[JackSpratts]

The Blogs of War

On the 21st-century battlefield, the campfire glow comes from a laptop. It's a real-time window on life behind the lines - and suddenly the Pentagon is on the defensive.
John Hockenberry

The snapshots of Iraqi prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib were taken by soldiers and shared in the digital military netherworld of Iraq. Their release to the world in May last year detonated a media explosion that rocked a presidential campaign, cratered America's moral high ground, and demonstrated how even a superpower could be blitzkrieged by some homemade downloadable porn. In the middle of it all, a lone reservist sergeant stationed on the Iraqi border posed a simple question:

I cannot help but wonder upon reflection of the circumstances, how much longer we will be able to carry with us our digital cameras, or take photographs and document the experiences we have had.

The writer was 24-year-old Chris Missick, a soldier with the Army's 319th Signal Battalion and author of the blog A Line in the Sand. While balloon-faced cable pundits shrieked about the scandal, Missick was posting late at night in his Army-issue "blacks," with a mug of coffee and a small French press beside him, his laptop blasting Elliot Smith's "Cupid's Trick" into his headphones. He quickly seized on perhaps the most profound and crucial implication of Abu Ghraib:

Never before has a war been so immediately documented, never before have sentiments from the front scurried their way to the home front with such ease and precision. Here I sit, in the desert, staring daily at the electric fence, the deep trenches and the concertina wire that separates the border of Iraq and Kuwait, and write home and upload my daily reflections and opinions on the war and my circumstances here, as well as some of the pictures I have taken along the way. It is amazing, and empowering, and yet the question remains, should I as a lower enlisted soldier have such power to express my opinion and broadcast to the world a singular soldier's point of view? To those outside the uniform who have never lived the military life, the question may seem absurd, and yet, as an example of what exists even in the small following of readers I have here, the implications of thought expressed by soldiers daily could be explosive.

His sober assessments of the potential of free speech in a war zone began attracting a wider following, eventually logging somewhere north of 100,000 pageviews. No blogging record, but rivaling the wonkish audience for the Pentagon's daily briefing on C-Span or DOD press releases.

Missick is just one voice - and a very pro-Pentagon one at that - in an oddball online Greek chorus narrating the conflict in Iraq. It includes a core group of about 100 regulars and hundreds more loosely organized activists, angry contrarians, jolly testosterone fuckups, self-appointed pundits, and would-be poets who call themselves milbloggers, as in military bloggers. Whether posting from inside Iraq on active duty, from noncombat bases around the world, or even from their neighborhoods back home after being discharged - where they can still follow events closely and deliver their often blunt opinions - milbloggers offer an unprecedented real-time real-life window on war and the people who wage it. Their collective voice competes with and occasionally undermines the DOD's elaborate message machine and the much- loathed mainstream media, usually dismissed as MSM.

Milbloggers constitute a rich subculture with a refreshing candor about the war, expressing views ranging from far right to far left. They also offer helpful tips about tearing down an M16, recipes for beef stew (hint: lots of red wine), reviews of the latest episode of 24, extremely technical discussions of Humvee armor configurations, and exceptionally raw accounts of field hospital chaos, gore, and heroism.

For now, the Pentagon officially tolerates this free-form online journalism and in-house peanut gallery, even as the brass takes cautious steps to control it. A new policy instituted this spring requires all military bloggers inside Iraq to register with their units. It directs commanders to conduct quarterly reviews to make sure bloggers aren't giving out casualty information or violating operational security or privacy rules. Commanding officers shut down a blog that reported on the medical response to a suicide bombing late last year in Mosul. The Army has also created the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell to monitor compliance. And Wired has learned that a Pentagon review is under way to better understand the overall implications of blogging and other Internet communications in combat zones.

"It's a new world out there," says Christopher Conway, a lieutenant colonel and DOD spokesperson. "Before, you would have to shake down your soldiers for matches that might light up and betray a position. Today, every soldier has a cell phone, beeper, game device, or laptop, any one of which could pop off without warning. Blogging is just one piece of the puzzle."

Strong opinions throughout the military ranks in and out of wartime are nothing new. But online technology in the combat zone has suddenly given those opinions a mass audience and an instantaneous forum for the first time in the history of warfare. On the 21st-century battlefield, the campfire glow comes from a laptop computer, and it's visible around the world.

"In World War II, letters basically didn't arrive for months," says Michael Bautista, an Idaho National Guard corporal based in Kirkuk whose grandfather served in World War II and who blogs as Ma Deuce Gunner (named for the trusty M2 machine gun he calls Mama). "What I'm doing and what my fellow bloggers are doing is groundbreaking."

If you're stuck in southern Baghdad in the dusty gray fortress called Camp Falcon and find yourself in need of 50-caliber machine-gun ammo, chopper fuel, toilet paper, or M&M's, you call Danjel Bout, a 32-year-old captain and logistics officer from the California National Guard who blogs as Thunder 6. He's been stationed here with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division for most of 2005. When he's not chasing down requisitions of supplies or out on patrol hunting insurgents, Bout is posting about the details of Army life in language evocative of literary warbloggers of yore like Thucydides, Homer, Thomas Paine, and John Donne.

Sleep, blessed, blissful, wonderful sleep. Mother's milk. A full harvest in a time of famine. The storm that breaks the drought. It is the drug of choice here - assiduously avoided because of the never-ending chain of missions, but always craved. If rarity is the measure of a substance's worth, then here in Iraq, sleep carries a price beyond words. There is no more precious moment in my day than the sublime instant where my mind flickers between consciousness and the dreamworld. In that sliver of time the day seems to shimmer and melt like one of Dalí's paintings - leaving only honey sweet dreams of my other life far from Arabia.

Bout's blog, 365 and a Wakeup, is unlikely to put you to sleep. It's one of the most genuine accounts anywhere of what life is like for a soldier in Iraq. The captain can be spotted composing and editing his posts on his laptop from the roof of one of Camp Falcon's dusty buildings in the dark early-morning hours, or in a scarce patch of shade during a rare moment of daylight downtime. His posts are sharply rendered parables and small, often powerful scenes built on details of the violent world around him. "I just kind of bookmark the things I see during the day so I can reflect on them later. There's almost nothing about life here that isn't interesting in some way."

Thunder 6 is the oldest of eight siblings in a devout Catholic family. His dad is a computer technician, his mom a horticulture therapist. This former altar boy and longtime reservist left the touchy-feely psychology PhD program at UC Davis after September 11, grabbed an M16 rifle and a Beretta 9-mm sidearm and went all-infantry. Trained as an Army Ranger, he saw action in Kuwait and Bosnia and claims to have no yearning for his former scholarly life. "I was coasting through college," he says, "and the Army spoke to honor and camaraderie and things I really believed in."

While Bout's blog is all about his emotional connection to the Army and very little about the daily bang-bang of Iraq, there are lots of milbloggers who will take you straight to the front lines, posting first-person accounts of the fighting and beating some newspaper reports of the same battle filed by embedded journalists. By the crude light of a small bulb and the backlit screen of his Dell laptop, Neil Prakash, a first lieutenant, posted some of the best descriptions of the fighting in Fallujah and Baquba last fall:

Terrorists in headwraps stood anywhere from 30 to 400 meters in front of my tank. They stopped, squared their shoulders at us just like in an old-fashioned duel, and fired RPGs at our tanks. So far there hadn't been a single civilian in Task Force 2-2 sector. We had been free to light up the insurgents as we saw them. And because of that freedom, we were able to use the main gun with less restriction.

Prakash was awarded the Silver Star this year for saving his entire tank task force during an assault on insurgents in Iraq's harrowing Sunni Triangle. He goes by the handle Red 6 and is author of Armor Geddon. For him, the poetry of warfare is in the sounds of exploding weapons and the chaos of battle.

"It's mind-blowing what this stuff can do," Prakash tells me by phone from Germany, where his unit moved after rotating out of Iraq earlier this year. One of his favorite sounds is that of an F16 fighter on a strafing run. "It's like a cat in a blender ripping the sky open - if the sky was made out of a phone book." He is from India, the land of Gandhi, but he loves to talk about blowing things up. "It's just sick how badass a tank looks when it's killing."

Prakash is the son of two upstate New York dentists and has a degree in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins. He's a naturalized American citizen, born near Bangalore, and he describes growing up in the US and his decision to join the military as something like Bend It Like Beckham meets The Terminator. He says he admired the Army's discipline and loved the idea of driving a tank. He knew that if he didn't join the Army, he might end up in medical school or some windowless office in a high tech company. With a bit of bluster, Prakash claims that for him, the latter would be more of a nightmare scenario than ending up in the line of fire of insurgents. "It was a choice between commanding the best bunch of guys in the world and being in a cubicle at Dell Computer in Bangalore right now helping people from Bum-fuck USA format their hard drives."

It's taken some adjustment, but Prakash says his parents basically support his Army career, although his father can't conceal his anxiety about having a son in Iraq. Prakash says he blogs to assure the folks back home that he's safe, to let his friends all over the world know what's going on, and to juice up the morale in his unit. "The guys get really excited when I mention them."

By the time Prakash left Iraq early this year, the readers of Armor Geddon extended far beyond family and friends. He still posts from his base in Germany and is slowly trying to complete a blog memoir of his and his fellow soldiers' experiences in the battle for Fallujah.

The most widely read milbloggers engage in the 21st-century contact sport called punditry, and like their civilian counterparts, follow few rules of engagement. They mobilize sympathizers to ship body armor to reserve units in combat, raise funds for families of wounded soldiers, deliver shoes to barefoot Afghani kids, and even take aim at media big shots. It was milblogger pundits who helped bring down Eason Jordan, a senior executive at CNN who resigned earlier this year over remarks he made that US troops were targeting reporters in Iraq.

One important milblogger who weighed in on the Jordan affair is a secretive 20-year-career Army GI who goes by the handle Greyhawk. His blog, the Mudville Gazette, investigated the incident and concluded that Iraq-based reporters disputed Jordan's claim. He's unhappy that a more thorough news investigation wasn't conducted. Other bloggers call Greyhawk "the father of us all" and credit him with coining the term milblogger shortly after he started Mudville in March 2003. In an email interview - Greyhawk wouldn't agree to "voice-com" or a "face-to face" - he writes proudly of his lifetime pageviews, which recently exceeded 1.7 million (700,000 of those have come in 2005): "Mudville is far and away the largest, oldest, widest-read active-duty MilBlog in the World. It's all in how you make the words line up and dance."

Then there's Blackfive: "I'm just a guy with a blog and I know how to use it," says this modest former Army intelligence officer and paratrooper who gives his real name only as Matt. He prefers the nom de guerre of his popular site. His peers voted Blackfive the best military blog in the 2004 Weblog Awards, beating out such contenders as Froggy Ruminations, The Mudville Gazette, 2Slick, and My War. Blackfive is a popular forum for analysis of the war and strident, argumentative warnings about media bias. It's nearly as cluttered with ads as the Drudge Report, and the sales pitches mostly hawk "liberal-baiting merchandise." There are pictures of attractive women holding high-powered weapons, dozens of links to conservative books and films, and even the occasional big spender like Amazon.com. Blackfive also sells his own T-shirts to benefit military charities.

He says that milblogging is the result of an explosion of communications technology throughout the military and an increase in brainpower among the lower ranks. "The educational level of sergeants and below is out of control." Blackfive himself has degrees in archaeology and computer science and avidly follows the postings of fellow bloggers. He describes Neil Prakash as "borderline Einstein" and Danjel Bout as "a real rock star." In his last deployment, Blackfive's unit had two such brainiacs, a sergeant with an MBA and another with a master's in economics from the University of Chicago.

Blackfive is retired now, honorably discharged and working as an IT executive for a big civilian company. He blogs from Chicago and confidently claims he can mobilize thousands of people and their wallets, all from a wireless hot spot at his local Starbucks. He stays in the shadows because he believes that his company would not approve of his blog or of his unabashed support for the US war.

The site has become a destination for thousands of information junkies and influential opinion makers. According to TruthLaidBear, which tracks blog traffic for advertisers, Blackfive is regularly in the top 100 blogs and averages 5,000 unique visits a day. During the height of the war, traffic to Blackfive spiked when some high- profile conservatives linked to the site.

"My brother followed a link from National Review to me, and somebody, I think it was Jonah Goldberg" - a somebody who is only the editor of National Review - "told him that four or five of the biggest think tanks read my blog every day."

Goldberg confirms that at times he turns to military blogs to supplement and sometimes contradict information coming out of traditional media sources. "Blackfive was good, and in the blog world if you offer something unique, you make eyeballs sticky."

Since World War I, the military has opened the letters soldiers sent back home from the battlefield and sometimes censored the dispatches of war correspondents. Now mail leaves the battlefield already open to the world. Anyone can publicly post a dispatch, and if the Pentagon reads these accounts at all, it's at the same time as the rest of us. The new policy requiring milbloggers to register their sites does not apply to soldiers outside Iraq, but nearly all of the bloggers contacted for this article say that the current system of few restrictions can't possibly last. Blackfive and Greyhawk wonder what the landscape will look like after the Pentagon finishes its review of global digital security. So far, the DOD is giving no hints.

Michael Cohen, a major and doctor with the 67th Combat Support Hospital based in Mosul, touched a nerve at the Pentagon late last year with his blog, 67cshdocs. Before he began posting, Cohen turned himself into a local private broadband provider in order to set up his own network outside the one provided to the field hospital. "Some of the docs suggested that life would be really good if we could get Internet into our nice trailers."

Cohen bought his network setup online and had it shipped directly to him in Mosul. For the oversize satellite dish, he had to get creative. He ordered it from Bentley Walker, a satellite broadband service provider, and they sent it to his wife's house in Germany. On a medical escort flight to Germany for a wounded soldier, Cohen persuaded the Air Force to let him hand-carry the dish onto a transport for the return trip. After about six weeks of agonized troubleshooting on a hot rooftop, the network was up and running. "We had pretty decent bandwidth," he says, "2 meg downlink and 1 meg up. It was better than the hospital."

Cohen says the system supported webcams linking people back home, its own instant messaging system, live gaming, and, he theorizes, a robust trade in porn. "If you were to make the series M*A*S*H about today's Army, Radar would be an IT guy and he'd be more popular than Hawkeye."

Then Cohen started to blog on his homegrown network. Originally it was an attempt to stay in touch with family and friends, but when a suicide bomber killed 22 people last December in a mess tent, Cohen began detailing how doctors dealt with the carnage. His moving account drew attention from worldwide press as well as parents desperate to know the fate of their loved ones:

The lab was running tests and doing a blood drive to collect more blood. The pharmacy was preparing intravenous medications and drips like crazy. Radiology was shooting plain films and CT scans like nobody's business. We were washing out wounds, removing shrapnel, and casting fractures. We put in a bunch of chest tubes. Because of all the patients on suction machines and mechanical ventilators, the noise in the ICU was so loud everyone was screaming at each other just to communicate.

Here are some of our statistics. They are really quite amazing: 91 total patients arrived.

18 were dead on arrival.

4 patients died of wounds shortly after arrival - all of these patients had non-survivable wounds.

Of the 69 remaining patients, 20 were transferred to military hospitals in other locations in Iraq.

This left 49 patients for us to treat and disposition.

Cohen posted mesmerizing details about the medical hardware and surgical procedures used to save lives on that bloody day. And then, without warning, it was over.

"My doctor boss came to me and said, hey, we need to talk. There are some people in the chain of command who believe there are things in your blog that violate Army regulations." Cohen was shocked. He hadn't used names or talked about military operations. But his impression was that the information he provided about medical capability in the field worried senior officers at Central Command. At first the Army asked Cohen to shut down his entire satellite network, which at its peak was serving 42 families, but ultimately decided against it.

"I think they didn't want a hornet's nest," Cohen says. Instead, Cohen stopped blogging.

Back in Germany now, where he says he spends more time delivering the latest R&R babies than treating battlefield casualties, Cohen says that he was tempted to challenge the shutdown, but since he was close to going home anyway, he went along with the decision. The Pentagon will not comment specifically on Cohen's situation except to reiterate its policy that blogs should not reveal any casualty information that could upset next of kin or any details that might jeopardize operational security.

Army reservist Jason Hartley's popular and notoriously irreverent blog, Just Another Soldier, also provoked the higher-ups; last summer, his commanding officer ordered him to shut it down. Hartley wrote with a fuck-you swagger that may partly explain why he's not blogging anymore:

Being a soldier is to live in a world of shit. From the pogues who cook my food and do my laundry to the Apache pilots and the Green Berets who do all the Hollywood stuff, our lives are in a constant state of suck.

Hartley got a lot of mileage out of a post about a soldier who was assembling a rifle blindfolded. Another soldier in his unit, as a joke, handed the assembler a certain piece of his anatomy instead of the tool he asked for.

"I told the story and asked the question, Who is more gay, the guy who touches a dick, or someone who allows a soldier to touch his dick?" This pressing infantry-level controversy hit a chord with über-blogger and noted pundit-of-all-things-queer Andrew Sullivan. "Sullivan was kind and wrote that he liked my site," Hartley recalls.

The Pentagon won't say why, but it ordered Hartley to shut down his blog. He did for a while. Then he resumed blogging a few months later, without asking permission, and was busted for defying a direct order and demoted from sergeant to specialist. He chose not to file an appeal and has returned to civilian life, though he's still in the reserves. His memoir about his time in Iraq will be published next month by HarperCollins.

If you read A Line in the Sand, it's hard to imagine Chris Missick offending Pentagon brass. He is careful not to criticize his superiors and will tell you he has aspirations to run for Congress. While waiting for an early-morning plane to take him back home to southern California, Missick confesses that his biggest blog-related scandal is a romantic one. His stateside girlfriend when he left for Iraq was displaced by another woman, someone Missick says fell in love with him by reading his blog. "When I get home I kinda need to sort that out." (He kinda did and now has yet another girlfriend. Let's hope she likes Elliot Smith music.)

Prakash remains in Germany, awaiting orders to jump back into his beloved tank, which he calls Ol' Blinky. He says he has no plans to resume his study of neuroscience, although it wasn't completely useless in Iraq. "Neuroscience actually came in handy when I had to explain to my guys exactly why doing ecstasy in a tank when it's 140 degrees out on a road that's blowing up every day is a really bad idea."

Danjel Bout, aka Thunder 6, is looking to get home safely, keeping his head down on the streets of southern Baghdad and in his blog. He says the real value of milblogging may be that it brings to the US the reality of what is becoming a long war. "I don't purposely leave out the moments when our bodies hit the adrenal dump switch, I just don't focus exclusively on them." More typical are his vignettes of Iraqi civilians interacting with US soldiers, or the sad tale of the death of a guardsman who had the chance to go home and instead requested another tour of duty, only to be killed by an improvised explosive device.

"Americans are raised on a steady diet of action films and sound bites that slip from one supercharged scene to another," he says, "leaving out all the confusing decisions and subtle details where most people actually spend their lives. While that makes for a great story, it doesn't reveal anything of lasting value. For people to really understand our day-to-day experience here, they need more than the highlights reel. They need to see the world through our eyes for a few minutes."

Which suggests, at the very least, that this UC Davis psych-major dropout turned milblogger was perhaps paying more attention in class than he lets on.

John Hockenberry (hockoo@earthlink.net) is a Peabody Award-winning broadcast journalist who spent the last nine years at NBC News. He wrote about assistive technology in issue 9.08.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/milblogs.html





$150 Million Teragrid Award Heralds New Era for Scientific Computing

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a five-year, $150 million award to operate and enhance the Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF)--also called "TeraGrid." Researchers and educators around the country can now access a range of computing resources that will accelerate advances in science and engineering.

"Many new users from a range of scientific communities will now have access to sophisticated IT applications and computational tools. Over time, these applications will be customized to the needs of the individual or community," said NSF Director, Arden L. Bement, Jr.

TeraGrid--built over the past 4 years--is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. Through high-performance network connections, TeraGrid integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities around the country.

"TeraGrid unites the science and engineering community so that larger, more complex scientific questions can be answered. Solving these larger challenges will, in turn, motivate the development of the next generation of cyberinfrastructure. This is a win-win situation consistent with NSF's mission to keep science and engineering at the frontier," continued Bement.

The scientists and engineers responsible for TeraGrid operations will work closely with researchers whose science requires powerful computing resources. For example, researchers using TeraGrid are exploring functions of decoded genomes, how the brain works, the constitution of the universe, disease diagnosis, and real-time weather forecasting to predict the exact locations of tornado and storm threats. TeraGrid will also help engineers design better aircraft via realistic simulations of new designs.

The new TeraGrid award includes $48 million to provide overall architecture, software integration, operations and coordination of user support. The University of Chicago will lead this effort under the guidance of Charlie Catlett, director of the TeraGrid project and former chair of Global Grid Forum. An additional $100 million will provide for operation, management and user support of TeraGrid resources at eight resource provider sites.

TeraGrid's creators and collaborators are developing a "science gateways" initiative to allow more researchers and educators access to TeraGrid capabilities, tailored to their own communities, through their own desktop computers. Science gateway projects are aimed at supporting access to TeraGrid via web portals, desktop applications or via other grids. An initial set of 10 gateways will address new scientific opportunities in fields from bioinformatics to nanotechnology as well as interoperation between TeraGrid and other grid infrastructures.

"In the past several years, the community has learned that reliable, sustainable cyberinfrastructure requires both close collaboration among organizations making their resources available to scientists and engineers through grid technologies, and a critical mass of people responsible for the overall enterprise," said Catlett. "A focused coordination team ensures that users experience a coherent system and provides a way to organize a large number of resource providers."

Such access will enable researchers to analyze terabytes--trillions of bytes--of data collected by scientific instruments, telescopes, satellites and remote sensors. TeraGrid will allow researchers to manipulate enormous data sets in novel ways to gain new insights into research questions and societal problems.

George Karniadakis, a professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, has long been a leader in applying NSF computing resources to a variety of fluid dynamics problems. Karniadakis now uses computational resources at four different TeraGrid sites simultaneously. "The TeraGrid is a distributed supercomputer, a system with potentially unlimited capability for us. For the first time, we can simulate cardiovascular processes in the entire arterial tree," he said.

Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at the University of Southern California, leads an effort to combine computational models from several disciplines to shed new light on the consequences of earthquakes. "TeraGrid is providing us with the computational resources to deploy an entirely new technology for seismic hazard analysis," Jordan said.

"We fully expect TeraGrid to catalyze the next generation of scientific discoveries," said Deborah Crawford, acting director of NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure. "Simply put, breakthrough science and engineering depends on a first-class cyberinfrastructure."

"TeraGrid is helping build a national infrastructure for computational research," according to Guy Almes, NSF program manager who oversees the project. "TeraGrid enables scientists and engineers to both be more productive in their research and education as well as enjoy doing this work with cutting-edge tools while working closely with peers around the world."

For more information about TeraGrid see: http://www.teragrid.org
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/513862/?sc=swtn





Morpheus Introduces Peer Response Distribution Platform for Authorized Content

Over one million legitimate video, music, game, and software titles to become available.
Tudor Raiciu

StreamCast Networks Inc., makers of the popular Morpheus P2P file-sharing software, today announced Peer Response, a platform designed to facilitate compensation for participating content creators and copyright holders.

Peer Response is a flexible distribution platform that provides multiple methods of compensation for authorized digital media files that are returned within a peer-to-peer user's search results. For the first time, content owners can get paid through sale or sponsorship of a single download in an open and decentralized P2P environment, or simply gain exposure by allowing consumers to discover and download their content for free.

"By connecting content creators with millions of interested users at the most powerful moments of the purchase cycle -- when consumers are declaring exactly what they want, Peer Response leverages existing file-searching behavior to convert downloaders into customers," stated StreamCast CEO, Michael Weiss.

Morpheus' Peer Response platform will launch with a full slate of legitimate music, game, and video downloadable titles to try and buy that include: Halo 2, From Russia with Love, Monopoly, Tha Outlawz "Celebrate," Ms. Cherry "It's Whatever," and thousands more. Over one million video, music, game, and software titles will be added in the coming months.

An integrated Morpheus-branded eWallet, which is a payment transaction solution for digital media developed exclusively for Morpheus by Media Global Infrastructure LLC, whose payment processing subsidiary, NewGenPay is a spin off of IBM, will provide seamless transactions for content purchases. Similarly, self- publishers will be provided with automated tools to distribute their content. Additional partners initially include industry leaders Softwrap, Intent Media Works, TryMedia, Weed and Gametrailers.com.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Morph...ent-6169.shtml





How a Puppet Master Brings Life to the Comically Dead
Charles Solomon

CASUAL viewers may find little to connect the egotistical lion and hip-hop zebra of the DreamWorks computer-animated "Madagascar" with the macabre stop-motion puppets of "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride," to be released next month by Warner Brothers. But animation aficionados will see in both the fine hand of Carlos Grangel, a Spanish artist whose designs are coming to define the cutting edge of big-studio animation.

Virtually unknown to the public, Mr. Grangel, 41, is a highly respected artist among animation professionals. While still a teenager, he worked on comic strips for Disney, and got a job at Steven Spielberg's Amblimation studio in London in 1989, working on "We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story" (1993) and "Balto" (1995). When Amblimation closed, Mr. Grangel (pronounced grahn-JELL) came to the newly established DreamWorks SKG as a designer for its animated features, beginning with "The Prince of Egypt" (1998).

"I've never met a designer who thought more like an animator than Carlos," said Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation. "He's always thinking not just 'how will this look,' but 'how will it move.' That may seem like the obvious aim of designing for animation, but very few people have that gift."

Mr. Grangel typically divides his time between the Glendale, Calif., campus of DreamWorks and the small studio he and his brother, Jordi, run in Barcelona. But he has devoted much of the last two and a half years to "Corpse Bride," Mr. Burton's mock-Victorian tale of a romantic misunderstanding between a fishmonger's son and the cadaver he accidentally jilts.

Mr. Burton first saw Mr. Grangel's work at the model-making studio Mackinnon & Saunders Ltd. in Manchester, England. He was working on his 1996 film "Mars Attacks!" and noticed drawings Mr. Grangel had done for the puppets in Steffen Schäffler's stop-motion short "The Periwig-Maker," which would be nominated for an Oscar in 2001.

"When I saw Carlos's drawings, they reminded me a little of the way I draw," Mr. Burton said in a telephone interview from London. "They showed that you could make appealing human characters."

"I felt quite connected with Carlos before I met him," Mr. Burton said.

Speaking by telephone from Spain, Mr. Grangel recalled a first meeting with Mr. Burton in London in 2003, at which he was handed a script for "Corpse Bride" and "a bunch of drawings that were loose, but lovely," he said.

" 'Here are my sketches,' " Mr. Grangel remembered Mr. Burton saying. " 'I want you to push them and explore every character.' 'Nightmare Before Christmas' is one of my favorite films; now Tim Burton was handing me sketches, and saying 'See what you can do!' I wanted to kill myself because I know it just doesn't get any better."

Mr. Grangel soon discovered that Mr. Burton's approach to design was radically different from the DreamWorks process. "At DreamWorks, each artist may present 20 or 25 versions of a character," he said. "We didn't design one lion for 'Madagascar'; we made hundreds of lions. We got used to that way of doing things, then one day Tim said, 'Why are you making so many drawings - which one do you like?' "

Once the designs were approved by Mr. Burton and his co-director, Mike Johnson, Mr. Grangel worked with crews at Mackinnon & Saunders, who built the puppets. The main characters are about 18 inches tall - half again the size of a Barbie doll. Stop-motion puppets are more than interesting-looking sculptures: they need armatures, jointed steel skeletons that enable the animators to adjust their positions in minute increments, and the "Corpse Bride" puppets had devices to adjust their expressions.

"The ones for 'Corpse Bride' represent a new generation of puppet that is so expressive," Mr. Grangel said, "they may change people's thinking about the possibilities of stop-motion animation." When asked why he chose stop motion over the currently popular computer animation, Mr. Burton replied: "The beauty of stop motion - and why I love the medium - is that it feels handmade. It's like 'Pinocchio' or 'Frankenstein'; it's breathing life into an inanimate object, and the joy for me is to see the artist's hand on the screen."

The designs for the puppets combine Mr. Burton's gothic personal style with elements from other illustrators, including Edward Gorey and Ronald Searle. There's a skeleton band that recalls the 19th-century Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada's Day of the Dead engravings, led by what could be the ghost of Bob Fosse: a singing, dancing skeleton in a bowler hat, voiced by the composer Danny Elfman.

The living characters look as bizarre as the specters. Victor, the reluctant groom, has the long, skinny legs of Jack Skellington in "Nightmare Before Christmas." But his expressive eyes and prominent chin resemble those of Johnny Depp, who supplies his voice. The character's physical appearance blends with the vocal performance to create a gentle, befuddled, yet curiously endearing young man. "The eyebrows and eyes, and the very shy mouth make the character sympathetic," Mr. Grangel said. "You care about him because he looks vulnerable."

Reflecting on his work for "Corpse Bride," Mr. Grangel said: "We created 82 characters, although some of them didn't make it to the final film because of story changes. They're all constructed of simple shapes: one thing I've learned over the years is that simple works best. A character's shape has to be recognizable, even when he's seen from far away."

Mr. Grangel said he and his fellow artists resisted the temptation to devote less care to the design of the minor characters. "We wanted every character to incorporate shapes that were interesting and would attract the eyes of the audience," he said. "I know there is an artist inside every member of the audience: if the designs are good, people will respond to them."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/movies/14solo.html





Lions Gate Is Expected to Support Blu-ray Discs
Ken Belson

Lions Gate Home Entertainment is expected to announce today that it plans to produce next-generation digital video discs using Blu-ray technology developed by Sony and others. The decision could give the supporters of the Blu-ray format an edge in its continuing battle against backers of HD-DVD technology, who are supporting a competing format for new high-definition discs.

Lions Gate, which controls about 4 percent of the DVD market, is the latest studio to declare its allegiance in the format contest. The Blu-ray technology is being developed by Sony, Panasonic and others, while the HD-DVD standard is backed by Toshiba, NEC and Sanyo.

Sony's movie studio, as well as Disney and Fox, have also said they will produce Blu-ray DVD's, which will include high-definition video, enhanced audio and stronger copyright protections. Lions Gate, Sony, Disney and Fox sell about 45 percent of the DVD's in the United States.

MGM, which was sold to an investment group led by Sony, controls another 4 percent of the DVD market. Many industry analysts say MGM's movies are likely to be produced in the Blu-ray format as well.

Paramount, a division of Viacom, and Warner Home Video and Universal Studios Home Video plan to release more than 80 titles in the HD-DVD format starting as early as the fourth quarter this year. Together, the companies control 45 percent of the market for the current generation of discs.

Lions Gate plans to release 10 movies in the Blu-ray format next spring.

Hollywood's largest studios have grown reliant on the billions of dollars that DVD sales produce and they have spent years weighing the benefits of the two formats.

HD-DVD, which is essentially an upgrade of existing disc technology, is considered cheaper to produce. Blu-ray supporters say that that Blu-ray discs store more data than HD-DVD discs, but they are more expensive to produce because of the newer technology.

Since studios sell tens of millions of DVDs every year, even a few pennies difference in the price of producing a disc can chew into profits. Cheaper production costs also allow the studios to sell discs at lower prices to consumers.

Though Lions Gate said that Blu-ray discs were likely to be expensive initially, it was convinced that the production cost would fall in the coming years.

"All along, our biggest concern was whether these discs could be mass-produced," said Steve Beeks, the president of Lions Gate Entertainment, which sells about 70 million discs a year. "Even though the first Blu-ray discs released will most likely carry a premium price, within three to four years the market is going to change."

Mr. Beeks said that the Lions Gate's agreement was not exclusive and his company could produce discs in the HD-DVD format if needed. However, he said the sooner the industry and consumers settled on a single format, the better.

Blu-ray is likely to become the dominant standard faster, Mr. Beeks said, partly because Sony plans to include the technology in its new PlayStation 3 game consoles that are expected to be in stores next spring. The game machines thus would double as Blu-ray disc players and could potentially increase Blu-ray disc sales.

Like the other studios, Lions Gate has had to balance the benefits of the competing formats against how quickly they could be marketed to consumers. Some industry executives say that growth in the sales of the current generation of DVD's is slowing and that introducing high-definition discs is needed to increase overall sales.

In recent weeks, stocks have declined at several studios, including Pixar Animation Studios, after they reported weaker-than-expected DVD sales of their movies.

Industry analysts expect DVD sales to grow in the high single digits this year, down from more than 20 percent in recent years.

However, some studio executives including Mr. Beeks argue that sales of current DVD's are still healthy enough that there is less need to rush new discs to market simply to stimulate revenue. Rather, they say, it is more important to develop discs that are significantly better technologically to entice consumers to upgrade their machines and disc collections.

Still, the cost of upgrading will be out of reach for average consumers for several years. Most high-definition TV's cost several thousand dollars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/bu...dia/17dvd.html





Universal Music Backs Sony's Blu-Ray

Universal Music Group, one of the world's largest music companies, on Tuesday said it planned to back Sony Corp.'s <6758.T> next generation DVDs, firing another salvo in the next generation media format wars.

Blu-ray, developed by Sony, is challenging rival HD DVD to be the main technology used in new DVDs that delivers sharper pictures and more features. HD DVD was developed by Toshiba.

The backing by Universal Music, whose talent roster includes Elton John, Mariah Carey and U2, is of little surprise. The company is listed as a member of the Blu-ray Disc Association on its Web site.

The battle between Sony and Toshiba draws comparisons to the videotape format wars of the 1970s and 1980s between Sony's Betamax and JVC and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.'s <6752.T> VHS, which curtailed consumer adoption.

Blu-ray is expected to be introduced by Sony in its next video game console, the PlayStation 3 by spring 2006. Devices that run Toshiba's HD DVD are expected to be in stores by this fall.

Universal Pictures, a division of General Electric's <GE.N> NBC Universal and unrelated to the music group, is backing HD DVD.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...IVERSAL-DC.XML





Blu-Ray Ups Ante on Data Storage
Bruce Gain

Universal Music Group is the latest company to get behind the Blu-ray optical disc, announcing its support for Sony's next-generation media format this week. Blu-ray discs will look like DVDs, but they'll hold substantially more data. Here's a rundown on key features of this emerging technology, and how it compares with the competing HD-DVD format.

How do Blu-ray discs differ from DVDs?

Storage capacity is the key difference between a Blu-ray optical disc and a DVD. Standard DVD capacities peak at around 4.7 GB for DVD-Rs. With up to 50 GB of available storage space, the capacity of commercially available Blu-ray discs is comparable to that of many external PC hard drives used for backing up data. While not yet commercially available, researchers say they have developed prototypes of double-layer Blu-ray discs in the lab that can hold up to 100 GB.

Will Blu-ray offer better video quality?

The Blu-ray optical disc format was, in part, developed to offer the requisite data-storage capacity needed to store high-definition video and television recordings in a DVD-like format. High-definition video files are, of course, significantly larger than standard video files, so don't expect to see more than two high-definition films on a double-layer Blu-ray disc. However, you can take advantage of a Blu-ray disc's capacity to store many lower-resolution television broadcast files. Instead of having to use many DVDs to hold a complete season of Law & Order or The Sopranos, for example, you may instead only need a single disc. According to the Blu-ray Disc Association's specifications, a single-layer Blu-ray disc can hold two hours of an HDTV recording or more than 13 hours of standard TV broadcasts.

What is blue laser ray technology?

A blue laser -- the technology upon which Blu-ray is based -- can read and write to significantly smaller pits on a disc in which data is more densely packed than on traditional red laser DVDs and CDs. The blue ray laser's wavelength is 450 nanometers (1 meter contains 1 billion nanometers) compared to the 659-nanometer wavelength of red lasers used for DVDs and CDs -- the shorter wavelength enables the blue laser to read and write to the smaller pits.

Will vendors offer a single recordable Blu-ray standard?

The recordable DVD-standard war confused many consumers, which probably impeded the adoption of recordable DVD media and players. Blu-ray proponents say only a single recordable Blu-ray standard will be available, so they hope Blu-ray recording will be less confusing than the alphabet soup of different recordable DVD formats (DVD±R, DVD±RW and DVD-RAM).

What about HD-DVD?

HD-DVD represents a competing storage standard. Like Blu-ray, HD-DVD relies on blue laser technology. However, a read-only, commercially available, double-sided HD-DVD disc can hold only about 30 GB of data, and a recordable HD-DVD, which is limited to only one side, has a capacity of 15 GB. The potential bad news is that a standards war may be brewing between industry proponents of the Blu-ray and HD-DVD standards. The success of either standard will, of course, have a lot to do with the films and content that become available. So far, Hollywood studios that support Blu-ray include 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures and Walt Disney Pictures. In the HD-DVD camp, you will find Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros. The studios may back both standards or only one will eventually prevail.

When can I expect to buy Blu-ray recordable players and discs?

Sony unveiled its BDZ-S77 recorder and Panasonic its DMR-E700BD for Japanese consumers in 2003 and 2004, respectively. However, it will probably be next year before recordable Blu-ray players for TVs and drives for PCs become widely available in the United States. Sony said its PlayStation 3 would play Blu-ray discs. Hewlett-Packard, Pioneer and Philips are among the manufacturers that could produce Blu-ray PC drives by the end of the year. Panasonic said it began production of Blu-ray discs in May.

Will a Blu-ray player or PC drive be able to read DVDs and CDs?

The Blu-ray standard is designed to be compatible with existing DVDs and CDs. So far, according to the Blu-ray Disc Association, LG, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung and Sony have developed Blu-ray players that will work with DVDs and CDs.

How expensive will Blu-ray devices be?

Prepare to pay a lot for Blu-ray recorders and discs. In the beginning, Blu-ray TV recorders will likely retail for more than $1,500 and PC drives will probably be priced at more than $500. Blu-ray discs could cost more than $20 apiece. However, Blu-ray players and discs will likely follow the traditional price curve of consumer electronics. Prices should fall rapidly if the technology is widely adopted.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,68539,00.html





Toshiba Ships First Perpendicular Drive
Nate Mook

While Seagate and Hitachi may have garnered all the attention surrounding new perpendicular recording technology, which enables hard drives to store more data by standing bits upright, Toshiba has reached the market first.

The company on Tuesday announced it is shipping a 1.8-inch drive that packs 40GB onto a single disk platter. Such a feat is a breakthrough for small drives, and could mean larger capacity music players. In fact, Toshiba's new drive is available now in the company's Gigabeat F41 MP3 player.

Seagate announced its own perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) drives in June, but in a 2.5-inch form factor for laptops. The Seagate Momentus 5400.3, a massive 160GB notebook drive, is expected to begin shipping later this year.

"PMR opens the door to products we haven't even begun to imagine, by removing the technical barriers inherent to packing more data on an HDD," said Scott Maccabe, vice president of Toshiba's Storage Device Division.

"Providing greater storage capacity on mobile disk drives allows Toshiba to give system OEMs the tools they need for next- generation digital information and entertainment devices."

Hitachi previously announced plans to build 1 terabyte disk drives and 20GB microdrives using PMR, but admitted such capacities were years away. The new technology means an almost two-fold increase in storage space without adding more disk platters.

Toshiba, meanwhile, is going after the smaller device market and says it will double capacity to 80GB in a 1.8-inch drive later this year. That could mean even larger iPods without a jump in cost.

The company also plans to apply PMR technology to 0.85-inch drives, which could lead to 8GB of storage per platter in ultra- small form factor drives.
http://www.betanews.com/article/prin...ive/1124219742





People Prefer To Buy CDs

MORE than two-thirds of music lovers prefer to own original CDs, despite the availability of pirated copies online, a survey shows.

A University of Western Sydney study, one of the first on people's online music habits, involved 100 baby boomers and 100 people aged between 29 and 14, known as Generation Y.

While 38 per cent of respondents admitted to illegally downloading music, most said they bought music through traditional means.

"Sixty-eight per cent of both generations surveyed continue to buy albums through traditional retailers because they prefer the original copy, like being able to look at other CDs while shopping, or like being able to listen to new CDs," researcher Geoffrey Lee says.

The study finds members of Generation Y are more likely than baby boomers to illegally download music, with 54 per cent indicating they visit music websites at least once a week to do so.

That compares with just 10 per cent of baby boomers.

Both generations understood that downloading music without paying for it was illegal, Lee said.

However, while baby boomers expressed concern, saying they knew they were stealing, the younger generation was less likely to care.

"The main reasons for downloading included: being able to listen to the song on their PC, being able to burn songs to a CD because it's cheaper than the original CD and being able to sample the song before purchasing," Lee says.

"No one from either group said they had paid to download music."

More people would be recruited to expand the study's findings, which is aimed at helping stop music piracy, Lee says.

Illegal downloading of music in Australia is estimated to reduce sales by 10 per cent.

"Internet piracy is becoming a huge issue for record companies globally, as it eats away at their profits," Lee says.

"It is one of the music industry's greatest hurdles if record companies are to remain viable.

"Traditional legislative and technological barriers have so far been unsuccessful in stopping offenders and it remains a difficult thing for record companies to police.

"We hope the study will shed some much-needed light on the problem, and that the results can be of practical use to the music industry."
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html





Recording Industry Says CD Burning Bigger Problem Than File-Sharing

Music copied onto blank CD's is becoming a bigger threat to the recording industry than online file-sharing.

The chief executive for the Recording Industry Association of America says "burned" CDs account for 29 percent of all recorded music obtained by fans in 2004.

About half of all recordings obtained in 2004 came from authorized CD sales and about four percent from paid music downloads. Nielsen SoundScan says album sales in North America are down about seven percent this year compared with a year ago.

Some industry executives favor releasing more albums in a copy-protected CD format, regardless of backlash from fans. The CDs typically allow users to burn no more than a handful of copies.
http://www.mymotherlode.com/News/art...vml/1123947632





Recording Industry's Slipped Disc
Robert MacMillan

I'm about halfway through transferring the music from my nearly 1,000 vinyl albums ... to compact disc. How's that for old-fashioned?

The setup is basic and sweet: I take the vinyl ("Whipped Cream & Other Delights " by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, for example) and run the sound through the amplifier and out to my CD burner. It's not a computer component; it's an actual piece of hardware that connects to the rest of my stereo system with RCA jacks. I've destroyed two of them so far in my quest to digitize Gustav Mahler and John Lennon not to mention Louis Armstrong & the All-Stars performing the hits of Fats Waller.

I've read many guides on the Internet and the nation's newspapers about how to skip this tedious process by transferring my tracks directly to the computer, but so far, none has proven sufficient to my non-geek needs. Not only that, I suspect that my computer doesn't have enough processing power to handle so much music, so I burn like " Fire in Cairo."

It turns out that I'm not the only music fan going nuts with the CDs. Mitch Bainwol, head of the Recording Industry Association of America, told the Associated Press that CD burning still beats file sharing on the list of top affronts to the major record labels:

"'Burned' CDs accounted for 29 percent of all recorded music obtained by fans in 2004, compared to 16 percent attributed to downloads from online file-sharing networks," the AP wrote. "The data, compiled by the market research firm NPD Group, suggested that about half of all recordings obtained by music fans in 2004 came from authorized CD sales and about 4 percent from paid music downloads. ... 'CD burning is a problem that is really undermining sales,' Bainwol said in a phone interview before addressing about 750 members of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers in San Diego on Friday. '(Copy protection technology) is an answer to the problem that clearly the marketplace is going to see more of,' he added."

I don't think the recording industry is feeling the sting from legions of people like me who want their Werner Mueller albums on a CD transfer. (I can't imagine those Phase 4 beauties are even on CD, let alone iTunes, but I've been wrong before.) While I might be a small part of the problem, the RIAA and record store retailers are feeling the heat from the thriving CD-to-CD burn.

"With all the attention the RIAA has placed on online file-sharing in recent years, the focus on CD burning Friday was welcomed by music retailers like Alayna Hill- Alderman, who said she's seen music CD sales slide in recent years while sales of blank recordable CDs have soared," the AP reported. "'We are feeling the decline in our store sales, especially with regard to R&B and the hip-hop world,' said Hill-Alderman, co-owner of Record Archive, a two-store company operating in Rochester, N.Y. 'It's all due to burning. We've lost tremendous amounts of those sales to flea markets and bodegas.'"

None of this means that file sharing isn't a problem for people trying to make a living in the music business. Instead, it shows that traditional methods of violating copyright law are -- if less futuristic and headline-grabbing -- very alive and very well. And the music industry's response is to work on a way to allow a limited number of times that you can burn a CD before it locks itself up.

Here's the AP on that angle: "The CDs typically allow users to burn no more than a handful of copies. Velvet Revolver's 'Contraband,' released last year, was equipped with such copy-protection technology and grabbed the top sales spot in its debut week. Some saw that as a sign music fans didn't mind CDs with copy restrictions. But other releases since, such as the latest Foo Fighters album, have sometimes spawned fan complaints that the restrictions go too far or create technology conflicts with portable audio devices."

I understand that CDs still account for so much of the music business's revenues, from the retailer in Rochester to the lawyers in Los Angeles, but this kind of action seems a tad on the late side. CDs are tangible, unlike the ethereal digital bytes of the Internet, but the content on those discs will continue to flow illegally unless the recording industry completely locks them up.

That seems unlikely to happen. Instead, the industry should take a cue from the success of iTunes and other legal music outlets: Give us something that we can't get from burning. For many, those are the accoutrements from album art to liner notes to all kinds of gussied-up editions of our favorite albums. To some extent this is happening -- from the Velvet Underground catalog to Marvin Gaye to Stevie Wonder . But I must add one small note: Ratcheting up the CD price is not a way to make that work.

P.S. to the RIAA: My vinyl-to-disc project is on long-term hiatus. Please don't sue me.

Shake That Moneymaker... for a Song

The music business is full of legends about artists who failed to get decent contracts out of the record labels, only to produce smash hits that filled everyone's pockets but their own. The New York Post today reported that a similar episode might have happened to one of the models whose body Apple uses to hawk the iPod: "Her silhouette has sold millions of iPods -- but the girl behind one of the most recognizable ads in the world says she can't even afford one of the pricey gizmos. This is the first time that Mandy Coulton, a 26-year-old dancer from Los Angeles, has been revealed as the body behind the hugely successful ad campaign for Apple's iPod music players. More than 20 million iPods have been sold since it was introduced in 2001. She was paid a flat fee of $1,500 for the shoot -- a tiny fraction of the billions Apple has reaped from the sale of its sleek portable player. But Coulton ... says it still wasn't enough to buy one of the must-have gadgets."

Coulton told the Post that she's "not bitter." I don't see how she could be, or even that she has trouble making the rent -- her husband is a venture capitalist.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...081500415.html





$50 Laptop Sale Sets Off Violent Stampede

People trampled, beaten with folding chair as 'total chaos' takes over
AP

A rush to purchase $50 used laptops turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over. One woman went so far as to wet herself rather than surrender her place in line.

“This is total, total chaos,” said Latoya Jones, 19, who lost one of her flip-flops in the ordeal and later limped around on the sizzling blacktop with one foot bare.

An estimated 5,500 people turned out at the Richmond International Raceway in hopes of getting their hands on one of the 4-year-old Apple iBooks. The Henrico County school system was selling 1,000 of the computers to county residents. New iBooks cost between $999 and $1,299.

Officials opened the gates at 7 a.m., but some already had been waiting since 1:30 a.m. When the gates opened, it became a terrifying mob scene.

People threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing each other. A little girl’s stroller was crushed in the stampede. Witnesses said an elderly man was thrown to the pavement, and someone in a car tried to drive his way through the crowd.

Seventeen people suffered minor injuries, with four requiring hospital treatment, Henrico County Battalion Chief Steve Wood said. There were no arrests and the iBooks sold out by 1 p.m.

"It's rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response for the purchase of a laptop computer — and laptop computers that probably have less-than- desirable attributes," said Paul Proto, director of general services for Henrico County. "But I think that people tend to get caught up in the excitement of the event — it almost has an entertainment value."

Blandine Alexander, 33, said one woman standing in front of her was so desperate to retain her place in line that she urinated on herself.

"I've never been in something like that before, and I never again will," said Alexander, who brought her 14-year-old twin boys to the complex at 4:30 a.m. to wait in line. "No matter what the kids want, I already told them I'm not doing that again."

Jesse Sandler said he was one of the people pushing forward, using a folding chair he had brought with him to beat back people who tried to cut in front of him.

"I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder and I went, 'Bam,'" the 20-year-old said nonchalantly, his eyes glued to the screen of his new iBook, as he tapped away on the keyboard at a testing station.

"They were getting in front of me and I was there a lot earlier than them, so I thought that it was just," he said.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8973616/





Codemasters Joins The Ranks Of Online Game Distributors

Not at a bad price, either
Mike Magee

IF IT'S not Microsoft Games, it’s somebody else in the rush to provide mainstream games over the internet.

Next up today is Codemasters which has partnered with the UK's first premium PC games on demand service Metaboli, who will be providing a raft of Codemasters titles over the interslice including Colin McRae Rally 2005, Second Sight, Toca Race Driver II, World Championship Snnoker and Perimeter.

The movement will spread further still, with plans to launch across key European territories throughout 2005 alongside the initial launch in the UK and France.

Codemasters swells the ranks of Metaboli's ever growing Games on Demand catalogue, which already includes PC games from publishers such as Atari, DreamCatcher, Eidos and UbiSoft.

Metaboli's Games on Demand service allows gamers to subscribe to one of two packages comprising the Ultimate Collection, offering unlimited access to 49 games, including all the latest releases, for £12.95 per month, or the Essential Collection, offering unlimited access to 32 games for only £6.95 per month. New games are currently being added at the rate of four per month, with a total of 70 games planned by the end of 2005.

Metaboli doesn't limit the number and frequency of downloads or how long games are played. Members can download the same game as many times as they like, even on different PCs.

Metaboli hopes that its service and pricing will help to encourage software pirates back to a state of legal consumption by offering advantages over existing Peer to Peer options, including ease of use, high speed downloads, multiplayer compatible games, automatic patching and high end security at a more reasonable price than you will find on the high street.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25447





The Skype's the Limit
Rick Aristotle Munarriz

Last week, News Corp. figured that it would be able to pull another new-economy rabbit out of Rupert Murdoch's hat. Just a month after announcing that it would be acquiring Intermix to land social networking site MySpace.com, it was revealed that Murdoch's company was talking to Skype about a buyout.

With a $3 billion price tag being batted about, it now seems as if Skype's most likely course is to test the market's open waters and go public. It is now in talks with Morgan Stanley to discuss its next move.

What is Skype? Why did Murdoch want in so badly? What will it all mean to you? If you don't know the answer to all three questions, look alive. That's where I'm going next.

What is Skype?

Voice over Internet Protocol -- or VoIP -- has been a busy buzzword lately. Providing telephone service through Web-enabled broadband accounts has proved to be a popular option for thrifty chatterboxes. You may be familiar with Vonage, offering unlimited phone calls to the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico for a mere $24.95 a month. The company has signed up 800,000 users and counting. Traditional dial-up telcos are also getting in on the act, and you can't really blame them. This is their potential obsolescence we're talking about.

Skype is different. It's free. Rather than relying on a network of regional data centers and local rate centers to route your calls to cell phones or landlines, Skype calls are absolutely gratis when they are placed from your Internet connection to another user online. Odds are that you won't have a shortage of people to talk to -- the free software has been downloaded 148 million times. That's not too shabby for a company that wasn't even around two years ago.

If you haven't heard of Skype, it's because the Luxembourg-based company has a more prolific life in Europe and other overseas markets. That will change. The company was founded by the same folks who brought you file-sharing giant KaZaA. Skype isn't going to get into the same legal tangles that its peer-to-peer MP3 swapping site did, but that doesn't mean that it's any less disruptive to an established, yet troubled industry.

Phone companies may see Vonage as a low-priced competitor, but Skype is an all-out threat.

To be fair, Skype has gone old school in one sense. It rolled out a SkypeOut service that charges users who want to call a conventional phone line. Users pay by the minute and the rates are attractive for calls placed to most countries.

Why did Murdoch want in so badly?

When people think Murdoch, they think about old media properties like Fox Network, The New York Post or The Times of London. However, News Corp. has always had a bit of a new technology streak. It's a heavy hitter in global satellite through BSkyB and its minority stake in DirecTV.

However, News Corp. has always felt like an incomplete entertainment conglomerate because it lacked the huge online presence of its media rivals. If folks continue to flock online and it comes at the expense of less time thumbing through the morning paper or watching television, News Corp. needs to matter in cyberspace.

It helped itself in grand fashion with MySpace.com. Social networking is huge as users exchange thoughts and media with folks who have similar interests. It's been hard for dot-com specialists to monetize the gargantuan number of page views that social networking has been generating, but it shouldn't be a problem for a broadcasting company like News Corp. to take advantage of hooking up its base of sponsors with the young audience that advertisers crave.

Skype would have been -- and may still prove to be -- a major coup for News Corp. It's a free software program that is now deriving some revenue through its landline connections. A company with wide advertising arms like News Corp. should be able to make the most of marketing to the Skype audience without turning them off along the way.

What will it all mean to you?
Skype isn't the only game when it comes to Internet telephony for freeloaders. Yahoo! and Microsoft offer free voice chat capabilities through their popular instant messaging programs.

However, as big as those two juggernauts may be, there is something to be said for specializing. You also can't discount Skype's mastery of viral marketing. KaZaA has been downloaded 370 million times, so Skype may just be scratching the surface at less than half that sum.

Obviously, all 148 million instances in which Skype's software was downloaded didn't translate into active users. However, when you consider that Vonage is leading the way with less than a million premium subscribers for its telephone service, Skype's installed reach is already much greater than that.

Skype, for all practical purposes, is what we like to call a Rule Breaker around here. That's the name of our ultimate growth investing newsletter service. You are welcome to check it out with a free trial subscription to learn more about promising disruptive technology stocks with Skype-like potential.

Whether Skype does go public or get acquired along the way, investors have good reason to follow a tantalizing company like this as it transforms into a publicly traded entity.

Murdoch would be blessed to land Skype before the rest of the world came calling (and thanks to Skype, those calls can be free, to boot). I can definitely see cash-rich companies like Google Yahoo!, and Microsoft all making a play for Skype.

Broadband's wide acceptance means that these companies aren't just counting eyeballs. Eardrums are starting to matter, too.

Digital audio? Global popularity? Oh, right. Add Apple Computer -- which also offers voice chat through its iChat software -- to the list of companies that may very well tempt Skype to elope before the bachelor auction takes place.

It's going to be good. Market cynics will argue that the company is overvalued, because it has produced such modest revenue in the past, but you know the score. Investing is all about the monetization potential of the future. If you've got the time, listen in.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz realizes that Skype rhymes with hype, but he thinks the company lives up to its billing. He does not own shares in any of the companies in this story. The Fool has a disclosure policy. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.
http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/...ry05081603.htm





Freenet Releases Pre Alpha Version Of 'Anonymous' P2P
Steve Malone

Despite the recent court victories by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and others against Grokster and the targeting of users who distribute music files, it seems the peer-to-peer (p2p) business is not about to give up without a fight yet.

A group of developers say they are on target to produce a system of anonymous file sharing by the end of the year.

If true, this will severely limit the efforts of the authorities in their attempts to stamp out illegal file sharing by prosecuting offenders. Organisations like the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America's) and MPAA and our own BPI (British Phonographic Institution) rely on ISPs handing over the names of the file sharers.

The Freenet project aims to make p2p file sharing and communication more secure by making the parties involved in the communication totally anonymous. Freenet's stated aim is to allow two or more people who wish to share information, to do so.

The group says it wants to promote free speech throughout the world, particularly in those areas such as

China and the Middle East where Internet communications are regularly intercepted and monitored.

Of course, if successful, the technology will be leapt upon by a new generation of file sharing networks hoping to evade the authorities now that the US Supreme Court has deemed p2p file sharing illegal. While acknowledging that Freenet could be put to illegal use, the group maintains that 'you cannot guarantee freedom of speech and enforce copyright law'.

Freenet developed out of an anonymous publication system created by Ian Clarke while a student at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. The project already has a basic p2p system working although it is not yet searchable in the same way that traditional p2p files sharing networks usually are.

The developers are currently working on making a globally scalable peer-to-peer 'darknet'. Typically, a darknet is a private closed p2p network of no more than ten or so trusted individuals. The Freenet plan is to develop a global darknet of small networks linked together in much the same way that the Internet itself is linked.

The group has now announced it has a pre-alpha version ready to test although it warns that the software is not for the faint hearted as the routing algorithm 'is neither user-friendly nor secure at this point'.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/75899/fr...ymous-p2p.html





Nanny-App

Blocking Shares On The Scatterbrain Network

The following steps will allow you to mark a package as "Unauthorized to be traded on the network." Marking content as unauthorized starts a message propagating throughout the current virtual Scatterbrain network, instructing Scatterbrain clients connected to the network to stop supplying the unauthorized content.

Marking content as unauthorized involves making your IP address available for others to view; your IP address will be displayed when another user attempts to retrieve the marked content. For further information, please see the notices displayed throughout the process of marking content as unauthorized.

If you have evidence that content you find available on a virtual Scatterbrain network is unauthorized to be shared on that network, you may take the following steps:

1. Make sure that you are connected to the network, and that you are connected to at least one other Scatterbrain client.
2. To confirm that you are connected to other clients, click on the "Network" tab; a list of IP addresses should be displayed.
3. Locate the package that contains the unauthorized content using the "Search Network" tab.
2. Once you have located the package you wish to mark as unauthorized, select it by clicking its icon.
3. Click on the sub-tab "Options", located below the text of the "Search Network" tab.
4. If you have selected a valid package, you will see a button entitled, "I have evidence that this content is NOT AUTHORIZED to be traded on this network," in the left-hand options window pane. Click this button.
5. A window will pop up explaining the process and providing important information about marking content as unauthorized. Read the text and follow the instructions presented therein.
6. If you agree to the terms, press the "Mark this content as UNAUTHORIZED" button to proceed.
7. Your Scatterbrain client will send a message that slowly trickles throughout the network, marking the content as unauthorized.


When a large number of users connect to multiple peers, the emergent network organization makes it very difficult to trace which users are trading what data. While this emergent property of individual anonymity can be very useful and provide unique benefit for individuals, groups, and companies, BrainTech, LLC is also aware that the anonymous nature of the network may attract those who wish to misuse their anonymity.

BrainTech, LLC has implemented the following features into its ScatterBrain P2P client in order to encourage legitimate use of its software and discourage unauthorized data exchange, within the framework of an anonymous environment:

1. Before sharing data, users are reminded that shared data becomes available to all users of the network.
2. Before sharing data, users are required to confirm that they are personally authorized to publicly publish the selected content. The selected content will be shared only if the user responds with "Yes". An answer of "No" or indicated uncertainty aborts the sharing process.
3. If any user connected to the network recognizes unauthorized content, they may mark it as unauthorized. Peers connected to the network will see that the content has been unauthorized and their clients will no longer freely share (supply) any of the data that has been marked as unauthorized.

The ScatterBrain P2P client software takes the following steps to prevent abuse of this feature:

1. It is simple to set up networks and invite friends only. In this way, potential abuse of this feature is minimized.
2. Users who marks content as unauthorized temporarily sacrifice their anonymity; other clients connected to the network can view the IP address of the client that has marked the content as unauthorized. This helps prevent mischievous users from randomly blocking legitimate network content, who can be blocked from the network using firewall software or blocking programs like BlockPost or PeerGuardian.
3. If two other users refute the unauthorized status (if they have evidence that the content was incorrectly marked as unauthorized), the content will become fully reauthorized, for everybody. However, those two users who refute the unauthorized status will also temporarily sacrifice their anonymity; other clients connected to the network can view the IP address of the client that refuted the unauthorized status.

Example for use of these features:

1. User "A" appropriately requests that a copyrighted music album be marked as unauthorized. The album is marked, and the message spreads around the network, preventing further download of the material.
2. User "A" appropriately requests that a copyright music album be marked as unauthorized. Users "B" and "C" inappropriately refute the unauthorized status of the album. The album remains available. However, "A" receives a message that "B" and "C" refuted the unauthorized status, along with their internet addresses. So, while "B" and "C" were able to inappropriately keep an unauthorized album on the network, their anonymity was sacrificed in the process. User "A" now has the identity of "B" and "C", and may possibly choose to initiate legal action against users "B" and "C" (who inappropriately refuted marking of the copyright album as unauthorized).
3. User "A" inappropriately requests that a manuscript be marked as unauthorized because it expresses a viewpoint she does not like. Users "B" and "C" refute the blocking of the manuscript, and the manuscript remains available. In addition, "B" and "C" now know the internet address of "A". With this information, "B" and "C" might take steps to prevent future connection with client "A".

BrainTech, LLC has gone to great effort to reduce the likelihood that its ScatterBrain P2P client software might be used to trade unauthorized material. If you have additional ideas for preventing the trade of unauthorized content while maintaining an anonymous network environment (widely distributed data traveling via Proxy), please let us know.
http://www.scatterbrainp2p.com/MarkU...structions.htm http://www.scatterbrainp2p.com/MarkU...zedContent.htm





Johns Hopkins-Led Center Will Study Voting Technologies

A federally funded center dedicated to improving the reliability and trustworthiness of voting technology, drawing on experts in computer science, public policy and human behavior, will be based at The Johns Hopkins University, the National Science Foundation announced Monday. Researchers from five other institutions nationwide will participate in the project, which is aimed at addressing public concerns about the growing use of electronic voting machines in local, state and national elections.

The NSF said it would provide $7.5 million over five years to launch the new endeavor called ACCURATE, short for A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections. Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins and technical director of the university’s Information Security Institute, will direct the center.

Rubin has received international attention in recent years for identifying risks associated with computer-based voting technology that has been put into use with minimal scrutiny by independent security experts. He has testified before state and federal lawmakers and election supervisors regarding potential security flaws in these machines.

The center’s work will be important because of dramatic changes taking place in the way in which people cast ballots. Fueled by significant funding from the Help America Vote Act of 2002, municipal and county governments across the nation are in the midst of the largest conversion of U.S. voting technology in a century. With this move, the percentage of U.S. voters casting ballots on electronic voting machines is expected to rise from 13 percent in 2000 to a much higher percentage in 2008. This is occurring despite persistent questions from leading security experts, legal scholars and computer scientists about the integrity and trustworthiness of e-voting. In some states, technology glitches in recent elections have led to calls for mandatory paper trails and stricter standards for electronic systems.

“Our country moved to electronic voting in public elections before the technology was ready,” Rubin said. “This center will develop the fundamental science necessary for secure, accessible, trustworthy and transparent voting.”

The NSF grant is expected to provide approximately $1.2 million to Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins to fund Rubin’s research into voting technology and for administration of the new center. Also participating in ACCURATE will be prominent researchers from Rice University; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Iowa and SRI International.

Some members of the multidisciplinary team will study electronic voting hardware and programming, including the cryptography used to ensure voters’ selections remain private and the methods used to verify that computers accurately compile all legitimate votes. These researchers will also look for ways to guard against a variety of election tampering threats.

“The basic question is how can we employ computer systems as trustworthy election systems when we know computers are not totally reliable, totally secure or bug-free,” said Dan Wallach, associate professor of computer science at Rice, who will serve as associate director of ACCURATE. “In voting, this is complicated by the fact that potential adversaries include everyone from the voting system designers, elections officials and voters to political operatives, hackers and foreign agents.”

Other team members will focus on legal and public policy issues that have received little attention in the rapid transition to electronic voting, as well as human behavior questions tied to the abrupt change in the way people are being required to cast their ballots. A key issue is how confident people will feel that their electronic vote was recorded accurately.

The multi-disciplinary team’s findings will be made public. The findings will be used to help develop technical standards and proposals for new e-voting systems that are easy to use and tamper-evident.

“There is no reason why computers cannot be used to improve election systems, but it has to be done right,” center director Rubin said. “Our research will focus on leveraging the best properties of different technologies to design the strongest overall system. ACCURATE has a unique opportunity to produce ground-breaking scientific research while at the same time helping to protect our democracy.”

Related links:
Avi Rubin’s Web Page: http://avirubin.com/
Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins: http://www.jhuisi.jhu.edu/
Johns Hopkins Department of Computer Science: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/513803/?sc=swtn





HP Earnings Top Wall Street Target, Stock Rises
Duncan Martell

Hewlett-Packard Co. posted quarterly results that topped Wall Street forecasts on Tuesday as its personal and business computer units showed strong improvement, sending its shares up nearly 7 percent.

Net income fell 88 percent after tax payments for repatriating $14.5 billion in foreign earnings, but profit margins improved at the company, which is slashing jobs and restructuring under new Chief Executive Mark Hurd.

The No. 2 computer maker, which competes against International Business Machines Corp., Dell Inc. <DELL.O>, Lexmark and others, also issued a profit forecast for the current quarter that was ahead of average Wall Street expectations.

Fiscal third-quarter net income fell to $73 million, or 3 cents per share, from $586 million, or 19 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter.

Operating profits rose strongly in the personal computer unit, and the business-computer unit returned to profit from a year-ago loss, but printing and services profits fell.

Total revenue rose to $20.8 billion from $18.9 billion.

Excluding $988 million in after-tax adjustments primarily relating to the repatriation, HP posted a profit of 36 cents per share, up from a year-ago profit before items of 24 cents per share.

Goldman Sachs analyst Laura Conigliaro, in a brief note to clients, estimated that interest income accounted for 5 cents per share in the third quarter.

Analysts, on average, had expected a profit of 31 cents per share on revenue of $20.5 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.

Dell last week reported second-quarter revenue that lagged forecasts by $300 million, and set a lower-than-expected revenue forecast for the current quarter, raising concerns that a recent surge in the PC industry may be moderating.

"We heard a little bit from Lexmark and Dell about the pressures in the printing business. The fact that their revenues are a little down but Hewlett's earnings are up makes me feel very good that they're doing what they have to do to protect their bottom line," said Diane Jaffe, group managing director, Laudus Balanced MarketMasters Fund.

Hurd told reporters on a conference call that he viewed the PC market as "steady" and "stable," allaying some of the concerns about a slowing PC market. In a statement, he referred to "solid" profit margin improvements in key HP business segments.

Hurd also said that HP plans to use some of the repatriated cash to make acquisitions and repurchase its own stock.

Operating profit in the PC-dominated personal systems group rose to $163 million from $23 million a year ago, while printing group profit fell to $771 million from $836 million. The business-computing enterprise storage and servers group had a profit of $150 million, versus a year-ago loss of $211 million. Profit at the services group fell to $256 million from $314 million.

The company's operating profit margin, excluding one-time items, widened to 5.7 percent from 4.5 percent in the year-ago quarter. HP's PC business had an operating profit margin of 2.6 percent, the best performance since its $19 billion takeover of Compaq Computer Corp. in May 2002, Hurd said.

The results are also a notable improvement from the year-ago quarter, when the enterprise systems group stumbled badly, prompting then-CEO Carly Fiorina to fire several executives. Fiorina was ousted in February by the board after not delivering the financial results she had promised.

Hurd, known as a cost-cutter from his days as CEO of NCR Corp. <NCR.N>, joined HP in April. HP is in the midst of shedding 14,500 jobs, or about 10 percent of its work force, in a restructuring announced in July to cut annual costs by $1.9 billion.

For the current, fourth, quarter, Palo Alto, California-based HP said it expects earnings per share, before items, of 44 cents to 47 cents on revenue of between $22.4 billion and $22.8 billion.

On that basis, analysts expect HP to earn 43 cents per share, on average, within a range of 39 cents to 47 cents, on revenue of $22.7 billion.

HP shares rose 6.5 percent, to $25.29 in extended trade on Inet, after closing down 39 cents at $23.70 on the New York Stock Exchange. (Additional reporting by Scott Malone in New York)
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...ewlett-Packard





Bellsouth, Napster Agree to Marketing Deal

Online music service Napster Inc. and telecommunications company BellSouth Corp. on Monday said they agreed to a marketing deal linking sales of high-speed Internet with a portable music giveaway.

Under the marketing deal, customers who sign up for BellSouth's FastAccess DSL can choose to receive a free three-month membership to Napster To Go, Napster's portable subscription music service, and a compatible MP3 player, the companies said in a statement.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...srch=Bellsouth





Polly wanna Anna?

Fighting The Final Digital Battle
Travis Kalanick

I vividly remember sitting in a movie theater half a decade ago and seeing the Universal Studios globe turning in full Technicolor just before the start of the feature presentation.
As the U-N-I-V-E-R-S-A-L lettering made its way to the foreground, my heart sped up and my hands began to sweat. My reaction was only natural, as my last company had only recently been sued by Universal, and 28 other media companies, for a quarter of a trillion dollars. My partners and I ultimately were forced to settle with Hollywood, sell the company, and start anew in the peer-to-peer space.

At the time, it was my opinion that these media companies did not know much about this chaotic, uncontrollable medium but definitely knew they didn't like what our search engine was finding. So instead of using the precise mechanisms that existing law already provided for their protection (known as take-down provisions in the Search Safe Harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), these companies were certain they needed to slow things down with a scary, overwhelming message to would-be entrepreneurs and their investors.

For almost an entire decade, innovators in digital media distribution were chilled by the aggressive tactics of the entertainment industry to protect their analog interests. For many years, we essentially saw a lockdown on Internet distribution of media. Practical licenses for legitimate Internet distribution were forbidden, while lawsuit after lawsuit was wielded as a blunt tool and a stern warning against those creators (aka innovators) who had their sights set on staking a claim in the wild west of online digital media.

This chilly pursuit's last salvo came with the Grokster decision by the Supreme Court last month. The court's principled yet vague decision remains a Pyrrhic victory for the entertainment industry in its fight against piracy. There will be no substantial abatement of peer-to-peer piracy as a result of the decision. Maybe the only lasting innovation resulting from these pursuits will be the advent of distributed, noncommercial, anonymous networks that make for difficult tracking by copyright owners, law enforcement and oppressive foreign governments alike.

Ironically enough, in the decade to come, we technologists should see a reversal of our collective fortune in our relationships with the media industry. The cold winter of media distribution innovation has already begun its thaw and will enter full spring bloom in the coming years.

That may sound a bit iconoclastic given everything we've heard from some of our techie leaders. But it is absolutely clear that technologists and technology companies are well-positioned to win the post-Grokster peace.

After the Grokster decision, there is nobody left for Hollywood to fight. The Kazaa-like "infringers" either lost in the Supreme Court along with Grokster, or the few remaining have basically gotten the message and are finding ways to go "legit" as we speak. Without anybody substantial left to fight (not counting those millions of consumers who might still be using peer-to-peer software to directly infringe), all that is left is to think about taking this huge groundswell in demand for digital distribution and making a big business out of it. The entertainment industry has "won." All that's left is to actually take their own prodigious creative talent, and innovate new business models around digital distribution. The VCR is a prime example--once the industry focused on positive innovation, it realized a bigger billion-dollar business than from traditional box-office receipts.

Second, the very entertainment execs who architected the fight against digital distribution are well on their way to overcoming their fears. Years of evangelism by dedicated entrepreneurs (myself included) of the legitimate uses of peer to peer have gone a long way. The development of technologies like Snocap and Audible Magic to identify, filter and "protect" online services closes the final gaps that will make the executives' transformation to innovation a reality. For example, utilizing Red Swoosh peer-to-peer distribution technology along with Snocap's identification and registration technology could make an infringing peer-to-peer service into a noninfringing one with the flip of a switch. As such, the entertainment industry not only publicly recognizes that digital distribution is an opportunity, it has even started to point out in the last six months that peer-to-peer technology is not all bad, singling out and even licensing to commercial peer-to-peer businesses.

Third, the market is ready. Broadband penetration has gone well past 50 percent in the U.S. Devices that play high-quality audio and video (in cars, living rooms and via mobile devices) are deploying in the tens of millions--soon to be hundreds of millions. The online-advertising market that will support online content is quickly becoming a substitute for the traditional broadcast media. And, most importantly, the demand is there. Early experiments in online music, television and movies have passed the test. After only 18 months on the PC, iTunes accounts for a few percent of the global music market and is a huge growth vehicle (more than a half billion dollars in sales expected this year; over $2 billion in sales expected next year), leading the way for many initiatives across music, television, movies and other services, with ultimate market sizes that will dwarf their analog equivalents.

Regardless of whether we agree with the entertainment industry's means to this end, it is inevitable that a huge wave of digital distribution is about to come ashore. Licenses are coming, and lawsuits against technology companies will recede--the quest for massive commerce will trump the use of unproductive wasteful lawsuits against technologies.

This huge wave means enormous opportunities to innovate with widely available licensing that enables massive commercial distribution. And with content distribution everywhere, we should keep our eyes on the prize--if iPod/iTunes tells us anything, it's that for every $100 million in content revenues, there is more than $1 billion in technology purchases.

There will be hiccups and hard work along the way. Some of the more extreme digital rights management technologies and other security mechanisms are not the most fun, but market forces could make some of these paranoia-induced features go away. And for those who cringe when they hear the term "filter," I have some advice: Integrate filtering into all of your search, peer-to-peer and consumer applications and make it optional for the user (users get a checkbox that turns on safe, legal, filtered file surfing; unchecked users are on their own).

Media companies have nowhere else to go but online. The consumers are there, the advertising is there, and the technologies are there. But after the Supreme Court case, the perceived corporate "bad actors" that scare entertainment companies are not.

Content won't be free, but our ability to innovate will be--at least more than it was during the last decade.
http://news.com.com/Fighting+the+fin...3-5825192.html





Lighter backpacks

Publishers Loosen Rules On E-Textbooks
John Borland

A group of major textbook publishers has agreed to loosen restrictions in an electronic-textbook experiment beginning this month at Princeton University and other schools, following some criticism of expiration dates.

The pilot project, which will see textbooks sold in downloadable form at 10 university bookstores this fall, went into operation earlier this week. Under the initial version of the program, the downloads were to be sold for 33 percent off the cost of a new, printed copy, but would only be usable for about five months.

On Friday, MBS Textbook Exchange--the textbook wholesaler that is organizing the program--said publishers had agreed to extend the expiration dates for the digital textbooks. The downloads will now last from 12 months to an unlimited time, depending on the publisher.

"All of us have always been committed to putting together a program that delivers a cost savings to the student through the traditional channel, which is the bookstore," MBS Direct Chief Executive Officer Dennis Flanagan, who is heading the project, said in a statement. "Adapting to student recommendations is what this test is all about."

The experiment, which is already ongoing at several schools including the University of Utah, is one of the most ambitious efforts offering students digital versions of textbooks instead of the heavy printed copies they're used to.

A handful of textbook publishers already offer downloadable versions of their works through their own Web sites or through partners. But the programs have been only lightly used--in part because most students tend to buy their books all at once either online or in the campus bookstore, rather than figuring out which publisher is responsible for which texts.

The new program will see little cards produced by MBS sold on the shelves next to used and new copies of textbooks, offering students the discount if they buy online instead. The generic cards--similar to phone cards--are associated with a specific book at the bookstore's check-out desk, and the student downloads the book later.

Formatted and copy-protected using Adobe technology, the books can be searched by keyword and read out loud by the software. But antipiracy protections will prevent them from being sold back to the bookstore or to other students once a class is finished.

MBS also said Friday that publishers have agreed to loosen restrictions on how much of a book could be printed and how often. That too will vary by publisher.

The digital books will be initially available at the University of Oregon, the University of Utah, Portland Community College, Bowling Green State University, Princeton University, Georgetown College, California State University-Fullerton, Morehead State University, and at privately owned stores serving West Virginia University and Louisiana State University.
http://news.com.com/Publishers+loose...3-5830640.html





ILN News Letter
Michael Geist

Chinese Net Portal Halts Music Search Service

Chinese Internet portal Netease.com Inc. suspended its online music search service because of concerns about violating copyrights amid a battle by music labels to combat infringement. According to music-industry executives, MP3 search services offered by Chinese portals and search sites allow users to link to other Web sites and download songs, cellphone ring tones and other unlicensed music content free. China this spring passed a law that imposes fines on Web sites that knowingly offer content illegally.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1...115373,00.html


Company Files Suit Against Five Yahoo Posters

Small-appliance maker Applica wants to muzzle five anonymous people it says are divulging confidential company information over the Internet. The company has sued the "John Does" it presumes are current or former employees over postings to a Yahoo Finance message board devoted to discussion of Applica.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/12391801.htm





Second thoughts on dot/xxx

Correspondence from GAC Chairman to ICANN Board regarding .XXX TLD
12 August 2005

From: Mohd Sharil Tarmizi
To: ICANN Board of Directors
Cc: Government Advisory Committee
Subject: Concerns about contract for approval of new top level domain
Date: Friday, August 12, 2005

Dear Colleagues,

As you know, the Board is scheduled to consider approval of a contract for a new top level domain intended to be used for adult content. I am omitting the specific TLD here because experience shows that some email systems filter out anything containing the three letters associated with the TLD.

You may recall that during the session between the GAC and the Board in Luxembourg that some countries had expressed strong positions to the Board on this issue. In other GAC sessions, a number of other governments also expressed some concern with the potential introduction of this TLD. The views are diverse and wide ranging. Although not necessarily well articulated in Luxembourg; as Chairman, I believe there remains a strong sense of discomfort in the GAC about the TLD, notwithstanding the explanations to date.

I have been approached by some of these governments and I have advised them that apart from the advice given in relation to the creation of new gTLDs in the Luxembourg Communique that implicitly refers to the proposed TLD, sovereign governments are also free to write directly to ICANN about their specific concerns.

In this regard, I would like to bring to the Board's attention the possibility that several governments will choose to take this course of action. I would like to request that in any further debate that we may have with regard to this TLD that we keep this background in mind.

Based on the foregoing, I believe the Board should allow time for additional governmental and public policy concerns to be expressed before reaching a final decision on this TLD.

Thanks and best regards,

Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi
Chairman, GAC
ICANN

http://www.icann.org/correspondence/...rd-12aug05.htm





Erotic Images Cause Temporary "Blindness"
David Zald

If your partner seems to be ignoring you after a flash of nudity on the television screen, it might not be his or her fault. New research indicates that people shown erotic or gory images frequently fail to process what they see immediately afterwards.

Portions of the research exploring this effect by Vanderbilt University psychologist David Zald and Yale University researchers Steven Most, Marvin Chun and David Widders will be published in the August issue of Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

“We observed that people fail to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images,” Zald, assistant professor of psychology and member of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, said.

Anyone who has ever slowed down to look at an accident as they are driving by—or has been stuck behind someone who has—is familiar with the “rubbernecking” effect. Even though we know we need to keep our eyes on the road, our emotions of concern, fear and curiosity cause us to stare out the window at the accident and slow to a crawl as we drive by.

Zald and his colleagues set out to determine if the rubbernecking effect carries over into more minute lapses of attention through two separate experiments.

In the first experiment, research subjects were shown hundreds of pictures that included a mix of disturbing images along with landscape or architectural photos. They were told to search the images for a particular target image. An irrelevant, emotionally negative or neutral picture preceded the target by two to eight items. The closer the negative pictures were to the target image, the more frequently the subject failed to spot the target. In a subsequent study, which has not yet been published, the researchers substituted erotic for negative images and found the same basic effect.

“We think that there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can basically jam up that bottleneck so subsequent information can’t get through,” Zald said. “It appears to happen involuntarily.”

Previous studies have demonstrated that there are limits to how much information we can hold in our visual short-term memory and that we often miss visual images that pass right before our eyes if we are paying attention to something else. The new research indicates that we can also miss what we are searching for if we are shown an unexpected image that impacts us emotionally, a situation the researchers call “emotion-induced blindness.”

This effect can explain some common human behaviors. “If you are simply driving down the road and you see something that is sexually explicit on a billboard, the odds are that it is going to capture your attention and for a fraction of a second afterwards, you are going to be less able to pay attention to the other information in your environment,” Zald said. “So you might not see that car coming at you or the person crossing the street because your bottleneck has been jammed.”

In the second experiment, the researchers sought to determine if individuals can override their emotion-induced blindness by focusing more deliberately on the target for which they are searching. In this experiment, the subjects undertook two different trials. In one they were told specifically to look for a rotated photo of a building; in the other they were told to look for a rotated photo of either a building or a landscape.

The research team hypothesized that the more specific instruction—to look for the building only—would help the research subjects override their emotion-induced blindness. After running the tests, the researchers discovered that they were partially right: specific instructions helped some subjects control their attention, but it didn’t help others.

Furthermore, the researchers determined that the subjects’ ability to control their attention was directly linked to the aspect of their personalities that involves their reaction to negative or frightening stimuli, assessed by using a scale that measured their levels of harm avoidance. Those who score high on this scale are more fearful, careful and cautious. Those who score low are more often carefree and more comfortable in dangerous or difficult situations. The researchers found that those with low harm avoidance scores were better able to stay focused on the targets than those with high harm avoidance scores.

Zald believes one explanation for the differences in performance during the experiment is that individuals that tend to be more harm avoidant have more trouble disengaging from emotional images than their more carefree counterparts, causing their attention to linger on an emotional image even though it is no longer visible.

“We increasingly are suspicious that people who are more neurotic or harm avoidant may not be detecting negative stimuli more than other people, but they have a greater difficulty suppressing that information,” Zald said.

A multimedia version of this story is available at http://www.exploration.vanderbilt.ed...rubberneck.htm.
http://www.newswise.com/p/articles/view/513735/

















Until next week,

- js.

















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

August 13th, August 6th, July 30th, July 23rd, July 16th, July 9th

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


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