[JackSpratts]

Accelerating The Internet To The Speed Of Light
Nick Miller

Australian scientists believe they are on the verge of a breakthrough in optical circuitry that may improve the speed of the internet by a factor of 1000.

The Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems, a research consortium of five universities, is trying to create a photonic chip that processes optical signals free of slow, silicon electronics.

Optical-signal processing allows unprecedented bandwidth - one optical fibre has a capacity of hundreds of terabits a second. At this speed, a high-definition movie could be downloaded in a fraction of a second, rather than the hours it takes with current technology.

Today, our international internet links are bedevilled by unavoidable lag - the time it takes for data to travel from the US to a user's PC in Australia.

For most of its journey, the data travels at the speed of light along optical fibres. But each time the information stream is switched, amplified, reprocessed or regenerated, it requires silicon-based electronics, which are much slower.

These bottlenecks stand in the way of a 1000-fold increase in the practical speed of the internet, the centre's researchers say. But they could be removed with optical computing, which uses light to switch light, without electronic interference.

Research director Ben Eggleton says the centre's program has four strands: a "regenerator" that reproduces an optical signal without electronics; a switch that uses a light signal to direct another light signal; optical buffers to slow light pulses, making them easier to handle; and three-dimensional photonic circuits.

The centre's participants at Sydney University and the Australian National University are about a month away from demonstrating an optical switch, he says. (The centre's other members are Macquarie University, University of Technology Sydney, and Swinburne University of Technology.)

Although scientists around the world work on the same problem, Professor Eggleton says the centre takes a unique approach.

It is working with a soft glass called chalcogenide, which changes its refracting properties when hit by high-intensity pulses of light - becoming a basic switch. The glass switches at very low powers, which makes it easier to work with and promises more practical applications.

Chalcogenide can also be printed, to create circuits. Scientists created "band gap" structures within the glass - patterns of tiny holes that further control the light beams. Professor Eggleton says this band gap could be the photonic equivalent of the basic unit of electronics - the semi-conductor.

"The band gap allows light to be moved in a particular direction. It allows us to make circuitry," he says. "So we have a very compact, low-power optical switch that can be incorporated into an optical circuit, which can be made using basic lithography (circuit printing)."

Other optical switches have been demonstrated using silicon, but the use of glass should allow much higher speeds.

The team hopes to demonstrate its first optical switch within the next few months. This would be an early step in creating a practical photonic circuit.

Such a circuit would dramatically improve the speed of data-flow around the world.

"The aim is to do more and more signal processing optically," Professor Eggleton says.

A beam of light is much faster and more agile than an electronic current. "Electronics relies on electrons moving through semi-conducters and that has a real, inherent speed limit," Professor Eggleton says.

"Photonics could be used in telecommunications or even in computing technology."

THE PHOTONIC CHIP

1 Optical data signals (light pulses) enter the chip via glass fibres thinner than a human hair. They are squeezed to fit the optical circuitry.

2 A switch, controlled by light, rapidly combines packets of optical data.

3 Integrated components act on the light, for instance changing its colour from blue to red, amplifying or delaying the signals.

4 The prism-like structure allows some colour data channels to be dropped while other channels are added for the next leg of the trip.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technolog...940441025.html





Pretty spacey

Drexel Professor: For a Bigger Computer Hard-drive, Just Add Water
Press Release

Imagine having computer memory so dense that a cubic centimeter contains 12.8 million gigabytes (GB) of information.

Imagine an iPod playing music for 100 millennia without repeating a single song or a USB thumb-drive with room for 32.6 million full-length DVD movies.

Now imagine if this could be achieved by combining a computing principle that was popular in the 1960s, a glass of water and wire three-billionths of a meter wide. Science fiction? Not exactly.

Ferroelectric materials possess spontaneous and reversible electric dipole moments. These dipole moments are times when the material gains a charge, in this case an electric one. For example, the Earth¹s magnetic field generates a dipole moment that causes compasses to face north, but the stability of ferroelectric charges has been a problem for researchers.

Until recently, it was difficult to stabilize ferroelectricity on the nano-scale. This was because the traditional process of screening the charges was not completely effective. However Dr. Jonathan Spanier from Drexel University and his research colleagues and the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new and slightly unusual mechanism stabilizing the ferroelectricity in nano-scaled materials:

surrounding the charged material with fragments of water.

Ferroelectric materials are compounds that possess electric dipole moments; similar to the magnetic dipole moments of Earth¹s magnetic field that causes a compass to always point north. Until recently, it was difficult to miniaturize ferroelectric materials because of problems with screening.

All ferroelectric materials, even Spanier¹s wires that are 100,000 times finer than a human hair, need to be screened to ensure their dipole moments remain stable. Traditionally this was accomplished using metallic electrodes, but Spanier and his team found that molecules such as hydroxyl

(OH) ions, which make up water, and organic molecules, such as carboxyl (COOH), work even better than metal electrodes at stabilizing ferroelectricity in nano-scaled materials, proving that sometimes water and electricity do mix.

³It is astonishing to see that molecules enable a wire having a diameter equivalent to fewer than ten atoms to act as a stable and switchable dipole memory element,² said Spanier, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Drexel.

If commercialized, ferroelectric memory of this sort could find its way into home computers, rendering traditional hard-drives obsolete. The extreme capacity offered by such a device could easily put a room full of hard-drives and servers into a jacket pocket, but this idea can be applied to other computer components, such as ferroelectric RAM.

RAM is necessary in a computer because it stores information for programs that are currently running. As this news release was written, RAM stored the words in a file. Because RAM can transfer files faster than a hard-drive, it is used to handle running programs. However most RAM is volatile, and if the computer loses power all the information in RAM is lost. This is not the case with ferroelectric memory.

Ferroelectric memory is non-volatile, so it is entirely possible for files to be stored permanently in a computer¹s RAM. Applying nano-wires and the new stabilization method to existing ferroelectric RAM would deal a double blow to hard-drives in size and speed.

Spanier and his colleagues, Alexie Kolpak and Andrew Rappe offrom the University of Pennsylvania and Hongkun Park of Harvard University, are excited about their findings, but say significant challenges lie ahead, including the need to develop ways to assemble the nanowires densely, and to develop a scheme to efficiently write information to and read information from the nanowires. In the interim, Spanier and his colleagues will continue to investigate the role of molecules on ferroelectricity in nanowires and to develop nano-scaled devices that exploit this new-found mechanism.

Support for the research at Drexel is from the Army Research Office and at Harvard and at Penn from the National Science Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Dreyfus Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Center for Piezoelectric Design.
http://www.drexel.edu/dateline/defau...&f=20060508-01





OLED, Paper Displays $10.2 Bln by 2011?
Geoff Duncan

Research firm NanoMarkets forecasts the global market for OLED and Paper-like displays will reach $10.2 billion by 2011.

Virginia-based research firm NanoMarkets is forecasting that the market for Organic LED (OLED) and paper-like displays will grow to some $10.2 billion worldwide by the year 2011, and grow to $14.7 billion by the year 2013.

Organic LED, or OLED, displays are not made of semi-conductors like traditional LEDs, but from much smaller carbon-based molecules which can be printed on media and substrates. OLED displays do not require a backlight and, thus, consume far less power than traditional LCD displays. A number of technologies exist for paper-like displays, with the most common to-date tiny colored spheres suspended between layers of film: electrical charges sent through the film cause the spheres to rotate, showing a light side or dark side (or, in some cases, a "grey" made up of half-dark, half-light).

NanoMarkets foresees that decreasing cost to manufacture OLED and paper displays combined with increased production capacity will transform the signage and advertising industries, enabling retailers to constantly update things like shelf-edge displays. OLED technology will also soon have the resolution and color capability to enter the television and video market; NanoMarkets believes OLED televisions will account for $2.2 billion in revenue in 2011 and begin seriously cutting into the LCD television market. Other key markets for OLED and paper-like displays include mobile computing and consumer electronics devices.
http://news.digitaltrends.com/article10322.html





Dell Shares In Spotlight After Outlook
David Koenig

Shares of Dell Inc. took a beating after the world's largest personal computer maker warned it will miss its own targets for sales and profits during the first quarter because of "pricing decisions."

Analysts said Dell's move showed that it cannot dodge tough competition and savage price-cutting for personal computers.

Dell said late Monday that it expects a profit of about 33 cents per share in the three months that ended Friday - down from its previous forecast of 36 cents to 38 cents per share. Analysts were expecting 38 cents per share, according to a survey by Thomson Financial.

The Round Rock-based company, which sells computers directly to businesses and consumers, also said first-quarter sales would be about $14.2 billion. It had previously forecast revenue of $14.2 billion to $14.6 billion.

The announcement sent Dell shares tumbling $1.72, or 6.5 percent, to $24.71 in early Nasdaq trading Tuesday, below the stock's previous 52-week low of $25.10.

Dell shares are down nearly 12 percent so far this year.

In a statement, the company said the shortfall in expected earnings was driven "primarily by pricing decisions in the second half of the quarter." During the quarter, Dell aggressively discounted some of its products as it lost ground to rivals.

Chief Executive Kevin Rollins said the company "continued to execute on our strategy to reinvigorate growth by making investments in our support infrastructure and product quality and by accelerating pricing adjustments."

Company officials declined to comment further. Dell will announce first-quarter results on May 18.

Steve Kleynhans, an analyst at META Group, said Dell was being swept up in price-cutting wars among PC makers, especially for low-end machines. He said Dell was hindered by its reliance on computer chips from Intel Corp. instead of less-expensive parts from Intel's chief rival in PC microprocessors, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

"We're experiencing a slowdown in the growth of the PC market, and prices are coming down," said Samir Bhavnani, a PC industry analyst with market researcher Current Analysis. "And PC makers, with Dell especially as the biggest one, are paying for pricing decisions they made months ago."

Charles Smulders, vice president of client computing at market-research firm Gartner Inc., agreed that the first-quarter results would put more pressure on Dell to consider AMD as a supplier. He also suggested Dell might try to change investors' expectations about its historically rapid growth.

"There is a mismatch between the financial expectations based on their history, and what the market can deliver in the current pricing environment," Smulders said.

Smulders said Dell is cutting prices to compete and increase revenue, but that won't generate the kind of profit growth that investors have come to expect from Dell.

Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner said Dell saw its share of industry computer shipments decline to 16.5 percent in the first quarter of 2006 from 16.9 percent a year ago. Though Dell shipped 10.2 percent more PCs than it did in last year's first quarter, Gartner said the growth rate was Dell's slowest since the third quarter of 2001.

---

AP Technology Writer May Wong contributed to this report from San Jose, Calif.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Down by the river

Ga. Student Suspended for Threatening Song
AP

A high school student was suspended for five days after singing a spoof of ''On Top of Ol' Smokey'' that includes lyrics about shooting a teacher.

Beth Ann Cox, 16, a junior at Peachtree Ridge High School, said she had been humming the song during German class but denied singing loudly or directing the lyrics at her teacher, Phil Carroll.

''I'd had a song stuck in my head all day, like the tune of it,'' she said. ''This kid in front of me asked me about the song. So I told him the words. I didn't say them loudly.''

The song includes the lyrics: ''On top of Ol' Smokey, all covered with blood, I shot my poor teacher with a .44 slug.''

Administrators pulled Cox out of class later Friday and asked why she had threatened her teacher. She was suspended Monday.

Cox has had differences with the teacher in the past, said her mother, Suzanne Cox.

''We feel that Dr. Carroll has some kind of a vendetta out for our daughter. And he used this to take a stand against her,'' Suzanne Cox said.

Sloan Roach, spokeswoman for the school district, about 30 miles northeast of Atlanta, said the suspension was ''appropriate disciplinary action'' for disrupting class.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...Suspended.html





Mom Said To Help Girls Bake Ex-Lax Cookies
AP

A 43-year-old woman is charged with helping her daughter and two other teenage girls bake cookies laced with a laxative that were then given to a teacher.

Julie Hunt appeared in Skowhegan District Court on Monday and pleaded innocent to a charge of misdemeanor assault.

Hunt was arrested Friday after a police investigation into the attempted prank at Carrabec Community School in Anson that sickened four seventh- and eighth-grade children.

The cookies, which were baked with Ex-Lax, were left on the teacher's desk on April 10 with a note saying, "We made these cookies just for you, hope you enjoy them."

According to a police affidavit, Hunt told the girls how to crush the laxative pills and mix them in with the cookie batter. The girls, who are 13 and 14, used an entire box of pills, the affidavit says.

Mary Adley, the principal of the school, called police on April 24 after hearing two girls talking about the incident.

Maine State Police Lt. Dale Lancaster said that the girls were not facing criminal charges. The affidavit said all three girls were suspended by school officials.

But Hunt's involvement could not be overlooked, Lancaster said.

"If you assist children with perpetrating these kinds of crimes, you will be charged," he said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





U.S. Subpoenas Newspaper for Sources in Steroid Case
Adam Liptak

In the latest effort by the government to learn the identities of reporters' confidential sources, the United States attorney in Los Angeles issued grand jury subpoenas to The San Francisco Chronicle and two of its reporters on Friday.

The relative ordinariness of the case, which arose out of reporting on steroid use in baseball rather than on covert operatives, domestic eavesdropping or secret prisons, may make its outcome instructive.

As a practical matter, the case will answer whether, after a series of recent setbacks, reporters retain any rights to protect their confidential sources in federal court.

Phil Bronstein, the editor of The Chronicle, said the paper would move to quash the subpoenas.

Whether it succeeds will turn in large part on which of two competing approaches the courts adopt. Both were represented last year in a federal appeals court's decision that sent Judith Miller, then a reporter for The New York Times, to jail in an investigation centering on the disclosure of the identity of Valerie Wilson, an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The three appeals judges who heard that case agreed that a 1972 decision of the United States Supreme Court, Branzburg v. Hayes, ruled out any First Amendment protections for reporters from federal grand jury subpoenas except in cases of prosecutorial harassment.

But one judge, David S. Tatel, proposed an alternative approach rooted in the federal common law of evidence rather than the First Amendment. A similar test is part of a proposed federal shield law likely to be introduced in the Senate shortly.

Judge Tatel said judges should balance "the public interest in compelling disclosure, measured by the harm the leak caused, against the public interest in newsgathering, measured by the leaked information's value."

In the Miller case, Judge Tatel said, the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity may have jeopardized her safety, her work and "friends and associates from whom she might have gathered information in the past." On the other hand, he wrote, Ms. Wilson's identity "had marginal news value."

Under that balancing, Judge Tatel wrote, Ms. Miller lost. But that same balancing, if adopted by the judge in the case involving The Chronicle, may yield a different result.

The subpoenas served Friday seek testimony and documents concerning three articles published by the paper in 2004 about a grand jury investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative, or Balco, which distributed performance-enhancing drugs to athletes.

The articles quoted, apparently verbatim, transcripts of grand jury testimony from prominent athletes, including the baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi. Whoever provided those transcripts to The Chronicle probably violated the law.

Mr. Bronstein, The Chronicle's editor, said the proper way to strike the balance between the value of the information and the harm caused by its disclosure was plain to him, if not to all his paper's readers.

"Had the reporting not been done and not been published," Mr. Bronstein said, "we would not have had a very strong debate about the illegal use of steroids in professional sports."

Readers, on the other hand, "have hammered us quite severely," he continued. There is, he said, "an awful lot of sentiment expressed about the sanctity of the grand jury process."

Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for Debra Wong Yang, the United States attorney in Los Angeles, declined to comment. The investigation is presumably being conducted from Los Angeles because federal prosecutors in San Francisco had had access to the leaked materials.

Eve Burton, vice president and general counsel of the Hearst Corporation, which owns The Chronicle, said the legal balance should be struck in favor of the reporters, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, given that the Balco grand jury appears to have concluded its work.

"The government's interest in learning who the whistle-blowers were in a case that's finished is less important," she said, "than the ability of journalists to protect their confidential sources."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/09/us/09leak.html





Survey says! Oh wait…

Patterns of Deceit Raise Concerns About Teenage Sex Surveys
Eric Nagourney

Does signing a virginity pledge after you have had sex make you a virgin again?

It hardly seems likely. But how else to explain a new study in which teenagers who said they had had sex in one survey then signed a pledge and told a different story in a survey a year later?

The study, which appears in the June issue of The American Journal of Public Health, was based on surveys by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development involving more than 13,000 students in grades 7 to 12.

The students were questioned two times, a year apart.

The most delicate questions were given through headphones, and the students typed their answers into a computer.

Among the questions students were asked: "Have you taken a public or written pledge to remain a virgin until marriage?" They were also asked if they had had sexual intercourse.

In the first survey, about 13 percent of the students said they had taken a pledge of virginity. In the second survey, the study found, more than half of that group denied having taken one.

Those who reported having sexual relations for the first time in the second survey were three times as likely to retract a virginity pledge as those who did report having had sex then.

About a third of the students said in the first survey that they had had sex, but about 10 percent of them denied it when asked the second time.

Those who had newly made a pledge were four times as likely to retract reports of sexual activity.

Why did so many students change their stories? "We can't really get inside their heads and know what they're thinking," said the study's author, Janet Rosenbaum, a doctoral student at the Harvard School of Public Health. But the study raises questions about how much reliance should be placed on surveys about sexual activity among teenagers, and how accurately experts can measure the results of programs that encourage them to abstain from sex to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

"Survey respondents typically reconcile their memories with their present beliefs," the study said. "Respondents may recall only memories consistent with their cur- rent beliefs or report actions that did not occur but are consistent with their current beliefs."

Such behavior is not unheard of when it comes to surveys. Studies have found, for example, that people who tell survey takers before an election that it is important to vote are more likely to claim falsely later that they did.

But there is a big difference between what happens in the voting booth and what happens in the bedroom or the car.

"Self-reported voting can be verified with official voting records," Ms. Rosenbaum wrote, "but self-reported sexual abstinence cannot."

Apart from what it says about the reliability of the pledges and abstinence programs, the study also raises concerns about whether they may make tracking sexually transmitted diseases more difficult.

"I think all of this has public health implications, particularly with respect to S.T.D.'s, insofar as we are not getting a clear picture from teens' own report of their sexual activity," said Cynthia Dailard, a public policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute, a research and advocacy group that studies reproductive rights.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/09/health/09virg.html





Thaslada Playmates!
Jack

All of 'em, from December '53 to this month. Amazing thread.





Sony to Sell PlayStation 3 for $499
Matt Richtel

Sony said on Monday that it planned to sell the base model of its PlayStation 3 video game console for $499, a price that industry analysts said could put it at a competitive disadvantage to rival Microsoft and its Xbox 360.

Sony said that it also planned to sell a higher-priced model with a larger hard drive for $599.

The console will be released on Nov. 11 in Japan and Nov. 17 in United States and Europe, Sony executives said. It will cost about $536 in Japan and $636 in Europe.

The release date and prices, made public at a flashy news conference in Los Angeles, were disclosed with pomp and circumstance, befitting Sony's vigorous effort to keep itself fresh in the minds of video game players.

Sony said it planned to ship six million consoles by the end of March 2007, including two million when the system is introduced in the fall.

The company had originally expected to begin selling the PlayStation 3 this spring, but said in March that it would postpone the release until November. The delay has given a full-year lead to Microsoft, which introduced its Xbox 360 last November.

The 360 sells at two prices, $299 for a basic system and $399 for a ramped up one.

Paul Jackson, a video game industry analyst with Forrester Research, said the price of the PlayStation would put Sony at a competitive disadvantage to Microsoft. The consoles will sell out at first because of the cult of PlayStation users, he said. But after that, he said, prices will have to come down quickly.

At its announcement, Sony executives tried to make the case that the PlayStation 3 would be the most advanced game system to date, with enough features to justify its price.

Some of the game players, analysts and journalists gathered at the news conference said they were not convinced.

The system "is as expensive as I expected, and that is to say it is outrageously expensive," said Chris Kohler, a freelance video game journalist and avid game player who lives in San Francisco. He said that Sony did not make a sufficient case that the console's features justify the cost. "They didn't show it today."

He added, "What they showed looked very much like the games you can get on the 360."

Sony also said for the first time that the hand-held controllers supplied with the games will enable players to manipulate activity on their television screens. For example, players will be able tilt their hands to make an airplane move to the left or right, or roll.

Even at the price announced on Monday, Sony will probably sell the PlayStation systems at a substantial discount to what it costs to make them, analysts said. The gap is attributable to the high cost of the console's components, notably its powerful cell processor and a high-definition DVD format called Blu-ray.

But the economics of the video game business can potentially support a model in which console makers subsidize their machines because they can make a lot of money by collecting royalty fees for games sold for those consoles. And further, Sony cannot afford to price its console too much higher than the 360.

The news conference was timed to coincide with the industry's big annual trade show, an immersion into high-technology sensory overload known as E3, which starts Wednesday at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

The other console makers, Microsoft and Nintendo, have scheduled announcements for Tuesday.

The business stakes are immense for all three, and for the hundreds of companies that make video games and accessories for the consoles, as well as the investors banking that the industry will continue to grow.

Perhaps no company is in the spotlight this week like Sony. It is the reigning heavyweight champion of console makers, with its PlayStation 2 having sold more than 100 million units since it was introduced in 2000.

Its dominance has been challenged by Microsoft, which sold around one-quarter that many Xboxes.

Microsoft's introduction of the 360 was met with consumer enthusiasm, and a caveat. The company initially sold as many consoles as it could make, but that turned out not necessarily to be a function just of customer demand but also of Microsoft production snags that limited supply.

Still, Michael Pachter, a video game industry analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, said Microsoft would probably have sold 10 million Xbox 360 consoles by the time the PlayStation 3 reaches the market.

Sony said it decided to delay the console's release to allow software developers to create games that take better advantage of the powerful processor and graphics technology of the PlayStation 3.

Yet the delay has been painful for those software makers and their investors. Companies like Electronic Arts, a big video game maker, have said that the slower-than-expected transition to a new generation of consoles is one reason they are in a significant sales slump that it appears will last for at least a year.

As for Sony, whether it can take over Microsoft's early lead depends in part on a business battle that is somewhat tangential to the console competition. In promoting Blu-ray as a high-definition DVD format, Sony is in a pitched battle with Toshiba, which is promoting a rival technological standard.

If Toshiba wins out, Sony's heavy investment in Blu-ray, and its inclusion in the PlayStation 3, could wind up being a costly mistake. But if Blu-ray prevails, users could be drawn to the PlayStation 3 in part for its ability to play vivid movies.

"Blu-ray is going to decide it," Mr. Pachter said of the console wars. "Consumers will pay more for a Blu-ray drive if we believe it has value."

He added that he thought Sony would prevail. "Sony's going to kill Toshiba because it has to," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/09/te... tner=homepage





The Bamboozle Draws Them by the Thousands for an Emo Jamboree
Kelefa Sanneh

"Make some noise, Giants Stadium!" It was Saturday night, and Tyson Ritter, from the All-American Rejects, was saying five words he had probably always wanted to say. Unfortunately, he had to add two more words, but he didn't seem to mind. The full phrase was, "Make some noise, Giants Stadium parking lot!" And the parking lot did as it was told.

The occasion was the Bamboozle, a Saturday-and-Sunday festival that brought about 25,000 thousand fans each day to the picturesque concrete expanse behind the stadium. From noon until 10 p.m. on both days, 10 dozen bands took to six stages; the headliners were Fall Out Boy and Taking Back Sunday. Even more than the traveling Warped Tour, the Bamboozle is a tribute to the health and energy of the plaintive, punkish music known as emo: nearly every band onstage fit that description, comfortably or un-.

Unlike lots of music festivals, this one made an emphatic point. After two long, often exciting, meteorologically tricky (the temperature plummeted at sunset), not-at-all-unpleasant days, it seemed clear that the emo onslaught wouldn't — and shouldn't — end any time soon.

Something else seemed clear, too. For these listeners, emo mainly lives on MP3's and other digital media; in fact, you might say emo is the first major rock genre of the MP3 era. (But the current boom in emo has antecedents in the 1980's and 90's.) And so while other festivals are full of fans devoted to specific groups this one was full of fans devoted to songs. Whatever was happening onstage, some people — maybe lots of people — were sure to be singing along.

The popularity of the All-American Rejects is testament to this song-centric culture. They specialize in big, straightforward, slightly whiny rock songs; they aren't particularly cool, loud, raucous or — to say the least — punk. But no matter; everyone knew these songs ("Move Along," their current single, has reached No.15 on Billboard's Hot 100), so everyone joined in.

The scene wasn't much different at the smaller stages. This was a well-informed crowd, thanks in part to myspace.com, which makes it easy (and free) to sample new music. So there were few surprises: these concertgoers already knew which bands they liked, and they moved among the stages like savvy consumers scouring familiar shops. It wasn't unusual to see a seemingly uninterested fan wandering away from the stage while mouthing every word. In lieu of hard statistics, here's a guess: at least half the bands had at least one song that at least half the concertgoers knew.

Right now, some of the biggest bands in this world — and at this festival — are the most theatrical. Fall Out Boy has sold over 2 million copies of its most recent album, "From Under the Cork Tree" (Island Def Jam), which is full of witty, petulant odes; the band's set was triumphant proof that few emo bands write better or more infectious songs. Other Bamboozle bands currently near the top of the emo heap: the emerging favorites Panic! at the Disco (which played an impressive set overstuffed with arch, often ridiculous lyrics); the strutters in the Long Island band Taking Back Sunday (whose new album hit the charts at No. 2 last week); the long-running California goth-punk act AFI (which is to release a new album next month).

A few bands were eyeing a more straightforward path to success. The Jonas Brothers, a young group that's getting used to being described as a (slightly) louder version of Hanson, played a low-key set on one of the smallest stages; it's getting a huge promotional push, which may well earn it the screaming preteen fans it clearly wants. At the same time, the hard-working pop-punk band Paramore was attracting a bigger crowd. The band is led by Hayley Williams, a tiny and energetic 17-year-old with a big voice. All she needs is a few more catchy songs; here's hoping she gets them soon.

Some of the most exciting music at the Bamboozle came from bands that managed to smuggle melodies into chaotic, metal-influenced songs. The band From First to Last has already released one of the year's best emo albums, "Heroine" (Epitaph). One of the weekend's highlights was a spitting-mad version of "The Latest Plague" from that CD. The Michigan band Chiodos showed off their quick-cut tantrums (metal riffs suddenly giving way to keyboard interludes) on Saturday, then returned on Sunday — under a pseudonym — to do it again.

And then there was Underoath, a Christian band from Florida with a good shot at becoming one of this year's emo success stories. While it played, an airplane circled above, advertising its new album, "Define the Great Line" (Tooth & Nail/Solid State), due out next month. The songs veered from death-metal chaos to anthemic choruses. And despite the airplane, the singer, Dallas Taylor, claimed he didn't mind if fans couldn't wait for the release date. "I'm not offended if you've already downloaded it," he said. "Just sing the words."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/09/ar...bamb.html?8dpc





Apple to sell Fox shows on iTunes
AP

Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store has started selling TV programs from Fox Entertainment Group's networks, including shows such as "24," the companies said Tuesday.

Shows for sale will cost $1.99 each to download and will come from the News Corp. unit's networks including Fox and FX as well as the 20th Century Fox Television library.

In addition to "24," programs will include "The Shield," "Prison Break," and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," among others.

Apple already sells shows from ABC, CBS and NBC on iTunes.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan...h_down&chan=tc





Chatterbox

SO ******. I am never buying anything from iTunes again. I could have spent $10 more dollars and gotten a RHCP membership and already had my tickets.
Jennabee

I feel like apple beat me up and stole my lunch money.
Phil88
http://discussions.apple.com/thread....73429&tstart=0





They can spam a million users a minute, but they can’t email a promo code…

iTunes Users Furious Over Botched Ticket Promo
Katie Marsal

A large number of Apple Computer's iTunes customers, who paid in advance for rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers' new album "Stadium Arcadium" in order to receive a Ticketmaster code that would allow them to purchase advance tickets for the bands upcoming tour, did not receive those codes before ticket pre-sales began on Tuesday and are now enraged with the iPod maker.

Hundreds of the angry iTunes customers are convening on the company's support forms, demanding to know why they did not receive their Ticketmaster pre-sale code Monday evening as Apple had led them to believe.

In an April press release advocating the promotion, Apple said: "Red Hot Chili Peppers fans who pre-order the album on iTunes will also receive an email with a code that they can use at Ticketmaster.com starting May 9 to purchase concert tickets before they go on sale to the general public on May 13."

A large majority of the customers still had not received their codes by Tuesday afternoon, despite the fact that pre-sales for many of the band's shows had already begun. Some of these customers reported receiving blank emails or emails about the promotion that lacked the special code, while others say they received no correspondence from Apple whatsoever.

One customer looking to purchase tickets for the Chili Peppers' Toronto, Canada show had not received his ticket code on Tuesday when he was informed that floor seats for the show had already sold out.

"I don't have my code yet either. This is the whole reason I pre-ordered Stadium Arcadium in the first place," said another disgruntled customer who plunked down $20 to participate in the promo. "Will someone at Apple please give us a shout?"

Apple has made no official comment on the issue, though several customers who contacted the company's various telephone hotlines were informed "Apple is aware of the problem" and that it is "working to get the emails [with the codes] out as soon as possible."
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1732





Red Hot Chili Peppers Left Broken Hearted After 'Stadium Arcadium' Leaks Online

Red Hot Chili Peppers have been left broken hearted after their new double album 'Stadium Arcadium' was leaked online ahead of its official release on May 8.

Posting on the band's official website, bassist Flea has revealed that learning of the leak has been a "bitter pill to swallow".

"If you down load it now off one of these file sharing sites you will be getting a pale imitation of the record," he said. "It will be of the poor sound quality of the technique they used to get it on there and that will break my heart, it will break John Frusciante's heart, it will break Anthony Kiedis' heart and it will break the heart of Chad Smith."

He added: "Yes, we worked for a year and a half to make the epic record of our lives and it is sad to me for the business reasons of course. I think we are selling something really cool and we put all we had into it, 28 songs, 2 hours of the best that we can offer and I think it is a fair deal for everyone.

"For people to just steal a poor sound quality version of it for free because some asshole stole it and put it on the internet is sad to me."

However, in the lengthy posting, Flea explained that the worst thing about 'Stadium Arcadium' being available on filesharing sites is the inferior quality of the internet versions.

"The thing that really bums me out is we worked so hard, and so thoughtfully, all of us, for so long to make this record sound as warm and full from top to bottom as was possible," he said. "We spent day and night for a year making sure every little sound was just right, that they were all put together in the most beautiful way we could.

"I can not put in words how much this record, 'Stadium Arcadium', means to us, how sacred the sound of it is to us, and how many sleepless nights and hardworking days we all had thinking about how to make it be the best sounding thing we could and now, for someone to take it and put it out there with this poor sound quality it is a painful pill for us to swallow."

Signing off the message, Flea urged fans to "let (your conscience) be your guide)" over whether they choose to illegally download the album, adding: "To take a version that has been defiled sound wise, a version in which some idiot has taken our year and a half of soul baring work and pissed all over it - that will break our hearts."

Meanwhile, to celebrate the official release of 'Stadium Arcadium', Red Hot Chili Peppers have announced details of their summer North American tour.
http://www.nme.com/news/red-hot-chili-peppers/22971





A duck in every pot, a mod in every box

China Campuses' Internet Hall Monitors
Howard W. French

To her fellow students, Hu Yingying appears to be a typical undergraduate, plain of dress, quick with a smile and perhaps possessed of a little extra spring in her step, but otherwise decidedly ordinary.

And for Hu, in her second year at Shanghai Normal University, coming across as ordinary is just fine, given the parallel life she leads. For several hours each week she repairs to a little-known on-campus office crammed with computers, where she logs on, unsuspected by other students, to help police her university's Internet forums.

Once online, following suggestions from professors or older students, she introduces politically correct or innocuous themes for discussion.

Recently, she says, she started a discussion of which celebrities make the best role models, a topic suggested by a professor as appropriate.

Politics, even university politics, are banned on university bulletin boards like these. Hu says she and her fellow moderators try to steer what they consider negative conversations in a positive direction with a well-placed comment. Anything they deem offensive, she says, they report to the university's Web master for deletion.

During some heated anti-Japanese demonstrations last year, for example, moderators intervened to cool nationalist passions, encouraging students to mute their criticisms of Japan and discouraging any bellicose remarks.

Part traffic cop, part informer, part discussion moderator - and all done without the knowledge of her fellow students - Hu is a small part of a huge effort in mainland China to sanitize the Internet.

For years, China has had its Internet police, reportedly including as many as 50,000 state agents who are online, blocking Web sites, erasing commentary and arresting people for what is deemed anti-Party, or anti-social, speech.

But Hu, one of 500 students at her university's newly bolstered, student-run Internet monitoring group, is a cog in a different kind of machine, an ostensibly voluntary one that the Chinese government is mobilizing to help it manage the monumental task of censoring the Web.

In April, that effort was named "Let the Winds of a Civilized Internet Blow," and is itself part of a broader "socialist morality" campaign started by the Chinese leadership to reinforce social and political control, known as the Eight Honors and Disgraces.

Under the Civilized Internet initiative, service providers and other companies have been urged to purge their servers of offensive content, ranging from pornography to anything that smacks of overt political criticism or dissent.

The Chinese authorities say that more than two million supposedly "unhealthy" images have already been deleted under this campaign by various mainland Internet service providers, and more than six hundred supposedly "unhealthy" Internet forums were shut down.

These deletions are presented as voluntary acts of corporate civic virtue, but have a coercive aspect to them, because no company would likely risk being singled out as a laggard.

Having started its own ambitious Internet censorship efforts, or "harmful information defense system," long before the latest government campaign, Shanghai Normal University, where Hu monitors her fellow students, is promoting itself within the education establishment as a pioneer.

Although most of its students know nothing of the university's Internet monitoring efforts, the leaders of Shanghai Normal conducted seminars last week for dozens of other Chinese universities and education officials on how to emulate their success in taming the Web.

University officials turned away a foreign reporter, however, making clear that the university does not wish to publicize its activities more broadly. "Our system is not very mature, and since we've just started operating it, there's not much to say about it," said Li Ximeng, deputy director of the university propaganda department. "Our system is not open for media, and we don't want to have it appear in the news or be publicized."

For her part, Hu beams with pride over her contribution toward building what the government calls a "harmonious society."

"We don't control things, but we really don't want bad or wrong things to appear on the Web sites," she said. "According to our social and educational systems, we should judge what is right and wrong. And as I'm a student cadre, I need to play a pioneer role among other students, to express my opinion, to make stronger my belief in communism."

While the larger Civilized Internet campaign all but requires companies to step forward and demonstrate their vigilance against what the government deems harmful information, the new censorship drive on college campuses shows greater subtlety and some might say greater deviousness, too.

It is here that the government is facing perhaps its most serious challenge: how to orient and maintain control of young people's thoughts in a world of increasingly free and diverse information. And the answer relies heavily on stealth.

For one thing, interviews with numerous students at a sprawling and well- manicured campus of Shanghai Normal University showed that few knew anything about the student-run monitoring, and none of those who had heard of it had imagined that such a large number of students had been enlisted for it.

"It's true there are some bad things on the Internet, but they shouldn't overdo it," said one student, Liao Xiaojing. "Five hundred is too many."

Others expressed more alarm. "Five hundred members sounds unbelievable," said a male undergraduate who gave his name only as Zhu. "It feels very weird to think there are 500 people out there anonymously trying to guide you."

The monitors themselves have been convinced that they are not engaging in censorship, or exercising control over the free speech of others. In interviews with five of the monitors, each initially rejected the idea that they were controlling expression, and occasionally even spoke of the importance of free speech.

Tang Guochao, 20, spoke in fervent terms about what he and his fellow monitors were doing. "A bulletin board is like a family, and in a family, I want my room to be clean and well-lit, without dirty or dangerous things in it."

Chinese efforts to censor and control the Internet in the broader society have often come up short against the curiosity and inventiveness of ordinary Web surfers, who constantly develop ingenious ways to find content that is banned and to discuss controversial topics.

"I don't think anybody can possibly control any information in Internet," said Ji Xiaoyin, 20, a third-year Shanghai Normal student studying mechanical design. "If you're not allowed to talk here, you just go to another place to talk, and there are countless places for your opinions. It's easy to bypass the firewalls, and anybody who spends a little time researching it can figure it out."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/...s/chinanet.php





We’re the monopoly and we’re not going to take it!

Smaller Cable Firms Take Aim At Net Neutrality Fans
Anne Broache

Young, wealthy Internet companies like Google shouldn't expect to get "special favors" from network operators that have sunk billions of dollars into fiber investments, the head of a smaller cable company said Monday.

Rocco Commisso, CEO of New York-based Mediacom Communications, delivered the latest commentary in the ongoing Net neutrality fray at an annual Washington, D.C., summit organized by the American Cable Association, a lobbying group for small and medium-size independent cable companies. Mediacom, which bills itself as the nation's eighth-largest cable television provider, counts 1.5 million basic-cable subscribers across 23 states, according to its Web site.

"I think what the phone industry's saying and what we're saying is we've made an investment, and I don't think the government should be coming and telling us how we can work that infrastructure, simple as that," Commisso said during a panel discussion about issues faced by companies like his, adding, "Why don't they go and tell the oil companies what they should charge for their damn gas?"

The remarks indicated it's not only the nation's largest broadband players, both in the cable and the telecommunications sectors, that have voiced public opposition to what they refer to as unprecedented governmental regulation of the Internet. They've said repeatedly that without evidence of a problem, there's no need for new laws.

Net neutrality, also called network neutrality, is the philosophy that network operators should not be allowed to prioritize content and services--particularly video--that come across their pipes. Proponents have launched a campaign to enact detailed regulations barring such practices, and so far they've won over some congressional Democrats.

Network operators counter that they deserve the right to charge premium fees to bandwidth hogs in order to offset their vast investments in infrastructure and to ensure the quality and security of their products. Mediacom has made $1.7 billion in capital investments over the past decade, according to Commisso.

"It's incredible that a company like Google that's got market capitalization bigger than the combined value of the cable business....these guys just started five, 10 years ago, and they're asking for special favors already," Commisso said.

His statement conjured up earlier admissions by telecommunications power players, including one Verizon executive who cautioned that Google should not be entitled to a "free lunch."

Net neutrality advocates--which include Google, Microsoft, Amazon.com and a medley of mostly left-leaning consumer groups--argue that such a business model would lead to increased costs for Web surfers and would assault the Internet's historically open architecture.

Their rallying cry--and their very selection of the term "Net neutrality"--is nothing more than a "very, very clever D.C. campaign," charged Tom Might, CEO of Arizona-based Cable One, which has customers in 19 states with large rural populations. Politicians, he suggested, "don't know what it is, but they're afraid to be against Net neutrality because it sounds so wonderful, like Mom and apple pie."
http://news.com.com/Smaller+cable+fi...3-6069873.html





US Patent and Trademark Office to Use Peer to Patent Program
Michael Hoffman

The public will get a chance to review patents before they are approved by the USPTO

The US Patent and Trademark Office has received praise for officially launching the Peer to Patent program -- the purpose of Peer to Patent is to find patents that have been issued for already made products or items that don't properly qualify for a patent. Because the USPTO usually does not have the manpower and time to thoroughly check every patent that comes into the office, many are unjustly rubber stamped. A New York law school helped develop the Peer to Patent program that will help ease the workload of "underpaid and overwhelmed" patent examiners. The pilot program will officially begin on May 12.

One of the goals of the program is to excessively scrutinize inventions while increasing certainty and stability in the patent program. To get some more information about the Peer to Patent program, please look around this website, which also includes a very extensive FAQ section. An interesting policy is the project's response on companies or individuals that may attempt to game the system:

Competition will drive more information into the process. So long as people make valid arguments as rated by their peers, their personal agenda is irrelevant. Having many participants in the process dilutes the effect of any bad apples or unconstructive participants. Within any social reputation system, norms evolve to safeguard the quality of participation and we can expect something similar here.

Certainly, there are some interesting connotations with this idea. Imagining IBM, AMD and Intel validating or invalidating each other's patents would solve dozens, if not hundreds of fringe IP law suits before they even occur.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2217





Yea, more cables!

Putting the Wire Back Into Networking
Damon Darlin

Back in the Stone Age of home networking, anyone who wanted to play on a computer not hooked directly into an Internet connection had to snake phone lines or Ethernet wires across floors and up staircases.

People talked about a promising idea: using the electrical wiring already in the house to move data from room to room. One early application, the X10 system for controlling lights and appliances, didn't always work well. The technology was certainly not ready to be used to bring Web pages to computers anywhere in the house.

Along came the wireless network. For $50, you could get the Internet sprayed across the house and never be tethered by a cord to the wall. It was slow in those early days, notoriously unreliable, and open to interception if you couldn't bother with setting up the encryption codes.

But it caught on. According to estimates made by Parks Associates, a market research firm based in Dallas, about 12.5 million homes now have wireless networks; another 10 million homes, mostly newer ones, have Ethernet or coaxial cables in the walls.

Cheap and ubiquitous is a hard combination to beat. But wireless networks did not end the quest to put data through electrical wires.

Technology companies continued to work on the idea. Some tried using phone circuits. A version for power lines called HomePlug came out in 2002, and while it hardly affected sales of wireless network equipment, it sold enough that major companies like Intel, Cisco, Sony, Sharp and Comcast created the HomePlug Alliance to push for next-generation products, with the first to come out later this year.

"I don't think anyone had expected the technology to progress," said Andy Melder, senior vice president for sales, marketing and business development at the Intellon Corporation, a maker of chips for home networking devices that use power lines.

Some companies are not waiting. Panasonic, Netgear and Marantz are already offering products that will move data through home electrical lines faster than routers using the current Wi-Fi standard for wireless networking, 802.11g.

Panasonic started selling its HD-PLC Ethernet adapters for power lines last month. A $200 starter kit provides two units, each about the size of two sticks of butter.

One adapter is attached to a router with a short Ethernet cable and plugged into a nearby wall outlet. The second device is plugged into an outlet elsewhere in the house. When a computer is linked to it with an Ethernet cable, data is transmitted through the home's electrical wiring at speeds of up to 190 megabits a second. Up to seven devices can run on the network.

Netgear, a leading maker of wireless networking gear, will be selling a similar system next month for about $300. (Every additional module costs about $150.) It moves data at a slightly faster rate.

Marantz says its ZR6001SP receiver will send music to special speakers in another room over power lines. The system, which includes both devices, will sell for about $1,300. Additional speaker units cost about $300. The music listener controls the receiver and the CD players or iPods connected to it from a control pad on the speakers.

"We were getting many requests from installers, like how do I get multiroom audio if I can't run wires," said Kevin Zarow, vice president for marketing and product development. The Marantz device also solves the problem of running speaker wires across a room.

At first blush, these products may seem to be nonstarters. After all, who would want to pay two or three times the price of a wireless network?

The answer lies in the simplicity.

Robert Stephens, founder and "chief inspector" of the Geek Squad installation and troubleshooting division at Best Buy, said installing wireless networks was the leading reason for house calls. "It's why most people need us," he said, noting that the complexity of installing a wireless network is evident from the fact that return rates on wireless networking devices drop to nearly zero when his installers do the work.

The Panasonic network over power lines, on the other hand, was up and running in less than five minutes. Encryption was automatically enabled, and there was no need to configure anything. It worked well even in a house with 90-year-old cloth-wrapped tube-and-knob wiring where the lights sometimes flicker. And though Panasonic warns that operating a power drill or a vacuum cleaner on the same outlet may cause an interruption of Internet service, running both while using the HD-PLC on the old wiring did not pose a problem.

The makers of all three products said that people who cannot get whole-house coverage with a wireless system or those plagued by dead zones might find it appealing.

But the real selling point for the technology is that it can transmit high-definition video without pixelating or skipping. It can claim that advantage over wireless networks — at least for now — because it has a higher data transmission rate.

"Three years ago, the majority of devices connected to a home network were home computers," said Mike Timar, national marketing manager for Panasonic's communications and home office electronics division. "But today there are MP3 players, game consoles and high-definition TV."

Wireless routers using the 802.11g standard move data at 54 megabits a second. That's fine for Web pages, but too constrained to move a high-definition video image, which needs about 85 megabits of capacity. The Panasonic and Netgear products have more than enough room to handle that, as will the HomePlug devices coming out later this year.

The next-generation wireless routers, using the 802.11n standard, will also transmit about 200 megabits a second, but a network may initially cost $150 to $250, erasing the cost advantage that wireless now holds.

Pitching the device to the next generation of TV watchers with high-definition televisions and DVD players also pulls in the market for game console users who might want to run multiplayer games from multiple rooms. It also neatly sidesteps the argument that wireless is more convenient.

"If you are watching TV, you don't care about mobility," said Kartik Gada, Netgear's networking product line manager.

There is a hitch, however. The three companies' products are not compatible with one another. Nor are they compatible with the products adhering to the standards set in August by the HomePlug Alliance.

Netgear and Panasonic jumped the gun on the standard out of frustration with what they said was the slow pace of the alliance. (Marantz is using a system called DAvED, which stands for digital audio via electrical distribution.)

"Not going with a standard-based approach is problematic," said Mr. Melder of Intellon, who is also a spokesman for the HomePlug Alliance. "It tends to freeze the consumer."

Panasonic executives said the company's breaking of the ranks would not necessarily create compatibility problems in the long run. They said a second standards group, the Consumer Electronics Powerline Communication Alliance, is working to ensure that all the networking devices for power lines could coexist and communicate.

There is something that all the makers of such gear, including Netgear and Cisco's Linksys unit, can agree on. People will probably end up having both wireless and wired connections in their homes.

Within about 18 months, cable companies may start offering set-top boxes with networking abilities over power lines. Computer makers, as well as television and DVD makers, will do the same. At that point, all a consumer will have to do is stick the power plug into the wall and the data will come racing down the wires with the electricity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/11/te.../11basics.html





Demi-Gods
Jack



Spore is the new game from Sim City creator Will Wright. Players assemble exotic avatars in a Pixar-like process, learn behavioral traits and wander strange planets in the richly drawn universe. It’s like a sci-fi Sims adventure for older gamers. Fascinating presentation available for download as a 200 meg .mov file.





Dolphins, Like Humans, Recognize Names

Bottlenose dolphins can call each other by name when they whistle, making them the only animals besides humans known to recognize such identity information, scientists reported on Monday.

Scientists have long known that dolphins' whistling calls include repeated information thought to be their names, but a new study indicates dolphins recognize these names even when voice cues are removed from the sound.

For example, a dolphin might be expected to recognize its name if called by its mother, but the new study found most dolphins recognized names -- their signature whistles -- even when emitted without inflection or other vocal cues.

More than that, two dolphins may refer to a third by the third animal's name, said Laela Sayigh, one of three authors of a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"They are known to produce these individually distinctive signature whistles, like names," Sayigh said in a telephone interview. She said the researchers wanted to know what information in the whistles helped dolphins identify each other's names.

The scientists already knew that dolphins responded to whistles, but wondered if something in the actual voice of the whistling dolphin was making the identity clear, or if the name itself was enough for recognition.

To find out, they studied bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota Bay, Florida. Instead of playing recordings of actual dolphins making signature whistles, the researchers synthesized signature whistles with the caller's voice features removed and played them to dolphins through an underwater speaker.

In nine out of 14 cases, the dolphin would turn more often toward the speaker if it heard a whistle that sounded like a close relative's.

"It's a very interesting finding that encourages further research, because they are using whistles as referential signals -- that's what words are," said Sayigh, of the University of North Carolina Wilmington. "Dolphins appear to be using these arbitrary signals to identify another dolphin."

She stopped short of saying dolphins might have a human-like language.

"I tend to shy away from using the word 'language' myself, because it's such a loaded term," Sayigh said. "I still really feel strongly that there is no evidence for something like our language. (Dolphins) have got the cognitive skills at least to have referential signals."
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science...eut/index.html






Korea Unveils World's Second Android

Korea has developed its own android capable of facial expressions on its humanoid face, the second such machine to be developed after one from Japan. The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy invited some 60 children to the Kyoyuk Munhwa Hoekwan in Seoul to introduce Ever-1 to the public. The name combines the first human name found in the Bible, Eve, with the "r" in robot.


The Korean Institute for Industrial Technology (KITECH) said the android, which has the face and body of a woman in her 20s, is 160 cm tall and weighs 50 kg. Ever-1 can move its upper body and “express” happiness, anger, sadness and pleasure. But the robot is still incapable of moving its lower half. Ever-1's skin is made from a silicon jelly that feels similar to human skin. The face is a composite of two stars, and its torso on a singer.

The 15 monitors in the robotic face allow it to interpret the face of an interlocutor and look back at whoever stands near it. Ever-1 also recognizes 400 words and can hold a basic verbal exchange.

"The robot can serve to provide information in department stores and museums or read stories to children; it’s capable of both education and entertainment functions," said KITECH scientist Baeg Moon-hong, part of the team that created the robot. "The Ever-2, which will have improved vision and ability to express emotions and can sit or stand, will be debuted towards the end of the year."
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/ht...605040016.html





Report Casts Doubt on Vista's Security Impact
Matt Hines

An early review of the much-publicized security features due in Microsoft's next-generation Windows Vista operating system concludes that the tools may be so unfriendly to users that they delay enterprises' move to adopt the new product.

In a research report published May 8, analysts at Boston-based Yankee Group said that Microsoft's latest attempt to better secure its dominant OS is significantly off the mark. Based on feedback garnered by the experts from a wide range of software developers already testing preview versions of Vista, Yankee Group said that the intrusive nature of the security features could turn off IT administrators and users alike.

While the researchers laud Microsoft's efforts to reduce account privileges to slow the spread of malware, lock down holes in its Internet Explorer browser, improve network access controls and integrate anti-spyware and anti-phishing applications into Vista, the report concludes that the execution of some of those plans may encourage companies to take a wait-and-see approach with the OS.

Andy Jaquith, the analyst who authored the report for Yankee Group, said that many people already working with Vista feel that Microsoft's security tools are unnecessarily repetitive and even patronizing, and interrupt the workflow of administrators to the extent it makes their jobs harder to perform.

Specifically, Jaquith, who tested a preview version of Vista released in December 2005, said that Microsoft's incorporation of user accounts that strictly limit access privileges via its User Account Control feature will be "particularly problematic."

Microsoft representatives didn't immediately offer comment on the findings of the Yankee Group report, but confirmed that they had read its contents.

Guru Jakob Nielsen offers advice on designing applications for usability. Click here to watch the video.

By forcing end users with such accounts to constantly seek approval from administrators to complete tasks they manipulate freely in today's versions of Windows, and creating headaches for those people charged with handing out such permissions, Jaquith said the features may simply be ignored or shut off by many people.

Read more here about delays in Vista.

"The User Account Control feature is like Chatty Kathy, it's always in your face and the danger is that users are going to start treating it like the snooze button on their alarm clock and hitting 'yes' without looking to see why they've been prompted," said Jaquith. "A lot of people, especially home users, will probably turn the feature off so they'll essentially be no better off than before."

Another issue with the User Access Control is that it is incompatible with popularly used anti-virus applications from companies such as Symantec and McAfee, forcing customers to wait until those firms have rewritten their products to mesh properly with Vista.

The analyst said he was surprised to see that the new SafeDocs backup program shipped with Vista can only be run by IT administrators, not end users.

Next Page: Putting itself at a disadvantage.

Yankee Group contends that Microsoft has also put itself at a disadvantage by failing to invest sufficient effort into its partnership programs for ISVs, making it likely that additional third-party programs being built to run on Vista will need more development work before coming to market.

Related delays could keep Vista-oriented products from arriving for as much as a year after the OS is introduced sometime in 2007, the report said.

Jaquith said that Microsoft is headed in the right direction with its security work in Vista, but he said he believes that it will take the company at least a year before it is able to make the features it has already added more digestible for administrators and end users.

One of the major issues will be the way in which the security tools "fundamentally shift" the way that administrators interact with Vista, he said, in that people who were used to having almost unlimited access to desktop controls will find themselves more limited in their scope of authority.

"It's not a step backward, but the features are going to cause some disruption in the manner that people work and will interfere with some people's perceived ability to do their job in short term," said Jaquith.

"If people had unfettered access to everything before, putting limits on that is going to be pretty jarring, but I think it's something that Microsoft had to do in some way."

So many viruses depend on their ability to take over computers' Windows administrative controls in order to spread themselves that the feature should have success in slowing attacks and protecting corporate networks, the analyst said.

In light of the issues surrounding Vista's security tools, Yankee Group is predicting that the software introduction will have a limited effect on the anti-malware applications industry, at least in the next year or two. Despite the added time to compete against Microsoft, researchers said that many providers of individual security technologies addressed by Vista, such as anti-spyware or anti-phishing filters, will likely consolidate to offer more integrated packages of defense software.

Ziff Davis Media eSeminars invite: Join us on May 11 at 2 p.m. ET to learn critical best practices for e-mail and instant messaging applications, including tips on "hygiene" from Gartner.

"We're telling enterprises, if you've got security controls in place and third-party packages that you're working with, keep using them, but Vista is eventually going to change the need for those," said Jaquith.

"We feel companies should really wait until the end of 2007, or the beginning of 2008 at the very earliest to get into the work, as Microsoft will have likely issued a service pack by that time to address any major issues."
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1958355,00.asp





DS Browser Screenshots

The Opera browser for Nintendo DS is a version of the Opera browser for logging onto the internet with the WiFi-enabled Nintendo DS. Using the DS card, you can connect to a network via a HotSpot or wireless router, and begin browsing on two screens. With an on-screen keypad and stylus, users can easily navigate the Web from their Nintendo DS with PDA-like functionality. The two screens are used for multifunction purposes — both can show one web page together, or one can show a zoomed-in view of the page, and when typing, the bottom screen shows the text being entered while the top shows the webpage you are on.
http://wiinintendo.net/?p=110





Spot a Bug, Go to Jail
Jennifer Granick

Circuit Court
A new federal prosecution again raises the issue of whether computer security experts must fear prison time for investigating and reporting vulnerabilities.

On April 28, 2006, Eric McCarty was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. McCarty is a professional computer security consultant who noticed that there was a problem with the way the University of Southern California had constructed its web page for online applications. A database programming error allowed outsiders to obtain applicants' personal information, including Social Security numbers.

For proof, the man copied seven applicants' personal records and anonymously sent them to a reporter for SecurityFocus. The journalist notified the school, the school fixed the problem, and the reporter wrote an article about it.

The incident might have ended there, but didn't.

The school went through its server logs and easily traced the activity back to McCarty, who had made no attempt to hide his tracks. The FBI interviewed McCarty, who explained everything to the agents. Then the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles charged the security expert with violating 18 U.S.C. 1030, the federal computer crime law.

Will they ever learn? In 2002, the U.S. Attorney in Texas charged Stefan Puffer with violating section 1030 after Puffer demonstrated to the Harris County District Court clerk that the court's wireless network was readily accessible to attackers. The prosecution claimed that Puffer, a security consultant, unlawfully accessed the system. Puffer argued that he was trying to help the county. A jury acquitted Puffer in about 15 minutes.

In 2004, Bret McDanel was convicted of violating section 1030 when he e-mailed truthful information about a security problem to the customers of his former employer. The prosecution argued that McDanel had accessed the company e-mail server by sending the messages, and that the access was unauthorized within the meaning of the law because the company didn't want this information distributed. They even claimed the integrity of the system was impaired because a lot more people (customers) now knew that the system was insecure.

Notwithstanding the First Amendment's free speech guarantees, the trial judge convicted and sentenced McDanel to 16 months in prison. I represented him on appeal, and argued that reporting on security flaws doesn't impair the integrity of computer systems. In an extremely unusual turn of events, the prosecution did not defend its actions, but voluntarily moved to vacate the conviction.

The McCarty prosecution, brought by the same office that so egregiously mishandled the McDanel incident, is in the same vein. As with Puffer and McDanel, the government will have to prove not only that McCarty accessed the school system without authorization, but also that he had some kind of criminal intent.

Likely, they will point to the fact that McCarty copied some applicant records. "It wasn't that he could access the database and showed that it could be bypassed," Michael Zweiback, an assistant attorney for the Department of Justice's cybercrime and intellectual property crimes section, told the SecurityFocus reporter. "He went beyond that and gained additional information regarding the personal records of the applicant."

But if he wanted to reveal USC's security gaffe, it's not clear what else he could have done. He had to get a sampling of the exposed records to prove that his claims were true. SecurityFocus reported that USC administrators initially claimed that only two database records were exposed, and only acknowledged that the entire database was threatened after additional records were shown to them.

In any event, McCarty had arguably already done enough to get himself prosecuted by this Justice Department.

The federal statute and copycat state laws prohibit accessing computers or a computer system without authorization, or in excess of authorization, and thereby obtaining information or causing damage.

What does it mean to access a networked computer? Any communication with that computer -- even if it's simply one system asking another "are you there?" -- transmits data to the other machine. The cases say that e-mail, web surfing and port scanning all access computers. One court has even held that when I send an e-mail, not only am I accessing your e-mail server and your computer, but I'm also "accessing" every computer in between that helps transmit my message.

That means the law frequently rests on the definition of "authorization." Many cases suggest that if the owner doesn't want you to use the system, for whatever reason, your use is unauthorized. In one case I took on appeal, the trial court had held that searching for airline fares on a publicly available, unprotected website was unauthorized access because the airline had asked the searcher to stop.

One Western District of Washington case, Shurgard Storage Ctrs., Inc. v. Safeguard Self Storage, Inc., says that when a company employee knows he is going to leave his position to go work for a competitor, but continues to use his computer account and copy information there for the purposes of aiding his new bosses, his access is unauthorized. A federal court in Maryland went the other way in a case with similar facts: In International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers v. Werner-Matsuda, a union employee who accessed her computer account for the purposes of helping a rival union recruit members did not violate the law. The statute proscribes unauthorized access, not authorized access for unwanted purposes, said the court.

What this means for McCarty is that there are ample legal reasons for the prosecution to drop the charges against him. Yet, there are also ample legal reasons why a security professional, upon finding a database flaw, might worry that the find would bring criminal charges rather than thanks.

This situation must change. People need to be able to exercise a little bit of self-help before plugging their data into web forms, and security professionals who happen upon vulnerabilities shouldn't have to choose between leaving the system wide open to attack and prosecution.

One solution might be to focus more heavily on whether the user has criminal intent when accessing the system. Another might be to criminalize specific activities on the computer, but not access to a public system itself. A third might be to define unlawful access as the circumvention of some kind of security measure. As we have more cases like McCarty's, McDanel's and Puffer's, perhaps security professionals will pressure state legislatures and Congress to improve the computer crime laws.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/ci...?tw=wn_index_6





Security Absurdity: The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security.

A long-overdue wake up call for the information security community.
Noam Eppel

Boiling Frog Syndrome

They say if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will, of course, frantically try to scramble out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite complacently. As you turn up the heat, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death. The security industry is much like that frog; completely and uncontrollably in disarray - yet we tolerated it since we are use to it.

It is time to admit what many security professional already know: We as security professional are drastically failing ourselves, our community and the people we are meant to protect. Too many of our security layers of defense are broken. Security professionals are enjoying a surge in business and growing salaries and that is why we tolerate the dismal situation we are facing. Yet it is our mandate, first and foremost, to protect.

The ramifications of our failure is immense. The success of the Internet and the global economy relies on trust and security. Billions of dollars of ecommerce opportunities are being lost due to inadequate security. A recent survey of U.S. adults revealed that three times the number of respondents believed they were more likely to be victimized in an online attack than a physical crime. A recent Gartner survey that indicated that 14% of those who had banked online had stopped because of security concerns, and 30% had altered their usage. People are simply losing trust in the Internet.

The security community is not just failing in one specific way, it is failing across multiple categories. It is being out innovated.

It is losing the digital battle over cyberspace.

Failing? Says Who?

Today we have forth and fifth generation firewalls, behavior-based anti-malware software, host and network intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention system, one-time password tokens, automatic vulnerability scanners, personal firewalls, etc., all working to keep us secure. Is this keeping us secure? According to USA Today, 2005 was the worst year ever for security breaches of computer systems. The US Treasury Department's Office of Technical Assistance estimates cybercrime proceeds in 2004 were $105 billion, greater than those of illegal drug sales. According to the recently released 2005 FBI/CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey, nearly nine out of 10 U.S. businesses suffered from a computer virus, spyware or other online attack in 2004 or 2005 despite widespread use of security software. According to the FBI, every day 27,000 have their identities stolen. And companies like IBM are putting out warning calls about more targeted, more sophisticated and more damaging attacks in 2006.

Something is seriously wrong.

One only has to open a newspaper and view current headlines documenting the almost constant loss of personal and financial data due to carelessness and hacking. It isn't just careless individuals that are leaking confidential information - it is large, multinational corporations with smart, capable I.T. departments with dedicated security professionals and huge security budgets.

Credit Card Breach Exposes 40 Million Accounts
Bank Of America Loses A Million Customer Records
Pentagon Hacker Compromises Personal Data
Online Attack Puts 1.4 Million Records At Risk
Hacker Faces Extradition Over 'Biggest Military Computer Hack Of All Time'
Laptop Theft Puts Data Of 98,000 At Risk
Medical Group: Data On 185,000 People Stolen
Hackers Grab LexisNexis Info on 32000 People
ChoicePoint Data Theft Widens To 145,000 People
PIN Scandal 'Worst Hack Ever'; Citibank Only The Start
ID Theft Hit 3.6 Million In U.S.
Georgia Technology Authority Hack Exposes Confidential Information of 570,000 Members
Scammers Access Data On 35,000 Californians
Payroll Firm Pulls Web Services Citing Data Leak
Hacker Steals Air Force Officers' Personal Information
Undisclosed Number of Verizon Employees at Risk of Identity Theft
Just How Bad Is It?

In some cases, even our best recommended security practices are failing.

In a recent experiment, AvanteGarde deployed half a dozen systems in honeypot style, using default security settings. It then analyzed the machines' performance by tallying the attacks, counting the number of compromises, and timing how long it took an attack to successfully hijack a computer once it was connected to the Internet. The average time until a successful compromise was just four minutes!

A person can go to his/her local computer store and purchase an expensive new computer, plug it in, turn it on and go get a coffee. When he/she returns the computer could already be infected with a trojan and being used in a botnet to send out spam, participate in phishing attacks, virus propagation, and denial-of-service attacks, etc.

The first thing most consumers do with a new computer is surf the Internet, play games, send emails - not install patches. However, even if a person was security-aware and even if the person followed SANS Incident Response Center's recommendations for Surviving the First Day of Windows XP, they will still be left vulnerable as the process of downloading and installing the latest Microsoft patches which may be as small as 70 megabytes (MB) or as large as 260 MB, takes longer then the time it takes for an unpatched computer to be compromised. "In some instances, someone had taken complete control of the machine in as little as 30 seconds," said Marcus Colombano, a partner with AvanteGarde.
The Failures Are Everywhere

The effects of our failure can be seen everywhere.

Spyware
The average user's computer is absolutely crawling with spyware and popups. According to the National Cyber Security Alliance a staggering 91 percent in the study have spyware on their computers. According to a report from EarthLink and Webroot Software, a scans of over 1 million Internet-connected computers found there's an average of almost 28 spyware programs running on each computer. Spyware can cause extremely slow performance, excessive and unsolicited pop-up advertisements, hijacked home pages, theft of personal information (including financial information such as credit card numbers), monitoring of Web-browsing activity for marketing purposes, routing of HTTP requests to advertising sites, etc. Sometimes Spyware can cross the line when it expose adult pornography to children.

Eric Howes, a renowned security researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found that many of the best-performing anti-spyware scanner "fail miserably" when it comes to removing spyware from infected computers, with some missing up to 25% percent of the critical files and registry entries installed by the malicious programs. Recovering from malware is becoming impossible, according to Microsoft.

Phishing
Phishing scams now exceed 40 million attempts per week. Phishing attacks started as poorly written email messages in broken English that only the most gullible would fall for. Today Phishing attacks are sophisticated operations with emails and fake websites that appear almost identical to the real thing. In June 2004, the Gartner Group reported that online bank accounts had been looted of $2.4 billion just in the previous 12 months. It estimated that 1.98 million adults in America had suffered losses with Phishing attacks which usually impersonate well known brands such as eBay, PayPal, Visa, SouthTrust Bank, KeyBank, AOL, Comcast, Earthlink, Citizen Bank, Verizon, etc.

George Ou revealed that many large American financial institutions are not using SSL to verify their identity to the customer. This makes it more easy for a phishing attacker to intercept and spoof a financial web site. Financial institutions that were identified as not using SSL properly include: American Express, Bank of America, Chase, Countrywide, DCU, Georgia Telco Credit Union, Keybank, NationalCity, NAVY Federal, PSECU, US Bank, Wachovia, and Washington Mutual.

Trojans & Viruses & Worms
There are literally thousands of new trojans, viruses and worms created each and every month. In the past, where as malware-creation was done mostly out of curiosity, entertainment or in search of notoriety, today they are being driven by financial returns and profits. Previously, the greatest potential danger was the deletion of computer files. Nowadays, your money and confidential information is at risk.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) estimates that computer crime costs American companies a staggering $62 billion a year—with computer viruses, worms or Trojan horses plaguing 84 percent of the 2,066 respondents to the agency’s 2005 security survey. Microsoft has had over two billion downloads of its malicious software removal tool in the last year, which tells us something about the overall size of the malicious software problem.

Malware is becoming ever more dangerous and sophisticated. A new class of cyrpto-viruses such as Ransom.A.Trojan and Zippo.A, infects a computer and encrypt documents on the hard drive. These viruses then demands the user to send money via paypal or Western Union to a designated account in order to reveal the password needed to decrypt the files. These "ransomware" viruses usually demand a relatively small amount of money (From 10.99 to a few hundred dollars) in exchange for the password which increases the likelihood that the ransom will be paid.

New generation of rootkits are becoming increasingly difficult to detect. Microsoft Research labs created the first proof-of-concept prototype for virtual machine-based rootkits called SubVirt. VM Rootkits drops a virtual machine monitor underneath an operating system, which makes the rootkit virtually impossible to detect from the host operating system because its state cannot be accessed by security software running on the target system.

Today's malware propagation strategies are overwhelming and exploiting the weakness in the industry-standard, signature-based detection method of most anti-virus software.

The conventional signature-based approach, which involves maintaining a library of characteristics of each and every malicious attack, is fast falling behind. It is completely reactive. The speed of attack and propagation is such that patches simply cannot be issued quickly enough. In 2001, the infamous Code Red Worm was infecting a remarkable 2,000 new hosts each minute. Nick Weaver at UC Berkeley proposed the possibility of a "Flash Worm" which could spread across the Internet and infect all vulnerable servers in less than 15 minutes. A well engineered flash worm could spread worldwide in a matter of seconds.

Another method to bypass signature-detection methods is custom-designed trojans such as Trojan.Mdropper.B and Trojan.Riler.C that are being created to target a specific company or industry. On June 16, the United Kingdom's incident response team, the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre, warned that stealthy Trojan-horse attacks were targeting specific U.K. companies and government agencies.

"I think it would be very, very naive for any company to ignore these attacks. The lack of instances makes this more insidious, because it's likely that that no one is detecting the attacks. People may only notice it months later--by then, it is too late." said Mark Sunner, chief technology officer, MessageLabs.

Spam
Bill Gates, the co-founder and chief software architect of Microsoft predicted the Death of Spam by 2006. Spam activity has increased 65% since January 2002 according to Postini. And as of April 2006 they report that 70% of all emails - or 10 out of 14 emails - are spam which includes unsolicited commercial advertisements, stock scams, adult content, financial hoaxes, etc.

Not surprisingly, spam is predicted to get much worse. At the 2006 European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research conference in Hamburg, John Aycock and Nathan Friess from the University of Calgary presented a paper on how spam can bypass even the best spam filters and trick experienced computer users who would normally delete suspicious email messages. The new technique relies on a new generation of spam zombies that monitor and mine email they find on infected machines, using this data to automatically forge and send improved, convincing spam to others. The next generation of spam could be sent from your friends' and colleagues' email addresses – and even mimic patterns that mark their messages as their own (such as common abbreviations, misspellings, capitalization, and personal signatures) – making you more likely to click on a Web link or open an attachment.

Botnets
When the U.S. Justice Department stepped up its investigation of cybercrime, it found spam originating from an unexpected source: hundreds of powerful computers at the Department of Defense and the U.S. Senate. The machines were "zombies" that had been compromised by hackers and integrated into bot networks that can be remotely controlled to send spam or launch distributed denial of service attacks. Botnets consisting of 100,000 and 200,000 nodes are not uncommon. There's even a case where a real botnet was found with about 1.5 million machines under one person's control.

According to data from PandaLabs, in 2005 more than 10,000 examples of bots were detected, representing an increase of more than 175 percent with respect to the previous year. Bots represented more than 20 percent of all malware detected in 2005. The number of variants of each bot could stretch into the thousands, a figure far too high for signature-based protection to cope with. For example, in the prolific Gaobot family, more than 6000 new variants were found in 2005 alone.

Web Application Vulnerabilities
Mercedes Benz, Fuji Film, Panasonic, US Navy, US Army, Greenpeace, Coldwell Banker, Microsoft, Google, Standford Electric, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, The SCO Group, the National Weather Service, Stanford University, SANS Institute, Symantec, Mcdonalds, Sandia National Laboratories, the U.S. Geological Survey, Bottom Line Technology, Association of Chief Police Officers, Midwest Express Airlines, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, the Office of Secretary Defense, the Defense Logistics Agency, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories.... what do all these have in common? Their web site were recently defaced.

Zone-h.org keeps a digital archive of web site defacements, documenting hundreds of new defacements every day of corporations, organizations, and governments around the world. The majority of these compromises were compromised using an admin configuration mistake (19.4%) or a known vulnerability to which a patch is available (15.3%) or other programming errors. In other words - entirely avoidable. The same insecure programming methods and same programming mistakes are being used over and over - even in web applications developed by tech-savvy corporations such as Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, eBay, Etc.

· October 2005 - A vulnerability in Google's Gmail's authentication and session management discovered allowed a cybercriminal the ability to potentially take complete control of a victim's Gmail account without requiring any involvement of the victim.
· February 2006 - A Hotmail vulnerability allowed cross-site-scripting attacks.
· February 2006 - An Ebay vulnerability was being actively exploited.
· April 2006 - An vulnerability in Yahoo Mail was actively exploited for targeted phishing.
· April 2006 - Phishers were using a Ebay vulnerability discovered April 2006 to trick victims.
· April 2006 - A Myspace vulnerability allowed malicious scripts to be inserted anywhere on the site.

Distributed Denial Of Service Attacks
A Distributed Denial Of Service attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems flood a single target with data which drains computational resources, such as bandwidth, disk space, or CPU time, thereby causing denial of service for valid users of the targeted system. The attacking computer hosts are often zombie computers with broadband connections to the Internet that have been compromised by viruses or Trojan horse programs that allow the perpetrator to remotely control the machine and direct the attack. With enough such slave hosts, the services of even the largest and most well-connected websites can be denied.

Gaming sites, blogs, payment gateways, gambling sites, domain registrars advertising services, media organizations, large software companies, security vendors, security professionals and researchers, regularly face intimidation, extortion attempts and downtime caused by DDoS attacks. The extortion works by an attacker shutting down a site using a DDoS attack, and then follow-ups with an email saying, "Pay us or else we will shut down your site again."

"It's happening enough that it doesn't even raise an eyebrow anymore." says Ed Amoroso, chief information security officer at AT&T. Paying an extortionist a few thousand dollars to leave your network alone might make bottom-line business sense if the alternative is enduring a distributed denial-of-service attack that could cost your company millions in lost revenue and public relations damage. And many companies do pay.

"Six or seven thousand organizations are paying online extortion demands. The epidemic of cybercrime is growing. You don't hear much about it because it's extortion and people feel embarrassed to talk about it." said Alan Paller, director of research for security organization SANS. "Every online gambling site is paying extortion." Paller claimed.

Active-X
The security weaknesses of Active-X controls have long been known. Yet they are still highly popular. And its about to get worse. Research by Richard M. Smith, suggests that as much as 50 percent of all Windows computers might contain one or more flawed Active-X control that could allow remote compromises. Smith used a tool to checks for "buffer overflows" in common Active-X controls. Smith found dangerous security problems in Active-X controls distributed by dozens of other major companies, including PC manufacturers and even some of the nation's largest Internet service providers. In some cases, these insecure Active-X controls come pre-installed on Windows PC from the factory!

The Yankee Group is quite clear about their opinion on Active-X when they say "Retire Active-X—now."

Passwords
One-factor authentications using passwords is still the most common form of authentication. New password cracking tools based on Faster Time-Memory Trade-Off Technique which uses pre-generated hash tables can crack complex passwords in a matter of days. While many employees and even executives are still using passwords such as "password" and "12345", a very respectable password (by today's standards) of "Aq42WBp" can be cracked easily using free, downloadable tools. Ophcrack can recover 99.9% of alphanumeric passwords in a Windows SAM database in SECONDS. Two-factor authentication would do a lot to improve user security (such as prevent some forms of phishing attacks) and the industry would benefit to see greater adoption, yet some of the most popular email sites such as Hotmail and Gmail don't support it leaving users with no option.

And while two-factor authentication does have benefits, Bruce Schneier is correct to state that, "Two-factor authentication isn't our savior." In response to the increased adoption of stronger authentication, cybercriminals are already proactively changing their tactics. Recent bank-stealing Trojans wait until the victim has actually logged in to their bank and then it just transfers the money out completely bypassing any authentication controls.

Patch Management
Too often, software vendors are slow releasing patches to fix critical flaws in their products, leaving their customers exposed. Oracle, which likes to claim its software is "Unbreakable", took an astonishing 800 days to fix two flaws, and last year took more then 650 days to publish a fix for another security flaw. Perhaps a good indication of the poor state of information security; the day Oracle announced the Unbreakable campaign, David and Mark Litchfield discovered 24 holes in Oracle products.

Often critical patches released by Microsoft which are intended to protect their customers, instead causes system hangs and crashes.

The security company Scanit recently conducted a survey which tracked three web browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were "known unsafe." Their definition of "known unsafe": a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been publicly announced and no patch was yet available. Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is the most popular browser in use today and installed by default on most Windows-based computers, was 98% unsafe. Astonishingly, there were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. Read that last sentence again if you have to.

"There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole." -- According to a survey by security company Scanit

Zero-Days
On Dec. 27, 2005 a Windows Metafile (.WMF) flaw was discovered affecting fully patched versions of XP and Windows 2003 Web Server. Simply by viewing an image on a web site or in an email or sent via instant messenger, code can be injected and run on the target computer. The vulnerability was in the Windows Graphics Rendering Engine which handles WMF files, so all programs such as Internet Explorer, Outlook and Windows Picture and Fax viewer which process this type of file were affected.

Within hours, hundred of sites start to take advantage of the vulnerability to distribute malware. Four days later, the first Internet messenger worm exploiting the .wmf vulnerability was found. Six days later, Panda Software discovers WMFMaker, an easy-to-use tool which allows anyone to easily create a malicious WMF file which exploits the vulnerability.

While it took mere hours for cybercriminals to take advantage of the vulnerability, it took Microsoft nine days to release an out-of-cycle patch to fix the vulnerability. For nine entire days the general public was left with no valid defenses.

The WMF Flaw was a security nightmare and a cybercriminal dream. It was a vulnerability which (a) affected the large majority of Windows computers (b) was easy to exploit as the victim simply had to view an image contained on a web site or in an email, and (c) was a true zero-day with no patch available for nine days. During those nine days, the majority of the general population had no idea how vulnerable they were.

Most disturbingly, the WMF vulnerability was auctioned off to the highest bidder, and reportedly was sold for $4,000 more than a month before Microsoft issued a patch and two weeks before virus hunters started noticing the potential flaw.

Yes, Zero-day exploits are now a reality. If you aren't scared yet about your online security, you should be.

Wireless Access Points
Millions of wireless access points are spread across the US and the world. According to a FBI presentation at a 2005 Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) meeting in Los Angeles, about 70% percent of these access points are unprotected and left wide open to access by anyone near that location. The rest are protected by Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) defined as a security protocol in the IEEE 802.11 standard. Only a small portion are using the new, more secure, WPA standard.

The problem is that the WEP standard is completely broken. Today, easily accessible tools can crack a 128 bit WEP key in minutes. One reason for the low adoption of the new WPA standard is that product manufactures and computer stores continue to make and sell devices which only support the insecure WEP protocol. So even if the average consumer takes the unusual step of attempting to enable security protection, he/she is still left highly vulnerable.

Internal Attacks
Internal attacks cost U.S. business $400 billion per year, according to a national fraud survey conducted by The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, and of that, $348 billion can be tied directly to privileged users. And according to the 2005 Global Security Survey, internal attacks on information technology systems are surpassing external attacks at the world’s largest financial institutions.

Vulnerabilities In Security Software
Rather than just focus on operating systems, cybercriminals are now also targeting and exploiting anti-virus and security software - the very security software that's supposed to protect PCs. According to a Yankee Group research paper, in a 15-month period ending March 31 2005, 77 separate vulnerabilities have been discovered in products from security vendors Symantec, F-Secure and CheckPoint Software Technologies and others.

For example, in May 2004 a critical remote vulnerability affected almost the entire line of Symantec firewall product line (including versions of Symantec Norton Internet Security, Symantec Norton Personal Firewall,Symantec Client Firewall, and Symantec Norton AntiSpam) which allowed remote kernel access to the system - even with all ports filtered, and all intrusion rules set. In March 2004 the W32/Witty.worm damaged tens of thousands of computers by exploiting computer systems and appliances running security gateway software from network protection firm Internet Security Systems causing an unstable system and corrupted files.

Mobile Viruses
We are discovering that no technology is immune from cybercriminals looking for ways to exploit it. Simply by using a cell phone, or personal digital assistant people can be a walking, talking security risk. There are currently dozens of viruses which target the popular Symbian phone operating system, however many of these are low-risk. While the problem is not yet widespread, it is only a matter of time before malware writers start to write more destructive mobile viruses. From a virus that will dial 1-900 numbers all day long, to the one that automatically buys a hundred ring tones that get added to your phone bill, there is money to be made and therefore there will be cybercriminals looking to exploit the technology.

Threats Everywhere - Even In Music CDs
Seemingly innocuous objects such as music CDs are now attack vectors which can leave you vulnerable. On Oct. 31, 2005 Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals discovered that Sony distributed a copy-protection DRM with music CDs that secretly installed a rootkit on computers. Once a CD is placed in the computer, the software tool is run without your knowledge or consent. The Sony code modifies Windows so you can't tell it's there - a process called cloaking which is a tactic usually used by virus writers - and It acts as spyware, surreptitiously sending information about you to Sony. And trying to remove it can damage Windows. Virus writers begin to take advantage of the Sony rootkit’s cloaking features, making their viruses undetectable by anti-virus software.

Under intense pressure by the media, Sony created an uninstaller program. However, the uninstaller didn't remove the rootkit - it only removed the cloaking features. It was then discovered that the uninstaller had a vulnerability which allowed any web page you visit to download, install, and run any code it likes on your computer. More than half a million networks, including military and government sites run were infected. The rootkit has even been found on computers run by the US Department of Defense.

Encryption
There has been significant advances and cryptography research against security algorithms. In 1999, a group of cryptographers built a DES cracker, effectively killing off the Data Encryption Standard. It was able to perform 256 DES operations in 56 hours. The machine cost $250K to build, although duplicates could be made in the $50K-$75K range. A similar machine built today could perform 260 calculations in 56 hours, and 269 calculations in three and a quarter years. Or, a machine that cost $25M-$38M could do 269 calculations in the same 56 hours. In 2004 Eli Biham and Rafi Chen, of the Israeli Institute of Technology and separately Antoine Joux, announced some pretty impressive cryptographic results against MD5 and SHA. Collisions were also demonstrated in SHA. In February 2005, Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu from Shandong University in China showed that SHA-1 is not collision-free by developing an algorithm for finding collisions faster than brute force.

What does this mean for the average person? While these developments are big news for cryptographers, they present little real-world risks to the average user at the moment. However, what these developments make clear is that its time for a new standard.

Jon Callas, PGP's CTO, said it best: "It's time to walk, but not run, to the fire exits. You don't see smoke, but the fire alarms have gone off."

Come On In... The Water's Fine!

This is no doubt an information security pandemic occurring. We are passed rising temperatures and hot waters - the pot is boiling!

Yet, SANS's Internet Storm Center's Infocon Threat Level is rarely at any level other then a consistent Green; the lowest threat-level rating. While the pot is boiling, the Infocon Threat Level is telling us, "Everything is normal. No significant new threat known." Symantec's ThreatCon is most often at l, which is the lowest threat-level rating. Panda's Software Virusometer is usually at Green - "Normal".

"This condition applies when there is no discernible network incident activity and no malicious code activity with a moderate or severe risk rating. Under these conditions, only a routine security posture, designed to defeat normal network threats, is warranted."

Panda Virusometer (at time of writing, May 1st 2006.) "The Panda Virusometer measures the probability of users being affected by a virus at any given time."

"There are no signs of viruses or hoaxes that represent a threat. Low risk of being infected by a virus or malicious code, as long as the usual precautions are taken."

To steal a line from Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word "safe" that I wasn't previously aware of." It is as if many in the information security community are so used to zero-days, 100,000-node botnets, daily virus threats, spam-clogged email boxes, organized-crime-funded aware, massive identity thefts, etc, that they look at this situation and believe this is "normal." Business as usual.

This attitude is dangerous.

And it must change.

Why Are We Failing?

We operate in a hostile environment. Cyberspace's digital battlefield heavily favors the cyber criminal. A cyber-criminal only needs to identify a single vulnerability in a system's defenses in order to breach its security. However, information security professionals need to identify every single vulnerability and potential risk and come up with suitable and practical fix or mitigation strategy. Furthermore, the freedom, privacy and anonymity cyberspace offers, gives cybercriminals the opportunity and confidence to target victims around the world with little chance of being caught.

Cybercriminals are simply out innovating us. The technology and information security landscape is in a constant state of change and security is a digital arms race with both exploits and defenses continuously improving. While the cyber criminals have adapted and modified their attack and exploit techniques, the security community struggles to modify and adapt not simply their defenses, but their mind set.

For example, when Microsoft wanted to limit Windows Updates to registered copies of Windows, they developed their "Genuine Advantage" system. In less then 24 hours, the it was cracked. Sony spent millions developing a DRM technology called key2audio for their music CDs to prevent unauthorized music duplication, track ripping and piracy. Shortly after CDs with key2audio started hitting store shelves, it was discovered that the DRM technology could be defeated - by a $0.99 cent pen by simply scribbling around the rim of a CD!

Is this image a CAPTCHA or a digital representation of our failure? You decide. Chances are that computer software would have more success decoding this then a human!

Computer users attempting to sign up for an email account or blog are now faced with a mismatch of letters and numbers that they have to try and decode. This system is called CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) - the security community's answer to bot impersonating humans to register for computer services (such as free email accounts used to send spam) which is now in use on sites like Yahoo, Paypal, and Hotmail. However, computer software devoted to circumventing CAPTCHA is becoming so effective, sites have been forced to generate CAPTCHAS that are even difficult for humans to solve! And spammers have already engineered methods to bypass CAPTCHA. This system only serves to frustrate legitimate users and does little to hamper illegitimate bots.

Cybercrime is accessible to anyone. Whereas once one had to possess extraordinary computer skill to become a cybercriminal, today you don't need special skills or knowledge to become a successful cybercriminal. Exploits and detailed vulnerability information are available to anyone on the Internet. Point-and-click wizards, virus generators, and hacking tools dramatically reduce the skill level required to attack a target. For $15 to $20, hackers can buy a "Web Attacker Toolkit" from a Russian web site which sniffs for seven unpatched vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Firefox, then attacks the easiest-to-exploit weakness. The toolkit then places a trojan on the victims computer which can be used log keystrokes, download additional code, or open backdoors. You don't even have to participate - armies of coders are available to code custom spyware for money, or perform denial of service attacks for hire such as the one a CEO of a web-based satellite T.V. retailer ordered against his competitors which caused outages as long as two weeks at a time and $2 million in losses.

The "Biggest Bank Heist in History" did not involve technological geniuses breaking encryption algorithms and cracking firewall defenses. In fact, the heist was so simple only the most basic of technological skills were required. Thieves masquerading as cleaning staff installed hardware keystroke loggers on computers within the London branch of Sumitomo Mitsui. Hardware keyboards are tiny devices which are physically installed on the back of a computer between the keyboard and CPU which silently and undetectably records every single key typed on the computer. They can be bought online for less then $100 US. They then proceeded to transfer more that $440 million to various accounts in other countries.

The number of PC users is expected to hit or exceed 1 billion by 2010, up from around 660 million to 670 million today. As the internet expands, it increases the number of opportunities and potential targets of cybercriminals.

Security isn't accessible. Security is a full time job which requires hiring skillful and dedicated security professionals and purchasing a deluge of costly technology systems and devices. For example, purchasing anti-DDoS services to protect against the costly distributed denial-of-service attacks can cost around $12,000 per month from carriers such as AT&T and MCI, according to John Pescatore, Gartner security analyst.

Individuals and most companies simply do not have the time, money, skill and resources required to effectively manage all of today's risks and threats.

Complexity is the enemy of security. As technology becomes more powerful and advanced, the complexity often increases too which only serves to benefit cybercriminals. Today, simple office printers now come equipped with built-in services like Telnet and SMTP, SNMP, Bluetooth, etc. The security of an entire network can be compromised by a printer with a remotely exploitable vulnerability.
How can we fix this?

Solving the security absurdity is a daunting challenge and there is no simple, easy fix. It requires creativity, insight, persistence, adaptation, co-operation, action and support across the entire Internet industry and community. This document is not intended to contain all the answers. Instead it is written to raise awareness of the problem which too many people seem to not want to acknowledge. Through increased awareness can there be new dialogs and discussions on solutions. Because what is clearly missing is more dialog to come up with solutions to today's security challenges.

No one can deny the Internet's immeasurable benefits to our lives. This only heightens the need to confront and stop the overwhelming security threats. These threats are putting at risk the very benefit and value of the Internet. While the Internet opened up new means of communication and data sharing, security threats are closing doors and preventing opportunities. The pot is at a boiling point and action must be taken!

Part Two of this article will contain a list of what we must do to address our current failure. It will incorporate your comments and feedback.

What do you think? How can we stop the failure? Your comments are most welcome.
http://www.securityabsurdity.com/failure.php





Coming Soon: The Code Breakers – a BBC World Documentary on FOSS and Development

A two-part documentary, “Code Breakers” will be aired on BBC World TV starting on 10 May 2006. Code Breakers investigates how poor countries are using FOSS applications for development, and includes stories and interviews from around the world.

The famous digital divide is getting wider. A two-part documentary, "The Code Breakers," to be aired on BBC World starting 10 May 2006 examines whether free/open source software (FOSS) might be the bridge?

FOSS contains 'source code' that can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction. It has been around for over 20 years but most PC owners are not aware that the Internet search engines and many computer applications run on FOSS.

"It's not that FOSS has had a bad press, it has had no press because there is no company that 'owns' it," says executive producer Robert Lamb. "But we found that in the computer industry and among the afficionados, it is well known and its virtues well understood."

The crew of the independent producers who made the film went to nearly a dozen countries around the world to see how the adoption of FOSS presents opportunities for industry and capacity development, software piracy reduction, and localization and customization for diverse cultural and development needs.

Stories from "The Code Breakers" include computer and Internet access for school children in Africa, reaching the poor in Brazil, tortoise breeding programmes in the Galapagos, connecting villages in Spain, and disaster management in Sri Lanka. The documentary also includes interviews from key figures around the world.

Intel, IBM, Sun and Microsoft all seem to agree that FOSS is a welcome presence in computer software.

According to Jonathan Murray of Microsoft "The Open Source community stimulates innovation in software, it's something that frankly we feel very good about and it's something that we absolutely see as being a partnership with Microsoft."

BBC World will air the two-part documentary at the following times:

Episode One

Wednesday 10 May 19:30 GMT

Thursday 11 May 09:30 GMT

Friday 12 May 16:30 GMT

Monday 15 May 01:30 and 07:30 GMT

Episode Two

Wednesday 17 May 19:30 GMT

Thursday 18 May 09:30 GMT

Friday 19 May 16:30 GMT

Monday 22 May 01:30 and 07:30 GMT

For local times, please lookup your country in the TV Listings on BBC World's website http://www.bbcworld.com/content/temp...asp?pageid=668.

Following its ten transmissions on BBC World the documentary will be available copyright-free for broadcast throughout the world.

The International Open Source Network (IOSN), UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP), International Development Research Centre of Canada and UNESCO have participated in the production of this documentary.
http://www.apdip.net/news/fossdoc





When "Off" Doesn't Mean Off
Bruce Schneier

According to the specs of the new Nintendo Wii (their new game machine), "Wii can communicate with the Internet even when the power is turned off." Nintendo accentuates the positive: "This WiiConnect24 service delivers a new surprise or game update, even if users do not play with Wii," while ignoring the possibility that Nintendo can deactivate a game if they choose to do so, or that someone else can deliver a different -- not so wanted -- surprise.

We all know that, but what's interesting here is that Nintendo is changing the meaning of the word "off." We are all conditioned to believe that "off" means off, and therefore safe. But in Nintendo's case, "off" really means something like "on standby." If users expect the Nintendo Wii to be truly off, they need to pull the power plug -- assuming there isn't a battery foiling that tactic. Maybe they need to pull both the power plug and the Ethernet cable. Unless they have a wireless network at home.

Maybe there is no way to turn the Nintendo Wii off.

There's a serious security problem here, made worse by a bad user interface. "Off" should mean off.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archive...ff_doesnt.html





The Worse Google Gets, The More Money It Makes?
Andrew Orlowski

Comment It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the mainstream press was barely acquainted with the genius and foresight of today's technology leaders.

Fifteen years ago Bill Gates appeared on the BBC's Wogan show - which the Beeb thought of as a nightly Johnny Carson, but which was really like watching Regis Philbin on cough syrup - to show off his WinPad PC. The wooden Gates made a joke about making his money disappear, with only a couple of clicks, using only a stylus. As Gates blinked, a nation which had never heard of Microsoft, and couldn't quite figure out why the guy in glasses wasn't singing or dancing, looked on in sympathetic embarrassment.

But Gates's prime time TV appearance underscored one point, popular in the public prints at the time, which was that a nerdish, upstart technology was changing the very foundations of the world as we know it. Microsoft was simply smarter, more agile, more cunning, and far more darkly mysterious than the fusty incumbents, like IBM, could ever realize. To stand in the way of Microsoft was to stand in the way of youth, innovation and progress itself.

Now, it may puzzle you as much as it puzzles us that this idea ever gained popular currency - let's save that discussion for another day. But it can't have escaped your notice that this mythical struggle has been reprised by the inkies several times - in the mid-1990s with Netscape - and today with the phoney war between Microsoft and Google.

If you're of the view that history repeats itself the second time round as farce, then the parallels are even more uncomfortable.

Today, Microsoft is a software monopoly that equally, is barely acquainted with its own methods of production. The last Microsoft engineer who worked on the original incarnations of Windows left an engineering capacity at the company a long, long time ago and, as a consequence, a company that once could turn on a sixpence and drop off an OS refresh that seriously screwed a competitor now takes seven years to eke out an update. Insulated by the comfortable monopoly position it enjoys, Microsoft today isn't even in control of Microsoft. But then again, why does it have to worry?

Now fast forward to 2006, where Google, if we're to believe the popular prints, is simply smarter, more agile, more cunning, and far more darkly mysterious than its incumbents can fathom.

Or, er, is it?

When Google unleashed PageRank™ on the world, it really created a monster.

Google was so proud of its algorithm that it liked to boast that it mirrored the "inherent democracy" of the internet, a phrase which coyly and insidiously, flatters us all. PageRank™ was a truer representation of life than we ever realized, Google said, if only we cared to look.

The trouble is, PageRank only worked within a small dataset of peer reviewed academic journals. To extrapolate this into a way of life, as Google's dreamy maths-obsessed boy wonders tried to do, was an essentially utopian gesture, which supposed that no one would try and game the system to their own nefarious ends. Only the inevitable happened, and as Google got more popular, and as the value of appearing in those top spots increased, Google gradually lost control of the algorithm which was once its muse. At the time, we remember, we gained very few plaudits for documenting this weary process - as Google was gradually gamed by desperate trinket salesmen (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10...logged_google/), who built link farms to tout their wares - and by technology evangelists (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/04...ed_repurposed/), who mistook overnight popularity for a validation of a lifetimes's achievement. All were to fall to earth eventually, as technology offers no short cuts or backdoors when the calculations are finally made.

So here we are. Today, Microsoft doesn't understand its source code. But nor can Google identify how much of its search index is comprised of robot-generated junk, designed to trick its PageRank™ algorithm. With billions of pages of "content" - pages of junk can be created on demand to populate cheap, disposable "web presences" - it's beyond the wit of any algorithm to determine what's real and what's simulacra.

Like Microsoft, Google has simply been outsmarted. To read the popular press and discover that they're arming for a billion dollar fight is like watching two dunken prize fighters hoping they'll land a punch.

But thanks to blogger Mark McGuire for providing another dimension, one we and everyone else missed.

Just as Microsoft doesn't have to care about the quality of its software, nor does Google (or Yahoo!, or any other want to be web destination) have to care about the quality of its product. Up to a point.

Noting the Big Daddy fiasco - Google's attempt to weed out the spam from its search index - McGuire notes (http://www.jellyfish.com/blog/2006/0...m-irrelevance/) that Google profits from the irrelevance. Google makes next to no money from "search", but makes all of its money from selling advertising.

Mark notes, as we do, a webmaster's comment that the deterioration is gradually turning the SERPS [Search Results] back into a primordial soup:

“At this rate, in a year the SERPS will be nothing but Amazon affiliates, ebay auctions, and Wiki clones. Those sites don’t seem to be affected one bit by the supplemental hell, 301’s, and now deindexing.”

Mark observes:

"Google may take some action here and there, but I believe that they actually like a little mud in the main organic results for commercial terms. Why? Because less than stellar organic results (from practices like web spam) mean higher CTR’s on their paid links and more juice for their quarterly earnings.

"A little irrelevance is good for paid links and paid links is how Google makes money."

If you want to be seen in Google, you have to pay to play - and create an Adwords account. How else are you going to be "seen"? In other words, it's pay to play - the old economy reasserting itself with a vengeance.

This is a fascinating subject - how far can you con the public without being rumbled? Google executives may well look at Microsoft's history and conclude they can ride the goodwill train for many years. A cynic may say the public doesn't really care about the mechancisms, so long as they're being delivered real results.

But the public is increasingly sophisticated, and as the web spammers have proved (the "Big Daddy" fiasco being the primary evidence) more than capable of outwitting Google.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05...crosoft_redux/





UK Hacker 'Should Be Extradited'

Mr McKinnon could face a lengthy jail sentence in the US
BBC

UK hacker Gary McKinnon should be recommended for extradition to the US, a district judge has ruled.

The decision means Mr McKinnon will face trial in America for what the US has called "the biggest military hack of all time".

Although he has admitted hacking US military networks, Mr McKinnon said he was motivated by curiosity not malice.

The final decision on whether he should be sent to the US for trial rests with the home secretary.

Hack attack

The decision was given at Bow Street Magistrates' Court in London and ends three years of uncertainty for Mr McKinnon.

Speaking outside the court after hearing the decision Mr McKinnon said: "It went as expected and now the appeals process can now start."

Karen Todner, Mr McKinnon's solicitor, said: "We're obviously very disappointed with the judgement that was given this morning. We're proposing to appeal this to the Secretary of State, and if we're still refused we will then appeal to the High Court for a decision to allow Gary to be tried here as a British citizen."

Mr McKinnon was first arrested in 2002 by the UK's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit for hacking into a series of computer networks used by the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Department of Defense.

The US in its case for extradition said Mr McKinnon caused more than $700,000 (£375,235) of damage while exploring the computer networks at various US military institutions.

It said one attack at the Earle Naval Weapons Station took place soon after September 11, 2001 made it impossible to use critical systems. The US Department of Justice said it took a month to get systems working in the aftermath of this attack.

Mr McKinnon has admitted that he spent almost two years exploring these networks but has said he was motivated by a search for what he called "suppressed technology".

In a recent BBC interview, Mr McKinnon said he had got close to getting pictorial evidence of technologies that could be of huge benefit to everyone but the US government was not releasing.

In numerous interviews about the case, Mr McKinnon has resisted attempts to portray him as a hacking mastermind. By contrast he said he was a "bumbling hacker" that exploited the lax security policies of the US military.

Speaking after the hearing ended, he said: "My intention was never to disrupt security. The fact that I logged on with no password showed there was no security to begin with."

Ms Todner said she was worried that any sentence Mr McKinnon received in the US would be "disproportionate" to the scale of the offences he committed.

"There is power under the Computer Misuse Act to charge him here and he could stand trial here," said Ms Todner. "In fact, had that happened he probably would have been tried, served his sentence and have been released by now"

If tried and found guilty in the US, Mr McKinnon could face decades in jail and fines totalling millions of dollars.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/4757375.stm





WTO Entry Must Be In Russia's Interest – Putin

President Vladimir Putin, commenting on Russia's stalled bid to become a WTO member, said on Wednesday that his country should join the global trade body only if it protects Russian economic interests.

Putin, who said in March that U.S. negotiators were creating artificial obstacles to Russian entry, said his country's entry talks "must not become the instrument of trade on questions which have nothing to do with this organisation."

Russia should join the World Trade Organisation "only on the conditions that take into account the economic interests of Russia," Putin said at his annual keynote address to the nation.

Russia, a major energy producer that has seen its trade weight boom amid soaring world oil prices, is the biggest power still outside the currently 149-member WTO, which acts as a forum for international negotiations and a trade watchdog.

Moscow has been negotiating membership for over a decade.

Striking a trade deal with the United States is key to Russia's entry but talks with Washington have been stalled for months over violations of intellectual property rights and access to Russian financial markets.

While Putin said Russia must fight video, music and software piracy, he made no reference to opening up financial markets.

Putin alarmed financial markets last December when he said the activity of branches of foreign banks working in Russia must be banned, a remark seen by the business community as hostile.

"A necessary condition for developing new technology is more reliable protection of intellectual property. We must defend copyright inside the country. That is our obligation to our foreign partners," Putin said.

"We must also ensure protection of intellectual property rights of our own producers."

Putin has said it is one of his top economic priorities to bring Russia into the Geneva-based body, a move that would ensure its exports would not face barriers in key markets.
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/news...RUSSIA-WTO.xml





My god, it’s full of stars

The Most Realistic Virtual Reality Room In The World
Press Release

More than $4 million in equipment upgrades will shine 100 million pixels on Iowa State University's six-sided virtual reality room.

Jared Knutzon, an Iowa State University graduate student in human computer interaction, demonstrates how Iowa State's C6 virtual reality room can control the military's unmanned aerial vehicles.

That's twice the number of pixels lighting up any virtual reality room in the world and 16 times the pixels now projected on Iowa State's C6, a 10-foot by 10-foot virtual reality room that surrounds users with computer-generated 3-D images. That means the C6 will produce virtual reality at the world's highest resolution.

Iowa State's C6 opened in June 2000 as the country's first six-sided virtual reality room designed to immerse users in images and sound. The graphics and projection technology that made such immersion possible hasn't been updated since the C6 opened.

The difference between the equipment currently in the C6 and the updated technology to be installed this summer, "is like putting on your glasses in the morning," said James Oliver, the director of Iowa State's Virtual Reality Applications Center and a professor of mechanical engineering.

The new equipment -- a Hewlett-Packard computer featuring 96 graphics processing units, 24 Sony digital projectors, an eight-channel audio system and ultrasonic motion tracking technology -- will be installed by Fakespace Systems Inc. of Marshalltown. The project is supported by a U.S. Department of Defense appropriation through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

The project began this spring with a prototype upgrade to one wall of the C6. The remainder of the work will continue throughout the summer. Oliver said the improved C6 will open in the fall. A grand opening celebration is being planned for the spring of 2007.

A better C6 will be good news for the Iowa State researchers who study virtual reality.

Chiu-Shui Chan, an Iowa State professor of architecture, has used the C6 to develop 3-D models of buildings, cities and workplaces. He's studying how virtual reality can be a tool to create a library of historical buildings, plan urban growth and test workplace efficiency.

A virtual model of the Xidan business district in Beijing can help city planners manage urban growth.

Chan said the upgrade will improve the visual realism and interactive speed of his virtual reality applications. And that will enhance the sense of place in his applications and the effectiveness of his research.

Chan said the C6's existing technology requires him to balance and sacrifice some of a project's size, speed, realism or human-computer interaction. "With the new system I won't have to worry about that," he said.

Eve Wurtele, an Iowa State professor of genetics, development and cell biology, working with Julie Dickerson, an Iowa State associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has used the C6 to develop new ways to visualize data from as many as 22,000 genes. She's also developing a virtual cell project that shows cells in 3-D action to help students learn about photosynthesis and other aspects of cell biology.

Wurtele said the higher speeds and better pictures will be a boost for her research and teaching.

"This upgrade is fantastic for us," she said. "It's essential for our research."

Mark Bryden, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, has used virtual reality to develop engineering tools that help engineers make better decisions. He said the C6 upgrade will mean more realistic images capable of transmitting more information. And seeing more information will allow engineers to be better informed when they make decisions.

Bryden also said the upgrade will put the C6 back on the leading edge of technology. He said that will help researchers attract projects and funding.

Oliver is leading a research team that's developing a virtual reality control room for the military's unmanned aerial vehicles. The researchers are building a virtual environment that allows operators to see the vehicles, the surrounding airspace, the terrain they're flying over as well as information from instruments, cameras, radar and weapons systems. The system would allow a single operator to control many vehicles.

The C6 upgrade will move that project forward, Oliver said.

"The idea is to get the right information to the right person at the right time," he said. "There's a tsunami of information coming toward you and you have to convey it effectively. We think this kind of large-scale, immersive interface is the only way to develop sophisticated controls."

So those 100 million pixels are going to make a difference, Oliver said.

"Seeing is going to be believing," he said. "This upgrade will enhance our ability to amplify the creativity and productivity of people. It will help us build on the center's record as a world leader in virtual reality. And it's one more way Iowa State can be the best at putting science and technology to work."
http://www.iastate.edu/~nscentral/ne...c6update.shtml





Get it while you can

Will Sites Like YouTube and The Hype Machine Go The Route Of Napster?
Mike Miliard

Television and movie studios aren’t quite sure what to do with YouTube. While they sort it out, music fans and pop-culture addicts are in hog heaven.

A couple of months ago, a man with the screen name x-amount logged on to Recidivism.org , the blog he maintains with a few of his friends, and made a pronouncement. “YouTube’s obviously blowing up. We’re living in that Napster-like magic moment where you simply can’t believe the kinds of historic stuff available to you with just a simple search. Which means of course that it’s all gonna get shut down ANY MINUTE.”

His fears are understandable. For any pop-culture junky, YouTube.com, barely a year after its launch, may just be the Greatest Site in the History of the Internet. On a recent afternoon, guided by nothing more than capricious free association, I watched about two-dozen clips. The Sex Pistols’ infamous, profanity-laced appearance on Bill Grundy’s Today show. Hüsker Dü chatting with Joan Rivers. Crispin Glover, allegedly on LSD, frightening David Letterman. The only episode of Lookwell, the cop-show spoof written by Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel, and starring original TV Batman Adam West. The only episode of Heat Vision and Jack, the story of a man and his talking motorcycle, created by Ben Stiller and starring Jack Black. Pudge Fisk’s homer over the Monster in the 1975 World Series. A PSA from a dead-serious Pee-wee Herman warning children about the dangers of crack cocaine.

That’s only the stuff I’m interested in. And it’s not counting the amateur material — game six of the ’86 World Series recreated on Nintendo’s RBI Baseball, or footage of the world’s second largest Tetris game, played out using the lights of a Brown University campus tower — that’s all over YouTube: the many millions of self-produced video curios posted to the site daily, almost one every other second.

Meanwhile, over on The Hype Machine, the hits just keep on coming. The site is an aggregator and search engine that scours the limitless galaxy of mp3 blogs that have cropped up over the past couple of years. You know: those sites with clever, lyrical names like Largehearted Boy and An Aquarium Drunkard? Sites curated by die-hard music fans who deal entirely in rare soul or underground hip-hop or twee indie pop, and who delight in writing music criticism alongside — free for download — the best track from the new Band of Horses album? Or the latest Diplo remix. Or live radio performances by Belle & Sebastian and the New Pornographers. Or tracks from not-yet-released Sonic Youth and Mission of Burma records.

These days, the songs and video clips that people once depended on file-sharing programs like KaZaA and Limewire to unearth are right there online, ready for download. No software installation required. No fear (for now at least) of a subpoena from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the trade group representing major labels. It’s a new world. Again.

Television and movie studios aren’t quite sure what to do with YouTube. The big record companies have been, on the whole, uncharacteristically quiet about the blogs, which are now more widespread and easier to search than ever. And a few even seem to see them as friends, not foes. While they sort it out, music fans and pop-culture addicts are in hog heaven.

“When you go [to YouTube], it’s kind of like going to a music store, when you know there’s a bunch of stuff you want, but you can’t quite figure out what it is,” says x-amount (whose real name is Beau). “But once you hit the right search term, it’s like, ‘Oh yeah!’ and ‘Oh, and then I could search for this!’ and ‘They might have this!’ It just explodes from there.”

Video stars

When Chad Hurley, 29, and Steve Chen, 27, founded YouTube in Hurley’s garage in February 2005, their plan was for it to be a personal video-sharing network, sort of a Flickr for home movies. It can still offer that function, but it’s also a lot more. “What we’ve become in the last several months,” says Julie Supan, YouTube’s senior director of marketing, “is an entertainment destination.”

And how. By allowing clips to be streamed in lightweight Adobe Flash animation, YouTube made watching online video much more user-friendly than the traditional download-and-wait model. Uploading is a snap too. And by allowing users to insert YouTube videos directly into their blogs and MySpace pages, it helped ensure that its popularity would spread like kudzu. Once Saturday Night Live’s instahit “Lazy Sunday” video found its way onto the site last December, it positively blew up. Since then, says Supan, people have watched “billions” of videos. Nowadays, about six million unique visitors are watching about 40 million clips every day. And every day, about 35,000 more videos are being uploaded to the site. All told, that’s 200 terabytes of data per day — roughly a third of Google’s or Yahoo’s traffic. And it’s all handled by 26 employees headquartered above a San Mateo, California, pizza shop.

The kid-in-a-candy-store exuberance that comes from surfing the site and finding stuff you haven’t seen in years — Chris Elliot’s “Man Under the Seats” on Letterman! A young Adam Sandler on Remote Control! — has helped fuel YouTube’s explosive popularity. Still, those clips, even though you can’t see them anywhere else anymore, are copyrighted. And, of course, so, too, is the “Lazy Sunday” clip. When NBC asked YouTube to take it down in February, it did so in a flash. Same thing happened later with Natalie Portman’s gangsta rap. When CBS complained that it was hosting a news clip of autistic high-school hoops phenom Jason McElwain scoring 20 points in four minutes, YouTube removed that one, too. And it’s not just pulling stuff from the big networks or clips that are available for sale on iTunes. In April, YouTube yanked a homemade video for Weezer’s “This Is Such a Pity,” which used footage from the 1984 break-dancing cult classic Breakin’.

“We’ve been really proactive and cooperative with the rights holders,” says Supan. “If we’re alerted and we have knowledge that there’s been videos uploaded that are unauthorized, we will remove them immediately. Because we’ve been so cooperative and so responsive, I think we’re in a really good position.”

They’ve taken other steps, too. In March they instituted a 10-minute limit on uploads, which will prevent users from uploading complete episodes of The Office or 24. (Independent, non-infringing content producers can sign up as “YouTube Directors,” which will allow them to eschew the time limit.) They’ve also developed more back-end technologies to simplify and automate the identification of infringing files, and to “fingerprint” removed videos so they can’t be uploaded again later.

YouTube is also taking an active role in educating its users, a large chunk of whom are young teenagers. “Uploading programming that’s on your hard drive but you don’t own is illegal,” says Supan. “They’re learning. They don’t realize that television isn’t free.”

All these steps, so far, have earned YouTube plaudits for being a “good corporate citizen” (as the Motion Picture Association of America recently called it). For all the talk of YouTube as a “Napster for video,” Supan is emphatic that the opposite is true. “Napster was a black market for illegal music-file swapping. We’re not a black market. And the biggest difference is that you can’t download anything on YouTube.”

Actually, that’s not exactly true. Already, several sites have sprung up that make downloading YouTube’s Flash clips to your hard drive as easy as copying, pasting, and right-clicking “Save As.” And other programs make it possible to convert those to iPod-ready formats. But with videos so easily and instantaneously available on the site, not everyone feels the need. “If there’s something really totally awesome that I want to have forever, yeah, I’ll go and download it,” says Beau. “But the older you get, you realize you don’t have to own it all.”

When I bring up the site’s marvelous appeal as a nostalgia repository, and I ask Supan if it’s only going after big fish like South Park and Brokeback Mountain (an entire version of which appeared on YouTube for a short time), looking to take down mainstream videos like that as soon as they’re up, she corrects me. “We’re not ‘going after’ any content on the site. We don’t control the content on our site. We’re just a service provider. It’s all posted at the discretion of the users.” And, she adds, “the reality is that it’s hard to say what’s uploaded by the content creator, the user, and what is not. And so therefore one can’t assume at this point.”

It’s a tacit admission that copyrighted material not only exists on the site, but it’s also a primary reason why so many viewers log on every day. But it’s also true that more and more mainstream content producers are catching on to YouTube — and are looking for ways to leverage its popularity by uploading content to it themselves.

When NBC yanked the “Lazy Sunday” clip, that was understandable, in a way. It was on sale for $1.99 on iTunes and available to watch on NBC.com (as long as you didn’t use Mac or Linux). But it was also, in the eyes of many observers, a big mistake. Saturday Night Live is a show that’s been accused more than once of being irrelevant, even moribund. Five million people watched that video, including young people, who may have never watched SNL before. For several weeks, it was a genuine cultural phenomenon. You really can’t buy advertising like that.

Contrast “Lazy Sunday” with another popular clip, the “real life” Simpsons intro, in which actors recreate the show’s opening-credits sequence. That was produced as an ad by the British network Sky One to hype its run of that season’s episodes. In order to get the same type of contagious buzz NBC tried to quash, Sky itself quietly leaked the clip to YouTube — and in short order it had more views than “Lazy Sunday.”

These days many studios and networks are houses divided against themselves: the legal department on one side and the marketing department on the other. As lawyers dry out their tongues licking stamps for cease-and-desist notices, other companies are getting wise to YouTube’s potential. MTV2 shows preview videos on the site, and E! uses it as a tie-in with its clip show, The Soup. Hollywood Records, trying to promote its Queen DVD, put the band’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” video on the site. (In a nifty bit of cross-promotion, the clip also encouraged viewers to tune in to Fox’s American Idol, one episode of which featured contestants singing Queen songs.) The Weinstein Company partnered with the site to show trailers and other promo material for flicks including Scary Movie 4 and Clerks II.

YouTube just secured a second round of funding: $8 million of venture-capital green. “That allows us to expand on all fronts: marketing, sales, infrastructure, being able to build out our data centers around the world,” says Supan, adding, “We’re seeing a huge cultural shift happening right now in digital-media entertainment and how it’s being distributed.”

This is not Napster redux. Unless it’s taken down, or dismantled and built up again as a corporate portal for pay video — as Napster was for music — YouTube is not going away anytime soon. And the sheer volume of it all makes the idea of scrubbing away all the cool (and copyrighted) stuff unrealistic. In the meantime, people are watching.

And then there’s music
The still-new but suddenly omnipresent phenomenon of mp3 blogs is a fraught and murky area. But for now, at least, it looks as though the big record companies may have learned some lessons since Napster first appeared in 1999.

By strict letter of the law, of course, most people who maintain mp3 blogs enable copyright infringement. But there are differences, hardly insignificant, between the blogs and the file sharing so loathed by the RIAA. They have to do with scale and intent.

For one thing, even though there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bloggers out there, most uploading several songs every day (compared with the massive number of songs downloaded on file-sharing networks), the traffic the sites attract is small peanuts. For another, even though mainstream stuff is easy to find, for the most part the songs made available on mp3 blogs are from indie artists and are hardly the massive unit movers the RIAA presumably spends the most time fretting about.

Most important, the name of the game here isn’t to get as much stuff as you possibly can for free: it’s to spread the word about new artists and new albums. The blogs almost always make the songs available for just a limited time (a week, maybe two); include links to online retailers such as Amazon.com, eMusic, and iTunes to facilitate purchase of the full album; and post a disclaimer. “Please go out and buy the records!” reads the notice posted on Said the Gramophone, one of the first and best mp3 blogs. “All songs are removed within a week or two of posting. If you are the copyright holder of any song posted here, please contact us if you would like the song taken down early.”

But as it happens, some copyright holders — even the Big Five record companies — are quite happy to have their songs on blogs. In 2004, when the medium was still in its infancy, the New York Times reported that Warner Brothers Records sent an mp3 from the new record by the Secret Machines to eight music bloggers. “They are an indie rock band and we would love for people to hear the band’s music from your site,” an employee, Ian Cripps, wrote. “Here it is, listen to it and let me know if you will post it.”

One blog, Music for Robots, took Warner Brothers up on it. Before long, in the comments section, a few user reviews cropped up that looked a little disingenuous. “I never heard these guys before, but theyre [sic] awesome,” wrote one listener. “I went to their website and you can listen to a lot of ther [sic] other stuff, very cool andvery [sic] good!” Later, that comment and others were found to have come from an IP address used by Warner Music.

When the Phoenix asked the RIAA about its stance on mp3 blogs, we were supplied with the following statement via e-mail: “If artists, record companies, publishers and others choose to use music blogs to distribute their music, that is their choice and we think that’s a great thing. It is important that bloggers respect the value of music by obtaining the appropriate licenses from the copyright owners, or their designees.”

Many indie labels have been known to take advantage — to great effect — of the free buzz the blogs provide. Matador Records has partnered with YouTube, too, for its “Pretty Girls Make Graves ‘Make Our Video’ Contest.” (The Phoenix is also sponsoring a contest, in which four fans will interview the band OK Go and edit their film, which will be posted on YouTube.) And while navigating the bounty of these blogs used to be haphazard, requiring users to surf from one bookmarked page to the next, new efforts to bring the strongest blogs together in one site make taking advantage of their ever-increasing number easier than ever.

About a year ago, Anthony Volodkin, a 20-year-old student at New York’s Hunter College and a moonlighting IT consultant, unveiled The Hype Machine, which aggregates hundreds of the best blogs and makes their songs easily searchable. Elbows is another popular aggregator. The songs may be posted for “sampling” purposes, but spend an afternoon searching for new titles, and you could easily cobble together entire new albums and fill a decent chunk of hard-drive space with all kinds of music you never knew you needed.

Add in the effects of increasingly popular hosting services like YouSendIt and EZarchive, which allow fans in online music groups to post files — sometimes zipped folders containing dozens of songs at a time — and a new paradigm seems to have arrived: an aboveground way to get loads of free music and video. Suddenly, the need for signing on to file-sharing networks has diminished.

Volodkin says he invented The Hype Machine, which updates every hour with new posts from across the blogosphere, simply to make it easy for people to listen to this stuff. “To actually go through and check out every single page and every song that people have up is a lot more difficult and time-consuming. A lot of people might not be able to do that, and they’ll miss out on a lot of great music.”

He also doesn’t think he’s helping facilitate the “stealing” of music. Shawn Fanning he ain’t. “Things like Napster or KaZaA — it was focused on, ‘Okay, let’s look for the artist, let’s download everything they have by the artist, complete CDs, just download media without any thought of it.’ In this case, I’m not sure how many people actually take the trouble to go through and download [a lot of] music. Oftentimes, in my case, at least, I have people buying things through the iTunes links.”

Volodkin prides himself on being a good citizen by linking only to blogs that live up to his standards. “Unfortunately, I think that some people do start mp3 blogs to gather advertising revenue, and to do some things [that are] really unethical. They post copyrighted content to just gather visitors and get hits. Most of those blogs I don’t include in The Hype Machine. I’ve heard also of people posting complete CDs, which I find really despicable, because that goes against everything that mp3 blogs are about.”

Moreover, he argues, blogs, while offering almost limitless free music, help sell songs in many cases. For one thing, they link directly to retailers. This writer, for one, headed directly to eMusic to buy the new Robert Pollard album after hearing a few tracks from blogs. And while it’s doubtful that many label owners will go on record as embracing blogs wholeheartedly — at least not yet — the fact that the majors haven’t gone after them in any significant way (one blog, 45RPM, was served with a cease-and-desist from the RIAA for hosting unreleased Strokes tracks last November) and the fact that at least a few of them are testing the waters suggest that they see potential in them.

Take a look at a few recent examples of this “invisible promotion”: artists like the Arctic Monkeys and Gnarls Barkley seemed to emerge from nowhere, fully formed. They didn’t, of course: the blogosphere was their incubator. The latter’s massive hit, “Crazy,” recently made history by becoming the UK’s first number-one single based on the strength of digital sales alone. A search for “Crazy” on The Hype Machine finds that it has been available for download from more than 20 blogs since last October.

“What’s behind them is a lot of good will,” says Volodkin of the mp3 blogs. “It’s not like file sharing, where it’s just, ‘I wanna spread music.’ We wanna spread enjoyment and passion for music. Not all music customers are thieves at heart.”

On the Web
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/
The Hype Machine: http://hype.non-standard.net
Elbows: http://elbo.ws/
Recidivism: http://recidivism.org/
Music For Robots: http://music.for-robots.com/
Said the Gramophone: http://saidthegramophone.com/

http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid12043.aspx





Police Dogs Sniff for Pirated DVDs

Labradors taught to recognize scent of discs

There are drug-sniffing dogs, bomb-sniffing dogs, people-sniffing dogs, and now DVD-sniffing dogs.

An alliance of film industry groups that includes the Motion Picture Association of America and the Federation Against Copyright Theft has announced the world's first dogs specially trained to detect CDs and DVDs in bags and packages. The idea is that the dogs may be able to alert police to large stashes of pirated movies.

The MPAA says there are currently two DVD-sniffing dogs in the world. They are Labradors named Lucky and Flo working at Stansted Airport in the United Kingdom. The canines have been taught to recognize the unique smell of a compact disc.

"Someone had the wise idea that maybe dogs could sniff out DVDs," Kori Bernards, MPAA spokeswoman, told ABC News. "There are a lot of pirated products that go in and out of Heathrow Airport and airports around the world."

The dogs have had some success so far, according to the MPAA. But there is still more training that needs to be done. At this point, the dogs alert police to any CD or DVD they smell in packages and bags. Customs officials in the U.K. hope one day the dogs will only signal when there are large collections of discs, which would more likely include illegally copied movies.

For the time being, Lucky and Flo are working at a FedEx shipping center at Stansted Airport where they are sniffing packages that are shipped around the world. Trainers say the dogs have been notifying customs agents of packages with discs in them. The packages have been opened but so far no pirated movies have been found.

"We're encouraged by this. It's a new tool against piracy but we welcome it and hope others will adopt such practices," said Bernards.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/sto...1944531&page=1





Cyber simian on your back?

Is Internet Addiction A Real Problem?
Eric Bangeman

Studies pointing out the dangers of our technology-enabled lifestyles are nothing new. Topics such the possibility of getting brain tumors from our cell phones and the danger of video game violence translating into real-world violence frequently pop up on the front pages of newspapers and web sites (including this one) around the world.

Another popular topic is addiction, specifically Internet addiction. A new study published in Perspectives in Psychiatric Care says that Internet addiction is a serious problem, manifesting itself in between 5 percent and 10 percent of all surfers.

One problem with the term "Internet addiction" is the looseness of the term as it can be applied to any number of problematic behaviors. The researchers in this case broke the term down into five specific behaviors:

· Cybersexual addiction
· Cyberrelationship addiction
· Net compulsion
· Information overload
· Interactive gaming compulsion

Cybersexual and cyberrelationship addiction along with interactive gaming compulsion are fairly self-explanatory. Net compulsion describes a range of unhealthy online behaviors including stock trading, gambling, and shopping, while information overload covers compulsive web surfing. As one might expect, men are more prone to the cybersexual addictions as well as the net and interactive gaming compulsions. Women seem to struggle more often with the cyberrelationship addictions.

If you're wondering how you stack up on the continuum of net addiction, there's a handy Internet Addiction Test, which comes from the Center for Online and Internet Addiction, in which you can discover how addicted you are. I took it and scored a 41, which puts me at the very low end of the "frequent problems exist regarding use of the Internet." My late-night surfing habits as well as my predilection towards checking e-mail and IM on my way out the door helped raise my score.

Studies such as this are useful in that they point out the fact that some people have a problem managing their online lifestyles along with ways of addressing the problem. The question remains as to whether there is any such thing as Internet addiction. Yes, people become addicted to certain online behaviors. In many cases, however, those behaviors look an awful lot like manifestations of "real-world" problems transported to the Internet. Sexual addiction becomes a cybersexual addiction, codependency and relationship enmeshment translate into a cyberrelationship addiction, and blowing too much money at the casino or horse track too often becomes just another net compulsion.

The behaviors and problems are real. But does putting them into one of five buckets under a broad umbrella of "Internet addiction" really help address the root problems causing those behaviors? When 54 percent of Internet addicts say they have a history of depression, 52 percent drug or alcohol abuse and 34 percent an anxiety disorder, it seems even clearer that cyberspace is just another place for unhealthy and self-destructive behaviors to manifest themselves.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060510-6795.html





The Right Way To Run a Wi-Fi Café
Nathan Willis

One of the benefits of living in a place as exotic as Abilene, Texas, is that it presents you with a choice of not one but three Internet-connected coffee shops. Last week, I spent an afternoon in each, scouting for the place I'll go to hole up and get work done this summer when the triple-digit temperatures hit, when mentally calculating the air conditioning costs begins to prove too distracting at home. I haven't yet reached a final decision, but I have some choice words for anyone weighing the idea of starting up a new Internet coffee shop.

Before I begin, let's be crystal clear about one thing: When I say Internet-connected coffee shop, I mean free Internet. I'm looking at you, T-Mobile and Starbucks -- if I'm interested in paying for a wireless connection, I can do that pretty much anywhere (not to mention more cheaply) without you.

Tip 1: Do as little as possible

Networking-wise, that is. Blocking ports, running portal sign-in pages, time-limiting Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) leases, and all other forms of interference are a waste of your time and your customers'. Consider timing out DHCP leases -- one of the local coffee shops here does that. All the DHCP lease can even theoretically do is make things worse. When it functions properly and the leases are renewed after 30 minutes, nothing is accomplished. When it breaks, it ticks off everyone in the building. The only thing it adds to the customer's experience is the possibility of a new failure mode.

Similarly, don't block ports. As a provider of Internet connectivity, you're not liable if someone wanders into your establishment and uses your connection to post seditious rants about invading Canada or to upload soap operas to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. On the other hand, by making an ill-informed, arbitrary decision about what TCP ports to permit traffic on, you'll drive away knowledgeable customers who need services such as Secure Shell (SSH), and kids who spend several hours a day gaming and are more than happy to buy beverages from you while they do it.

One of my local coffee shops has browser-detection code in its portal page. Browser detection? What are we, cave men?!?

Tip 2: Do the security right

Start with your router. Broadcast a meaningfully chosen service set identifier (SSID); a wireless network named linksys or wrt54g might as well be named attack me. Besides, naming your network after your establishment makes it clearer to customers which network they need to connect to.

Next, put some basic security measures in place, such as disallowing router management from the Wi-Fi network, changing the default password, and enabling (at least) the basic firewall.

Then tackle the air itself. Encryption: don't leave home without it. There isn't a Wi-Fi-capable machine in the world that cannot connect via password-protected Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), and it can make the difference between happy repeat customers and angry snooping victims. I know you don't like to talk about it, but we both know you've already overpaid for that faux-driftwood-framed blackboard on which your assistant manager writes the blends of the day in colored chalk. Add the password to it; you'll look hip to the youngsters, and you might drive a few leechers in from the parking lot. They'll probably still be cheapskates, but that's where your attractive sales staff is supposed to take over.

Tip 3: Preserve the ever-shrinking comfort zone

This boils down to a few key points: Carpet and electrical outlets are good; loud music and hard wooden chairs are bad. I guess the theory behind the tragic proliferation of uncomfortable seating and bad atmosphere is that the quicker you get one customer out, the quicker you get the next one in. I'm no MBA, but that seems short-sighted.

Luckily, the things that attract the Wi-Fi-using laptop toters are the same things that attract coffee shop customers in general. Quiet acoustics let people talk, and they allow computer users to focus on their work. Only electrical outlets offer no real parallel to non-computing customers' needs.

Here, though, pinching pennies and capping the outlets guarantees you less business, and is unnecessary to boot. You can get an electrical usage meter and measure how much juice it takes to charge a laptop battery -- even if all of your outlets are in use all day long, it's still nothing compared to the heating and air-conditioning bill. Besides, we all know the real money comes from charging four dollars for a paper cup filled with milk and coffee. If you're worried about the margins, try to sell more coffee. It's better for business anyway.

Tip 4: Be your own boss

Broadband is cheap, especially compared to commercial rent. Don't get duped by the local wireless Internet service providers (WISP) who want to brand your in-store service. It's a fad, and it only benefits the service provider. Using a time-limited DHCP lease redirects traffic through a portal Web page that users must keep open. It is without a doubt the most irritating thing in the commercial wireless world, and it is forced upon the customer by Clearwire, the WISP that "sponsors" coffee shops' connections in the hopes of selling more home service contracts. I am confident it does not succeed at that.

Only slightly better is one coffee shop that runs a straight no-frills-and-no-browser-ads connection, but has every flat surface in the joint plastered with stickers and signs advertising its WISP sponsor. Even if you don't see the obvious turn-off to customers of this captive propaganda, you surely must recognize that if these WISPs ever start making actual money, they'll increase the rate they charge you to the maximum limit you can afford. And those that never manage to turn a profit will leave you high and dry, scrambling to find a new connection without any time to spare.

It's far better to shop for a normal, business-class DSL line that you can use with no strings attached. More flexibility, fewer annoyances -- these are good things.

Who cares, exactly?

Well, there you have it. If I left something out, feel free to chime in below.

NewsForge readers are among the computer-using customer set, and we want a good Internet coffee shop experience. But since we also have more experience than average at system administration and network administration tasks, we're in a position to prove helpful. I'd be exaggerating to call it a "win-win" scenario -- really, I just want to find a decent coffee shop with a good free network before the July sun starts baking me through the roof.
http://business.newsforge.com/busine...?tid=39&tid=92





A Pie-in-the-Sky Treehouse Made Real
John Schwartz


Spencer Tirey for The New York Times

OBSESSION, like inspiration, comes unbidden and has a habit of latching on. For Ezra Idlet, it struck in Kansas City, between the sound check and the show.

Mr. Idlet, half of a quirky folk-rock duo called Trout Fishing in America, was killing time in a bookstore eight years ago when he picked up the coffee-table book "Treehouses: The Art and Craft of Living Out on a Limb," by Peter Nelson (Houghton Mifflin, 1994). The book, with its gorgeous photos of houses produced by wild flights of imagination, resonated with him. He had never built anything bigger than the woodshed behind his house, but thanks to the diagrams and drawings in the book, "It just looked like it was possible," he said. "I thought, well, yeah!"

What Mr. Idlet, 52, had in mind was not a limb-spanning lean-to for his kids, but a real house nestled in the trees on his land in northwestern Arkansas. He owns 100 acres in the Boston Mountains stretch of the Ozarks, southwest of Fayetteville and down a dirt road. He bought the land in 1992. At the time, he and Keith Grimwood, his musical partner since 1979, had decided to decamp from Houston with their families for wider open spaces. (Mr. Grimwood, now 54, left an apartment in suburban Houston and bought 10 acres with a house and two cabins in West Fork, Ark., about half an hour away from Prairie Grove; Mr. Idlet bought his land with the proceeds from the sale of a house in a heating-up neighborhood, the Heights, just north of downtown Houston.)

When Mr. Idlet returned home from the Kansas trip, he told his wife, Karen, about his treehouse vision. She, in turn, explained her position: No. "She said, 'We have a lot of things we really need to do before we get to that,' " he recalled.

And so, instead of building the treehouse, he wrote a song. (When something is on Mr. Idlet's mind, he said, "it often comes out in a song," and the idea "was really, really working on me.") The song, "Dreaming," became one of the group's best loved:

Dreaming, I see bridges spanning spaces between red oak trees,
Connecting houses in the leaves.
Someday my room will rock and shiver with the wind.
One day I'll eat my pie up in the sky.

Like many of Trout's songs, it is sung from the perspective of a wistful, overgrown kid. When Trout performs for children — they have 12 albums, two of which have been nominated for Grammy awards — they embody a kind of goofball gestalt at odds with the sugary-sweet format of so much other music for the younger crowd. Their songs have titles like "My Hair Had a Party Last Night" and "18 Wheels on a Big Rig" (a song that requires Mr. Grimwood to count to 18 in Roman numerals). And the two have a Mutt-and-Jeff quality — Mr. Idlet is 6-feet-9 and Mr. Grimwood, 5-feet-5 — that delights their fans.

But Mr. Idlet and Mr. Grimwood, who borrowed their group's name from the title of the novel by Richard Brautigan, also perform unabashedly sentimental and wickedly funny songs for grown-ups, with an unexpected emotional punch. In "The Last Day of Pompeii," written by Michael Smith, a woman facing Vesuvius's lava reflects, "If I knew then what I know now":

I would have taken that Mediterranean cruise
Filled up on chocolates, cigarettes and booze
Given some perfect stranger the blues
Hot stuff for me...

Mr. Idlet, accordingly, is not one to give up on his dreams. In the two years that followed, he continued to doodle designs for the treehouse, and would introduce the song at shows by announcing that it symbolized something he really wanted to do, although it was "kind of impractical for the moment."

Still, he kept trying to find ways to realize his obsession without going broke. One day he was talking to a neighbor, Clancy McMahon, who is a professional home builder. Mr. McMahon wanted to buy a couple of horses for his children. Mr. Idlet, who had horses, offered a swap: animals for expertise.

After Ms. Idlet's brother, Jody Thom, who also builds houses, promised to help as well, Ms. Idlet finally agreed. "When Karen saw it didn't require money to get expert, intelligent help, that tipped the scales," Mr. Idlet said. Bit by bit, other friends volunteered to help, drawn by the wild vision of the thing.

The treehouse has now been under construction for more than six years, the work tucked in between musical gigs around the country. On a recent day, Mr. Idlet and Mr. Grimwood sat with a visitor over sandwiches and spicy pickled okra after a grinding, white-knuckle climb in Mr. Idlet's four-wheel drive pickup truck up the hogback hill leading to the treehouse.

About the size of a studio apartment at 540 square feet, the house is a one-room cabin in the air. It is an agreeable space full of light and calm, with a few simple decorative touches (a stained-glass panel over the front door, a small, beguiling mosaic in front of the wood stove). It sits among the trunks of three red oak trees, which come up through the deck; six steel poles provide additional support. It moves and shakes slightly, which takes a little getting used to but eventually feels as natural as the gentle swaying of the trees themselves.

The house is unfinished, but from the steel roof to the wood floors to the composting toilet, it's all coming together. There is a loft for sleeping, and a dormer at the top of the ladder that leads to it, so that Mr. Idlet does not bump his head on the way up. The loft railing, still under construction, will incorporate raw cedar branches. There is no electricity: the stove and refrigerator will run on propane, and the chandelier (bartered for a music workshop) has oil lamps. There is also a wind-up Brunswick phonograph that plays Mr. Idlet's enormous collection of 78-r.p.m. records. "You won't need a lick of electricity up here," he said.

The outside deck has railings that angle outward, with a built-in bench; the effect is of a recliner that creates the illusion of being suspended in air. When a visitor kicked his feet back to stand up and half of his foot pushed against empty space, Mr. Idlet viewed the scene with alarm. "That is a design defect that needs to be addressed," he said. His tone, however, conveyed something approaching pleasure: another problem to solve.

When the treehouse is complete, he said, he hopes to use it as a study in the woods — a place where he can play music and write new songs.

"It'll always be a work in progress," Mr. Grimwood countered. "It's just never going to be over with."

In fact, Mr. Idlet does seem to be constantly planning additions, including a smaller house, or at least a platform, on a nearby white oak, connected to the main house by a rope bridge. But for now, he has a more pressing concern: the local red oak borers that might someday kill the trees. The insect threat, which he learned about only after the project was well under way, has led him to take preventive measures, he said, like watering and fertilizing these trees to strengthen them. If he had known that the borers were coming, he said, he might have been talked out of building.

Driving back down the hill from the treehouse, the truck groaned down the muddy, rocky slope, while a vista of the Ozarks opened ahead, green and startling. Mr. Idlet sighed, admitting that he occasionally thinks about the house he sold in Houston.

"I've been told if I'd held on to my place I'd be rich," he said. Then, after a pause: "But I am."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/11/garden/11tree.html


















Until next week,

- js.


















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