[JackSpratts]

Surveillance

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report
Eric Lichtblau and James Risen

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," according to officials familiar with the matter.

"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

The current and former government officials who discussed the program were granted anonymity because it remains classified.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the technical aspects of the operation and the N.S.A.'s use of broad searches to look for clues on terrorists. Because the program is highly classified, many details of how the N.S.A. is conducting it remain unknown, and members of Congress who have pressed for a full Congressional inquiry say they are eager to learn more about the program's operational details, as well as its legality.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security's Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.

But the Bush administration regards the N.S.A.'s ability to trace and analyze large volumes of data as critical to its expanded mission to detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out, officials familiar with the program say. Administration officials maintain that the system set up by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not give them the speed and flexibility to respond fully to terrorist threats at home.

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

"All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in that area," said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

Such information often proves just as valuable to the government as eavesdropping on the calls themselves, the former manager said.

"If they get content, that's useful to them too, but the real plum is going to be the transaction data and the traffic analysis," he said. "Massive amounts of traffic analysis information - who is calling whom, who is in Osama Bin Laden's circle of family and friends - is used to identify lines of communication that are then given closer scrutiny."

Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches.

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance.

Historically, the American intelligence community has had close relationships with many communications and computer firms and related technical industries. But the N.S.A.'s backdoor access to major telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency's operational capability, according to current and former government officials.

Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be significant. "If the government is gaining access to the switches like this, what you're really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/po... ner=homepage





NSA Web Site Places 'Cookies' on Computers
Anick Jesdanun

The National Security Agency's Internet site has been placing files on visitors' computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most of them.

These files, known as "cookies," disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week, and agency officials acknowledged Wednesday they had made a mistake. Nonetheless, the issue raises questions about privacy at a spy agency already on the defensive amid reports of a secretive eavesdropping program in the United States.

"Considering the surveillance power the NSA has, cookies are not exactly a major concern," said Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group in Washington, D.C. "But it does show a general lack of understanding about privacy rules when they are not even following the government's very basic rules for Web privacy."

Until Tuesday, the NSA site created two cookie files that do not expire until 2035 - likely beyond the life of any computer in use today.

Don Weber, an NSA spokesman, said in a statement Wednesday that the cookie use resulted from a recent software upgrade. Normally, the site uses temporary, permissible cookies that are automatically deleted when users close their Web browsers, he said, but the software in use shipped with persistent cookies already on.

"After being tipped to the issue, we immediately disabled the cookies," he said.

Cookies are widely used at commercial Web sites and can make Internet browsing more convenient by letting sites remember user preferences. For instance, visitors would not have to repeatedly enter passwords at sites that require them.

But privacy advocates complain that cookies can also track Web surfing, even if no personal information is actually collected.

In a 2003 memo, the White House's Office of Management and Budget prohibits federal agencies from using persistent cookies - those that aren't automatically deleted right away - unless there is a "compelling need."

A senior official must sign off on any such use, and an agency that uses them must disclose and detail their use in its privacy policy.

Peter Swire, a Clinton administration official who had drafted an earlier version of the cookie guidelines, said clear notice is a must, and `vague assertions of national security, such as exist in the NSA policy, are not sufficient."

Daniel Brandt, a privacy activist who discovered the NSA cookies, said mistakes happen, "but in any case, it's illegal. The (guideline) doesn't say anything about doing it accidentally."

The Bush administration has come under fire recently over reports it authorized NSA to secretly spy on e-mail and phone calls without court orders.

Since The New York Times disclosed the domestic spying program earlier this month, President Bush has stressed that his executive order allowing the eavesdropping was limited to people with known links to al-Qaida.

But on its Web site Friday, the Times reported that the NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained broader access to streams of domestic and international communications.

The NSA's cookie use is unrelated, and Weber said it was strictly to improve the surfing experience "and not to collect personal user data."

Richard M. Smith, a security consultant in Cambridge, Mass., questions whether persistent cookies would even be of much use to the NSA. They are great for news and other sites with repeat visitors, he said, but the NSA's site does not appear to have enough fresh content to warrant more than occasional visits.

The government first issued strict rules on cookies in 2000 after disclosures that the White House drug policy office had used the technology to track computer users viewing its online anti-drug advertising. Even a year later, a congressional study found 300 cookies still on the Web sites of 23 agencies.

In 2002, the CIA removed cookies it had inadvertently placed at one of its sites after Brandt called it to the agency's attention.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





Powell Speaks Out on Domestic Spy Program
Steven R. Weisman

Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said on Sunday that it would not have been "that hard" for President Bush to obtain warrants for eavesdropping on domestic telephone and Internet activity, but that he saw "nothing wrong" with the decision not to do so.

"My own judgment is that it didn't seem to me, anyway, that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants," Mr. Powell said. "And even in the case of an emergency, you go and do it. The law provides for that."

But Mr. Powell added that "for reasons that the president has discussed and the attorney general has spoken to, they chose not to do it that way."

"I see absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing these kinds of actions," he said.

Asked if such eavesdropping should continue, Mr. Powell said, "Yes, of course it should continue."

Mr. Powell said he had not been told about the eavesdropping activity when he served as secretary of state.

He spoke on the ABC News program "This Week" about the disclosure, first reported in The New York Times, that Mr. Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to intercept communications by Americans without approval from a special foreign intelligence court.

Though Mr. Powell stopped short of criticizing Mr. Bush, his suggestion that there was "another way to handle it" was another example of his parting company on a critical issue with the president he served for four years.

This fall, Mr. Powell broke with the administration on the issue of torture, endorsing a move by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, to pass a measure in Congress banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees by all American authorities, including intelligence personnel. The White House at first opposed the measure but later accepted it.

Since leaving office at the end of Mr. Bush's first term, Mr. Powell has been involved in several business and public service ventures, including the establishment of the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at City College of New York, his alma mater.

On Iraq, Mr. Powell repeated earlier statements that differed somewhat from those of Mr. Bush, saying he did not know whether he would have advocated going to war with Iraq if he had known that the country had no stockpiles of illicit weapons.

Referring to the case for going to war if there were no such weapons, Mr. Powell said he would have told the president, "You have a far more difficult case, and I'm not sure you can make the case in the absence of those stockpiles."

Mr. Powell said he expected American troop levels to continue to go down in the coming year out of necessity, because it will become difficult to sustain the current high levels and because the effort to train Iraqis should be successful.

The main worry in Iraq, he said, is the growth of semi-independent militias with allegiance to sectarian groups within the Iraqi military.

Asked if the ethnic divisions in Iraq that were reinforced by the recent elections posed a threat of civil war, Mr. Powell said, "I think it is something we all have to be worried about."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/26/po.../26powell.html





Officials Want to Expand Review of Domestic Spying
Eric Lichtblau

Congressional officials said Saturday that they wanted to investigate the disclosure that the National Security Agency had gained access to some of the country's main telephone arteries to glean data on possible terrorists.

"As far as Congressional investigations are concerned," said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, "these new revelations can only multiply and intensify the growing list of questions and concerns about the warrantless surveillance of Americans."

Members of the Judiciary Committee have already indicated that they intend to conduct oversight hearings into the president's legal authority to order domestic eavesdropping on terrorist suspects without a warrant.

But Congressional officials said Saturday that they would probably seek to expand the review to include the disclosure that the security agency, using its access to giant phone "switches," had also traced and analyzed phone and Internet traffic in much larger volumes than what the Bush administration had acknowledged.

"We want to look at the entire program, an in-depth review, and this new data-mining issue is certainly a part of the whole picture," said a Republican Congressional aide, who asked not to be identified because no decisions had been made on how hearings might be structured.

Current and former government officials say that the security agency, as part of its domestic surveillance program, has gained the cooperation of some of the country's biggest telecommunications companies to obtain access to large volumes of international phone and Internet traffic flowing in and out of the United States.

The agency has traced and analyzed the traffic flow - looking at who is calling whom, where calls originate and end, and other patterns - to gather clues on possible terrorist activities. In cases where security agency supervisors believe they can show a link to Al Qaeda, President Bush has authorized eavesdropping on calls without a warrant within the United States, so long as one end of the phone or e-mail conversation takes place outside the country.

The White House declined to comment Saturday on the security agency program or the use of data-mining, saying it would not discuss intelligence operations.

"The administration will aggressively fight the war on terror in an effort to protect the American people while at the same time upholding the civil liberties of the American people," said Allen Abney, a White House spokesman. "The president is doing both of these things and will continue to do both of these things."

Defenders of the program within the federal government say that the security agency's broad analytical searches and data-mining, combined with actual eavesdropping, are an essential part of detecting and preventing terror attacks.

And they say the president is well within his legal authority to order such programs, because of his inherent constitutional power and because of Congressional authorization in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that permitted him to use "all necessary and appropriate force" to fight terrorism.

But civil rights and privacy advocates voiced concerns Saturday about the expanded role of the security agency, which historically has focused almost exclusively on foreign powers in mining for data on American phone lines.

"To the extent that the N.S.A. is collecting information on people who are suspected of no wrongdoing whatsoever, it presents some very critical privacy concerns," said Marcia Hofmann, who leads the government oversight section at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a group that lobbies for greater privacy rights. "And it shows the need for Congress to put in place real safeguards to prevent the government from abusing this information."

Lisa Graves, senior counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "There's no data-mining loophole in the Fourth Amendment." Ms. Graves added, "We're seeing an administration that's engaging in a lot of legal hair-splitting to justify behavior that's not authorized by the law."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/po...25wiretap.html





Defense Lawyers in Terror Cases Plan Challenges Over Spy Efforts
Eric Lichtblau and James Risen

Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda.

The lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out.

The expected legal challenges, in cases from Florida, Ohio, Oregon and Virginia, add another dimension to the growing controversy over the agency's domestic surveillance program and could jeopardize some of the Bush administration's most important courtroom victories in terror cases, legal analysts say.

The question of whether the N.S.A. program was used in criminal prosecutions and whether it improperly influenced them raises "fascinating and difficult questions," said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has studied terrorism prosecutions.

"It seems to me that it would be relevant to a person's case," Professor Tobias said. "I would expect the government to say that it is highly sensitive material, but we have legal mechanisms to balance the national security needs with the rights of defendants. I think judges are very conscientious about trying to sort out these issues and balance civil liberties and national security."

While some civil rights advocates, legal experts and members of Congress have said President Bush did not have authority to order eavesdropping by the security agency without warrants, the White House and the Justice Department continued on Tuesday to defend the legality and propriety of the program.

Trent Duffy, a spokesman for the White House, declined to comment in Crawford, Tex., when asked about a report in The New York Times that the security agency had tapped into some of the country's main telephone arteries to conduct broader data-mining operations in the search for terrorists.

But Mr. Duffy said: "This is a limited program. This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings and churches."

He added: "The president believes that he has the authority - and he does - under the Constitution to do this limited program. The Congress has been briefed. It is fully in line with the Constitution and also protecting American civil liberties."

Disclosure of the N.S.A. program has already caused ripples in the legal system, with a judge resigning in protest from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last week. The surveillance court, established by Congress in 1978 to grant warrants in terrorism and espionage cases, wants a briefing from the Bush administration on why it bypassed the court and ordered eavesdropping without warrants.

At the same time, defense lawyers in terrorism cases around the country say they are preparing letters and legal briefs to challenge the N.S.A. program on behalf of their clients, many of them American citizens, and to find out more about how it might have been used. They acknowledge legal hurdles, including the fact that many defendants waived some rights to appeal as part of their plea deals.

Government officials, in defending the value of the security agency's surveillance program, have said in interviews that it played a critical part in at least two cases that led to the convictions of Qaeda associates, Iyman Faris of Ohio, who admitted taking part in a failed plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, and Mohammed Junaid Babar of Queens, who was implicated in a failed plot to bomb British targets.

David B. Smith, a lawyer for Mr. Faris, said he planned to file a motion in part to determine whether information about the surveillance program should have been turned over. Lawyers said they were also considering a civil case against the president, saying that Mr. Faris was the target of an illegal wiretap ordered by Mr. Bush. A lawyer for Mr. Babar declined to comment.

Government officials with knowledge of the program have not ruled out the possibility that it was used in other criminal cases, and a number of defense lawyers said in interviews that circumstantial evidence had led them to question whether the security agency identified their clients through wiretaps.

The first challenge is likely to come in Florida, where lawyers for two men charged with Jose Padilla, who is jailed as an enemy combatant, plan to file a motion as early as next week to determine if the N.S.A. program was used to gain incriminating information on their clients and their suspected ties to Al Qaeda. Kenneth Swartz, one of the lawyers in the case, said, "I think they absolutely have an obligation to tell us" whether the agency was wiretapping the defendants. In a Virginia case, Edward B. MacMahon Jr., a lawyer for Ali al-Timimi, a Muslim scholar in Alexandria who is serving a life sentence for inciting his young followers to wage war against the United States overseas, said the government's explanation of how it came to suspect Mr. Timimi of terrorism ties never added up in his view.

F.B.I. agents were at Mr. Timimi's door days after the Sept. 11 attacks to question him about possible links to terrorism, Mr. MacMahon said, yet the government did not obtain a warrant through the foreign intelligence court to eavesdrop on his conversations until many months later.

Mr. MacMahon said he was so skeptical about the timing of the investigation that he questioned the Justice Department about whether some sort of unknown wiretap operation had been conducted on the scholar or his young followers, who were tied to what prosecutors described as a "Virginia jihad" cell.

"They told me there was no other surveillance," Mr. MacMahon said. "But the fact is that the case against a lot of these guys just came out of nowhere because they were really nobodies, and it makes you wonder whether they were being tapped."

John Zwerling, a lawyer for one of Mr. Timimi's followers, Seifullah Chapman, who is serving a 65-year sentence in federal prison in the case, said he and lawyers for two of the other defendants in the case planned to send a letter to the Justice Department to find out if N.S.A. wiretaps were used against their clients. If the Justice Department declines to give an answer, Mr. Zwerling said, they plan to file a motion in court demanding access to the information.

"We want to know, Did this N.S.A. program make its way into our case, and how was it used?" Mr. Zwerling said. "It may be a difficult trail for us in court, but we're going to go down it as far as we can."

Defense lawyers in several other high-profile terrorism prosecutions, including the so-called Portland Seven and Lackawanna Six cases, said they were also planning to file legal challenges or were reviewing their options.

"Given what information has come out, with the president admitting that they had avoided the courts, then the question becomes, do you try to learn whether something like that happened in this case?" said Patrick Brown, a Buffalo lawyer in the Lackawanna case. "I would have to talk to my client about whether that's a road we want to go down."

Gerry Spence, who is the lead counsel representing Brandon Mayfield, a Portland lawyer who was arrested in error last year in connection with the Madrid bombings and is now suing the government, said of the security agency program: "We are going to look into that. The calmest word I can use to describe how I feel about this is that I am aghast."

Because the program was so highly classified, government officials say, prosecutors who handled terrorism cases apparently did not know of the program's existence. Any information they received, the officials say, was probably carefully shielded to protect the true source.

But defense lawyers say they are eager to find out whether prosecutors - intentionally or not - misled the courts about the origins of their investigations and whether the government may have held on to N.S.A. wiretaps that could point to their clients' innocence.

Stanley Cohen, a New York lawyer who represented Patrice Lumumba Ford in the Portland Seven case, said many defendants would face significant obstacles in mounting legal challenges to force the government to reveal whether material obtained through the security agency's program was used in their cases.

"You really could have standing problems" for many of the defendants, Mr. Cohen said.

But some Justice Department prosecutors, speaking on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified, said they were concerned that the agency's wiretaps without warrants could create problems for the department in terrorism prosecutions both past and future.

"If I'm a defense attorney," one prosecutor said, "the first thing I'm going to say in court is, 'This was an illegal wiretap.' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/28/po...rtner=homepage





Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency

George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political career that it would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship. Apparently he never told his vice president that this was a joke.

Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush's running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the presidency - from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens.

It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming about for decades. Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.

The president "needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," Mr. Cheney said this week as he tried to stifle the outcry over a domestic spying program that Mr. Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks.

Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the institutional and legal structure of multilateral foreign policy: he championed the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to build an antimissile shield that doesn't work but makes military contractors rich. Early in his tenure, Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton to run with Mr. Bush in 2000, gathered his energy industry cronies at secret meetings in Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr. Cheney offered the usual excuses about the need to get candid advice on important matters, and the courts, sadly, bought it. But the task force was not an exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people who agreed with him, and allowed them to write national policy for an industry in which he had recently amassed a fortune.

The effort to expand presidential power accelerated after 9/11, taking advantage of a national consensus that the president should have additional powers to use judiciously against terrorists.

Mr. Cheney started agitating for an attack on Iraq immediately, pushing the intelligence community to come up with evidence about a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda that never existed. His team was central to writing the legal briefs justifying the abuse and torture of prisoners, the idea that the president can designate people to be "unlawful enemy combatants" and detain them indefinitely, and a secret program allowing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants. And when Senator John McCain introduced a measure to reinstate the rule of law at American military prisons, Mr. Cheney not only led the effort to stop the amendment, but also tried to revise it to actually legalize torture at C.I.A. prisons.

There are finally signs that the democratic system is trying to rein in the imperial presidency. Republicans in the Senate and House forced Mr. Bush to back the McCain amendment, and Mr. Cheney's plan to legalize torture by intelligence agents was rebuffed. Congress also agreed to extend the Patriot Act for five weeks rather than doing the administration's bidding and rushing to make it permanent.

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court refused to allow the administration to transfer Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been held by the military for more than three years on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks, from military to civilian custody. After winning the same court's approval in September to hold Mr. Padilla as an unlawful combatant, the administration abruptly reversed course in November and charged him with civil crimes unrelated to his arrest. That decision was an obvious attempt to avoid having the Supreme Court review the legality of the detention powers that Mr. Bush gave himself, and the appeals judges refused to go along.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have insisted that the secret eavesdropping program is legal, but The Washington Post reported yesterday that the court created to supervise this sort of activity is not so sure. It said that the presiding judge was arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges and that several judges on the court wanted to know why the administration believed eavesdropping on American citizens without warrants was legal when the law specifically required such warrants.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are tenacious. They still control both houses of Congress and are determined to pack the judiciary with like-minded ideologues. Still, the recent developments are encouraging, especially since the court ruling on Mr. Padilla was written by a staunch conservative considered by President Bush for the Supreme Court.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/23/op...icle_popular_1





Alito's Zeal for Presidential Power

With the Bush administration claiming sweeping and often legally baseless authority to detain and spy on people, judges play a crucial role in underscoring the limits of presidential power. When the Senate begins hearings next month on Judge Samuel Alito, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, it should explore whether he understands where the Constitution sets those limits. New documents released yesterday provide more evidence that Judge Alito has a skewed view of the allocation of power among the three branches - skewed in favor of presidential power.

One troubling memo concerns domestic wiretaps - a timely topic. In the memo, which he wrote as a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Judge Alito argued that the attorney general should be immune from lawsuits when he illegally wiretaps Americans. Judge Alito argued for taking a step-by-step approach to establishing this principle, much as he argued for an incremental approach to reversing Roe v. Wade in another memo.

The Supreme Court flatly rejected Judge Alito's view of the law. In a 1985 ruling, the court rightly concluded that if the attorney general had the sort of immunity Judge Alito favored, it would be an invitation to deny people their constitutional rights.

In a second memo released yesterday, Judge Alito made another bald proposal for grabbing power for the president. He said that when the president signed bills into law, he should make a "signing statement" about what the law means. By doing so, Judge Alito hoped the president could shift courts' focus away from "legislative intent" - a well-established part of interpreting the meaning of a statute - toward what he called "the President's intent."

In the memo, Judge Alito noted that one problem was the effect these signing statements would have on Congressional relations. They would "not be warmly welcomed by Congress," he predicted, because of the "novelty of the procedure" and "the potential increase of presidential power."

These memos are part of a broader pattern of elevating the presidency above the other branches of government. In his judicial opinions, Judge Alito has shown a lack of respect for Congressional power - notably when he voted to strike down Congress's ban on machine guns as exceeding its constitutional authority. He has taken a cramped view of the Fourth Amendment and other constitutional provisions that limit executive power.

The Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have had to repeatedly pull the Bush administration back when it exceeded its constitutional powers. They have made clear that Americans cannot be held indefinitely without trial just because they are labeled "enemy combatants." They have vindicated the right of Guantánamo Bay detainees to challenge their confinement. And they will no doubt have to correct the Bush administration's latest assertions of power to spy domestically. The Senate should determine that Judge Alito is on the side of the Constitution in these battles, not on the side of the presidency - which the latest documents strongly question - before voting to confirm him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/op...bfae43&ei=5070





College Student Sues Over Mistaken Drug Bust
AP

When college freshman Janet Lee packed her bags for a Christmas trip home two years ago, her luggage contained three condoms filled with flour - devices that she and some friends made as a joke.

Philadelphia International Airport screeners found the condoms, and their initial tests showed they contained drugs. The Bryn Mawr College student was arrested on drug trafficking charges and jailed. Three weeks later, she was released after a lab test backed her story, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Thursday.

Lee filed a federal lawsuit last week against city police, seeking damages for pain and suffering, financial loss, and emotional distress. She was arrested on Dec. 21, 2003, and was held on $500,000 bail and faced up to 20 years in prison had she been convicted of the drug charges.

"I haven't let myself be angry about what happened, because it would tear me apart," Lee said. "I'm not sure I can bear to face it. I'm amazed at how naive I was."

Airport screeners found the condoms filled with white powder in Lee's checked luggage shortly before she was to board a plane to Los Angeles to visit her family. She said she told city police they were filled with flour. She said she made them as a joke and would squeeze them to relieve stress.

Police told her a field test showed that the powder contained opium and cocaine, according to the Inquirer. A lab test later proved the substance was flour - and prosecutors dropped the charges, the newspaper reported.

Lee's lawyers, former prosecutors David Oh and Jeremy Ibrahim, say that either the field test was faulty or someone fixed the results.

Ibrahim said lawsuit was filed near the end of the two-year statute of limitations because Lee, now a junior, was emotionally devastated.

"She lost significant face with this event," Ibrahim said.

Police department spokesman Capt. Benjamin Naish and district attorney's office spokeswoman Cathie Abookire declined to comment.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...M&SECTION=HOME





Widespread Radioactivity Monitoring Is Confirmed
Matthew L. Wald

The F.B.I. and the Energy Department have conducted thousands of searches for radioactive materials at private sites around the country in the last three years, government officials confirmed on Friday.

The existence of the search program was disclosed on Thursday by U.S. News & World Report, on its Web site. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, government agencies have disclosed that they have installed radiation-detection equipment at ports, subway stations and other public locations, but extensive surreptitious monitoring of private property has not been publicly known.

The federal government has given thousands of radiation alarms, worn like cellphones on the belt, to police and fire departments in major cities.

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Brian Roehrkasse, confirmed that law enforcement personnel were conducting "passive operations in publicly accessible areas to detect the presence of radiological materials, in a manner that protects U.S. constitutional rights."

U.S. News, citing people it did not name, said many of the sites that federal agents had monitored were mosques or the homes or businesses of Muslims, and the report set off a dispute between a Muslim group here and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement: "This disturbing revelation, coupled with recent reports of domestic surveillance without warrant, could lead to the perception that we are no longer a nation ruled by law, but instead one in which fear trumps constitutional rights. All Americans should be concerned about the apparent trend toward a two-tiered system of justice, with full rights for most citizens, and another diminished set of rights for Muslims."

But John Miller, an assistant director of the F.B.I., said in a statement that his agency "does not target any group based on ethnicity, political or religious belief."

"When intelligence information suggests a threat to public safety, particularly involving weapons of mass destruction," the statement said, "investigators will go where the intelligence information takes them."

Mr. Miller said the bureau was "disappointed at the conclusions" reached by the Muslim group. He added that F.B.I. agents would work through the holiday weekend to catch whoever set off a bomb on Tuesday that damaged the door of a mosque near Cincinnati.

According to a federal official who would not allow his name to be used, the investigators have visited hundreds of sites in Washington, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas and Seattle on multiple occasions, as well other locations for high-profile events like the Super Bowl. The surveillance was conducted outdoors, and no warrants were needed or sought, the official said, speaking on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss classified programs.

"If you can go drive a car into the parking lot near the shopping mall, we can go there," he said. "It's nothing intrusive. We're not searching into a particular building, just sniffing the air in the area."

Federal officials have expressed anxiety about two radiological threats. One is a "dirty bomb," a conventional explosive that would spread a radioactive material. Such an attack would be unlikely to kill anyone with radiation, but it could contaminate streets, buildings or other public places. The materials that would be used are highly radioactive and might be detected from some distance, experts say.

The other threat is that someone would try to detonate a nuclear bomb. Bomb fuel, either enriched uranium or plutonium, is much harder to detect, because its radiation signature is weak, physicists say. But it is also much harder to obtain.

At least some of the surveillance was by the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, part of the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, which leads the American effort to secure nuclear materials around the world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/na...dioactive.html





War on Terror Meets War on Cancer

A method used to track drugs, explosives, counterfeit bills and bioweapons may have new uses -- detecting fast-growing cancers and studying obesity and eating disorders -- thanks to a study that challenges the dogma that water inside cells is chemically identical to water outside cells.

The method, known as “stable isotope ratio mass spectrometry,” can determine where a substance was produced by “weighing” various forms or isotopes of an element in the substance – such as the ratio of rare oxygen-18 to common oxygen-16.

Additional uses of the method may result from a new study that challenges the long-held belief that water moves so rapidly through cell membranes and pores that the water inside cells is chemically identical to the water outside cells.

Scientists from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., published the study the week of Monday Nov. 21 in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers found that up to 70 percent of the water inside rapidly growing bacterial cells was generated by metabolism, the process of converting food into energy and other necessities of life. That conclusion was based on their surprising discovery that water inside the bacterial cells (intracellular water) has a different oxygen-18-to-oxygen-16 ratio than water outside the cells (extracellular water).

“We’ve shown a significant portion of the water inside the bacteria can come from metabolism of the food and oxygen they consumed,” and not from water outside the cell, says University of Utah chemist Eric Hegg, the study’s principal author.

If future research proves the same thing is true in mammalian cells, then the difference in isotopic makeup of water inside and outside of rapidly growing cells might be used to detect fast-growing cancer cells in the brain or other hard-to-biopsy areas of the body, or study the metabolism of obese people or people suffering anorexia or bulimia, says Hegg, an assistant professor chemistry.

Hegg did the study with James Ehleringer, a distinguished professor of biology at the University of Utah, and Helen Kreuzer-Martin, a University of Utah research assistant professor of biology and a staff scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Isotope Ratio Analysis Combats Terrorism

The analysis of stable isotopes – forms of an element that are stable because they do not decay radioactively – started out as a way to learn about how ecosystems work, based on how environmental factors affect the proportions of various isotopes in plants, animals, soil and air. Later, stable isotopes in sediments or other materials were used to learn details about prehistoric environments, such as changing temperatures over time.

In recent years, Ehleringer pioneered the use of stable isotopes to study what has been dubbed “the ecology of terrorism.” He has helped the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Secret Service and Drug Enforcement Administration.

Several years ago, Ehleringer analyzed counterfeit U.S. $100 bills and showed cotton in the counterfeits had different oxygen isotope ratios than Texas-grown cotton in legitimate bills. Early counterfeits had cotton that isotope analysis indicated was grown in a wet, cool climate, while later versions came from a dry, warm climate. That confirmed the government’s belief the counterfeiters had ties with terrorists who moved from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.

In 2000, the Drug Enforcement Administration began using Ehleringer’s method to test thousands of drug samples each year. Slight differences in the nitrogen-15-to-nitrogen-14 ratios helped Ehleringer distinguish soils where coca plants were grown, while ratios of carbon-13 to carbon-12 revealed plants grown in humid versus drier climates. That let the DEA distinguish cocaine from Peru, Colombia, Bolivia or Ecuador.

Similar analysis of carbon isotopes in heroin and chemicals used to process it made it possible to learn where heroin poppies were grown and processed.

Ehleringer and Kreuzer-Martin later showed that the oxygen isotope ratios in bacteria similar to anthrax reflected the ratios of the water in which they were cultured, providing clues to where the bacteria were grown.

The method also has been used to track the source of explosives favored by terrorists, and has been proposed as a way to use hair samples from terrorists to determine their past movements, based on isotope ratios in food and water at different locations.

How the New Study Was Performed

Prevailing wisdom says that water inside and outside of cells is identical in terms of ratios of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16, and rare hydrogen-2 to common hydrogen-1.

The paradigm is that water diffuses so quickly into and out of cells that the water inside a cell is indistinguishable from water outside a cell,” Hegg says.

The researchers grew E. coli bacteria at body temperature in flasks containing a nutrient-rich liquid culture medium. There were four sets of flasks, each holding a growth medium containing water with a different ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16.

After the bacteria grew for three hours, the contents of each flask were sucked through a filter, leaving a pasty “cake” of bacterial cells with the consistency of wet flour.

Water was extracted from the bacterial cakes by placing each cake in a test tube, freezing the cakes by putting the tubes in liquid nitrogen, using a vacuum to remove the air from each tube, then putting the tubes in boiling water. The water from each cell cake was boiled into steam, which was routed to another tube where the water condensed.

Before undergoing this process, half of the bacterial cakes were washed with water with four different ratios of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16. The washing process allowed researchers to calculate how much of the water extracted from the bacterial cakes came from outside and from inside the bacteria. Water samples were analyzed in a mass spectrometer, which detects the atomic weights of isotopes of oxygen within the water.

The result: The ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 was different in water from inside and outside the bacteria. The extent of that difference allowed the scientists to determine that 30 percent of the water inside rapidly growing E. coli came from outside the bacteria and 70 percent of the water was produced by metabolism inside the bacteria.

Ehleringer says the new study will not affect most existing uses of stable isotope analysis because the findings apply only to rapidly growing cells like bacteria, and most uses of stable isotope analysis do not involve fast-growing cells.

Hegg and Kreuzer-Martin say the new findings might make it more complicated to determine where bacteria used in bioterrorism were grown. That isn’t true of anthrax, which is spread by spores that are almost dormant. But for live bioweapons spread through the air in an aerosol mist – bacteria that cause plague, tularemia or Q fever, for example – the difference in isotope concentrations inside and outside the bacterial cells must be taken into account in trying to identify where the bacteria were grown based on the isotopic signature of the water in which they were cultured.

Findings Suggest a New Way to Study Eating Disorders

“One area where our results could prove very useful is in assessing metabolic activity,” Hegg says. “Being able to accurately measure this number is often important in obesity research and understanding eating disorders. The greater the metabolic activity of a cell, the bigger the difference between the ‘inside’ water and the ‘outside’ water.”

Hegg says a person’s metabolic rate now is measured by having them drink water enriched in oxygen-18 and hydrogen-2. Over time, these uncommon isotopes are excreted through urine, and additional oxygen-18 is lost as carbon dioxide is exhaled. The person gradually regains normal levels of the common isotopes oxygen-16 and hydrogen-1, and the change allows the metabolic rate to be calculated.

“As with any scientific measurement, there will be errors associated with this calculated metabolic rate,” Hegg says. “Thus, having a second way to measure metabolism would be beneficial.”

A potential second method could measure oxygen and perhaps hydrogen isotope ratios in a common metabolite – a product produced by most human cells as they metabolize food and water. The ratios of the isotopes would reveal the percentage of water in body cells that was produced by metabolism, and thus the rate of metabolism.

“We could compare the ratios obtained from a ‘healthy’ person to the ratios obtained from an obese person,” Hegg says. “One also could imagine performing similar tests on an anorexic or bulimic individual. You would be asking whether the isotope ratio of the metabolite more closely matched the food that the individual consumed or the proteins already in the individual's body. If it is the latter, then it means that the individual is basically in a starvation state, living off of their stored proteins.”

Finding Hidden but Aggressive Cancers

The difference in isotope ratios in water inside and outside a cancer cell “could be useful in developing a test to assess the metabolic rate of a tumor – how fast the tumor is growing,” says Hegg. “This could be especially important in tumors in which obtaining a biopsy is difficult.”

If doctors can do a biopsy to remove a sample of a tumor, the cancer cells can be cultured in a dish to determine how rapidly they grow. “But if you can’t biopsy it because it’s in your brain or another hard-to-reach location, then you need some other way to figure out how fast it’s growing,” Hegg says.

Such a test would involve taking a blood sample to collect some metabolite produced by the cancer cells.

“If that metabolite has the same isotope ratio as the water in your bloodstream, then the tumor is not growing so rapidly,” says Hegg. “However, if the isotope ratio in the metabolite is vastly different than the ratio in your body water, it indicates the tumor is growing very rapidly, so it needs to be treated more aggressively.”
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/516264/?sc=swtn





RIAA Investigators Challenged by Technical Expert
Jon Newton

A technical expert working with the lawyer who's been handling the Patti Santangelo case hopes he'll be opening a new factual frontier, for the first time debunking supposed evidence upon which many of the Big Four Organized Music cartel's anti-p2p file sharing lawsuits are pinned.

Ray Beckerman has been looking for a way to crack the process through which Sony Music, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and EMI supposedly "prove" someone has been infringing copyrights.

And Zi Mei is the man, Beckerman told p2pnet. "I've known him for a long time. He's brilliant."

Among other things, RIAA employee Jonathan Whitehead claims, "metadata accompanying each file [allegedly downloaded from defendants' computers by the RIAA] demonstrates that the user is engaged in copyright infingement," says Zi Mei in an affidavit supporting a motion to vacate an ex parte order.

'Ex parte' means, "one side has communicated to the Court without the knowledge of the other parties to the suit," says Beckerman in an earlier explanation of the way the RIAA identifies its victims. It's, "very rarely permitted, since the American system of justice is premised upon an open system in which, whenever one side wants to communicate with the Court, it has to give prior notice to the other side, so that they too will have an opportunity to be heard," he says.

But, Zi Mei goes on in the document, the RIAA doesn't even begin to explain how it manages to reach the conclusion that the metadata are proof of copyright infringement.

And that's not surprising, he says, "since there is no correlation whatsoever between (a) metadata in the files allegedly downloaded by the RIAA and (b) the origin of these files."

Zi Mei also emphasises that mp3 metadata are optional and may, or may not, be present in a file, and may or may not be accurate.

Since they're aren't part of the audio data, a computer or mp3 player can play files regardless of the existence or content of metatags, he says, also pointing out that literally anyone can create, edit or remove ID3/ID4 tags with software bundled with mp3 players, or any other easy to find applications.

"Simply put, there is no correlation between metadata in a file and the origin of the file," states Zi Mei in his document. "In no way can it be used as a tracking mechanism like a FEDEX or UPS tracking number.

"It certainly cannot be used to determine whether the files allegedly found on the defendants' computers got there legally or illegally, since those files could have been downloaded from an authorized online service, or copied legally from commercially purchased audio CDs.

Zi Mei also explains that moreover, hash files are equally useless as proof of wrong-doing.

On Recording Industry vs The People, Beckerman says at the core of the entire RIAA litigation process are:

(1) the mass lawsuit against a large number of "John Does";

(2) the "ex parte" order of discovery; and

(3) the subpoenas demanding the names and addresses of the "John Does".

"In Atlantic v. John Does 1-25, a case pending in federal court in Manhattan, a midwesterner sued as John Doe Number 8 has made motions which seek to knock out all three (3) prongs of the RIAA litigation machine," he declares.

"On December 1st he made a motion to sever the mass lawsuit, and dismiss as to John Does 2-25, on the ground that it is impermissible to join 25 unrelated defendants under the federal rules, where there is no connection between the defendants other than the fact that they are accused of engaging in similar, but unconnected, conduct.

"Also on December 1st, he moved to quash the subpoena issued to his ISP, on the ground that the RIAA has not sufficiently alleged any copyright infringement.

"Today, December 28th, he has moved to knock out the third underpinning of the RIAA John Doe weaponry - the ex parte order."

More to come on this. Stay tuned.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/5002/challenge.html





Danger Will Robinson!

Be Careful With WMF Files
Mikko

Over the last 24 hours, we've seen three different WMF files carrying the zero-day WMF exploit. We currently detect them as W32/PFV-Exploit.A, .B and .C.

Fellow researchers at Sunbelt have also blogged about this. They have discovered more sites that are carrying malicious WMF files. You might want to block these sites at your firewall while waiting for a Microsoft patch:

Crackz [dot] ws
unionseek [dot] com
www.tfcco [dot] com
Iframeurl [dot] biz
beehappyy [dot] biz

And funnily enough, according to WHOIS, domain beehappyy.biz is owned by a previous president of Soviet Union:

Registrant Name: Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev
Registrant Address1: Krasnaya ploshad, 1
Registrant City: Moscow
Registrant Postal Code: 176098
Registrant Country: Russian Federation
Registrant Country Code: RU

"Krasnaya ploshad" is the Red Square in Moscow...

Do note that it's really easy to get burned by this exploit if you're analysing it under Windows. All you need to do is to access an infected web site with IE or view a folder with infected files with the Windows Explorer.

You can get burned even while working in a DOS box! This happened on one of our test machines where we simply used the WGET command-line tool to download a malicious WMF file. That's it, it was enough to download the file. So how on earth did it have a chance to execute?

The test machine had Google Desktop installed. It seems that Google Desktop creates an index of the metadata of all images too, and it issues an API call to the vulnerable Windows component SHIMGVW.DLL to extract this info. This is enough to invoke the exploit and infect the machine. This all happens in realtime as Google Desktop contains a file system filter and will index new files in realtime.

So, be careful out there. And disable indexing of media files (or get rid of Google Desktop) if you're handling infected files under Windows.


New WMF 0-Day Exploit

There's a new zero-day vulnerability related to Windows' image rendering - namely WMF files (Windows Metafiles). Trojan downloaders, available from unionseek[DOT]com, have been actively exploiting this vulnerability. Right now, fully patched Windows XP SP2 machines machines are vulnerable, with no known patch.

The exploit is currently being used to distribute the following threats:
Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Agent.abs
Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Small.zp
Trojan.Win32.Small.ga
Trojan.Win32.Small.ev.

Some of these install hoax anti-malware programs the likes of Avgold.

Note that you can get infected if you visit a web site that has an image file containing the exploit. Internet Explorer users might automatically get infected. Firefox users can get infected if they decide to run or download the image file.

In our tests (under XP SP2) older versions of Firefox (1.0.4) defaulted to open WMF files with "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer", which is vulnerable. Newer versions (1.5) defaulted to open them with Windows Media Player, which is not vulnerable...but then again, Windows Media Player is not able to show WMF files at all so this might be a bug in Firefox. Opera 8.51 defaults to open WMF files with "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer" too. However, all versions of Firefox and Opera prompt the user first.

As a precaution, we recommend administrators to block access to unionseek[DOT]com and to filter all WMF files at HTTP proxy and SMTP level.

F-Secure Anti-Virus detects the offending WMF file as W32/PFV-Exploit with the 2005-12-28_01 updates.

We expect Microsoft to issue a patch on this as soon as they can.


You Don't Want To Download MSN Messenger Beta 8

There is no MSN Messenger 8 yet. Not in public beta anyway.

However, there's a new virus going around pretending to be "MSN Messenger 8 Working BETA".

There's two ways to catch it. First, by downloading it from a fake site where it has been supposedly "leaked":

If you download and run BETA8WEBINSTALL.EXE from that site, you won't get a new chat client. Instead, your existing MSN

Messenger will start to send download links to everyone in your contact list. It also connects your machine to a botnet server.

The download link always contains the recipients' email address. For example, if you'd have a friend with email address huuhaa@foobar.com, he would get a download link like msgrbeta8.com/im.php?msn=huuhaa@foobar.com:

We've just added detection for this one as Virkel.F.
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/





New Finnish Copyright Law Forces Major Afterdawn.com Changes
Thomas Mennecke

Afterdawn.com has been long known as an excellent resource for its consolidation of various DVD/CD enhancement/alteration tools and guides. Those looking to convert a DVD-9 to a DVD-R or learn how to use the latest copy of DVD Decrypter only had to execute a quick search query to find this knowledge. Its future in this arena however is now in limbo, as a new Finnish copyright law will force major changes to this website.

On October 25, 2005, the Finnish Parliament approved new legislation that brought the country’s lax copyright laws into harmony with the European Union's Copyright Directive (EUCD.) The new copyright laws, which go into effect at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2006, are strikingly similar to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA.)

For example, the new Finnish copyright law prohibits the circumvention of copy protection technology for personal use and the distribution of such tools. In addition, the law bans the advertisement of these tools, the possession of such tools, guides on circumvention or the “organized discussion” of circumvention.

You may ask yourself, “Well that’s Finland, who cares?” If you’re a fan of Afterdawn.com and their plethora of information on these issues, you just might.

Afterdawn.com, a Finnish based website, has been forced by this new copyright to seriously alter many of its most valued attributes. Well known for its excellent guides on DVD and CD modification software, the site has become a learning tool for newcomers and veterans alike. Many individuals were first introduced by Afterdawn to superior DVD ripping and compression tools such as DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink.

If one was not yet computer savvy enough to understand the function of these tools, Afterdawn has elaborate guidance on using a wide variety of software. For example, if an individual was not yet knowledgeable on ripping a full DVD-9 and compressing it to more common 4.5 gigabyte DVD-R, Afterdawn.com’s guidance could bring success to even the most lost individual.

These days appear to be over, at least on Afterdawn.com. Afterdawn.com announced today, after what was most likely months of agonizing soul searching, it will: 1) discontinue hosting a wide variety of software, and 2) edit guides that make reference to circumventing copy protection software. Afterdawn.com’s forums however, will remain unchanged and intact.

The first change will be most dramatic, as it means the removal of Alcohol 120%, DVD Decrypter, DVD Shrink, Clone DVD, DVD Region Free and many more.

Changes to Afterdawn.com’s guides will be slightly less dramatic yet still noticeable. Only three guides will be completely removed from the site, since they are specifically related to DVD Decrpyter. The more generalized guides will be edited to remove such specific references to copy protection circumvention. This means the guides will be vaguer but will still exist, leaving the user to then fill in the pieces.

As of this writing, the guides have not been edited or removed. With six days remaining before the new law takes effect, it’s a near certainty that dozens of mirror sites located outside Finland will ensure Afterdawn.com’s hard work doesn’t go to waste.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1041





Japanese Firms Confirm Talks To Create Chip Powerhouse
Ashlee Vance

Hitachi, Toshiba and Renesas have confirmed that they're considering creating a company to handle their shared chip fabrication needs. Meanwhile, various media reports say the three companies are much farther along with their plans than they let on.

The triumvirate refused to spare more than two sentences on their ambitions in a statement issued today.

"Hitachi, Toshiba and Renesas today announced that they have initiated a joint study on the feasibility of an independent semiconductor foundry business offering advanced fabrication processes to which each of the companies could outsource fabrication. The joint study will consider establishing of a planning company, the outline of which is not yet decided."

The statement served a weak counter to reports from Bloomberg and the often over- eager Nikkei Shimbun that claim the companies have already committed to setting up a shared foundry. Goals for the foundry would be set by the middle of next year with production starting in 2007, according to the reports. NEC and Matsushita are also said to be involved in the deal.

A Japanese chip house with such impressive backing would aid competition against the likes of Taiwan's TSMC, Intel in the US and a growing Chinese chip presence. The costs of chip fabrication continue to rise, making it difficult for individual companies to fund disparate efforts. Creating a joint foundry would help stretch research and development funds and let the Japanese companies go up against rivals more effectively.

This type of arrangement has been rumored for a long time.

Reports suggest that the companies would work to create 45-nanometer process technology ahead of rivals.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/200...an_chip_house/





Need For Speed… How Real?
Om Malik

After years of being stuck in the slow lane, the US consumers are finally going to get a massive speed upgrade and taste the true broadband for the first time. From a 512 Kbps world to 6 Mbps, then 8 and soon 15 Mbps…. it seems the future has finally arrived. And with that, the question…. how much speed is enough? Can we the consumers really tell the difference between 15 and 30 Mbps? Or is it just a way for the broadband operators to get us to pay more… for something which we might use less.

To say that we are a nation starved of bandwidth would be an understatement. Generically speaking, The average US broadband experience is stuck somewhere between 500 Kbps to 3 Mbps. However, as we have been reporting in the recent months, things might be changing, as cable operators, and phone companies both roll out faster broadband connections.

BellSouth is now selling a 6 Mbps while Verizon is offering a $179 a month 30 Mbps plan. Comcast customers can now dream of between 6-and-8 Mbps speeds, while Cablevision has offered 50 Mbps service for an undisclosed amount of money.

The Wall Street Journal has a nice round-up of some of the speed upgrades. But what is behind the new found “speed thrills” philosophy of the incumbent carriers? One word: money. It costs the network operators a tiny bit more to offer more bandwidth, but they can sell higher speed connections for a premium price. Actually, the more speed you give to the consumers, the less they use the network. (Of course, no one can really tell if you are getting a real 3 or 6 or 10 megabit throughput. Support people at broadband providers have a standard line: its de innernet, what can I do?)

David Card, analyst with Jupiter Research points out that, “Time spent online isn’t shrinking, nor, in most cases, is the absolute number of users of any given function going down. It’s just that the breadth of activities any one user engages in is shrinking.” That perhaps can be explained by what Dave Burstein, publisher of DSL Prime wrote in an email to me …
Websurfing runs at only about a megabit per second, and nearly everything else except downloading is effectively throttled down at the source. Downloading turns out to have some natural limits as well; at 100 Mbps, you can download enough music for 24 hours of listening in only four minutes per day. The practical result, confirmed by high speed leaders like Masayoshi Son of Yahoo BB in Japan, is that the faster speeds yield only a extremely modest increase in real traffic demand.

As part of my daily reading, I read a fantastic essay by Shing Yin of Bernstein Research. Is Broadband Speed Like Money? Great line…. isn’t it?
….are we about to build ourselves into another bandwidth glut? Not in the backbone…but in the access network, where the Bells and cable MSOs are racing to roll out ever-faster broadband speeds? ….

Extending Shing’s methodology , I put together this little chart.

What this shows is that as we increase the speed, the real impact of the speed on what we do with it is marginal. Can your eyes tell the difference between a web-page loading in one second or 0.27 seconds. I guess not. If you can download a music file in 1.08 seconds, does that really mean you will be buying music all the time. No you perhaps will be buying better quality, and perhaps marginally more music. There is the other option, but its just easier to pay! Sure at 30 Mbps you can download DVD quality The Bourne Identity in 11 minutes, but its still going to take you 2 hours to watch it. These are analog questions in an increasingly digital world.
“Can a consumer tell any difference between 1.5 megabit per second and four megabit per second service?” asks Bruce Leichtman, president of Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “The answer is no.

So what the incumbnets are selling is a perception of speed that thrills. Don’t get me wrong…. I will upgrade, and hope the experience improves, but at some point, we need the applications that truly harness this speed come-along and are allowed to thrive. Not likely in the “we will control the net” attitude adopted by the incumbents. Even in truly immersive multiplayer games, its the latency, not the speed that matters.

The real bandwidth question is when are going to see an increase in the uplink speeds? Since the incumbents throttle the uplink speeds to barely usable, the broadband remains quasi one-way. P2P, the one true broadband technology is yet to blossom, especially in the legal realm.

Meanwhile perception is reality…. so more bandwidth.
http://gigaom.com/2005/12/20/need-for-speed/





Bugatti Veyron 16.4: To Drive the Impossible Dream
Richard Feast

MANY people thought that Volkswagen lost touch with its customer base in 2003 when it introduced the Phaeton, a luxury sedan perfectly wonderful in almost every way save for a price tag that veered uncomfortably close to six figures.

What, then, will the skeptics make of the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, the fastest, most powerful and - no surprise - most expensive production car in the world? Bugatti is owned by VW, and the Veyron's engine is related, if distantly, to the W-8 power plant available in the last-generation Passat.

Not to worry; the Veyron's credentials speak for themselves. A 1,001-horsepower two-seater that blasts to 60 miles an hour in 2.5 seconds - and continues pulling all the way to 253 m.p.h. - the car is a sheer technological wonder.

Still, nothing prepares the newcomer for the reality behind the bald performance statistics. The Veyron is blisteringly, and effortlessly, fast. Other vehicles on the road appear to stop as the Veyron whooshes past with the ease of a Formula One car. It is a sobering realization that the grand prix racer is not as fast as a Veyron.

Even stationary, the Veyron looks like a car that takes no prisoners. Slightly less than 176 inches long (no longer than a Kia Spectra) and almost 79 inches wide, it is surprisingly compact. Most of the space inside seems to be occupied by an enormous 16-cylinder engine, a seven-speed transaxle and an all-wheel-drive system. Ten radiators are required to disperse all the heat the Veyron's mechanical systems generate.

The car's two-tone paint, horseshoe-shape grille and center dashboard panel of engine-turned aluminum reach back to Bugatti's design heritage. The interior is exquisite; details like vents and door pulls are made of machined and polished aluminum.

Over all, the car represents an extraordinary blend of opulence and power. As luxurious as a Maybach, the Veyron provides a level of comfort far beyond that of quasi racers like the Ferrari Enzo and Porsche Carrera GT, neither of which can match its acceleration, top speed or braking.

Thomas Bscher, president of Bugatti Automobiles, is just as proud of the car's refined manners. "This car can be driven by anyone," he said, a statement clearly begging to be substantiated.

The mighty motor rumbles to life at the touch of the starter button. Despite its placement just a few inches behind the driver's shoulders, the engine produces a muted growl that is music to the enthusiast.

Venturing onto the highways here, near Bugatti's headquarters in the Alsace region of France, the car's rarity and value generate considerable apprehension. Embarrassment, injury, a big repair bill or worse await a driver who does not show proper respect.

The automated seven-speed transmission shifts gears so seamlessly that the only clue is a change in the engine note. The car's unfamiliarity erodes with the miles; speed simultaneously increases. It seems entirely natural to shift using the gearshift paddles mounted on the steering wheel .

The ride over poor surfaces is amazing for such a taut high-performance car. The steering is so precise that the Veyron feels almost as nimble as a Miata.

It would be nice to relate that this reporter's driving skills are capable of wringing the maximum from the Veyron. They are not, but they were enough to determine that at really high speeds the car is quiet, comfortable, refined - and as easy to drive as Mr. Bscher says. The car's everyday top speed of 234 m.p.h. is enough to make it a king of the road. To be the performance emperor, though, the driver must resort to a second ignition key to the left of his seat.

The key functions only when the vehicle is at a stop. A checklist then establishes whether the car - and its driver - are ready to go for the maximum speed beyond 250 m.p.h. If all systems are go, the rear spoiler retracts, the front air diffusers close and the ground clearance, normally 4.9 inches, drops to 2.6 inches.

To appreciate the Veyron's performance extremes, ride along with Pierre-Henri Raphanel, a former professional racer who demonstrates the car to potential buyers.

Mr. Raphanel looks relaxed as he blasts the Veyron to almost 180 m.p.h. Other traffic and roadside objects appear and vanish in a blurred, real-life re-enactment of a computer game before he eases off.

When the freeway empties, Mr. Raphanel demonstrates the Veyron's brakes. The car's speed simply vanishes - braking to a stop from 250 m.p.h. takes less than 10 seconds, he said - but for the passenger, there is an equally astonishing experience: the driver is holding both hands in the air and wearing a big grin. The car has stopped in a straight line with no corrections at the steering wheel. If anything, the giant carbon-ceramic brakes and the rear air brake are more impressive than the acceleration.

Everything about the Veyron is shaped by superlatives, but even Mr. Bscher acknowledges, "Nobody needs a car like this."

Indeed, who could argue that it isn't a frivolous liability? On what roads can it be tested, given that it reaches speeds in excess of those achieved in qualifying laps for the Indianapolis 500? When the Veyron was recorded at 253 m.p.h., it was on a test track in Germany.

How relaxed would an owner be about leaving a Veyron in a parking structure for a couple of hours? How anxious would he be handing the ignition key to a parking valet?

The fuel economy - if that is the right word - is 9 miles per gallon in the city and 18 highway, according to preliminary E.P.A. estimates. Don't even think about mileage during more spirited driving: at maximum speed, the car would theoretically run out of fuel in 12 minutes, Mr. Raphanel said.

A giant automotive achievement, the Veyron owes its existence to Ferdinand Piëch, who bought rights to the fabled Bugatti name in 1998, when he was chairman of Volkswagen, with the goal of building the ultimate supercar.

Bringing it to market required an unwavering commitment by Mr. Piëch, a man with a reputation as a brilliant engineer, though many have questioned his grasp on commercial reality.

With four turbochargers, the Veyron's mighty 8-liter, 16-cylinder power plant produces 1,001 horsepower and enough torque (922 pound-feet) to uproot a redwood. The engine drives all four wheels via a seven-speed automated manual gearbox.

Despite extensive use of carbon fiber and aluminum, the Veyron is, at 4,162 pounds, quite heavy. Even so, the car is capable of staggering acceleration: from zero to 125 miles an hour in 7.3 seconds and to 250 in 55.6 seconds, according to Bugatti.

The price, for those indiscreet enough to ask, is $1.2 million in the United States, before taxes.

Theoretically, several of Volkswagen's rivals could create a Veyron alternative; some could even afford to. Mr. Bscher says the project cost no more than some automakers spend each year on Formula One racing - perhaps $400 million. In today's harsh business environment, though, automakers face challenges that make it unlikely they would allocate the technical and financial resources to one-up the Veyron.

Creating cars for plutocrats was a curious strategy for the manufacturer of the People's Car. The results, nevertheless, are now available to the handful of buyers with the necessary wherewithal.

INSIDE TRACK: The sports car NASA would build.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/au...es/25AUTO.html





Windows Genuine Advantage Updated; New Workaround Script

General, Reverse Engineering, Windows
anti tgtsoft

In addition to adding Mozilla plugin support, it seems Microsoft removed the chunk of code that accepted a cookie value that bypassed Windows Genuine Advantage requirements, breaking my Trixie/Greasemonkey scripts. As I don't have the luxury of continuously activating my MSDN licensed boxes for WGA purposes, I created new scripts and a new hash-generation automated job on my main desktop.

Every two hours, my main desktop executes a custom program that a) launches GenuineCheck.exe, b) uses Win32 API to jot down the current hash, and c) uses PuTTY to echo the hash into a file on my host. I retreive this hash on-demand using simple XmlHttp objects in the scripts and append them to the current URL. Simple! (source on-demand)

Download the new Greasemonkey script (verified to work in Trixie unmodified)

For those experiencing errors within Firefox 1.5, please read 'Known Issues' in this blog post.
http://www.anti-tgtsoft.com/index.ph...y051225-130051





When Someone Illegally Downloads A Song On The Internet For Free, The Move Affects More Than Just Rich Stars Who Sing The Songs
Mark Bennett

The moment left Phil Barnhart in a swirl of inspiration and frustration.

A cause near to his heart led Barnhart to the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court last March. The Terre Haute native sensed his livelihood was at stake. So he traveled from his home in Nashville, Tenn., to that famed building in Washington, D.C.

While the nine justices listened to arguments from lawyers inside, Barnhart and a few of his colleagues stated their case outside.

“A small contingency went up and protested the day of the [hearing],” Barnhart said, “which was really a great experience - to stand on the courthouse steps and see the Capitol in the background, it was really a great American moment.”

But his cause doesn't push emotional buttons within most Americans as deeply as others might. And its abstract nature is part of his dilemma.

Barnhart writes songs. Sony/ATV Music Publishing in Nashville pays Barnhart to create tunes. And he's good at it. He co-wrote Martina McBride's hit “A Broken Wing,” which earned a Country Music Association Awards nomination for Song of the Year in 1998. His lyrics anchored Lonestar's 1996 No. 1 hit “No News,” which won ASCAP Song of the Year. But not every song Barnhart or other writers create are huge moneymakers, and they count on royalties from sales to purchase health insurance, pay their light bills and feed their families.

And when someone illegally downloads one of his songs on the Internet for free, Barnhart gets nothing.

That's what led him to protest in Washington on March 29. That day, the Supreme Court heard arguments about a lawsuit by the music and movie industries against software companies, such as Grokster, whose products allow computer users to link with other machines as they search for and download files, such as Barnhart's songs. Two months later, the high court issued its ruling in favor of the entertainment industry, a decision that led to Grokster's shut down last month.

According to The Tennessean, record labels estimate that more than 90 percent of the billions of files on the networks are copyright violations. That peer-to-peer free acquisition of music is called “file sharing.”

As the peak season for legal music purchases - the December holidays - came to a close, Barnhart said he still takes exception to the use of that euphemistic phrase - file sharing.

“Isn't it great how that's such a non-threatening term?” he told the Tribune-Star in a telephone interview. “It sounds like you're sharing a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.”

Much more is at stake, of course.

Digital market growing

Music insiders, Barnhart says, estimate 25 million illegal music downloads occur daily.

“The revenue from that would be astronomical,” he said.

According to Recording Industry Association of America statistics, legally purchased Internet downloads of songs now account for about 5.9 percent of approximately $12 billion of annual music sales. And while physical music products - CDs and cassette tapes - still account for the bulk of sales, purchases of legally downloaded digital tunes may increase 150 percent or more by year's end, according to the NPD Group, an industry analysis firm. Apple's iTunes Music Store already ranks seventh among all music retailers, NPD analyst Russ Crupnick told the Knight-Ridder Tribune news service.

Still, as fast as paid digital downloading is growing, that method still constitutes just a fraction of the market. Sales of CDs and tapes are expected to dip by 8 to 10 percent this holiday season, Crupnick told Knight-Ridder, and the surge in legal Internet downloads may not offset that. The shift to a different listening format won't be fully known until after Christmas, when people who received iPods or iTunes gift certificates start using them.

Either way, the illegal download market remains a contentious issue. Just a week ago, the RIAA filed 751 lawsuits against file sharers on three college campuses and elsewhere around the country, including towns in Illinois.

The Supreme Court's June ruling appears to have slowed the file-swapping. So have the RIAA's anti-file-sharing and anti-piracy campaigns, which range from educating parents and students about stealing, to challenging violators in court. Before the Supreme Court decision, 6.4 million households downloaded at least one music file in June. That number dropped 11 percent to 5.7 million in October.

The RIAA has drawn intense criticism for what some consider to be heavy-handed tactics. But rampant growth of the illegal downloads might go unabated without that response. “It's really the wild, wild West,” said Ted Piechocinski, director of the music business program at Indiana State University.

“[The RIAA has] gotten a lot of bad publicity for going after the grandmothers and the 13-year- olds” who are downloading illegally, Piechocinski said. “But they've made their point. There's got to be some way to get people's attention.”

It's not hard for Piechocinski to get his students' attention in his ISU class called “Copyright in the Age of Napster.” A predecessor to Grokster, Napster was one of the first companies to create software allowing peer-to-peer file sharing until a 2000 court of appeals ruling that it fostered copyright infringements. Napster now offers a legal subscription service - something Grokster's Web site states that company will soon offer too.

Before coming to ISU in 2004, Piechocinski worked as vice president of Cherry Lane Music Co., where he handled copyright and licensing issues related to works by artists such as Metallica, Bonnie Raitt, Barbra Streisand, Trisha Yearwood and Dave Matthews Band. And his ISU pupils - like other college students around the country - are hip to the downloading technology at the center of this marketing battle. That demographic group, after all, is frequently targeted by RIAA suits.

“The class we had last semester was just so much fun,” Piechocinski.

The students created “The College Copyright Credo.” It urges colleges to educate their students about what is legal and what isn't and the risks of stealing music, asks Congress to review copyright laws every 10 years to accommodate the rapid changes in technology, and suggests record companies be more flexible in offering customers ways of renting or testing music before a full purchase.

The course enlightens the students, Piechocinski said.

“They love their free stuff, but they recognize that this is all part of the life cycle we're all a part of,” he said. “And if one part suffers, we're all going to suffer down the road.”

Stars aren't always the writers

Barnhart wishes people better understood that. He's been a lyricist in Sony/ATV's stable of songwriters for 16 years now. But it took him much longer to reach that plateau. His life led him from Terre Haute, which his family left when he was a boy, to Florida, to California, Mexico, Nashville and other points between.

“I didn't always take the best road, and I paid for it along the way,” Barnhart said. “But it's given me great experiences to draw from. I don't have to make anything up.”

The words he writes move people, he's been told.

“When you've touched somebody's life, that's the payback,” Barnhart said.

Still, songwriters must feed families and pay the utilities, too.

“I don't think they understand the business side of creating music,” he said. “I think a lot of people - when they hear a song - think that person wrote that song. And they think, ‘If I download his song, that artist is out making money from touring

and endorsements, and it won't make a difference.'” In reality, though, many stars are performing tunes written by people such as Barnhart.

When he protested on the Supreme Court steps, some college students staged a counter protest against the entertainment industry. They'd been inspired by pro-dowloading propaganda on the Internet, Barnhart said, “to make people feel like they're not stealing.”

Some anti-music industry rhetoric focuses on corporate wealth, and over-priced concert tickets and CDs. But lots of people working in that business outside the limelight count on those profits to fund their paychecks, Barnhart said. And besides that, no matter how large the company, stealing is still stealing.

“Walk into a restaurant or a store and try to walk out without paying, and see what happens,” he said. “You're going to get arrested. That's stealing. And when you take one of my songs, that's stealing.”

He decided to talk to one of the young counter protesters. Barnhart asked her if she planned to find a job after she'd finished college, and she said yes.

“So I told her, what if that employer said, ‘Oh, we're expecting you to come here for work at 7 in the morning, but we're not going to pay you'? And when you download a song, I don't get paid,” Barnhart recalled.

This morning, many people around the Wabash Valley and the world are opening Christmas gifts that might be CDs, cassettes or even iPods or iTunes certificates. That's the right way to get music, Barnhart said.

Plucking illegal downloads out of cyberspace may seem anonymous and harmless. “But that doesn't take away from the fact that you're stealing,” Barnhart said. “It's not a personal attack on anyone. It's just that there's not a gray area.”
http://www.tribstar.com/articles/200.../bennett01.txt



Reality check: in 2004 both BMI and ASCAP, the world’s largest composer’s rights organizations, distributed the most money to songwriters in their respective 65 and 90 year histories, and revenues continue to flow; they are on track for another record this year.

An ASCAP spokesman told a reporter this week, "The Internet has not negatively affected us." - Jack





Cash Pours In For Student With $Million Web Idea
Peter Graff

If you have an envious streak, you probably shouldn't read this.

Because chances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet.

Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear when you call up his home page.

He had the brainstorm for his million dollar home page, called, logically enough, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, while lying in bed thinking out how he would pay for university.

The idea: turn his home page into a billboard made up of a million dots, and sell them for a dollar a dot to anyone who wants to put up their logo. A 10 by 10 dot square, roughly the size of a letter of type, costs $100.

He sold a few to his brothers and some friends, and when he had made $1,000, he issued a press release.

That was picked up by the news media, spread around the Internet, and soon advertisers for everything from dating sites to casinos to real estate agents to The Times of London were putting up real cash for pixels, with links to their own sites.

So far they have bought up 911,800 pixels. Tew's home page now looks like an online Times Square, festooned with a multi-colored confetti of ads.

"All the money's kind of sitting in a bank account," Tew told Reuters from his home in Wiltshire, southwest England. "I've treated myself to a car. I've only just passed my driving test so I've bought myself a little black mini."

The site features testimonials from advertisers, some of whom bought spots as a lark, only to discover that they were receiving actual valuable Web hits for a fraction of the cost of traditional Internet advertising.

Meanwhile Tew has had to juggle running the site with his first term at university, where he is studying business.

"It's been quite a difficulty trying to balance going to lectures and doing the site," he said.

But he may not have to study for long. Job offers have been coming in from Internet companies impressed by a young man who managed to figure out an original way to make money online.

"I didn't expect it to happen like that," Tew said. "To have the job offers and approaches from investors -- the whole thing is kind of surreal. I'm still in a state of disbelief."
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsAr...mber=1&summit=





Best Tech Moments of 2005
Kevin Poulsen

In the tech world, 2005 was a period of bold ideas and exciting breakthroughs -- shadowed, at times, by devastating reversals.

New software apps changed the way we looked at the world, while hardware got smaller, faster and more fun. On the net, blogs provided many of the most dramatic moments, sometimes courting lawsuits, other times taking us places we could not otherwise go: New Orleans, Iraq, even inside the twisted mind of an accused killer.

As we begin what's certain to be an exciting new year of Yahoo acquisitions and rising Google stock, it's perhaps a good time to stop and reflect on the highs and lows of the year that was. Here are our picks for the 10 best tech moments of 2005.

Michael Robertson hires DVD Jon: What do you get when you cross a maverick tech entrepreneur with a young genius who specializes in cracking content-protection schemes? When Robertson imported 22-year-old Norwegian hacker Jon Lech Johansen in October, he was cagey about what the twice-acquitted author of DeCSS would be working on in sunny San Diego.

Now we know it's a new music-storage service called MP3tunes Locker, eerily reminiscent of Robertson's late, great my.mp3.com, which was lamentably sued out of existence by the recording industry five years ago. Admittedly, the Locker hasn't yet raised a big ruckus in the post-iPod world; but with this A-list cast, who cares about the plot?

The $100 laptop: From the moment MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte unveiled the (mostly) working prototype of his $100 laptop at a U.N. summit in Tunisia, he was trailed by a plume of reporters and admirers eager for a glimpse of the lime-green tote. The appeal is obvious: Negroponte's noble, world-shaping ambition to put millions of the tiny hand-cranked learning machines in the hands of impoverished children around the globe, and the fetishistic draw of the rugged computer's nostalgic, toylike design.

Still, skeptics abound. Slate added up the retail price of the components and predicted the laptop would actually cost more like $300, and Intel chair Craig Barrett argued that discriminating children in developing countries would reject the Linux machines as underpowered gadgets. Less sillily, questions remain about the environmental impact of dumping the computers in developing countries, and whether the money wouldn't be better spent on food and medicine. We'll know soon enough: In December, Taiwan's Quanta won a bidding war to manufacture between 5 million and 15 million of the laptops, expected to roll off the assembly line in the fourth quarter of 2006.

Katrina, blogged: Ten floors above some of the worst devastation ever visited on the United States, the New Orleans hosting company DirectNic managed not only to keep its servers purring, but to pump out crisis updates and images to the net. A company webcam trained on the street captured pictures of survivors scrounging for food and looters pillaging neighboring buildings.

Company "crisis manager" Michael Barnett shared his firsthand observations on his LiveJournal blog, which reached 3,000 hits an hour as word of its existence spread. "I mean, it's Lord of the Flies out there right now," Barnett blogged Aug. 31. "There's no order at all. No respect for private property, no respect for life." When the worst finally passed, the blog morphed into NOLA.us, a community site still serving the Big Easy as it struggles to rebuild.

The Pirate Bay redesign: While the Motion Picture Association of America was flexing its legal muscle to squash obscure BitTorrent speak-easies like CDDVDHeaven and crazymazey.kicks-ass.org, the Capone of free downloading was brazenly launching an improved site to reach an even larger audience. You don't have to be a copyright scofflaw to appreciate the revamped Pirate Bay. With a clean look, advanced search and support for 10 languages, the site's coolest feature for non-downloaders is a detailed breakdown of the top 100 torrents at any given time, selectable by type of content -- movies, games, comics and so on -- or viewable as a mixed global index. It's the Google Zeitgeist of crime.

Popular features from the old site remain, including Pirate Bay's exhibit of the legal threats it has received from companies like Microsoft, Apple Computer, DreamWorks and Warner Bros., displayed alongside the site managers' taunting, acerbic responses. Proprietor Fredrik Neij insists that Pirate Bay is perfectly legal under the copyright law in Sweden, where it's based, and its continued existence lends credence to that claim. What's certain is that the swashbuckling tracker is the elephant in the room when the MPAA announces a new crackdown on torrent sites or claims its deal to keep movies out of Bram Cohen's nascent search engine is a victory over pirates (who had little reason to use it anyway).

"Hot Coffee" boils: Rarely is the internet treated to such a rich spectacle of corporate dissembling and political opportunism as provoked by the discovery in July of a sexually themed mini-game nestled in Rockstar Games' best-selling Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The raunchy bonus material could be unlocked with a special patch developed by a Dutch coder, but it wasn't accessible in normal gameplay. In other words, teens reveling in the innocent fun of carjacking weren't in any danger of being unexpectedly and tragically exposed to computer-generated cartoon sex -- they'd first have to seek out the mod, download it and install it, by which point they might as easily have snagged the Paris Hilton video. But that inconvenient fact didn't stop game-industry watchdogs from raising holy hell over the love scene, nor Sen. Hillary Clinton from calling a press conference to denounce Rockstar and demand a Federal Trade Commission investigation.

Adding to the farce, tin-eared PR professionals at Rockstar's parent company, Take Two Interactive, initially disclaimed responsibility for the hidden smut, blaming it all on hackers. When they eventually 'fessed up, the game industry's ratings board resolved the crisis by boosting the San Andreas rating to AO for "adults only," raising the minimum age of purchase from 17 to 18. Rockstar later re-released the game sans porn. With the specter of lovemaking safely removed from the violent shooter, it won back its lower rating of M for "mature." We give the whole thing a PG-13: generally entertaining, but with a warning for brief scenes of adults acting like children.

Intelligent design expelled from biology class: Federal Judge John Jones III ruled (.pdf) it unconstitutional to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in public school biology classes, and then went on to produce a 139-page opus that accused former Dover, Pennsylvania, school board members of religious hypocrisy, lying and "breathtaking inanity," and condemned them for volunteering their community as a legal lab rat. Jones' decision was thorough enough to serve as a jurisprudential textbook on the folly of doping science- class curricula with thinly veiled religious dogma, though it's no point of pride that America still needs such a textbook.

Lost opens the hatch, finds an Apple II: It was a great year for geek TV, topped by the start of the second season of ABC's eerie Castaway/Twin Peaks mash-up, Lost. The show, of course, revolves around a group of airline crash survivors marooned together on a mysterious island. After a debut season that touched on such phenomena as numbers stations and remote viewing, this year opened a mysterious metal hatch in the ground, and with it a new level of plot that brings in a spooky '70s-era think tank, some cool retro tech and maybe the end of the world. Good stuff, and if producer J.J. Abrams can keep his story line from spiraling out of control in the fashion of his increasingly incomprehensible Alias myth-arch, this one could stay addictive for years.

None of which is meant to denigrate Sci Fi Channel's stellar Battlestar Galactica, also in its second season. But the episode with Lucy Lawless contained a logic error that cost the show some points with this reviewer's internal Comic Book Guy. Finally, no highlights list would be complete without mention of UPN's much-belated cancellation of the dreadful Enterprise. A long road, indeed.

Broadcast flag defeated: If there's anything worse than being drunk on your own power, it's being drunk on power you don't really have. The FCC has been on a bit of a bender lately, separately ordering broadband providers to retrofit their networks with costly wiretapping technology, and consumer electronics makers to build trapdoors into all new digital televisions and video recorders. That later edict would have put Hollywood in direct control of which programs and movies consumers could record, along with how and when they could record them.

Fortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit staged an intervention in May, ruling that the commission had no authority to mandate the broadcast flag. The same court is hearing a challenge to the electronic surveillance order in 2006, when, hopefully, it will send the FCC straight to the Betty Ford Center for some rehab. Whether it's the Bush administration looking for easier surveillance of U.S. citizens, or the content industries out to sell more pay-per-view, the only proper place to enact new laws is on Capitol Hill.

Ancient telegraph operator beats teen texter in speed contest: A race in Australia last April saw retired post office telegrapher Gordon Hill, 93, beat the dickens out of a 13-year-old girl named Brittany, who was armed with a mobile phone and a pair of flying thumbs. Brittany used SMS shorthand, while Hill sent every character of the 21-word-datagram and still won by 18 seconds. Lest this be mistaken for a fluke, a similar contest staged the next month by comedian Jay Leno produced the same results. Meanwhile, the FCC is considering dropping the five-word-per-minute Morse code requirement for new ham radio operators. Maybe they should be making it mandatory for the rest of us instead.

NASA rovers survive a full Martian year: By mid-December, NASA's twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity had both celebrated their one-Martian-year anniversaries of trucking around their own little corners of the red planet, beaming stunning pictures and groundbreaking geographic data back to Earth. That's 687 Earth days of interplanetary telepresence, from a mission that had been planned to last only three terrestrial months. NASA engineers overcame everything from software bugs to sand dunes to keep the robots running, and if the aging machines are destined to someday become lifeless technological artifacts on a barren world, they'll be silent monuments to human imagination and achievement as well.

Worthy of mention: A few big stories that barely failed to make the cut:

Google Earth delivers the goods
Darpa Grand Challenge finish line crossed
Mac OS X runs on PCs
IPod nano hits the big time
Roving geek blogs Iraq, then Louisiana

http://wired.com/news/technology/0,6...w=wn_tophead_1





Stallone Magazine Allowed to Stay on Sale
AP

Sylvester Stallone can keep his magazine, Sly, on newsstands despite the complaints of an Internet magazine with the same name that a judge suggested was more of a shoe "fetish" publication.

Judge Richard Casey said the 59-year-old actor, who gained fame in the "Rocky" movies, could continue to produce the lifestyle and fitness magazine for middle-age men even though it carries the same title as the Internet magazine.

"There is a little difference between shoe fetish and Mr. Sylvester Stallone," Casey said at a hearing Tuesday.

John Bostany, a lawyer for the Internet magazine that brought a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages, protested the judge's characterization.

"My client's magazine is not a fetish mag," he said.

Despite the victory, it was unclear how long Stallone's magazine would last. The current issue was the last of four scheduled to be published before the magazine was to be evaluated to determine its future.

A message left for the publisher, American Media, was not immediately returned.

Stallone intends to bring boxer Rocky Balboa out of retirement. He will write, direct and star in "Rocky Balboa," the sixth film in that franchise, with shooting set to begin next year.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...=ENTERTAINMENT
















Until next week,

- js.

















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Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black