers almost certainly refer to CRT monitors only.

2. Ok, well, every CRT monitor saves 15 watts then going from white to black.
Answer: The amount of energy saved here is depends on many factors, including the size, type, and manufacturer of the specific monitor. A study conducted in 2002, the infamous Roberson Study, found that different CRT monitors saved between 4 and 30 watts going from white to black, a big range. A new study by Techlogg on 4 CRT monitors found that they all did save energy, but the range was narrower and the savings was smaller (only between 7 and 11 watts). It is likely that CRT monitors are getting more efficient.

3. What about LCD monitors? I keep hearing that is makes no difference what color they display, or that they even use more energy displaying black over white.
Answer: Another big misconception. LCD monitors have a light behind the screen that is always on, so white is usually the most efficient color to produce; you just let the light shine through. Black on the hand requires the light to be completely blocked, and this takes energy. So, on the face of it, white would always be cheaper than black to create on LCD screens. Turns out this is mostly true, and on average, takes less than a watt of energy to do.

But there more, because some clever LCD manufacturers check how dark the screen is, and if it's very dark they dim the backlight; this saves energy. The Roberson study found this was true for every LCD monitor, Techlogg found it was primarily true for monitors over 24 inches wide. This doesn't save much energy, tops 4 watts, but it does save some. So, LCD technology has changed over time, and it is true that the differential between displaying white and black is much tighter than CRT monitors, a few watts at most.

4. Very interesting. So that solves it, since about 75 percent of the monitors in the world are LCD monitors, and since it doesn't really save a lot of of energy to display black over white (some even cost energy), the whole energy saving argument is a wash.
Answer: It is true that there are a large number of LCD monitors out there, and that for the majority of them it doesn't make a whole lot of difference energy wise to show black vs. white. Sites such as Techlogg and Infoworld used these numbers to demonstrate that the technique was ineffective.

In fact, this very argument proves that the technique works! The reason is that energy consumed by the LCD monitors is dwarfed by the massive savings from the other 25 percent of monitors, the power guzzling CRT monitors. If you want, you can try this experiment to convince yourself of this fact.

Get three lcd monitors and plug them into a power strip. Then get one CRT monitor, and plug that into the same power strip. Plug the power strip into your testing equipment, then plug that into the wall outlet. Now turn on all the machines and get them all connected to the Internet; show an all white screen on all of them, and take a reading from your test equipment. Now show an all black screen on all of them. Read your testing equipment again. You have two readings now, the second should be lower than the first.

For another explanation, read Pablo Paster's posting on the topic.

5. Great, so it works! Does it work on any site?
Answer: Yes, the energy saving principle will work on any site. Google is often referenced (they get over 500 million hours of use each year) but other good candidates would be Yahoo, MySpace, and YouTube. :: TriplePundit ::Infoworld
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007...things_you.php





Beyond batteries: Storing Power in a Sheet of Paper

Researchers turn everyday paper into resilient, rechargeable energy storage device
Press Release

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new energy storage device that easily could be mistaken for a simple sheet of black paper.

The nanoengineered battery is lightweight, ultra thin, completely flexible, and geared toward meeting the trickiest design and energy requirements of tomorrow’s gadgets, implantable medical equipment, and transportation vehicles.

Along with its ability to function in temperatures up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit and down to 100 below zero, the device is completely integrated and can be printed like paper. The device is also unique in that it can function as both a high-energy battery and a high-power supercapacitor, which are generally separate components in most electrical systems. Another key feature is the capability to use human blood or sweat to help power the battery.

Details of the project are outlined in the paper “Flexible Energy Storage Devices Based on Nanocomposite Paper” published Aug. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The semblance to paper is no accident: more than 90 percent of the device is made up of cellulose, the same plant cells used in newsprint, loose leaf, lunch bags, and nearly every other type of paper.

Rensselaer researchers infused this paper with aligned carbon nanotubes, which give the device its black color. The nanotubes act as electrodes and allow the storage devices to conduct electricity. The device, engineered to function as both a lithium-ion battery and a supercapacitor, can provide the long, steady power output comparable to a conventional battery, as well as a supercapacitor’s quick burst of high energy.
A sample of the new nanocomposite paper developed by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Infused with carbon nanotubes, the paper can be used to create ultra-thin, flexible batteries and energy...

The device can be rolled, twisted, folded, or cut into any number of shapes with no loss of mechanical integrity or efficiency. The paper batteries can also be stacked, like a ream of printer paper, to boost the total power output.

“It’s essentially a regular piece of paper, but it’s made in a very intelligent way,” said paper co-author Robert Linhardt, the Ann and John H. Broadbent Senior Constellation Professor of Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer.

“We’re not putting pieces together – it’s a single, integrated device,” he said. “The components are molecularly attached to each other: the carbon nanotube print is embedded in the paper, and the electrolyte is soaked into the paper. The end result is a device that looks, feels, and weighs the same as paper.”

The creation of this unique nanocomposite paper drew from a diverse pool of disciplines, requiring expertise in materials science, energy storage, and chemistry. Along with Linhardt, authors of the paper include Pulickel M. Ajayan, professor of materials science and engineering, and Omkaram Nalamasu, professor of chemistry with a joint appointment in materials science and engineering. Senior research specialist Victor Pushparaj, along with postdoctoral research associates Shaijumon M. Manikoth, Ashavani Kumar, and Saravanababu Murugesan, were co-authors and lead researchers of the project. Other co-authors include research associate Lijie Ci and Rensselaer Nanotechnology Center Laboratory Manager Robert Vajtai.

The researchers used ionic liquid, essentially a liquid salt, as the battery’s electrolyte. It’s important to note that ionic liquid contains no water, which means there’s nothing in the batteries to freeze or evaporate. “This lack of water allows the paper energy storage devices to withstand extreme temperatures,” Kumar said.

Along with use in small handheld electronics, the paper batteries’ light weight could make them ideal for use in automobiles, aircraft, and even boats. The paper also could be molded into different shapes, such as a car door, which would enable important new engineering innovations.

“Plus, because of the high paper content and lack of toxic chemicals, it’s environmentally safe,” Shaijumon said.

Paper is also extremely biocompatible and these new hybrid battery/supercapcitors have potential as power supplies for devices implanted in the body. The team printed paper batteries without adding any electrolytes, and demonstrated that naturally occurring electrolytes in human sweat, blood, and urine can be used to activate the battery device.

“It’s a way to power a small device such as a pacemaker without introducing any harsh chemicals – such as the kind that are typically found in batteries – into the body,” Pushparaj said.

The materials required to create the paper batteries are inexpensive, Murugesan said, but the team has not yet developed a way to inexpensively mass produce the devices. The end goal is to print the paper using a roll-to-roll system similar to how newspapers are printed.

“When we get this technology down, we’ll basically have the ability to print batteries and print supercapacitors,” Ajayan said. “We see this as a technology that’s just right for the current energy market, as well as the electronics industry, which is always looking for smaller, lighter power sources. Our device could make its way into any number of different applications.”

The team of researchers has already filed a patent protecting the invention. They are now working on ways to boost the efficiency of the batteries and supercapacitors, and investigating different manufacturing techniques.

"Energy storage is an area that can be addressed by nanomanufacturing technologies and our truly inter-disciplinary collaborative activity that brings together advances and expertise in nanotechnology, room-temperature ionic liquids, and energy storage devices in a creative way to devise novel battery and supercapacitor devices," Nalamasu said.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-bbs080907.php





Nokia Warns Consumers of Battery Overheating Risks
Tarmo Virki

Nokia warned consumers that 46 million batteries used in its mobile phones could overheat and offered to replace them for free while it negotiates with battery maker Matsushita over who would bear the costs.

The world's top cell phone maker said about 100 such incidents had been reported globally, but no serious injuries or property damage had been reported.

"Nokia has identified that in very rare cases the Nokia-branded BL-5C batteries ... could potentially experience overheating initiated by a short circuit while charging, causing the battery to dislodge," it said on Tuesday.

Nokia said it was working closely with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., which made the batteries in question between December 2005 and November 2006, to investigate the problem.

Replacing the batteries would have some financial impact, but Matsushita would pay part of the costs, Nokia said.

Analyst Richard Windsor of Nomura estimated the cost to Nokia at a maximum of 100 million euros ($137 million).

"Historically, when there's been a problem of this nature the supplier has had to pay," he said. Research firm Gartner said one such battery would cost around $4.

Nokia's U.S. shares were down 24 cents or 0.79 percent at $30.34 after noon on the New York Stock Exchange. Its European shares closed down 1.55 percent, helping nudge the DJ European technology index down 0.84 percent.

Some U.S. cell phone analysts said the warning would be unlikely to either hurt Nokia's market share or boost its main rivals such as Motorola Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. or LG Electronics.

But Jyske Bank downgraded its rating on Nokia shares to "reduce" from "buy," saying every third Nokia user would now have to check their phone's batteries.

"I think this will hurt Nokia's brand a lot and that's the most precious asset Nokia has," Jyske analyst Soren Linde Nielsen said.

According to Interbrand, Nokia's brand is valued at $33.7 billion, making it the world's fifth most valued brand after the likes of Coca-Cola and Microsoft.

Splitting The Costs

Mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson, owned by Sony Corp. and Ericsson, said it depends mostly on batteries from Sony and does not use Matsushita batteries.

Last year, Sony was hit by hefty costs to recall 9.6 million laptop PC batteries that could overheat and catch fire.

A representative for LG said she did not know of any LG cell phones that were affected. Motorola officials were not immediately available for comment. Samsung representative Kim Titus said the company had not sued regarding batteries from Matsushita in any of its handsets and would not be affected.

The "BL-5C" is Nokia's most widely used battery, powering its low-end 1100 series phones and multimedia handsets N70 and N91, among others. Several suppliers have made a total of more than 300 million of them for Nokia.

Nokia said it had issued a product advisory (http://www.nokia.com/batteryreplacement) to consumers based on preliminary findings from its investigation.

"By reacting swiftly and responsibly, and by being fully transparent, we believe that consumers will continue to view Nokia as a responsible and trustworthy brand," Robert Andersson, Nokia's head of customer and market operations, told Reuters.

Matsushita said there had been a rare problem in the manufacturing process rather than in the design of the batteries. It said the effect on its earnings was uncertain.

"We are still in discussion with Nokia about how to divide the replacement cost," said Matsushita spokesman Akira Kadota.

Nokia spokeswoman Marianne Holmlund said that in similar cases in the car industry, less than half of consumers eligible for replacement had used the option.

In 2003, a Belgian consumer organization said some Nokia batteries had a short circuit risk, but the Finnish firm denied those claims and said media reports of exploding phone batteries were all related to counterfeits.

(Additional reporting by Mayumi Negishi in Tokyo, Georgina Prodhan in Frankfurt, Tehri Kinnunen in Helsinki and Sinead Carew in New York)
http://www.reuters.com/article/domes...00572220070814





'Dance Dance Immolation' Steps Up the Heat



At a warehouse in Oakland, Calif., Saturday night, video gamers got shot in the face with fire--all in the name of what some would call fun. The fun, in this case, was an evening of Dance Dance Immolation. DDI is derived from Dance Dance Revolution, the popular video game that tests players' dance moves and is being incorporated into middle school physical education programs. DDI, however, combines the movements with flamethrowers--needless to say, it's for grown-ups only.
http://news.com.com/2300-1043_3-6188...g=nefd.gallery





Good morning Mr. Phelps

Videos Purchased from Google to Self-Destruct Wednesday
Scott M. Fulton

In a move that may have some wondering whether the proverbial left hand knows what the other left hand is doing, Google issued a notice to its Google Video customers last week informing them that it is discontinuing its video sales business on Wednesday. But that wasn't all: The notice explicitly says that videos purchased or rented, and then downloaded to customers' PCs will no longer be viewable on or after August 15.

In other words, if you were to use this page to search for a video within a specific price range today, regardless of what you pay for it, due to DRM restrictions it will not play after Wednesday.

As a way of compensating for customers' grievances, the company is offering them coupons good toward purchases through other online retailers that use Google Checkout. Based on early reports, the value of the coupons is roughly equivalent to the amount of their purchases. However, in order for customers to redeem them, they must make purchases of the same amount or more, and they must do so within 60 days of August 15.

The move comes just after Universal Music Group indicated its intention to sell MP3 tracks without DRM through Google and perhaps others, though not iTunes.

Google's official explanation, as cited by the Associated Press, is that the company believes more in the compensating power of advertising support alongside video than in charging users directly.

"The current change is a reaffirmation of our commitment to building out our ad-supported...models for video," the AP report quotes Google spokesperson Gabriel Strickler as saying.

There is some data to back Strickler up. According to a comScore Media Metrix report last month, Google accounted for 21.5% of the US' streaming media traffic, with Fox Interactive's sites (mostly MySpace) a distant second at 8.1%. That's streams, such as the embedded kind that appears in Web pages, not VOD or direct downloads. If the money in video is to be made in exploiting audience size for advertising, some might rightfully ask how come audio doesn't work the same way.

Of course, all this diverts from what could be the major question in customers' minds: Weren't their video purchases supposed to be permanent? Strickler's comments appear only to be addressing shareholders' concerns, not customers.

One of those customers is Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow, who wrote last Friday, "This is a giant, flaming middle finger, sent by Google and the studios to the customers who were dumb trusting enough to buy DRM videos. How many of these people will trust the next DRM play from Google (no doubt coming soon from YouTube) or the studios?"

Apparently not every customer is so worried. A member of the Broadband Reports forum who invested $17.12 on replay videos of NBA basketball games, wrote on Saturday, "I'm being reimbursed for $20 so I actually come out ahead. Losing that video is no big deal anyway."
http://www.betanews.com/article/prin...day/1186971575





Google Selleth then Taketh Away, Proving the Need for DRM Circumvention
Ken Fisher

It's not often that Google kills off one of its services, especially one which was announced with much fanfare at a big mainstream event like CES 2006. Yet Google Video's commercial aspirations have indeed been terminated: the company has announced that it will no longer be selling video content on the site. The news isn't all that surprising, given that Google's commercial video efforts were launched in rather poor shape and never managed to take off. The service seemed to only make the news when embarrassing things happened.
HD DVD cracks: there's no going back

Yet now Google Video has given us a gift—a "proof of concept" in the form of yet another argument against DRM—and an argument for more reasonable laws governing copyright controls. How could Google's failure be our gain? Simple. By picking up its marbles and going home, Google just demonstrated how completely bizarre and anti-consumer DRM technology can be. Most importantly, by pulling the plug on the service, Google proved why consumers have to be allowed to circumvent copy controls.

A consolation prize

Google contacted customers late last week to tell them that the video store was closing. The e-mail declared, "In an effort to improve all Google services, we will no longer offer the ability to buy or rent videos for download from Google Video, ending the DTO/DTR (download-to-own/rent) program. This change will be effective August 15, 2007."

The message also announced that Google Checkout would issue credits in an amount equal to what those customers had spent at the Google Video store. Why the quasi-refunds? The kicker: "After August 15, 2007, you will no longer be able to view your purchased or rented videos."

See, after Google takes its video store down, its Internet-based DRM system will no longer function. This means that customers who have built video collections with Google Video offerings will find that their purchases no longer work. This is one of the major flaws in any DRM system based on secrets and centralized authorities: when these DRM data warehouses shut down, the DRM stops working, and consumers are left with useless junk.

Furthermore, Google is not refunding the total cost of the videos. To take advantage of the credit Google is offering, you have to spend more money, and furthermore, you have to spend it with a merchant that supports Google Checkout. Meanwhile, the purchases you made are now worthless. To do it right, Google should either provide users with non-DRMed copies of the videos they bought, or they should refund the money entirely. The current option is hardly acceptable, however. Would you buy a TV, a car, a book, or anything if the guy who sold it to you could take it back at any moment so long as he offered you a coupon?

Did you buy Kobe Bryant's 81-point game to commemorate that bit of NBA history? Enjoy staring at an unplayable file come Wednesday. But hey, at least you get $2 back to go buy underwear!

Copyright Office, here we come

Since the death of the commercial part of Google Video will render thousands and thousands of purchases useless, the Library of Congress will have no choice but to consider the matter when they return to their triennial review of the DMCA. To date, the Library of Congress has granted exceptions to the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA in instances where DRM has rendered something completely unusable, such as eBook DRM which can render eBooks useless for handicapped people. Recent exceptions from the last review are detailed here. Of note: the right to bypass DRM on products that no longer work properly was considered but rejected last time around.

Now, thanks to Google, we have a case study, a real-world example we can point to and say: "Hey, this isn't right." It features one of the world's most innovative and financially powerful technology companies bagging out on users. It features thousands of consumers buying DRMed goods in earnest, and it ends with a bang; Google decides to exit the market, leaving consumers with a load of useless goods.

Needless to say, this could happen with any player. Google could float its store if it wanted to, but it is exiting the business. What happens when Amazon does the same? Or Apple, or the next guy?

If this isn't further proof that parts of the DMCA should be gutted, at the very least it is a strong sign that the Library of Congress needs to address this issue. Congress should be thinking about this brave new world of "unproperty" where you're charged good money to "buy" products that, in reality, you're only renting until AverageCorp gets bored of the business.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...umvention.html





Demise of DRM, Economics of File Sharing and Persistent Security Risks

Digital Rights Management (DRM) may be fading as Universal Records joins EMI in testing the DRM-free music downloads. According to MP3.com:
The world's largest music company--home to the likes of U2, 50 Cent, and Eminem--is set to begin testing sales of DRM-free downloads, a move that signals a continuing shift in the major record labels' antipiracy strategy in the face of anemic CD sales.

But if record companies think illegal file sharing is the problem with their sales, they'd better take a look at a study entitled The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis which doesn't support the idea that file sharing is eating into profits.

The authors of the paper cryptically explain their methods:
We match an extensive sample of downloads to U.S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, we instrument for downloads using data on international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Our estimates are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the decline in music sales during our study period.

Translation: people who illegally copy music wouldn't buy it anyway so don't count them as lost sales.

So where are we now? Record companies have started to throw in the towel on DRM and if Universal dumps DRM completely it is likely others will follow. File sharing will continue because it seems that it's done independently of what the record companies do anyway. What may change is attitudes about file sharing and P2P clients.

Here is a possible scenario:

1. Record companies dump DRM completely.
2. More customers assume it's OK to share music files, after all they aren't prevented from sharing
3. The number of P2P file sharing clients grows
4. Too few users keep their clients patched and organizations don't manage P2P on their networks as they should.
5. P2P becomes an even more viable option for malware distribution than it is today
6. Creative attackers start to use P2P as an infrastructure for botnet and other rogue applications, kind of like the current rush to build Facebook applications.

For every silver lining, there seems to be a cloud.
http://www.realtime-websecurity.com/...cs_of_fil.html





Universal To Acquire V2 Music Group
FMQB

Universal Music Group has announced its intent to acquire Richard Branson's V2 Music Group, which includes V2 Records. The label is home to artists such as Stereophonics and Paul Weller, and V2 also owns and operates Co-Operative Music, its in-house licensing organization that includes independent labels like Bella Union, City Slang and Wichita Recordings and artists such as Bloc Party, Peter Bjorn and John, and Go Team!

Terms of the proposed transaction were not disclosed, although a source told Reuters that the purchase price was about 7 million pounds ($14 million). A separate source said the offer was likely higher since rival bids ran as high as the mid-teens millions. The sale is still subject to regulatory approval.

In making the announcement, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music International Lucian Grainge said, "V2 is recognized as a pioneer in independent music with a diverse artist roster that spans many musical genres. As such, V2’s roster will complement our existing business. By applying our expertise in artist development and in the digital space, we’ll be able to maximize and enhance the opportunities for its artists even further."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=456209





iTunes Now Selling John Lennon Tracks
AP

Apple Inc. has begun selling downloads of tracks from 16 of John Lennon's post-Beatles albums, including "Working Class Hero" and "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band," on iTunes, the company said Tuesday.

The albums represent Lennon's recording output while he was with Capitol Records, a unit of Britain's EMI Group PLC.

While many of the late singer-songwriter's solo recordings have been available for download commercially elsewhere, this marks the first time they have been available on Apple's market-leading online music service.

Songs on two albums - "Lennon Legend" and "Acoustic" - were being made available for download exclusively on iTunes, the company said.

Video content was also being included with the purchase of some of the albums for a limited time.

The Lennon tracks will also be available without copy-protection restrictions and in higher-quality audio for $1.29 each. Regular versions are priced at 99 cents each.

"John would have loved the fact that his music will now be available in a format suited to a new generation of listeners," Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, said in a statement released by Apple.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/pop/14...non_Songs.html





Rutgers Player Sues Imus, CBS
UPI

A Rutgers University women's basketball team member from New York has sued Don Imus and CBS, saying his disparaging on-air remarks damaged her reputation.

The suit by Kia Vaughn, who claimed the shock jock's sexist and racist statements about the team defamed her, was filed Tuesday just hours after Imus settled his $120 million breach-of-contract suit with CBS, USA Today reported Wednesday.

"This is basically about vindicating my client's good name," Vaughn's attorney, Richard Ancowitz, told the newspaper. "This is not a situation she ever asked for, and she would love to turn the clock back. But unfortunately she can't, because of what Don Imus said on April 4."

Imus was taken off the air for calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy headed ho's." The settlement with CBS has fueled speculation about Imus' return to radio.

Vaughn's lawsuit, thought to be the first by a player in the matter, alleged Imus, former on-air partner Bernard McGuirk and CBS, which broadcast his syndicated radio show, were responsible for damaging her character and reputation. A dollar amount was not listed.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Enterta...imus_cbs/3634/





Picks up 20 mil

Imus Settles With CBS, May Make Comeback
Pat Milton

Don Imus has reached a settlement with CBS over his multimillion-dollar contract and is negotiating with WABC radio to resume his broadcasting career there, according to CBS and a person familiar with the negotiations.

Imus and CBS Radio reached a settlement that would pre-empt the dismissed radio personality's threatened $120 million breach-of-contract lawsuit, CBS spokesman Dana McClintock said Tuesday.

No terms of the settlement were disclosed.

The person familiar with the talks told The Associated Press that Imus is taking steps to make a comeback with WABC-AM. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the news had not been announced, also said the deal with CBS calls for a ''non-disparaging'' agreement that forbids him from speaking negatively about his former employer.

The settlement and possible comeback come more than four months after Imus created an uproar over his racist and sexist comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team.

Just before his dismissal, Imus signed a five-year, $40 million contract with CBS Radio (owned by CBS Corp.). Famed First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus said in May that Imus planned to sue CBS for $120 million in unpaid salary and damages.

WFAN, the New York radio station that was Imus' flagship, also announced Tuesday that former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason will take over the morning time slot along with Craig Carton, a New Jersey radio personality.

WABC is a talk-radio station that features political and topical shows with such stars Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

Imus, 66, was dismissed April 12 after describing the Rutgers women's basketball team as ''nappy-headed hos'' on his nationally syndicated radio program, which was also simulcast on MSNBC. (General Electric Co.'s cable TV channel now has the ''Morning Joe'' program with Joe Scarborough.)

Garbus had said Imus would sue for the contract's unpaid part. He cited a contract clause in which CBS acknowledged that Imus' services were ''unique, extraordinary, irreverent, intellectual, topical, controversial.''

The clause said Imus' programming was ''desired by company and ... consistent with company rules and policy,'' according to Garbus.
http://www.whotv.com/Global/story.as...29709&nav=2HAB





NAB Shows Performance Royalty Impact With Mock Airplay Invoice
FMQB

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has created a "mock invoice," sent to radio stations, as part of its fight against the proposed performance royalty on terrestrial radio. The letter suggests contacting your Congressman and runs down a series of arguments against the royalty. Among the points, the NAB says that "imposing a tax of this size on free, local radio stations will cripple smaller radio stations" and "the big record labels like to hide behind their artists, but at least half of all fees end up in the pockets of foreign record label conglomerates, while the rest is divided up among the stakeholders. Often, the artists only receive a few pennies out of every dollar."

The mock invoice tells stations that they can expect to pay out 10-35 percent of gross revenue to the labels "for the honor of airing their music, making mega-stars out of their artists and putting money in their pocket through free promotion of their music and concert tours."

The entire "invoice" can be read here in PDF format.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=457018





Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83
Peter Keepnews

Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died early today in Manhattan. He was 83.

His death was announced today by a spokesman for Blue Note records, on which he frequently appeared. No cause was given. Mr. Roach had been known to be ill for several years.

As a young man, Mr. Roach, a percussion virtuoso capable of playing at the most brutal tempos with subtlety as well as power, was among a small circle of adventurous musicians who brought about wholesale changes in jazz. He remained adventurous to the end.

Over the years he challenged both his audiences and himself by working not just with standard jazz instrumentation, and not just in traditional jazz venues, but in a wide variety of contexts, some of them well beyond the confines of jazz as that word is generally understood.

He led a “double quartet” consisting of his working group of trumpet, saxophone, bass and drums plus a string quartet. He led an ensemble consisting entirely of percussionists. He dueted with uncompromising avant-gardists like the pianist Cecil Taylor and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. He performed unaccompanied. He wrote music for plays by Sam Shepard and dance pieces by Alvin Ailey. He collaborated with video artists, gospel choirs and hip-hop performers.

Mr. Roach explained his philosophy to The New York Times in 1990: “You can’t write the same book twice. Though I’ve been in historic musical situations, I can’t go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting.”

He found himself in historic situations from the beginning of his career. He was still in his teens when he played drums with the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, a pioneer of modern jazz, at a Harlem after-hours club in 1942. Within a few years, Mr. Roach was himself recognized as a pioneer in the development of the sophisticated new form of jazz that came to be known as bebop.

He was not the first drummer to play bebop — Kenny Clarke, 10 years his senior, is generally credited with that distinction — but he quickly established himself as both the most imaginative percussionist in modern jazz and the most influential.

In Mr. Roach’s hands, the drum kit became much more than a means of keeping time. He saw himself as a full-fledged member of the front line, not simply as a supporting player.

Layering rhythms on top of rhythms, he paid as much attention to a song’s melody as to its beat. He developed, as the jazz critic Burt Korall put it, “a highly responsive, contrapuntal style,” engaging his fellow musicians in an open-ended conversation while maintaining a rock-solid pulse. His approach “initially mystified and thoroughly challenged other drummers,” Mr. Korall wrote, but quickly earned the respect of his peers and established a new standard for the instrument.

Mr. Roach was an innovator in other ways. In the late 1950s, he led a group that was among the first in jazz to regularly perform pieces in waltz time and other unusual meters in addition to the conventional 4/4. In the early 1960s, he was among the first to use jazz to address racial and political issues, with works like the album-length “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.”

In 1972, he became one of the first jazz musicians to teach full time at the college level when he was hired as a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And in 1988, he became the first jazz musician to receive a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Maxwell Roach was born on Jan. 10, 1924, in the small town of New Land, N.C., and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He began studying piano at a neighborhood Baptist church when he was 8 and took up the drums a few years later.

Even before he graduated from Boys High School in 1942, savvy New York jazz musicians knew his name. As a teenager he worked briefly with Duke Ellington’s orchestra at the Paramount Theater and with Charlie Parker at Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem, where he took part in jam sessions that helped lay the groundwork for bebop.

By the middle 1940’s, he had become a ubiquitous presence on the New York jazz scene, working in the 52nd Street nightclubs with Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and other leading modernists. Within a few years he had become equally ubiquitous on record, participating in such seminal recordings as Miles Davis’s “Birth of the Cool” sessions in 1949 and 1950.

He also found time to study composition at the Manhattan School of Music. He had planned to major in percussion, he later recalled in an interview, but changed his mind after a teacher told him his technique was incorrect. “The way he wanted me to play would have been fine if I’d been after a career in a symphony orchestra,” he said, “but it wouldn’t have worked on 52nd Street.”

Mr. Roach made the transition from sideman to leader in 1954, when he and the young trumpet virtuoso Clifford Brown formed a quintet. That group, which specialized in a muscular and stripped-down version of bebop that came to be called hard bop, took the jazz world by storm. But it was short-lived.

In June 1956, at the height of the Brown-Roach quintet’s success, Brown was killed in an automobile accident, along with Richie Powell, the group’s pianist, and Powell’s wife. The sudden loss of his friend and co-leader, Mr. Roach later recalled, plunged him into depression and heavy drinking from which it took him years to emerge.

Nonetheless, he kept working. He honored his existing nightclub bookings with the two surviving members of his group, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the bassist George Morrow, before briefly taking time off and putting together a new quartet. By the end of the 50’s, seemingly recovered from his depression, he was recording prolifically, mostly as a leader but occasionally as a sideman with Mr. Rollins and others.

The personnel of Mr. Roach’s working group changed frequently over the next decade, but the level of artistry and innovation remained high. His sidemen included such important musicians as the saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Stanley Turrentine and George Coleman and the trumpet players Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham and Booker Little. Few of his groups had a pianist, making for a distinctively open ensemble sound in which Mr. Roach’s drums were prominent.

Always among the most politically active of jazz musicians, Mr. Roach had helped the bassist Charles Mingus establish one of the first musician-run record companies, Debut, in 1952. Eight years later, the two organized a so-called rebel festival in Newport, R.I., to protest the Newport Jazz Festival’s treatment of performers. That same year, Mr. Roach collaborated with the lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. on “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” which played variations on the theme of black people’s struggle for equality in the United States and Africa.

The album, which featured vocals by Abbey Lincoln (Mr. Roach’s frequent collaborator and, from 1962 to 1970, his wife), received mixed reviews: many critics praised its ambition, but some attacked it as overly polemical. Mr. Roach was undeterred.

“I will never again play anything that does not have social significance,” he told Down Beat magazine after the album’s release. “We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we’re master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been through.”

“We Insist!” was not a commercial success, but it emboldened Mr. Roach to broaden his scope as a composer. Soon he was collaborating with choreographers, filmmakers and Off Broadway playwrights on projects, including a stage version of “We Insist!”

As his range of activities expanded, his career as a bandleader became less of a priority. At the same time, the market for his uncompromising brand of small-group jazz began to diminish. By the time he joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts in 1972, teaching had come to seem an increasingly attractive alternative to the demands of the musician’s life.

Joining the academy did not mean turning his back entirely on performing. In the early ‘70s, Mr. Roach joined with seven fellow drummers to form M’Boom, an ensemble that achieved tonal and coloristic variety through the use of xylophones, chimes, steel drums and other percussion instruments. Later in the decade he formed a new quartet, two of whose members — the saxophonist Odean Pope and the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater — would perform and record with him off and on for more than two decades.

He also participated in a number of unusual experiments. He appeared in concert in 1983 with a rapper, two disc jockeys and a team of break dancers. A year later, he composed music for an Off Broadway production of three Sam Shepard plays, for which he won an Obie Award. In 1985, he took part in a multimedia collaboration with the video artist Kit Fitzgerald and the stage director George Ferencz.

Perhaps his most ambitious experiment in those years was the Max Roach Double Quartet, a combination of his quartet and the Uptown String Quartet. Jazz musicians had performed with string accompaniment before, but rarely if ever in a setting like this, where the string players were an equal part of the ensemble and were given the opportunity to improvise. Reviewing a Double Quartet album in The Times in 1985, Robert Palmer wrote, “For the first time in the history of jazz recording, strings swing as persuasively as any saxophonist or drummer.”

This endeavor had personal as well as musical significance for Mr. Roach: the Uptown String Quartet’s founder and viola player was his daughter Maxine. She survives him, as do two other daughters, Ayo and Dara, and two sons, Raoul and Darryl.

By the early ‘90s, Mr. Roach had reduced his teaching load and was again based in New York year-round, traveling to Amherst only for two residencies and a summer program each year. He was still touring with his quartet as recently as 2000, and he also remained active as a composer. In 2002 he wrote and performed the music for “How to Draw a Bunny,” a documentary about the artist Ray Johnson.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/ar...-roach.html?hp





See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
John Borland

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.

This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.

The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 5.3 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.

Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President George Bush.

The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."

A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.

Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community.

As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy users of the system. Former Montana Senator Conrad Burns' office, for example, apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice" to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content following it.

Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested changes come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.

The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however. Employees at the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias.

One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions, with specific details that read like a popular history book or an eyewitness' memoir.

Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.

Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals, particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.

For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.
http://www.wired.com/politics/online...8/wiki_tracker





Wikipedia is Only as Anonymous as Your IP

Virgil Griffith, a good friend and fellow hacker, reminds us today that anonymity on the internet does not really exist. With his newly released search tool Wikiscanner, you can search an index of 35 million Wikipedia edits by IP, allowing you to find edits coming from within organizations like the CIA or the EFF (bonus if you can find something about Kevin Bankston smoking).

Finding out that someone from the Fox News network changed this:
The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken's book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the [[National Public Radio]] program ''[[Fresh Air]]'' on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox's case against him was "literally laughed out of court" and that "wholly (holy) without merit" is a good characterization of Fox News itself.

into
The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken's book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the liberal [[National Public Radio]] program ''[[Fresh Air]]'' on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox's case against him was the best thing to happen to his book sales.

is quite amusing.

Time for crowdsourcing to find the gems in there and report them over at Wired's wikiwatch.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/20...dia_is_on.html





Dutch Bloggers Due in Court over Filming Under Skirts

Two Dutch news bloggers caught filming under women's skirts in a car park in order to warn the public of the intimate views afforded by see-through stairs must appear in court, according to their blog.

A court spokesman in Alkmaar, where the pair have been called to appear in October, said they had been charged with filming people without permission after someone complained. The bloggers say the women knew that they were being filmed.

The subterranean car park in the northern Dutch town of Heerhugowaard has a transparent ceiling in its stairwell, allowing people to look up at shoppers passing above.

The Geen Stijl blog said they were only filming to see whether the local council had done anything about the transparent ceiling after the issue was brought to their attention several months before.

The two bloggers could face a two-month prison sentence, according to Dutch news agency ANP.
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...80160520070814





British Rail Passengers to Get Free Wi-Fi Ride
Andy McCue

Rail passengers on the London-to-Scotland east coast main line will get free Wi-Fi as part of National Express' 1.4 billion-pound ($2.8 billion) winning bid to run the franchise.

National Express plans to take over the rail route from GNER in mid-December after fending off competition for the franchise from Arriva, FirstGroup, Stagecoach and Virgin Trains.

GNER completed the approximately $6.5 million installation of Wi-Fi broadband connectivity on all 41 of its east coast trains last year, and although the service has been free for first-class passengers, those in standard (coach) are charged either $5.96 per half hour or $20.11 for a full day's use.

But in addition to faster journey times, National Express has also promised to extend free Wi-Fi to passengers in standard class as part of its seven-year contract.

The on-board Wi-Fi uses a combination of a satellite link and mobile 3G/GPRS networks to maintain 100 percent connectivity, even when going through tunnels.
Now on News.com
Road Trip 2007: Thousands of miles, tons of tech Family togetherness a la videoconference Far from 'The Jetsons,' air cars for commuters Extra: Getting serious about gaming

A server from Swedish company Icomera on the train provides a 2MB satellite downlink, which is combined with the mobile connectivity. Wireless access points are then fitted at the end of each carriage on a train, which connect to the main onboard satellite server and can support about 40 simultaneous users in each carriage at a time.

National Express said it will also build a simpler "one-stop shop" Web site to highlight the cheapest tickets available, introduce smart cards by 2010, provide real-time travel updates to mobile phones, and allow passengers to print tickets at home or use "m-tickets" through their mobile phones.

Andy McCue of Silicon.com reported from London.
http://news.com.com/British+rail+pas...3-6202446.html





The Road to Clarity
Joshua Yaffa

“So, what do you see?” Martin Pietrucha I asked, turning around in the driver’s seat of his mint green Ford Taurus. It was a cold day in January, and we were parked in the middle of a mock highway set on the campus of Pennsylvania State University in State College. Pietrucha is a jovial, 51-year-old professor of highway engineering. His tone was buoyant as he nodded toward the edge of the oval stretch of road where two green-and-white signs leaned against a concrete barrier.

What I saw, Pietrucha knew, was what we all may see soon enough as we rush along America’s 46,871 miles of Interstate highways. What I saw was Clearview, the typeface that is poised to replace Highway Gothic, the standard that has been used on signs across the country for more than a half-century. Looking at a sign in Clearview after reading one in Highway Gothic is like putting on a new pair of reading glasses: there’s a sudden lightness, a noticeable crispness to the letters.

The Federal Highway Administration granted Clearview interim approval in 2004, meaning that individual states are free to begin using it in all their road signs. More than 20 states have already adopted the typeface, replacing existing signs one by one as old ones wear out. Some places have been quicker to make the switch — much of Route I-80 in western Pennsylvania is marked by signs in Clearview, as are the roads around Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport — but it will very likely take decades for the rest of the country to finish the roadside makeover. It is a slow, almost imperceptible process. But eventually the entire country could be looking at Clearview.

The typeface is the brainchild of Don Meeker, an environmental graphic designer, and James Montalbano, a type designer. They set out to fix a problem with a highway font, and their solution — more than a decade in the making — may end up changing a lot more than just the view from the dashboard. Less than a generation ago, fonts were for the specialist, an esoteric pursuit, what Stanley Morison, the English typographer who helped create Times New Roman in the 1930s, called “a minor technicality of civilized life.” Now, as the idea of branding has claimed a central role in American life, so, too, has the importance and understanding of type. Fonts are image, and image is modern America.

As a teenager in Portland, Ore., Meeker ran a small business out of his parents’ house making signs for local stores, cutting letters out of Plexiglas with a band saw. He majored in fine art at the University of Oregon and went on to get a master’s degree in graphic and industrial design at Pratt Institute in New York. In the mid-80s, Meeker created a uniform signage system for the country’s rivers and other navigable waterways for the Army Corps of Engineers. More than 200 people were drowning nationwide each year, most of them during the 30 to 40 minutes around dawn and dusk when sign visibility is especially poor. Graphic design traditionally focuses on problems of layout, but Meeker wondered if the issue wasn’t more basic — namely, the sign surface had to be brighter. He approached 3M, the Minnesota-based manufacturer whose products include Scotch tape and the Post-it note, and proposed the idea of using an unreleased line of yellow fluorescent sign material that would keep its shine during the dark morning and evening hours. “I am just like anybody else who sees a problem with a civic issue and sets out to fix it,” he told me as we sat one afternoon in the living room of his home in the Westchester County suburb of Larchmont. “I’ve always thought that design can be a form of social activism.”

In 1989, after his success with the waterways project, the State of Oregon approached Meeker with a commission to think up a roadside sign system for scenic-tour routes. The problem sounded modest enough: Add more information to the state’s road signs without adding clutter or increasing the physical size of the sign itself. But with the existing family of federally approved highway fonts — a chubby, idiosyncratic and ultimately clumsy typeface colloquially known as Highway Gothic — there was little you could add before the signs became visually bloated and even more unreadable than they already were. “I knew the highway signs were a mess, but I didn’t know exactly why,” Meeker recalled.

Around the same time Meeker and his team were thinking about how to solve the problem of information clutter in Oregon, the Federal Highway Administration was concerned with another problem. Issues of readability were becoming increasingly important, especially at night, when the shine of bright headlights on highly reflective material can turn text into a glowing, blurry mess. Highway engineers call this phenomenon halation and elderly drivers, now estimated to represent nearly a fifth of all Americans on the road, are most susceptible to the effect.

“When the white gets hit, it explodes, it blooms,” Meeker, who has the air of a scruffy academic, went on to say.

He placed two road signs side by side on his couch and shined a flashlight at each in quick succession. In the path of the moving beam, the first, a white-on-black street sign from the early 1900s, remained dark; its letters became momentarily lighter but not much brighter. As he moved the light to the second sign, a more modern white-on-blue sign taken from a nearby intersection, its whole surface brightened, sending back waves of light and giving the letters a fuzzy, white glow. Repeated at 70 miles per hour, especially for drivers with impaired vision, the effect is not only annoying but also dangerous.

The government’s highway engineers proposed increasing the size of the letters by 20 percent. But larger letters would mean even larger signs, a costly and cumbersome venture that would do little but increase visual clutter on the roadway. “You’re talking about billions of dollars,” Meeker said, explaining that on signs what is taller is also wider. “It wouldn’t just be a question of replacing the signs and all their support structures, but you would have to widen lanes and redo overpasses to make room for these things.”

Meeker wasn’t working for the federal highway agency, but in his mind the problem of clutter on signs in Oregon and the federal government’s concern with halation seemed intertwined. Along with researchers from the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, a highway-research body attached to Penn State that was also interested in questions of sign legibility, Meeker again approached 3M — the manufacturer of most of the country’s reflective sign material — with the idea of joint studies on the relationship between typeface design and halation.

What started as a project to organize information for tourist routes in Oregon would soon turn into an all-consuming quest, and one that marked the first time in the nation’s history that anyone attempted to apply systematically the principles of graphic design to the American highway.

Road signs first appeared in ancient Rome as stone markers counting the distances to various cities in the empire. In the age of the automobile, they began popping up on the side of the road a little more than a decade after the Ford Motor Company released its first Model T. Auto clubs and state highway departments placed the markings with little thought toward uniformity or consistency, and issues of typography were barely considered. The text that did appear on these early signs was largely hand-painted and all in uppercase, simply because no one could effectively draw lowercase letter forms by hand.

Explaining the task of drawing letters, Meeker said: “All capital letters are either straight lines or curved lines. The worst-case scenario is pretty much ‘B.’ ” But lowercase letters, maddening knots full of arcs and curves, present a more serious challenge to the Sunday-afternoon road-sign painter.

Hand-drawn signs were difficult to read at night, not because of the halation but because there was simply no shine to catch the driver’s attention. To try to remedy this, municipal sign makers began sprinkling handfuls of coarse sand on the freshly painted letters, followed by experiments with marbles. The first truly reflective sheeting came later, in the early 1940s, when 3M introduced sign material made with a patchwork of glass beads laminated under a plastic film.

Until the 1920s, when the development of die-cut technology allowed for the shaping and cutting of thin metal alloy, signs were often idiosyncratic, with layouts and typefaces varying by city and region. But as the popularity and accessibility of long-distance road travel increased, so, too, did the need for coherent nationwide standards. Federally approved fonts first appeared in the 1935 edition of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the bible of federal road and highway standards that dictates the size, shape and placement of road signs.

In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced his goal of an expanded Interstate System, and highway engineers worked quickly to fashion a rough alphabet by rounding off the square edges of the block lettering created during die-cut sign making. Today, there are six Highway Gothic typefaces in the official Federal Highway Administration series. Most prevalent on the modern highway is the fifth typeface in the family, Series E-Modified, and it is with this that Clearview is most often directly compared.

The letter shapes of Highway Gothic weren’t ever tested, having never really been designed in the first place. “It’s very American in that way — just smash it together and get it up there,” says Tobias Frere-Jones, a typographer in New York City who came to the attention of the design world in the mid-1990s with his Interstate typeface inspired by the bemusing, awkward charm of Highway Gothic. “It’s brash and blunt, not so concerned with detail. It has a certain unvarnished honesty.”

The quirky appeal of imperfection does give Highway Gothic its fans, who share highway lore and trade vintage road signs on the Internet. To highway enthusiasts like Richard Moeur, who runs a Web site devoted to traffic signs, the existing highway typeface has become evocative of the wonder of the open road. Moeur mentioned one example of the classic highway look “in the wild,” as he calls it, on a stretch of Interstate 40 on the road into Flagstaff, Ariz.: “There it is, in big 16-inch letters and a 3-foot tall Interstate shield, on a sign 10 feet tall by 16 feet wide — ‘I-40 WEST Los Angeles.’

“That sense of possibility has always meant a lot to me,” he says. “For some, a sign is just a utilitarian object. For others, it’s a symbol of connectivity.”

Meeker initially assumed that the solution to the nation’s highway sign problem lay in the clean utilitarian typefaces of Europe. One afternoon in the late fall of 1992, Meeker was sitting in his Larchmont office with a small team of designers and engineers. He suggested that the group get away from the computer screens and out of the office to see what actually worked in the open air at long distances. They grabbed all the roadsigns Meeker had printed — nearly 40 metal panels set in a dozen different fonts of varying weights — and headed across the street to the Larchmont train station, where they rested the signs along a railing. They then hiked to the top of a nearby hill. When they stopped and turned, they were standing a couple hundred feet from the lineup below. There was the original Highway Gothic; British Transport, the road typeface used in the United Kingdom; Univers, found in the Paris Metro and on Apple computer keyboards; DIN 1451, used on road and train signage in Germany; and also Helvetica, the classic sans-serif seen in modified versions on roadways in a number of European countries. “There was something wrong with each one,” Meeker remembers. “Nothing gave us the legibility we were looking for.” The team immediately realized that it would have to draw something from scratch.

Two designers working with Meeker, Christopher O’Hara and Harriet Spear, set out to create the new typeface, initially based on hand-drawn traces of Highway Gothic. “We wanted to take out the goofiness, to restore some sort of rational relationship to type design,” O’Hara told me. “There are a lot of things about it that don’t make any sense.” O’Hara and Spear started by opening the font up, carving out the cramped interior areas of the letters that trapped light and gave Highway Gothic its notoriously fuzzy quality.

The first indication of success came a few months later, in January 1993, when Meeker took O’Hara’s early sketches to Penn State for some human testing. He showed the drawings to Pietrucha and his colleague Philip Garvey, a researcher with a background in human psychology. In Clearview’s first public test, Garvey sat in an office chair in the basement of the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, with Clearview displayed on a computer screen at the opposite end of the long hallway. To simulate halation, they turned off all the lights and blurred the letters on the monitor. Clearview certainly looked better, but could they prove it?

Intrigued by the early positive results, the researchers took the prototype out onto the test track. Drivers recruited from the nearby town of State College drove around the mock highway. From the back seat, Pietrucha and Garvey recorded at what distance the subjects could read a pair of highway signs, one printed in Highway Gothic and the other in Clearview. Researchers from 3M came up with the text, made-up names like Dorset and Conyer — words that were easy to read. In nighttime tests, Clearview showed a 16 percent improvement in recognition over Highway Gothic, meaning drivers traveling at 60 miles per hour would have an extra one to two seconds to make a decision.

Word of the Penn State tests soon reached the Texas Transportation Institute, which conducted its own tests and then requested 25 computer disks with Clearview for further testing. “I knew we were onto something,” Meeker says. “But we were still too raw. We needed some polish.” He began asking around for recommendations in the tightly knit world of type design. A friend mentioned the name of James Montalbano, an upstart type designer who had already received some renown for drawing custom fonts for magazines like Glamour and Vanity Fair.

Montalbano, now 53 years old, works from a studio on the top floor of a brownstone near the Brooklyn waterfront. He has close-cropped hair and constant stubble, as well as the lumbering, punch-you-in-the-ribs demeanor of a high-school woodshop teacher, a job he in fact held for a year after graduating from Kean University in Union, N.J. In kindergarten in Jersey City, he was scolded for his stubborn insistence on drawing two-tiered lowercase “a” ’s. But it wasn’t until he took a continuing-education class with the type designer Ed Benguiat at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in the late 1970s that Montalbano discovered his talent for creating his own type.

At their first meeting, a hot, muggy day in the summer of 1995, Meeker came to Montalbano’s apartment to show the early sketches of Clearview. “It was stiff — there wasn’t any sort of grace to it,” Montalbano told me last winter of his initial impressions of the raw typeface. The stem weights were inconsistent, meaning the font looked bolder in some letters and lighter in others, and the baseline levels of the letters were uneven, giving it a wobbly, slightly boozy look. Montalbano recalls interrupting Meeker’s impassioned presentation. “I don’t know much about all this legibility theory,” he remembers saying. “But I do know about poorly drawn type.” He was hired immediately and set to work to sculpture Meeker’s initial drawings into a complete, sellable typeface.

“The fundamental flaw of Highway Gothic is that the counter shapes are too tiny,” Montalbano told me, referring to the empty interior spaces of a typeface, like the inside of an “o.” When viewed from a distance, and especially at night under the glare of high-beam headlights, the tightly wound lowercase “a” of Highway Gothic becomes a singular dense, glowing orb; the “e,” a confusing blur of shapes and curved lines. Meeker puts it more bluntly: “They look like bullets that you couldn’t put a pin through.”
Montalbano smoothed out the rough, imprecise edges of O’Hara and Meeker’s first version, widening the counter shapes even further. He understood that Clearview’s success would come not from where its shapes are on the sign but precisely in where they are not — the open spaces in Clearview’s letters are what make it so readable. It is as if, as Pietrucha put it that morning on the test track at Penn State, “we put the typeface on a diet”.

But selling the government on the idea of adopting Clearview as a road sign font was another matter. Over several years Meeker and Pietrucha went to meetings at the Federal Highway Administration; they would end each one by setting up a row of sample highway signs in the long hallways of the agency’s headquarters. The government’s own engineers were impressed with Clearview, but any immediate progress was slowed by the inevitable forces of inertia and bureaucracy in Washington. “We’d go in each time excited,” Meeker says of their presentations to federal officials. “And we’d leave each time thinking, ‘Why did we even bother?’ ”

At times, Clearview receded to the background as both Meeker and Montalbano busied themselves with other, more immediately fruitful design work. But they would keep returning to the font for minor changes: an adjustment in thickness here, a change in letter spacing there.

“Those guys are tinkerers,” Pietrucha says of Meeker and Montalbano. “They were always playing around, wondering how we could optimize it. We had something we called Clearview, but was there a Clearer-view? Or a Clear-est view?”

Type is just as much about psychology as geometry. A letter’s shape, its curves, the way it sits next to other letters — all these factors give a font its personality and in turn create an emotion and connotation for the reader.

Clearview is a sans-serif face, meaning the terminal points of its letters lack any ornamental lines, wedges and other shapes. It wasn’t until the 1920s that sans-serif came into wide use with typefaces like Futura and later, in the ’50s, Helvetica, but they are now the typeface style of choice for any design job requiring a clean, vaguely futuristic aesthetic. The clear, pristine shapes of sans-serif fonts grab the eye in an instant, lending themselves to advertising copy and large, punchy headlines as well as highway signs. But in large blocks of text, the detailed edges of the letter forms in serif fonts give the type an easy-to-follow flow reminiscent of cursive script, making them the preferred typeface for newspapers, magazines and books.

There are some typefaces that work for selling estate jewelry and others that seem to fit in best pushing high-tech toys. Volkswagen’s aggressively plain ads for the Beetle ushered in a new era of straightforward and minimalist advertising in the ’60s. “The Creative Revolution,” as it came to be known in the advertising world, was set off by a few words — “Lemon” and “Think Small” were among the most popular slogans — written in Futura, a typeface chosen for its bare style that spoke to Volkswagen’s message of simple claims and precision engineering. Decades later, in the early 2000s, a light and nimble lowercase typeface style defined the waning years of the dot-com boom. Its casual, approachable look quickly appeared in the logos of corporate behemoths like Cingular, British Petroleum and Accenture. Stodgy or irreverent, timely or timeless, typography helps establish the ethos and identity of a brand — and it can have a similar effect on the highway.

“Type on the roadway is very much like the corporate identity of a country,” says Graham Clifford, a friend of Montalbano’s who runs his own branding and design firm in New York. Clifford, who is English, mentioned the ubiquity of British Transport, which has been used in his country since the late 1950s. In the decades since its adoption, it has appeared on T-shirts and in advertisements, much as Highway Gothic has come to infuse the American consciousness. Phil Baines, a London-based typographer, once called British Transport “the house style for Britain.” Other countries have their own style, too. Clifford told of a trip he took with his wife, driving from England through Wales, then crossing by ferry to Ireland and up to Northern Ireland. Many signs in and around Dublin were written in a quirky local script; the markers in Belfast, however, were uniformly British Transport. “The change in typeface lets you know you’re in a different place,” Clifford said.

It can also let you know you’re in a different time. In 1941, Hitler abandoned the ornate blackletter typeface that had been a text standard in Germany since the Gutenberg era. Party propaganda was then printed in a roman serif typeface, giving the Nazi regime a starkly modernist identity. “Typography is all about tone of voice,” Clifford says. “Do I shout at people? Do I whisper at people? Do I scream from the rooftops? Am I talking to a woman? To a man?”

Highway Gothic conjures the awe of Interstate travel and the promise of midcentury futurism; Clearview’s aesthetic is decidedly more subdued. “It’s like being a good umpire,” Pietrucha says, suggesting that one of Clearview’s largest triumphs will be how quietly it replaces Highway Gothic sign by sign in the coming years. “It will completely change the look of the American highway, but not so much that anyone will notice.”

As Montalbano tweaked Clearview’s design, a problem continued to gnaw at him. Thicker, darker letters are more recognizable on signs, but they can also lead to dense, bloblike shapes that tend to blur, especially at night — the main downfall of Highway Gothic. How could he increase Clearview’s profile, Montalbano wondered, without repeating the same designs mistakes of its predecessor? The answer would come thanks to a branding crisis at the National Park Service.

In the summer of 1998, the park service had just received some alarming news: According to one survey, the vast majority of Americans were under the false impression that Smokey Bear worked for the National Park Service and not the Forest Service. At the time, the park service was using a mismatched collection of a half-dozen typefaces on its road signs, wayposts and other printed materials. A signature typeface, it reasoned, would help to solve its brand-recognition problem.

The park service hired Montalbano and Meeker to come up with one. After considering various existing faces, Montalbano ended up drawing a stately looking serif that he dubbed Rawlinson, his wife’s last name. “My father-in-law worked for the Forest Service,” he told me, “so I thought I’d name the park service font after him, just to keep the confusion alive.”

They sent the typeface to Penn State for testing; it came back showing only a 2 percent improvement in legibility over Clarendon, the serif font in use at the time on the park service’s road signs. Montalbano received a call from a worried Meeker. “We knew that no bureaucracy would ever change anything for a 2 percent improvement,” Montalbano says. To increase recognition at longer distances, Montalbano tried pulling up the height of the lowercase letters, bringing them almost level with the height of the capitals. In typographic jargon, this measure is known as the x-height, based on the level of the top of the lowercase x, and even more than the shapes of the letter forms themselves, it can give a typeface an individual character.

Montalbano explained this idea over lunch at a cafe across the street from his office in Brooklyn. “If a word is set in all caps, all you will see are little white rectangles,” he said, scribbling a quick “HELLO” on a napkin. The word looked heavy, almost industrial.

“But this has a definite profile,” he continued, and then he drew “Hello” again on another napkin, this time in a mix of upper- and lowercase letters, its peaks and curves and dips setting off all the necessary clues in the subconscious. He held the paper in front of me. As he slowly pulled it farther away, the individual letters became harder to read, but the shape of the word remained distinct. “Your brain,” he concluded, “knows the shape of the word.”

With an increased x-height, Rawlinson showed a significant improvement in legibility while taking up 15 percent less sign space than the heavy, powerful-looking Clarendon. “I called Don up right away and told him, ‘I want to apply this same idea to Clearview,’ ” Montalbano said.

Meeker and Montalbano staged a demonstration a few weeks later at the Penn State test track, spending a few thousand dollars of their own money to print up highway signs with the new version of Clearview. They invited representatives from the Federal Highway Administration and transportation officials from half a dozen states. The group stood on the tarmac and stared at a side-by-side comparison of Clearview and Highway Gothic. “Signs that you’d be hard pressed to read at 700 feet were legible at 900 or 1,000 feet,” Montalbano said. “People were really freaked out”.

Clearview, then, had succeeded in its mission: It made signs easier to read from a distance and reduced the distracting nighttime blur of halation. But its most visible debut came not on the highway but on the oversize billboards of Times Square. On New Year’s Day 2006, AT&T revealed its redesigned brand image. Clearview was featured in headlines, billboards and advertising copy, as well as on huge banners plastered around Midtown Manhattan.

The company wanted to project “a more welcoming and transparent image,” says Wendy Clark, a senior vice president in charge of advertising at AT&T. For more than a decade, the company had been using Gill Sans, a leaden, staid typeface from the 1920s. Market research showed that many consumers identified the old AT&T with attributes like “monolithic” and “bureaucratic” — an image problem it hoped to fix, in part, with a new typeface.

“Clearview is approachable,” says Craig Stout, a creative director at Interbrand, the agency that oversaw the AT&T campaign. “It isn’t shouting at you to get your business.” A year after AT&T began using Clearview for all its advertising and corporate communications, Interbrand conducted a follow-up survey, asking consumers, “Do you consider AT&T to be a technologically savvy brand?” Positive responses had doubled.

“The highway stuff is what got me into it, but it’s the font’s other applications that have me really excited,” Montalbano says. In addition to creating a parallel Clearview type family for standard design applications, he is also working on converting it into foreign scripts. There is already a special Latin alphabet designed for Eastern European languages. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Maxim Zhukov, a Russian typographer, is adapting the type design for translation into Cyrillic. That a typeface originally inspired by a problem with tourist signage in Oregon could one day line the cavernous halls of the Moscow metro is not so much a testament to Clearview’s functional, universal appeal as it is to typography’s strange and enigmatic power of reincarnation. “The real life of a font is mysterious and unpredictable,” Zhukov says. Certainly that has been the case with Clearview. Oregon, as it happens, has yet to adopt the typeface.

A couple months ago, Meeker’s 12-year-old son, Eric, had his own unplanned encounter with the typeface. He had a homework assignment due in his seventh-grade English class, Eric told me, and in a rush, he printed a document — a fictionalized journal entry from the Civil War — from a computer in his dad’s downstairs office. Hurrying out the door, he didn’t notice it had printed in Clearview. A few days later, his teacher handed the assignments back. “Great job,” he said to Eric. He paused, then added, “There was just something about it that made it so easy to read.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/ma...12fonts-t.html





Ex-Adman Says He Began Poe Toast
UPI

In a twist on the tell-tale heart tale, a former adman said he started the homage of roses and cognac laid at the Baltimore grave of writer Edgar Allan Poe.

Sam Porpora, a 92-year-old Poe devotee, said he began the tradition in the late 1960s as a publicity stunt to aid the church that owned Westminster cemetery, where the author is said to be buried, the Baltimore Sun reported Wednesday.

Once he "restored Poe to greatness," Porpora said he retired from the toasting business and wasn't sure who kept up the midnight presentation since.

Others differ with Porpora's recollection. Jeff Jerome, Poe House and Museum curator, said his research indicated the ritual dates to 1949, the 100th anniversary of the death of the writer, who died mysteriously in Baltimore at age 40.

Through the years, several people have claimed the connection, Jerome told the Sun but few had Porpora's credentials. He was a parishioner of Westminster Church, a caretaker for the adjoining cemetery and its longtime tour guide.

"He is very enthusiastic about Poe and Baltimore history," said Jerome, who added he can't substantiate Porpora's claim.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Enterta...oe_toast/4128/





Knowledge Networks Pays $300,000 to Settle Internal Copyright Complaint

Firm's marketing group distributed press packets to employees containing newspaper and magazine articles under copyright
Grant Gross

Analyst firm Knowledge Networks has agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a complaint that it distributed news articles to its employees without permission of the copyright owners, a trade group announced Thursday.

The Knowledge Networks settlement is the first under the Software & Information Industry Association's Corporate Content Anti-Piracy Program, launched in October.

Knowledge Networks' marketing group had been distributing press packets to some employees on a regular basis, the SIIA said. Those packets contained articles under copyright and owned by SIIA members such as the Associated Press, United Press International, and publishing company Reed Elsevier, the trade group said.

SIIA litigation counsel Scott Bain called Knowledge Networks a "reputable company that made a very costly mistake." One of SIIA's goals for the settlement is to deter copyright infringement and educate other companies about the need for compliance programs, he said.

A Knowledge Networks spokesman declined to talk about the case in detail. "We are happy the matter has been resolved amicably," said spokesman Dave Stanton.

Knowledge Networks, based in Menlo Park, Calif., has agreed to take steps to avoid further problems, including sending its staff to an SIIA copyright course, SIIA said.

In a statement distributed by SIIA, Knowledge Networks said it regretted the actions.

"[We] disseminated copies of relevant newspaper and magazine articles in the good faith belief that it was lawful to do so," the company said in the statement. "We now understand that practice may violate the copyright rights of those publications. We regret that those violations may have occurred and we are pleased that this matter has now been resolved."

Asked if internal distribution of news articles was commonplace at many companies, SIIA's Bain disagreed. "Companies do not do this all the time," he said. "Some companies have compliance procedures in place to keep it from happening."

Compliance procedures include staff designated for licensing and compliance, sufficient budgets for the content licensing needs of the company, education programs for staff, deals with major content outlets, and strict policies and internal penalties for violating copyright, Bain said.

SIIA learned about the situation through a confidential tip, the trade group said. The person who reported Knowledge Networks will receive a $6,000 reward.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/...mplaint_1.html





Lifejackets for Newspapers

Henry Blodget, the CEO and Editor-n-Chief of Silicon Alley Insider, has conducted a hypothetical analysis of the economics of newspapers gone solely digital, called Running the Numbers: Why Newspapers Are Screwed.

Blodget leads in with a obvious caution about the distinction between the online and off-line economies in advertising:
Newspaper content generates way more revenue in the physical world than it does online, because offline it can be packaged with classifieds and display ads and actually sold. In the online world, meanwhile, it has to be given away, and because classified ads are now run by classified sites and newspaper sites are only one of dozens of places where people get news, the advertising opportunity is comparatively tiny.

So warned, he sets up the scenario:
[L]et's pretend that, tomorrow morning, every print reader stops buying the paper, and, instead, reads it online. To be safe, let's further assume that each offline "subscription" actually encompasses two or three readers. In other words, let's pretend that, tomorrow, print circulation goes to zero, and online readership jumps by 2.5 million. What would happen to the business?

1. The company would eliminate paper, distribution, printing, and all other physical production costs.
2. Online inventory (and, therefore, revenue) would increase by about 33% (7.5mm to 10mm users)
3. Content creation costs would stay the same. (The site would have to pay the freight for all the content it now gets for free).
4. All print revenue--ads and circulation--would vaporize.

Mr. Blodget then itemizes the necessary assumptions, or variable settings, for costs and revenues, all of which are fairly conservative, and most-likely over-generous towards newspapers. The results?

Revenue drops by more than half, 40%-50% of employees get fired, and the company still loses money. Using the NYT's Q2 numbers and these assumptions, for example, revenue would have dropped from $789 million to $285 million. More importantly, EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) would have dropped from $118 million to -$64 million. Which means that management would just be getting ready to fire a few hundred more people.

While perhaps an extreme portrait, this is not necessarily an unrealistic extension of the prevailing expectations for news delivery in the near term. Perhaps it takes a mogul to raise a newspaper.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/20...ckets_for.html





San Jose Semaphore's Message Atop Adobe Building Is . . .
Sal Pizarro



The code is cracked.

And for anyone who thought a simple message was being transmitted by the rotating disks atop the Adobe tower in downtown San Jose, boy, were you wrong.

The message of San Jose Semaphore is the entire text of the Thomas Pynchon book, "The Crying of Lot 49."

The solution was discovered by two Silicon Valley tech workers, Bob Mayo and Mark Snesrud, who received a commendation at San Jose City Hall today.

Using both the rotating disks and the art project's audio broadcast, they deciphered a preliminary code based on the James Joyce novel, "Ulysses," which was the key to solving the entire message. It took them about three weeks.

"It was not a real easy thing to figure out," said Snesrud, a chip designer for Santa Clara based W&W Communications.

Ben Rubin, the New York artist who developed the project, applauded the duo's "computational brute force" in finding the message.

"I'm especially glad the code was cracked and that it was done in a very classical way," Rubin said.

The Pynchon book, written in the mid-1960s, is set in a fictional California city filled with high-tech campuses. It follows a woman's discovery of latent symbols and codes embedded in the landscape and local culture, Rubin said.

The semaphore is made up of four 10-foot wide disks, which are composed of 24,000 light-emitting diodes. The disks each have a dark line going from one end to another and twirl around every eight seconds to create a new pattern.

It made its debut on Aug. 7, 2006 as part of the ZeroOne digital art festival. Rubin said there are no plans to stop the semaphore or change its message - at least for the time being.

"It'll change the way people look it," Rubin said of having the solution known. "Maybe in a few years, we'll revisit it."
http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_6620943





The Times’s First Home Is Being Torn Down
David W. Dunlap



After enduring a century and a half of change in Lower Manhattan, decrepit and anonymous, the birthplace of The New York Times is now being torn down, brick by brick.

By an odd turn of history, the demolition of The Times’s oldest home occurred just as the company settles into its seventh and newest headquarters, a 52-story tower across Eighth Avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Yesterday, a worker armed with an appropriately 19th-century demolition tool — a sledgehammer — sat astride the south wall of 113 Nassau Street, between Ann and Beekman Streets, pounding chunks of the structure into dust.

“Little old building,” Margaret Moffatt said wistfully as she walked by on her lunch hour with some colleagues, one of whom, Henry Raven, was a bit more sarcastic. “Making way for progress,” he said.

(Actually, it may be making way for a 28-story residential building, to judge from applications filed with the city’s Department of Buildings. The owners did not respond to telephone messages yesterday.)

What Ms. Moffatt and Mr. Raven did not know — few New Yorkers do — is that Volume 1, Number 1 of The New-York Daily Times, four pages for one penny, was published at 113 Nassau Street on Sept. 18, 1851. The newspaper stayed there until 1854, when it moved a bit closer to City Hall.

This six-story building was, in other words, a journalistic log cabin.

And it was not much more accommodating. There was no glass yet in the windows on the evening when The Times first went to press. Breezes blew through the place, extinguishing the candlelight. “All was raw and dismal,” Augustus Maverick wrote in his 1870 biography of Henry J. Raymond, the founding editor.

Raw and dismal it remained. What little architectural integrity the building possessed was all but wiped away in the 1970s when it became a McDonald’s. The property was put up for sale in 2004. The New York Times Company had no interest in buying it. There was no serious talk of landmark designation.

From 113 Nassau Street, Raymond declared in his first editorial that The Times would present “all the news of the day from all parts of the world” and appear “for an indefinite number of years to come.”

He said something else on that long-ago September day: “No newspaper, which was really fit to live, ever yet expired for lack of readers.” Where these words were written is now a pile of rubble.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/nyregion/15times.html


















Until next week,

- js.



















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