[JackSpratts]

Burning Man Spreads Its Flame
Julia Chaplin

THEY were all there: the shirtless guys in weird top hats walking around on stilts; women with unexercised buttocks spilling out of metallic hot pants; people in loincloths twirling fire. To anyone who has visited Burning Man, the arts festival in the Nevada desert now in its 16th year, the cast was instantly recognizable.

Except this party wasn’t in the middle of the Black Rock Desert, with close to 40,000 alternative culture-vultures covered in dust.

It was a few blocks from Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and the 101 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles.

An estimated 5,000 Burners, as festival-goers are known, gathered Oct. 14 for a “decompression” party, part reunion and part fund-raiser for the Burning Man organization. The purpose was to reconnect with friends last seen dancing in a pagan frenzy near neon-lighted art installations, before the ritual torching of the 40-foot effigy that gives the gathering its name.

A man dressed like a Goth minotaur whispered a password to Burners he deemed worthy of admitting to an after-party in a loft. “We want to preserve the vibe,” said the man, called DJ Wolfie. “You know, so women can dance topless and not get harassed.”

Part arts festival, part “Mad Max” encampment, Burning Man — as its ample coverage in the news media has described — attracts a mix of neo-hippies, robot hobbyists, tech billionaires (Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google have flown in by private plane) and even the occasional celebrity like Sting and Rosario Dawson. For a week ending on Labor Day, people try to break free from societal rules and conduct.

The event has grown each year, attracting 39,100 in its latest incarnation, up from 35,567 in 2005, according to Andie Grace, a spokeswoman. Now many attendees are bringing the festival home.

Reunions like the one in Los Angeles have taken place in San Francisco; Portland, Ore.; Flagstaff, Ariz.; San Diego and New York, where last weekend an all-night party was held at 3rd Ward, a raw industrial space and rooftop in Brooklyn.

“There’s pretty much some crazy Burning Man-type party every weekend,” said Steve Ratti, an account manager at an advertising agency in New York, who started a Wednesday-night Burner happy hour, now held at the Continental bar in the East Village.

Lorin Ashton, a popular D.J. at the festival, said he is hired to spin about four nights a week at Burner-type events from North Carolina to Massachusetts. “It was really funny,” he said, recalling recent dates he played in the Rockies in September. “I was at a saloon in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, called the Mangy Moose. I thought it would be all these wing nuts and redneck cowboys, but instead it was packed with all these freak-show Burners. It was the same thing in Missoula.”

Burners insist it’s more than the prospect of a good party that brings them back together; for many the festival, with its communitarian ethos and anticommercial philosophy (and in some cases its free-flowing drugs and spontaneous hookups), makes a lasting impression.

“People have a transformative experience and they can’t go back to the old way of living,” said Daniel Pinchbeck, an author who has written about Burning Man in books and magazine articles. “For me, going the first time was like the a-ha moment that people use to describe the first time they saw a Cubist painting or a Surrealist painting. It really changes ideas of what art is and what a community can do together.”

Two years ago, the Burning Man organization set up an official regional network program to meet the demand for year-round gatherings. It offers advice on how to buy event insurance and an application process for official chapters representing the festival, of which there are about 65 around the world.

Regional chapters play host to camping trips, art exhibitions and loft parties, where people dress in costumes and refer to one another by their festival aliases. (Burning Man attendees are often christened with whimsical names, like Playa Barbie or Hot Sauce, which are supposed to make it easier to shed real-world identities and inhibitions.) One need only log onto Tribe.net, Burningman.com or local blog lists like Nonsense or the Squid List to track the coordinates of the many gatherings.

In New York, there are events influenced by Burning Man at the Madagascar Institute and Rubulad, alternative arts spaces in Brooklyn, as well as roving parties held by communities of people who bonded by staying at the same desert campsites, often elaborately constructed, at the festival. One clan, Disorient, was founded by a group that included the artist Leo Villareal and Nicholas Butterworth, an Internet impresario. “I’m happy to see Burning Man grow and bring that spirit into the culture,” said Mr. Villareal, whose light sculptures have been exhibited at P.S. 1 and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Disorient is a host of several New York-area parties a year, including the Black and Light Ball earlier this year. “The rules and the spirit of generosity and collaboration is very different than the spirit of New York, where it’s more cutthroat and why would you get anything for free, and everyone is suspicious when you’re giving them something,” Mr. Villareal said.

The Burning Man aesthetic reaches beyond parties to influence public art projects and even advertising and entertainment. “Burning Man is used as an adjective amongst agency art directors now,” said Keith Greco, a production designer who uses fellow Burners as performers or artists for clients like Cirque du Soleil, Sony Pictures and Red Bull. “It’s up there now with ‘Blade Runner’ or Cirque du Soleil. They’ll say, ‘Can you make it a little more Burning-Man-ish?’ ”

It’s fitting that San Francisco — where the first festival took place on a beach in 1986 — now is home to public artworks that originally appeared at Burning Man: “Passage,” a giant scrap-metal sculpture of a mother and child on the Embarcadero; and “Stan, the Submerging Man,” an 18-foot bell diver covered with 45-r.p.m. records that is headed to a park south of Market Street. The works have been paid for in part by the Black Rock Arts Foundation, the official Burning Man arts organization, which has raised $500,000 this year.

As Burning Man’s tentacles stretch outward, some groups have broken away, claiming the mother festival has lost its more confrontational and youthful energy.

“The image that Burning Man has these days is just a bunch of naked 30- to 40-year-olds wearing a bunch of raver lights,” said Ryan Doyle, an artist who is part of the Black Label Bike Club, whose members across the country customize bicycles and style themselves after motorcycle gangs like the early Hells Angels. “That’s not an image anyone who cares about their image would really want to be associated with.”

Mr. Doyle and a dozen or so members of his club work each year during Burning Man for the festival’s Department of Public Works, camping for six weeks and setting up the infrastructure. His crew “has always been a punk, younger crowd,” he said. “Who else is going to go work out in the desert for cheap for six weeks? Plus you can still blow stuff up and have explosions before anyone gets there. Burning Man has gotten too soft and safe.”

On Oct. 28, members of the Black Label Bike Club held a block party in a street behind a Home Depot parking lot in Brooklyn. While spectators crowded around, cyclists in body armor jousted with big sticks, knocking each other onto beer-soaked mattresses. Mr. Doyle doused the crowd in a wet clay mixture shot from a giant phallus.

Mr. Pinchbeck, the writer, said the official festival now “has its own tendencies towards conformism.”

He continued, “Over time it becomes a style of hipsterism, where everyone dresses the same and is nonconformist in the same way.”

Despite the festival’s anticommercial credo, art made by Burners is winding up in the corporate realm. Lexus has been giving celebrity-packed parties for its new LS model luxury car inside mini replicas of a 15-story installation made of secondhand pine nailed into a free-form cavern, which lighted up the skyline at last summer’s Burning Man.

A Belgian businessman had spent 500,000 euros (about $640,000) to send the designer of the installation, Arne Quinze, and a crew of 85 to Nevada for a month to erect it, and then to import 20 journalists to cover the spectacle. Burners called it the Belgian Waffle, and some decried it as crass.

Probably the most far-reaching integration of Burning Man into the real world has been among art collectives living in industrial areas of cities, including Oakland, Calif., and Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Fellow Burners have moved into communal live-work lofts. Patrick Shearn, whose festival name is Eleven, moved into a loft in the Brewery, an arts complex in downtown Los Angeles, with a group of five friends he met at Burning Man. They named themselves Abundant Sugar.

To pay the rent, they hold dinners with circus performances and build whimsical sets for movies and Hollywood events, like a giant fake oak tree in their living area that was used as décor at the Emmy Awards last year. “Before this I was living in a two-bedroom apartment by myself in Santa Monica surrounded by jogging soccer moms and Range Rovers,” Mr. Shearn said. “I met a group at Burning Man and said to myself, ‘Why can’t I do this every day?’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/fa...12Burners.html





The Doors Celebrate 40th Anniversary
Solvej Schou

The Doors last played the Sunset Strip's Whisky a Go Go on Aug. 21, 1966, and lead singer Jim Morrison's rebellious, shamanistic shouts burned memories into the audience.

The group, whose sound helped define the 1960s, was fired by the famous club that night -- Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and guitarist Robby Krieger. They never played the Whisky again ... until now.

On Wednesday night, the rock band's remaining three members -- all gray-haired and in their 60s -- hosted a cacophony of events on the Strip to celebrate the group's 40th anniversary, including a thunderous performance at the Whisky by Manzarek, Krieger and guest musicians. The repertoire included such Doors anthems as "L.A. Woman" and "Light My Fire."

Densmore, estranged from his former mates after a lawsuit over use of the group's name, showed up at the club, but didn't play. A judge last year issued a permanent injunction banning Krieger and Manzarek from calling themselves The Doors and using any likeness of the late Morrison to promote a renewed version of the band.

Earlier in the night, the 61-year-old Densmore expertly beat hand drums and joyfully read snippets of Morrison's darkly sexual and quasi-political poetry down the street at Book Soup. The bookstore fills the site of Morrison's old stomping ground, Cinematique 60.

All three Doors members signed copies of the newly released coffee-table book "The Doors by The Doors."

"To honor whatever creative muse came to us, gifted to us, I do these things. Ray and Robby, whether we're having a rift right now, are musical brothers. I thought if we lasted 10 years, that would be something. Forty? Really? Jeez," Densmore told The Associated Press in a recent phone interview.

Hundreds of fans, from parents toting kids to starry-eyed 21-year-olds and aging rockers, were ecstatic at meeting their idols, even without the larger-than-life presence of Morrison, who died of heart failure in 1971 at age 27 after years of hard living.

"I miss Jim as a friend. Artistically, he was a great poet," Manzarek said over the phone. "That's why we put the band together in the first place, to marry poetry and rock 'n' roll, like the beatniks married poetry and jazz."

Morrison's image, of course, will forever remain that of a hip, young voice of a generation. While impossible to know how the ensuing years might have changed that, Krieger, in a phone interview, offered his thoughts.

"Jim Morrison was not the kind of guy who would get old gracefully," Krieger posited. "He would kind of be a mess. I wish he was still here, and I wish we were still making music."

Self-described No. 1 Doors fan and collector Ida Miller, who runs the site www.idafan.com, stood in the VIP tent behind the Whisky watching videos of a young, lush-mouthed Morrison.

"The first time I saw Jim, I haven't been right since," said the smiling 59-year-old, who saw the group five times, starting in 1968. "I never got tired of The Doors."

Twenty-one-year-old Kevin Bloomberg would agree.

The lanky, long-haired guitarist crushed into the packed Whisky to see Krieger, who hosted a listening party earlier in the evening of the band's new "Perception" box set, due out Nov. 21.

Wearing a ripped black Doors T-shirt, which he had Krieger sign, Bloomberg gushed about meeting the slight-of-build musician.

"It's like my soul became one," he said. "My parents were into The Doors, so I got into them."

Just next to the Whisky, at the Cat Club -- formerly the London Fog, where The Doors first played -- a line of admirers snaked around the sidewalk to greet Manzarek, who hosted a mini-version of The Doors' Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum exhibit opening next year.

Appropriately, the night ended on musical notes.

Incense curled through the hot air as audience members sat and soaked in Densmore's spiritually minded acoustic poetry performance.

Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington and Former Jane's Addiction singer Perry Farrell joined in with parts of Morrison's "An American Prayer" and other poetry, backed by members of Farrell's new band, Satellite Party.

Later, the two singers turned up the volume at the Whisky with Krieger and Manzarek, aided by Satellite Party members and former Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash.

As a bespectacled Manzarek pounded his keyboard, Krieger jammed on his guitar.

Though neither Bennington or Farrell could rival Morrison's stage furor, and Densmore's absence was felt, the joyful attempt brought the Whisky to roars of approval -- mirroring earlier words of wisdom from Manzarek.

"You play music as long as you can breathe. When you stop breathing is when you stop playing rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll will never die. It will always be, it will always go down in history."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1022133





Prince Chooses His Arena: Las Vegas
Jeff Leeds

It was not much more than a decade ago that the pop megastar behind classics like “When Doves Cry” and “Purple Rain” seemed intent on shrouding himself in inscrutability, even changing his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Just after midnight on Saturday, though, the artist once again known as Prince declared himself to be curiously, and regularly, available: he began an indefinite run of twice-a-week performances at his own hastily built new nightclub here.

In an energetic two-hour set that ran from the vintage 1987 hit “U Got the Look” through “Black Sweat” from his recent “3121” album, Prince delivered a survey of his catalog (“So many hits, so little time,” he said with a smirk at one point), peppering it with references to Scripture and spirituality. And so it was that a pop deity who since declaring himself a Jehovah’s Witness has surfaced with music that spans both sex and salvation, introduced his new pulpit in Sin City.

Prince of course joins a growing line of established artists to bet on Las Vegas, and for whom it seems uniquely equipped to deliver a jackpot. Probably no other city could bring the constant flow of high-rolling fans required to make this sort of undertaking work. But it is still a wager: Las Vegas has both validated legend status and marked a star’s devolution to cliché. This is the place where the Rat Pack reigned in style; it’s also a place that played host to the fat-period Elvis.

Yet Prince’s move here also came as a particular shock. How could Prince, a pop trailblazer who has in recent years largely abandoned the conventions of the commercial music business, set up shop amid the slot machines and buffets?

It seems only semi-permanent. His nightclub, at the Rio hotel-casino, is called 3121 after the album; the same name adorns the adjacent, loosely Asian-themed restaurant being run by his personal chef.

The talks to return Prince to Las Vegas, where he played the Mandalay Bay casino-hotel’s arena as a stop on his 2004 tour, reportedly turned serious this year after he dropped by the Rio to appear as a featured guest during a gig there by his longtime associate Morris Day.

But now that he has hung out a shingle, the question buzzing through entertainment circles here is how long the famously mercurial Prince will stick with the regimen of twice-weekly performances in the same spot. Event organizers say they have scrambled to provide him with every amenity to ensure his comfort, including a private lounge built under the stage (accessible by a purple staircase).

Prince’s partisans insist he is committed, but at the same time they are quick to distance him from the roster of acts that have set up shop at casinos here in easy-living pseudo-retirement, like Celine Dion and Barry Manilow.

“The show is anything but a retirement show,” said Sam Jennings, director of Prince’s fan club operation. “He sees it as just an opportunity to stretch his legs musically,” by mixing up his song choices, booking performers of his own choosing several nights a week and inviting guests to perform with him on his Friday and Saturday gigs. Tickets on Prince’s nights are $125.

If opening night is an indication, Prince’s purple reign may indeed depart from the productions now commonplace on the Strip.

“Ain’t no lip synching up on this stage,” he assured the audience of 900 as he performed just off the giant circular dance-floor that occupies the center of the nightclub.

In fact there was not only no lip synching; there was hardly any effort to dress up the production at all aside from displaying the 3121 logo in neon on the wall behind him. In keeping with the stripped-down style that has been a hallmark of his recent concert tours, Prince performed with only a bass player, a keyboardist and a drummer, with two back-up dancers (“the Twinz”) strutting and singing on several songs.

All of that signaled a departure from the dizzying labyrinth of over-heated productions here, which run from topless revues to Cirque de Soleil acrobatics spectacles to Ms. Dion’s choreographed showcase. His arrival comes as event promoters are proudly wagering that Las Vegas is shedding its image as a bone yard cluttered with over-the-hill performers and is instead becoming a real outlet for hot — or at least contemporary — performers.

But if even a pious Prince represents sexuality — and he does — then Las Vegas seems ready to embrace that as well. After a short-lived attempt to reinvent itself as a playground of family entertainment, it has reverted to its more risqué side with a vengeance, especially since gaming in increasingly available outside of Nevada.

Even with the array of celebrity performers, the casinos these days are heavily promoting new adult-oriented nightclubs. (The Palms, already a hit with clubs like Rain, has added a Playboy Club with bunny-eared dealers; Steve Wynn’s new hotel — no strollers allowed — is trumpeting a club called Tryst.) The Treasure Island hotel, which once invited families to come see its nightly, theme-park-style pirate show aboard two giant ships on the Strip, has redesigned the performance by populating one ship with gyrating, hair-flipping “sirens.”

“The casinos thought a few years back we need to have something for families just in case they showed up,” said George Maloof, owner of the Palms, which is now opening a new 2,400-seat theater for intimate musical performances à la Prince’s. “I think we figured out that’s not what we’re about.”

Certain hotels are also trying out presentations of Broadway shows. John Meglen, the president of Concerts West, the event promoter behind Prince and Ms. Dion, said that was a mistake. “People want to go to Las Vegas and see things they really can’t see anyplace else,” Mr. Meglen said. While Broadway’s big productions may travel to various cities, “right now, if you want to see Prince, you have one choice,” he added. The concept, Mr. Meglen said, is to replicate the exclusive, but raw and free-wheeling feel of the parties Prince had been giving at his Los Angeles home until this year. (The mansion parties also provided the theme for his latest album.)

So will Prince, who ranked as the best-selling concert attraction in America on his 2004 arena tour, fit into the new Las Vegas? If he does, it will be because he strikes a chord with the tourists who flock to the city’s promise of outsize, garish fantasies. Can Las Vegas deliver for him? Prince’s restaurant was less than half full on opening night. But consider: In his 2004 tour, Prince racked up $87 million played 69 cities. His closest competitor at the box office? Ms. Dion, who generated more than $80 million playing one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/13/ar...ic/13prin.html





Reggae, the Ramones and Keane: Just What He Needed
Ric Ocasek

FOR the legions who have mispronounced Ric Ocasek’s name for three decades, it’s oh-KASS-eck. As a producer, this former Cars frontman, now 57, has worked with Brazilian Girls, No Doubt and Weezer, among others. He spent a year as an artists-and-repertory executive for Elektra. He’s writing his second book of poetry and prose and working on another solo album, due this spring. In his spare time he draws. In October “The Cars Unlocked” was released: a retrospective DVD and CD of live concert performances and interviews that Mr. Ocasek culled and produced. The Boston-based Cars, which broke up in 1987, recorded six albums, which have sold more than 25 million records. Mr. Ocasek has broad musical tastes: he’s been known to choose a CD by its cover. From his home in Manhattan, he spoke with Winter Miller about what he’s listening to and watching.

White Mice

“Muzik” (Basic Replay) is a reggae record. I don’t know much about White Mice; I went to Other Music and bought a bunch of records. It was the cover; the guy on the cover looks about 10. The reggae is beautiful, really well done. There’s hardly any info on the record, no liner notes, nothing about him. When I got it, I thought, Oh God, this is really great. Reggae is one of my favorite kinds of music; I never get tired of that beat on three. I think he’s breaking ground. On the cover he looks like he is. He doesn’t have any dreads, he’s got a bow tie on.

Keane

I love “Under the Iron Sea” (Interscope). Tom Chaplin’s voice is really beautiful. They don’t sound like any other band out there, and they’re consistent. I saw them perform live once, and they were just completely real about it; there was no fake show. The guy could really pull off the vocals. He sings some stuff in falsetto. I really like the song “Atlantic”: it’s a catchy pop song — could be a hit — but it still has integrity. It’s not schlock pop.

Dead Moon

“Echoes of the Past” (Sub Pop) is a compilation record; it’s got 50 songs on it. It’s a band hardly anybody knows about. Every song sounds the same, kind of like the ’60s band the Seeds. It’s a band that will never be commercial, never see the light of day in that sense, but it does have a devout following. It’s almost like Robert Plant singing, but it’s kind of straight-out old rock ’n’ roll riffs. It’s kind of raw, but I really like it.

Albert Hammond Jr.

He’s the guitar player from the Strokes. He writes phenomenal songs. I was really shocked another member of the band could write as well as that. I heard snippets of “Yours to Keep” (Rough Trade) before it was out, but once it came out, I was really pleased with what he did. It looks like Albert has a future making records. It was arranged really well.

Bad Brains

This is from 1982. It’s real raw. That band is probably the No. 1 punk band in the world. They probably influenced every punk band there is. There’s not a lot of footage of them at all; they were hard to pin down. As the years went on H. R., the lead singer, got hard to deal with. He wouldn’t do the hardcore stuff anymore, he started to get crazy, he wanted to stick with the reggae. But when he did do the hardcore stuff, there was no one who could even come close. There wasn’t much you could see; even if you went on YouTube, you wouldn’t see much. But “Bad Brains Live at CBGB 1982” (Music Video Distributors) is the real deal; its really what the Bad Brains were like. This is a phenomenal thing to have out.

The Ramones

The Ramones DVD “Raw” (Image Entertainment) is really comprehensive, far more comprehensive than “The Cars Unlocked.” It’s more of a traditional documentary. If you really wonder what the Ramones were all about over the years, if you’re a Ramones fan or even if you’re not, it’s phenomenal video. I liked every bit of it. It’s fun to see all the Phil Spector stuff. You heard stories, like Phil Spector had a gun in the studio, and you didn’t know if he did, but you watch it, and you find out he did. It’s a great retrospective of them.

Peter, Bjorn and John

The songs are great — the arrangements and the general vocals. It sounds a bit British. The chord structures are slightly different: they don’t play a C chord like everyone else. A lot of British bands use a different chord structure. They may learn to play things on the guitar different. It’s a hard thing to pinpoint. The album’s called “Writer’s Block” (Wichita), which I never understood because I never had it. I never put that pressure on myself. I always have stuff to write.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/ar...ic/12play.html





Industry Considers Digital Future
Kevin Young

Members of the record industry are worried about the internet.

New technology has led to far greater availability of cheaply-priced music.

Discounted charts album from online retailers can take business from traditional high-street stores, while the illegal sharing of files threatens sales of official releases, labels say.

The past year has also seen the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace, seen by some as a great way to reach potential fans and, with unsigned acts, talent-spotters who can offer record deals.

But it is easy for material to be placed online illegally - and singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, now in his 30th year in the business, has particular concerns.

He is among leading figures who have been gathering in London to mould the music industry for a digital future.

'Incredible potential'

"The majority of people posting songs on to social-networking sites don't have a record deal," he says.

"They're using the site as a way of getting attention to get a deal, so often the first legal contract they're entering into regarding their work will be through the terms and conditions of that site.

"If we're in a situation where sites are harvesting intellectual property rights, it almost becomes impossible to use these sites without consulting a lawyer."

Bragg removed his work from MySpace earlier this year when he realised that its terms and conditions meant he would lose some of the ownership rights to his own material.

He concedes the sites do have "incredible potential".

"I reckon if they'd been around 25 years ago, it would have saved me two years of playing in dingy pubs in south London," he says.

But there is a need for an industry-standard rights agreement "that recognises that ownership resides ultimately with the originator" of any music, the 48-year-old says.

"Undoubtedly Rupert Murdoch is making a lot of money selling advertising on MySpace and he's not paying a penny for content."

High street 'collapse'

Bragg's manager Peter Jenner, who has also worked with Pink Floyd and The Clash in a career spanning five decades, has analysed the situation for the Music Tank organisation.

He is certain the mindset of the record industry must change, especially with regards to retailers.

"The supply to Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda is going to lead to the collapse of HMV as a record business," he predicts.

"HMV is now almost already mainly video and games with some music still in there, and I think that retreat will go on. The big-store model, with all the titles, is a dead duck."

Jenner believes that the record industry has been wrong to license tracks which appear on CDs given away by magazines and newspapers.

This signalled discs "did not have a great value - that they were incredibly cheap to make", he says.

"I suspect that making them cheaper is the record companies' latest own-goal. They're cheapening their premium product."

He also fears the internet is misunderstood by labels.

"They weren't really able to come to grips with the essential truth of the internet, which is that it's all about sharing of files."

A protection system known as digital rights management (DRM) restricts the distribution and accessibility of music files can be tightly controlled.

However, this is "a complete turn-off to the consumers and doesn't work", Jenner claims - and is another area he says needs to be changed.

"Labels were trying to stop the internet doing what it does - exchange files - and try to chain it, put lead weights on it, so files wouldn't move around.

"All it does is penalise the honest."

Pension

Bragg agrees the music industry should have less control over artists' material in general.

"I don't want to be in a situation where I'm still playing when I'm 70 but you can't get my records, because either they're owned by a label that doesn't exist any more and no-one knows who owns the rights, or there is a label and they're just sitting on them.

"The ability of a song that I've written to still be raising money 90 years later raises the question of whose pension that piece of work should be.

"Someone at the record company - or my pension, for the benefit of my heirs."

It is clear which he would prefer.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nt/6148654.stm





Renewing a License to Kill and a Huge Movie Franchise
Manohla Dargis

The latest James Bond vehicle — call him Bond, Bond 6.0 — finds the British spy leaner, meaner and a whole lot darker. Now played by an attractive bit of blond rough named Daniel Craig, Pierce Brosnan having been permanently kicked to the kerb, Her Majesty’s favorite bad boy arrives on screens with the usual complement of cool toys, smooth rides, bosomy women and high expectations. He shoots, he scores, in bed and out, taking down the bad and the beautiful as he strides purposefully into the 21st century.
It’s about time. The likable Mr. Brosnan was always more persuasive playing Bond as a metaphoric rather than an actual lady-killer, with the sort of polished affect and blow-dried good looks that these days tend to work better either on television or against the grain. Two of his best performances have been almost aggressively anti-Bond turns, first in John Boorman’s adaptation of the John le Carré novel “The Tailor of Panama,” in which he played a dissolute spy, and, more recently, in “The Matador,” a comedy in which he played a hit man with a sizable gut and alarmingly tight bikini underwear. Mr. Brosnan did not demolish the memory of his Bond years with that pot, but he came admirably close.

Every generation gets the Bond it deserves if not necessarily desires, and with his creased face and uneasy smile, Mr. Craig fits these grim times well. As if to underscore the idea that this new Bond marks a decisive break with the contemporary iterations, “Casino Royale” opens with a black-and-white sequence that finds the spy making his first government-sanctioned kills. The inky blood soon gives way to full-blown color, but not until Bond has killed one man with his hands after a violent struggle and fatally shot a second. “Made you feel it, did he?” someone asks Bond of his first victim. Bond doesn’t answer. From the way the director, Martin Campbell, stages the action though, it’s clear that he wants to make sure we do feel it.

“Casino Royale” introduced Bond to the world in 1953. A year later it was made into a television drama with the American actor Barry Nelson as Jimmy Bond; the following decade, it was a ham-fisted spoof with David Niven as the spy and a very funny Peter Sellers as a card shark. For reasons that are too boring to repeat, when Ian Fleming sold the film rights to Bond, “Casino Royale” was not part of the deal. As a consequence the producers who held most of the rights decided to take their cue from news reports about misfired missiles, placing their bets on “Dr. No” and its missile-mad villain. The first big-screen Bond, it hit in October 1962, the same month that Fleming’s fan John F. Kennedy took the Cuban missile crisis public.

The Vatican later condemned “Dr. No” as a dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex.

Ka-ching! The film was a success, as was its relatively unknown star, Sean Connery, who balanced those descriptive notes beautifully, particularly in the first film and its even better follow-up, “From Russia With Love.”

In time Mr. Connery’s conception of the character softened, as did the series itself, and both Roger Moore and Mr. Brosnan portrayed the spy as something of a gentleman playboy. That probably helps explain why some Bond fanatics have objected so violently to Mr. Craig, who fits Fleming’s description of the character as appearing “ironical, brutal and cold” better than any actor since Mr. Connery. Mr. Craig’s Bond looks as if he has renewed his license to kill.

Like a lot of action films, the Bond franchise has always used comedy to blunt the violence and bring in big audiences. And, much like the franchise’s increasingly bloated action sequences, which always seem to involve thousands of uniformed extras scurrying around sets the size of Rhode Island, the humor eventually leached the series of its excitement, its sense of risk. Mr. Brosnan certainly looked the part when he suited up for “GoldenEye” in 1995, but by then John Woo and Quentin Tarantino had so thoroughly rearranged the DNA of the modern action film as to knock 007 back to zero. By the time the last Bond landed in 2002, Matt Damon was rearranging the genre’s elementary particles anew in “The Bourne Identity.”

“Casino Royale” doesn’t play as dirty as the Bourne films, but the whole thing moves far lower to the ground than any of the newer Bond flicks. Here what pops off the screen aren’t the exploding orange fireballs that have long been a staple of the Bond films and have been taken to new pyrotechnic levels by Hollywood producers like Jerry Bruckheimer, but some sensational stunt work and a core seriousness. Successful franchises are always serious business, yet this is the first Bond film in a long while that feels as if it were made by people who realize they have to fight for audiences’ attention, not just bank on it. You see Mr. Craig sweating (and very nice sweat it is too); you sense the filmmakers doing the same.

The characteristically tangled shenanigans — as if it mattered — involve a villainous free agent named Le Chiffre (the excellent Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen), who wheels and deals using money temporarily borrowed from his equally venal clients. It’s the sort of risky global business that allows the story to jump from the Bahamas to Montenegro and other stops in between as Bond jumps from plot point to plot point, occasionally taking time out to talk into his cellphone or bed another man’s wife. Mr. Craig, whose previous credits include “Munich” and “The Mother,” walks the walk and talks the talk, and he keeps the film going even during the interminable high-stakes card game that nearly shuts it down.

If Mr. Campbell and his team haven’t reinvented the Bond film with this 21st edition, they have shaken (and stirred) it a little, chipping away some of the ritualized gentility that turned it into a waxworks. They have also surrounded Mr. Craig with estimable supporting players, including the French actress Eva Green, whose talent is actually larger than her breasts.

Like Mr. Mikkelsen, who makes weeping blood into a fine spectator sport, Ms. Green brings conviction to the film, as do Jeffrey Wright and Isaach de Bankolé. Judi Dench is back as M, of course, with her stiff lip and cunning. But even she can’t steal the show from Mr. Craig, though a human projectile by the name of Sébastien Foucan, who leads a merry and thrilling chase across Madagascar, almost does.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/11/1...es/17roya.html





Gracenote Defends Its Evolution
Eliot Van Buskirk

Gracenote, the magic ingredient in your software that identifies CDs upon insertion and recently started helping add album art to your iTunes tracks, has taken its share of hits from techies and open-source activists over the past seven years.

The alleged problem? Among other things, detractors claim the company built a profitable business on the backs of unpaid volunteers, and now sells the data those volunteers contribute back to them in various forms.

In a recent post about MySpace, I made allegations along those same lines, prompting Gracenote co-founder and chief architect Steve Scherf -- a co-creator of CDDB, the CD-recognition service later purchased by Gracenote -- to express a degree of umbrage and offer to explain the history of Gracenote from his perspective.

"You might be surprised to know that nobody has ever asked," Scherf wrote, "though there sure are a lot of opinions." As someone who has expressed said opinions on a few occasions, I figured I owed him a chance to try to set the record straight on the myriad problems people continue to have with Gracenote.

Wired News: Were you the first person to recognize and start to answer the need for CDs to be identified over the internet?

Steve Scherf: The earliest primordial form of CD recognition I'm aware of was in a high-end audio device made by a defunct company started by Andy Hertzfeld called Frox. It wasn't internet-aware, but to me it signals the beginning of the digital music age because it showed that it was possible to programmatically identify CDs.

Before I ever got involved, Ti Kan and other CD-player-application developers were throwing around the idea of co-developing an internet service for looking up CD metadata. I think Ti got fed up with them because they were all talk and no action, so he decided to go it alone, developing a service for his own CD-player application, known as Xmcd.

Xmcd and other applications (including the old Windows CD Player) could look up CD info from data you entered yourself, or that others entered and posted to FTP sites. Users would e-mail Ti their data, and he'd gather it into a giant bundle for others to download. The internet was pretty slow in those days, so it could take a great while to fetch the entire package. The benefits of building an on-demand lookup service were clear: much lower bandwidth consumption, immediate gratification for the user, and more current data, not to mention the ability to accept additions to the database automatically. Plus it was cool.

WN: I read that Ti Kan open-sourced Xmcd, the early foundation of CDDB. Are you also a supporter of the open-source movement?

Scherf: Open source makes the world go round. I learned just about everything I know about computers from simply reading source code and trying to improve upon or emulate it. The closed-source utopian world some very notable software companies would love to see would stifle knowledge and innovation, not to mention commerce. Often, software is an expression of an idea that is well-known, and keeping the expression of that idea hidden away in a compiled binary object is pointless.

This may sound hypocritical when you consider that Gracenote's own client software is closed source. To be frank, I have had little say in the matter of open-sourcing Gracenote software, so my opinions on the subject don't necessarily reflect that of the company. Don't be surprised if the company's stance on open source changes in the near future.

WN: In the early years, CDDB relied on user submissions. Was that always part of the software, or was it added later?

Scherf: Automated e-mail submissions were a part of Xmcd before I ever got started writing the CDDB server. Ti had already started collecting e-mailed user contributions automatically before I created the CDDB server.

At first, the server was rather primitive in how it managed data, requiring hand-installation of the latest databases. Within a few revisions I had the server code managing the database on its own and transmitting deltas (database edits, as opposed to edited databases) to downstream servers. This added the real-time aspect to database updates that people have come to expect of CDDB, or any kind of online service for the matter.

CDDB still relies very heavily on user submissions. Though we get a sizeable chunk of data directly from labels and other entities, user contributions still outweigh (those). We owe everything to our users.

WN: Escient bought CDDB in 1998. Did the purchase come about after Escient saw what Gracenote could do for networked devices firsthand, or how did that take place?

Scherf: The Escient product at the time was actually the Tunebase unit, a head unit for CD changers that managed the discs and displayed album info on your TV as you played music. Tunebase depended entirely upon CDDB to function, and Scott Jones, the CEO of Escient, recognized that we were the only game in town for CD recognition. He was hot to acquire CDDB to ensure that it wouldn't disappear on him.

The internet was really taking off, and people were starting to take notice of CDDB. Smart businesspeople simultaneously seemed to have an epiphany that this database was the keystone to internet music, and they descended upon us from all quarters.

At that time, we wouldn't let commercial applications use CDDB. Most of our servers were running on computers at universities or public organizations using donated disk storage, CPU time and network bandwidth. But when we heard Microsoft was planning on shipping a CD player with Windows that featured CD recognition, we realized we had to re-evaluate our position on commercial applications.

Microsoft did not have a CD-recognition service of its own, and they apparently did not want to even talk to us. I guess we were too open-sourcey and hobby-level for them. Instead, they held a competition between commercial third parties to see who could provide Microsoft with the best CD-recognition service. None of them actually had their own, so who do you think they came to?

We lost a lot of sleep over the situation (I did, at least), because it was clear we had to change or become irrelevant. If Microsoft was determined to have a CD-recognition service, surely hordes of other companies wanted to do the same.

We were bombarded by people wanting CD recognition in their products. Some played nice, but a good number did not. A shill for a now-defunct, then-$300 million company posed as a hobbyist who wanted to make a music search engine. We eventually caught on to the ruse and cut off the "hobbyist's" feed. Their data went stale and they withered away. They were not the last to pull something like this.

Commercial requests came in so quickly that it was clear we needed a solution, but we didn't have the money for a bank of servers.... We could either hand over CDDB to someone else and wash our hands of it, or find a good home where we'd get paid to develop it. The choice was clear. I loved CDDB and could not give it up, so we had to find a company willing to take it on. Others have suggested that we could have handed CDDB over to the community at large. But I enjoyed developing the service immensely, and did not want to open up development to others. To me, the joy is in the actual building, and like many engineers, I do it best unperturbed.

More importantly, the focus and dedication required for CDDB to grow could not be found in a community effort. If you look at how stagnant efforts like freedb have been, you'll see what I mean.

The clock started ticking when one company made us a serious, unsolicited offer. We resisted, but they threatened us in a way that our lawyer later told us was essentially extortion. We needed to find a safe haven soon, and along came Escient.

Scott Jones, the CEO, was the first and only person to play straight with us. After meeting him in his office in an Indiana strip mall, it was clear he wanted CDDB to continue as it was. Yes, he had once made a really ridiculous offer to buy CDDB, and we had turned down much better offers than his, but our primary goal was the continued existence of CDDB and the improvement of its user experience. He was the only one who seemed able to guarantee that he wouldn't dismantle it.

WN: Who owns Gracenote now?

Gracenote is a now a standalone private company with several large, well-known investors. Scott Jones is still the majority stakeholder. (Other owners include Simon Investments, part of Simon Real Estate; Bessemer Venture Partners; Sequoia Capital; Panasonic; Philips and Samsung.)

WN: What do you make of opinions that Gracenote privatized two public goods: the original open-sourced software that CDDB was based on, and song information input by unpaid volunteers?

Scherf: This is a popular opinion in certain circles. At first, there wasn't a negative reaction to the sale, and I took this to mean that people weren't fundamentally opposed to CDDB finding a commercial home. People only started complaining around the time certain folks at the company started mishandling developer relations. (None of the people directly responsible for this behavior remain at Gracenote, and thankfully there's a much better understanding of how to treat customers now).

This episode poisoned some peoples' view of CDDB, and I do not particularly blame them. Discussions abounded on the net for a good while, but the company was close-mouthed, deciding it was better not to feed the trolls any further. Since then, a lot of misinformation sprinkled amongst the true things has taken root and become part of the Gracenote lore.

The plain fact is, you can't close something that has been released under the GPL. The CDDB source-code genie was out of the bottle. Even today, there's nothing stopping anyone from using the source code to start a business. But just because I released the code to the public up to a point does not mean that I am obliged to build this code for the rest of my life and hand it over to whoever wants it.

As for the data, I can only point out that all of the data ever submitted to CDDB before it became "privatized" has been released to the public. You can go to freedb.org any time and download that entire database, including all the data that users entered before CDDB became commercial.

WN: How do you respond to allegations that CDDB/Gracenote's collection of user listening data violates privacy?

Scherf: We are scrupulous with how we handle information collected from users. We don't collect personal information of any kind, and any that we might have collected in ancient history has been destroyed. We even go so far as to throw away user IP addresses after seven days (ask your ISP if they do that!), and in any case, IP addresses never, ever, make it into our data warehouse. We keep so little information, it can cause problems when we need to track down bugs with developers' applications.

We keep album data that was looked up in a given time period, the user's geographical region (city, province/state, country) and the application they used to look it up. That's it.

WN: Who had the idea to use track times to identify CDs? I know Gracenote has acoustic recognition as well. Is anything else used to identify CDs now? What else is Gracenote's acoustic recognition being used for these days?

Scherf: Although the idea of using track times to identify discs existed before CDDB's time, the real trick is in using that information to find discs quickly and accurately. For some twisted reason, each time a new batch of CDs is manufactured, the factory makes a new master that often has timings slightly different from previous batches of the same disc. (I think there is a Linkin Park disc in our database with over 1,000 different TOCs.) .

It's a black art, and involves layers of hashing, fuzzy logic and other matching methods to ensure quality results. This is what Gracenote has mastered, and is far more important than just the lone idea of using track times to identify discs.

As far as acoustic recognition, Gracenote has two types of audio recognition. The simpler one is used for identifying audio files, and helps audio software catalog your music collection. The other, heavier method is very tolerant of background noise. .

The MySpace story shows one of the many ways we use this technology. One of the coolest applications is the ability to identify a song over a cell phone. We're also starting to identify music used in old TV shows, so that the rights holders/artists can be paid back royalties, as well as monitoring live radio/TV broadcasts.

WN: Gracenote was built to identify CDs, which are outside the world of digital rights management. Assuming things become more DRMed in the digital age, with song data set at the source and immutable from there, would the need for a song-identifying system such as Gracenote decrease, or would it be better off if things go the way of the unprotected MP3? And what would Gracenote look like in a post-CD world?

Scherf: CDs effectively never wear out, and as new forms of digital audio arrive, people will be ripping and re-ripping for a good long while. I fully expect our disc-recognition service to be running for decades to come, even if not a single CD were sold after today.

Personally, I hope that DRM fades away. In the end I think everyone will benefit, both rights holders/artists and users alike. I think artists like Weird Al have demonstrated that less-restrictive distribution models can work for everyone.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,...l?tw=rss.index





EMI Music Agrees to Video Licensing Pact
AP

EMI Music has agreed to license music videos by its slate of recording artists to an online video portal and on-demand cable service operated by Gotuit Media Corp., the companies said Thursday.

The multiyear agreement, reached this week, calls for the companies to share revenue from advertising on Gotuit.com. The deal allows only U.S. computer users who visit the site to access EMI's videos. No other financial terms of the pact were disclosed.

EMI Music, a unit of Britain's EMI Group PLC, is home to recording artists such as Coldplay, Keith Urban and Chingy.

Woburn, Mass.-based Gotuit Media Corp. supplies videos on demand via select Time Warner Cable and Comcast cable systems.

Visitors to Gotuit.com can view videos, but not upload any of their own, something allowed by video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube.com.

EMI Music's deal with Gotuit is the latest example of how recording companies are seeking ways to generate revenue from licensing their content to online video sites.

Universal Music Group already licenses videos to Gotuit.com.

Unlike the other major recording companies — Universal Music, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment — EMI has yet to reach a licensing deal with YouTube, now owned by Google Inc.

"We're in discussions with them, but we still feel there's copyright issues to be resolved," said EMI Music spokeswoman Jeanne Meyer.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061116/...i_online_video





In Breif

Answer Filed in Arista v. Greubel in Texas; Defendant Says Plaintiffs' Receiving $115M From Kazaa Bars Duplicate Recovery from Defendant

In Arista v. Greubel in Texas, the defendant has interposed a number of affirmative defenses, including:

-A first affirmative defense which alleges that if defendant were liable, Kazaa would be jointly and severally liable along with him, and that the $115,000,000 settlement which the RIAA received from Kazaa constitutes recovery in full.
-A third affirmative defense that the $750-per-song damages theory is unconstitutional, and that recovery should be limited to 4 times the value of each download, or $2.80 each.

Mr. Greubel is represented by Charles Lee Mudd, Jr., of Chicago, Illinois, and John G. Browning of Dallas, Texas.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...reubel-in.html





Dubious Mix: Rich Suitors, Ailing Papers
David Carr

Into a chaotic world of antsy shareholders fed up with declining margins and circulation, there is the thunder of hooves in the distance, a white knight coming over the hill with huge saddlebags of money to save the once-noble newspaper industry from certain doom.

The Tribune Company, under pressure to sell and having received lukewarm offers from private equity investors, is now turning its attention to a Forbes list of wealthy potential buyers, including a combined bid from Eli Broad and Ronald W. Burkle — or David Geffen perhaps, in a solo rescue of The Los Angeles Times.

During the weekend came word that Tribune has also attracted Maurice R. Greenberg, the insurance tycoon, who is said to consider newspapers undervalued. Civic-minded businesspeople in Hartford, Baltimore and Boston have all suggested that they, too, would like to step into the breach created by seismic changes in the industry.

We have seen this movie before, as recently as last spring. After The Philadelphia Inquirer ended up as an orphan in the McClatchy buyout of Knight Ridder, Brian P. Tierney, a Philadelphia businessman, led a consortium of investors to save a prized city asset. He promised that he and his partners would invest in good journalism, retain the paper’s leadership and avoid job cuts.

Six months later, Mr. Tierney has pulled back on expenses. He dumped the publisher in the summer and the editor last week, and is now looking for 150 jobs to be trimmed from an already-reduced base of 425.

What had been billed as an epic Philly love story, with civic leaders reaching deep to turn things around, has turned into one more disaster movie. It is as if Mr. Tierney kicked the tires on an otherwise solid used vehicle with a few dents, paid a discounted price, and then found out that there were two squirrels under the hood when he pulled out of the lot.

Mr. Tierney neither manufactured nor created The Inquirer’s travails: because advertising revenues industrywide went off a cliff starting in July and, as a result, net profits at the paper this year will most likely be half of their level two years ago.

The better newspapers continue to deliver cash flow, and in the case of the Tribune Company, a profit margin of 20 percent, but secular changes in the industry — that whole darn Interwebnet thingie — have not only wiped out growth; they are now eating into the advertising base.

Circulation, the other pedal the industry pushes on, has lost compression and then some. The Los Angeles Times has lost reputation and circulation — 8 percent in just the last six months — and last week, Dean Baquet, one of the industry’s most esteemed editors, was sacrificed to the gods of cost control.

So if newspapers in the hands of experienced operators are flailing — the Tribune Company made huge amounts on newspapers before the paradigm shifted — how is it that men who made money selling groceries, building houses or breaking pop music acts will suddenly crack the code? Even the storied operator Warren E. Buffet, whose Berkshire Hathaway has significant holdings in the Washington Post Company and Gannett, has not been able to buck the trend at The Buffalo News.

“All of the inherent growth has been squeezed out of the industry, which eliminates any number of potential buyers,” said Edward Atorino, a media analyst with the Benchmark Company. “Without classifieds, which are on the way out, and the flight of advertising to the Web, this is an industry that is going to be resized in a fundamental way.”

Each potential buyer of the Tribune papers has said, mostly through surrogates, that profits are not the point, but men who spent their lives piling up money hate to watch it evaporate. And any experienced business reporter will tell you the average titan has little understanding or sympathy for aggressive newsgathering.

“They say they are not interested in making money and they are not going to interfere in the editorial process, so what exactly is the deal here?” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism at Washington and Lee University.

Winning a newspaper in a bidding war is a little like winning a lottery whose prize is to have a piano dropped on your head. You get the piano, but you won’t be in much of a mood or condition to play it.

“I have never met a rich man who didn’t think he knew how to run anything,” said John Morton, a longtime newspaper analyst. “But the newspaper business is in the midst of a very complicated time where they could lose a lot of money very quickly.”

Mr. Morton and others say that quality newspaper brands with dominant positions in their local markets will eventually become good businesses again, but it will take the kind of patience that public markets lack and corporate titans rarely display.

“There are enormous questions about the economic model,” said David Abrahamson, a professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. “But you should never discount the attractions and seduction of cultural power. History will show that some people will do wonderful things with it, while others will turn into complete Visigoths who want their golfing buddies to get good coverage.”

Even if they stay out of the news process, staring down lower margins and tough fundamentals can wear on even the most enlightened owner.

“When I see this going on, I don’t want to hoist a flag and salute,” said David Nasaw, a professor of history at the City University of New York. “Newspapers are a serious enterprise, not amateur hour, and say what you want about the old press barons, they were newspaper people and they understood the business and got their hands dirty.”

When Mr. Tierney and his cohort bought The Inquirer, they were undoubtedly sincere in both their rhetoric and intentions. And perhaps they were suckered in by the conceit of many businesspeople — that with a little common sense and some scratches on the back of an envelope, they could turn newspapers back into the A.T.M.’s they once were.

That turned out to be a fairy tale. The trouble with white knights is that once they get knocked off their horses, they end up covered in the same mud that mere mortals slog through every day.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/13/bu...ia/13carr.html





CNN Remixes Itself
Alan Wexelblat

The questions of copyright and "official" versions just keep getting funnier.

This time we have CNN attempting (apparently successfully) to force YouTube to take down as copyright violation the original broadcast version of a show. But they have no problems with YouTube copies of an edited version, which they themselves showed.

Confused? Me too. Here's what I can piece together:
Bill Maher guests on Larry King Live. This show is shown live to parts of the US (East Coast) but rebroadcast from tape for later time zones (West Coast). On the live version, Maher made some remarks suggestiong that RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman is gay. My hipper gay friends tell me this is an open secret. He's closeted and all that, but yeah he's gay. OK, whatever.

Except CNN doesn't seem to like those remarks so when Maher's appearance gets rebroadcast for the later showing those comments are edited out. Of course people notice (duh, CNN really doesn't get it) and people who recorded the original version post it to YouTube. People also post the edited version. CNN sent a copyright violation letter to the person who posted the original, unedited version, and then edited its online transcript of the show to match what was later shown.

Here's the Americablog entry, which contains both the cease-and-desist letter and a link to the Huffington Post blog, which has the entire video and the screaming headline "CENSORED BY CNN".

Way to publicize a controversy and make yourselves look like idiots, guys.
http://copyfight.corante.com/archive...xes_itself.php





YouTube’s Greatest Hits
Charles Isherwood

Until recently I had assumed that the “you” in YouTube referred to anybody but me, maybe everybody but me. Like who? College kids with a compulsive need to procrastinate. Media-obsessives anxious to keep track of the hot new joke or political gaffe. Exhibitionists and their friends. Lovers of humiliation comedy. People with an excessive fondness for the cute antics of their pets.

Certainly, this freakish and freakishly large video archive offers plenty of material to sate the appetites of those constituencies. But it also offers a dizzying array of material for addicts of what, for lack of more egalitarian term, I’ll call high culture. Or high-ish culture: I’m talking not just about opera and dance, but also that often derided but enduring enterprise called the Broadway musical.

Thanks to its ease of operation, YouTube allows pretty much anyone with a mild curiosity about opera or musical theater to expand his frame of reference without spending a dime, thanks to the compulsive generosity of members with a desire to exhibit their curatorial prowess. It also offers the rabidly enthusiastic a chance to display the colorful plumage of their passions. Spend an hour or two trolling through YouTube looking for high art, following a path forged with the help of the Web site’s own built-in (and eccentric) electronic trailblazer, and you come away amazed at the volume (and sometimes the quality) of material available for instant viewing.

On the opera front the easiest place to start is by typing in the name of a favorite singer. The most popular are represented in depth. Unsurprisingly, Maria Callas clips number more than 100, including lots of interviews and late-career concert performances but also a scene from the Lisbon “Traviata” of 1958, immortalized by the playwright Terrence McNally.

You can also see some choice highlights from the career of Leonie Rysanek, a dramatic soprano who garnered a passionate following for her vocally fearless and dramatically incisive interpretations, or the great tenor Jon Vickers, seen in his prime in selections from “Peter Grimes,” “Otello” and “Tristan und Isolde.” (An important caveat: things come and go on YouTube, sometimes hour by hour; clips I saw one day would be untraceable the next.)

Or if you want to compare and contrast, you might begin by typing into the search field the name of a popular aria — “Sempre libera,” for instance, Violetta’s coloratura showpiece from the first act of “La Traviata.” They’re all here, it seems, the stars of yore and of today, perhaps tomorrow: Anna Moffo in a film version from 1967, Joan Sutherland at her precise best, Angela Gheorghiu at Covent Garden in 1994 under Georg Solti, Sumi Jo and Teresa Stratas and Adriana Kohutkova too.

Wait a sec. Adriana who? “Nowadays one of the best Slovak opera singers,” the note attached to the clip explains. And let’s not forget Mihaela Stanciu. She’s there too. Click on her “Traviata” clip, and you are referred to a veritable trove of Mihaela’s greatest hits. Thus does YouTube create an odd, quantitative equivalence between a relatively obscure Romanian soprano and some of the greats of today and yesteryear. Zealotry of various stripes is the engine that keeps YouTube humming, and as Ms. Stanciu’s video repertory indicates, there’s no fanatic like an opera fanatic.

When it comes to dance, by contrast, the pickings are pretty slim. This isn’t as surprising as it might seem. Dancers tend not to have the cultish followings of opera singers. Dance lovers also often disdain videotaped performances as flimsy representations of an art form that loses its savor when it isn’t seen live.

Although the quality varies widely, sound tends to transmit better than sight on YouTube, at least in my experience, particularly if you’ve got a good pair of speakers. But there’s not much to be done about the grainy, jerky and sometimes murky look of many of the videos, particularly the “bootleg” stuff shot with hand-held video cameras.

Type in the name of George Balanchine, the most celebrated choreographer of the 20th century, and a mere 17 offerings pop up. All but two of them are slices from a Paris Opera Ballet performance of “Jewels” recently released on DVD and broadcast on PBS. Mikhail Baryshnikov and Alessandra Ferri in “La Sonnambula” and a dance bit from the 1977 soapy backstage ballet movie “The Turning Point” are also accessible.

Modern dance is even less well represented than ballet. There are many Paul Taylor clips, but none that I could find that had anything to do with the choreographer (the curse of a commonplace name). I found nothing of note on a search for Martha Graham. A gorgeous (and relatively clear) two minutes of a youthful Merce Cunningham performing in “Septet” in 1964 was among the few rewarding discoveries.

The Broadway collection is richer but also pretty spotty, and sometimes downright strange. You could probably spend an afternoon watching various possessed souls lip-synching to “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Jennifer Holliday’s gut-wrenching aria from “Dreamgirls.” But I couldn’t find any bootleg clips from the original production itself (aside from the Tony telecast medley), or for that matter from the original Broadway production of “A Chorus Line.” If you want to check out highlights of this year’s Grand Rapids Civic Theater production of “A Chorus Line,” however, you’re in luck.

YouTube has gained its popularity as a sort of collective cultural sideshow, full of oddities and embarrassments both watchable and unwatchable. The culture archives are no exception and are full of priceless curiosities. It wasn’t linked to the show’s title, but I found a 1980 clip of Leontyne Price, of all people, singing “What I Did for Love” from “A Chorus Line.” Weirdly mesmerizing. (It looks like it came from one of those “Fledermaus” galas featuring dubious guest turns.)

A friend sent me a funny clip of a lederhosen-clad boy soprano singing (impressively) the Queen of the Night’s fiendish aria “Der Hölle Rache” from “The Magic Flute.” The poor thing looks like he’d rather be kicking a soccer ball around. Wonder what “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” from “Gypsy” sounds like in Portuguese? YouTube has the answer.

And then there’s “Carrie: The Musical,” the discovery of which I consider the most choice fruit of my immersion in YouTube’s murky depths. Based on the Stephen King novel about a telekinetic teenager who has a very bad night at the prom, this flop musical has come to symbolize Broadway folly. It ran for just five performances in 1988, but a suspiciously large number of people claim to have seen it.

Now, thanks to YouTube, you can join the knowing ranks. Sort of. The dedication of a single enthusiast has ensured that “Carrie” is not forgotten: a big chunk of “Carrie”-related material can be checked out, everything from television reviews by Pat Collins and Joel Siegel to B-roll tape (video supplied to stations for promotional purposes).

Most riveting, for me, were the scenes taped from high up in the balcony. The song “And Eve Was Weak” is captured pretty much in its entirety, and it’s kind of fabulous — and not in a so-bad-it’s-good way either.

Performed with hair-raising conviction by Betty Buckley, who as Carrie’s mother looks like a spider scurrying around the stage, and Linzi Hateley as Carrie, this duet finds the two locked in a fierce fight for the troubled girl’s soul. O.K., maybe it’s not “Jenufa” — Janacek’s opera about a rigid stepmother and her doomed daughter — but it’s a well-wrought, emotionally powerful scene that is a damn sight more ambitious, effective and interesting than pretty much any five minutes from any jukebox musical you can name.

I’ve watched it half a dozen times now, with my admiration for Ms. Buckley’s fearless performance waxing continuously as my suspicion grows that “Carrie: The Musical” has been unjustly maligned.

Maybe I’m getting carried away. Ferreting around cyberspace in YouTube can be a bit like going down the rabbit hole, entering a strange, oddly seductive media universe in which normal standards you’d bring to the consumption of culture don’t seem to apply. Why would anyone want to watch some nobodies from Grand Rapids performing “A Chorus Line”? You scoff, and then, possessed by curiosity, outrage or some other impulse, you click.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/arts/16tube.html





Who's Been Eating My Wi-Fi?

As wireless problems go, poor security has nothing on pot plants, fruit machines and microwave ovens...
Will Sturgeon

Want to know why wi-fi coverage sometimes isn't all it's cracked up to be? It may have something to do with large plants in the vicinity, or even fruit machines. Will Sturgeon explains...

I've been spending some time in pubs recently. Anybody who knows me may not have fallen off their seat at that piece of news but I've been working - honestly.

I've also been spending a fair amount of time thinking about - and sometimes even writing about - wi-fi.

Over the past few months on silicon.com we've maintained a guide to some of London's wi-fi pubs.

On my travels around these places I found a great variation in the wi-fi available - in terms of costs as well as quality.

So I roped in an old contact of mine, Ian Schenkel, managing director EMEA at AirMagnet, whose software tests, diagnoses and monitors the performance, potential problems and security of wi-fi networks and we set about finding out just how good London's pubs are.

And if pubs - or London - aren't your thing, along the way I discovered some best practice rules for setting up wi-fi - whether you're doing so in a pub, office or any other space you might care to mention.

Wi-fi pubs

Schenkel tells me: "In any pub environment you are not going to get the best reception." He explains that pubs tend to be designed, quite rightly, with drinkers, not workers in mind and their lay-out and furniture often counters, rather than complements the wi-fi signal.

Upon walking into one large chain pub, a stone's throw from Liverpool Street station he adds: "One of the key things you are going to see here is interference problems. There's no fruit machines but you've still got lighting, steel pillars, plants."

He mentions fruit machines, the ubiquitous one-armed bandits, because he envisages these being one of the biggest obstacles to quality wi-fi we will encounter today - eating up radio frequency quicker than they eat up the punters' coins. Problems related to lighting and the actual construction of the building are more intractable.

The next pub we try proves the point perfectly. We locate the wi-fi access point near the pub's front door and get a signal strength of around 75 per cent. This requires us standing with the monitoring laptop right on top of the box - not a position conducive to working.

The box containing the wi-fi access point is also a quiz machine and on either side there are fruit machines and a video game. There could hardly be a worse location for a wireless access point.

The effect of this is that just two metres away from the access point, the signal is down to less than 50 per cent. That's easily still workable but the deterioration is alarming.

And at the other end of the bar, perhaps 10 metres from the access point, that signal is an almost unusable 10 per cent.

"That is absolutely the environment," I'm told of this shocking decline in the signal strength. Brass bar fittings, steel pins through wooden beams, a microwave oven behind the bar - it will all be detracting from the signal.

Plants are another major problem - and especially so in offices where a large potted palm can be the deadly enemy of wi-fi signals. If you're reading this in any wireless environment look about you.

Schenkel tells me: "People see that their access point will give them 30 metres of coverage so they look around, measure up, plug it in and think 'that'll do, we'll chuck it up there'. They don't stop to consider what else is within that 30 metres that could interfere with the signal or where the best place to put the access point really is."

Many of the pubs we visit show this lack of planning in abundance. It is also the case in other public wireless hotspots - and when consumers are expected to pay this seems a major failing.

Schenkel says: "It's easy to overcome as long as you have the right density of access points to deliver the quality of service your customers should expect."

Another problem in common with many wi-fi environments is that configuration is often poorly thought out. Many users and wi-fi access points are competing for bandwidth on the same channel - often channel 11 - and some channels are becoming critically overloaded while others go unused.

The bonus in many of the pubs we try is that security all looks pretty good.

"I really would have expected to find a lot more security problems," Schenkel tells me after about the fifth pub throws up nothing but pretty watertight wi-fi. His tone is more surprised than disappointed.

"Sure, there are things here you wouldn't expect to find in a business but for a public environment there's nothing I'd be worried about."

Instead it is performance which draws his professional criticism after another pub throws up weak signals in much of the building. He says customers paying for a service - often at around £5 per hour are entitled to expect better signals.

And then we hit gold.

The Corney & Barrow chain have bars all over the City and the first thing we notice in the chain's Broadgate Circus bar is the quality of the signal.

We move around, even seat ourselves around a corner but there is no shaking the fact this signal clings to the line which denotes a 75 per cent signal strength on AirMagnet's dashboard. We go down the road to Paternoster Square, beneath the London Stock Exchange and it's the same story - an excellent signal throughout.

"They've obviously taken this very seriously," says Schenkel. "They've not just put an access point up and slapped a sticker on the door that says they do wi-fi."

"This is a pub I would definitely recommend," he adds.

And it gets better. The service is free to use and good enough to stream high resolution video. Worth raising a glass to.

The obvious conclusion to draw from all of this is that London's pubs are still in the early-adopter stage - signified by some naïve mistakes and poor implementations - though often it is commercial third parties who should have known better (or perhaps who came up against a wall of indifference).

But they are coming online quickly with varying degrees of success and this should be encouraged. Many London pubs - and those outside the capital too - do offer high quality wireless coverage and those pubs will help to inform consumers that this is an option available to them. That awareness - and a tendency among consumers to vote with their feet - will speed further improvements in quality and availability.

For now, perhaps more worrying is the fact many of these problems are universal. In theory, there is no building that cannot be wireless-enabled but the cost of doing so may be prohibitive and may contribute to corners being cut.

But how many problems are also of a business' own making? How high up the list of priorities is wi-fi access - either current or future - when it comes to office design? A pub landlord can probably be forgiven for not mugging up on wi-fi access, while studying for the bar, but businesses - whether third party providers rolling out access in public spaces or companies implementing their own wireless access - are clearly missing a trick or two.

It's enough to turn a person to drink.
http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch...,00.htm?p5=3bx





Scientific American 50: SA 50 Winners and Contributors


RESEARCH LEADER OF THE YEAR: 1. Angela Belcher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

BUSINESS LEADER OF THE YEAR: 2. Swiss Re

POLICY LEADER OF THE YEAR: 3. Vice President Al Gore

Other Research, Business and Policy Leaders

More Than Government Grants
4. Michael Kremer, Harvard University (policy)
5. Scott Johnson, Myelin Repair Foundation (policy)
6. Kathy Giusti, Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (policy)
7. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Foundation (policy)
8. Warren E. Buffett, investor/philanthropist (policy)

On the Road to Green
9. Iogen Corporation (business)
10. Michikazu Hara, Tokyo Institute of Technology (research)
11. DaimlerChrysler (business)
12. General Motors, DaimlerChrysler and BMW (business)
13. EDrive Systems and Hymotion (business)

Unlocking Alzheimer's
14. John R. Cirrito and David M. Holtzman, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine (research)
15. Randall J. Bateman and David M. Holtzman, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine (research)
16. Robert P. Hammer, Louisiana State University (research)

Beginning to See the Light
17. Igor I. Smolyaninov, University of Maryland (research)
18. John B. Pendry, Imperial College London, David Schurig and David Smith, Duke University, and Ulf Leonhardt, University of St. Andrews (research)
19. Nader Engheta, University of Pennsylvania (research)

The Promise of the Mother Cell
20. Kevin Eggan, Harvard Stem Cell Institute (research)
21. Richard K. Burt, Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine (research)
22. Laurie A. Boyer and Richard A. Young, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (research)
23. Susan L. Lindquist, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (research)
24. Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado and Representative Mike Castle of Delaware (policy)

Smart Tags Get Smarter
25. IMEC (business)
26. Eugenio Cantatore, Philips Research Laboratories (business)
27. Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (business)

Chicken-Wire Electronics
28. Andre K. Geim, University of Manchester, and Philip Kim, Columbia University (research)
29. Walter de Heer, Georgia Institute of Technology (research)
30. Prabhakar R. Bandaru, University of California, San Diego (research)
31. Ray H. Baughman, Mei Zhang and Shaoli Fang, NanoTech Institute, University of Texas at Dallas (research)

Growing Replacement Parts
32. William R. Wagner and Michael S. Sacks, University of Pittsburgh (research)
33. Cytograft (business)
34. Shulamit Levenberg, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

Robots on the Move
35. Stanford Racing Team (research)
36. Jessy W. Grizzle, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (research)

DNA Sequencing on the Cheap
37. George M. Church, Harvard Medical School (research)
38. 454 Life Sciences (business)
39. H. Kumar Wickramasinghe, IBM Almaden Research Center (business)

Material Progress
40. Natalia Dubrovinskaia, University of Bayreuth (research)
41. Pulickel M. Ajayan, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (research)
42. Antoni P. Tomsia, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (research)
43. Daniel E. Morse, University of California, Santa Barbara (research)

Sight Savers
44. Larry I. Benowitz, Children's Hospital Boston (research)
45. Elizabeth Goldring, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (research)
46. Protagoras Cutchis, Johns Hopkins University (research)

Of Brain Maps and Saving the Internet
47. Christopher Monroe, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and David J. Wineland, National Institute of Standards and Technology (research)
48. Timothy Wu, Columbia University (policy)
49. Andrew J. Turberfield, University of Oxford (research)
50. Paul G. Allen, Allen Institute for Brain Science (research)
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...mber=1&catID=9





Deutsche Telekom CEO Ricke Replaced

Europe's largest telecoms group by sales Deutsche Telekom has changed bosses. Chief Executive Kai-Uwe Ricke has stepped down to be replaced by the head of its mobile phone division Rene Obermann. Klaus Zumwinkel, head of Deutsche Telekom's supervisory board, said Obermann has its support and has been appointed for a five-year-period. Obermann said: "The market conditions for Deutsche Telekom will remain difficult. It's no secret that we are up against very strong competition, plus there are there are huge cost pressures and major technological changes."

No reason was given for Kai-Uwe Ricke's departure, but there has been pressure from shareholders after poor results. Pre-tax third quarter profit, at 1.2 billion euros was a third lower than the same period last year. It seems Ricke was ousted because he had lost the support of the group's top shareholders - the German government and private equity group Blackstone - following a profit and sales warning three months ago. Analyst Jürgen Kurz said: "It is clear that Ricke hesitated for too long before taking things in hand and saying firmly that Deutsche Telekom really needed to be reformed, if it was going to become a market leader."

Obermann has said he will focus on what he called the difficult balancing act of raising customer service levels, while reducing costs. But he may have the same trouble as his predecessor as the German government, which still owns a third of the shares of the former state monopoly, is reluctant to support job cuts.
http://euronews.net/create_html.php?...e=390582&lng=1





Sun Microsystems Open-Sources Java Under GNU General Public License, Version 2
Mae Kowalke

Sun Microsystems today made all three major implementations of its Java software platform available as open source, under the GNU General Public License, Version 2 (GPLv2).

In its announcement, Sun said that this move means the company “is now the biggest contributor to the open-source community.” It previously made other products open source, including Solaris OS, OpenOffice, and Java EE.

The company said it plans to open all of its middleware using GPLv2. Sun added that its open sourcing initiative is intended to fuel innovation, drive evolution of the Java platform, allow Java developers worldwide to make better use of platform enhancements, and to speed up time-to-market for new Java applications.

An Associated Press report today referred to Sun as “a formerly high-flying dot-com that has lost billions of dollars since the stock market collapse of 2000,” adding that a key element of the company’s rebound strategy is affiliation with the open source movement.

“Sun believes Java technology has reached the right level of maturity, adoption, and innovation—with widespread use across enterprises and devices—to move into the next stage of its evolution,” the company said in its announcement. “In the largest single contribution under the GNU GPL, Sun is releasing all of its key Java implementations under this widely respected free-software license.”

GNU GPL also is used for the Linux operating system, AP noted.

“The open-sourcing of this really means more -- more richness of offerings, more capability, more applications that consumers will get to use,” the AP report quoted Rich Green, Executive Vice President of Software at Sun, as saying. “The platform itself will become a place for innovation.”

Every last drop of Java should be available as open source by March, 2007, the company said.

As this article was being published, Sun Microsystem stocks were trading on the NASDAQ for about $5.31, up roughly four cents, or 0.76 percent, from Friday closing of $5.27.
http://www.tmcnet.com/news/2006/11/13/2071686.htm





IBM Cool to Sun's Open-Source Java Plan
Martin LaMonica

IBM on Monday urged Sun Microsystems to participate in existing open-source Java projects at the Apache Foundation rather than start new ones.

Java creator Sun on Monday announced that it is releasing its Java desktop and mobile software under the General Public License (GPL) version 2.

The code will be implementations of standards called Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) and Java Platform Mobile Edition (Java ME). The code to Sun's Java server is available through the GPL now as well.

After years of internal debates and public calls from IBM to make Java open source, you would think that IBM would be overjoyed at the news.

Not so.

IBM on Monday issued a statement attributed to Rod Smith, vice president of emerging Internet technologies in the IBM Software Group, who penned the open letter in 2004 requesting Sun to make Java open source.

Smith said that IBM supports all open-source licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). But he noted that there are already two projects around open-source Java.

There is Harmony, a project in the incubator phase at Apache to build an open-source edition of Java SE. IBM joined the Harmony project shortly after it was launched in 2005.

Meanwhile, Motorola two weeks ago said that it will contribute code to start a Java ME project at Apache .

"In light of the Apache projects, we have discussed with Sun our strong belief that Sun should contribute their Java technologies to Apache rather than starting another open-source Java project, or at least make their contributions available under an 'Apache friendly' license to ensure the open-source Java community isn't fragmented and disenfranchised, instead Sun would be bringing the same benefits of OS (open-source) Java to this significant and growing open-source community," the statement said.

Sun chose the General Public License, rather than the Apache License, in part to ensure that there is compatibility with Linux, which is under the GPL, according to the company.

It has not created specific projects around its planned code contributions and has left the question of project governance unanswered at this point. Sun published a detailed FAQ on its open-source Java plans Monday.
http://news.com.com/2061-10795_3-6134853.html





Give the Gift of Pre-Installed Linux This Year
D.C. Parris

With Christmas around the corner, you'll be glad to know that you can check out over 100 vendors around the globe who offer desktop and notebook computers with GNU/Linux pre-installed. Put another way, LXer's Pre-Installed Linux Vendor database is now available!

A few months back, LXer reader, cyber_rigger, began compiling a list of vendors who offer GNU/Linux pre-installed. The list quickly grew, even drawing attention from other news outlets. Meanwhile, the LXer team went to work to produce a usable database that anyone can browse and search. We still have one or two features to implement, but users can quickly and easily browse the Pre-Installed Linux Vendor Database of 106 vendors. All vendors in the list offer reasonably-priced desktops and/or notebooks for home and office users, and either offer Linux only, or as an installation option on the system configuration page of their sites.
GNU/Linux For Non-Techies

Typically, when people plan to buy a PC, they shop the major retailers and the web, looking for the best deals they can find. What they normally see is Windows pre-installed. Many people don't realize they have a choice, or the advantages of any given option. What's more, once the person buys a PC, they subsequently discover that they have to pay even more money - often well beyond their budget - to get additional programs. Then there are the security risks inherent with the Windows family of operating systems. Even with a fully-patched system with anti-virus, you still have to acquire anti-spam, anti-spyware and related software to stay relatively safe in an Internet-connected world. For many non-technical users, Windows just isn't worth the hassle.

Until now, it has been difficult to find computer retailers that offer GNU/Linux pre-installed. Now, however, you can browse LXer's database to find vendors, whether you need one in Turkey, other parts of Europe, Australia, or the United States. You can find laptops, desktops, or even workstations for your business. At least one vendor even offers Myth TV systems. Some vendors, admittedly, are more focused on small to medium sized businesses, but many are open to consumers as well. You will also find a range of GNU/Linux OS distributions, so you can pick the right one for your family member. For computing enthusiasts, there are even vendors who simply offer no operating system at all. Unlike Dell, which charges more for an OS-less PC, most of these vendors offer their 'no OS' PCs at a lower cost.

About The Database

If you know where to look, you can find a computer with GNU/Linux pre-installed from Dell. The trick is, you have to know where to look. Most of the vendors in LXer's database either offer GNU/Linux exclusively, or allow you to choose your operating system from the configuration options. There is little need to hassle with where to find the Linux computers. In some cases, you may find special instructions to help you along. The database is very easy to browse, and is aimed at helping non-technical users find just the right PC. Additionally, you'll discover that many vendors are willing to provide further customization, even if they don't advertise that fact. Whether or not that costs extra depends on the vendor.

It might interest you to know that cyber_rigger even did a little research to find out which are the most offered GNU/Linux OSes. Desktops and notebooks have slightly different reigning distros. In the desktop category, Ubuntu (18%), SUSE (14%), Fedora (13%), Linspire (13.5%), and Red Hat (8%) led the list. For notebooks, it was Ubuntu (22%), SUSE (16.9%), Fedora (16.9%), Debian (8.5%) and Red Hat (8.5%). As this only accounts for what is offered, we can't be sure yet which are the most requested distributions. Still, it gives a rough idea of what the shops are willing to offer. Also, our database tells you if the vendor advertises GNU/Linux on the front page. You might consider letting those vendors know how appreciative you are.

We had planned to allow users to filter by model (desktop or notebook). as well as on 'no OS' computers (for enthusiasts). Unfortunately, we ran into a snag, and will add that functionality in later. For now, though, you can browse the database, based on the distributions offered, and the vendor's country. If you don't see a GNU/Linux distribution listed in the appropriate column, the vendor is probably a 'no OS' vendor, although one or two vendors did not say which GNU/Linux distribution they were offering. Currently, the only way to add vendors is by submitting the appropriate information to the editorial team.

You have been planning to give someone a Linux box for Christmas. Or maybe you want to help someone buy one for their family. You didn't want to recommend Dell or Circuit City, and you just didn't know where else to look. Just click the 'Products' link in the top menu on our site. Be sure to do your homework though. Just because a vendor is in our database doesn't mean they provide great service, or even that we approve of them. It just means you have one more choice that you didn't have before. Also, if you find our information inaccurate, please do let us know.
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/74282/index.html





Intel Rolls Out Quad-Core Processors
Jordan Robertson

Intel Corp., the world's largest computer chip maker, on Tuesday launched a family of chips with four computing engines inside a single microprocessor.

The "quad-core" processors, which boast improved performance over models with just one or two processing cores, could help the company win back market share lost to smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., analysts said. Processors with multiple cores can handle more complex jobs at once.

Intel rolled out four processors for servers under the Xeon 5300 branding, and another processor under the Core 2 Extreme series aimed at hardcore computer gamers, programmers and other people with heavy-duty computing needs.

The Core 2 Extreme chip is up to 80 percent faster than previous models, the Santa Clara-based company said. The Xeon 5300 chips use roughly the same power as previous generations while boosting performance as much as four times over single-core models.

Intel plans to release three more quad-core processors in the first quarter of 2007, including a more mainstream model for entertainment and multimedia uses under the name Core 2 Quad, and a Xeon processor designed for low-voltage uses and another for single-socket servers and workstations.

Intel, which is locked in a fierce battle for market share with smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., had originally promised the quad-core chips for mid-2007 but earlier this year announced it was ramping up production, beating Sunnyvale-based AMD to market by several months.

AMD, which has been stealing market share from Intel with chips that reviewers said were cheaper and faster to run, has said it expects to launch quad-core processors for its Opteron product line by mid-2007.

The battle has had an impact on Intel's financial health. The company announced a massive restructuring in September that called for a 10 percent reduction in staff - or 10,500 positions - to save $3 billion per year by 2008.

Intel executives hailed the quad-core launch as another key step toward reversing sinking profits and regaining lost market share. It also follows the launch this summer of its Core 2 Duo microprocessors, which deliver as much as 40 percent better performance while consuming as much as 40 percent fewer watts than previous models.

"We're back - we're running hard and setting the pace for the entire industry," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel's senior vice president. "I think of this as the exclamation point on a wonderful year of products."

AMD executives on Monday promised a smooth transition to quad-core chips while seizing on a major design difference between the two companies' chips.

Intel's design packages together two dual-core chips that plug into a single processor socket, while AMD's will integrate the processors onto a single sliver of silicon, a design that AMD claims will offer higher performance and power efficiency.

Analysts said the race for quad-core chips currently amounts to little more than a battle for bragging rights, as most desktop computer software isn't yet adapted for the designs, and mainstream adoption of the chips is likely more than a year away.

Stephen Kleynhans, a research vice president with research firm Gartner Inc., downplayed the design difference, saying customers care more about output and performance and that Intel's launch only ratchets up the competition between the two companies.

"This shows us that we've got really good, healthy competition in the processor industry," he said. "It really is about the manufacturers being able to point and say, 'I've got the best processor.' It's a halo for the rest of their products, and Intel happens to be in a really good position right now."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-14-00-47-50





As Scandal Unfolded, H.P.’s Profits Surged Ahead
Damon Darlin

In a period punctuated by distracting revelations of company spying, Hewlett-Packard nevertheless sharply increased its revenue and made more profit from the revenue.

Net income for its fourth quarter, which ended Oct. 31, rose to $1.7 billion, or 60 cents a share, from $416 million, or 14 cents a share, a year ago, which included $1.57 billion in restructuring charges. After adjusting for the manner in which the charges are accounted for, net income increased 27 percent. Revenue increased 7 percent, to $24.6 billion.

With $91.7 billion in revenue for the year, a 6 percent increase over 2005, the company overtook I.B.M. as the world’s largest technology company. (The consensus of analysts puts I.B.M.’s 2006 revenue at $90.72 billion.) H.P. has also overtaken Dell as the world’s largest PC vendor mostly because sales of its notebook computers grew 24 percent.

“We certainly aren’t taking any victory laps, but we are pleased with the progress,” the chairman and chief executive, Mark V. Hurd, said.

Analysts were pleased with revenue growth in the quarter, but they were focused on how the company had made more money on each dollar of revenue across all but one line of business. For example, revenue from personal computers grew 10 percent to $7.8 billion while operating profit grew 68 percent to $336 million, largely because of the strength in sales of notebook computers. While selling PCs remained a low margin business, operating profit margin increased to 4.3 percent of revenue from 2.8 percent a year earlier.

The story was similar in the company’s printer business. Operating profit grew 22 percent to $1.1 billion as operating margins increased to 14.8 percent from 13.2 percent. In software, operating margins were 17.2 percent up from 9.2 percent a year ago. The company’s $4.7 billion services business, which had been its weakest link, saw operating profit jump 56.8 percent as margins rose to 12.4 percent from 9 percent.

The company’s top executives were distracted through much of the quarter by revelations of spying operations conducted against several directors and journalists. The imbroglio led to the resignation of Patricia C. Dunn, the company’s chairwoman, who this week pleaded not guilty to four felony charges. A former company lawyer and its director of ethics, Kevin Hunsaker, also faces charges. He has pleaded not guilty. Three contractors were also charged and have also pleaded not guilty.

The fallout from the affair has not ended. The company disclosed that the Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an investigation of the handling of disclosures of board information. It also said the Federal Communications Commission has requested information on the company’s spying, which included using false pretenses to obtain private phone records. The California attorney general is expected to sue Hewlett-Packard in civil court. In addition, the United States attorney in Northern California continues his investigation.

The strong profit is one reason that investors snoozed through a month of reports of the illegal and unethical behavior by company lawyers, investigators and private detectives.

H.P. shares rose as high as $40.51 in after-hours trading and closing at $40.13 in regular trading.

The company’s executives said that the improvement in profit margins showed that Mr. Hurd’s plan to cut costs and free up cash to invest in growth opportunities is starting to work. “Restructuring has done wonders for profitability and it will give them room to strengthen market share gains in key areas,” said William C. Shope, a securities analyst with J. P. Morgan. “The challenge will be to sustain revenue growth.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/te...17hewlett.html





Sony Executive: PS3s to Be Flown In
Peter Svensson

Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 is in high demand and short supply, prompting some gamers to camp out in front of stores for the chance to pay up to $600 for one of the sleek consoles.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Kazuo Hirai, the head of Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ) Computer Entertainment America, emphasized that while the company is trying to satisfy demand as quickly as possible, it's in it for the long haul - and sticking to strategies that have allowed it to dominate the video game market for a decade.

AP: How long will it take until everyone who wants a PS3 can get one?

Hirai: We are trying everything we can to get as many units into the North American market as possible. The thing that we're trying to focus on now is shortening the lead time from the factories to the retailers and consumers. Usually, something this size and weight we would put on a boat, but what we're doing is chartering planes to fly them in ... that combined with trying to ramp up production as quickly as possible as well.

AP: So are we talking months here before there's a surplus in the stores?

Hirai: Well, I think that's really going to be a function of the demand for the product. ... I think we are going to be selling out of the product very quickly. Hopefully we'll replenish it very quickly as well with the weekly shipments. But ultimately, when we have a situation that the consumer can walk into retail and pick one up remains to be seen, basically.

AP: There are rumblings out there among people waiting for the PS3 that some stores won't be able to fill their pre-orders because allocations have been moved between retailers. Is there anything to that?

Hirai: We've always allocated our products to our retail partners in a very fair way and also a transparent way. We don't favor one retailer over another.

AP: There was a price break on the cheaper PS3 model in Japan (the price was cut from about $500 to $400). Is that something we can expect in the U.S.?

Hirai: We've been very comfortable with the pricing points we've announced. In speaking to our retail partners, they're very happy with the price points as well. We see no need to adjust the pricing at this point in time.

AP: What is the bottleneck in production?

Hirai: I think it was well publicized that we had some issues initially with laser diode production (used in the Blu-ray disc player). Those issues have been ironed out, but with any component, whether it's laser diodes or anything else, you do have a ramp-up period. You suddenly can't go from zero one day to 100,000 units the next day.

AP: How do you feel you're positioned vis-a-vis the competition?

Hirai: We have a long-standing history of providing a stable platform that the consumer can enjoy for many, many years. We launched the first PlayStation in 1995 in the U.S., and we were in that business till last year. PlayStation 2, six years into the market, continues to be the best-selling video-game console in the market, with over 110 million units shipped worldwide. With the PlayStation 3, we'll be embarking on the same kind strategy, where the console will be supported by a fantastic lineup of software titles ... It's really all about making sure that you have content that's fresh in the eyes of the consumers, month in and month out. That strategy has worked very well for us in the past, and we're going to continue on that strategy.

When we introduce a product, we introduce a product that's going to be relevant for a very long time, we don't suddenly leave the other, older console twisting in the wind, which seems to be a strategy some of the older companies go through. ... We have many more years to go with the PS2, we're not suddenly dropping support for that platform.

AP: There have been some complaints in Japan that the PS3 had problems playing some games from the older PlayStations. Is that something that can be fixed?

Hirai: Just to put it in perspective, I think there are probably 8,000 titles out there for the PlayStation 2 on a worldwide basis, and the vast majority of those titles will play on the PlayStation 3 right out of the box. If you look at the launch of the PlayStation 2, there were some titles there as well that did not play on the PlayStation 2.

The beauty with the PlayStation 3 is that you can always have the firmware (the console's underlying software) updated as you connect the PlayStation 3 on to the Internet. As we go through these upgrades, one of the things we want to do is make sure that the percentage of compatible games goes higher and higher.
http://www.forbes.com/business/comme...ap3182311.html





Backward compatibility issue

PlayStation 3 Not Playing Some Older Games
Yuri Kageyama

Sony's PlayStation 3 game console, which went on sale in Japan over the weekend leading off a global launch, can't play some of the older games for the original PlayStation and the upgrade PlayStation 2, a company official said Tuesday.

Sony Corp. had billed PlayStation 3 as compatible with the previous PlayStation machines.

But Sony Computer Entertainment spokesman Satoshi Fukuoka said some of the 8,000 older games weren't working properly on PS3, making the wrong sounds or images, and some couldn't be played at all.

He declined to give a number for the games that weren't functioning, but he said the same problem is expected when the game console goes on sale in the U.S. Nov. 17. About 16,000 different games have been sold for the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 in North America.

Fukuoka said the problems in playing the older games were not a glitch and had been expected. Sony announced the problem on its Japanese Web page Nov. 11, the day when the PS3 went on sale to lines of eager fans at Japanese retailers.

Users can punch in the name of the PS or PS2 game on the Web page, and a list will pop up, telling you if the game can be played without problems or not.

For example, all the "Biohazard" series games can be played without problem, except for one in which a virtual gun won't fire properly, according to Sony's Web page.

"We are sorry for the game fans that they cannot play all the games," Fukuoka said. "But unfortunately some of these problems could not be avoided."

PlayStation 3 is facing off in a three-way console war for this Christmas against Nintendo Co.'s Wii, which goes on sale Nov. 19 in the U.S., and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360, which had a year's head start over rivals.

Although response has been enthusiastic to the PS3, the launch hasn't been smooth.

Production problems meant that only 100,000 PlayStation 3 machines were in time for its debut in Japan. When it goes on sale in the United States on Nov. 17, some 400,000 PS3 consoles will be available there.

The console's European launch has been pushed back until March. That was the second delay, as PS3 had been initially promised for spring of this year.

Sony has a lot riding on the success of the PS3, which is powered by the new "Cell" computer chip and supported by the next-generation Blu-ray video disc format.

But Sony will be losing money for a some time because of the high costs for research and production that went into the highly sophisticated machine.

The red ink is coming at a time when the Japanese electronics and entertainment company, known for the Walkman portable audio player and "Spider-Man" movies, is struggling to stage a comeback.

In recent years, Sony has fallen behind in key products like flat-panel TVs and digital music players. A fumble in its PS3 business could prove a huge blow at a time when it's seeing its brand image badly tarnished by a massive global recall of lithium-ion batteries for laptops.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-14-05-02-08





Sony Losing Big Money on PS3 Hardware
James Niccolai

Sony is taking a big loss on each PlayStation 3 console it sells but end users are benefitting from "supercomputing performance" at the price of a cheap PC, according to research company iSuppli, which dismantled the console to analyze the parts inside.

Console makers often sell their hardware at a loss with the hope of profiting from the games that run on them. But Sony's loss on each PlayStation 3 will be unusually deep, according to iSuppli estimates released today.
Loss per Unit Is 'Remarkable'

The combined materials and manufacturing costs for each device come to about $806 for the model with a 20GB hard drive, excluding the cost of the controller, cables, and packaging, iSuppli said.

With a suggested retail price of $499, that would mean Sony is taking a loss of about $307 on each console it sells. The differential for the 60GB model is less, with the cost exceeding the price tag by $241.

By comparison, the materials and manufacturing costs for the hard-drive version of Microsoft's rival device, the Xbox 360 are $323, iSuppli estimated. That's less than the suggested retail price of $399.

"It's common for video-game console makers to lose money on hardware, and make up for the loss via video game-title sales. Still, the size of Sony's loss per unit is remarkable, even for the video-game console business," iSuppli said.
PlayStation 3 an 'Engineering Masterpiece'

Most of the cost comes from the PlayStation 3 console's processing power. The multicore Cell processor alone, which was co-designed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, and is the gaming device's main processing engine, accounts for about 10 percent of the cost of each machine, iSuppli said.

The research company also highlighted Sony's use of dual graphics chips from Nvidia Corp. and Toshiba, and its use of four 512-megabit DRAM chips from Samsung Electronics. Sony's motherboard probably costs the company $500 in total, compared to $204 for the Xbox 360, iSuppli said.

This is all good news for customers, who get all that computing power for a relative bargain. iSuppli called the PlayStation 3 an "engineering masterpiece," with a motherboard that looks more like that of an enterprise server or network switch than a games console.

The console provides "more processing power and capability than any consumer electronics device in history," iSuppli said.

The PlayStation3 made its debut in Japan on Saturday and is being rolled out worldwide this week and next.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2006...pcworld/127906





CompUSA to Offer Early Sales of Vista
David Koenig

Microsoft Corp. will sell licenses for its new Windows Vista operating system and Office 2007 productivity suite through CompUSA stores Nov. 30, two months before the products go on sale at other retailers.

The world's largest software company said Monday that customers will be able to buy licensing agreements to run Windows Vista Business and Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 on five or more personal computers.

The move will put small businesses on the same footing as larger rivals, who also will be able to buy the new operating system and business software ahead of the general release scheduled for Jan. 30.

The companies declined to discuss financial terms of their agreement. A Microsoft executive said the Redmond, Wash.-based company expects to sell Vista licensing agreements through other retailers next year.

This is the first time Microsoft has allowed small business customers to buy licenses for new operating system before the general public, said Cindy Bates, general manager of small business sales at the software company.

"Over 50 percent of our small business customers shop (for software) in retail stores," Bates said. "Last time, if you walked into store you were only able to buy the boxed product, which is more expensive and less easy to manage."

Once inside a CompUSA store, small-business customers will need to speak to a sales representative to buy a license agreement. That interaction will give the store and Microsoft a chance to sell the customer other products, such as the software company's support program.

Bates said licensing several PCs would be at least 10 percent cheaper than if a small business owner simply bought boxes containing discs with Vista and the office software. The suggested retail price for a boxed copy of Windows Vista Business is $299, or $199 for an upgrade from a previous version. The small-business edition of Office 2007 in a box carries a suggested price of $449 ($279 for an upgrade).
Bill Maddox, an executive vice president at Dallas-based CompUSA, said the launch of Windows XP was "huge" for privately held CompUSA, "and we expect this to be the same."

Bates declined to discuss negotiations between Microsoft and CompUSA, but said at least two other retailers were aware of the agreement before it was announced Monday.

"They were aware of the opportunity, and I think they will pay a lot of attention to this," she said, adding that it was "not really a bidding situation."

Rob Enderle, a technology analyst with the Enderle Group in San Jose, Calif., said it was unusual for Microsoft to strike an exclusive deal with a retailer.

"When you get an exclusive agreement with Microsoft, you can take that to the bank," he said. "Good for them."

Enderle said CompUSA might have rated an edge because of superior in-store training of employees. He also suspected that CompUSA agreed not to push the cheaper Vista Home Basic and Premium as options for cost-conscious small business owners. Jessica Nunez, a spokeswoman for the company, said there was no such agreement.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-13-17-37-06





Bootleg Versions of Vista and Office 2007 Appear
David Garrett

Reports have surfaced that bootleg copies of Windows Vista and Office 2007 can be obtained from Web sites that offer not only the software itself, but also a working product key and a hack that circumvents Microsoft's activation system.

A product key is a unique number that serves as proof of purchase for Microsoft's software, which requests the key upon installation. Once installed, both Vista and Office 2007 must be registered with Microsoft over the Internet, at which point Microsoft screens the software to determine its authenticity.

Software that fails the screening might be locked down, giving users access to minimal features, or simply shut down, giving users no access at all.

According to reports, several Web sites selling the pirated software have offered an "activation crack" -- a small, additional piece of software that tricks Vista into skipping the registration process once it has been installed on the user's system. No such hack has been reported for Office 2007, but given the speed at which software pirates operate, such a hack could appear in the coming months or even weeks.

Pirates' Booty

In a prepared statement, Microsoft claimed that pirated copies of Vista and Office 2007 won't work for long, despite hackers' attempts.

"This unauthorized download relies on the use of pre-RTM (release to manufacturing) activation keys that will be blocked using Microsoft's Software Protection Platform," said Microsoft. "Consequently, these downloads will be of limited value."

No matter what their value, the downloads could be flat-out dangerous. Pirated software not only is illegal, but also is often altered or tampered with in ways meant to harm consumers' machines -- and even consumers themselves.

"You don't know what you're getting," said John Wolf, director of Internet enforcement for the Business Software Alliance, an antipiracy group whose members include Microsoft, Adobe, and other software giants.

"If you're getting pirated software, most often it's been tampered with," he said. "You're running the risk that they may have made a mistake, or they may have inserted something intentionally that may be malware."

Penny Wise

What's more, said Wolf, the damage might not be to your machine alone.

If you're on a network, it's not only your system and your workstation that can be affected. Wolfe pointed out that virus attacks and other malicious code that pirates employ are designed to spread quickly, infecting as many machines as possible.

The bottom line? "You're taking a big risk," said Wolf. Illegal software can save pennies, but cost far more in the long run.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20061116/tc_nf/47944





After Vote, Public Demands Change: Take Down the Signs
Ian Urbina

Election Day has come and gone, and now comes the true test for candidates: how well they clean up after themselves. With a bumper crop of more than 20 million campaign signs this election season, the race has begun.

“Only shallow candidates have lots of volunteers ready to put the signs out but not enough volunteers ready to take them down,” said Steve Grubbs, a former Iowa legislator and founder of VictoryStore.com, which sold more than five million yard and roadway signs this year, double the number from 2004. “It’s a lot of signs to deal with, but they’re slackers if they can’t get them down within a week of the election.”

For some, that is too long to wait.

In the last year, county and local officials in at least nine states have imposed new restrictions on where political signs can go and how long they can be left out.

Delaware began charging campaigns $25 for each sign still on public property 30 days after the election. Virginia highway officials deputized volunteers in the adopt-a-highway program to remove signs from public property. In Columbus, Ohio, the traffic administrator mails letters to all candidates the day after the election, imploring them to take signs down within two weeks.

In Memphis, the Shelby County Environmental Court, which can impose fines of up to $50 per sign found on public property, has heard cases this year against the United States Senate candidates Bob Corker and Harold E. Ford Jr., and has a case on the docket involving Gov. Phil Bredesen.

Overnight, the signs, those ornaments of free speech that candidates work so hard to put up and protect from poaching by opponents, become so many eyesores.

The day after the election, Chick-fil-A, a restaurant chain, began offering a free chicken sandwich at participating stores to any customer who turned in a political yard sign.

Another chain, Sticky Fingers, is offering free appetizers in exchange for the signs and has accumulated more than 5,000 so far. “We’re thinking about putting up a Wall of Shame for the candidate who has left the most signs out,” said Chad Walldorf, the chain’s co-owner.

Campaigns are buying more signs, Mr. Grubbs said, because prices have dropped through the use of cheaper materials and design-it-yourself Web sites.

Campaign signs are legal along roadways in many parts of the country, but after the election, they become “trash on a stick,” said Rick Hurt, a member of the 1960 Area Community Alliance, a neighborhood improvement group in Houston.

Lawn signs are usually the responsibility of the home owner, and in many areas there is a time limit on how long they can stay up.

In New York City, political signs are barred from all public property. In cities and counties where they are permitted on public roads, highways or light poles, campaigns are usually supposed to make a “good faith” effort to pick them up after a certain period. While winners tend to be diligent, officials and campaign consultants said, losers are regularly short on the money and volunteers to get the job done.

In Pasco County, Fla., regulations require signs to be removed within 10 days of the election, but signs from the September primary still line State Road 52 and U.S. 41.

In Memphis, the Public Works Department rips signs from public property and sues the offending candidates. The week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Judge Larry Potter of the Shelby County Environmental Court has fined 35 candidates since January 2005.

A typical statewide candidate buys 10,000 to 50,000 signs, depending on the size of the state, Mr. Grubbs said. A standard 18-by-24-inch corrugated plastic sign costs about a dollar a sign in quantities larger than 5,000, he said.

Some citizens have taken the fight against out-of-date signs into their own hands.

The primaries in South Carolina ended June 13. But the signs are still standing, said Sunny Philips, a Columbia resident who pulls her car over every time she sees a delinquent one and tosses it in her trunk.

“A lot of people use post-hole diggers to put them in the ground,” Ms. Philips said, “so the stakes go into the ground really far. Getting them out is not fun.”

After each major election, one Maryland resident has a bonfire in her backyard in Anne Arundel County with about 30 of her neighbors to burn the signs they gather. “We’re pretty nonpartisan about it,” said the host of the party, who asked to remain anonymous because she said she was not sure if burning the signs was legal. “People just want them gone.”

In 2004, two Kansas radio stations caused a furor among local politicians by offering cash prizes to the listener who turned in the most campaign signs. In announcing the competition before Election Day, the stations caused some people to turn in signs prematurely and others to remove signs from private property.

In Arlington, Va., times are especially busy for Robert Lauderdale. Mr. Lauderdale is a member of Citizens Against Ugly Street Spam, a volunteer group that patrols neighborhoods for illegal signs.

While it normally takes 90 minutes to clear an eight-mile stretch of road, he said, it can take double that if the signs are in dangerous places, like the medians of four-lane highways.

“They’re like pimples on a teenager,” Mr. Lauderdale said. “It’s pretty much impossible to get rid of all of them.”

Some state parties are lucky to have volunteers who specialize in cleanup.

Known around St. Louis as the “sign guy,” George Engelbach said he had no intention of letting Republicans in his state get a reputation for being slobs. For the last 30 years, Mr. Engelbach has driven through the night shortly after the polls close, gathering up signs for any and all Republicans on the country roads around his home in Hillsboro.

“I don’t pull up the Democrats’ signs — that’s their job,” said Mr. Engelbach, 65, who disassembles the signs and stacks them in his barn for use in future campaigns.

The true fiscal conservatives reuse their signs. After the August primary, Steve Taylor, a spokesman for Representative Todd Akin, Republican of Missouri, went Dumpster diving to retrieve discarded signs . The wooden sticks on which many signs are mounted are worth $4 each, Mr. Taylor explained, adding, “Congressman Akin is very frugal.”

For those doing cleanup, crafty campaigners are truly annoying.

In Grand Rapids, Mich., the number of signs practically doubled the night before Election Day. “They know the clerk is too busy to do anything about them,” said the city clerk, Terri Hegarty.

Wayne Mowdy, an engineer with the Maryland State Highway Administration, whose crews begin pulling down campaign signs this week, said some campaigns made it especially hard for them.

“They’ll put them on poles set back from the street so we can’t use our cherry pickers,” Mr. Mowdy said. “You have to get a ladder to pick them off.”

Scott Leiendecker, the Republican director of the Board of Elections in St. Louis, said losing candidates often got a helping hand from their opponents’ canvassers. They collect the losing candidates’ signs as trophies, Mr. Leiendecker said.

“The signs are framed and hung on the wall like a scalp,” he said.

Christopher Maag contributed reporting from Cleveland, and Bob Driehaus from Cincinnati.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/us...rtner=homepage





With a Dish, Broadband Goes Rural
Ken Belson

The town of Rindge, N.H., is just 70 miles from Boston, but to telephone and cable companies it might as well be at the end of the earth. Many of the town’s 5,500 residents cannot get broadband Internet access from the providers in the area, Verizon and Pine Tree Cable, even though communities nearby have had the service for years.

Craig Clark, who works from home in Rindge, made do with a sluggish dial-up line until he signed up for broadband service from the satellite provider WildBlue Communications last autumn. With a 26-inch dish outside his home and a modem inside, Mr. Clark now connects to the Internet at speeds similar to those offered by the phone company.

“It’s not a perfect technology, but it is one of the best options for those of us in rural areas,” he said.

In bringing Mr. Clark and others in rural America into the fast lane, WildBlue and its chief rivals — Hughes Network Systems, which markets under the name HughesNet, and Spacenet, which sells the StarBand service — are filling one of the biggest gaps in the country’s digital infrastructure. Roughly 15 million households cannot get broadband from their phone or cable provider because the companies have been slow to expand their high-speed networks in areas where there are not enough customers to generate what they regard as an adequate profit.

There are some drawbacks to the satellite approach that make it unlikely to be a serious rival to more common broadband options, as Mr. Clark has found.

WildBlue’s cheapest service costs $50 a month, about twice Verizon’s introductory offer, and the dish costs several hundred dollars. Heavy rain sometimes interrupts the signal and knocks out Mr. Clark’s service, and small delays are common as signals beam to and from a satellite orbiting 24,000 miles above the earth.

But alternative technologies, like wide-area wireless services and access over power lines, are still in their infancy. And demand for broadband in rural areas is as strong if not stronger than in suburbs and cities. Broadband is essential to distance-learning programs, health clinics that communicate with bigger hospitals and farmers who rely on the latest market and weather data. Second-home owners and resorts are potential customers, too.

“If you don’t have a broadband connection, you’ll be left in a backwater and won’t be able to take part in the economy,” said David J. Leonard, WildBlue’s chief executive. “There’s a growing unmet demand in these markets.”

While the subscriber numbers for satellite services are a fraction of what companies like Comcast and AT&T have, they are growing quickly. The number of households and businesses that use them is expected to hit 463,000 this year, up 34.5 percent from 2005, according to NSR, a telecom research firm. The number of subscribers will nearly double, to 897,000, by 2010, the group estimates.

Hughes, which got into the business about two decades ago by providing data links to gas stations, convenience stores and far-flung company offices, has dishes at about 500,000 sites. About 80 percent of the 10,000 or so new customers that sign up for its HughesNet service each month are consumers.

WildBlue, which is adding nearly 15,000 customers a month, expects to have 120,000 subscribers by the end of this year. StarBand has about 30,000 customers.

Operating margins at satellite broadband providers are about twice those at cable companies, which must pay heavily for programming and employ teams of workmen to handle installations.

WildBlue and Hughes, on the other hand, outsource the work to third-party installers and dealers. Their biggest constant expenses are for marketing and subsidies for the dishes and other equipment.

Both Hughes and WildBlue, however, will launch satellites in the coming months equipped with new technology to provide access to far more customers. Since these cost about $250 million each, a lot more customers will be needed to pay for them.

For now, customers with few alternatives appear willing to absorb the relatively high prices. WildBlue, StarBand and HughesNet offer several speeds of service for $50 to $130 a month. Installation fees and the dish can cost another $500, though discounts abound.

“People are willing to spend to get broadband,” said Pradman P. Kaul, chief executive of both Hughes Network Systems and its parent company, Hughes Communications. “The economics are not a hurdle,” he said, adding that nearly 40 percent of his new subscribers choose the faster plans.

The companies do not always keep all of that revenue. WildBlue, for instance, has struck deals to be a wholesale provider of Internet service for AT&T and the satellite television companies DirecTV and EchoStar. These companies market the service but keep a share of the monthly revenue and receive equipment at subsidized rates.

AT&T, which is using satellite broadband to reach the 20 percent of its customers who are unable to get its fixed-line service, brands its product “AT&T high-speed Internet powered by WildBlue.” Since May, it has signed up about 4,000 subscribers, according to Mr. Leonard.

Hughes bypasses the middleman by selling directly to consumers. But it has to pay for all its own marketing, which can be expensive when trying to reach small pockets of customers spread across the country. Satellite providers spend about $600 to find and sign up each new customer.

For now, the companies have plenty of money to keep them going. Hughes Communications went public in February, and its shares have nearly doubled since, giving it a market capitalization of nearly $840 million. In the second quarter it lost $4.4 million, far smaller than the $55.5 million loss in the first quarter.

WildBlue has been around for almost a decade, but really got going in 2003 when Liberty Media, Intelsat, the investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative invested $156 million. In August, WildBlue issued $350 million in debt to help pay for the satellite that the company plans to launch before the end of the year.

Mr. Leonard said that while going public was an option, he first wanted WildBlue to turn a profit at least in terms of net cash flow.

Meeting that target will be a challenge. WildBlue had to set up waiting lists in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri and Ohio, among other places, because the satellite beams that serve those areas are full. In contrast to satellite TV, the Internet service involves two-way signals that require more satellite capacity as more customers are added. Software upgrades and the new satellite will ease the bottleneck.

But at the same time, cable and phone companies are making a slow push into previously unserved areas, shrinking the pool of potential customers.

Atlantic Broadband, a small cable company with operations along the East Coast, has started selling broadband in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, where Kelly Rusinack, a HughesNet subscriber, lives. After she tried the cable service at her sister’s house next door, she decided to switch once her contract with HughesNet expires in January.

“My sister’s service is so much better than what I have, it’s disgusting,” she said, adding that cable broadband costs about $50 a month — half of what Hughes charges her — and the connection is more reliable.

There is little chance, however, that a cable company will make it to Dr. Brooke Swearingen’s second home in Rangeley, Me., about 20 miles from the Canadian border. His home is about 12 miles from town, too far from Verizon’s switching station to get its high-speed Internet service.

Dr. Swearingen and his wife, Marlene, are physicians from the Boston area, need a good connection to do research and check e-mail, and their dial-up line was too slow. Dr. Swearingen said he found WildBlue online and signed up for the $50 monthly service in August; the dish and installation were free.

The big hurdle was finding a direct shot to the sky, which required trimming a few tree branches.

The extra speed and always-on connection means the Swearingens are able to extend their getaways and avoid having to run home to get work done.

“If my wife didn’t have this and had to write a paper, she’d stay in Boston,” Dr. Swearingen said. “You’d love it to be faster, but compared to dial-up, it’s night and day. It lets us get away and still be connected.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/te...satellite.html





100 Gigabit Ethernet Transmission Sets New Record
Eric Bangeman

Researchers at a California company have conducted the first successful tests of 100 gigabit per second Ethernet. Using a 4,000km fiber network for a demonstration at the Super Computing Show in Tampa this week, Infinera transmitted a 100Gbps Ethernet signal from Tampa to Houston and back again.

Infinera's demonstration used existing 10Gbps infrastructure to carry the 100Gbps signal. The 100Gbps signal was sliced and diced into ten 10Gbps streams which were then transmitted across Level 3's network. Infinera uses a proposed 100Gbps specification they came up with that guarantees the ordering of the packets and quality of the signal when transmitted across current 10Gbps infrastructure.

The successful test marks the first time a 100Gbps Ethernet signal has been successfully transmitted over a 10 gigabit network, according to Infinera. "100 Gigabit Ethernet will be a critical technology to accommodate bandwidth growth, and this demonstration shows that we have the capability to implement this as a super-lambda service over today's networks," said Infinera cofounder and CTO Drew Perkins.

Last month, we reported on a successful 14 terabit per second transmission by Nippon Telephone and Telegraph—enough bandwidth to serve up all of YouTube's estimated daily traffic in all of 15 seconds. Unlike Infinera's demonstration, NTT's transmission was accomplished over a single 100-mile-long fiber optic line. NTT's backbone consists primarily of 1Tbps fiber; most US IP backbones consist multiple 10Gbps links.

Level 3 CTO Jack Waters believes that Infinera's tech "enables LAN Ethernet protocols in the WAN environment," calling it a "practical, economical solution that operates over the wide area using existing DWDM technologies"

Infinera's 100Gbps solution also opens up the possibility of a tenfold increase in current network capacity without a complete infrastructure overhaul. You're not about to see your local ISP offering 10Gpbs Internet, but the technology does have the potential to address the problem of ever-increasing demand for bandwidth.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061115-8231.html





Microsoft Aims to Improve Its ‘Works Well With Others’ Score
Victoria Shannon

Microsoft plans to unveil a technology industry alliance on Tuesday to make software from competing companies and partners work better together, company executives said.

Bob Muglia, the Microsoft senior vice president who has led the company’s so-called interoperability efforts for the last year, will announce details of the alliance in Barcelona, Spain, at an event for European software developers.

The move is Microsoft’s latest effort to move from being a company that insists on the advantages of its own products to one that can adapt when customers use other companies’ goods.

Eleven days ago, for instance, Microsoft struck a deal with Novell, a longtime rival, to ensure that Novell’s version of the Linux operating system operates with Windows in corporate data centers.

Analysts saw the partnership as a concession by Microsoft that open-source software like Linux was a rival it could not defeat.

Others say Microsoft is trying to take the lead in interoperability so it can manage the relationships, rather than cede management to others.

The new Interop Vendor Alliance, which is being financed by Microsoft and is starting with 22 corporate members, will work publicly and privately to share information to solve common problems faced by customers and test real-world situations.

One example, company officials said, would be the not-so-simple task of letting a company’s employees sign on to multiple programs with a single user name and password, rather than using separate log-ons for each application.

In Europe, interoperability is a bit of a loaded word when it comes to Microsoft. The inability of Microsoft’s crucial operating system, Windows, to work well with its rivals’ products was at the heart of a European Commission antitrust case that resulted in a record fine against the company in 2004.

The commission found that by withholding vital information about Windows, the company deliberately restricted interoperability between personal computers using Windows and computer servers running software from Microsoft’s rivals.

Mr. Muglia, in an interview, said the alliance was “much, much broader than what has been mandated by the European Commission.” He continued, “This is about the long term.”

Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft, said business customers were telling the company interoperability was as important to them as security and reliability. Corporate and government technology managers are not buying from a single company, but they still need to share information from one system to another. The vendor alliance is one way to make it easier.

Siemens, NEC, Business Objects, Software A.G., Novell and Sun Microsystems are among the alliance’s members. Membership is open to Microsoft partners, technology licensees or “platform vendors,” the company said.

Jason Matusow, general manager of standards at Microsoft, said the companies would follow common rules governing the sharing of intellectual property, but Microsoft would not reveal any proprietary source code. “There will be no sharing of the secret sauce,” he said.

Brian Stevens, chief technology officer at Red Hat, the leading seller of Linux products, said Microsoft was to be commended for “moving in the right direction since the judgments” against it in various countries. But he cautioned that what would come out of the agreements was not clear.

“There’s so much lack of trust with Microsoft,” Mr. Stevens said. “We’re really looking for these agreements to be bidirectional, based on open standards. They’re a lot closer, but there needs to be more.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/te...gy/14soft.html





Review

The Man Who Made Mouse Ears Famous
Michiko Kakutani

WALT DISNEY
The Triumph of the American Imagination

By Neal Gabler

Illustrated. 851 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

The reputation of Walt Disney — the father of Mickey Mouse, the architect of Disneyland and the man once dubbed the 20th-century Aesop — has gone through more violent swings than that of nearly any other popular artist.

Sergei Eisenstein proclaimed his work “the greatest contribution of the American people to art.” The critic Mark Van Doren called him a “first-rate artist” who “knows innumerable truths that cannot be taught.” And Gilbert Seldes described him as a revolutionary who had slyly undermined the rationalist viewpoint of the modern world.

But as early masterpieces like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Fantasia” gave way to increasingly banal and formulaic movies — as Mickey evolved from an antic, devil-may-care fellow into a kinder, gentler, more domesticated creature — critics began to turn on Disney. He came to be seen as an avatar of middle-brow Middle America and Hollywood’s relentlessly commercial ethos: a purveyor of the synthetic, the sanitized, the puerile and the cloyingly cute.

The scholar Vincent Scully dismissed him as an entrepreneur who substitutes facsimiles of experience for the real thing and “so vulgarizes everything he touches that facts lose all force.” And in the now classic 1968 book “The Disney Version,” Richard Schickel denounced Disney as “a kind of rallying point for the subliterates of our society”: “as capitalism,” he wrote, “it is a work of genius; as culture, it is mostly a horror.”

In recent years the tide has begun to turn sharply in Disney’s favor. Following Steven Watts’s 1998 book, “The Magic Kingdom” — which described Disney as “a major architect of modern American culture” and “perhaps the pre-eminent interpreter” of the nation’s fantasy life — there comes Neal Gabler’s new biography, “Walt Disney,” which asserts that this animator not only created a new art form, but also “changed the world.”

As Mr. Gabler sees it, Mickey Mouse’s creator and alter ego “refined traditional values,” “reinforced American iconoclasm, communitarianism and tolerance and helped mold a countercultural generation.” He also credits Disney with helping establish “American popular culture as the dominant culture in the world,” and encouraging and popularizing “conservation, space exploration, atomic energy, urban planning and a deeper historical awareness.”

Thankfully, such breathless hyperbole is largely confined to the opening and closing sections of this book; the remainder is devoted to giving the reader a thoughtful, incisive and largely straightforward account of Disney’s life and career, from his Midwestern childhood to his apotheosis as the nation’s “Uncle Walt” and the proprietor of the world’s most famous amusement park.

Disneyland combined nostalgia for a halcyon, nonexistent past with utopian fantasies of Tomorrowland. As Mr. Gabler sees it, the park embodied both its creator’s candified memories of his own youth — a boyhood idyll in the small town of Marceline, Mo., would be memorialized in the park’s Main Street — and his need to turn what he saw as a threatening world into a safe, controllable habitat.

“As Disneyland was designed to block out the world,” Mr. Gabler writes, “it was also designed to offer a particular kind of psychological experience that one didn’t ordinarily find at an amusement park or carnival, much less in reality. Most amusement parks, in fact, were like the Warner Brothers cartoons of the late 1940s — noisy, chaotic, bombastic, subversive. One was made to feel that the social rules didn’t apply there, that one was entirely free. Walt Disney, the purveyor of comfort, intended his park to provide just the opposite — not freedom but control and order.”

The power of fantasy and wish-fulfillment, of course, informed most of Disney’s work, and the drive to live within his “own illusions and even to transform the world into those illusions,” Mr. Gabler argues, stemmed from the animator’s own youth.

“During a peripatetic childhood of material and emotional deprivation, at least as he remembered it, he began drawing and retreating into his own imaginative worlds,” the author writes. “That set a pattern. His life would become an ongoing effort to devise what psychologists call a ‘parcosm,’ an invented universe, that he could control as he could not control reality. From Mickey Mouse through ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ through Disneyland through Epcot, he kept attempting to remake the world in the image of his own imagination, to certify his place as a force in that world and keep reality from encroaching upon it, to recapture a sense of childhood power that he either had never felt or had lost long ago.”

The portrait of Disney that Mr. Gabler draws in this book is one of a lonely, eccentric, immensely gifted man: an ambitious workaholic, driven more by perfectionism than by dreams of entrepreneurial power; a dreamer, obsessive about whatever project captured his imagination, be it a cartoon mouse, animatronic robots, miniature trains (he installed a small railroad that ran around his property in Holmby Hills), or the elaborate, kitschy dreamscape of Disneyland.

Though Mr. Gabler notes that Disney was a doting father to his two daughters, it’s clear that work occupied the center of his life: his wife, Lillian, complained in the early years that she had become a “mouse widow” and later observed that her husband, who spent most of his time at the park, knew where every nail in Disneyland was located.

Mr. Gabler — the author of such earlier works on popular culture as “Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality” and “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood” — gives us a wonderfully tactile understanding of Disney’s early achievements in the art of animation, showing us the technical innovations he pioneered, while tracing the lineaments of his evolving aesthetic.

He also shows how a painful 1941 strike destroyed the collegial atmosphere of Disney’s studio, embittered Disney and galvanized his fierce anti-Communist politics. Mr. Gabler documents the fallout that World War II had on the studio: in the ensuing years, rival animators like Joseph Barbera and William Hanna, and Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones at Warner Brothers, would feel increasingly emboldened to challenge the Disney style. And he chronicles how Disney began, in the late 1940s, to feel he had lost his way — a sense of drift that would be exorcised only with the passion he conceived for constructing Disneyland.

In the end Mr. Gabler’s approach is more psychological than sociological, and while he fails to grapple with the consequences of the giant commercial snowball that Disney unleashed upon the world, his decidedly nonjudgmental approach succeeds in leaving the reader with a visceral appreciation of the emotional drives that underlay Disney’s original achievement.

“But in the final analysis,” Mr. Gabler writes, “the deepest appeal of Disneyland may have been less the perfection itself than the construction of it, as it had been in the Disney animations where the theme of responsibility meshed with the act of creation. Whatever else Disneyland did, it gave its visitors not just the vicarious thrills of the characters whose personas they assumed on the rides or their sense of triumph; it gave them the vicarious power of the man who had created it all: Walt Disney.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/books/14kaku.html





Pretty pictures

Female Video Bloggers Moving to TV News Channels
Amit Agarwal

Female vloggers with pretty faces and huge fan-following are just few in number but very much in demand especially among the TV channels who are keen on exploring this new world of vlogging.

First it was Amber Mac who quit G4TechTV to join CityNews International as their New Media Specialist, reporting on new media and interactive trends. Amber co-hosted the popular Call For Help show with Leo Laporte before making the move to traditional news media.

Now it's the turn of vlog celebrity Amanda Congdon to go on air. She will regularly appear on ABC News Now and occasionally appear as a correspondent on the network's TV news broadcasts. Like Amber, Amanda will also host a video blog on abcnews.com focusing on topics such as new media, politics, and the environment.

According to BW, Congdon is also working to develop a show for HBO's on-air and on-demand channels. The subject of the show is still in the works, but Congdon plans to both write and star in the series.

Amanda, in a recent interview with Guy Kawasaki, also spoke in detail about her split with Rocketboom - "Suffice it to say, this struggle was about control.. I thought I was involved in a partnership, but that was a guise.. You just can’t wrap me up and put me in a closet only to take me out when you - and you alone - need me. I'm not a robot. I'm a human being."

In a related news, Dave Winer hints that Nick Douglas left Valleywag to do a web video show with one of the big video producers but Blogging Times feel that Nick may move to Diggination.

Lot of excitement coming up in the video blogging space in the next few months.
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/11/f...ing-to-tv.html





From Rocketboom to ABC

Video blogger Amanda Congdon is the latest "cewebrity" to jump to mainstream media; an industry is forming to help others follow her lead
Catherine Holahan

Internet celebrity Amanda Congdon just finished broadcasting her cross-country relocation from New York to L.A. on the World Wide Web. Now she is making another move—this one from online to on air. The former host of Rocketboom, one of the most popular video blogs on the Web, with roughly 211,000 daily viewers, has a new gig as a contributor for Disney's (DIS) ABC network.

Congdon will regularly appear on the network's 24-hour digital channel ABC News Now and occasionally appear as a correspondent on the network's TV news broadcasts. She will also host a weekly video blog, or "vlog," on abcnews.com focusing on topics such as new media, politics, and the environment. "She certainly has the eyes and ears of a great many people who may have only trafficked in Internet information," says Michael Clemente, executive producer of ABC News Digital Media. "I would love to see her talking to [Illinois Senator] Barack Obama, new people with new products, and all sorts of things."

In addition, Congdon is developing a comedy for Time Warner's (TWX) HBO, which itself has plans to beef up online programming (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/2/06, "HBO's Bold Broadband Plans"). Congdon will star in the show, which will appear both online and on air in different forms. The subject matter has yet to be determined.

Talent Search

The new ABC role may make Congdon the first video blogger to make the jump to a major network. For the 25-year-old actress, the new job sounds like a dream. "What really excites me is the concept of bridging the gap between old and new media," says Congdon. "I am just so excited that these networks are open enough to let me do all these different projects."

Congdon, however, is not the first "cewebrity" to parlay fame on the Web into a real-world job. Joe Eigo, a 26-year-old martial artist and gymnast, was relatively unknown until he uploaded video clips of his acrobatic fighting style to the Internet. Since then, Eigo's clips have been downloaded millions of times and he was scouted to join Jackie Chan's stunt team. He also landed an appearance in the movie Around the World in 80 Days. Several other online video personalities have used their notoriety to sign with prominent talent agencies and further careers in comedy, media, and entertainment (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/30/06, "Don't I Know You from the Internet?").

In fact, major movie and TV studios are increasingly looking to the Web for new talent for both on- and offline projects. IQ Films and Steelyard Pictures used Yahoo's (YHOO) Jumpcut.com to conduct an online casting call for their latest movie, The Power of Few.

Agencies on the Lookout

Dina Kaplan is chief operating officer and cofounder of blip.tv, which features Congdon's AmandaAcrossAmerica blog. Kaplan says she is regularly approached by traditional media outlets that see her online vlog hosting site as a place to mine new talent. "We have had meetings with a bunch of Hollywood agencies," says Kaplan. "They see us as a farm team for them."

Talent agencies also see the Net's potential. United Talent Agency, which represents actors including Vince Vaughn, has created a Digital Media Dept. to bring online stars into traditional media. UTA counts video blogger Hosea "Ze" Frank, host of The Show with Ze Frank, and Kent Nichols, co-creator of the Ask a Ninja video blog, among its clients.

Music companies are also looking online for new talent. This month, Music Nation will start letting musicians upload music videos to its site as part of a record deal contest with Epic Records. Universal and EMI also plan to sponsor online star searches (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/30/06, "American E-Idol").

Looking to Profit Online

In many cases, traditional media companies are more interested in keeping Internet stars online than putting them on air. The idea is reaching a new and, in many cases, younger audience. "When you have conversations with traditional platforms, often the biggest interest is not to leverage whatever buzz you have online to move to a traditional platform," says Frank. "They are trying to figure out how to make this model work in the online space."

Traditional media have a big incentive to court Internet stars. Online advertising is expected to grow to $25.2 billion in 2010, consuming 8.9% of all advertising spending, says research firm eMarketer. That's up from $15.9 billion—or roughly 5.7% of total ad spending—this year.

ABC has been particularly deliberate about expanding on the Web. While other news programs, such as those at CBS (CBS) and NBC (GE), have Web simulcasts and video blogs, ABC News has a 15-minute daily newscast just for Internet audiences. Most major networks have also been moving their new programs online to create more buzz and wrap in new audiences (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/11/06, "Click Here to Catch Up on CSI"). ABC is no exception, making episodes of such shows as Lost, Grey's Anatomy, and Desperate Housewives available free online.

Awards and Advertisers

Kaplan has no qualms sharing talent such as Congdon with TV. As more people become famous for vlogs, more people are likely to begin producing better blogs to attract mainstream media attention. The better their blogs, the more audiences and advertisers will want to associate themselves with online content and brokers like blip.tv.

To help market their talent, PodTech, blip.tv, Yahoo Video, Intel (INTC), Guba, Revver, and others helped arrange the first ever "Vloggies," an Oscar-like black-tie ceremony for video bloggers. The awards were handed out on Nov. 4 in San Francisco. Winning top honors were Ask a Ninja, Frank, and the crew that develops Alive in Baghdad, a series of video blogs by Iraqis.

As vlogs have become more mainstream, advertisers have also begun taking notice. They have experimented with ads on videos shown on user-generated video site Revver. They are also working with companies such as AOL and News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace to incorporate advertising on user-generated video sites.

The Copyright Effect

However, these deals have been slow to take off because of concerns about the kinds of content on user-generated video sites. The difficulty of filtering copyrighted material from millions of user-produced videos has also given some advertisers pause, according to Metacafe CEO Arik Czerniak. To allay those concerns, Metacafe has begun paying users for licenses and uses both human video reviewers and technology to ferret out copyrighted content. MySpace has also begun aggressively removing copyrighted content (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/31/06, "Music Downloading's New Deal").

With sites moving to make user-generated content safer for advertisers, online celebrities and their videos are likely to become even more appealing for major networks and others. That means more cewebrities could turn into genuine celebrities. "The first time I ever put a video on the Net, I didn't know it would have such a great effect," says Eigo. "Now I know it can make dreams come true."
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...v.g3a.rss1114a





Dan Rather Returns to TV on Tiny HDNet
Frazier Moore

Dan Rather has gone digital. Dan Rather has gone boutique. Returning to television with "Dan Rather Reports," his new weekly magazine, he will now be available in just the four million satellite and cable homes reached by media mogul Mark Cuban's high-definition channel HDNet.

By contrast, "The CBS Evening News," which Rather anchored for 24 years, reaches virtually all the nation's 111 million TV homes, and it's watched by more than seven million viewers nightly.

"We are broadcasting to a tiny audience," Rather readily acknowledges.

Even so, his new venture is commanding attention beyond the relative handful who will catch its premiere Tuesday at 8 p.m. EST.

Why not? Rather, who in June left CBS News after 44 years, is beginning a new chapter at age 75. From scratch. Lickety-split. And defying everyone who figured, whether with regret or glee, that he was finished.

Who wouldn't be wondering if he can pull it off?

Headquarters for his new production company is a small high-rise suite just a block from Times Square. The paint is dry. Furniture and state-of-the-art production equipment are in place. Any further refinements can wait.

"Right now, trying to get this program off the ground, I have about all I can say grace over," Rather says in his comfortable but no-frills new office, where his own high-def flatscreen (he points out with a chuckle) still isn't operative.

Not only is his team, fewer than two dozen overseen by Rather and executive producer Wayne Nelson, focused on opening night, but after that: another 41 weekly hours in the coming year, plus additional documentaries.

Exactly what viewers will see Tuesday won't be locked down until the last minute, Rather says, with portions likely to be aired live.

"I want us to be right up on the balls of our feet, able to shift in a nanosecond if we have to," he says, listing three areas to concentrate on: investigative stories, in-depth interviews and "hard-edged field reports." Favorite subjects are likely to include the nation's fighting forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic squeeze on middle-income families and politics.

"I see this as a pioneering experience," Rather says. And he could be right. Here is TV news issuing not from a huge organization, but, uniquely, from the vision of one guy.

"When I first talked to Mark Cuban, he told he that he was prepared to give me total, complete and absolute editorial and creative control," Rather says. "Now stop and think about that for a moment: do you know any journalists past and present (with such an arrangement)?"

Yeah, but for most of his run at CBS News, wasn't Rather the reigning presence, the 900-pound gorilla?

"I was responsible for the `Evening News' and accountable for the 'Evening News,'" he allows, "but I had to, and did, answer up." He ticks off the steps of the corporate ladder that ascended even higher than his lofty perch on West 57th Street. "There are people above you."

Not now. According to Rather, Cuban "only asked two things of me: 'I want you to strive for excellence, and be fearless.'"

So, now for Rather, it's no excuses. And like him or not, how he manages this gift of total independence could well be instructive for anyone who worries about journalism under a corporate thumb.

"Increasingly, most of the major news outlets in this country are owned by very large corporate entities, and, in some cases, international conglomerates," notes Rather. And, among their many interests, some "increasingly come in conflict with what I think is strong journalism, the kind of role I think journalism should play in the country."

Rather doesn't mention it, but a classic example is the 1995 "60 Minutes" expose that charged the tobacco industry with ignoring, and lying about, evidence of its products' harmfulness. Big Tobacco threatened lawsuits and top CBS executives caved. Savvy business, maybe. But cowardly journalism.

While declaring he was proud to be at CBS News throughout his 44-year stretch, Rather admits to harboring concerns about corporate co-opting when he was there.

"I tried to speak about it sometimes," he says. "Sometimes the management didn't take all that kindly to my speaking out about it. Could I have done more myself? Yes. Should I have done more? Yes."

But that's behind him now. So are his final, stormy years at CBS News, when he (and others) suffered the aftershocks of his discredited "60 Minutes Wednesday" report on President George W. Bush's military service that aired in 2004. The resulting scandal led to his departure from the "Evening News" anchor chair and, 15 months later, his exit from the network.

Some of the hits he took were deserved, he says, while the rest, well, that story ignited a firestorm that almost ruined Rather's reputation.

"Let's face it," he reasons, "over the length and breadth of a career, I've gotten a whole lot more than I ever deserved on the upside. So if I got some things I didn't deserve on the downside, I can't and won't complain about it."

Instead, his eyes are on the far horizon, he says. He has a brand-new broadcast to get on the air. And he believes that, if he makes the most of his opportunity, "Dan Rather Reports" could make a difference. A positive force in journalism, even for people who can't see it.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/2006...ban-hdnet.htm#





TiVo to Expand Internet-Based Content
May Wong

In its ongoing bid to be a central conduit of media, TiVo Inc. plans to broaden its digital video recording service later this year so users of its set-top boxes can download videos from the Internet and watch them from their television sets.

The new feature, one of several announcements TiVo was to make Tuesday, comes as homemade clips and Hollywood movies are all becoming more popular on the Web and an increasing number of tech giants are tackling the barriers to deliver video from a computer to the comforts of a living room.

"Broadband video is growing rapidly on the Web, but the television will continue to be the key way viewers want to watch video," said TiVo's chief executive Tom Rogers. "Our overall goal is to provide as many types of content in as many formats to be displayable on the television through TiVo."

TiVo's new broadband offering, however, will work only with downloaded videos that are not copy-protected, such as most user-generated clips and many video podcasts. Feature films and videos purchased from online stores like Movielink or Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes will not be supported, though company officials said they are seeking to offer such protected content in the future.

The service feature will be implemented by the end of this year through an upgrade to the TiVo Desktop software, which some subscribers already use to view photos from the Web and listen to Internet radio. TiVo said it will take downloaded videos that have been placed into a computer's TiVo folder and automatically convert them into an MPEG-2 video format so the videos can be viewed on TVs and searchable via TiVo boxes. The video formats that will be supported are QuickTime, Windows Media Video and MPEG-4.
The software will cost $24.95 for new users and will be a free upgrade for existing users.

TiVo also will introduce another new feature that lets subscribers share their homemade movies with friends or family by setting up a personal "channel" to send their videos to the TiVo boxes of those who have agreed to be on that private network.

Instead of using the Web only or sending copies on DVD, TiVo users will be able to essentially distribute their own videos directly to others' TiVo boxes through the company's partnership with online video-sharing provider One True Media.

It doesn't have to be limited to family circles. The videophiles of a high school football team or a local soccer league, for instance, would also be able to broadcast their work via TiVo, said Jim Denney, TiVo's vice president of product marketing.

The way it will work: From One True Media's Web site, a TiVo user would invite other TiVo owners via a one-time e-mail to subscribe to their private video channel. The videos would then show up under a new "Homemade Movies" category in the "TiVoCast" section in which TiVo distributes media from other Web-content partners, such as the National Basketball Association and The New York Times.

In other deals to be announced Tuesday, most notably one with CBS Interactive, TiVo is expanding its offerings of broadband programming through TiVoCast. The unit of CBS Corp. also recently reached a wide-ranging deal with the online video sharing service YouTube - now owned by Google Inc. - to distribute selected video clips from CBS's network. CBS said its offerings on TiVoCast will include original programming from CBS.com, CBSNews.com and CBS SportsLine.

TiVo introduced the TiVoCast feature earlier this year to Series 2 set-top box owners and will soon add it to its latest Series 3 boxes.

It was among TiVo's first moves to try to marry the television to programming found on the Internet.

Other gadgets that link computers with TVs already exist but have failed to gain much consumer traction.

Well-known, deep-pocketed companies, however, are stepping up their interest.

Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable provider, last week said it was planning to soon launch a Web site in which some uploaded videos could end up being shown on Comcast's video-on-demand cable television service.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Corp. said it has partnered with Hollywood studios to soon deliver downloadable movies through its Xbox 360 game console. Sony Corp. also says movie downloads are in its pipeline for PlayStation 3 users.

And early next year, Apple said it will debut a compact set-top box, dubbed iTV, that will allow consumers to wirelessly send movies purchased online - as well as other digital content stored on a computer - to a television set.

Alviso-based TiVo is a pioneer in digital video recording, a technology that lets users record programming on a hard drive, skip commercials, or be able to pause, rewind or do instant replays of live TV.

Also on Tuesday, the company was to unveil a deal with International Creative Management, a leading Hollywood talent agency, so more celebrities will be able to recommend shows they like and allow TiVo users to automatically download those programs to their set-top boxes.

Rogers said all the expanded service features along with TiVo's new "unified" way of searching for all of the TV- and Web-based content from one place will further help TiVo stand out from rival DVR providers.

"We could be the one-stop choice for television viewing in this expanding world of broadband choices," Rogers said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-14-00-51-57





TV Executive Expected to Join AOL
Richard Siklos and Bill Carter

Randy Falco, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group, is in talks to leave his position as the No. 2 executive at the television group to take a senior operating role at AOL, Time Warner’s Internet subsidiary, according to executives briefed on the move.

The move to shake up the top ranks of the two big media companies is expected to be announced as soon as this week. But it was unclear last night, the executives said, whether Mr. Falco, 52, would hold the title of president or chief executive at AOL, and what position Jonathan F. Miller, AOL’s chairman and chief executive, would maintain after the move.

Spokesmen for Time Warner, AOL and NBC Universal declined to comment.

Mr. Falco, two people briefed on the discussions said, is considering the position because it would be a chance to run his own business after more than three decades at NBC. Since December, Mr. Falco has reported to Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal Television, who has emerged as the most likely internal candidate to succeed Bob Wright as the chief executive of NBC Universal.

While Mr. Wright’s empire, a division of General Electric, also includes the company’s movie studio and entertainment parks, the television group under Mr. Zucker oversees the NBC television network, Universal Studios, the Spanish-language network Telemundo and cable channels including USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel, Bravo and CNBC.

Mr. Falco’s expected departure from NBC Universal comes as its core broadcast network’s prime-time lineup is showing signs of revival after a years-long slump that left it in last place among the four major networks.

Last month, the company announced a revamping plan aimed at eliminating $750 million in costs, responding to commercial pressures with such efforts as narrowing its programming in the first hour of prime time and closing the center housing the MSNBC news channel in New Jersey to consolidate operations in New York.

At AOL, Mr. Falco would be taking on another considerable challenge. AOL is in the midst of discontinuing its dial-up Internet access business in favor of a free service for broadband Internet users intended to capitalize on the rapid growth of online advertising.

That strategy, led by Mr. Miller and Time Warner’s president, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, has shown some early signs of success since it was introduced in August.

The arrival of Mr. Falco would raise questions about Mr. Miller’s role and future at the company he has run since 2002. At the same time, it is not clear whether Mr. Falco’s position at NBC Universal would be filled.

Mr. Falco, a consummate broadcaster, has been in his current role since December, with operational responsibility for the television group including affiliate relations, cable distribution and worldwide television distribution.

Mr. Falco recently led a new venture, called the National Broadband Company, that was set up to distribute video around the Internet for NBC’s affiliate TV stations and any other video producer.

An executive who is well liked within NBC, Mr. Falco has been particularly close to Mr. Wright and to Dick Ebersol, the head of NBC Sports. Mr. Falco served as chief operating officer for several telecasts of the summer and winter Olympic Games as recently as the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City and the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. He has won six Emmy Awards for those broadcasts.

Among his many responsibilities since joining the company directly after graduating from Iona College in 1975, Mr. Falco has overseen the design and creation of the “Today” show’s studio in Rockefeller Center and managed the conversion of the NBC television network to digital signals from analog.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/bu...ia/15tele.html





Blog Entrepreneur Leaves AOL
Saul Hansell

Jason Calacanis, the outspoken blogger and entrepreneur who ran AOL’s Netscape division, resigned on Thursday in the wake of the firing of AOL’s chief executive, Jonathan Miller.

Mr. Calacanis sold his company, Weblogs Inc., a network of blogs, to AOL last year and continued to run it from offices in Santa Monica, Calif. This year he took over Netscape.com, transforming it from a Web portal into a site that lets users vote and comment on news articles.

In recent months, Mr. Calacanis said he was considering leaving AOL to start a new company. His decision to resign was hastened by the news that Time Warner, AOL’s parent, had replaced Mr. Miller with Randy Falco, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group.

“I’m not inclined to start over with a new guy,” Mr. Calacanis said in an interview on Thursday. As for what to make of the treatment of Mr. Miller, who discovered he was being replaced after a reporter called AOL asking about Mr. Falco’s appointment, Mr. Calacanis said only: “I’m perplexed. Why now?”

On his blog (www.calacanis.com), Mr. Calacanis wrote a long entry on Wednesday praising Mr. Miller and calling it “a very sad day.”

Several AOL executives said morale at the company had been shaken, and that many of the people who reported to Mr. Miller saw the shakeup as an affront, given the amount of work they had put into creating a new strategy for AOL.

This year AOL has moved to sharply scale back its Internet access business to create a free advertising-supported service on the Web. AOL executives say early signs show that the service is taking off with consumers.

Neither Mr. Falco nor Mr. Miller made an appearance at AOL’s headquarters in Dulles, Va., on Thursday.

News of Mr. Calacanis’s resignation was first reported by the blog TechCrunch.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/technology/17aol.html





Discovery Communications Hires New Chief
Frank Ahrens

Silver Spring's Discovery Communications Inc. has hired NBC Universal executive David Zaslav to replace outgoing chief executive Judith McHale, the company said today.

Zaslav is the second high-ranking NBC executive to leave in as many days to come to Washington, following Randy Falco yesterday, who will take over AOL from Jonathan Miller.

McHale announced her resignation earlier this year and said she would stay at the head of the cable network until a new chief executive was hired. She has not elaborated on her post-Discovery plans. There was speculation she would help longtime friend Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) on a presidential campaign, but Discovery said today such a move is unlikely.

Zaslav is head of NBC Universal cable and domestic television and has worked at the network since 1989, when he helped launch CNBC.

"I have had the pleasure of knowing David for over two decades since he first helped me in the early days of Discovery as a bright, energetic young lawyer who enthusiastically embraced our brand and worked tirelessly on our key programming and distribution deals," Discovery founder and Chairman John S. Hendricks said in a release. "In the time since, David has amassed an enormous set of management and financial skills at NBC Universal where he built the distribution base and operations of an enviable array of cable and new media offerings."

Hendricks and Zaslav serve on the board of directors of TiVo Inc.

"Simply put: this is a dream job," Zaslav said in a release. "From right out of law school in the mid-1980s, I have long admired John's incredible vision, integrity and entrepreneurial spirit."

Discovery's programming, such as Animal Planet and TLC, reach 1.4 billion subscribers worldwide in 170 countries.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...111600607.html





The Death of the Disc

Why HD-DVD and Blu-ray are dead on arrival.
Sean Cooper

Until recently, the history of home entertainment was the history of encoding formats. For movies and music to get into our homes, manufacturers had to invent some medium that was capable of holding Star Wars or ABBA Gold. And so it went: vinyl, eight-track, cassette, Betamax, VHS, CD, DVD. Our shelves filled with slabs of plastic, spools of magnetic tape inside cartridges, and 5-inch discs stamped with binary-encoded metal foil.

Now, home entertainment has a new idea: high-definition video. By increasing the number of pixels in an image, HD encoding can deliver a sharper picture. Because high-definition images pack more visual data, HD movies require more storage space than DVDs can provide. So, naturally, we've now got two new encoding formats: the Toshiba-backed HD-DVD and Sony's Blu-ray.

The movie studios and electronics manufacturers think—wrongly—these new high-def formats will extend the market for home-entertainment media indefinitely. Both formats will fail, not because consumers are wary of a format war in which they could back the losing team, a la Betamax. Universal players that support both flavors of HD should appear early next year. No, the new formats are doomed because shiny little discs will soon be history. Here are four reasons why.

The Internet.

On Nov. 22, Microsoft will unveil its Xbox Live movie-rental and download service—the first to include HD content. This is obviously a shot across the bow of Sony's PlayStation 3, which includes a Blu-ray player. (The Xbox 360 plays only standard DVDs out of the box.) The significance of Xbox movie rentals reaches beyond the console wars, though. For one, using the Xbox for over-the-wires delivery of HD content removes the need for physical media. It also removes a key barrier for iTunes-style sales of movies, particularly high-definition movies: Once you download The 40-Year-Old Virgin in HD, how do you get it from your computer to your plasma screen? Few people have their PCs connected to their TVs. But every Xbox 360 is connected to a TV, and most are connected to the Internet (to use Microsoft's Xbox Live online gaming service). Don't have an Xbox? Similar services from Apple, Netflix, and others will soon pour HD movies into homes using a broadband connection and a cheap set-top box.

Cable on-demand.

Like Microsoft's console, your Comcast box is a fat-pipe conduit between the company's inventory of HD content and your HDTV screen. Furthermore, on-demand playback is immediate—you don't have to wait for downloads to complete. Movie studios wary of siphoning money from DVD sales have mostly avoided making new releases available on demand (proof, perhaps, of on-demand's potential earning power down the road). That's starting to change, though, and a premium tier of titles is now hitting on-demand at the same time they're hitting Blockbuster. And just as record labels' fears over music downloads were placated by copy-protection schemes implemented by iTunes, Rhapsody, and other online services, the cable companies will soon put together content deals that make sense for the studios. Microsoft's Xbox movie rentals, which expire 24 hours after they are downloaded, are a good example of what those deals will look like.

New formats mean pricey hardware. After spending $3,000 or more on an HDTV and multichannel audio gear, nobody's in the mood to burn another pile of cash. HD players aren't cheap: $350 to $600 for HD-DVD and $750 to $1,000 for Blu-ray. Sony's decision to support Blu-ray in the PlayStation 3 is a strong-arm tactic to drive demand for Blu-ray-encoded movies. But this loss-leading move could sink Sony's new console—and maybe even the whole company—when Blu-ray stalls out.

The rise of the hard drive.

When you buy a DVD, you pay for the cost of embedding a piece of plastic with data, packaging it, shipping it to retailers, and stocking it on shelves. Movie downloads require only the space necessary to store the data on a hard drive for as long as you want to hold on to it, either for a single viewing (in the case of rental downloads like the Xbox 360's) or forever (archived on your computer or an external drive). On iTunes an album costs about 10 bucks—as much as $8 less than some CD retailers charge, partially because of the reduced cost of getting music to buyers online. Look for the same savings when it comes to downloading movies. And then there's the fact that hard-disk storage capacities are pushing ever upward while size and price drop. In a few years, you'll buy every episode of The West Wing on a drive the size of a deck of cards rather than on 45 DVDs in a box the size of your microwave oven. If you think that sounds far-fetched, consider that shortly after releasing a comprehensive, eight-DVD New Yorker collection (since updated to nine discs), the magazine released the same collection on an (admittedly expensive) iPod-sized hard drive. Which would you rather have, especially once the price of hard drives sinks even lower?

Make no mistake: Buying movies online isn't there yet. Titles in standard-def are few, in hi-def fewer still. With five times the visual information of a standard-def flick, an HD download of The Matrix, were it even available, could take all day over the average broadband connection. And a simple, consumer-friendly system for storing, backing up, and accessing a large movie library is probably a year or more off. As for cable on-demand services, they are clumsy to use, lack a deep back catalog, and lag behind DVD release schedules. (Meanwhile, DVDs fit nicely on a shelf, rarely fail, and don't require annoying download periods or sophisticated gear to get them to play on your TV.)

All of that will change—and fast. It will change because consumers want it to change. Music buyers used their modems to force the major labels into the fear zone and Tower Records into bankruptcy. The same will happen to the movie studios and DVD retailers unless they curb their disc addiction.
http://www.slate.com/id/2153877/





The $100 Laptop: What Went Wrong

Assessing the true cost of a futile effort to equip the Third World.
John C. Dvorak

Over the past few years, various initiatives have been proposed to equip Third World countries -- especially those in Africa -- with cheap computers. Believers in the concept that computers will solve all the world's ills are behind much of this.

So Africa, South Asia and other targeted regions of the world find themselves the focus of all sorts of initiatives to provide hand-me-down, special purpose and even junked computers.

Then along comes the latest scheme to actually provide a unique hand-cranked laptop utilizing a small generator to power the thing.

The idea was developed by the charming Nicolas Negroponte, former head of the MIT Media Lab and organizer of One Laptop Per Child, an initiative to produce a $100 laptop and distribute it to the poorest children in the world.

Negroponte, who was unavailable to comment for this column, knows how to draw attention to things, and this one has received a double portion.
Slick looks, but high prices
That said, actual machines have been designed, and they look pretty slick. Unfortunately it doesn't appear that the manufacturing cost of these machines has come anywhere close to $100. Nobody actually wants to discuss that aspect yet.

It's also iffy whether these machines are going to do anyone any good. In fact the entire idea may be misguided and counterproductive. At least that's what Stanford journalism lecturer and Africa watcher G. Pascal Zachary thinks.

Besides incredible difficulties with the distribution networks in Africa, Zachary wonders who will maintain these machines. Generally speaking, a societal infrastructure with a lot of computers needs a lot of support mechanisms.

"And in today's world the real value of a computer is it being networked," says Zachary. "Finding a network in the poor areas is either impossible or very expensive."

Electricity first, laptops second?
But I myself have moaned about the details of this One Laptop Per Child scheme as folly or idealistic. The basic argument is that with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year, so why waste that sum on a laptop? What are they thinking?

But Zachary has a more profound point: "The fact that these people need electricity more than they need a laptop is only part of the problem," he says. "The real problem is lost mind share. The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful."

To summarize, there are only so many hours in the day, and we should not be wasting them on this kind of naïve feel-good showboating. Let's face it: These high-tech gems are a laughable addition to a mud hut.

Even on the One Laptop Per Child site there is a creepy anecdote -- related as if it exemplified a positive benefit -- about how some poor family in Cambodia used the hand-cranked laptop's screen as a source of light for their abode.

Perhaps the organization should be thinking of the hand-cranked generator as serving that purpose alone and not computing. Lights, along with cellular phones and radios, seem more important than laptops.

We should be spending our energy trying to figure out what to do with the hundreds of millions of computers that are junked rather than making more junk.
Dangerous distraction
But let's get back to the mind-share issue. This sort of thing not only takes us away from useful projects in developing nations, but it distracts the high-tech scene in the U.S., too. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, news, msgs), for example, has been spending time on this.

In fact AMD has a slew of low-end parts in the $100 laptop. But the company, at the same time, is discontinuing its own initiative to make cheap machines for the Third World, citing government interference and other problems.

I personally would love to see these laptops save the world, as some people have suggested they might. But those holding that opinion tend to view the world from the window of a five-star hotel.

In fact, this is a massive exercise in futility. And it's a shame.
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com...larLaptop.aspx





Searching for BitTorrent
SlyckTom

At the helm of Searching.com is John Gotts. Many people may not be quite familiar with the name or what Seraching.com represents, but anyone involved in the BitTorrent community will be soon, if they haven’t already.

John Gott’s community – or family as he calls it – of websites generates a substantial amount of web traffic. According to John, his websites are responsible for drawing over 60 million unique visitors per month. Part of this consortium includes Wiki.Com, PhotoAlbum.com, eTunes.com and an assortment of employment sites, recipe sites, dating sites, and just about anything searchable. What does this mean to the BitTorrent faithful?

John’s interested in BitTorrent because it represents exactly the overall genre he's interested in – the pursuit of knowledge. Every site his consortium has an interest in has some connection with the search of information. However BitTorrent represents an avenue yet to be explored – an untapped potential that has a lock on the highly sought after 15-35 age demographic.

“BitTorrent.com got it right,” John told Slyck.com. “That’s the future of our Torrent sites.”

Like Bram Cohen has said from the beginning, John is adamantly against copyright infringement. And like Bram, John is secure in the fact that he can delve into the BitTorrent world, keep the community happy, yet monetize the vast untapped potential.

“What I’d love to see is the ability of people to rent or buy a file. People would still have the choice of a free copy [with advertising], but we could also have a high quality copy without ads and faster download speeds. Imagine if we could monetize that potential – money that would otherwise be lost would instead go to the copyright holders.”

“We also want to create a place for independent media. If you’re just starting off, where else can you go?” As many independent artists have discovered, file-sharing networks have been instrumental for success.

And the assimilation has already begun. Anyone who’s a frequent guest of myBittorrent.com may have already picked up on a few subtleties. Located at the header of the site, there’s Searching.com’s logo – and accompanying the logo are six torrent sites; BushTorrent, Demonoid, Fenopy, Snarf-it, TorrentPortal and TorrentReactor.

To the right side of myBitTorrent.com is a set of links to Searching.com. Look familiar? What all these torrent sites, including myBittorrent.com, have in common is they all belong to the Searching.com community. John’s dream of expanding his empire to include all things searchable is becoming a reality with the absorption of several high profile BitTorrent sites.

But John was clear to point out that absorbing the over 150 various sites doesn’t equate to absolute ownership – although his company usually buys a controlling share.

“Everyone owns a piece of everything. Think of it as a family. We all help each other, and we don’t baby-sit anyone. It’s a brain trust of engineers.” As part of a large “partnership” – rather than ownership - when work needs to be done somewhere in the collective, a programmer from a partnership website may find him or herself working on VideoAdvertising.com (an anti-click fraud website.)

John finds himself fortunate that he’s working with some of the brightest minds in the field – many of whom are responsible for the top 500, 1000, or 10,000 websites online. He’s confident of his partner’s abilities, and because of their brimming potential, he’ll be as “big as MySpace.com in 12 months.”

Yet changes are coming, and in many cases they are already beginning to manifest. Demonoid.com already has links to eTunes, as myBittorrent.com does. The face of many BitTorrent sites will see radical changes occur in the near future, changes that will transform people’s perceived interpretation of what a BitTorrent site should be. Searching.com is targeting the massive economic potential of the coveted 15-35 demographic – let’s see if they play along.
http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=27881





How To Get More Power From A Wireless Router

The $16 Honk Kong Antenna That Could
Brolo

In December 2005, I impulsively decided to buy a wireless router. I didn’t have any wireless computers running at the time, but I did have a desktop machine, an XBox and various other hobby PC’s. So I went to Future Shop with one goal in mind: to buy the coolest-looking mini-router I could find. Performance be damned. My eyes fell upon the Linksys WRT54GC and I was smitten. How could anyone not buy this router? It’s so cute! If you are such a person, you have no heart. You probably go to the nearest pet shop to laugh at the puppies.

For most of 2006, this WRT54GC had a low-stress life. It handled FTP connections between my Xbox and PC but most of the time, it simply ran a single wired Ethernet connection out to my PC. This Linksys was living the good life. When it wasn’t transferring packets, it was sipping Hennessy. But then, one day when the router was out sun tanning by the pool, I bought a wireless notebook. The free ride was over. Now the Linksys would actually have to perform sans wires. That’s French for…without wires. I was curious to see if this mini-router could actually send out a useable signal at all given its small size. Compared to average-sized routers with two external antennas, the WRT54GC only has one antenna – and it’s built in.

Since my notebook was usually no more than twelve feet away from the router, the connection seemed solid. The story could end here, but that would be too easy. This Linksys model allows for an external antenna to be added if the owner feels inclined to drop $50-$60 on a brand-name antenna. <sarcasm>Boy was I inclined! Hot diggety!</sarcasm>. I learned that there are numerous compatible SMA antennas on the market today, but anything built by Linksys or D-Link seemed to cost at least $45US. That’s more than 50% of what I paid for my entire router, so these choices seemed too frivolous for my hobo-esque standards.

Enter eBay

I found the same antennas for sale at lower prices, but they were still rather pricey once shipping was factored in. After some advanced algorithmic searching (read: checking out a bunch of auctions while eating Jello), I found the Asian Holy Grail. The 9db WiFi Booster Long Antenna. All the way from Hong Kong, this antenna boasts 2dB greater gain than the more expensive 7dB Linksys antenna. And the price for this phallic omen? $6US plus $10 shipping. In total, a paltry $16US to my door. But would it arrive in one piece? Would it perform? Or would I lose all interest and watch football? Only time would tell.

Eight days later, the 12 inch antenna was in my hands. It was much larger than I expected it would be which left me feeling rather inferior and less manly. But nonetheless, in the name of science, I would press on to discover if this no-name antenna from Hong Kong would make any difference at all to my signal strength.

Let’s get down to business…

Hardware Summary

• Acer Travelmate 291Lci
• Pentium M 1.4 GHz w/ 512 MB RAM
• Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG (IEEE 802.11b/g)
• Linksys WRT54GC (firmware 1.02.8)
• 9db WiFi Booster Long Antenna (purchased on Ebay from ‘pointingmouse’)
• Stainless Steel Popcorn Pot v3.0

Software Summary

• OS: WinXP Pro SP2
• Windows automated WiFi configuration
• Yahoo! WiFi indicator Widget
• Mini Airport Signal 1.0 Widget

The Tests

I wanted to gauge signal strength and bandwidth in different locations inside and within close proximity to my apartment. The areas I selected are:

Location Work desk Bedroom In front door Out front door In storage room
Distance from Router (feet) 8.1 n/a (through wall) 25.5 30 35


To gauge internal vs. external antenna strength, I performed signal tests under the following WAP conditions.

1. Normal setup: router on floor
2. Popcorn setup: router enclosed under stainless steel pot
3. Normal + antenna: router connected to 9db antenna
4. Normal + antenna2: router connected to 9db antenna in alternate location
5. Popcorn + antenna: router covered; connected to 9db antenna
6. Popcorn + antenna2: router covered; 9db antenna in alternate location

As you can see, the desk and router are in the same room and quite close to one another. Measured distance is 8.1 feet

This photo shows you my most advanced piece of hardware: the trusty popcorn pot. I wanted to somehow muffle the signal to better gauge antenna performance by taking the router out of the equation. Who knows….maybe this will INCREASE router performance!! I could sell these on Ebay and make a fortune.

Here is the alternate antenna location – on top of a bongo drum. Instead of running the 1.5 metre antenna cable toward the desk, it’s now running toward the front door as well as closer to the bedroom door. This *should* beef up the signal strength numbers for most tested locations.

This shows where the signal must reach for the bedroom test. Distance is not finite as there is no clear line of sight. A direct route takes the signal through a cement wall, whereas the bounce-around route eventually takes it through the bedroom door.

Further back from the bedroom entrance is the front doorway. There is just barely a line of sight to the router from here. Reception should be better here than in the bedroom. Distance is 25.5 feet.

Move five steps back from the doorway, close the door, and you’re now standing in the apartment hallway. Distance is only 4.5 feet further than the inner doorway, but the signal now has to make it through the door.

Now I’m pushing my luck. If I step back yet another five feet, I end up standing across the hall in a large storage room and having passed a very heavy metal door. I have doubts that I’ll get any reception from here.

Test Results

The Yahoo WiFi Widget showed me signal strength as an analog bar display. This is handy for daily use, but not so much for fine-tuning signal strength. After a little more web surfing, I found the Mini Airport Signal Widget. It works just like the Yahoo Widget, but shows me signal strength as a percentage – 0% being no signal and 100% being perfect signal.

To track data rate, I simply kept an eye on the Network Properties menu within Windows to view average Mbps while transferring network files.

Note:
Yahoo WiFi Widget: http://widgets.yahoo.com/download/
Mini Airport Signal Widget: http://www.widgetgallery.com/view.php?widget=35961

Desk Bed In Front Door Out Front Door In Storage Room
Normal - No Antenna 96% (54Mbps) 71-72% (1-2mbps) 75-7%9 (36) 0 0
Under pot - No Antenna 89-91% (48Mbps) 0 0 0 0
Under pot - W/ Antenna 100% (54Mbps) 100% (54Mbps) 100% (54Mbps) 95-9%7 (48) 79-80% (24)
Under pot - W/ Antenna 2 100% (54) 91-96% (48) 96% (48-54) 85-88% (36-48) 76-81% (24)
Normal + Antenna 100% (54) 95-100% (54) 100% (54) 93-99% (54) 81-83% (24)
Normal + Antenna 2 100% (54) 100% (54) 100% (54) 75-88% (36) 73-75% (1-11)


To make these results more meaningful, here are some graphs showing wireless signal strength (%) and throughput (Mbps) from all locations. As I’ll explain later, you should take the signal strength values with a grain of salt.

Result Analysis: Router – no antenna

The two left-most “Normal” tests show signal strength with no external antenna. Notice that without this antenna, I get a good signal from 8 feet away (desk) and a reasonable one from 25 feet away with a direct line of sight (doorway). Once a single wall is introduced, or a popcorn pot or a doorway, the signal is virtually gone. I was very surprised to see that the router used by itself was barely strong enough to use in my bedroom a very short distance away (an unstable 1-2Mbps; 72% signal strength.

The popcorn pot worked as expected to reduce internal antenna strength. The router was still useable from eight feet away (down from 54 to 48Mbps), but everything else got a big zero.

Router with external antenna

With the $16 no-name antenna attached to the WRT54GC, my scores increased tremendously. As you can see from the graphs, gains are noticeable right across the board. Bedroom signal strength went up from 1-2Mbps to 54Mbps under most tested conditions (the exception being one pot test @ 48Mbps). As for outside the front door and in the storage room, I could actually pick up reliable signals where there were no signals before. This breathes life into the possibility of sharing WiFi (and the monthly bill) with a neighbour.

As for moving the antenna to the alternate location (antenna 2 tests), it didn’t make as much of a difference as I expected. Scores moved up as well as down, but overall performance difference appeared to be negligible.

Lastly, I also learned that “signal strength” is really not a good measure of wireless throughput. At times, signal strength was in the high 70’s but bandwidth was in the area of just 1-2 Mbps. If I got below 85%, I was actually down to about half of my maximum bandwidth (24Mbps). Getting down to the low 70’s gave me unstable throughput of only 1-11Mbps. So if signal strength gets down to 50%, do not assume that you’ll be reaching a throughput speed of 27Mbps, or that 10% will get you 5.4Mbps. Anything below 70% will most likely get you nothing.

Conclusion

The performance similarities between ‘Under pot w/ antenna’ and ‘Normal + antenna’ speak volumes about the performance of the $16 Ebay antenna. Conditions were identical, except for the fact that the router was either surrounded by a layer of steel or out in the open. Comparing these, you’ll notice that the scores barely change. This tells me that the $16 Ebay antenna does such a good job at sending my WiFi signal that the built-in router antenna becomes utterly redundant and useless. So my conclusion is short and sweet.

1. For $16US to my door, the ‘WiFi Booster Long Antenna’ is a tremendous deal.
2. At $45-$60US, the 7db Linksys antenna had better be able to walk the dog and do the laundry.
3. The WRT54GC’s built-in antenna is pretty much useless.
4. I make really good popcorn (Seriously. I do.)

http://www.crucial.com/?gclid=CIym6Y...FRRRVAodixXTGA





Microsoft, MetroFi Unite for Joint Venture
Sarah Skidmore

Microsoft Corp. said it will partner with MetroFi Inc. to build a free wireless Internet service for Oregon's largest city.

MetroFi announced late Tuesday it will launch the Wi-Fi service in Pioneer Courthouse Square, a popular gathering place in downtown Portland, by the end of the year and expand it to the rest of the city within two years.

Microsoft will provide locally focused MSN content and advertising through its new online platform, adCenter. The platform, designed to compete with Google Inc., allows advertisers to target users based on their browsing habits and data such as gender, age and location.

"It's a great alliance," said Chuck Haas, CEO and co-founder of MetroFi. "Having either city or neighborhood-level content...demonstrates the next wave on online advertisement and brings more value to advertisers and subscribers."

MetroFi operates Wi-Fi networks in several Silicon Valley cities and has agreements with 13 cities across the United States to develop municipal networks.

Portland already has some free Wi-Fi spots available through the Personal TelCo project, a volunteer group in Portland. The city has been eager to provide a municipal Wi-Fi service for the whole metro area, a trend taking place across the country.

The new system will eventually cover 95 percent of the city.

MetroFi will pay to create and maintain the system. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said the service will be maintained through advertising revenue.

Users can opt for advertising-free service for $20 a month.

Sam Klepper, general manager in the MSN Media Network Group at Microsoft, said the company partnered with MetroFi because it has one of the largest municipal Wi-Fi footprints of any provider. But Microsoft may consider working with other wireless providers and cities in the future.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-15-01-46-03




Disruptive Technology
Pierre-Alexandre Garneau

Nintendo is trying, with the Wii, to create a disruptive technology that unseats current industry leaders. I believe they may already have created that disruptive platform, but it’s not their new console.

The concept of “disruptive technology” was popularized with the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. The gist of it is that, in many markets, technological capabilities increase faster than most consumers’ needs. At the same time, some companies create new products that are less capable in the traditional aspects, but feature new characteristics that weren’t considered important in the past.

For example, in the past hard drives were big boxes that had large capacity (for the time). Capacity increased faster than consumer’s needs, and eventually having physically smaller hard drives that held less data became more interesting than large drives that held more data. The companies making the big old drives slowly were overtaken by the companies making the new drives.

Contrary to popular belief, disruptive technologies don’t necessarily revolutionize a market instantly; the new technology often existed in a niche market for a long time before its capacities became good enough for the mainstream market. Look at portable MP3 players: even though the iPod set the market on fire, there were many other similar products beforehand that were promising but not good enough to replace the popular portable CD players.

We can apply this logic to consoles. Graphics quality — the traditional metric for evaluating a console — is improving faster than many consumers care about. For all the talk about the HD era, very few people have TVs that support 1080p. Many people also note that we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns in graphics; adding a few thousand polygons more on the screen just doesn’t have the impact it used to. Yet, both Sony and Microsoft concentrate on graphics power to promote their new system.

The console market seems ready for a disruptive technology to shake its core assumptions. Is the Wii the platform to do so? Nintendo hopes so. They see their new console as the “Revolution” that will change gaming into caring more about ease of use than raw power. I don’t believe that will happen: the Wii games are just too similar to their competitors’, even with the new controller. The Wii may be a success, but I don’t think it will disrupt the status quo.

The good news for Nintendo is that they’re already the leaders in what may be the real disruptive technology: handheld consoles. Handheld games used to be too limited to reach the masses, but now the PSP and DS are reaching graphical quality that’s “good enough” for the mainstream. They also have unique qualities that traditional consoles don’t have: portability, easy connectivity with nearby players and approachable games.

Handhelds are good enough in the traditional characteristics of consoles, but also bring something new to the table. Sounds like a potential disruptive technology to me — as I said, disruptive technologies don’t overtake a market instantly, but rather do so when they become good enough for the mainstream market.

I believe the Nintendo DS’ success is the tipping point of what may be the real new era of gaming — forget the HD era, here comes the Portable Era. The next hot system may very well be defined by its battery life and ease of transportation rather than by the quality of its graphics.
http://www.pagtech.com/2006/10/04/di...ve-technology/





Physics Promises Wireless Power
Jonathan Fildes

The tangle of cables and plugs needed to recharge today's electronic gadgets could soon be a thing of the past.

US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires.

The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said.

Although the team has not built and tested a system, computer models and mathematics suggest it will work.

"There are so many autonomous devices such as cell phones and laptops that have emerged in the last few years," said Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the researchers behind the work.

"We started thinking, 'it would be really convenient if you didn't have to recharge these things'.

"And because we're physicists we asked, 'what kind of physical phenomenon can we use to do this wireless energy transfer?'."

The answer the team came up with was "resonance", a phenomenon that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applied.

"When you have two resonant objects of the same frequency they tend to couple very strongly," Professor Soljacic told the BBC News website.

Resonance can be seen in musical instruments for example.

"When you play a tune on one, then another instrument with the same acoustic resonance will pick up that tune, it will visibly vibrate," he said.

Instead of using acoustic vibrations, the team's system exploits the resonance of electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic radiation includes radio waves, infrared and X-rays.

Typically, systems that use electromagnetic radiation, such as radio antennas, are not suitable for the efficient transfer of energy because they scatter energy in all directions, wasting large amounts of it into free space.

To overcome this problem, the team investigated a special class of "non-radiative" objects with so-called "long-lived resonances".

When energy is applied to these objects it remains bound to them, rather than escaping to space. "Tails" of energy, which can be many metres long, flicker over the surface.

"If you bring another resonant object with the same frequency close enough to these tails then it turns out that the energy can tunnel from one object to another," said Professor Soljacic.

Hence, a simple copper antenna designed to have long-lived resonance could transfer energy to a laptop with its own antenna resonating at the same frequency. The computer would be truly wire less.

Any energy not diverted into a gadget or appliance is simply reabsorbed.

The systems that the team have described would be able to transfer energy over three to five metres.

"This would work in a room let's say but you could adapt it to work in a factory," he said.

"You could also scale it down to the microscopic or nanoscopic world."

Old technology

The team from MIT is not the first group to suggest wireless energy transfer.

Nineteenth-century physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla experimented with long-range wireless energy transfer, but his most ambitious attempt - the 29m high aerial known as Wardenclyffe Tower, in New York - failed when he ran out of money.

Others have worked on highly directional mechanisms of energy transfer such as lasers.

However, these require an uninterrupted line of sight, and are therefore not good for powering objects around the home.

A UK company called Splashpower has also designed wireless recharging pads onto which gadget lovers can directly place their phones and MP3 players to recharge them.

The pads use electromagnetic induction to charge devices, the same process used to charge electric toothbrushes.

One of the co-founders of Splashpower, James Hay, said the MIT work was "clearly at an early stage" but "interesting for the future".

"Consumers desire a simple universal solution that frees them from the hassles of plug-in chargers and adaptors," he said.

"Wireless power technology has the potential to deliver on all of these needs."

However, Mr Hay said that transferring the power was only part of the solution.

"There are a number of other aspects that need to be addressed to ensure efficient conversion of power to a form useful to input to devices."

Professor Soljacic will present the work at the American Institute of Physics Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco on 14 November.

The work was done in collaboration with his colleagues Aristeidis Karalis and John Joannopoulos.


HOW WIRELESS POWER COULD WORK
1) Power from mains to antenna, which is made of copper
2) Antenna resonates at a frequency of 6.4Mhz, emitting electromagnetic waves
3) 'Tails' of energy from antenna 'tunnel' up to 5m (16.4ft)
4) Electricity picked up by laptop's antenna, which must also be resonating at 6.4Mhz. Energy used to re-charge device
5) Energy not transferred to laptop re-absorbed by source antenna. People/other objects not affected as not resonating at 6.4Mhz

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6129460.stm





1 Percent of Web Deemed Pornographic
Maryclaire Dale

About 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft are sexually explicit, according to a U.S. government-commissioned study.

Government lawyers introduced the study in court this month as the Justice Department seeks to revive the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which required commercial Web sites to collect a credit card number or other proof of age before allowing Internet users to view material deemed "harmful to minors."

The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the law in 2004, ruling it also would cramp the free speech rights of adults to see and buy what they want on the Internet. The court said technology such as filtering software may work better than such laws.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the law on behalf of a broad range of Web publishers, said the study supports its argument that filters work well.

The study concludes that the strictest filter tested, AOL's Mature Teen, blocked 91 percent of the sexually explicit Web sites in indexes maintained by Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.

Filters with less restrictive settings blocked at least 40 percent of sexually explicit sites, according to the study of random Web sites by Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at University of California, Berkeley.

"Filters are more than 90 percent effective, according to Stark," ACLU attorney Chris Hansen said Tuesday during a break in the trial. "Also, with filters, it's up to the parents how to use it, whereas COPA requires a one-solution-fits-all (approach)."

COPA follows Congress' unsuccessful 1996 effort to ban online pornography. The Supreme Court in 1997 deemed key portions of that law unconstitutional because it was too vague and trampled on adults' rights. It would have criminalized putting adult-oriented material online where children can find it.

The 1998 law narrowed the restrictions to commercial Web sites and defined indecency more specifically.

In 2000, Congress also passed a law requiring schools and libraries to block porn using software filters if they receive certain federal funds. The high court upheld that law in 2003.

Justice Department lawyers Theodore Hirt and Raphael Gomez declined to comment Tuesday on Stark's findings.

Stark prepared the report based on information the Justice Department obtained through subpoenas sent to search engine companies and Internet service providers.

Google refused one such subpoena for 1 million sample queries and 1 million Web addresses in its database, citing trade secrets. A judge limited the amount of information the company had to provide.

Stark also examined a random sample of search-engine queries. He estimated that 1.7 percent of search results at Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, MSN and Yahoo Inc. are sexually explicit and 1.1 percent of Web sites cataloged at Google and MSN fall in that category.

About 6 percent of searches yield at least one explicit Web site, he said, and the most popular queries return a sexually explicit site nearly 40 percent of the time.

But filters blocked 87 percent to 98 percent of the explicit results from the most popular searches on the Web, Stark found.

Stark also said that about half the sexually explicit Web sites found in the Google and MSN indexes are foreign, making them beyond the reach of U.S. law. But he agreed with government assertions that the most popular sites are domestic.

"COPA - right out of the bat - doesn't block the 50 percent (posted) overseas," Hansen said. "So COPA is substantially less than 50 percent effective."

Closing arguments in the four-week, non-jury trial before Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. are expected Monday.

The law, signed by then-President Clinton, requires Web sites to get credit card information or some other proof of age from adults who want to view material that may be considered harmful to children. It would impose a $50,000 fine and six-month prison term on commercial Web site operators that allow minors to view such content, which is to be defined by "contemporary community standards."

The law has yet to be enforced. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a preliminary injunction, ruling in June 2004 that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail.

The plaintiffs, including Salon.com, say they would fear prosecution under the law for publishing material as varied as erotic literature to photos of naked inmates at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-14-18-45-30





Rolling the Dice

The United States' big legal gamble with Internet gaming.
Henry Lanman

In the wee hours of an early Saturday morning several weeks ago, about half an hour before Congress left for its pre-election recess, it passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. The act tries to bar credit-card payments to Internet gambling sites, and there has been much speculation about its wisdom and likely efficacy. What has been less noted, though, is that through this bill and a handful of similar missteps, the government has put itself in a position to be taught a sharp lesson about the nature of power in a globalized marketplace. Unless Congress and the Bush administration begin to pay a little more attention to how they handle Internet gambling, they could well end up creating an entirely avoidable headache for some very powerful constituents—holders of U.S. copyrights and patents—by punching a hole in the international web of agreements that protects them. Taken as a whole, these efforts offer a veritable master class in how not to regulate a 21st-century economy.

The new law doesn't make any additional types of gambling illegal. Rather, it merely attempts to make it harder to engage in online-gambling activities that Congress already believes are illegal—by requiring credit-card companies to identify and block transactions with online casinos. But in laying out with specificity what kind of Internet gambling Congress thinks is—and is not—already prohibited, the law likely will add to a free-trade debacle in which the United States already finds itself knee-deep.

To understand why this new law may cause free-trade problems, you need to know a little bit about U.S. laws governing both online and brick-and-mortar gambling. Gambling in the United States is governed by a bewildering array of both state and federal laws, but the main statute that was used to chase online casinos out of the United States was the federal Wire Act. Passed in 1961, the Wire Act basically prohibits those "in the businesses of betting" from sending or receiving certain types of bet-related information over interstate or international wires. The Wire Act doesn't prohibit everything, though. It doesn't, for instance, cover bets placed and taken within a single state, which turns out to be a significant exception. Likewise, because of a separate 1978 statute called the Interstate Horseracing Act, the Wire Act doesn't prohibit interstate betting on horse racing, either.

In 2003, the island nation of Antigua and Barbuda took a look at the thicket of U.S. laws governing gambling and decided that they violated the United States' free-trade obligations, as administered by the World Trade Organization. Antigua had a more than scholarly interest in this issue because, when offshore Internet gambling businesses were first being set up, the country decided to both welcome and strictly regulate them. Not liking what it saw in the U.S. law, Antigua initiated a WTO proceeding challenging the regulations.

Antigua's basic theory in its WTO complaint was simply that, if the United States allows any Internet gambling at all, it couldn't, in light of its WTO obligations, impose barriers to foreign companies seeking access to its market. It was a pretty straightforward free-trade argument. In response, the United States tried to take advantage of a "morals" defense in WTO proceedings that says, reasonably enough, that if you don't make a product in your country due to moral objections, you needn't open your market to foreign providers of that product.

Interestingly, the United States was able to establish that there was a defensible "moral" distinction between brick-and-mortar casinos in the United States and online casinos and that it could prohibit the latter while allowing the former. But to take advantage of this distinction, the United States had to show that it prohibits all forms of Internet gambling. And to do so, it could only turn to laws such as the Wire Act, which rather plainly do no such thing. As a result, the WTO upheld Antigua's complaint and essentially ruled that while a "morals" defense could theoretically be made, the United States was in no position to actually make it, since it doesn't completely prohibit Internet gambling.

The WTO gave the United States a year to comply with its ruling by either changing its laws to fully ban online gambling or by allowing foreign access to the online-gambling market. That year ended last April, but rather than do anything to comply, the United States simply issued a statement to the effect that it had spent the year reviewing the matter and decided that it has been in compliance all along. Antigua is, unsurprisingly, challenging this response. A final decision from the WTO is expected early next year.

It was in this context—a context to which Congress seems to have been largely oblivious—that Congress enacted its recent legislation. The legislation causes new problems, because it seems to clarify beyond any doubt that the United States does not, in fact, prohibit all forms of Internet gambling. Indeed, the law contains an explicit list of circumstances in which Internet gambling is permitted, including betting on horse racing and in-state gambling. So, whatever slender chance the United States may have had of establishing some broad moral objection to online gaming appears to have disappeared. In fact, things look so bleak for the United States that the government recently published a "Request for Comments" in the Federal Register that is essentially a nationwide call for help from anyone who thinks they can come up with an argument it can use here. The government, it seems, is all out of ideas.

The obvious question is what Antigua can do with a victory at the WTO. Retaliatory tariffs plainly aren't particularly appealing for small country like Antigua, because they would certainly hurt more than they would help. But the plucky little island paradise does have some creative options at its disposal. If the United States remains recalcitrant, under the WTO rules, Antigua would potentially have the right to suspend its own compliance with the treaty that obligates it to respect the United States' intellectual-property laws. That, one can well imagine, might get Washington's attention.

Want a cheap copy of Microsoft's latest software or a nice medical device that, annoyingly, is protected by a U.S. patent? Come to Antigua. In such a scenario, Antigua couldn't simply be ostracized as a rogue state. It would have every right under WTO rules to pursue such a course. In fact, Antigua could go down this road only in response to the United States' continuing refusal to honor its international obligations. While there undoubtedly would be complicated issues and restrictions on the scope of any suspension the WTO approves, the United States shouldn't assume that the world body is too timid to hand Antigua this sort of stick with which to retaliate, since it has authorized intellectual-property-based reprisal before. Antigua's frank calculation here, of course, is that while the administration might be comfortable stiffing the Antiguan trade representative, it would probably take notice if, say, an irate Microsoft or Disney started insisting that it get this problem solved.

This whole episode may turn out to be a case study of what can go wrong when Congress succumbs to an idea that probably should never have made it out of the 19th century—prohibition—in far more complex contemporary circumstances. To the extent it has been thinking about the dispute with Antigua at all, the United States may have been assuming that it could white-knuckle any public-relations fallout and not actually have to change its behavior. In the past, in an economy based largely on physical goods, this might have been a reasonable strategy, but it doesn't look good when intellectual property is such a crucial asset. As the United States knows better than anyone, useful intellectual-property protection requires a shared set of global enforcement agreements. Precisely because it has the most to gain from this system, the United States is also uniquely vulnerable to gaps in it. And that's why allowing countries like Antigua to suspend intellectual-property treaties in trade disputes gives them such a potent weapon, a fact that the United States, much to its annoyance, may soon learn.

Henry Lanman is a lawyer in New York City.
http://www.slate.com/id/2153352/





Corporate Propaganda Still On the News: Study Finds Local Stations Overwhelmingly Fail to Disclose VNRs

A new study by the Center for Media and Democracy says Americans are still being shown corporate public relations videos disguised as news reports on newscasts across the country. In April, the Center identified 77 stations using Video News Releases in their newscasts. The findings led to an investigation by the FCC. A followp-up study has found 10 of those stations are still airing VNRs today for a total of 46 stations in 22 states. [includes rush transcript]

Corporate propaganda on the six o'clock news --- A new study by the Center for Media and Democracy says Americans are still being shown public relations videos disguised as news reports on newscasts across the country. The fake reports are called Video News Releases, or VNRs. They're produced by marketing firms hired to promote products or political messages.

If this story sounds familiar, it's because dozens of stations have already been caught in the act. As we reported on Democracy Now! in April, the Center for Media and Democracy identified seventy-seven stations using VNRs in their newscasts. The findings led to an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission.

Well, despite the controversy, ten of those stations are still airing VNRs today, for a total of forty-six stations in twenty-two states. Most of the VNRs have aired on stations owned by large media conglomerates, such as News Corp., Tribune, and Disney. They've also been sponsored by some of the country's biggest corporations, including General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, and Allstate Insurance.

In all but six cases, the television stations failed to identify where the VNRs came from. In twelve cases, television stations even edited out disclosures included in the original fake report. And in four cases, the television stations failed to disclose the reporters on the screen were actually publicists.

We're going to speak with one of the authors of the report in a minute, but first, let's take a look at one of the VNRs that made it to air. In June of this year, the PR firm Medialink Worldwide put out a VNR that sought to disprove the link between Global Warming and Hurricanes.

Original TCS Daily VNR, created by Medialink.

This VNR was produced for the firm "TCS Daily Science Roundtable." Until last month, TCS was owned by the Republican lobbyist DCI Group. TCS was also the recipient of a $95,000 dollar grant from the oil giant ExxonMobil for QUOTE: "climate change support."

But when ABC affiliate WTOK-11 in Meridian, Mississippi aired the VNR in May, none of these details were mentioned. Instead, viewers were shown an edited version of the VNR, with the station's news anchor reading the same script.

WTOK-11 10PM newscast, May 31, 2006.

We asked a representative of ABC affiliate WTOK-11 in Meridian, Mississippi to join us on the program but we did not get a response. Another fifteen stations either turned down our request or did not respond.

We did hear back from a few stations. Fred D"Ambrosi, news director at the San Diego CBS affiliate KFMB-TV, responded to our request about a VNR that failed to disclose the "reporter" was actually a publicist hired by General Mills. D"Ambrosi says the fake report aired by mistake and that he doesn't think VNRs should air at all without proper disclosure.

We also called the Radio-Television News Directors Association They sent a petition to the FCC last month urging them to halt their investigation into VNRs. They declined our request to join us on the program today.

Diane Farsetta is co-author of the Center for Media and Democracy study, it's called "Still Not the News: Stations Overwhelmingly Fail to Disclose VNRs" . She joins us from Washington DC.

Diane Farsetta, senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to speak with one of the authors of the report in a minute. But first, let's take a look at one of the VNRs that made it to air. In June of this year, the PR firm Medialink Worldwide put out a VNR that sought to disprove the link between global warming and hurricanes.

VNR NARRATOR: You've seen it before: winds, floods, the devastation left after a massive hurricane passes through. There's a lot of debate as to what's been causing all of these hurricanes. Some scientists say it's part of a naturally occurring cycle, while others have made the claim global warming is to blame. Dr. William Gray and Dr. James O'Brien, two of the nation's top weather and [inaudible], point to scientific data for the answer.

DR. WILLIAM GRAY: We only have good data with a satellite around the globe, going back about 20 years. And in those 20 years, we see no significant change in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes or major hurricanes around the globe.

VNR NARRATOR: Gray and many of his colleagues believe it's not global warming that’s creating these massive hurricanes, but the cycle of nature itself.

DR. WILLIAM GRAY: Since it’s changed, there's been a lot of people saying, “A-ha, the globe is warming. This is a cause of these last two years’ storms.” Well, we don't think that's the case. Whether this is a way nature sometimes works.

VNR NARRATOR: It’s these changes in the Atlantic salt content and currents that Gray says causes most of the hurricanes on the East and Gulf Coasts. This year the probability of a major hurricane is about 81%. And while this number is a prediction, it's based on science and research, so it never hurts to be prepared. I'm Kate Brookes.

AMY GOODMAN: This VNR was produced for the firm TCS Daily Science Roundtable. Until last month, TCS was owned by the Republican lobbyist, DCI Group. TCS was also the recipient of a $95,000 grant from the oil giant ExxonMobil for, quote, "climate change support." But when ABC affiliate WTOK-11 in Meridian, Mississippi, aired the VNR in May, none of these details were mentioned. Instead, viewers were shown an edited version of the VNR with the station's news anchor reading the same script.

WTOK-11 ANCHOR: Hurricane seasons for the next 20 years could be severe, but don’t blame global warming. One of the nation's foremost hurricane predictors is Dr. William Gray, the famed Colorado State University hurricane predictor. He says the earth's natural cycles are to blame for the increase in activity.

DR. WILLIAM GRAY: Since it’s changed, there's been a lot of people saying, “A-ha, the globe is warming. This is a cause of these last two years’ storms.” Well, we don't think that's the case. Whether this is a way nature sometimes works.

WTOK-11 ANCHOR: Gray makes predictions for the upcoming hurricane season every year before it begins.

AMY GOODMAN: That was from ABC affiliate WTOK-11 in Meridian, Mississippi, in May. We asked a representative of the station to come on our program, but we didn't get a response. Another 15 stations either turned down our request or didn't respond.

We did hear back from a few stations. Fred D’Ambrosi, news director at the San Diego CBS affiliate KFMB-TV, responded to our request about a VNR that failed to disclose the so-called reporter was actually a publicist hired by General Mills. D’Ambrosi says the fake report aired by mistake and that he doesn't think VNRs should air at all without proper disclosure.

We also called the Radio-Television News Directors Association. They’re called the RTNDA. They sent a petition to the FCC last month urging them to halt their investigation into VNRs. They declined our request to join us on the program today.

Well, Diane Farsetta did agree to come on. She joins us from Washington, D.C. She’s co-author of the Center for Media and Democracy, the study called "Still Not the News: Stations Overwhelmingly Fail to Disclose VNRs." The report comes out today. Welcome, Diane Farsetta, to this follow-up to your first report. Explain now what you have found.

DIANE FARSETTA: Well, basically, what we have found is that this practice of airing VNRs without any disclosure continues. In some ways, it's more of the same. In some ways, it's worse than what our first report documented. As you mentioned, there are ten station that are repeats from the first report. Eight of those, in their more recent VNRs, offered no disclosure whatsoever. So, to make clear, these are eight stations that are currently under investigation by the FCC. So, all told, there are 54 different instances that this report documents: newscasts airing, incorporating VNRs, overwhelmingly without any disclosure to their audiences.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Diane, you've been accused by, for example, the RTNDA, which is a very important organization for news directors around the country -- it's the Radio-Television News Directors Association -- saying you're trying to pull the government into determining the content on their networks, on their programs, on their stations.

DIANE FARSETTA: Right. Well, I mean, we think it's so ridiculous that -- that those sorts of claims are ridiculous for many different reasons. First of all, when we're talking about VNR disclosure, we're talking about something -- an important piece of information that's being denied to news audiences that they need to be able to evaluate these claims that are being presented. The global warming example that you showed is a great example of, if only that information had been presented, that this was presented by ExxonMobil's lobbying firm, you would take that information, you would evaluate it much differently. So, the aim of disclosure is not to suppress VNRs. It's not to say TV stations can’t air these. It's to provide an essential piece of information to news audiences. So, we think there's not really any basis for First Amendment opposition to VNR disclosure, not to mention that TV stations are given free use of the public airwaves, and they're supposed to be serving the public interest.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to another example. This is an original video news release, VNR, produced by the PR firm Medialink Worldwide for its client, Siemens Oncology. The piece was created to advertise a medical device called MVision. The video features Medialink publicist Kate Brookes acting as a reporter.

KATE BROOKES: At 81 years old, Frederic Linder is looking forward to watching his new grandson grow up, and when the time comes, teaching him Hamlet. But first, he's hoping to beat prostate cancer. He's currently undergoing radiation therapy at the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center.

FREDERIC LINDER: I feel absolutely nothing. I have no side effects. In fact, from here, I usually go to the Y to work out a little bit.

KATE BROOKES: Linder’s physicians are treating him with the help of a new tumor imaging technology.

ANDREAS SCHLATTER, Siemens Oncology: MVision is a new technology allowing the radiation therapist to create three dimensional images of the patient, when the patient is at the treatment table just prior to the radiation therapy treatment.

KATE BROOKES: The significance? Doctors can now see and pinpoint the exact area they're attempting to treat. Traditional two-dimensional views, doctors say, leave much more to chance.

DR. JEAN POULIOT: So, all of a sudden, just before you treat your patient, you have access to the entire anatomy in 3-D to validate the positioning and the setup of the patient. So, there's a high confidence that when we shoot the beam, when we use the beam for dose delivery, it really is where we intend it to be.

AMY GOODMAN: On August 22, 2006, ABC affiliate KSFY-13 in Sioux Falls, Iowa, aired the VNR in its entirety. In their introduction, a local anchor made it appear the publicist, Kate Brookes, was actually a reporter.

KSFY-13 ANCHOR: New technology may help revolutionize cancer treatment for more than a million patients diagnosed with the disease this year alone. As Kate Brookes explains, recent advances are helping doctors to treat tumors faster, safer and more precisely.

KATE BROOKES: At 81 years old, Frederic Linder is looking forward to watching his new grandson grow up, and when the time comes, teaching him Hamlet. But first, he's hoping to beat prostate cancer. He's currently undergoing radiation therapy at the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center.

FREDERIC LINDER: I feel absolutely nothing. I have no side effects. In fact, from here, I usually go to the Y to work out a little bit.

KATE BROOKES: Linder’s physicians are treating him with the help of a new tumor imaging technology.

ANDREAS SCHLATTER, Siemens Oncology: MVision is a new technology allowing the radiation therapist to create three dimensional images of the patient, when the patient is at the treatment table just prior to the radiation therapy treatment.

KATE BROOKES: The significance? Doctors can now see and pinpoint the exact area they're attempting to treat. Traditional two-dimensional views, doctors say, leave much more to chance.

DR. JEAN POULIOT: So, all of a sudden, just before you treat your patient, you have access to the entire anatomy in 3-D to validate the positioning and the setup of the patient. So, there's a high confidence that when we shoot the beam, when we use the beam for dose delivery, it really is where we intend it to be.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the VNR that aired on a KSFY newscast in South Dakota in August. A spokesperson for KSFY declined to be interviewed for our broadcast, but did say the station had mistakenly failed to properly identify the piece as a VNR. Well, your final response, Diane Farsetta?

I want to say that the National Association of Broadcast Communicators, a consortium of broadcast PR firms that produce VNRs, did issue a statement, along with the Public Relations Society of America, about your original report. They say the report, quote, "seriously distorts the FCC rules concerning VNRs and creates the false impression that numerous broadcast stations across the country are violating FCC rules." We invited both of them on the program, of these organizations. They failed to -- they both declined our request. I'm sorry about that. But your final response to them?

DIANE FARSETTA: Sure, I would say viewers can go to stopfakenews.org, and they can watch the report. They can read it. As far as our take on the FCC regulations, everything that we have in both of our reports are direct quotes from the FCC's own statements, the public notice that they issued in April 2005 on video news releases, which says stations generally must clearly disclose when they air video news releases.

AMY GOODMAN: Diane, finally, you're holding a news conference today?

DIANE FARSETTA: We are. And Commissioners Copps and Adelstein will be joining us for that. So, we will have more discussion about policy.

AMY GOODMAN: And we will link to that on our website at democracynow.org. Diane Farsetta, senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy, co-author of “Still Not the News: Stations Overwhelmingly Fail to Disclose VNRs.”
http://www.democracynow.org/article..../11/14/1518200





O. J. Simpson Writes a Book He’ll Discuss on Fox TV
Edward Wyatt

O. J. Simpson, who was acquitted 11 years ago in the 1994 death of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald L. Goldman has written a book and will appear on television telling “how he would have committed the murders if he were the one responsible,” his publisher and the Fox television network said on Tuesday.

Judith Regan, whose publishing imprint ReganBooks will release Mr. Simpson’s book Nov. 30, also conducted the television interviews, which will be broadcast on Fox in two one-hour segments on Nov. 27 and Nov. 29. Both ReganBooks and Fox are owned by the News Corporation.

According to a news release, the book and the TV special, which has a working title of “O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened,” will depict Mr. Simpson describing “how he would have carried out the murders he has vehemently denied committing for over a decade.”

Mr. Simpson was acquitted of criminal charges, but a civil court found him responsible for the deaths, and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in restitution to the families. Only a part of the amount has been paid, and relatives of the victims have continued to pursue their claims.

It is not clear how much, if any, of the royalties on the sale of the book will go to the victims’ families. A Regan representative and a spokeswoman for Fox declined to comment beyond the news release.

The National Enquirer reported in October that a Simpson book was being planned, but that report was dismissed after Yale Galanter, a Florida lawyer said to be representing Mr. Simpson, told The Daily News that it was untrue. Mr. Galanter did not respond to phone calls yesterday seeking comment.

The TV special is being produced by Ms. Regan, who moved to Los Angeles from New York this year. Ms. Regan has previously produced shows for television featuring her authors, including a special with Jenna Jameson, the sex-film star and author of the book “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,” which was also published by ReganBooks.

Fox representatives would not comment on whether it would solicit advertisers for the specials or whether it had concerns about presenting the specials in prime time. In its news release, the network quoted Mike Darnell, executive vice president for alternative programming, who said: “This is an interview that no one thought would ever happen. It’s the definitive last chapter in the trial of the century.”

At least one other network said it had passed on the chance to bid on the TV special because it thought the content was of questionable taste.

Rebecca Marks, a spokeswoman for NBC Universal Television, said the network passed because “from an advertising point of view, from a public relations point of view, everything, it was impossible.”

The TV special will be on Fox during the final week of the November sweeps, the period when local network affiliates measure viewership in order to determine what rates they can charge for advertising.

Bill Carter contributed from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/business/15book.html





Publisher Calls Book a Confession by O. J. Simpson
Edward Wyatt

The publisher of a book by O. J. Simpson, in which he hypothesizes about how he could have committed the 1994 murder of his ex-wife and her friend, said on Thursday that she believed Mr. Simpson’s statements were, in fact, a confession.

“The book is his confession,” the publisher, Judith Regan, said during a telephone interview. “I would have had no interest in publishing anything but that.”

Titled “If I Did It,” the book is scheduled for release on Nov. 30. A two-part television interview of Mr. Simpson is to be broadcast on Fox on Nov. 27 and Nov. 29.

Ms. Regan acknowledged, however, that Mr. Simpson, who was acquitted of criminal charges in the slayings, did not say directly in the book or the interview that he killed his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald L. Goldman. Rather, he spoke about the murders in the hypothetical sense, a stance that admits nothing and could be viewed as a denial.

But the plans for the book, and the interviews, have created a storm of outrage from family members of the victims and from women’s groups and victims’ rights organizations.

Ms. Regan defended her decision to publish the book, which she said was spurred in part because she, like Nicole Brown Simpson, was a victim of domestic abuse. She added that she was willing to help the victims’ families recover any money that flowed to Mr. Simpson from the book.

Ms. Regan also said she was told that the advance and royalties for the book, which was written with an uncredited ghostwriter, would go to Mr. Simpson’s children and not to him. Mr. Simpson owes $33.5 million plus accumulated interest to the victims’ families after being judged responsible for the deaths in civil court.

Fred Goldman, the father of Ronald Goldman, said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Thursday that Mr. Simpson did not deserve the public forum being given to him by Fox and ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins.

“He destroyed my son and took from my family Ron’s life and future,” Mr. Goldman said. “And for that I’ll hate him always and find him despicable.”

Denise Brown, the sister of Nicole Brown Simpson, issued a statement accusing Ms. Regan of “promoting the wrongdoing of criminals.”

Ms. Regan defended her actions, saying that she was approached with the idea of a book by “a manager who represents a third party,” and that the third party owned the rights to the story. She declined to identify the party and referred a reporter to a lawyer at HarperCollins. Telephone calls to HarperCollins and its legal department were not returned.

“We contracted with the third party,” she said. “I was told that the money would go to his children. They said the money was not going to Simpson. If it is I hope Fred Goldman and the Browns and everyone else can get it.”

Asked if she would help the victims’ families gain access to the money to help satisfy the court judgment against Mr. Simpson, Ms. Regan said, “If they want any information I’m happy to give it to them.”

A Florida lawyer who represents Mr. Simpson was quoted by The New York Post on Thursday as saying that he had no knowledge of the deal before the news was released on Tuesday. The lawyer, Yale Galanter, did not return repeated telephone calls for comment.
Mr. Simpson lives in Florida, where homestead laws protect a person’s house against seizure for the payment of court judgments. His pension from the National Football League, which has been estimated at $400,000 a year, also cannot be seized. With no other obvious income, there has been little for the victims’ families to recover.

Ms. Regan said she did not understand the criticism being leveled at her over the book and television interview.

“Barbara Walters interviews murderers, dictators and criminals,” she said. “Katie Couric interviewed him, and no one said anything,” she added.

However, an interview with Mr. Simpson conducted by Ms. Couric and broadcast on NBC in 2004 on the 10th anniversary of the murders, drew protest from some viewers.

In 1995, Mr. Simpson had sought a pay-per-view arrangement for the interview, but pay-per-view sponsors balked. NBC said this week that it had been offered the chance to bid on the rights to broadcast the new interview with Mr. Simpson, which was conducted by Ms. Regan, but that it declined.

ABC executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the network, said on Thursday that the network also declined to bid on the interview rights.

Unlike most news organizations that conduct interviews, Ms. Regan’s publishing company paid millions of dollars for the rights to Mr. Simpson’s story. The National Enquirer reported last month that ReganBooks is paying $3.5 million for the rights, but Ms. Regan said on Thursday that the amount was “far less,” though she declined to specify by how much.

Ms. Regan said that Mr. Simpson’s conduct during the interview convinced her of his guilt. A segment of the interview is on Fox’s Web site at www.fox.com/oj.

“When you see the interview, you’ll be stunned by his thought process,” she said. “In my view, this is his confession.”

Ms. Regan said she took on the subject because she viewed it as her duty as a publisher and because “I wanted him to confess for very personal reasons.”

Ms. Regan expounded on those reasons in an essay that she provided to The New York Times. In the 2,200-word essay, Ms. Regan states that she was the victim of domestic abuse and that she was not surprised that many people did not believe Mr. Simpson could be guilty of murder or abuse.

“I’d seen it before,” Ms. Regan wrote, “the men in court, dressed in their designer suits, blaming the women they attacked. I’d seen, firsthand, the ‘criminal injustice system,’ as I called it in my 20s — the system that let him go one night after assaulting me so he could come right back and do it again.”

Ms. Regan also wrote that she believed it was her responsibility as a publisher to bring Mr. Simpson’s words to the public, and she likened her role to “the mainstream publishers who keep Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ in print to this day.”

In her phone interview she said: “I think this confession is a historic part of an event that needed closure. We are all in the publishing business, and our business is to tell stories about what is going on. This is a news event.”


Bill Carter contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/arts/17ojbook.html





EFF Asks Supreme Court to Tackle Secret Law
Press Release

Americans Have the Right to See Laws They Must Follow

Washington, D.C. - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of non-profit organizations asked the U.S. Supreme Court Monday to hear a case challenging a secret law governing travelers in American airports.

The case centers on the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) requirement that travelers show identification before boarding commercial aircraft. So far, the TSA has refused to disclose the terms of the identification requirement to the public, claiming that they are "sensitive security information." In the amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to hear Gilmore v. Gonzales, EFF demonstrates that Congress never intended agencies to have unfettered discretion to impose requirements upon the public without allowing the public to review them.

"The TSA is allowed to withhold some information from the public, but only in cases where transportation security is at risk," said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. "Simply showing Americans the rules they must follow can't possibly compromise security. The real danger here is meaningless secrecy, which can hide security flaws, frustrate the justice system, create confusion, and undermine government accountability."

The Constitution and laws like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) prohibit the government from imposing secret laws on the public. But if the lower court decision permitting the secrecy is allowed to stand, it opens the door to other government agencies creating undisclosed rules and regulations without oversight.

"'Security' shouldn't be a magic password allowing the government to escape accountability," said Hofmann. "The Supreme Court should hear this case and review why the TSA insists on keeping this basic information secret."

The amicus brief was also signed by the American Association of Law Libraries, American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, Center for Democracy and Technology, National Security Archive, Project on Government Secrecy of the Federation of American Scientists, and Special Libraries Association.

For the full amicus brief:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/gilmo...ore_amicus.pdf

Contact:

Marcia Hofmann
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
marcia@eff.org

http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_11.php#005000





My Mother is a Software Pirate
Joe Wilcox

Yesterday, my mom called frantic, because she could no longer connect to the Internet. While we worked through the problem, she asked, "What does it mean that Windows isn't genuine? Do I have spyware, or a virus?"

Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage antipiracy mechanism had branded my mom's computer as running counterfeit software. I set up that computer for her three years ago, and I'm confident that it left here with a legally licensed copy of Windows XP Home.
I can't be certain whether the WGA tool wrongly branded her software as counterfeit or a friend reinstalled another copy of Windows while trying to help her solve a problem. I'll have to get more information from mom to determine which is the more likely scenario. She has never indicated that anyone reinstalled Windows, but the scenario is as reasonable as the WGA tool generating a false positive.

Analysts would classify my 65 year-old mother as a mature (no pun intended) Internet user. She has been online since 1998, when I sent her a first computer. No question, mom comfortably gets around the Web, but her online experience is largely limited to AOL--and more recently Verizon--and she couldn't troubleshoot even small computing problems without assistance. Verizon couldn't solve her Internet connection over the phone, so now the burden is on me.

I may buy her a replacement laptop and ask that she ship back the old one. If experienced Verizon technicians couldn't solve the Internet connection problem over the phone, I'm unlikely to do better. I'm partly motivated for the forensic analysis, because I want to know if her Internet connection problems are related to WGA. Branded computers receive limited Windows updates.

Mom's situation foreshadows what some businesses may experience with Windows Vista deployments. Microsoft's "Genuine" technology--Software Protection Platform--will be part of Windows Vista. Many IT organizations will have to change best practices to accommodate SPP. Microsoft will make changes to volume licensing keys and periodically reverify--or in Microsoft parlance, "validate"--that software on corporate computers is legitimate. Already, analysts warn that SPP will slow Windows Vista deployment among enterprises.

Businesses also may find that some troubleshooting mechanisms could create invalidations like mom's. There are two rules of dead-end Windows troubleshooting: If all else fails, reboot. If rebooting fails, reinstall Windows. Some IT re-installation or re-imaging shortcuts could lead to licensing invalidations. But affected end users will be in good company. My mom.
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/conte...129TX1K0000535
















Until next week,

- js.



















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