[JackSpratts]

Telecom Industry Wins a Round on Eavesdropping
David Stout

Telecommunications companies won a skirmish in the Senate on Monday as a bill to protect them from lawsuits for cooperating with the Bush administration’s eavesdropping programs easily overcame a procedural hurdle.

By 76 to 10, with Democrats divided, the Senate voted to advance the bill for consideration. A measure to block it, which was led by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut fell short, as those who wanted the bill to reach the floor got 16 votes more than the 60 needed to achieve that goal.

What happens next is not immediately clear. A different bill, which would not grant immunity to the companies, was also expected to be introduced by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Judiciary Committee. And whatever bill emerges from the Senate may have to be reconciled with a House version that does not include immunity.

The measures are meant to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that has deeply divided the White House and Capitol Hill and members of the House and Senate. Some action is necessary fairly soon, because the current FISA law expires in February.

In his unsuccessful bid to block the legislation, Senator Dodd urged his colleagues not to immunize the telecommunications industry for cooperating with the National Security Agency’s secret program of eavesdropping without warrants. The program was disclosed late in 2005 by The New York Times.

“For the last six years, our largest telecommunications companies have been spying on their own American customers,” Mr. Dodd said. “Secretly and without a warrant, they delivered to the federal government the private, domestic communications records of millions of Americans — records this administration has compiled into a data base of enormous scale and scope.”

“I have seen six presidents — six in the White House — and I have never seen a contempt for the rule of law equal to this,” Mr. Dodd asserted.

Another opponent of the immunization measure, Senator Russell D. Feingold, called it “deeply flawed.”

“This time around, the Senate should stand up to an administration that time and again has employed fear-mongering and misleading statements to intimidate Congress,” said Mr. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin.

But supporters of the administration’s program of surveillance without warrants have described it as necessary to protect Americans from terrorists, and they insist the program strikes a sensible balance between national security and personal liberty.

But not all of the 76 senators who voted to advance the bill necessarily agree entirely with the administration. Some do, but others voted to advance the bill so they can criticize it or offer amendments.

For instance, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, voted to advance the bill because, he said, the issue is “too important to hold up any longer.” Mr. Kennedy said he strongly favored the version backed by Senator Leahy, who himself voted on Monday to advance the competing bill, rather than the version that just advanced, saying that version would grant “vast new authorities to spy on Americans.”Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said he would offer an amendment that would substitute the federal government as defendant in lawsuits, in place of the companies.

“The telephone companies have, I believe, acted as good citizens,” Mr. Specter said.

President Bush has threatened to veto any measure that does not grant immunity to the companies. The House version of the legislation, enacted a month ago, was approved by 227 to 189, or dozens of “yes” votes short of the two-thirds needed to overcome a presidential veto.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said he agreed to have both Senate measures considered at the same time because “this process will give senators the opportunity to fully debate the various issues.”

In addition to Mr. Dodd and Mr. Feingold, the senators who voted against advancing the immunization measure were Barbara Boxer of California, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, Tom Harkin of Iowa, John Kerry of Massachusetts, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, and Ron Wyden of Oregon, all Democrats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/wa...17cnd-nsa.html





Dodd: “We Say To President Bush, We Would Never Take ‘Trust Me’ For An Answer”

The Senate today began debate on a FISA bill that would overhaul the rules for electronic surveillance and provide retroactive immunity for telecom companies that participated in the Bush administration’s illegal spying efforts.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) took to the Senate floor and protested the bill today, arguing that that Congress should not reward the President’s “favored corporations” for betraying “millions of customers’ trust.”

In response to the White House’s insistence that the telecomm’s actions were legal, Dodd explained, “[W]e say to President Bush that a nation of truly free men and women would never take ‘trust me’ for an answer, not even from a perfect president — and certainly not from him”:

So here we are–facing a final decision on whether the telecommunications companies will get off the hook for good. The president’s allies are as intent as they ever were on making that happen. They want immunity back in this bill at all costs.

But what they’re truly offering is secrecy in place of openness. Fiat in place of law.

And in place of the forthright argument and judicial deliberation that ought to be this country’s pride, two simple words from our president’s mouth: “Trust me.”

I cannot speak for my colleagues–but I would never take that offer, not even in the best of times, not even from a perfect president. I would never take that offer because our Constitution tells us that the president’s word is subject to the oversight of the Congress and the deliberation of the courts; and because I took an oath to defend the Constitution; and because I stand by my oath.

“Trust me.” It is the offer to hide ourselves in the waiting arms of the rule of men. And in these threatened times, that offer has never seemed more seductive. The rule of law has rarely been so fragile.

“It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger…from abroad.” James Madison, the father of our Constitution, made that prediction more than two centuries ago. With the passage of this bill, his words would be one step closer to coming true. So it has never been more essential that we lend our voices to the law, and speak on its behalf.

On its behalf, we say to President Bush that a nation of truly free men and women would never take “trust me” for an answer, not even from a perfect president — and certainly not from him. […]

If this disastrous war has taught us anything, it is that the Senate must never again stack such a momentous decision on such a weak foundation of fact. The decision we’re asked to make today is not, of course, as immense. But between fact and decision, the disproportion is just as huge.

So I rise in determined opposition to this unprecedented immunity and all that it represents. I have served in this body for more than a quarter-century. I have spoken from this desk hundreds and hundreds of times. I have rarely come to the floor with such anger.

But since I came to Washington, I have seen six presidents sit in the White House–and I have never seen a contempt for the rule of law equal to this. Today I have reached a breaking point. Today my disgust has found its limit.

I don’t expect every one of my colleagues to share that disgust, or that limit. I wish they did–but had that been the case, we would never have come to this point.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/12/17/dodd-fisa/





Obama’s Statement on Dodd and Filibuster
Jane Hamsher

I contacted the Clinton, Edwards and Obama campaigns last night to ask them if they had statements on Dodd's filibuster against retroactive immunity today. So far the only one to get back to me with one is Obama:

Senator Obama unequivocally opposes giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies and has cosponsored Senator Dodd's efforts to remove that provision from the FISA bill. Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same. It's not clear whether he can return for the vote, but under the Senate rules, the side trying to end a filibuster must produce 60 votes to cut off debate. Whether he is present for the vote for not, Senator Obama will not be among those voting to end the filibuster.

Both the Edwards and Clinton campaigns said they are working on statements.

It would be wonderful if Obama came off the campaign trail to support Dodd.
http://firedoglake.com/2007/12/17/ob...nd-filibuster/





Surveillance Bill Delayed
Pamela Hess

The Senate late Monday delayed its consideration of a vote on a new government eavesdropping bill until January.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid delayed the bill because there were more than a dozen amendments planned, and not enough time left on the legislative calendar to manage them.

"Everyone feels it would be to the best interests of the Senate that we take a look at this when we come back after the first of the year," said Reid, D-Nev.

The new surveillance bill is meant to replace a temporary eavesdropping law Congress hastily passed in August. That law, which expanded the government's authority to listen in on American communications without court permission, expires Feb. 1.

Senators clashed Monday in hours of debate over whether the government's need to eavesdrop on potential terrorists outweighs Americans' expectations that their private communications are protected.

The Senate was grappling with how to update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that dictates when federal agents must obtain court permission before tapping phone and computer lines inside the United States to gather intelligence on foreign threats. Agents may tap lines without court permission outside the country.

The most contentious question is whether telecommunications companies that helped the government tap American communications after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks should be granted immunity from lawsuits stemming from their actions. The surveillance was done without permission from the secret court created 30 years ago to protect Americans from unwarranted government intrusions on their privacy.

Senate leaders hoped to decide this week whether to shield the telecommunications companies from the roughly 40 pending civil lawsuits alleging violations of communications and wiretapping laws. The White House says if the cases go forward they could reveal information that would compromise national security. If they succeed, the companies could be bankrupted.

The companies were helping the Bush administration carry out the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, a still classified effort that intercepted communications on U.S. soil without oversight from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court from Sept. 11 to January 17, 2007.

"For the last six years, our largest telecom companies have been spying on their own American customers," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.

"This program is one of the worst abuses of executive power in our nation's history," said Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis. "It's time for congress to state, when we pass a law we mean what we said," Feingold said.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said he believes the TSP was legal and "essential to prevent further terrorist attacks against our homeland." The companies helped out of concern for the country's security after the terrorist attacks, he said.

The White House threatened Monday to veto any bill that does not contain a retroactive immunity provision. The Senate Intelligence Committee's version of the bill provides it; a competing version from the Judiciary Committee does not.

The House recently approved a surveillance bill that does not provide retroactive immunity.

Multiple efforts were under way Monday to craft alternative immunity provisions. Among the potential amendments is one by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who wants the U.S. government to stand in for telecommunications companies as the defendant in the cases. The Senate Judiciary Committee rejected putting such a provision in its version of the bill.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., also introduced an immunity amendment that would leave it to the 15 judges on the FISA court to decide whether the companies merit protection from lawsuits. The court, which was not consulted on the electronic surveillance at the center of the debate, would determine whether the government's written requests to the telecommunications companies were legal. If not, it would determine whether the telecommunications companies believed they were complying with a good-faith request from the government.

The White House wants a permanent rewrite of FISA, contending that changes in telecommunications technology have made the law an obstacle to intelligence gathering. FISA requires the government to obtain court approval before conducting electronic surveillance on U.S. soil, even if the target is a foreign citizen in a foreign country.

However, many purely international communications are now routed through fiber-optic cables and computers in the United States.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/st...121702614.html





Bush Lawyers Discussed Fate of C.I.A. Tapes
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane

At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Some other officials assert that no one at the White House advocated destroying the tapes. Those officials acknowledged, however, that no White House lawyer gave a direct order to preserve the tapes or advised that destroying them would be illegal. The destruction of the tapes is being investigated by the Justice Department, and the officials would not agree to be quoted by name while that inquiry is under way.

Spokesmen for the White House, the vice president’s office and the C.I.A. declined on Tuesday to comment for this article, also citing the inquiry.

On Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Dana Perino, issued a statement saying “The New York Times’ inference that there is an effort to mislead in this matter is pernicious and troubling.”

Ms. Perino’s statement said that other than President Bush’s comment that he had not known about the tapes, White House officials have declined to discuss the matter because of pending investigations by the Department of Justice and the C.I.A. inspector general.

The new information came to light as a federal judge on Tuesday ordered a hearing into whether the tapes’ destruction violated an order to preserve evidence in a lawsuit brought on behalf of 16 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The tapes documented harsh interrogation methods used in 2002 on Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two Qaeda suspects in C.I.A. custody.

The current and former officials also provided new details about the role played in November 2005 by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the agency’s clandestine branch, who ultimately ordered the destruction of the tapes.

The officials said that before he issued a secret cable directing that the tapes be destroyed, Mr. Rodriguez received legal guidance from two C.I.A. lawyers, Steven Hermes and Robert Eatinger. The officials said that those lawyers gave written guidance to Mr. Rodriguez that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that the destruction would violate no laws.

The agency did not make either Mr. Hermes or Mr. Eatinger available for comment.

Current and former officials said the two lawyers informed the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, about the legal advice they had provided. But officials said Mr. Rodriguez did not inform either Mr. Rizzo or Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, before he sent the cable to destroy the tapes.

“There was an expectation on the part of those providing legal guidance that additional bases would be touched,” said one government official with knowledge of the matter. “That didn’t happen.”

Robert S. Bennett, a lawyer for Mr. Rodriguez, insisted that his client had done nothing wrong and suggested that Mr. Rodriguez had been authorized to order the destruction of the tapes. “He had a green light to destroy them,” Mr. Bennett said.

Until their destruction, the tapes were stored in a safe in the C.I.A. station in the country where the interrogations took place, current and former officials said. According to one former senior intelligence official, the tapes were never sent back to C.I.A. headquarters, despite what the official described as concern about keeping such highly classified material overseas.

Top officials of the C.I.A’s clandestine service had pressed repeatedly beginning in 2003 for the tapes’ destruction, out of concern that they could leak and put operatives in both legal and physical jeopardy.

The only White House official previously reported to have taken part in the discussions was Ms. Miers, who served as a deputy chief of staff to President Bush until early 2005, when she took over as White House counsel. While one official had said previously that Ms. Miers’s involvement began in 2003, other current and former officials said they did not believe she joined the discussions until 2005.

Besides the Justice Department inquiry, the Congressional intelligence committees have begun investigations into the destruction of the tapes, and are looking into the role that officials at the White House and Justice Department might have played in discussions about them. The C.I.A. never provided the tapes to federal prosecutors or to the Sept. 11 commission, and some lawmakers have suggested that their destruction may have amounted to obstruction of justice.

Newsweek reported this week that John D. Negroponte, who was director of national intelligence at the time the tapes were destroyed, sent a memorandum in the summer of 2005 to Mr. Goss, the C.I.A. director, advising him against destroying the tapes. Mr. Negroponte left the job this year to become deputy secretary of state, and a spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to comment on the Newsweek article.

The court hearing in the Guantánamo case, set for Friday in Washington by District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. over the government’s objections, will be the first public forum in which officials submit to questioning about the tapes’ destruction.

There is no publicly known connection between the 16 plaintiffs — 14 Yemenis, an Algerian and a Pakistani — and the C.I.A. videotapes. But lawyers in several Guantánamo cases contend that the government may have used information from the C.I.A. interrogations to identify their clients as “unlawful combatants” and hold them at Guantánamo for as long as six years.

“We hope to establish a procedure to review the government’s handling of evidence in our case,” said David H. Remes, a lawyer representing the 16 detainees.

Jonathan Hafetz, who represents a Qatari prisoner at Guantánamo and filed a motion on Tuesday seeking a separate hearing, said the videotapes could well be relevant.

“If the government is relying on the statement of a witness under harsh interrogation, a videotape of the interrogation would be very relevant,” said Mr. Hafetz, of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University law school.

In addition to the Guantánamo court filings, the American Civil Liberties Union has asked a federal judge to hold the C.I.A. in contempt of court for destroying the tapes. The A.C.L.U. says the destruction violated orders in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by several advocacy groups seeking materials related to detention and interrogation.

David Johnston contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/wa...19cnd-cia.html





Hearing On CIA Interrogation Tapes

The Bush administration must answer questions about the destruction of CIA interrogation videos of two al Qaeda suspects, a federal judge said Tuesday, rejecting the government's efforts to keep the courts out of the investigation.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy ordered Justice Department lawyers to appear before him Friday at 11 a.m. to discuss whether destroying the tapes, which showed two al Qaeda suspects being questioned, violated a court order.

The Justice Department has urged Congress and the courts to back off, saying its investigators need time to complete their inquiry. Government attorneys say the courts don't have the authority to get involved in the matter and could jeopardize the case.

For now, at least, Kennedy disagreed. Attorneys in unrelated cases, meanwhile, began pressing other judges to demand information about the tapes.

"Just because the judge wants to have a hearing doesn't mean he is going to rule against the government," CBS News chief legal analyst Andrew Cohen said. "But I suspect that federal lawyers are going to have some tap dancing to do in court as they explain how those CIA videotapes could have been destroyed in 2005 when there were questions about whether they fell under the judge's do-not-destroy order."

In June 2005, Kennedy ordered the Bush administration to safeguard "all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay."

Five months later, the CIA destroyed the interrogation videos. The recordings involved suspected terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The Justice Department argued that the videos weren't covered by the order because the two men were being held in secret CIA prisons overseas, not at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

David Remes, a lawyer who represents Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo Bay, said the government was obligated to keep the tapes and he wants to be sure other evidence is not being destroyed.

"We want more than just the government's assurances. The government has given these assurances in the past and they've proven unreliable," Remes said. "The recent revelation of the CIA tape destruction indicates that the government cannot be trusted to preserve evidence."

Kennedy did not say why he was ordering the hearing or what he planned to ask. Even if the judge accepts the argument that the government did not violate his order, he still could raise questions about obstruction or spoliation, a legal term for the destruction of evidence in "pending or reasonably foreseeable litigation."

Also Tuesday, lawyers for a man convicted of terrorism charges alongside Jose Padilla asked a federal judge in Miami to force the government to turn over any remaining evidence regarding Zubaydah's interrogation. Prosecutors have acknowledged that Zubaydah provided information identifying Padilla as an al Qaeda operative working on a purported "dirty bomb" plot, leading to his May 2002 arrest at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.

Lawyer Ken Swartz said information about his client, convicted terrorism supporter Adham Amin Hassoun, might be found in those interrogations.

In a third case, this one involving another Guantanamo Bay detainee, attorney Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice asked U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington to schedule a hearing. Kessler's order, filed in July 2005, is almost identical to Kennedy's, and Hafetz says he worries key evidence was destroyed.

The Justice Department had no comment on Kennedy's decision to hold a hearing. Its lawyers are working with the CIA to investigate the destruction of the tapes and urged Kennedy to give them space and time to let them investigate.

Remes had urged Kennedy not to comply.

"Plainly the government wants only foxes guarding this henhouse," Remes wrote in court documents this week.

The Bush administration has taken a similar strategy in its dealings with Congress on the issue. Last week, the Justice Department urged lawmakers to hold off on questioning witnesses and demanding documents because that evidence is part of a joint CIA-Justice Department investigation.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey also refused to give Congress details of the government's investigation into the matter Friday, saying doing so could raise questions about whether the inquiry was vulnerable to political pressure.

Kennedy served as a federal prosecutor during the Nixon and Ford administrations until he was named a federal magistrate judge in 1976. President Carter appointed him to be a local Washington judge and President Clinton appointed him to the federal bench.
http://wcco.com/politics/CIA.tapes.h....2.613415.html





9/11 Panel Study Finds That C.I.A. Withheld Tapes
Mark Mazzetti

A review of classified documents by former members of the Sept. 11 commission shows that the panel made repeated and detailed requests to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of operatives of Al Qaeda, and were told by a top C.I.A. official that the agency had “produced or made available for review” everything that had been requested.

The review was conducted earlier this month after the disclosure that in November 2005, the C.I.A. destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogations of two Qaeda operatives.

A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelikow, the panel’s former executive director, concluded that “further investigation is needed” to determine whether the C.I.A.’s withholding of the tapes from the commission violated federal law.

In interviews this week, the two chairmen of the commission, Lee H. Hamilton and Thomas H. Kean, said their reading of the report had convinced them that the agency had made a conscious decision to impede the Sept. 11 commission’s inquiry.

Mr. Kean said the panel would provide the memorandum to the federal prosecutors and congressional investigators who are trying to determine whether the destruction of the tapes or withholding them from the courts and the commission was improper.

A C.I.A. spokesman said that the agency had been prepared to give the Sept. 11 commission the interrogation videotapes, but that commission staff members never specifically asked for interrogation videos.

The review by Mr. Zelikow does not assert that the commission specifically asked for videotapes, but it quotes from formal requests by the commission to the C.I.A. that sought “documents,” “reports” and “information” related to the interrogations.

Mr. Kean, a Republican and a former governor of New Jersey, said of the agency’s decision not to disclose the existence of the videotapes, “I don’t know whether that’s illegal or not, but it’s certainly wrong.” Mr. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said that the C.I.A. “clearly obstructed” the commission’s investigation.

A copy of the memorandum, dated Dec. 13, was obtained by The New York Times.

Among the statements that the memorandum suggests were misleading was an assertion made on June 29, 2004, by John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of central intelligence, that the C.I.A. “has taken and completed all reasonable steps necessary to find the documents in its possession, custody or control responsive” to formal requests by the commission and “has produced or made available for review” all such documents.

Both Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton expressed anger after it was revealed this month that the tapes had been destroyed. However, the report by Mr. Zelikow gives them new evidence to buttress their views about the C.I.A.’s actions and is likely to put new pressure on the Bush administration over its handling of the matter. Mr. Zelikow served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2005 to the end of 2006.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. McLaughlin said that agency officials had always been candid with the commission, and that information from the C.I.A. proved central to their work.

“We weren’t playing games with them, and we weren’t holding anything back,” he said. The memorandum recounts a December 2003 meeting between Mr. Kean, Mr. Hamilton and George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence. At the meeting, it says, Mr. Hamilton told Mr. Tenet that the C.I.A. should provide all relevant documents “even if the commission had not specifically asked for them.”

According to the memorandum, Mr. Tenet responded by alluding to several documents that he thought would be helpful to the commission, but made no mention of existing videotapes of interrogations.

The memorandum does not draw any conclusions about whether the withholding of the videotapes was unlawful, but it notes that federal law penalizes anyone who “knowingly and willfully” withholds or “covers up” a “material fact” from a federal inquiry or makes “any materially false statement” to investigators.

Mark Mansfield, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had gone to “great lengths” to meet the commission’s requests, and that commission members had been provided with detailed information obtained from interrogations of agency detainees.

“Because it was thought the commission could ask about the tapes at some point, they were not destroyed while the commission was active,” Mr. Mansfield said.

Intelligence officials have said the tapes that were destroyed documented hundreds of hours of interrogations during 2002 of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, two Qaeda suspects who were taken into C.I.A. custody that year.

According to the memorandum from Mr. Zelikow, the commission’s interest in obtaining accounts from Qaeda detainees in C.I.A. custody grew out of its attempt to reconstruct the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

Its requests for documents from the C.I.A. began in June 2003, when it first sought intelligence reports describing information obtained from prisoner interrogations, the memorandum said. It later made specific requests for documents, reports and information related to the interrogations of specific prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah and Mr. Nashiri.

In December 2003, the commission staff sought permission to interview the prisoners themselves, but was permitted instead to give questions to C.I.A. interrogators, who then posed the questions to the detainees. The commission concluded its work in June 2004, and in its final report, it praised several agencies, including the C.I.A., for their assistance.

Abbe D. Lowell, a veteran Washington lawyer who has defended clients accused of making false statements and of contempt of Congress, said the question of whether the agency had broken the law by omitting mention of the videotapes was “pretty complex,” but said he “wouldn’t rule it out.”

Because the requests were not subpoenas issued by a court or Congress, C.I.A. officials could not be held in contempt for failing to respond fully, Mr. Lowell said. Apart from that, however, it is a crime to make a false statement "in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative or judicial branch."

The Sept. 11 commission received its authority from both the White House and Congress.

On Friday, the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey and to Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, asking them to preserve and produce to the committee all remaining video and audio recordings of “enhanced interrogations” of detainees in American custody.

Signed by Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, the letter asked for an extensive search of the White House, C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies to determine whether any other recordings existed of interrogation techniques “including but not limited to waterboarding.”

Government officials have said that the videos destroyed in 2005 were the only recordings of interrogations made by C.I.A. operatives, although in September government lawyers notified a federal judge in Virginia that the agency had recently found three audio and video recordings of detainees.

Intelligence officials have said that those tapes were not made by the C.I.A., but by foreign intelligence services.

Scott Shane contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/wa...n/22intel.html





UPDATE 1-XM says Resolves Lawsuit with Universal Music

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc said on Monday it has settled a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Universal Music Group and hopes to reach deals with the other music companies.

The dispute centers around XM's portable "Inno" device, which can store and record music from satellite radio.

Major music labels including Vivendi's Universal, Warner Music Group Corp, EMI Group Plc and Sony BMG sued XM in May 2006, saying the Inno infringes copyrights and transforms a passive radio experience into the equivalent of a digital download service like Apple Inc's iTunes.

XM said on Monday it has reached a multiyear deal with Universal, which will withdraw from the complaint. It said the pact covers all XM radios with advanced recording functions, including future products. XM did not give financial terms.

"We look forward to continuing our discussions with the other music companies in hopes of arriving at a resolution that benefits everyone, especially consumers," XM said in a statement.

Warner Music and EMI declined comment. Sony BMG, which is a joint venture between Sony Corp and Bertelsmann AG, did not have immediate comment.

Warner Music is in talks with XM to try to settle the dispute and expects a resolution soon, said a source familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The original lawsuit, filed in New York federal court, had accused XM Satellite of "massive wholesale infringement" and sought $150,000 in damages for every song copied by XM customers using the Inno, which went on sale last year.

XM had argued that the Inno, which is manufactured by Pioneer Corp, is a legal device that lets consumers listen to and record radio as the law has allowed for decades.

"We are pleased to have resolved this situation in an amicable manner," Universal Music Chairman and Chief Executive Doug Morris said in a statement." XM is "recognizing the intrinsic value of music to their business and the need to respect the rights of content owners."

XM, with more than 8.5 million subscribers, is waiting for regulatory approval to merge with No. 2 satellite radio company Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. Sirius already has a deal with the recording industry.

XM shares were down 42 cents or 3.1 percent at $13.13 in late trading on the Nasdaq. Sirius shares were down 10 cents or 3 percent at $3.21. (Reporting by Sinead Carew, Franklin Paul and Tiffany Wu; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Gerald E. McCormick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...42071320071217





Justice Dept to Rule on XM/Sirius Deal Soon: Analyst

The U.S. Department of Justice may rule on the proposed acquisition of XM Satellite Radio by rival Sirius Satellite Radio as early as Friday, a Bear Stearns analyst said.

The Justice Department could not immediately be reached for comment.

"Conversations with contacts in (Washington) D.C. suggest that DOJ decision is imminent," Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck wrote in a research note. He added the decision could come today or Monday.

Peck believes that higher ranking officials at the agency will allow the merger to go through, overruling junior staffers who recommended blocking the merger.

Sirius plans to buy XM in an all-stock deal worth about $5 billion, but the merger, announced in February, has been criticized as anti-competitive by some U.S. lawmakers, consumer groups and the traditional radio industry.

Sirius and XM must win approval from the Justice Department's antitrust division, as well as from the Federal Communications Commission, for their deal to be completed.

XM shares climbed 9 percent to $14.93 in early trade on Friday, while Sirius shares rose 4 percent to $3.66.

(Reporting by Franklin Paul and Diane Bartz in Washington; Editing by Derek Caney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...29039220071130





Three U.S. Lawmakers Back XM/Sirius Merger
Diane Bartz

Three U.S. House of Representatives lawmakers have come out in favor of Sirius Satellite Radio Inc's proposed purchase of its rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc, the companies said on Thursday.

Republican Connie Mack of Florida backed the merger, as did Democrats Joe Baca and Bob Filner of California, the two companies said in a statement.

The Justice Department is evaluating whether the merger of the only two U.S. satellite radio companies would hurt competition. Congress has held hearings on the proposed deal but has no say in the Justice Department's antitrust evaluation.

On Thursday, shares of the two companies rebounded after falling sharply late Wednesday on concerns about whether the merger would win approval from antitrust regulators.

Democrat John Conyers of Michigan, who chairs a House antitrust task force, and Republican Steven Chabot of Ohio sent a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey earlier in the week expressing concern that senior department officials might intend to approve the merger over the objections of staff lawyers.

In afternoon trading, Sirius was up 16 cents or 4.86 percent at $3.45 a share while XM rose 85 cents or 6.43 percent to $14.06.

Sirius and XM also said that General Motors Corp supported the merger and had urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid putting conditions on the deal. GM installs XM Satellite Radio in some of its vehicles. The FCC is reviewing the deal to determine its impact on the public.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/indus...21997920071214





RIAA Versus Grandma, Part II: the Showdown that Wasn't
Eric Bangeman

The RIAA has settled a case against a grandmother in Texas who was accused of sharing music over the KaZaA network. Both the RIAA and Rhonda Crain, the defendant, agreed to a stipulation of judgment against Crain, but the record labels involved in the suit will not get any damages for any infringement that occurred.

Crain, a grandmother who was displaced by 2005's Hurricane Rita, was sued for copyright infringement in September 2006 after the RIAA's investigators flagged user "kcrain@KaZaA" for sharing 572 tracks on the P2P network, including tracks by 50 Cent and Usher. After Crain denied engaging in file-sharing and rejected the RIAA's $4,500 prelitigation settlement offer, the RIAA filed suit.

Represented by Lone Star Legal Aid, Crain denied engaging in file-sharing and, in a counterclaim, said that the labels had no evidence that she had infringed on their copyrights other than her ISP's linking of the IP address flagged by SafeNet on KaZaA to her account. She also accused the labels of extortion, and in a filing this past July, accused the RIAA of using investigators not licensed by the state of Texas in violation of state law.

Crain's counterclaims were dismissed in September, but late last month, the parties agreed to settle the case. Under the terms of the settlement, a final judgment has been entered in favor of the RIAA, although Crain does not admit to infringement herself. She is permanently barred from copyright infringement and is required to delete all of the recordings that "Defendant and/or any third party that has used the Internet connection and/or computer equipment owned or controlled by Defendant."

That last stipulation may be the reason behind the RIAA's decision to settle the case without any damage award. The KaZaA user seen by the RIAA's investigators was signed on using the screen name kcrain@KaZaA, which may indicate that one of Rhonda Crain's children or grandchildren was logged into KaZaA at the time and that the defendant's only "crime" was paying for the Internet account used for file-sharing.

That was what happened in two cases that the record labels came out on the wrong end of. Debbie Foster and Patricia Santangelo triumphed over the RIAA after the judges in both cases dismissed the lawsuits with prejudice, meaning that they were both the prevailing parties.

In each case, there was evidence that someone in Foster's and Santangelo's homes may have been logged into KaZaA, but the RIAA was unable to show that the defendants themselves engaged in file-sharing. The labels had argued that, even if Foster and Santangelo had not been on KaZaA themselves, they were both liable for "secondary infringement."

Had the Crain case moved towards a trial, the RIAA would likely have found itself forced to make the same secondary infringement argument. Judge Lee R. West, who ruled in favor of Debbie Foster, found that the Copyright Act failed to support the RIAA's secondary infringement allegations. "The Copyright Act does not expressly render anyone liable for infringement committed by another," wrote Judge Lee. "Under... common law principles, one infringes a copyright contributorily by intentionally inducing or encouraging a direct infringement." Paying for an Internet account used by someone else didn't rise to that standard.

By settling with the RIAA, Crain moves out from under the legal cloud without admitting infringement and, more importantly, without having to pay any damages to the RIAA. For its part, the labels avoid the risk of having the case against Crain dismissed and being forced to pay attorneys' fees, as they had to do in the Foster case (Santangelo was given the right to seek attorneys' fees by the judge in that case, but I could find no record of an award one way or another).
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...hat-wasnt.html





Why Nobody Likes a Smart Machine
John Tierney

At a Best Buy store in Midtown Manhattan, Donald Norman was previewing a scene about to be re-enacted in living rooms around the world.

He was playing with one of this year’s hot Christmas gifts, a digital photo frame from Kodak. It had a wondrous list of features — it could display your pictures, send them to a printer, put on a slide show, play your music — and there was probably no consumer on earth better prepared to put it through its paces.

Dr. Norman, a cognitive scientist who is a professor at Northwestern, has been the maestro of gizmos since publishing “The Design of Everyday Things,” his 1988 critique of VCRs no one could program, doors that couldn’t be opened without instructions and other technologies that seemed designed to drive humans crazy.

Besides writing scholarly analyses of gadgets, Dr. Norman has also been testing and building them for companies like Apple and Hewlett-Packard. One of his consulting gigs involved an early version of this very technology on the shelf at Best Buy: a digital photo frame developed for a startup company that was later acquired by Kodak.

“This is not the frame I designed,” Dr. Norman muttered as he tried to navigate the menu on the screen. “It’s bizarre. You have to look at the front while pushing buttons on the back that you can’t see, but there’s a long row of buttons that all feel the same. Are you expected to memorize them?”

He finally managed to switch the photo in the frame to vertical from horizontal. Then he spent five minutes trying to switch it back.

“I give up,” he said with a shrug. “In any design, once you learn how to do something once, you should be able to do it again. This is really horrible.”

So the bad news is that despite two decades of lectures from Dr. Norman on the virtue of “user-centered” design and the danger of a disease called “featuritis,” people will still be cursing at their gifts this Christmas.

And the worse news is that the gadgets of Christmas future will be even harder to command, because we and our machines are about to go through a rocky transition as the machines get smarter and take over more tasks. As Dr. Norman says in his new book, “The Design of Future Things,” what we’ll have here is a failure to communicate.

“It would be fine,” he told me, “if we had intelligent devices that would work well without any human intervention. My clothes dryer is a good example: it figures out when the clothes are dry and stops. But we are moving toward intelligent machines that still require human supervision and correction, and that is where the danger lies — machines that fight with us over how to do things.”

Can this relationship be saved? Until recently, Dr. Norman believed in the favorite tool of couples therapists: better dialogue. But he has concluded that dialogue isn’t the answer, because we’re too different from the machines.

You can’t explain to your car’s navigation system why you dislike its short, efficient route because the scenery is ugly. Your refrigerator may soon know exactly what food it contains, what you’ve already eaten today and what your calorie limit is, but it won’t be capable of an intelligent dialogue about your need for that piece of cheesecake.

To get along with machines, Dr. Norman suggests we build them using a lesson from Delft, a town in the Netherlands where cyclists whiz through crowds of pedestrians in the town square. If the pedestrians try to avoid an oncoming cyclist, they’re liable to surprise him and collide, but the cyclist can steer around them just fine if they ignore him and keep walking along at the same pace. “Behaving predictably, that’s the key,” Dr. Norman said. “If our smart devices were understandable and predictable, we wouldn’t dislike them so much.” Instead of trying to anticipate our actions, or debating the best plan, machines should let us know clearly what they’re doing.

Instead of beeping and buzzing mysteriously, or flashing arrays of red and white lights, machines should be more like Dr. Norman’s ideal of clear communication: a tea kettle that burbles as the water heats and lets out a steam whistle when it’s finished. He suggests using natural sounds and vibrations that don’t require explanatory labels or a manual no one will ever read.

But no matter how clearly the machines send their signals, Dr. Norman expects that we’ll have a hard time adjusting to them. He wasn’t surprised when I took him on a tour of the new headquarters of The New York Times and he kept hearing complaints from people about the smart elevators and window shades, or the automatic water faucets that refuse to dispense water. (For Dr. Norman’s analysis of our office building of the future, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

As he watched our window shades mysteriously lowering themselves, having detected some change in cloud cover that eluded us, Dr. Norman recalled the fight that he and his colleagues at Northwestern waged against the computerized shades that kept letting sunlight glare on their computer screens.

“It took us a year and a half to get the administration to let us control the shades in our own offices,” he said. “Badly designed so-called intelligent technology makes us feel out of control, helpless. No wonder we hate it.” (For all our complaining, at The Times we have nicer shades that let us override the computer.)

Even when the bugs have been worked out of a new technology, designers will still turn out junk if they don’t get feedback from users — a common problem when their customer is a large bureaucracy. Engineers have known how to build a simple alarm clock for more than a century, so why can’t you figure out how to set the one in your hotel room? Because, Dr. Norman said, the clock was bought by someone in the hotel’s purchasing department who has never tried to navigate all those buttons at 1 in the morning.

“Our frustrations with machines are not going to be solved with better machines,” Dr. Norman said. “Most of our technological difficulties come from the way we interact with our machines and with other people. The technology part of the problem is usually pretty simple. The people part is complicated.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18tier.html





Pellicano Lawyers, Feds Spar Over Evidence

The judge will rule within days on whether a further hearing is necessary on the conduct of the government in wiretap case.
Greg Krikorian

In their most contentious court hearing to date, federal prosecutors and defense attorneys in the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping case sparred Monday over whether the government's conduct in the long-running investigation should invalidate crucial evidence, including a search warrant for the onetime private eye's offices.

With only two months before the scheduled start of trial, U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer said she would hold one in-chambers hearing over the handling of audio recordings seized from Pellicano's Sunset Strip offices. Fischer also said she would rule within days on whether a separate courtroom session was warranted into the government's conduct in the case and particularly the actions of veteran FBI Agent Stanley Ornellas.

For months, attorneys for Pellicano and his five co-defendants have accused the government of misconduct, focusing particularly on Ornellas' sworn account of evidence used to obtain a search warrant. Pellicano lawyer Michael Artan was among several defense lawyers Monday to accuse the 35-year FBI veteran of knowingly including false information in the warrant.

"Agent Ornellas does not have clean hands," Artan said near the outset of a two-hour hearing. "He lied." Artan said Ornellas used an unreliable informant and embellished details of a threat against a former Los Angeles Times reporter to secure a search warrant at Pellicano's office. The phony details, he said, included allegations that the front windshield of the reporter's vehicle had been shattered by a gunshot when no bullet was ever found by the LAPD.

"This is the Los Angeles Police Department, not the Mayberry Sheriff's Department," Artan said. "If there had been anything to suggest a bullet, there would be forensic testing."

But prosecutors Daniel Saunders and Kevin Lally challenged the accusations, saying defense attorneys had fallen far short of proving that Ornellas misled the courts or engaged in the sort of "deliberate or reckless" behavior needed to prove misconduct.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...-pe-california





Cellular Spending Exceeded Wireline Spending in the US in 2007

Cellular phone expenditures increased rapidly from 2001 through 2006. Coupled with a decrease in spending on residential landline phone services (residential phone services) over the same period, spending on the two types of services were practically equal in 2006. Expenditures for cellular phone services per consumer unit rose from $210 in 2001 to $524 in 2006, an increase of 149%. Expenditures for residential phone services per consumer unit fell from $686 in 2001 to $542 in 2006, a decline of 21%. In 2001, the ratio of spending on residential phone services to spending on cellular phone services was greater than 3 to 1. In 2006, the shares of these two components were almost equal, with residential phone expenditures accounting for 49.9% of total telephone expenditures and cellular phone expenditures constituting 48.2%.
http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P9287





The Coming Exaflood, and Why it Won't Drown the Internet
Nate Anderson

Eating his words

In December, 1995, Bob Metcalfe wrote a famous column for InfoWorld in which he predicted that the Internet would suffer "gigalapses" at some point in 1996. According to his scenario, the massive traffic of the time was building like a wave about to break on the unsuspecting villagers who had just begun to rely on this "Internet" thing for e-mail and some primitive web browsing. Fantastic failures would be the norm as overloaded networks struggled to push the bits along.

Metcalfe knew his networking; this is the man who worked on Ethernet and founded 3Com, after all. His column's call to arms certainly achieved one effect: it riled up a lot of network engineers who claimed that 1996 was in no way going to be the Year the 'Net Crashed.

And of course, it didn't. There were no gigalapses in 1996, and things have been chugging along more or less smoothly for another decade since.

In early 1997, after it had become clear that his predictions had proven considerably more apocalyptic than reality warranted, Metcalfe made his mea culpa. He took to the stage at the Sixth Annual World Wide Web Conference in Santa Clara to eat his words. Literally.

Up on stage, Metcalfe brought out a cake designed to resemble his column. The crowd booed. "You mean eating just a piece of cake is not enough to satisfy you? I kind of suspected it would turn ugly," said Metcalfe, according to a Reuters writeup of the event.

He then took a copy of his original article and, predating the current "Will it blend?" craze, pulped the column in a blender along with some liquid and drank the entire slurry in front of a cheering crowd. Whatever else it was, the event represented excellent value for money.

In a note to the North American Network Operators Group, Metcalfe then admitted that "I was wrong. I ate the column. I am sorry. I am not worthy."

Everything old is new again

Despite Metcalfe's column-drinking, doomsday predictions about the collapse of the Internet have never been hard to come by. Most recently, concern has focused on the rise of Internet video, one of the key drivers of traffic growth over the last couple of years. Should Internet traffic surge more quickly than networks can keep up, the entire system could clog up like a bad plumbing job.

A scholar at the Discovery Institute (yes, that Discovery Institute), Brett Swanson, kicked off the current round of debate about Internet capacity with a piece in the Wall Street Journal. Swanson warned that the rise in online voice and video were threatening the Internet, especially at its "edges," those last-mile connections to consumers and businesses where bandwidth is least available. "Without many tens of billions of dollars worth of new fiber optic networks," he wrote, "thousands of new business plans in communications, medicine, education, security, remote sensing, computing, the military and every mundane task that could soon move to the Internet will be frustrated. All the innovations on the edge will die."

What we are facing is nothing less than a "coming Exaflood."

Swanson's word refers to the exabytes of data expected to cross the Internet within the next few years (an exabyte is one thousand petabytes; each petabyte is one thousand terabytes), along with the sinister suggestion that this information will wash across the ‘Net's routers in a biblical wave of destruction. Swanson believes that the challenge of the Exaflood can be met, but only if a certain political agenda is adopted—more on this in a bit.

Swanson is not alone in forecasting massive growth. The US Internet Industry Association released a report in May on "The Exabyte Internet" in which the group talked about the "ramifications on Internet public policy as we grow from a Megabyte Internet to an Exabyte Internet." Cisco released a report on the "Exabyte Era." Clearly, these exabytes pose a risk to our precious tubes; will they clog them up?

Here comes the fear

Here's the problem: data on the Internet is exploding. IDC estimates that 161 exabytes of digital content was created and copied in 2006; in 2010, that number could grow as high as 988 exabytes. Not all digital content passes across the Internet, of course, but much of it does (and more of it will as online backup systems become pervasive).

Cisco's estimates for IP traffic are in line with this growth rate in digital content. The network equipment maker estimates that IP traffic will quintuple between 2006 and 2011, and it says that P2P traffic alone will account for three exabytes of data each month by that time. Cisco notes that three exabytes is equivalent to 750 million DVDs.

If network providers can't or won't upgrade their networks fast enough, delays and outages could be the result. And it's not just the core of the Internet that is the focus of these concerns; in fact, the major companies that run the largest networks in the world are the ones most likely to substantially upgrade their networks to keep pace. Instead, the problem could come at the edges of the network, the last-mile connection to homes and businesses.

Part of the problem is that the size of media files is growing quickly. Music files, once commonly offered at 128kbps, are now routinely offered at 265kbps or 320kbps. Video files sizes are also exploding with the rise of HD formats. Simply downloading these files from a company's servers could make for real congestion in the last mile, and this was as a special problem for cable operators, which often share bandwidth among all users of a single node. HD won't even be the worst of it, as new 4K video (4,000 pixels across) threatens to balloon file sizes even further over the next decade.

But the growth in file sizes is made worse by a concurrent increase in the use of P2P as a delivery mechanism. Distribution gets pushed form the center of the network to the edges as users increasingly become both the consumers and providers of content, so the tubes could be clogged in both directions. Much of this traffic may not even reach the public Internet when large ISPs like AT&T and Comcast have both the uploader and downloader as subscribers. The USIIA describes this transition as a traffic shift "from the Internet backbone to a peered system in which content is streamed directly to consumers," and the group notes that it will require ISPs to upgrade the most expensive part of their networks to keep pace: the last mile.

New services like video rental are also making the move online and should hit the mainstream within several years. Even now, when online video distribution is just beginning to take off, Microsoft alone uses an estimated 5,500TB each month in bandwidth just to send movies and television shows to Xbox 360 consoles. Social networking, not usually thought of as a high-bandwidth proposition, can certainly slurp up the bits. According to Cisco estimates, MySpace alone moves 4,148TB each month. Even gaming requires big bandwidth. World of WarCraft, by itself, moves over 2,500TB of data a month, more than Yahoo's US operations.

Keep in mind that the entire US Internet backbone transferred only 6,000TB a month back in 1998. Now, a decade later, individual US sites like YouTube require nearly twice that amount.

Throw more bandwidth at the problem

The USIIA cites a research study from Teleography that found Internet traffic increased by 75 percent in 2006, while capacity grew by only 47 percent. Should such trends continue, we could be in for some trouble. One approach to the problem is simply adding more bandwidth. It's the most obvious solution, of course, and it's one suggested by people like industry analyst David Isenberg. Isenberg argues that it's simply cheaper to "overprovision" the Internet, even by a factor of two, than it is to resort to traffic shaping and packet management tools on a large scale.

Not everyone agrees that this approach is feasible. The USIIA, for instance, says, "Though additional capacity is an important part of the overall strategy, it will not in itself resolve all of these issues." That's because Internet traffic is growing faster than capacity, but also because of the difficulty in upgrading the edges of the network, not just the center (where such upgrades are relatively simple).

Nemertes Research, in its recent report on the subject, concluded that "demand for Internet and IP services is increasing exponentially, while access investment is proceeding linearly. An exponential curve will always intersect a linear one given enough time." Nemertes believes that this will happen sometime around 2010. When it does, the Internet won't collapse, but individual users will "increasingly find themselves encountering Internet brownouts or snow days, during which performance will (seemingly inexplicably) degrade."

To their credit, most people involved in writing about the "coming Exaflood" have kept the alarmism dialed back. Nemertes is clear that the effects on the Internet could be substantial, but that no amount of data is likely to bring the entire set of networks to a grinding halt. The USIIA, likewise, sounds the alarm bell but notes that "the numbers do not yet mean an Internet in imminent danger of collapse." Cisco says in the very first line of its executive summary, "The Internet is not collapsing under the weight of streaming video."

And despite warning that "all the innovations on the edge will die," Brett Swanson closed his Wall Street Journal piece by claiming that the crisis could be averted with "tens of billions of dollars worth of new fiber optic networks."

So that's alright, then. The Exaflood may be rolling in upon us, and it may threaten the Internet with a data tsunami, but the crisis can be averted if enough cash is tossed in the direction of the problem. And ISPs—whose business data transmission is, after all—will no doubt do whatever it takes to keep the Internet "snow days" away. Assuming they don't have to abide by 'Net neutrality, of course.

You didn't really think this issue was non-political?

The politics of flooding

There's a reason that "exaflood" sounds scary. It's supposed to. Though Swanson's Wall Street Journal piece tried to avoid alarmism, it did have an explicitly political point in mind: net neutrality is bad, and it could turn the coming exaflood into a real disaster (check out the Fiber to the Home Council's YouTube video explaining the exaflood for an excellent example of this type of thinking).

"Wall Street will finance new telco and cable fiber optic projects, but only with some reasonable hope of a profit," Swanson wrote. "And that is what net neutrality could squelch." His examples of the kind of deals ‘Net neutrality might threaten include:
1. Google's guarantee of $900 million in advertising revenue to MySpace
2. Google's payment of $1 billion to Dell to install Google search boxes on its computers
3. YouTube partnered with Verizon Wireless
4. MySpace signed its own content deal with Cingular

The first two examples have nothing to do with any sort of commonly-understood concept of 'Net neutrality (neither Google, MySpace, nor Dell are network operators), but one sees what Swanson means. Certain kinds of deals could be off the table; that's the whole point of network neutrality.

The USIIA report, though it stays away from discussing "network neutrality" in those terms, does argue that the cost of network upgrades over the next few years could run as high as a trillion dollars. The first priority of the government, therefore, should be on "enabling network operating companies to secure and utilize the investment capital needed to meet these estimates and provide consumers with affordable broadband services." What the US needs is a better "pro-growth environment."

Writing in the Washington Post, the heads of the Internet Innovation Alliance said much the same thing. "The formula for encouraging such extraordinary investments is clear: minimize tax and regulatory constraints and maximize competition."

Would a lack of deals like those above really hamper investment in the ‘Net? It's possible. Because network neutrality means so many things, it's difficult even to speculate unless we're all talking about a single proposed bill or an FCC regulation. It's worth noting that the ‘Net managed to get itself built so far and has been generally neutral. Even the FCC has adopted a set of four neutrality principles that companies are expected to adhere to. Despite that, I just looked out the window; the sky is still there.

Still, writing network neutrality into law is complicated business with huge potential for unintended (and negative) effects. Should a law be passed, and should it derail investment, the Internet wouldn't stop working; it would just be stuck in a time warp.

Nemertes Research claims in its report that the main result of failing to expand capacity would be to slow down the pace of innovation (although some existing services could also be affected). "The next Amazon, Google, or YouTube might not arise," says the report, "not from lack of user demand, but because of insufficient infrastructure preventing applications and companies from emerging."

Who stands to gain

But assuming that ‘Net neutrality troll stays away and the investment money can be raised, several of the recent reports express doubt that the ISPs will truly keep up with end-user demand. Such reports are music to the ears of deep packet inspection hardware manufacturers, who stand ready to offer ISPs a way out: throttling, filtering, and packet shaping.

If the simple overprovisioning of dumb (i.e., generally neutral) networks turns out to take care of the exaflood, and is affordable, DPI vendors have one less reason to sell their gear. If network neutrality becomes law, DPI vendors would have one more legal obstacle to selling their gear (it could still be used for plenty of lawful things, such as CALEA compliance).

So vendors of both routing equipment and DPI gear are thrilled with the prospect of a huge spike in bandwidth.

I spoke with Cam Cullen, the director of Americas' product management for DPI vendor Allot. He said that Allot gear was sold mainly to ISPs and enterprises and is used for subscriber management (bandwidth caps, throttling, etc.), for keeping peering links from saturation, and for monitoring the network core.

Smaller US ISPs tend to use DPI at their peering points with larger ISPs in order to make sure such links aren't saturated by P2P apps or anything else. Should an ISP's peering links reach saturation, no more bandwidth is available to that ISP's customers; additional connectivity can't generally be dialed up on the fly.

At larger ISPs, this isn't a problem, so they tend to use DPI for subscriber management. Cullen notes that Asia and Europe have far more experience at using DPI to create custom packages (buy faster access to P2P might cost extra, for instance, as might buying a plan that better supports gaming). The US has generally adopted a different, all you can eat approach that doesn't (explicitly) impose bandwidth caps or speed throttles on applications. Part of that was due to concerns over ‘Net neutrality legislation, but Cullen says that most of those concerns have evaporated.

Networking equipment makers like Cisco are also poised to cash in, and in fact have already started. An August article in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that Cisco's profits surged this year on the back of increased hardware sales. Social networking and video are already forcing a major buildout of ‘Net capacity. "We believe there's an opportunity to be an instant replay to what occurred for Cisco in the very early 1990s," CEO John Chambers told the paper.

Bring on the zettaflood

Regardless of what side in the ‘Net neutrality debate one comes down in, backers are convinced that the "coming Exaflood" can be handled. Even if it can't, the Internet will survive, but innovation will suffer. Either way, life will go on.

Fear of future traffic is an old story on the Internet. It didn't start with "gigalapses" and it won't stop with the "exaflood." In fact, the next chapter is already being written.

I had hoped to wrap up with a tongue-in-cheek reference to the "coming zettaflood" but found that I had already been beaten to it, and by a familiar name: Brett Swanson. Apparently, the "exaflood" feature was well-enough received to spawn a sequel. Like most sequels, the plot is a bit derivative, but the fans seem to enjoy it.

In October, Swanson gave a keynote at the Fiber to the Home Conference in Orlando, a group that would love nothing better than to be told that massive new amounts of bandwidth will soon be called for. He closed by predicting that US IP traffic could hit 1 zettabyte by 2015. Soon after the exaflood washes over us, it appears, the zettaflood will rise to menace us once more.

And so it goes.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...g-exaflood.ars





Blockbuster Slaps Its Biggest Fans
Saul Hansell

Why would Blockbuster want to penalize its best customers and biggest fans? That appears to be exactly the effect of the price increase it announced today for its Total Access video rental service.

That service was a rather attractive proposition that really offered an advantage over the popular DVD-by-mail service from Netflix. Under the Total Access plan, you could have a set number of DVDs at once, and exchange them either by mail or in a Blockbuster store. For example, for $24.99 a month you could have possession of three DVDs at once, and make an unlimited number of exchanges by mail or in Blockbuster stores. It charged $17.99 for a three-DVD plan, with unlimited mail exchanges and no more than five in-store exchanges. (The Netflix three-DVD-at-a-time plan costs $16.99.)

The problem was that Blockbuster was losing a lot of money at those prices.

In a conference call with investors last week, James W. Keyes, Blockbuster’s chief executive, said Total Access was a hit with consumers, but the wrong sort:

We did achieve a significant boost in subscriber count but we attracted some of the most price-sensitive and the heaviest-consumption customers with our offer of free in-store exchanges.

Attracting “heaviest consumption” customers who are “price sensitive” means Blockbuster found a lot of people who liked movies a lot and rented more of them when it offered the all-you-can eat plan. The economics of subscription businesses — like health clubs — is that you make your money on people who sign up and never actually use your service. Blockbuster’s service was really popular and a great value, so it had to pull back.

Now new customers for the unlimited-store-exchange, three-DVD-at-a-time plan will pay $34.99, a $10 increase. The plan with five in-store exchanges will rise $2 to $19.99. Frankly, that one doesn’t seem too bad to me actually: to be able to get a new movie the same night you want one five times for $3 over the Netflix rate.

What is more dicey is how Blockbuster is treating its existing subscribers. It is raising prices for some of them, depending on how much they use the service. A Blockbuster spokeswoman told hackingnetflix.com that current customers will pay anywhere between $19.99 and $34.99 for the three-DVD plan with unlimited in-store exchanges, but she wouldn’t explain the formula.

If businesses allow users to have “unlimited” use of something, betting they won’t use that much of it, is it right for them to change the rules for consumers that take them up on their offer? That has come up recently with cellphone companies and cable companies that put limits on their unlimited use data plans.

Blockbuster is probably within its rights to do this. Unlike cellphones, where there is typically a contract, Blockbuster’s service runs month to month, so consumers can cancel and it can raise prices at will. And you could argue that keeping some customers — those who don’t rent that much at stores — on the lower price plan is better than raising prices for everyone.

Still, I wonder how well a business can grow when it singles out those customers who are most loyal — and who love its products the most — for the biggest price increases.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...ans/index.html





Peter Jackson to Produce `The Hobbit'
Jake Coyle

Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema have reached agreement to make J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit," a planned prequel to the blockbuster trilogy "The Lord of the Rings."

Jackson, who directed the "Rings" trilogy, will serve as executive producer for "The Hobbit." A director for the prequel films has yet to be named.

Relations between Jackson and New Line had soured after "Rings," despite a collective worldwide box office gross of nearly $3 billion - an enormous success. The two sides nevertheless were able to reconcile, with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) splitting "The Hobbit" 50/50, spokesmen for both studios said Tuesday.

"I'm very pleased that we've been able to put our differences behind us, so that we may begin a new chapter with our old friends at New Line," Jackson said in a statement. "We are delighted to continue our journey through Middle Earth."

Two "Hobbit" films are scheduled to be shot simultaneously, similar to how the three "Lord of the Rings" films were made. Production is set to begin in 2009 with a released planned for 2010, with the sequel scheduled for a 2011 release.

New Line Cinema is owned by Time Warner. Sony and Comcast are among the owners of MGM.
http://www.examiner.com/a-1111326~Pe...?cid=sec-promo





Iron Maiden Strikes New Deal With EMI
FMQB

Iron Maiden has extended it's 28-year relationship with EMI with a new deal that includes albums, touring, merchandise and sponsorships. The deal covers the world excluding the United States. As the group prepares to embark on the Somewhere Back In Time world tour, its management team says the timing was perfect to renew its pact with EMI.

"We've had three tremendous decades working with EMI and have many friends there. Through many regimes, EMI have always given us their full support and our relationship with their companies worldwide has always been excellent," said Maiden manager Rod Smallwood. "We've got some great plans for 2008 and beyond, and I can't wait to get back on the road next year on a tour which appropriately celebrates the band's formative years."

EMI Music U.K. Chairman & CEO Tony Wadsworth added, "Since the early eighties Maiden has been a flagship band for EMI and we have enjoyed a fantastic long term relationship. Now that we can work with and support them in their broader music activities, our goal is to help build on the foundations already in place for an even more successful future."

Meanwhile, the Somewhere Back In Time tour, which will focus on the Maiden catalog from the '80s, kicks off February 1 in India. The only two U.S. dates announced thus far are February 19 in Los Angeles and March 14 in East Rutherford, NJ. More dates will be added.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=530703





Singing Her Way From Obscurity to Fame on the Internet
Devan Sipher

Cinderella is alive and well and living on Staten Island.

Ingrid Michaelson, a 28-year-old singer-songwriter whose self-produced album “Girls and Boys” reached No. 2 on the iTunes pop chart, is enjoying an enchanted transformation as a recording artist.

Ms. Michaelson’s climb out of obscurity started, as is so often the case these days, on the Internet. Now she is known to many “Grey’s Anatomy” fans for her quirky, heartfelt songs that were featured over the past year on the ABC television series. After a cross-country music tour, she is performing on Wednesday at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan, and she pointed out that the concert sold out a month ago without any advertising. (She has added a concert on Feb. 15 at Webster Hall.)

Not bad for someone who, until May, was teaching in an after-school theater program in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island, where she still lives with her parents, a dog and a pet rabbit in the house she has inhabited since she was born.

“It’s so uncool, it’s cool,” said her mother, Elizabeth Egbert, the executive director of the Staten Island Museum.

Ms. Michaelson has inherited her mother’s dry wit, which she combines with youthful enthusiasm and a penchant for funky eyeglasses. “Apparently my glasses make me sound just like Lisa Loeb,” she deadpanned, alluding to articles that compared her to Ms. Loeb, a well-known singer.

Ms. Michaelson began her music career in 2002 as a barista at the Muddy Cup, a coffee bar and performance space in Stapleton, where she performed weekly. By 2003, she had produced her first album, “Slow the Rain,” and was playing at the Bitter End in Manhattan.

She called those shows a sobering experience. “I learned pretty quickly that just because you’re playing at a good venue doesn’t mean people are going to come see you,” she said.

So she decided to throw caution to the wind, or, more specifically, to the Internet. She completed “Girls and Boys” in 2006 and loaded the music onto a MySpace page, where it caught the attention of Lynn Grossman, the owner of Secret Road, a music licensing and artist management company in Los Angeles.

“I listened to her song ‘Breakable’ about 40 times in a row, and I completely fell in love with the song,” Ms. Grossman said, referring to a surprisingly buoyant song about human fragility.

Ms. Grossman’s visceral reaction to the material astonished her. After years in the music industry, she said, she had considered herself desensitized. “It’s really rare when something pierces through,” she said.

So she immediately contacted Ms. Michaelson, pledging to get a song on “Grey’s Anatomy,” which was Ms. Michaelson’s dream.

Yet Ms. Michaelson remained skeptical. “You get so many false promises from people that you don’t expect anything to happen,” she said.

But things did happen. And fast. Old Navy chose her song, “The Way I Am,” for a sweater commercial. VH1 selected her for its artist discovery program, making her the first unsigned artist to appear on the channel. And radio stations, including WPLJ-FM (95.5) in Manhattan, added her songs to their playlists.

“I had a three-year plan, and we achieved all those goals in 10 months,” Ms. Grossman said. As for “Grey’s Anatomy,” the series used not one but three of the songs from Ms. Michaelson’s album. Then the producers took the unusual step of asking her to try writing something specifically for the show.

She grabbed the opportunity and created “Keep Breathing,” a song that juxtaposes a plaintive melody with deceptively simple lyrics. “I like to say a lot in a very small amount of words,” Ms. Michaelson said.

The song played through the closing minutes of the season finale in May, with the last line, “All we can do is keep breathing,” repeating incessantly over layers of reverberating percussion and instrumentation.

“I love songs that have tension, tension, tension, and then release,” Ms. Michaelson said. “We feel it in our bodies. We hold in the tension, and then we release and exhale.”

After a whirlwind year, this might be a good time for Ms. Michaelson to exhale. But that’s easier said than done. The music business is notoriously unpredictable, and she is all too aware that her fairy tale success story did not happen by the book.

“I worry this is all going to disappear in a few months, and I’ll have to wait tables again,” she said. “I get anxiety-ridden, and I can’t relax.”

She took a breath and added, “I should sing my own songs to myself.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/ny.../18singer.html





Madonna Ditches Label, Radiohead Go Renegade: The Year The Music Industry Broke

In the first installment of our three-part series on the future of music, we take a look back at what went wrong and when.
James Montgomery, with additional reporting by Gil Kaufman

In April, Trent Reznor released Year Zero, a concept album about a future society teetering on the brink of apocalypse. It was supposed to be a grand work of fiction, but it could just as easily have been about the music industry in 2007 — a bleak, burned-out world where the sky fell on a daily basis and the rivers ran red with the blood of record execs. (That the album didn't sell well only furthers the analogy ...)

Make no mistake about it, 2007 was a b-a-a-a-d year for the industry. According to Nielsen SoundScan, album sales were down 15 percent from 2006 (a trend that's continued for eight straight years now); big-name artists jumped ship in increasingly complicated — and messy — ways; and the powers-that-be seemed to get even more heartless and disconnected, thanks to a series of lawsuits, feuds and terrible decisions.

In fact, you could probably say that 2007 was Year Zero. Things started to change because they couldn't possibly get any worse.

In the first installment of our three-part series on the future of the music industry that is rolling out this week, here's a blow-by-blow recap of just how bad the year was ...

January 14: The "Dreamgirls" soundtrack tops the Billboard albums chart with sales of just over 60,000 copies. It's the lowest sales total for a #1 album in SoundScan's 16-year run, beating the record set the previous week, when the soundtrack landed at #1 with sales of 66,000 copies.

January 30: Sony BMG announces that it has reached a proposed settlement with the Federal Trade Commission that would allow consumers to trade in CDs with the controversial self-installing "rootkit" antipiracy software — which the company had included without consumers' knowledge — "through June 31," according to a press release (of course, in keeping with the less-than-forthright spirit of the whole rootkit issue, there are only 30 days in June). The company also agrees to pay up to $150 to repair any damage to computers caused by users trying to remove the digital-rights-management software, which was revealed to cause serious security risks. The settlement also calls for Sony BMG to disclose any limitations on consumers' use of the music CDs, and prohibits the company from collecting user information for marketing purposes and from installing software without users' consent. Sony is also required to provide a way for users to easily uninstall the rootkit software.

March 5: In a blow to small Internet radio, the Copyright Royalty Board — made up of three copyright-royalty judges appointed by the librarian of Congress — significantly increases the royalties paid to musicians and record labels for streaming digital songs online, ending a discounted fee for small Internet broadcasters. Under the ruling, the current rate of $0.08 each time a song is played will more than double by 2010. In April, a coalition of webcasters, including National Public Radio, attempts to request a new hearing, but the Royalty Board rejects the appeal, and on July 15, the royalty hike goes into effect. In November, both AOL and Yahoo contemplate shuttering their Web radio services due to the increased royalties.

March 21: Paul McCartney leaves longtime label EMI to sign with Starbucks' new record label, Hear Music. His album, Memory Almost Full, is released in June through both traditional retailers and more than 6,000 Starbucks locations in the U.S., and sells more than 160,000 copies in its first week. "For me, the great thing is the commitment and the passion and the love of music," McCartney tells an audience of Starbucks shareholders. "It's a new world now and people are thinking of new ways to reach the people, and for me that's always been my aim."

June 11: In a move that would have seemed unimaginable in the label-driven industry of old, Kelly Clarkson feuds openly with the head of her label — Sony BMG head Clive Davis, for decades one of the most powerful industry executives — and parts ways with her management company, the Firm, amid controversy about her upcoming album My December. Three days later, concert promoter Live Nation announces that Clarkson's summer tour in support of the album has been canceled due to underwhelming ticket sales. My December hits stores later in the month, and sells more than 290,000 copies in its first week, giving Clarkson the #2 album in the country — behind the "Hannah Montana" soundtrack — but shows little staying power. Clarkson later apologizes for her remarks.

July 10: Canadian indie outfit Stars make their new album, In Our Bedroom After the War, available for download just 10 days after completing it — and some three months before its scheduled release date. The move is done with the blessing of their label, Arts& Crafts, and the album becomes a mainstay on the iTunes Music Store's most-downloaded list.

July 15: Prince ticks off his U.K. record label and Britain's Entertainment Retailers Association when he decides to release his new album, Planet Earth, for free with the Sunday edition of the British newspaper The Mail. It's estimated that 2.27 million people receive the album, which helps boost sales of tickets for his 21-night stand at London's O2 arena. "It's direct marketing, and I don't have to be in the speculation business of the record industry, which is going through a lot of tumultuous times right now," Prince says.

September 19: Kanye West's Graduation sells nearly 957,000 copies to claim the top spot on the Billboard albums chart. 50 Cent's Curtis bows at #2 with sales of more than 691,000. Both are the best first-week numbers of 2007 (besting Linkin Park's Minutes to Midnight, which scanned 623,000 copies in May), and Graduation notches the biggest first week in nearly two years — beating, interestingly, West's Late Registration, which sold more than 860,000 copies when it was released in September 2005.

October 1: Radiohead shock fans by announcing on their blog that not only have they completed their much-anticipated new album, In Rainbows, but that "it's coming out in 10 days," via download — leading to reams of "this is a taste of the future of albums"-type commentary. The bandmembers, who have been free agents since the release of 2003's Hail to the Thief, decide to release the album by themselves in two formats: download-only, which allows fans to name their price for the album, and as a deluxe "discbox" version (priced at approximately $80).

October 4: The Recording Industry Association of America wins its first case against file-sharing, when a jury finds 30-year-old Brainerd, Minnesota, resident Jammie Thomas guilty of copyright infringement. In question were 24 music files she allegedly posted on the peer-to-peer site Kazaa. Thomas is ordered to pay $220,000 in fines — or $9,250 per song file. Her lawyers appeal the ruling, on the grounds that it is "unconstitutionally severe," but in December, the U.S. Department of Justice intervenes, urging the courts not to rule on the constitutionality of the damages, as "Copyrights are of great value, not just to their owners, but to the American public as well."

October 8: Trent Reznor announces the end of his 13-year relationship with Interscope Records, writing on his site, "As of right now, Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contact with any label. ... It gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit." He then goes on to write that there are "exciting times" ahead. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. And he's not kidding: Within a week, he promises (threatens?) to scuttle Interscope's release of a Year Zero remix album by leaking tracks from it to the Internet, then announces that he's partnering with Saul Williams to release The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust! via download, and gets into a public argument with the Universal Music Group over the legality of a proposed fan-only remix site, before deciding to launch the site himself.

October 9: One day before downloads of In Rainbows are scheduled to begin, Radiohead send an e-mail to those who've ordered it, stating that the album will be encoded at 160 kilobits per second, a rate far inferior to their other LPs, which are all available for download at 320 kbps (or most MP3s floating around file-sharing sites like OiNK, for that matter). This angers many fans, who feel that the band duped them by not announcing the encoding rate upfront, and the bad feelings are only furthered when Radiohead's managers give an interview to a British trade mag, in which they suggest the download version of In Rainbows is a promotional tool for the actual CD.

October 10: In Rainbows is made available for download. Over the next two months, much speculation ensues as to just how many people downloaded it and exactly how much they paid to do so: Early reports have more than 1.2 million fans downloading it at an average price of $8, though later findings by comScore, a company that measures consumer activity online, adds that more than 60 percent of downloaders paid nothing for the album. Neither Radiohead nor their publicists discuss the financial aspects of the download experiment, though the band does issue a statement dismissing comScore's findings as "wholly inaccurate."

October 16: Madonna finalizes a massive 10-year deal with Live Nation, believed to be worth $120 million. It's the largest so-called "360 deal" in history, involving not only Madge's future studio albums but her tours, merchandising, film and TV projects, DVD releases and music-licensing agreements. "For the first time in my career, the way that my music can reach my fans is unlimited," Madonna says in a statement. "The possibilities are endless. Who knows how my albums will be distributed in the future?" The deal brings to an end the singer's 25-year relationship with Warner Music Group, which has released all of her albums to date.

October 23: OiNK, "the world's biggest source for pirated, pre-release albums," is shut down after a two-year criminal investigation led by Interpol (the international police organization headquartered in Lyon, France ... not the band). Officers raid the apartment of OiNK's creator, a 24-year-old Brit named Alan Ellis, and seize the site's servers in Amsterdam. Ellis is arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and copyright infringement, and the e-mail addresses of the site's more than 180,000 users are made available to police — though it is not known whether they could face criminal prosecution as well. Ellis' trial is scheduled to begin in February.

November 7: Thanks to a last-minute rule change by the folks at SoundScan, the Eagles' Wal-Mart-only LP, Long Road Out of Eden, debuts at #1 on the Billboard albums chart with sales of more than 711,000 copies. The total nearly triples that of the country's #2 album, Britney Spears' Blackout, and gives the group — which hadn't released an album of new studio material in 28 years — the second-highest debut of 2007.

November 27: Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris gives a disastrous interview to Wired magazine, in which he compares the music industry to a character from the comic strip "Lil' Abner," calls college students who download music "criminals" and explains the industry's inability to keep up with the Internet by saying, "There's no one in the record company that's a technologist. ... It's like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?"

November 28: Reigning "American Idol" champ Jordin Sparks' self-titled debut lands at #10 on the Billboard chart with sales of 119,000 copies. It's the lowest first-week sales total for any "Idol" winner — by more than 180,000 copies.

December 3: Island Def Jam lays off nearly 6 percent of its staff. Rumors of axings at major labels like Sony BMG and the Universal Music Group begin to swirl — and at press time, it looked like they may have begun. The Warner Music Group announces that it has cut bonuses for employees, and Terra Firma, the private equity group that owns EMI (home to Capitol Records), reportedly makes "cutbacks a core part of its strategy." There are also reports of massive reshuffling at labels like Epic, RCA and Arista.
December 31: In Rainbows is set to be released to retailers in the U.K. through XL Recordings. The U.S. release will come one day later, through TBD Records, an offshoot of the Dave Matthews-founded ATO Records.
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/157....jhtml?src=rss





McCartney Happily Evolving With New Label
FMQB

Back in March, when Paul McCartney became the first artist to sign with Hear Music, the label formed by Starbucks and the Concord Music Group, he said at the time, "For me the great thing is the commitment and the passion and the love of music, which as an artist is good to see. It’s a new world now and people are thinking of new ways to reach the people, and for me that’s always been my aim." It was a huge change for McCartney, who had spent 45 years with EMI. Now, in a new interview with U.K. newspaper The Times, he talks openly about how his former label had gotten stale and the importance of finding new and innovative ways of releasing music.

"Everybody at EMI had become a part of the furniture. I’d be a couch; Coldplay are an armchair. And Robbie Williams, I dread to think what he was," McCartney told the Times. "But the most important thing was, I’d felt [the people at EMI] had become really very boring. And I dreaded going to see them... because I could guess what they were going to say: ‘Love your record, Paul.' And I’d say: ‘Well, what should we do with it?’ Then they’d go: ‘Well, we think you ought to go to Cologne,' which is what they always say. This idea became symbolic of the treadmill, you know? You go somewhere, speak to a million journalists for one day, and you get all the same questions. It’s mind-numbing. So I started saying: 'God, we’ve got to do something else.'"

He found that "something else" with Starbucks' new music venture, and Macca added that he also admires the Radiohead tactic of releasing music online as soon as its complete, noting that it's actually reminiscent of the old guard. "This was how we used to operate. I remember John [Lennon], for instance, writing 'Instant Karma' and demanding it was released the following week," he said.

Meanwhile, at age 65, McCartney is not doing much slowing down. In February he picks up an award for Outstanding Contribution to Music at the Brit Awards. He will then go into the studio to assist on an album by his son, James. Also nearing completion are a guitar concerto and a new album under his alter ego, The Fireman. And his latest album, Memory Almost Full, will be up for three Grammy Awards at the February ceremony.

"I'm very pleased with these Grammy nominations for my latest album, Memory Almost Full," he said in a statement. "I had a lot of fun making it with [producer] David Kahne and my band and am very pleased with how successful it has been, particularly because of the way we got it out to people in a new and interesting way."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=532275





Trent Reznor on Year Zero, Planting Clues, and What's Ludicrous About Being a Musician Today

Wired contributing editor Frank Rose interviewed Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor at his house in Beverly Hills on October 18, 2007.

Rose: So, as you know, I'm doing a piece on ARGs and focusing on 42 [Entertainment] and Year Zero. And I've spent most of the last day and a half with the Year Zero people going over that, and sort of —

Reznor: The 42 guys?

Rose: Yeah, I'm sorry, with the 42 guys, right, right. In fact —

Reznor: (You met) Susan and Alex?

Rose: Yeah, exactly. In fact, this morning Susan took me to the place where you did the sort of secret concert. [laughs] That was a pretty great location. And so anyway, I just wanted to, you know, first off get a sense of how you got started. What was the impetus for you in terms of doing this? I gather you contacted them.

Reznor: Yeah, on my end what had happened was I was on tour from 2005ish-toured for about a year and a half, almost two years for the With Teeth album. And while on tour I realized OK, I'm bored. You know, it's fun to play that two hours a day, but the rest of the time is (kind of wasted). And I started messing about on-I'd never had any luck writing music on tour because I never had the kind of attention span. And this time I opened up laptops and, you know, everything had advanced so much that you actually get a very nice recording experience now contained —

Rose: Right, right.

Reznor: So, I started working (about) some music and ideas, and that led to quite a bit of ideas. It ended up being-when the tour was finished last a year ago just now I had more than an album's worth of musical ideas that seemed fertile and interesting. And lyrically I'd been toying around with the idea of taking Nine Inch Nails out of being just a narrative about my own head and addressing something that had gotten higher up on the list of importance to me over the years, which has just been kind of what's happening in America and the direction we've taken as a country. And it felt kind of dangerous to expand Nine Inch Nails into that, and risky, and that seemed like at this point in my life a good thing. And so I worked from the idea that I was going to set this record 15 or so years into the future. And I was going to write it from various points of view of people in that world and have no real narrative that went from point A to B, but just glimpses, snapshots, Polaroids going by. And it started as an experiment of just seeing how that would work, and within the month the album was pretty much written, which is extremely fast for me. And I knew, OK, I'm four-fifths of the way there, I'm committed to this idea. And it still feels good and it still feels — like when I first started I didn't know if it would just be terrible or if it might be all right, you know. And as it started going it "feeled" itself and it turned into something that really felt strong to me. But I wound up with a problem at the end. And the problem was: I now had a collection of songs that made sense to me because I knew what the backstory was. And I should interject then that right at the beginning of this phase of getting off tour, about a year ago I came back to LA, had the music, a lot of the music, had ideas. And before I started writing the songs, I spent maybe a week really writing out kind of what the sociopolitical vibe would be like in this climate, what would it be like from a spiritual tone, events that may have happened leading up to this, you know, if I was going to forward-write history leading up to this day 15 years from now. I had a good working kind of knowledge of what things were going to be like and events that would have triggered that led us to this place. And then chose people that would be in these various different places to write these songs. That was the idea. Wrote this music. And had kind of been toying around with the question of how I was going to tell the backstory and make the record make sense to other people. And, at first, it went through a few iterations of the best media and ways to do that. It could have been liner notes, if there were such a thing these days, you know. A cryptic tale that kind of set the story that if you bought a Who album would be written on the inside or the inside sleeve. Showing my age, because that's still how I look at records. I still think A and B sides and still kind of work in that format. So, that kind of lost its steam, and I couldn't find the right way to do that. And then I thought maybe it could be a Web site that kind of explains it. But what I realized was, the — for example the idea that, let's say, one of the ideas in Year Zero is that a faction of American citizens who have lost their right to vote and their freedom of speech and their voice isn't heard and their government isn't allowing them any way to express themselves and their art is suppressed, a more radical faction of Americans feel that, well, they've learned what does work is forms of terrorism. It does get attention. So, maybe they, in a homegrown way, lash out and try to blow up a senator's family to get their voice heard. So, domestic terrorism — that was an idea that came up as a valid means of questionable morality of what someone might resort to to get the message across when their own government's holding them down. And me telling you what I just told you in a form of an essay or Web site or paragraph is one thing. But actually finding a Web site that probably isn't real, but, God, what if — that hoaxish feeling, like War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells kind of thing, seemed like a much more effective way for the audience to experience it rather than be told a little fictional thing. "Oh, that explains why this song's kind of ..." So that led my creative partner Rob Sheridan — who's our art director as well, has been for a few years, we kind of share the same brain. He's coming at it from a 15 years younger than me perspective, but we have similar taste, and we flush out the generation gap — it's covered up pretty well. And we started talking about, how the hell can we do this in a way that — how can we tell this story? How do we find — we want to make the world's most elaborate album cover, you know, using the media of today instead of making people buy a vinyl record, which they're not going to do, or a CD or an MP3, which has no artwork, no — so that led to us remembering really the whole thing that happened with — why am I drawing a complete blank right now? Spielberg and —

Rose: Oh, and A.I.? Right, uh-huh.

Reznor: We remembered, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Remember when — and neither of us had played that game, but we both, we both were aware of it. And I remember hearing about it after it kind of got off the ground, something about the (credit and the postman), if you Googled that it came up with this and that led to this crazy person. What appealed to me was the incredible detail and thought that went into it. I thought, what an interesting way to kind of make it — I mean ultimately, in that case, you're marketing a movie. You're trying to garner interest among a pretty specialized group of people, you know, demographic, that would be interested enough to find that and research it. But I really loved the way that it utilized these new forms of communication and medium that were emerging. Internet and bulletin boards, et cetera. And so we did a little research and found that. That was really the main thing I was even aware of in the ARG world. I was aware of — like I'm a big fan of Lost, you know, and that type of — I've seen those little magazine ads that that's from the airline that's in — or something like. And it intrigues me, for whatever reason that is, an interest in puzzle solving, a mystery, taboo, you know, finding something new you weren't supposed to. The joy of researching something that's not too hard to do but yields a result. It feels like you uncovered something. So, anyway, we set up a meeting with these guys. And right off the bat [i] was really impressed with them in terms of intellect and tastefulness.

Rose: Can I interrupt for a second? How did you get in touch with them? Did you just like send them an email or ...?

Reznor: We found 42 Entertainment. I said, "Can you track these guys down? It's something I have an interest in." Because I didn't know, frankly, if they would want to do something like this, which seemed different to me than — and I'll get into specifically what it is, and what I've known that they've done. And secondly, can we afford it? Because I know I couldn't go to the record label and say — well, I could ask. But that has its own set of problems that I'll get into in a second. So, regardless, a meeting was set up. And initially it was a couple phone calls and me kind of explaining what I wanted to do. And where I think it differed from what they've done in the past — and this is what we kind of got — we didn't get into an argument with, just this is what I needed to make clear, was that I don't — first thing I did was tell them what we had. And it kind of came back [with the approach to] 42 Entertainment-fy it, which was create a narrative that kind of ran alongside of this that added a kind of starting point and endpoint in terms of a narrative that could be understood and put together over time. And I sat with that for a while and then I came back, and I said, "No, that shouldn't be it. And here's why." Because the Lost Experience, and I don't know who even did that one, but as a fan of Lost, when I found out about it, and followed a few breadcrumbs it felt like the equivalent of the Star Wars books that are in the grocery store. It's set in the same world, and it has some of the elements I like. But I know Darth Vader's not going to be in it. It doesn't feel like the A team is working on this. It's just something — and then my mind puts it in the category of oh, it's marketing. You know. I'm not going to find any real gems here, it's just a marketing thing. So, I said I want to make sure the focus on this project stays on the music, and I want this to all be the same. You're not marketing my record, the record is as much marketing this project. I want it to be a kind of just experiment. This is where the flaky artist guy comes out, you know. But I think what needed to be pure about it was it wasn't ever considered marketing. And we never tried to monetize anything, unless there's some way that it doesn't in any way make you feel like you're being hustled by something. Which is why I didn't tell the record company about it. Because the very first thing any record company would do would be: alright, how are we going to tie this in with K-Rock, giveaways. And how do we get them to buy ringtones and Verizon will give them — you know. If it goes that way — if it happens to spring up where there's some interesting way that somehow that can be monetized and it doesn't impinge on, great. But we're not letting that drive how we do this thing is that you have sell ring tones so we're going to — this has to be a giveaway to give concert tickets to — fuck all that. It's not what this is. So, anyway, the plan got a bit modified with 42 where I said I don't want to introduce a narrative of characters that have nothing to do with the music to kind of give your story legs and a game plan. Let's make it all puzzle pieces that by the end of — I gave them my Wiki that I'd written, Rob and I had written — that had all the whole background of Year Zero. And it was —

Rose: You had already sort of put that online or —

Reznor: Not — just internally. Rob and I use that as a kind of working template to put our ideas together, because it was easy to branch off into the different — and it was also easy to see, hey, we need to — for example, let's get more into the India-Pakistan dispute and what caused that and the repercussions. You could go into elaborate detail or not — kind of was tangible and made more sense to us. So, we gave them that. And I just kind of said why don't we just pick bits of this that we can flesh out into things that become breadcrumbs or Web sites or whatever they might be. But let's not add into it Character X who we find out goes from this to that. Let's make this just a snapshot of something. And they came up with the mechanism, the fiction of a 20th of a second of the Internet got sent back in time and landed on our Internet. And what was nice about that was it eliminated progression of story. It eliminated the narrative. Now it was what —

Rose: Slices, yeah.

Reznor: You'd put together a piece of a newspaper that you found and got bits of this. And I've got to say, like, it was the most collaborative rewarding experience I've had, counting music, that I've ever had.

Rose: Really, uh-huh.

Reznor: Just working with a team of people that I innately trusted and respected and was regularly amazed by the ideas they'd come up with. And also I sensed mutual respect to where I didn't feel like they thought I was just being stubborn about things. We all had a good kind of taste barometer, you know. We'd run it by and someone would say, "Oh, this could be" "You know what, you're right." It was never an antagonistic thing, and I think the result we ended up with was something I'm very proud of.

Rose: Yeah, it's pretty amazing, yeah, right.

Reznor: It was a fun process. I'm not sure ... you know it did more than I ever thought it would do. And, you know, it was just an interesting way to get that story out, and I think it really made the record sound better to me, in a way.

Rose: Right. [laughs]

Reznor: You know, but it did require me, in a number of places, kind of explaining to the public [that] it's not fucking marketing. You know, because immediate — that was the one that hurt me the most. The second that the whiff came out that this was coming out, and they had no idea how deep it went. And I think a lot of my music fans have never experienced what happens in an ARG or what — it was fun watching it unravel. But right off the bat someone goes, "Oh, it's 42 Entertainment. They've been hired to market this record." It's not fucking marketing, you know. I'm not trying to sell you anything. Anyway.

Rose: Huh. So, who — how did you come up with the idea of, you know, leaving USB drives in bathrooms with songs on them?

Reznor: Well, I think that came from their side of things. What we were trying to do was — what were we trying to do? I think what was unique to them was because this was a music project, it gave them some new opportunities that they didn't normally have. Like lots of clues in audio that we collaborated on — how to hide stuff in the actual sound of the record in places. And we also had this thing that was, I think, unique to them, which was a live tour starting up. Which is, events that people will be interested in going to. How can we make it something that feels like not everything is something found on the Internet so everybody — I'll back up one step too and say — they probably got into this, but I remember right at the kind of phase of debating whether we were going to work together, the initial kind of courtship, there was this kind of sense of it would be cool if we could make a difference in the world feeling, you know with the subject of what we're dealing with. And that was a new thing for me with Nine Inch Nails as well. The thought of — I've been asked this, "Well, why'd you do it anyway?" So one reason was what was good about the format of an ARG which forces people to form communities and discuss things, and then watching the debate, or I'd see them find a clue about something. And I could see that they're hitting around what we mean. And then someone would hit it right on the head and they'll get dismissed, and then they'll go back way off track. And then it winds up, usually, nine times out of 10, right back [at] what you wanted them talking about. And then you see people discussing what that means, you know, and where this isn't just — although it's fictional it's all based on things that are happening right now, which most everything that was dealt with in the world of Year Zero is based on policies or things in motion at the present. And the whole point of it was to get people to pay a little bit more attention. And when asked, "Well how do you prevent — do you think that's how the world's going to really be?" I hope not. But I think the key to it not being turning into that is more people paying more attention to what is happening right now. And seeing some people online, even if it's a handful of people that's questioned the next little thing that happens to slide by in the guise of the Patriot Act or we're protecting your freedom and think to question it, I think that's certainly a step in the right direction of youth today or anybody for that matter.

Rose: So, you followed the progress online, I mean the players' progress?

Reznor: Oh yeah, it was a lot of fun for us. We were in Europe when this thing started. What we did then was we worked backwards from if it's around the record, now we have a solid kind of the release date of the record was I think May or April. The record will leak by the fact that they all do a couple weeks before then when it goes to manufacturing somebody leaks it. So, we have that window of time when that's going to happen, between a month and two weeks it will for sure leak.

Rose: So, you mean somebody will post it on one of the —

Reznor: Yeah.

Rose: (one of the nets) yeah.

Reznor: Yeah, what's ludicrous about being a musician today, and this is a whole other hundred hour conversation I can have, is because any record label still meat and potatoes come from retail brick and mortar sales, they can't offer anything for sale until it can show up in the store. They're going to piss off Wal-Mart or Best Buy or whoever it may be. Meanwhile, avid fans who you want are monitoring the Torrent sites and the PtP sites for that first — you know, as I do as a fan of bands. Do I want to hear it now or do I want to wait a month, go to the store and then put it back on my computer, or just get it on the computer? So, you have to work around that leak date, which always at the latest happens when it goes to manufacturing. There's people there that just upload it. And as you know one copy means every copy. So, working around those dates, and then utilizing what we had happening at the time, which was (we're) starting before that, I think it was their idea, let's come up with ways to maybe have actual music as clues. What if someone found — yeah! Now I didn't get permission to do that from the record label, because they wouldn't have. So, I don't know who did it but it seemed to wind up in the — that was one thing, that was one of a bunch of things that we did do that seemed to resonate and got picked up on. They also had things — did they tell you about this — where we had speakers, directionalized speakers where we could pump sound into people's heads from quite a ways away.

Rose: Oh no, no, I (don't know) about that.

Reznor: It sounded better on paper than it actually did in the execution. But we had — I forget what they actually call them, but it's basically a focused cone of sound from these amusement parks and things so you could hear something in one corner but you don't — and if you get out of that very fine — if you were 30 feet away from here I could aim it at you and you'd hear it. If I aim it that way it disappears. So, we were trying to pump messages into people's heads at the show between acts. You'd be sitting back with this thing, aiming it, with an iPod with some scary message that we'd computer voiced —

Rose: So like you aim it at specific people or it's just like a small group of people?

Reznor: We'd look at people that we thought would be the kind of people we expected were probably online, you know, and try to target them. But we could never tell if they were really hearing it or not. Then I went out and hotrodded one up and put a bigger power amp on it. I was walking the line between — I was ready for smoke to come out of somebody's head. So, that was an idea that really didn't work as well as we thought. But we put a lot of effort into little things like that, to try to really make an experience that broke down the idea that you come and see concerts, two bands play, you drink a beer, you go to the bathroom, you go home. And ideally in the future the plan is to work with them again. It's something that's probably less classic ARGish and more about breaking that audience performer barrier down into something that — we haven't figured it out yet. But something that you know will never be a mainstream thing, but to the people that are into it. I think why this idea worked for Nine Inch Nails is I know that there's a faction of my fans that would be into this sort of thing. It was a real treat to be able to watch them uncover it. We couldn't wait after the show to get online and try to get Internet in Barcelona, watching seeing if — "Did they find it, did they find it? One guy found it on IRC." We'd be monitoring all these things.

Rose: Monitoring the chatrooms?

Reznor: The chatrooms and IRC chats and the fastest information would be there. Then you could kind of watch — there was one exciting one where there was a mural, that was actually the one in Brixton.

Rose: Right, uh-huh, yeah.

Reznor: And somebody got — I forget how we put that clue, I think on a flyer, an actual flyer gave an address that they had to figure out was an address. And somebody was driving to go there, and everyone online's like, "They've got to be there by now. I mean it's not that far to get there." And then the guy that's there presents a whole onslaught of pictures and all this (you know) try to solve part of it before he put the pictures up, because he knew people would see the mural, and there's a bunch of clues in there. It was exciting. I sound very nerdy I guess right now. But it was very rewarding —

Rose: You're talking to the right magazine, it's OK.

Reznor: — experience.

Rose: [laughs] Right.

Reznor: The other guys in the band are out, you know, having drinks and having fun. And Rob and I, you know, we're iChatting each other trying to monitor how people are picking up on this stuff. It was interesting.

Rose: So, is this back in your hotel room? Backstage? Sort of right —

Reznor: Hotel room. Because we had to leave the venue, which always had terrible Internet. And then get to the hotel which just had very bad Internet.

Rose: Right, right. So, and you also posted songs online that you could download from BitTorrent. I mean they're still there, in fact, some of them.

Reznor: Yeah, the way we did that was that was another thing that we started doing, we experimented with on With Teeth, which was it dawned on me another bored day in the hotel doing press for the album. And I didn't have anything with me except my Mac. And I booted up Garage Band, and I'd never really paid any attention to it because you know it's not a real application (an artist) snobby music programmer. And I was amazed how powerful it actually is as a multitrack editor and time stretching device. And how fun it is with all their built in loops to just very simply create something that was interesting. It was intelligent enough to know what key things were in, and it was drag and drop simplicity that you don't get in the Pro Tools world. So, as an experiment, I happened to have multitracks of a couple of the songs with me for some reason. And I wondered if I could streamline them enough to fit into that program, and load with a rewarding experience. And it did. And then I sent it out to the crew and I said just mess around with this and see what — you know, and it was a really positive experience of, you know, I've got a country-western version of "The Hand That Feeds." And I thought, you know, this would be cool to just get out to people. Based on the premise that you know the software's pretty powerful now. And I know I would download a song by a band I didn't even like if I could mess around with it and have fun and feel like I'm, whatever. So, then it was a matter of talking the record label into giving away master multitrack tapes. And I think their lack of knowledge about what that was aided my cause on that. And there seems to be this preciousness about your master tapes. Why the hell can't we let them out? You know, I'm done with them. The record's out. People can have fun, mess around. So, we did that, ended up doing that with two songs off of that album, and it spurred a whole community of people doing remixes because now they have the key to get into the track, and dissect it. And so, one of the ones we put up — or we offered them for download in Mac format, Garage Band. But in a frustrating way the second (that the disc) come out everybody's hacking into them to try to get them to be something on PC. And, "I listened to it in iTunes and it's just the vocal." Just, arr. So, we sprayed them all out as just wav files, you could load into any program. But rather than eating the cost of the bandwidth, they just posted them on (pirate bay), let the ISPs eat the cost.

Rose: I'm sorry, you posted them on?

Reznor: We put them up on Pirate Bay I think is where we posted the Torrents, because anyone who was doing all that stuff knows how to use a Torrent anyway. And rather than pay whatever it is to give stuff away, just get them there. I didn't really think that would cause any controversy, to be honest with you, but I did notice that we're in bed with the pirates. I'm just looking for free bandwidth, you know. That's all it was. And it was easier than (send space), you know.

Rose: So did you — you got flack from the RIAA I heard.

Reznor: Well, I did read a little bit of — a little grumbling from them. But I'm not on their side. And they're not on my side. And that's what I wish the public knew more about where the RIAA really stands. And they're just a lobbyist group for the record labels. They do not have the artists' best interests in mind. And as proof of that in the last few years, a couple examples that are ridiculous in terms of things that there's no way they can misconstrue that as being for the artists' rights, you know. And I think what they're doing now as far as going after the housewife, you know, is ludicrous. This is your fans and your audience that you're attacking —

Rose: The housewife in Minnesota?

Reznor: Yeah. I mean ... I'm strongly against that. Which brings me to this point, which is you know I had a real awakening when I was living in New Orleans, which is where I lived from '91 until just a couple years ago. I started getting out of touch with what's happening. You know, I was in the studio locked in there and getting older and not paying attention to what's going on (and really). And I remember going to somehow I wound up at some college kid's dorm. And this would have been I'd say '96, '97. Ten years ago. And it was like, oh, everybody listens to their music on computers now.

Rose: [laughs] Right, right, yeah.

Reznor: You know, I didn't really think anyone really did that. But that is everybody's stereo, back then. And everyone had stolen everything. I was never a Lime Wire guy because it's too much hassle to find the song. It just seemed (seemed shitty to me). But you know it dawned on me, when iPods first came out I was very skeptical. And it's not the music experience I want. You know, I'm still back in the world of — I don't know what it was. Head in my ass basically. I didn't see how radically that was going to transform not only the business. But now that I have a thousand albums in my car all the time, I listen to more music. I was too lazy, I always had the same five discs in there. I'd never think to change it.

Rose: Yeah, right, sure.

Reznor: But then went through a phase of feeling very bad and violated by the fact that people felt it was their right to steal your art. It's like I'd like to be compensated for the hard, hard work I put into this. And just because you're able to steal it doesn't mean it's OK to steal it. I used to stand behind this kind of bullshit line of do you think it's OK to steal Photoshop? I did it, but that feels like I shouldn't have done that.

Rose: To steal the program you mean? Photoshop?

Reznor: Yeah, I mean somehow that seemed different than a song, you know. But what I've come to realize, you know, since it can't be stopped — and I blame that on an outdated concept of what copyright law is in the way of ownership. Primarily the greed of the record industries have not — their own greed has prevented them from adopting any solution that would give people what they want. People want to listen to a lot of music and do whatever they want with it. They don't want DRM, they don't want subscriptions. They don't want a player that only can do this but can't do that and you only have one copy. They don't want that. You know? I don't want that. And they're so rooted in this outdated business model that they're not willing to give up their CEO salaries or their Lear jets or their ridiculous overdone staff or their lion's share of the cut of records that get sold. And so, a couple years ago I kind of realized that music essentially is free now. I'd prefer if it wasn't. But it is. And being on the other side of that argument is a losing battle. And once you kind of get your head around — it's not a flawless thing, because I think the songwriter he's more fucked in this scenario. But applying it to my own life, hey I've had a pretty good run. I can still make a living with touring. And maybe you buy a t-shirt. And I would rather 10 million people get my record and listen to it for free than 500,000 that I coerced to pay $15 for it, you know? And I think given the state of the way the industry is right now, the only way to look at it is I think what Prince is doing. I think Radiohead if they would have executed it better could have — you know the idea is right. Eliminate this dinosaur in the corner that's primarily taking all your money, based on a thieving business model, and are making enemies out of the people that they're customers. You know, that's ridiculous. I mean if you're going to go after someone go after ISPs. Don't go after somebody that — what good is that going to do?

Rose: Yeah, right. So, what would you have done differently from what Radiohead (did)?

Reznor: Well, I'm a big Radiohead fan, and I applaud their what seemed like courage. But I felt a little funny after X amount of people have signed up to pay for a download to then find out the day before or the day you're going to get it, oh it's a 160K MP3, which is MySpace streaming quality, which is not good. And what if you just paid $20 for that because you want to support your favorite band, and find out oh I just paid for something that sucks? And then hearing some inane idiotic comments from their managers saying, "Well, the real way to hear Radiohead is on a CD." Oh, so this is all just a bait and switch to get us to buy something that we thought was the real product that wasn't after we paid for it. And then to get us to rebuy it as a CD because it has extra tracks because you want to make sure you have your brick and mortar traditional record deal in place feels — that feels like I've been had, as a fan.

Rose: That's interesting, I didn't realize that that's how it worked in fact.

Reznor: Yeah. And then the band even, one of the guys in the band, well it's higher rate than iTunes, which is 128. No, it's not. Because iTunes is in AAC files, not mp3. Not to split hairs.

Rose: Yeah, well no, AAC is much better.

Reznor: I think as a musician right now, and one that cares about perception of integrity above making every last cent and every opportunity to monetize everything, it's a very slippery slope now. Because basically people if you're moderately technologically aware music is free to you. And I had said before Radiohead did their thing that if I had an album ready to go right now I would offer it, PayPal button, download it for free if you want, if you want to support the artist here's four or five bucks. Click here and it goes to the artist. If that option was available across the board I'd pay for every record I come across. And I would believe that putting it back in the hands of the fans in terms of honor and respect, that yields results. Not everybody, certainly not everybody's going to do that. But I think giving people (an opportunity) to feel good about, I think people do want to support the music that they like, I think that — and Radiohead did do that. I think that's good. However, it felt like there's a catch on that. Because I was the guy that paid for the $80 physical thing that's coming out, because I'm a fan and I wanted to see what it was like. But I do know a lot of people that felt like, "I don't want that, but I'm going to pay for this record." And then got a cassette copy of it, you know.

Rose: [laughs] Right.

Reznor: That felt like a — it felt weird to me.

Rose: How did you deal with — you were talking a few moments ago about you know like two weeks or so before the album comes out, you know, it gets uploaded. How did you deal with that in terms of the game or in terms of, you know, I mean everything?

Reznor: Right. For a band like Nine Inch Nails, and I would also add the Radioheads of the world in that camp, as opposed to the Gwen Stefanis and the Fergies, we genuinely have one spike of interest now. Two spikes of interest. And that would be when the record leaks, and when the retail release comes out. And the first one in my case is a ten out of ten. And the second one is a seven and a half out of ten, because the fans already have it. And then it's just their moral remembrance to go and actually and pay for one now. After that, it's consumed and passed along, discussed furiously and then it's forgotten. And then the next level of spike comes if we tour. It used to be you had the advance single that would get some kind of bit of interest, the release date would be a ten out of ten, and then the single that comes out, the second single with a video with it. Now it doesn't make any sense monetarily to really make videos unless you can do them cheaply, because there are no outlets for them any more, because MTV's too concerned about lifestyle reality programming. There is a reason to do it on YouTube. And I found out throughout Europe they still play videos a fair amount. But where that differs from say the Fergie Gwen Stefani model, they still have those videos and they have an audience that might be technically less on top of it, maybe. But they still get dictated what to listen to, and radio still plays those things and they do what they're told in that camp. In our camp it comes out, it goes through channels, and that's where it stays. So, my theory was, after the record leaks I don't have any surprises left in terms of the music for the record. But before it leaks I've got 15 surprises. How can I seed them out in the way that I would like people to hear it? Like as an artist in a perfect world everyone would get the record at the same time, and everyone would stop what they're doing and go into a place that sounds nice, take the phone off, listen to it from start to finish, think about it, listen to it again from start to finish, go to bed that night. In the real world now its' terrible quality bootlegs file shared, I've got the third song, you've got the second song and it's jumbled around and it's — because music is primarily free I think people just want to get more and more and more. Compared to when I was growing up, I had $10 to spend on a record, I listened to that record, and I got my $10 worth, even if I may not have liked it. I fucking bought it, let me — now you just have all the stuff. I've got a lot of shit on my iPod I haven't listened to yet, you know. And it does have less value because it's free. So, what we did was strategically linked out songs ahead of time via methods we could use in the game and the story that would direct people and (taint) them what I wanted them to think about the record before the bulk of it came out. And generally it would be this is not what the rest of it sounds like, get them scratching their beards for a minute. A couple weeks later, here's something else that doesn't even sound like it's even the same band. Oh, throw them for a loop. And then punch them when the whole thing leaks out.

Rose: So, that's what the USBs were about.

Reznor: That was the method we used to get those out. There's another one that you could hear snippets of a song if you found a clue that was a phone number that had a bit of it in the background. But the other factor we had to consider was several of kind of the bigger clues were in the actual audio of the album. And we had to factor in, in this very carefully orchestrated reveal of all the parts, this might happen two weeks before the record's out or it might happen a month before if somebody's careless. This window's shifting. We made it pretty far further than we thought, closer to the release date before it leaked. And the last set of clues would be on the actual physical jacket sleeve, that no one would really get until much closer to the deadline, because for some reason that seems to be — you'd see scans of some stuff, but that generally is right up to the release date before people get that and can scan it. Then everyone's trying to look for clues. You know, I found during the course of this ARG that as much as I loved watching people do it, I would get super frustrated when they're ruining the game, sometimes, by their over eagerness, you know what I mean? You put these — and I'm sure these guys told you the same thing. You'd put in clues that you thought nobody's going to figure this out. I mean I would never ever come up with how you do that. And in ten minutes they've got it. And other things that feel like it's almost too easy, never solved. You know. So, it's interesting watching everybody else. But I do admit getting frustrated at times where there'd be this kind of race to spoil, just not even enjoying the process, just racing to the end of it, you know. But it was a fun experience.

Rose: Yeah. Huh. So, you've said that you're not going to release on major labels anymore, except I think you have what one more due on (Interscope)?

Reznor: I'm done with Interscope. There is the remix record coming out that's still going to come out. And they have the right to release a greatest hits record at some point, which there's no animosity between myself and the main guys at the label. And I think they understand that a lot of what I'm saying that's been against labels is just from a hey, the ship's going down and I disagree with most of what you guys are doing. And I'm not going down with you just because you guys are greedy. And I'm going to call you on it. But, will I ever be on a major label? I mean right now I can tell you what we're not doing is meeting with all the labels to find out what kind of deal we can get, because quite frankly there's nothing really that we need them for today. I think I really feel that the next few years the business is in a between phase. And the right model hasn't revealed itself yet. And I don't think it's the Radiohead model, which what we would do is similar to that. I don't think that's the end — all thing, and it certainly doesn't work for new bands. You know if nobody knows who you are nobody's going to buy your record. I know I've been meeting with a lot of technological companies that are trying to fill that void of being your store for you. But there's always an agenda there. And most of these companies won't be here certainly within the year, maybe six months. You know Snowcap is a good example of something that I just — just feels wrong to me, doesn't feel like the right thing. Add into it some of the things they can't do, sell outside the States, (so 30%). Give you fucking 30% to do what?

Rose: [laughs] That's right. Might as well be at a label, right.

Reznor: I finally got 100% back. I'm not really — you know up from 20% that I had. But it certainly would be nice if there was a toolkit that was out there. You know if I was what's his name from Microsoft, Allen that's got more money than he knows what to do with — he's got five huge yachts with recording studios and all that bullshit in there that makes me sick when I think about it — how about if you're into music how about creating or funding someone creating a toolkit that's free, that would give musicians the power to house their own music and sell it from storefronts that don't take the lion's share of that? Give them some tools that musicians can make their own music and not be now beholden to some other hustling company that's trying to —

Rose: Right, right.

Reznor: And put some respect back into the process. We have a little — Rob and I, the aforementioned art director — we'll e-mail back and forth any time we see things that are like — we're hoping somebody makes a kind of archival Web site of in the major label music business's last days, some of the desperate things they're doing to try to sell music. There's just some sickening things.

Rose: What do you have in mind?

Reznor: Well one of them was some rapper, write lyrics to my new song and win, you know, something to do with Doritos. Something just ridiculous. And then we were talking about the company that has something to do with Blackeyed Peas, this, that and the other thing. You go to their site and there's Google ads all over their official sites and sign up here to get — put this on your site and if anyone buys it you'll get a percentage of the sale of my record.

Rose: [laughs] Sounds like a pyramid scheme.

Reznor: Yeah. I mean for some artists that may not be something that seems in appropriate, you know, and I'm not here to judge them. I am here to judge them, actually. But you know, can't it be about the music? Can't it be about have some dignity and just be about the experience? You know I'm the guy that fights to have better quality sleeve and printing job on the CD, because I think it matters. To me it matters, you know. When I'm sitting next to the marketing guy at the record label trying to explain why that matters. "No it does matter if it's a matte finish versus (only) because it feels better." "Yes, but it's seven cents more. That means you're going to lose..." "But it feels better." It makes it a better experience to me. It's not just about — it's about the whole thing. And that usually falls on deaf ears these days. Because everything's about — when musicians started bragging about what great businessmen and how much money they have, so when did that start happening? Mid-90s?

Rose: [laughs] Yeah, right, probably, yeah.

Reznor: I mean I'm sure it had something to do with hip hop's emergence as a superforce. But I remember you know early '90s if your music was on a commercial, you were kicked out. That was —

Rose: Yeah totally. But now it's the opposite.

Reznor: Suddenly it's like that's a great way to break a band. Get on an iPod commercial. You know it's like, oh, we've come to that now. You know, I guess it's better than American Express. Or is it? You know? It's sad that it has to rely on those achieving things to survive these days. But I don't think you do.

Rose: So, you said you were going to work with 42 again. Is this going to be on the remix album do you think or like the next project you do?

Reznor: No, the remix record is just what it is. It's a remix record and the kind of thing we've added to that. I think it's the best remix record I've done, which is that's — what does that mean? But it also comes with a data DVD, if you buy the physical that has every track on this new album, Year Zero, as multitracks in its generic WAV file format to work with anything, or as Garage Band or as (abelton live) which is Mac (and PC). And that will coincide with the release of a new version, the first component of the new Nine Inch Nails website. Which will be built around remix type site where you can upload your mixes, rate others, listen to theirs, download them, whatever you want to go. Just kind of a hopefully elegant place to put stuff based on discussion. No fee, you know just a place to see what's up.

Rose: That's an interesting idea.

Reznor: Interesting graphs to see data in new ways. And just see how it goes, you know. No real agenda there other than I thought it would be something cool to do. Interscope went along with it. So. And I don't know of anyone that's done that. I'm sure someone may have done it, but. That's the remix record. And then I'm just working on some new music now that I don't — I'm finding that it's starting off with a different vibe, I've just started working on, because — and this may be famous last words — but because I know this project won't end up on probably any label, I don't feel any need to cater it to any format. And it feels kind of freeing right now. It may be unlistenable at the end of the day, I don't know. But I'm not worried about that time I bring the record in and say, "Here's my new album. Sorry guys. No hit singles again." You know? That's gone. So, it's really do whatever I want to do. Not that I couldn't in the past. But somehow you're aware that there's — the thing I felt on the label that I've been on is they're really good at getting the record out there. And there's certain types of records that are unmatched at marketing. But when it's not one of those records then they're like a big machine knows how to do this thing. But if you give them this thing, they're not sure what to do with that thing. And they look at it as a failure if it doesn't perform like that thing. And that's a frustrating entity to deal with sometimes. Where and you always — at least I do — feel like well I failed them in some capacity. These are my business partners, I've given them something that didn't — wasn't a sleek model that did what that one did. You catch yourself but that's ... I don't want to be that model. I never was that model, I'm not trying to be that model. You're trying to make me that model, just let it do its thing. So, it's an interesting time in the music business. You know it's scary, it's also — it's change that's needed to take place. I remember when I first got a record deal in '89, and I actually saw the numbers on a record deal. And you realize how little — you do all the work, they lend you some money to record an album, you pay them back every penny. Then they own it, and they give you this much, 15 percent or, on the upside, 20 percent of wholesale, after they've overcharged you for manufacturing, which they own so who knows how much that really costs. And then they don't pay you until you audit them. And that's OK somehow. And there's no penalty for that. You know this kind of sucks, you know? How did this get started? Who allowed this kind of format to be the norm? And if what's happening now puts an end to all that, it's 30 years too late, you know. Not saying there won't be something else equally as thieving that can prey upon musicians and artists. But hopefully they'll be more educated, the young kid coming into it doesn't make the mistakes that I made (in my footsteps).

Rose: So, how do you think you will release your new album? Or will it be an album even?

Reznor: I mean what we're thinking of right now is less of a long album like thing and more frequent EP type things that come out rather than every couple of years, maybe every few months. Because there's something about the idea that I can go downstairs and work on something and then that night it can be out in the world, ooh. And, you know, there are things that — there are issues we need to think about that I find myself embroiled in right now, because I spent the last few months — I should say I spent the last few years, couple years, same time I worked on Year Zero I was working on (Solium's) new album, writing and producing that. And we just finished that a couple months ago. And found that, wow, major labels are afraid of signing new artists that don't sound like the Black Eyed Peas. And this is something that's pretty volatile and interesting, and has something to say and doesn't sound like everything else. And I'd just gotten into it with (soulabap) which, "I can't in good conscience let you go sign with a major label, you know. I wouldn't do it. We're not on the same footing right now, but let's see how we can apply what's happening today in the world to your record and see how we can make it interesting." And unlike, say, what Radiohead, which is very pull. You just go there if you know who they are and you're interested in them or you seek it out, it's the only place you can get it and find it. That works I think fine for them. What I would be thinking about for Nine Inch Nails or certainly for (Saul) is a way to get out to more people that doesn't feel too pushy, doesn't feel to spammy or —

Rose: Right, right.

Reznor: Or in any way feels compromising in terms of its association with who your guy funding it might be. In other words, any corporate affiliations that might help get the word out. It's interesting what Prince did with his record in England about giving it away with the newspaper. You know, and it angered retail, brick-and-mortar retail, people because they're selling the same record that's for free in the newspaper. And I understand that, and I have sympathy for them. That they're another casualty of the record business just like the artist is. But from Prince's point of view, you can sell a handful or you can give away a truckload. And then he plays 20 some shows at the big arena over there and who's laughing at the end of the day? Now, I don't know that that's the right model, I don't necessarily think it is. But the idea of making music something that you're not under the illusion that you're going to coerce people into not stealing and paying for, but getting it out to a shitload more people, that's exciting. And maybe you can monetize it another way through what I mentioned, (merchant it off) or maybe not. But at the moment I don't see any real alternatives. And I'd much rather have a lot of people hear what (I love to do) or discover (Saul), you know. We're working on a plan where you can get his record for free, or you can support and pay what I consider a reasonable amount, and I think anyone would consider. Valet parking or an hour's worth of entertainment that we've worked our asses off, you know?

Rose: [laughs] Right, right.

Reznor: Big Mac, not even supersized, just regular sized meal or you know. And it's a challenge right now just trying to find the thing that feels, feels the best, that doesn't feel like it's some kind of hustle.

Rose: The sort of store mechanism to how exactly you would release it or make it available?

Reznor: Yeah, I mean if — I think the purest way is to build your own store, then your bandwidth costs are on your back on the downside. But when you take an artist like (Saul) that doesn't have a big pot of money to start digging into develop that, test it and then house it and then have support for it, it starts looking a lot more appealing to look at other options and people who have already built that. But then it's what do they want from it? Payment is one thing. But affiliation I think is another important one. Because you know like something I just was thinking about is when you visit some of these sites that you can buy people's music, it feels like — this will sound snobby but it's just being truthful — it seems like the people that are on those sites are not there because they want to be there. They're there because that's the only place they can be. You know? And it feels sometimes like a lot of it's made for the bedroom techno artist, nothing against that guy. But it has a kind of perception of value is a bit lower. It's K-Mart versus (Amoeba), you know. It feels cooler getting it there. Versus is this defective? You know what I mean? I don't know why that is, and maybe it's just me and Rob that feel that way. But just some of the miscellaneous bullshit, just thinking about it in terms of how do I get my music out to people the most bulletproof way that satisfies all our needs. They get it for free or whatever they want to pay for it, X amount, and I do it in a way that I'm not losing money hand over fist to give you my album away for free to pay for bandwidth to get it into your iPod, you know what I mean? That doesn't make any sense to me.

Rose: Yeah, right.

Reznor: And it's an interesting time, just trying to weigh everything out. So, I don't know if that answered your question or not but —

Rose: Yeah.

Reznor: I can't tell you definitely I would do it this way. But you know if I was putting an album out tomorrow I would do it where you have a choice of paying nothing or I would say a fixed amount, this much, your choice. And if you get it as a fixed amount, here's the bonus. We'll give it to you as a FLAC file if you want or the mp3 high, or medium (or low). If it's free, it's a good quality MP3. But I can't justify enormous bandwidth costs to give you something completely for free. If you can get it for free, great. Or just steal it somewhere, if you're going to do that anyway. But I think the important part of that is giving people a legitimate option to support art and music they love. I think inherently people that are into it don't feel bad about that. At the moment what you're fighting is a perception that, oh, it's the record label, and they're greedy fuckers, and they're overcharging anyway. That's how I feel, you know.

Rose: [laughs] Right.

Reznor: And I know that, you know.

Rose: Huh. So, to get back to the ARG question, do you know — do you have any idea what you want to do with them next? Or is that sort of like —

Reznor: Well, I left that experience of working with them feeling like I wished I worked for them, you know what I mean? I have more fun doing that than a lot of what I end up doing in my own career. And I sensed a real respect and admiration mutually from them as well, and it was fun because I think — this is my own possibly warped perception, but we both had a good time doing it, and it felt kind of not as rigid as maybe some things they worked on. And for me it was interesting because I wasn't working with the marketing company, I was working with artists who happened to work in that world. And that's what I think resonated between both camps. Alex and I still stay in touch, as do Susan and I. And we've talked about — we've just planted the seeds of let's say like initially the next thing I was going to do is the final portion of Year Zero record, and a tour that supported both things. And the idea then was that we wouldn't repeat another ARG like we just did. But something that broke into that boundary with the concert experiences and maybe each concert is unique and ties in with your presence there. A lot of long discussions over a lot of coffee and idea back and forth with them, now that I know that they're a resource in terms of what is possible, you know. So, there is no concrete idea, and what's shifted in my world is now not being on Interscope. And also the kind of unpredictable how do I feel creatively. I don't particularly feel like right now I want to sit down and go back in Year Zero and open up that world. I want to work in terms of some shorter bursts of music that are just coming out of subconscious. And we are planning on doing some live shows in the near future with a new band and new way of presenting Nine Inch Nails. And that may or may not involve some element of 42 for that. You know, when the record label when we did the ARG, they were amazed at — did they tell you about our meetings we had with them?

Rose: No. With the label?

Reznor: With the record label. Yeah, I funded it myself so I could call the shots basically. But it came a point when it was about to come to life, work was being done, they had been hired, and I wanted to involve the label, explain to them what was going to happen, so that they basically didn't mess it up. Just let it do its thing, but warning them what might start happening. And there was some of the most absurd conversations I would have, where I'm trying to explain something that's — if you try to explain what an ARG is to somebody, it's a tough —

Rose: Yeah, yeah it is, it is, right, right.

Reznor: I can tell you another tough conversations. Calling my manager and saying, "Listen, here's what I want to do. I'm going to hire these guys — " "How much?" "Yeah, but here's what's going to happen. People are just going to start sensing this thing's going on. And it's going to be this rabid kind of excitement about this story that ties into the record." "Well, how are they going to find out about it?" "Well, first on a T-shirt, you notice a letter's a little bit different. And someone's going to put that together, and someone's going to think what if I type that in a browser? And it's going to take them to a site. And that's going to talk — and they're going to put that online." I could hear myself saying it, and I thought goddamn I sound like a crazy person, you know. And I'm saying, "Look how much money I'm going to spend to do this." It sounds crazy, you know. But to their credit they trusted me. And they understood what — they kind of picked up on what would be cool about it.

Rose: The label you mean?

Reznor: No my management.

Rose: Your management, right, (Jim).

Reznor: "I'm going to do it anyway, you know what I mean. But I wanted to let you know I want them on board." So then we're all on board and it's in motion, and the money's being spent, and now I'm talking to the label and I'm saying, "Here's what I'm doing." And I could see that same what's going to happen now? "There's a few things that for sure are going to happen, but I can't tell you what they are. No offense, but if I tell you what they are and someone finds out before it happens, it ruins what it is. So, it's for your own protection." Really, it's because I don't want you to know because you'd fuck it up somehow. In this form, "Hey K-Rock, check out this billboard down the street next week. You're going to see this thing blow up." And a minute later, "Hey, check out the billboard down on" you know. Story blown.

Rose: Yeah, got it, absolutely.

Reznor: So, then we had a meeting where I brought them in, because I figured they're smart. And they have impressive credentials. Let's put them in front of the record, it will sell. We had a little music listening party at a recording studio, and I brought Susan and Alex in. And I said, "Now it's the guys from 42 Entertainment, and they're going to explain what they did for Vista and for some other bullshit." And then I left [laughs]. They were nervous, talking to these people. And I couldn't stand to bet here and watch them (in fire). It all worked out well.

Rose: Yeah, yeah, right. How did you — I know they came to you with the idea of the sort of secret concert. How did you —

Reznor: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That was something that never could have happened without those guys on board. Because we were on tour, I remember we were in London and they came over for something, a mural went up.

Rose: Yeah, the Brixton thing, yeah.

Reznor: And then we started talking about it was getting to the phase where — not everything was planned out from the very beginning. Certainly the skeletal ideas. But then some things were left to mutate depending on how it went. And at that meeting it was like, "OK, we should think about the end and we should think about how to wrap it up and make it feel like this phase of it has a conclusion to give people a sense of accomplishment, and to keep them from being frustrated looking for something that isn't there anymore." And then there was the idea of "What about this idea? Susan, you're going to kill me." It was (Alonna) saying this. "And what about this, we're in Cleveland. You guys play a secret show. As soon as everyone leaves the building they're across the street from the building, boom, detonates, implodes."

Rose: [laughs]

Reznor: You know, and I'm like these are my kind of people. How the fuck can we do that? Yes, you know. Anyway, that mutated into — I came up with the idea of — it was their idea to have a show. The problem I had with that was it can't be a full show, it needs to maintain a level of excitement where people feel like they're getting a treat, that something happens. It can't just be a show, because then it becomes a show. So, I kind of wrote up a synopsis of what I thought would be a cool thing to happen, including primarily what happened, you know. And I thought for sure there'd be some liability (of us) being able to do that. And what if someone gets hurt, and you know. But then I kind of rationalized it, like OK, when you to a haunted house somebody's coming at you with a chainsaw and a strobe light in the dark, you know. Those somehow nobody goes to jail for that usually. And so they really just started working on the idea. And I knew that the people they would get to execute it would be — I'm not just kissing ass when I'm talking to you. But by that time they'd really proven themselves as they don't disappoint. It's an A list — its what I would do if I was in that job. I'm a guy that overthinks things and you know gets — but it was the same, I knew they could pull it off. And we talked about it, and we decided to use that place you saw. It's where we filmed the ("Survivalism") video a while earlier. And much to my amazement, that went off without a hitch, you know. Without a hitch,. and there were so many things that could have just made us look stupid, you know. And to my surprise, you know, watching — all I could see, because we were in the building. I could see the bus pulling up and we were all looking out the window and seeing people walk out and guys on the roof. It looked great, you know. And I couldn't tell what was happening in the actual meeting until I saw we edited it right after the film, watched the video tape. And it was — I was surprised that it was what I hoped would happen. It was that suspension of disbelief, worked it out so where it would feel like, hey everybody thought this was (entertaining news) but now we tie Nine Inch Nails and fiction into this and now you realize, oh I'm at the first resistance meeting. And this is the guy — oh, I'm in the movie. You know. And the whole idea of it being broadcast, Webcast, and then it cuts off right when you don't know what happened. And those people that we carefully selected would be the ones that tell the story. I thought it was genius. All those flourishes were there (and doing). And what was great about it was the next day, people had — so the story ended with the SWAT team coming in, tear gas and sirens, people getting rushed out to the bus, were bound up against the wall, and you know, people running out, freaked out. And then people filled in the story with they went to jail. Which I don't think they did, you know what I mean. I couldn't tell what was real myself. My manager Jim called me up and he's like, "What the hell happened last night?" I'm like, "It went off without a hitch." "No one was in jail?" "Not that I know of. I don't know why they would, it wasn't really cops there, were there?" You know what I mean, like it really got into like I can't imagine what it would have been like if you had fallen along the line and got cut off and then the stories popping up. I didn't really hear anybody kind of pulling the sheet away, showing the guy behind the curtain, you know. It all felt like it really — I don't know how many people in the end really were aware of what was happening at that time. You know, but in terms of keeping it pure, and really making that thing feel like it had a cool climax. That was — I can't tell you how much fun it was for me. That's the kind of stuff I love to do, and be able to pull it off and have the team together to come up with an idea and say, "Oh yeah, if anyone in the world can do it, these guys can, you know." And they take pride in making it happen, and it was good. Down to their — well, I better not say. Down to the guy providing the weapons, the real weapons, the SWAT team trainer, you know, who was terrifying in his own way.

Rose: [laughs]

Reznor: Really into, you know, making sure it looked right.

Rose: Right, right.

Reznor: Did they tell you about the girls that were plants too?

Rose: No, no.

Reznor: That's a good detail. Normally when I'm explaining to somebody what happened, you know, I explain the story of how they get their little kit and phone rings and they're all excited and they know to meet at this place and they get put in the van or the bus and don't know where they're going. They get there and they realize they're a meeting, and then what they probably suspect comes to life. And the band's going to play, and wow — and then bang. Even on the set list, we had a full 20 song set list including a couple songs we'd never played live. And I knew someone would see that. And the very first thing I see, "You know what pissed me off the most is they were going to play Perfect Drug." You know, but I knew the fifth song it's over. So the sixth song was, you know. But for that added bit of realism, I said, now imagine you're one of those guys that you're probably on the nerdy tip if you're the guy that's at the thing, got the kit, (what's on) the phone call. And at the place you're going to meet there's kind of a hot chick who's also kind of nerdy but by herself. And she's sitting next to you on the bus ride there. And she's you know (roll over) during the meeting that you sit through. And then she stand next to you when the band's playing. And then when the SWAT team breaks in, she's the one that gets grabbed by the hair and thrown to the ground and punched and pulled back. It was a plant the whole time. So, we had a couple of them in there just to add to the what the fuck factor. And that was the weapons provider's girlfriend. So, it was fun.

Rose: [laughs]

Reznor: It has to be that cross the line a little. It can't be too safe. But so far no lawsuits, so I think everyone survived.

Rose: So, did the — actually one thing I wanted to ask you about, I read about that you tried to buy 42 at one point?

Reznor: That who did?

Rose: That you did. That you offered to buy them.

Reznor: No, no, it was Jimmy from Interscope.

Rose: Uh-huh, oh Jimmy did.

Reznor: Yeah, what happened was I was never — I heard about it third party. When this started happening on the Internet there was a big buzz. And the label was looking at, well, everything we don't really know about these guys seem to — Jimmy told me, (hey it's Star Wars on the Internet you did). Now that didn't relate to Star Wars sales figures for the album, which is what they were hoping it would be — a 2 million sales. "We found the future of the music business. Do an ARG for every record." So then, unbeknownst to me, then I heard that Jimmy was talking to what's his name, the name guy.

Rose: (Leo Klein) or —

Reznor: No, no, at 42.

Rose: Oh, at 42. Jordan (Likum).

Reznor: Jordan, yeah. And set up a meeting with them, first with my manager there and then not with my manager there to kind of get involved in seeing, "OK, you guys know about this mysterious Internet thing and in touch with the people that use this thing that are stealing our music. Maybe it makes sense for us, because we have deep pockets, just to buy you and we have you as an asset." And I even wrote to those guys and said, "Look, this is not my doing. You know, I didn't even know about this. So, don't blame me or don't thank me. It's whatever it is." And to be honest with you, what I thought was if I was — just to talk too much here for a minute — if I was running the record label I would buy them. And I would say, "You guys are in charge of new media now, their blanket term for everything that's not a CD basically. And educate us how to make the label not the enemy. And what do people want? You know, because we don't know. How can we get back on people's good side? How can we give them some service — they don't want to buy plastic circles anymore. What do they want? How does it make sense for us? What do we need to do?" But I don't think that it was that kind of discussion. "I think it was more what exactly do you guys do? And how can we apply it to the roster that we have?" And I think when that became clear that that probably wasn't the best solution I think the talks just dissipated.

Rose: Yeah. This is Jimmy (Arvin) you're talking about.

Reznor: Yeah, Jimmy's a smart guy. You know, Jimmy if you look back at how he's navigated Interscope through the waters of the '90s from where it was to what it is now, that's him. That's his — he's the guy that call him any time of the night and will go to any length to get the artist he wants. He's a smart guy and will outmaneuver you in a number of ways. I consider him a friend and also have been outmaneuvered by him, regularly. But I could see where he sees — he smells something that is of quality, of interest. And in this case it was 42. And the sharks circled the ship there. I'm not saying it would have been a bad thing for either party. But I was just sitting on the sideline. I think where you heard me, my name came up, was I heard if he buys them (I'll make) a chunk of the company. But that was never a discussion with Jim and I or me and them. And I would have said, "Look, don't. I'm not trying to make this happen, you know what I mean? I respect you guys and I respect our relationship. There's no weird."

Rose: I probably read about it on MTV news or something like that, but I was curious to — I thought the coverage of even like Rolling Stone, you know, MTV, it was always like — I mean the coverage of the ARG that you guys were doing was like what are these wacky rock stars going to think of next? You know, it was kind of odd.

Reznor: It was more mainstream than I ever thought it was going to be. You know, to which I'm grateful of that. I mean I did it, so I'd hope people would notice it was happening.

Rose: Yeah, the ARG was more mainstream you're —

Reznor: Yeah. I mean it got picked up in more mainstream journals than I expected. I think it was — again the reason for doing it was to — the subject matter of the album made sense to do it. If I'm singing about [78:44] but that lent itself to that medium. And I felt that it was the strongest way to convey that story. And there was a story to convey that made the music make more sense, I think. And probably as much work went into each side that I really looked at it as that isn't the art and that isn't the marketing. They're both the same thing. (If there) was some way to immortalize that as a boxed set explanation of some sort, or DVD with all the media. We've talked about that even, some way to kind of get behind the scenes all the details, the original Wiki, just have access. Because it's interesting.

Rose: Yeah, it is, it is. (I be) explain it myself.

Reznor: To show how many layers of thought and how bulletproof the fiction was and how many times we went back and forth on, well, once you get time travel involved then a whole 'nother world of — I remember a few times where we all locked up after four hours of talking about something. Yeah, but if the future you is that, then how did ... would I have known about — getting into that. Which appeals to me as a fan of science fiction. What's nice about all this is it whetted my appetite to do some things other than make an album, go on tour, make an album, go on tour. Talk about where the name came from, you know, over and over and over and over again. And I felt like, you know, there's no rules as to what entertainment is. And I think rock concerts are lazy. Shitty band you don't like plays. Intermission. Band you like plays, it sounds back. Go home. You know what I mean? Eat a hot dog maybe. Buy shitty t-shirt for too much money. Just break it all down and say, utilize the medium we have today and cross kind of collaborations between those things. It just felt like a fun thing to do, really, was the idea.

Rose: Yeah, right, right.

Reznor: And it wasn't to be weird and it wasn't to confuse people and it wasn't to get you to sign up for our fan club or any shit like that. It was ... but at the end of the day I'm also coming at it with the luxury of you know I had a sizable recording budget from Interscope that I spent most all of it on this.

Rose: Oh really?

Reznor: Yeah, because I don't have tons of money, cash on hand, to frivolously pursue these things. Just reality comes into play, basic economics come into play. And with this it was some soul searching when it was like take the whole burden on and maybe do the coolest thing ever? OK, it's no discussion. I mean yeah I'm going to do that, you know. If I have the opportunity to, sure.

Rose: So, does that mean you didn't spend as much recording as you might have or?

Reznor: Well, the deal that I just got out of was one that was, you know, I signed a recording contract in '89, it got sold from one record label to Interscope. It got re-upped in '94 or something and the end of it was now. But each record goes up in money, and it's their option to keep you or not (on all of it). So, you know, as those numbers went up, cost of recording really has gone down, because most of it happens in your house. And more money I've spent on the last couple of records I've put into gear that I can just do it myself. Not necessarily to save money but just convenience. And people buy less records. So, it's working all against the record label. But with that said I have the luxury of a large advance that would cover something like the 42 thing. And it just seemed like justified. As long as I didn't think of it in terms of real world money.

Rose: [laughs]

Reznor: (guitar) or I could do this thing [82:57] my mom a new house, but yeah I could, you know. If you start that discussion then it usually leads to a bad place. If you just don't think about it, say I want to make the coolest thing ever. And I'm glad I did it, I am.

Rose: Great. Well, thank you, thank you, terrific.

Reznor: OK, I love — it's nice to talk about — one I'm not doing any interviews now because I'm in a whole working on new stuff. But to be able to talk about this kind of stuff is so much more interesting to men than the rock music side of —

Rose: Yeah.

Reznor: Tedious stuff, you know. But ...

Rose: Right. Was there ever a time in the middle of it that you thought, like, it wasn't working or might go awry or something? I mean, when you were, like, tracking people, you know, sort of, like, watching what they were doing online?

Reznor: Not really. I mean, the biggest debates we had in terms of — once we ironed out the big things, like let's remove the narrative that you're going to interject into it, and let's just make it about snapshots. Once that, that was probably the biggest headbutting between Jordan and myself in terms of — and I have to respect they've done this and I haven't. And so I basically said, "Let's try to do it this way. But if you know it's not going to work, don't let me — you know I don't know it's not going to work." I don't like the idea of let's come up with sort of comic book characters to feel like it's not this, it's something parallel to it. And I think they realized as we got going that that was a better way. It felt good to me. It wasn't — when we started executing it after we kind of worked out the major issues it felt solid to me. It wasn't any part of it I was edgy about. Other than placing myself in fiction in it. And that was the thing that you don't want to — I didn't want to have to lie about anything. I think the way we did it was smart. It was a minor thing that you read into that. Just to elaborate for a minute, the idea that — the first question was if you were trying to rationalize everything out, if this really has happened and the idea was that I got seeded with some snapshots of the album cover for example, and some information that some third party sent to me. And one of the things was a recording of a song that I just started writing, that were the same words, but I hadn't finished the song yet. But I could hear a kind of shitty copy, some distorted copy. It sounds like me, and it's exactly what I'm writing. How? So, I investigate and this person kind of tells me this farfetched story that he's intercepted some of these things off the Web that are from the future. And it's kind of your duty to kind of write a record about this or be inspired by this. I don't know if it's bullshit or not. So, it fits with the music I'm writing now. Let me — inspired by, OK. And I end up making this record that ends up becoming the record that gets sent back to myself. And that's how these murals have appeared now. Who this third party that you don't know is we never got into. 'Cause it had its own — if there wasn't a real third party it had its own set of problems that they run into and they have a real person in there [86:42] We kept that very nebulous, but that person also fed some graphic artists things that became these murals that popped up. And so there's somebody that's intercepted some of these things and feels it's their moral duty — they believe it, kind of a conspiracy theorist person. They start feeding it out to people they like, artists they like to try to get the seed in popular culture that this could happen, maybe defuse it from happening. A lot of debate on how to work that in where it didn't feel — oh there's a lost chapter from this. I probably — well, I'll say it. There's a couple guys who were about to — talking about writing a biography about me. And there's nothing that I'd be less interested in than that. You know that's so not what — even thinking about it makes me feel uneasy. But then I started thinking, what if it was the first two-thirds of the book were reality, up until the present, then it goes into the last third of what happens to me? The book has been sent back or found (as an archive). And then it became interesting, you know. Not sure when the cross over takes place, it has my death in the book and where it ends up, (ties in to) what happens in Year Zero. So, that's something that is kind of on the burner right now, may or may not be executed depending on when I do the second part of this thing, if there is a second part of this thing.

Rose: A second part of Year Zero? You mean more songs or?

Reznor: Yeah, the idea was that it would be a two part record. And the second record is yet to be done. Kind of continues the story into answering the questions that were not addressed on this. What is (the presence), for example. We know what that is. We made sure we didn't — we left it where it could be a few things. I know what it is.

Rose: You do. Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Reznor: I knew when I first started it what it is. And it branches off into the incredibly pretentious world of my own philosophy. But that's why I'm just kind of letting it sit there for a while. I'm the author I can do these things. But I knew what it was and we made something that wouldn't break, what it is, but didn't rely on until I find an elegant way to execute the next part that does what I want it to do but doesn't end my career instantly. [laughs] Or maybe it does, maybe.

Rose: [laughs] So, is this the material you're working on now?

Reznor: Well, it's not — right this second I find myself energized, been in a different mindset. So what I'm doing is just setting them aside for the time being. I think we'll do some shows coming up in a new way, and some music will come out before then that won't be necessarily tied into that. And then I think when I get that out of my system dig in and really — if I feel inspired at that point. It may be one of those things that the moment in time passes. We'll see.

Rose: If you feel inspired to do the next part of Year Zero —

Reznor: Yeah, today I don't feel — I feel — Year Zero felt — although it was very complex, it was effortless to do. The music fell out of my head. I'm not saying it wasn't hard work at the time, but it wasn't agonizing over ideas and how am I — just get down and do it and it came out. I must have been thinking about it subconsciously. The ARG, the background of the story was literally a week of me by myself and a week of me and Rob helping me bouncing ideas off stuff. It was the meat and potatoes of 90% of it. Then we gave it to 42 and then they executed its chapters of it essentially. But it wasn't — it was never a time when it felt bogged down and stuck in the mud. And I feel like the second part's going to get a little — my hands are going to get dirtier because it's less off the cuff, and now it has to — it feels like it's going to be that. And rather than put the breaks on right now I'm just say for the next year I'm just going to sit and think this out and write an album that really, you know, I kind of feel like I want to get back out and get some music out quickly. And I have some other ideas that aren't related to that. Those feel more exciting at the moment. And I'll either get to it, which I plan to, or it might be one of those things that's there's always something that's — I don't know yet.

Rose: So, you know there was some pretty ballsy stuff in that album and in the ARG in terms of you know like political commentary so to speak. Did you get any flack from that or did you expect to?

Reznor: I heard some things from — I have a friend that works in the government and it was like, "Watch list, you're definitely on it. You fucked up." That kind of shit.

Rose: Really?

Reznor: And I don't know if our relationship is such that I don't know if that was because she knows how I'd react to hearing that. Or if it's truth, you know, I don't know. And I was too proud to ask, or even inquire about it because I know that was just a fishhook waiting to — you know. But I've gotten in and out of the country 50 times and there's no sign of that happening. You know, I think if it — it would be sad if what I said got me in some situation where — I'm just, the things that you claim I have, those rights, I'm exercising them. I don't agree with what you're doing at all. I'm utilizing my voice to say that and express it in any way I feel is appropriate. But you know I can't — I'm saying that from a guy that hasn't been cavity searched or can't leave — you know what I mean, I haven't felt the wrath of that. So, I'm sure there's a whole downside to that. But at the moment I'm functioning on the arrogance of you know fuck you.

Rose: [laughs] Did you see the letter that came in from the kid in Iran?

Reznor: Yeah.

Rose: Yeah, wasn't that amazing?

Reznor: Amazing, really amazing. I mean and it's stuff like that that kind of was like, that's why we're doing it. You know what I mean? It reminds you that it's — the meeting of music and all entertainment for that matter or art for that matter, you send seeds out and people make it what — make it their own. That just never fails to amaze me how that — whether it be like the Johnny Cash covering my song. That's the weirdest because that was literally just a dark moment in my bedroom trying to make myself feel better, just write this thing down, turn it into a song and it felt like a very private moment in my own life, and felt proud of. Ten years later, the last person on the earth I would expect to hear from, Johnny Cash, wants to record that song. And then it's kind of is an epitaph for him. Wow, weird. You know I'm like I never would have imagined that. Finally got respect in my hometown. "You wrote that Johnny Cash song, right?" "Yeah, I did. I did write that Johnny — ", you know.

Rose: [laughs] Right, right, yeah, exactly.

Reznor: Whatever it takes.

Rose: Uh-huh. Huh. Great, well, thank you, thank you. This is super.

Reznor: Oh, been a pleasure.

Rose: Is Rob here by the way?

Reznor: He is not. He is — and he lives on the other side of town.

Rose: I'm sorry? He's —

Reznor: He's not here, but he is in town. I'm sure he would be.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/m.../ff_arg_reznor





David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music

It seemed like a crazy idea. When Radiohead said it would release its new album, In Rainbows, as a pay-what-you-will digital download, you'd have thought the band had gone communist. After all, Thom Yorke and company are one of the world's most successful groups — a critical darling as well as a fan favorite for nearly 15 years. They hadn't put out a new album in more than four years, and the market was hungry for their next disc. So why would Radiohead conduct such a radical experiment?

It turns out the gambit was a savvy business move. In the first month, about a million fans downloaded In Rainbows. Roughly 40 percent of them paid for it, according to comScore, at an average of $6 each, netting the band nearly $3 million. Plus, since it owns the master recording (a first for the band), Radiohead was also able to license the album for a record label to distribute the old-fashioned way — on CD. In the US, it goes on sale January 1 through TBD Records/ATO Records Group.

While pay-what-you-will worked for Radiohead, though, it's hard to imagine the model paying off for Miley Cyrus — aka chart-topping teenybopper Hannah Montana. Cyrus' label, Walt Disney Records, will stick to selling CDs in Wal-Mart, thank you very much. But the truth is that Radiohead didn't intend In Rainbows to start a revolution. The experiment simply proves there is plenty of room for innovation in the music business — this is just one of many new paths. Wired asked David Byrne — a legendary innovator himself and the man who wrote the Talking Heads song "Radio Head" from which the group takes its name — to talk with Yorke about the In Rainbows distribution strategy and what others can learn from the experience.

Byrne: OK.

Yorke: [To assistant.] Shut the bloody door.

Byrne: Well, nice record, very nice record.

Yorke: Thank you. Wicked.

Byrne: [Laughs.]

Yorke: That's it, isn't it?

Byrne: That's it, we're done. [Laughs.] OK. I'll start by asking some of the business stuff. What you did with this record wasn't traditional, not even in the sense of sending advance copies out to the press and such.

Yorke: The way we termed it was "our leak date." Every record for the last four — including my solo record — has been leaked. So the idea was like, we'll leak it, then.

Byrne: Previously there'd be a release date, and advance copies would get sent to reviewers months ahead of that.

Yorke: Yeah, and then you'd ring up and say, "Did you like it? What did you think?" And it's three months in advance. And then it'd be, "Would you go do this for this magazine," and maybe this journalist has heard it. All these silly games.

Byrne: That's mainly about the charts, right? About gearing marketing and prerelease to the moment a record comes out so that — boom! — it goes into the charts.

Yorke: That's what major labels do, yeah. But it does us no good, because we don't cross over [to other fan bases]. The main thing was, there's all this bollocks [with the media]. We were trying to avoid that whole game of who gets in first with the reviews. These days there's so much paper to fill, or digital paper to fill, that whoever writes the first few things gets cut and pasted. Whoever gets their opinion in first has all that power. Especially for a band like ours, it's totally the luck of the draw whether that person is into us or not. It just seems wildly unfair, I think.

Byrne: So this bypasses all those reviewers and goes straight to the fans.

Yorke: In a way, yeah. And it was a thrill. We mastered it, and two days later it was on the site being, you know, preordered. That was just a really exciting few weeks to have that direct connection.

Byrne: And letting people choose their own price?

Radiohead performs "Jigsaw."

Yorke: That was [manager Chris Hufford's] idea. We all thought he was barmy. As we were putting up the site, we were still saying, "Are you sure about this?" But it was really good. It released us from something. It wasn't nihilistic, implying that the music's not worth anything at all. It was the total opposite. And people took it as it was meant. Maybe that's just people having a little faith in what we're doing.

Byrne: And that works for you guys. You have an audience ready. Like me — if I hear there's something new of yours out there, I'll just go and buy it without poking around about what the reviews say.

Yorke: Well, yeah. The only reason we could even get away with this, the only reason anyone even gives a shit, is the fact that we've gone through the whole mill of the business in the first place. It's not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a response to a situation. We're out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do? This was the obvious thing. But it only works for us because of where we are.

Byrne: What about bands that are just getting started?

Yorke: Well, first and foremost, you don't sign a huge record contract that strips you of all your digital rights, so that when you do sell something on iTunes you get absolutely zero. That would be the first priority. If you're an emerging artist, it must be frightening at the moment. Then again, I don't see a downside at all to big record companies not having access to new artists, because they have no idea what to do with them now anyway.

Byrne: It should be a load off their minds.

Yorke: Exactly.

Byrne: I've been asking myself: Why put together these things — CDs, albums? The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part. Maybe it's just because everybody's thinking musically in the same way for those couple of months.

Yorke: Or years.

Byrne: However long it takes. And other times, there's an obvious...

Yorke: ... Purpose.

Byrne: Right. Probably the reason it's a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you're getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you're going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there's a kind of bundle.

Yorke: Yeah, but the other thing is what that bundle can make. The songs can amplify each other if you put them in the right order.

"Do you know where your income comes from?"

Byrne: Do you know, more or less, where your income comes from? For me, it's probably very little from actual music or record sales. I make a little bit on touring and probably the most from licensing stuff. Not for commercials — I license to films and television shows and that sort of thing.

Yorke: Right. We make some doing that.

Byrne: And for some people, the overhead for touring is really low, so they make a lot on that and don't worry about anything else.

Yorke: We always go into a tour saying, "This time, we're not going to spend the money. This time we're going to do it stripped down." And then it's, "Oh, but we do need this keyboard. And these lights." But at the moment we make money principally from touring. Which is hard for me to reconcile because I don't like all the energy consumption, the travel. It's an ecological disaster, traveling, touring.

Byrne: Well, there are the biodiesel buses and all that.

Yorke: Yeah, it depends where you get your biodiesel from. There are ways to minimize it. We did one of those carbon footprint things recently where they assessed the last period of touring we did and tried to work out where the biggest problems were. And it was obviously everybody traveling to the shows.

Byrne: Oh, you mean the audience.

Yorke: Yeah. Especially in the US. Everybody drives. So how the hell are we going to address that? The idea is that we play in municipal places with some transport system alternative to cars. And minimize flying equipment, shipping everything. We can't be shipped, though.

Byrne: [Laughs.]

Yorke: If you go on the Queen Mary or something, that's actually worse than flying. So flying is your only option.

Byrne: Are you making money on the download of In Rainbows?

Yorke: In terms of digital income, we've made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever — in terms of anything on the Net. And that's nuts. It's partly due to the fact that EMI wasn't giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff.

Byrne: So when the album comes out as a physical CD in January, will you hire your own marketing firm?

Yorke: No. It starts to get a bit more traditional. When we first came up with the idea, we weren't going to do a normal physical CD at all. But after a while it was like, well, that's just snobbery. [Laughter.] A, that's asking for trouble, and B, it's snobbery. So now they're talking about putting it on the radio and that sort of thing. I guess that's normal.

Byrne: I've been thinking about how distribution and CDs and record shops and all that stuff are changing. But we're talking about music. What is music, what does music do for people? What do people get from it? What's it for? That's the thing that's being exchanged. Not all the other stuff. The other stuff is the shopping cart that holds some of it.

Yorke: It's a delivery service.

Byrne: But people will still pay to have that experience. You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends. By making a copy and handing it to your friends, you've established a relationship. The implication is that they're now obligated to give you something back.

Yorke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just thinking while you were saying that: How does a record company get their hands on that? It makes me think of the No Logo book where Naomi Klein describes how the Nike people would pay guys to get down with the kids on the street. I know for a fact that major record labels do the same thing. But no one has ever explained to me exactly how. I mean, do they lurk around in the discussion boards and post "Have you heard the..."? Maybe they do. And then I was thinking about that Johnny Cash film, when Cash walks in and says, "I want to do a live record in a prison," and his label thinks he's bonkers. Yet at the same time, it was able to somehow understand what kids wanted and give it to him. Whereas now, I think there's a lack of understanding. It's not about who's ripping off whom, and it's not about legal injunctions, and it's not about DRM and all that sort of stuff. It's about whether the music affects you or not. And why would you worry about an artist or a company going after people copying their music if the music itself is not valued?

Byrne: You're valuing the delivery system as opposed to the relationship and the emotional thing...

Yorke: You're valuing the company or the interest of the artists rather than the music itself. I don't know. We've always been quite naive. We don't have any alternative to doing this. It's the only obvious thing to do.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/m...urrentPage=all





Next for Apple: Lossless iTunes Store
Nate Lanxon

They say once you've had FLAC, you don't go back. It was certainly true for me. And now I have an inkling Apple will add lossless music downloads to the iTunes Store within the next 12 months.

Apple adopted AAC as its standard music download format, not only because the creator of MP3 has named it the superior successor to its creation, but because it also allows for the embedding of DRM -- the ubiquitously despised method for preventing unauthorised copying. But there's another reason.

Before iPod, few players supported AAC. By choosing the format, Apple maintained the ecosystem it needed in order for the iTunes/iPod pairing to succeed -- a double act that fuels the sale of iPods, Apple's primary goal. As it did with Apple Lossless, Apple could have surely developed its own alternative to MP3, but it would have been pointless as the perfect, standardised, DRM-able option was available, and it didn't come from Microsoft.

But why lossless downloads?
Lossless audio is the audiophile's best friend, but the storage device's worst enemy -- it's sonically identical to CD audio, but at the cost of massive file sizes. Until recently, lossless audio wasn't an option for portable players. But now iPods come with up to 160GB of storage, lossless is a viable option for portable media, and pocketable audiophile earphones are within the reach of certain budgets (though of course iPods would surely be plugged into hi-fi equipment, too).

Apple has used its own lossless audio format since 2004 -- Apple Lossless Audio Codec, or ALAC. But why bother developing its own, when patent- and royalty-free options were already available? Firstly, some options weren't Mac-compatible. Others didn't support DRM. FLAC, arguably the most popular lossless codec, actively discourages the use of DRM, and Apple knows better than to anger a mob of hardcore geeks by shoving copy-protection into their open-source format.

But by not using FLAC -- a format rarely supported by players, bar Cowon, for example -- Apple ensures only its devices will work with Apple Lossless, thus a) maintaining the crucial ecosystem, and b) ensuring future sales of iPods, namely the expensive 160GB models.

With the current state of the music industry, innovation surrounding music consumption is vital. iTunes is not only the solitary music store capable of successfully monetising lossless downloads (due to its integration with iTunes/iPod), but it's also arguably the only one with a company behind it that will push for innovation until it's blue in the face.

Steve Jobs was recently named the most powerful businessman in the world by Fortune magazine. He was also the first to get a major record label to ditch DRM from its entire catalogue. iTunes and the iPod is not only perfectly geared up for lossless downloads, but it has the most powerful industry shaker-upper behind it, and a heap of potential new customers gagging to hand over their cash.

Give it 12 months.

http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/natelanxon...9294808,00.htm





Mac Versus Windows Vulnerability Stats for 2007
George Ou

The year 2007 has been an interesting year that brought us improved security with Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). But to get some perspective of how many publicly known holes found in these two operating systems, I’ve compiled all the security flaws in Mac OS X and Windows XP and Vista and placed them side by side. This is significant because it shows a trend that can give us a good estimate for how many flaws we can expect to find in the coming months. The more monthly flaws there are in the historical trend, the more likely it is that someone will find a hole to exploit in the future. For example back in April of this year, hackers took over a fully patched Macbook and won $10,000 plus the Macbook they hacked.

I used vulnerability statistics from an impartial third party vendor Secunia and I broke them down by Windows XP flaws, Vista flaws, and Mac OS X flaws. Since Secunia doesn’t offer individual numbers for Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.4, I merged the XP and Vista vulnerabilities so that we can compare Vista + XP flaws to Mac OS X. In case you’re wondering how 19 plus 12 could equal 23, this is because there are many overlapping flaws that is shared between XP and Vista so those don’t get counted twice just as I don’t count something that affects Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 twice.Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X vulnerability stats for 2007

So this shows that Apple had more than 5 times the number of flaws per month than Windows XP and Vista in 2007, and most of these flaws are serious. Clearly this goes against conventional wisdom because the numbers show just the opposite and it isn’t even close.

Also noteworthy is that while Windows Vista shows fewer flaws than Windows XP and has more mitigating factors against exploitation, the addition of Windows Defender and Sidebar added 4 highly critical flaws to Vista that weren’t present in Windows XP. Sidebar accounted for three of those additional vulnerabilities and it’s something I am glad I don’t use. The lone Defender critical vulnerability that was supposed to defend Windows Vista was ironically the first critical vulnerability for Windows Vista.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=758





Apples For The Army
Andy Greenberg

Given Apple's marketing toward the young and the trendy, you wouldn't expect the U.S. Army to be much of a customer. Lieutenant Colonel C.J. Wallington is hoping hackers won't expect it either.

Wallington, a division chief in the Army's office of enterprise information systems, says the military is quietly working to integrate Macintosh computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. That's because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac computers, and adding more Macs to the military's computer mix makes it tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack, Wallington says.

This past year was a particularly tough one for military cybersecurity. Cyberspies infiltrated a Pentagon computer system in June and stole unknown quantities of e-mail data, according to a September report by the Financial Times. Later in September, industry sources told Forbes.com that major military contractors, including Boeing (nyse: BA - news - people ), Lockheed Martin (nyse: LMT - news - people ), Northrop Grumman (nyse: NOC - news - people ) and Raytheon (nyse: RTN - news - people ) had also been hacked.

The Army's push to use Macs to help protect its computing corps got its start in August 2005, when General Steve Boutelle, the Army's chief information officer, gave a speech calling for more diversity in the Army's computer vendors. He argued the approach would both increase competition among military contractors and strengthen its IT defenses.

Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) computers still satisfy only a tiny portion of the military's voracious demand for computers. By Wallington's estimate, around 20,000 of the Army's 700,000 or so desktops and servers are Apple-made. He estimates that about a thousand Macs enter the Army's ranks during each of its bi-annual hardware buying periods.

Military procurement has long been driven by cost and availability of additional software--two measures where Macintosh computers have typically come up short against Windows-based PCs. Then there have been subtle but important barriers: For instance, Macintosh computers have long been incompatible with a security keycard-reading system known as Common Access Cards system, or CAC, which is heavily used by the military.

The Army's Apple program, created after Boutelle's 2005 address, is working to change that. As early as February 2008, the Army is planning to introduce software, developed by Arlington, Texas-based Thursby Software, that will also enable Mac desktops and laptops to use CAC systems--a change that should make it easier to get Macs into the service.

Though Apple machines are still pricier than their Windows counterparts, the added security they offer might be worth the cost, says Wallington. He points out that Apple's X Serve servers, which are gradually becoming more commonplace in Army data centers, are proving their mettle. "Those are some of the most attacked computers there are. But the attacks used against them are designed for Windows-based machines, so they shrug them off," he says.

Apple, which declined to comment, has long argued its hardware is less hackable than comparable PCs. Jonathan Broskey, a former Apple employee who now heads the Army's Apple program, argues that the Unix core at the center of the Mac OS operating system makes it easier to lock down a Mac than a Windows platform.

And Apple's smaller market share has long meant that it didn't attract cybercriminals hoping to wreck the most havoc possible. "If you look at the numbers, you see that malicious software for Macs is very limited," he says. "We used to sell Apples by saying they don't get viruses."

Of course, cyberspooks may be honing their Mac-attacking skills, too. An end-of-year report by Finnish software security company F-Secure highlights the growing number of hackers targeting Apple systems with malicious software, some of which could allow cybercriminals to steal security passwords. In the past two years, until this October, F-Secure found only a small handful of malicious programs targeting Macs. In the past two months, the company has found more than a hundred specimens of Mac-targeted malicious code.

Charlie Miller, a software researcher with Independent Security Evaluators, worries that the Army's diversification plan isn't enough to thwart the bad guys. He sees a two-platform system as a "weakest link" scenario, in which a determined cyber-intruder will seek out the more vulnerable of the two targets. "In the story of the three little pigs, did diversifying their defenses help? Not for the pig in the straw house," he says.

The marketing pitch that Apples are inherently more secure than PCs is also largely a myth, contends Miller, who gained notoriety for remotely hacking the iPhone last August. He points to data gathered by software security firm Secunia, which showed that Apple had to patch nearly five times as many security flaws in its software over the past year as Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) had to patch in Windows. Apple's Quicktime player alone, he says, was patched 34 times. "I love my Macs, but in terms of security, they're behind the curve, compared to Windows," Miller warns.

But the Army's Jonathan Broskey stands by his claims of Apple's security: He says the high number of patches to Apple software is a good sign--evidence of the large community of developers actively working to tighten Unix programs and eliminate bugs. Nonetheless, like any responsible IT department, he says the Army's Apple program will closely monitor security updates to Mac-specific programs. "The Army's no different from any corporation," he says.

Still, relative to corporate cybersecurity, Lieutenant Colonel Wallington points out, the stakes are much higher. A leaked deployment order, for instance, might reveal the path of a supply truck and the points where it could be sabotaged, he says.

"This is information that affects the lives of soldiers and the civilians we're trying protect," Broskey adds. "It has to be safeguarded."
http://www.forbes.com/home/technolog..._1221army.html





Microsoft Patent Could Force Downloaders to View Commercials
David Chartier

A new patent application filed by Microsoft describes methods for "enforcing" advertisements in downloaded media. Traditionally, ads accompany streaming content and, by extension, restrict that content to a browser. But technology that could bring ads to downloaded content would open up new opportunities for digital distribution services, advertisers, and consumers, and could give DRM a whole new leg to stand on.

Microsoft's patent application, titled Enforcing Advertising Playback For Downloaded Media Content, describes systems that are based both on tokens and DRM which would prohibit playing a media file unless its accompanying advertising is viewed. The technology is designed to prohibit fast-forwarding, editing, or otherwise circumventing the advertisements, though it is unclear exactly where the ads would be placed. Internet users have repeatedly announced their distaste for pre-roll ads in streaming content and video games, but users of NBC's Hulu service reportedly don't mind its TV-like interstitial ads.

On the other hand, users have made it abundantly clear that paid content, such as the $1.99 TV shows from Apple's iTunes Store, should be devoid of any advertising whatsoever. This is where Microsoft's ad-enforced download technology could actually offer a new choice for distributors and consumers. Downloads offered for less than $1.99—or, ideally, for free—that contain an agreeable amount of advertising could gain real traction with consumers who want to download, collect, and organize their own media library. This would be especially advantageous for users who want to experience media on portable devices, or while otherwise offline.

The studios could take a swing at digital distribution by offering free (or cheap) files that contain a little advertising and DRM, in exchange for offline and portable viewing. If Microsoft or another service could offer a selection of TV shows and movies at least competitive with the dominant iTunes Store, the allure of free, portable media might help customers overcome some of their DRM loathing.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...--and-drm.html





Security Researcher Promotes Concept of 'Safe' and 'Promiscuous' Web Browsers

A quick tip for keeping yourself safe online--if you don’t mind extreme web browsing
Rick Cook

For the most part, the defense against Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)--considered one of the most insidious but least appreciated threats in application security--must come from websites themselves, not ordinary web users. To ensure that criminals can’t trick an unknowing user’s web browser into sending unauthorized requests to the websites where they do online banking or other sensitive activities, web developers must increase the number of times they authenticate customers and make other changes in how sites are programmed.

But Jeremiah Grossman, CTO at Whitehat Security and one of the country’s most prominent application security researchers, has a workaround he uses to protect himself online. It involves having two browsers: One, which he calls the “promiscuous” browser, is the one he uses for ordinary browsing. A second browser is used only for security-critical tasks such as online banking. When Grossman wants to do online banking, he closes his promiscous browser, opens the more prudish one, and does only what he has to do before closing it and going back to his insecure browser.

The approach works because then, even if Grossman encounters the CSRF attack while online, the website where he does sensitive activities won’t execute any orders it receives from his browser. "The bad guys are just looking in the off chance someone is logged into that particular website," Grossman says.
http://www2.csoonline.com/exclusives...html?CID=33396





Net neutrality

Major Aussie ISP Telstra BigPond Shafts Open Source OpenOffice
John Pospisil

Australia’s largest Internet service provider Telstra BigPond has removed the free open source office suite OpenOffice from its unmetered file download area following the launch of its own, free, hosted, office application, BigPond Office.

The removal of OpenOffice was brought to our attention by a TECH.BLORGE.com reader, who complained to Telstra’s support department about no longer being able to download OpenOffice updates. His first complaint was met with the following response:

BigPond is in the process of refreshing our File
Downloads service and this has resulted in the removal of various
files which have previously been listed. Due to a recent business
decision these files won’t be reinstated. Please visit BigPond
Files for further updates.

Our reader, an IT veteran with more than 25 years experience in the IT industry, than asked support why OpenOffice was removed, pointing out that the file download request page makes no mention of an invalid file criteria due to ‘business reasons’. He received this surprisingly honest email:

With the launch of BigPond Office, the OpenOffice downloads were removed
to ensure we were not offering competing products. If there are specific
OpenOffice files you require, which are not available as part of the
BigPond Office suite - please resubmit your request.

Our reader was outraged by Telstra’s move, which he sees as an attack on the open source software movement.

“The principle of the matter upsets me,” he said. “The fact that BigPond has removed previously allowed open source software is un-ethical. They are discriminating against me, even though I pay the same as other customers. They are attacking the Free Software movement.”

“You can’t offer a service and then suddenly change the rules because you know no-one can do anything about it. If you look at BigPond’s rules for a ‘valid file’, it has omitted to mention that files that ‘compete’ with its products are ‘invalid’ … BigPond needs to update the rules on its file request web page.“

“Although, one could argue, that customers could easily download the software directly, but then what exactly is BigPond’s point? To punish its customers? ”

While I’m very sympathetic to our reader’s outrage, I’m not sure that what Telstra has done is necessarily unethical. It’s a commercial enterprise and it can use its discretion, to some degree, about what services it chooses to provide — even though, as our reader points out, it doesn’t spell out that it won’t host software that competes with services it offers.

However, Telstra BigPond’s action is unquestionably petty, and will no doubt generate ill feelings amongst the open source community.

The action also seems to be driven by a lack understanding of what BigPond Office is actually about. As a hosted online application, BigPond Office is useful for people who want to access their documents from different machines; it’s not really a viable alternative to Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. BigPond Office is competing with the likes of Google Docs, and is really only of interest to BigPond users who can access BigPond Office without using up their monthly bandwidth quota. It’s highly unlikely that someone would download OpenOffice, instead of signing up for BigPond Office.

So, come on Telstra BigPond, show some good will, and reinstate OpenOffice in the BigPond File Download area; banning it only demonstrates pettiness and ignorance.
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...ce-openoffice/





$8,000-Per-Gallon Printer Ink Leads to Antitrust Lawsuit
Ryan Paul

A Boston man has filed a class-action lawsuit accusing hardware maker HP and office supply retailer Staples of colluding to inflate the price of printer ink cartridges in violation of federal antitrust law. According to the suit, HP allegedly paid Staples $100 million to refrain from selling inexpensive third-party ink cartridges, although the suit doesn't make it clear how plaintiff Ranjit Bedi arrived at that figure.

For most printer companies, ink is the bread and butter of their business. The price of ink for HP ink-jet printers can be as much as $8,000 per gallon, a figure that makes gas-pump price gouging look tame. HP is currently the dominant company in the printing market, and a considerable portion of the company's profits come from ink.

The printer makers have been waging an all-out war against third-party vendors that sell replacement cartridges at a fraction of the price. The tactics employed by the printer makers to maintain monopoly control over ink distribution for their printing products have become increasingly aggressive. In the past, we have seen HP, Epson, Lenovo and other companies attempt to use patents and even the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in their efforts to crush third-party ink distributors.

The companies have also turned to using the ink equivalent of DRM, the use of microchips embedded in ink cartridges that work with a corresponding technical mechanism in the printer that blocks the use of unauthorized third-party ink. Adding insult to injury, most printers are lying, filthy ink thieves, according to a recent study, misreporting that they are low on ink when they are not.

Bedi's suit asks for unspecified damages and an injunction barring the two companies from engaging in anticompetitive business practices.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...nk-prices.html





Businesses Generally Ignoring E-Discovery Rules
Chris Preimesberger

A full year after the institution of federal e-discovery court rules, it appears few potential storage customers are paying attention.

A year and 16 days after the institution of the revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure on Dec. 1, 2006, about two-thirds of U.S. businesses remain unprepared to meet strict court requirements for the discovery and handling of electronic evidence, according to a data storage researcher.

The new regulations, ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court in April 2006, mandate that businesses must be able to quickly produce such data—including e-mail, digital word documents, images and digital audio and video—when required by litigation in a federal court.

To this end, a relatively new IT sector built around efficient storage and access to legacy business data has been developing, but apparently the genre still has plenty of space to grow. At the one-year milestone, it doesn't appear as if many potential customers are paying attention—or, if they are aware of the rules, are simply ignoring them.

"The survey reveals serious legal issues for organizations that are either ignoring the new federal mandates for compliance and e-discovery or are clearly not well educated on how to meet the technical requirements," said IT researcher Michael Osterman of Osterman Research, in Black Diamond, Wash.

Many recent court cases have shown that companies are expected to show a clear retention policy, Osterman said.

"I don't think it's difficult to understand the [FRCP] rules," Osterman told eWEEK. "Or that business owners don't know about them. I just think that it sometimes takes 'headline shock' to make people move on some things—especially when we're talking about 'potential' liabilities.

"In other words, if it hasn't happened to them yet, it hasn't happened."

Osterman, a veteran, well-respected storage and data center researcher, said that it often takes bad news to happen to another company before a business owner gets serious about the potential problems he or she could face in litigation.

"Let's face it: Unless some company gets hit by a $15 million judgment, it is difficult for an IT manager or a CIO to go to his board and say, 'We might be liable under the new laws for not keeping all our e-mails and word docs. The 'potential' problems often don't get addressed," Osterman said.

Osterman told of a company he knows in the United Kingdom—one of the larger employers in that nation—that had a sudden change of mind on this issue.

"The CIO had gone to his board in April 2005 with a 265-thousand-pound purchase order request for e-discovery and archiving software and services. He was turned down. In September of that same year, one of the company's competitors was hit by a large court judgment.

"Three days later, the first company's board approved the CIO's original request," Osterman said.

Many companies are still unclear on the concept of e-discovery in general, Osterman said.

"There really is no consensus yet on whether a company should keep all its e-mail and other docs, or whether a company should keep a finite number of years' worth of data, or whether it should keep more than 30 days' worth of data," Osterman said. "As long as a company can prove it has predictable methods of storing or not storing data, it can show the court that it has some sort of policy in place."

The uncertainty is about the nature of the policies, which can be different according to each company. Only 47 percent of companies have some kind of e-mail retention policy in place, Osterman said.

Some of the other findings from Osterman include:

53 percent of companies lack a policy to govern e-mail retention and deletion.

67 percent of companies allow individual end users to determine how long messages are kept by the company.

66 percent of companies do not have the e-mail archiving technology required to manage e-mail retention, litigation holds and e-discovery.

If they are taken to court, these companies would likely be required to search backup tapes, desktop files and legacy systems to find information that was deleted in the absence of a good-faith retention policy, Osterman said. Manual e-discovery searches can be costly.

In addition, companies without an e-discovery policy risk being sanctioned for the illegal destruction of evidence, including courtroom penalties that can cost a company an important legal case on process grounds, Osterman said.

The survey was conducted among 111 companies in fall of 2007 by Osterman Research for MessageOne, based in Austin, Texas.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2236400,00.asp





Plexiglas-Like DVD to Hold 1TB of Data

A TeraDisc could hold up to 250,000 high-resolution pictures or 40 HD movies
Lucas Mearian

At the upcoming CES conference in Las Vegas, one company plans to demonstrate the ability to store half a terabyte of data on a DVD disc that is made of a polymer similar to Plexiglas.

Israel-based Mempile Inc. said its TeraDisc DVDs will offer 1TB of storage for consumers in the next few years -- and corporations will be able to use the technology to permanently store data at a fraction of the price of spinning disk and tape, according to Dr. Beth Erez, Mempile's chief marketing officer. Today's high-definition DVDs hold a maximum of 50GB in formats such as HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

With 1TB capacity, a TeraDisc could hold up to 250,000 high-resolution photos or MP3s, or about 40 HD movies or 115 DVD movies. While that may seem like an unnecessary amount of capacity for anything but the largest professional needs, Tom Coughlin, a storage analyst at Coughlin Associates in Atascadero, Calif., said HD formats for movie distribution are already four times the current 1080-pixel resolution currently used for consumer HD retail movie distribution. Over the next 10 years, both studio and consumer HD products will multiply by 10 times the current resolution.

"If HD now is 25GB, you can easily have something that's 300GB or larger in the future. So I think we've not reached the limits of resolution that people want in their entertainment devices," Coughlin said.

The TeraDisc platter and drive prototype

Another company offering DVD storage is Cambridge, England-based Plasmon PLC, which relies on the same blue-laser technology used by Blu-ray and HD DVD. Plasmon's technology, called Ultra-Density Optical (UDO technology) can write up to 60GB on a proprietary DVD format platter for corporate data archive use. Plasmon sells automated libraries, which can store terabytes of data. Pricing varies, but Computerworld found a 60GB UDO platter for $60 on Pricegrabber.com. Plasmon's road map envisions 240GB discs, and it offers drives for use in automated libraries and stand-alone drives for desktops. The DVDs are available in both first-generation 30GB and second-generation 60GB models.

Similarly, TDK is working on next-generation Blu-ray Disc technology that will offer up to 200GB on a DVD platter.

Mempile's DVD drives will initially retail for between $3,000 and $4,000, and a 700GB platter -- the first model expected out around 2011 -- will sell for $30, according to a Mempile spokeswoman. Until now, Mempile had demonstrated writing and reading data on 100 layers within a .6mm thick substrate material that in total can hold 500GB. The company plans to begin retailing its product next year. Over the next three years, the company expects to increase the disc's thickness to the industry DVD standard of 1.2mm, which will allow it to record 5GB on each of 200 layers, spaced 5 microns apart, for a total of 1TB of capacity. According to a company white paper, the technology road map calls for a 5TB DVD "a few years down the road."

Unlike HD DVDs, which use blue lasers to record and read data off a reflective surface on top of a polymer substrate, Mempile's TeraDisc drives use more powerful red-laser technology to write and read. The Mempile drive has two lasers, one that tracks and one that reads and writes. The drive uses a CD-like system for tracking data in the substrate. Erez said his company's technology writes bits at the molecular level, changing the color of florescent molecules in the Plexiglas-like material to record the data.

Erez said traditional HD DVD technology, which reflects light back to an optical reader, causes signal deterioration and background noise, where writing and reading through a clear substrate offers a cleaner signal that is more efficient for data transfer. "We have no noise in looking at the 200th layer or the second layer or the 10th," Erez said.

Erez said the TeraDisc technology can also be used for network-based backup for archive purposes. Mempile is manufacturing the TeraDisc technology using polymers produced by chemical developer Arkema Inc., which also produces hoses and gaskets for cars and polyethylene packaging for foods, among other things.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9053822





Penny-Sized Flash Drive Holds 16GB

Intel has announced a flash memory companion module for its forthcoming "Menlow" chipset for Linux-based mobile Internet devices (MIDs). The Z-P140 SSD (solid-state drive) measures 0.7 x 0.5 x 0.07 inches (18 x 12 x 1.8mm), and will be available in capacities up to 16GB.

Intel describes its new SSD as "smaller than a penny, and weighing less than a drop of water." The part is "400 times smaller in volume than a 1.8-inch hard drive," Intel boasts, "and at 0.6 grams, 75 times lighter."

The Z-P140 comprises a small 12mm x 12mm dual-channel PATA (IDE) controller module powered by a 32-bit RISC processor, and connected to the host board via a standard 40-pin interface. The physical connector is a 168 BGA (ball grid array).

Atop the PATA module, between one and four NAND flash modules can be stacked via a 122 BGA package-on-package (PoP) interface. Each PATA channel supports up to two modules. Currently supported NAND modules include Intel's SD54B 2 GB and SD58B 4 GB NAND modules.

The Z-P140 parts have a standard PATA interface, and thus could serve as a drop-in replacement for IDE hard drives in most any computer system. However, the parts will be marketed initially at least for use with Intel's "Menlow" chipset for MIDs (mobile Internet devices).

Additional claimed characteristics for the Z-P140 SSD include:

• Read speeds of 40 Megabytes-per-second (MB/s)
• Write speeds of 30 MB/s
• Active power use 300mW (milliwatts)
• Sleep mode power use 1.1mW
• 2.5 million hours MTBF (mean-time between failures)

Intel calls the SSD an "optional part" of the Menlow platform. The chip giant announced Menlow in Beijing in April, a day after revealing its vision for Linux-powered Linux-based Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs). Menlow includes Intel's "Silverthorne" mobile device processor, based on a 45nm silicon process and "High-K" metal gate transistor technologies, along with the "Poulsbo" companion chip (integrated northbridge/southbridge).

Pete Hazen, director of marketing for Intel's NAND products group, stated, "Our customers are finding the Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD to be the right size, fit, and performance for their pocketable designs."

Availability

The Z-P140 is currently sampling, with mass production slated for Q1, 2008. The 2GB version will ship first, followed by the 4GB version.

Intel's currently shipping Z-U130 SSD connects via a USB interface. An SSD with a SATA interface will be announced as a product line in 2008, Intel said.
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS5845259932.html





Scholastic Plans to Put Its Branding Iron on a Successor to Harry Potter
Motoko Rich

With the Harry Potter series now completed, Scholastic, the United States publisher of those wildly successful books by J. K. Rowling, is moving forward with what it hopes will be its follow-up blockbuster series.

Called “The 39 Clues,” this series will feature 10 books — the first of which is to go on sale next September — as well as related Web-based games, collectors’ cards and cash prizes. The project demonstrates Scholastic’s acknowledgment that as much as the publisher heralded the renewed interest in reading represented by the Harry Potter books, many children are now as transfixed by Internet and video games as they are by reading.

“We want to go where the kids are and really be part of their complete world, rather than going to one aspect of their world,” said David Levithan, an executive editorial director at Scholastic. He added, “We talk of it as being subversively educational.”
The series, to be officially announced by Scholastic on Tuesday morning, will be aimed at readers 8 to 12 and offer mystery novels telling the story of a centuries-old family, the Cahills, who are supposed to be the world’s most powerful clan. According to the books, famous historical figures ranging from Benjamin Franklin to Mozart were members of the family. The plots will revolve around the race by two young Cahills, Amy, 14, and Dan, 11, against other branches of the family to be the first to find the 39 clues that will lead to ultimate power.

Rick Riordan, the best-selling author of the Percy Jackson series, which includes “The Lightning Thief” and “The Sea of Monsters,” mythologically themed books aimed at preteens, has written the first title in this new series, “The Maze of Bones.” He has also outlined the story arc for the next nine installments.

The books will come out once every two or three months, and the publisher has already signed Gordon Korman, the author of “Swindle” and “Schooled,” aimed at middle school children, to write Volume 2. Peter Lerangis, who has written books in the Spy-X and Watcher series, as well as ghostwritten for The Baby-Sitters Club and Three Investigators series, will write the third title, and Jude Watson, who has written several “Star Wars” prequels, will write the fourth.

The series is also Scholastic’s attempt to create a branded franchise for which it owns all the rights. Ms. Rowling retained the rights to the Harry Potter series, which meant that she could pursue separate deals for film and other licensed products, effectively cutting out Scholastic.

An online game will allow readers to search for the 39 clues themselves, while solving puzzles and playing mini-games that will be refreshed daily. Mr. Levithan said the site would include blogs written from the points of view of characters, and maps, treasure hunts and videos, many with historical and geographical content.

Each book will come with six collectors’ cards that can be used to find further clues in the online game. Players can also win cash and other prizes.

The publisher hopes that reluctant readers will be drawn to the books by the game. “Reading the books will make you better at the games, so that is the incentive,” said Suzanne Murphy, publisher of Scholastic’s trade division.

Jesse Soleil, director of the Lab for Informal Learning, a research group within Scholastic that has been developing new projects, said many gamers were already avid readers. But for those who aren’t, he said, the series is “about living where these kids are, and even if they are reading the books for information for the game, hopefully they will get some entertainment, and it will get them into reading.”

Mr. Riordan was drawn to the series partly because of the gaming component. “I’m a gaming geek from way back,” he said, recalling his passion for Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager. Now he plays online games like World of Warcraft with his two sons.

But he said he didn’t try to write the first book with specific gaming outcomes in mind. “My main concern was crafting an adventure novel that would stand on its own, even if kids never access the Internet at all,” Mr. Riordan said.

During the brainstorming phase and after he wrote a manuscript, Mr. Riordan worked with editors at Scholastic, who suggested details that could be worked into the novel so that they could also be used in the game.

“There’s a lot of commonality between what makes a good game and a good book,” Mr. Riordan said. “Whether you’re a gamer or a reader, you want to feel immersed in the story and invested in the action and the characters, and you want to care about the outcome and you want to participate in solving the mystery.”

As for whether attaching the books to an Internet game could help recruit new readers, he said: “Some kids are always going to prefer games over books. But if you can even reach a few of those kids and give them an experience with a novel that makes them think, ‘Hey, reading can be another way to have an adventure,’ then that’s great. Then I’ve done my job.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/books/18scho.html





Campaign Song 2008? Strike Up the Broadband
Michiko Kakutani

Already, the influence of the Internet and new media has been felt on the national political scene — from the success of Barack Obama in raising large amounts of money from small donors over the Web, to the George Allen “Macaca” clip posted on YouTube, which played a key role in his losing his Senate seat in 2006, thereby helping turn over control of the Senate to the Democrats. In his lively new book, “The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web and the Race for the White House,” Garrett M. Graff — the founding editor of the blog FishbowlDC.com and editor at large of Washingtonian magazine — asks how the technology that is transforming the global economy is going to affect the “first campaign of the new age.”

Because that campaign is still in medias res, his book circles around this question without coming to any real conclusions. But along the way Mr. Graff raises a lot of provocative questions about how candidates are grappling with “the new campaign paradigm” (which, he says, emphasizes a dialogue between candidates and voters, instead of a one-way conversation); how they are planning to chart America’s course in a new, globalized world that is increasingly reliant on broadband communication and technological innovation; and how his own generation (born in the 1980s and “more technologically savvy and more civic-minded than the one before it”) regards the current state of politics.

Although many of the more compelling ideas in this book are heavily indebted to the works of other writers — most notably, the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s writings on globalization — the astonishingly young Mr. Graff (who was born in 1981) proves in these pages that he is a cogent writer, willing to tackle large-scale issues and problems.

Unlike some bloggers, who, as Matt Bai noted in his recent book, “The Argument,” willfully eschew a historical perspective, Mr. Graff grounds his narrative in lots of historical analogies and a broad spectrum of reading. The one big flaw of his book is that while he can be eloquent on the positive effects that the Internet has had on American politics — including making vast amounts of information easily accessible, increasing voter involvement and empowering grass-roots movements — he does not come to terms with its downsides: its tendency to fuel partisanship (which in turn makes compromise and legislation on the big issues facing the country more difficult); its blurring of the lines between subjective analyses and rigorously fact-checked reports; its tendency to promote commiseration among like-minded people instead of reasoned debate between individuals with different points of view.

Mr. Graff got his start as Howard Dean’s first Webmaster and he makes it clear in these pages that he believes that “the reins of power online are firmly in the hands of the Democrats” — even though the veteran political reporters Mark Halperin and John F. Harris suggested in their 2006 book, “The Way to Win,” that the new media overwhelmingly favors conservatives, not only because of the ascendance of Fox News, the Drudge Report and talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, but also because the right showed with its Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004 that it knew how to manipulate the new-media landscape.

In contrast, Mr. Graff argues that Republicans have been slower to capitalize on Internet fund-raising than Democrats like Barack Obama, that the G.O.P. signaled its wariness of the Internet this year by trying to scuttle a YouTube debate, and that “a new power structure of ordinary bloggers” like Daily Kos has emerged on the left that poses a potent threat to conservatives.

“The left’s blogosphere,” Mr. Graff writes, “has grown up in an era when Republicans controlled government, giving them a target and an ongoing battle to wage. The right’s blogosphere has grown only in fits and starts within a party that’s both in power and by its core nature more hierarchical.”

When it comes to Washington’s understanding of the need to build a technological infrastructure for the 21st century — expanding broadband access, encouraging research and development, and educating and recruiting new-economy workers — Mr. Graff is gloomier about both sides of the political aisle. Whereas the cold war helped set off a boom in science- and government-sponsored research, he says, the United States now “risks being overtaken in the world that it created.”

Mr. Graff writes that America “is no longer a net exporter of high tech, going from a $54 billion surplus in 1990 to a $50 billion deficit in 2001”; that in 2005 only one out of the 25 largest I.P.O.’s worldwide was held in the United States; that only 3 of the Top 10 recipients of American patents in 2003 were United States-based companies; that as a percentage of gross domestic product, federal research and development dollars fell to less than 1 percent in the early 2000s from nearly 2 percent in 1965; and that the United States now ranks 12th among major industrialized nations for broadband penetration.

Today, Mr. Graff observes, “the nation’s best minds quickly end up in places like Silicon Valley or Wall Street,” not the government, leaving Washington increasingly “out of touch” with the new economy. “This disconnect points to one of the biggest problems that the country faces today,” he goes on. “The new economy lacks a political infrastructure. The older industries are the best organized and most entrenched and therefore the most powerful. They’re able to land the meetings with officials that lead to government loans; it’s their armies of lobbyists who can operate in back rooms, slipping in tax breaks and making competition for newcomers more difficult.”

Echoing arguments that Bill Bradley made in his 2007 book, “The New American Story,” and Charles E. Schumer made in his 2007 book, “Positively American,” Mr. Graff suggests that the erosion of quality in American education poses a serious threat to American competitiveness in a global environment in which countries like China and India are capturing more and more of the high-tech jobs that once went to the United States.

Given globalization, Mr. Graff argues, education and job security, like energy policy, are no longer simply domestic issues, adding that the question of whether the United States “will make the investments and decisions necessary to compete in the coming decades must be front and center” in the presidential campaign of 2008.

So far, this does not seem to be happening. While some candidates are learning to embrace the digital age as a means of getting their message out, none have yet made the issue of technological innovation and the challenge of globalization centerpieces of their campaign.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/books/18kaku.html





Keeper of an Unlikely Trove, Gutenberg to Warhol
Andrew Jacobs

It is difficult to say which is more surprising: that the Newark Public Library owns prints by Picasso and Rauschenberg, a page of the Gutenberg Bible and a 1493 handwritten tome known as the Nuremberg Chronicles, or that William J. Dane, a dapper, refreshingly irreverent art scholar from New Hampshire, has been tending to this astounding collection for six decades.

Mr. Dane does not like to talk about his age, but it is worth noting that he was old enough to join the Army during World War II and fight through France, Belgium and Germany.

“I don’t want this to be a story about some old dumbbell who stayed at the same job for 60 years,” he said last Friday, adjusting his tie, which was adorned with burgundy-and-green bunches of grapes.

In a well-timed distraction, Mr. Dane pulled up his sleeve to reveal a rhinestone-slathered watch that would have put Liberace to shame. “You like my bling,” he said deadpan. “It’s an hour fast because I haven’t figured out how to change the hands.”

Mr. Dane, who carries the regal title “keeper of the prints,” has been cradling and nourishing one of the country’s most impressive collections of prints, posters and rare books since he left the scorched battlefields of Europe and ambled into the library’s main branch on Washington Street, whereupon he was immediately hired as a clerk.

“I guess you could say I was at the right place at the right time,” said Mr. Dane, a state legislator’s son who has lived in the same Newark building — a faded steel-and-glass tower designed by Mies van der Rohe — for 30 years.

In the 1940s, before the city became tarnished by words like “blight” and “urban decay,” Newark was an industrial powerhouse whose leading citizens thought its public art should reflect its ambitions and rival the collections of New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.

During the late 19th century, local patrons had begun plying the library with etchings by Piranesi, 4,000-year-old Sumerian writing tablets and a one-of-a-kind ambrotype — a photographic image on glass — of a youthful Abraham Lincoln, years before the weight of civil war scored his face with sadness.

At the time he was hired to work in the Department of Art and Music, Mr. Dane did not know much about fine art, but he quickly learned that the man who had started Newark’s collecting spree in the early 20th century, John Cotton Dana — a giant to librarians and museum directors worldwide — would have wanted him to keep it growing, and to make sure it was accessible to what elitists of the era might have described as the rabble.

“He thought it was important for the people of Newark to know how an etching was different from a print,” Mr. Dane said, briskly spinning past the display cases on the library’s second and third floors that hold signed works by Miró, Goya and Rosenquist.
“Ahh, Andy,” he said, pausing at a Warhol serigraph of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

A few paces later, he glanced up at a Red Grooms portrait of Gertrude Stein and recounted the time he had run into Ms. Stein while he was studying art in France. The writer promptly asked him to mind her dog for a few minutes.

During the rough years — decades really — Mr. Dane made sure that the library kept stocking up on works of the Abstract Expressionists, Pop artists and Japanese print makers. He sought out pieces by unheralded local artists and spent $40 on a signed Lichtenstein lithograph whose price tag would now include at least three additional zeros.

“When we were acquiring Jackson Pollock posters,” Mr. Dane said, “people thought we were crazy to buy work by a guy who made art by dripping paint.”

Through the years, as the library drew the unwanted attention of elected officials eager to fill ugly budget gaps, Mr. Dane folded his arms and dug in his heels.

“Bill has been able to protect the collection at times when some people might have sold it off to pay for city services,” said Clement A. Price, a history professor at Rutgers University who serves on the library’s board of trustees.

Even as Newark suffers through yet another budget crunch, Mr. Dane has leveraged a wispy budget to beef up the library’s collection, which includes 23,000 prints, 5,000 posters and 1,000 autographs — think Mozart, Thomas Paine, Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Wilma J. Grey, the library’s director, declined to reveal Mr. Dane’s acquisition budget, saying she did not want to provoke dissension among cash-strapped departments and the city’s 10 library branches.

“We don’t like to talk about it, but it’s minimal,” she said. “The great thing about William is he’s been able to spot artists that were up-and-coming.”

When it comes to the collection, Mr. Dane is not one to play favorites. But he has an admitted weakness for handmade artists’ books and mass-produced pop-up books, the more outrageous the better.

“Watch out, watch out, here it comes,” he said, cracking open a battery-powered Star Wars book that featured Han Solo and Darth Vader duking it out with sabers fashioned from glow sticks. “Boy, that was scary!”

Mr. Dane cannot say when he might retire, but he hopes to stay long enough to see the completion of a proposed $100 million expansion, which would double the library’s shelf space and provide more opportunities for exhibitions. After all, what good is owning a Dürer etching or an Escher woodcut if it is seen only by a few librarians and academics?

“A library should be a palace for the people,” he said, as the building’s 5 o’clock closing bell rang out with earsplitting finality.

As he rode the elevator down, he noticed that an enterprising library patron had written “Lil T Wuz Here” in a red marker on the wall of the elevator. It appeared that Mr. Dane might try to wipe away the still-glistening ink — but he stopped himself.

“How nice,” he said approvingly. “An artist at work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/ny...18library.html





2007: By The Numbers, In Bigger Than The Sound

We break down the music industry's past 12 months, including 50 Cent's retirement promise, Nicole Scherzinger's perpetually delayed LP and more.
James Montgomery

On The Record: The Numbers Of The Year

If you go by the numbers (or, really, any other indicator), 2007 was the worst 12-month period the music industry has ever seen. Sales of albums were down some 15 percent from '06, continuing an eight-year trend of redefining the term "scraping the bottom of the barrel." The "Dreamgirls" soundtrack set the record for the lowest chart-topping sales total (66,000 copies) then shattered it the following week (60,000). Will.I.Am's solo effort, Songs About Girls, was outsold by an Iron and Wine record, The Shepherd's Dog. By 10,000 copies. People quibbled over the difference between 320 and 160 kilobits, debated whether the Billboard 200 even mattered anymore and tried very hard to tell the difference between Finger Eleven and OneRepublic (hint: one of them is from Canada).

Yes, it was bad times all around ... so bad, in fact, that no mere essay could encapsulate it all. But the numbers don't lie. So, in order to rub salt in the wounds/ kick a man when he's down/ flog a dead horse/ get out of writing an actual column this week since it's almost the end of the year and I've mentally checked out, I'm presenting 2007: By the Numbers, a list of figures, digits and stats that accurately sums up the year that was, and is almost entirely based in fact (surely a first for Bigger Than the Sound).

I'm also including a couple of reader top 10s that were submitted after my massive 20 Best Albums of 2007 column from last week. Boy, you guys sure hate Against Me!

(Oh, and this will be my final BTTS of the year. I'll be back in 2008, provided the contents of this column don't get me fired. Happy holidays, everyone.)

And now ... let's get numeric:

» Total sales of Nickelback's All the Right Reasons, Daughtry's Daughtry, Carrie Underwood's Carnival and Some Hearts, Fergie's The Dutchess and Miley Cyrus' Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus as of December 9: 19,847,303 copies

» Total number of "High School Musical" soundtracks sold as of December 9: 7,004,406 copies

» Total sales of the Arcade Fire's Funeral, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's Some Loud Thunder and LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver as of December 9: 455,347 copies

» Approximate number of year-end lists topped by any of those three albums: 4,589,668 (and counting)

» Approximate size of the chasm between consumers and critics, in miles: 5,879 (and counting)

» Projected first-week sales of Will.I.Am's Songs About Girls: 100,000 to 120,000 copies

» Actual first-week sales of Will.I.Am's Songs About Girls: 20,876 copies

» Rumored age of "teen" sensation Lil Mama: 29

» Approximate number of times I made the exact same joke in this column: 4

» Amount of time, in days, between the release of Good Charlotte's Good Morning Revival and them falling completely off the cultural radar: 5

» Number of people who just read that and went, "Holy crap, Good Charlotte released an album this year?!?": 4,477

» Total worth of 50 Cent's "I'll retire if Kanye West beats me" promise, if you held it in one hand and a quarter in the other: 25 cents

» Despite realizing that, the percent of my entire being with which I hoped it would be true: 100

» Number of promised (threatened?) release dates for Nicole Scherzinger's solo debut, Her Name Is Nicole, multiplied by number of singles released from the album that failed to impact in any way whatsoever: 12 (4 dates x 3 singles)

» Percent sure I am that Her Name Is Nicole will see the light of day in 2008: 23

» Amount of feet my jaw dropped when I was informed what Soulja Boy's "Crank That" was really about: 5

» Number of countries that is probably illegal in: 27

» Number of times I was actually afraid of bodily harm because of something I wrote: 4

» Number of times that fear was brought on by the phrase "50 Cent is filming a live concert a couple of floors below us, and he's not happy": 1

» Number of times I had to follow something negative I said about much-buzzed-about act the Black Kids with the phrase " ... the band" so as not to offend those around me: 548-plus

» Pounds of crow I was forced to eat when I ended up putting the Black Kids' "Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You" on my Best Singles of 2007: 16

» Total number of people who downloaded Radiohead's In Rainbows on October 10: somewhere between 0 and 10,000,000

» Total amount of money Radiohead made in the In Rainbows windfall: somewhere between $0 and $10,000,000

» Total difference, in kilobits per second, of the encoding on the download-only version of In Rainbows and a "high-quality" MP3: 160

» Number of Radiohead fans enraged by said kilobit-per-second difference, who are apparently also bats gifted with supersonic hearing: somewhere between 0 and 10,000,000

» Actual audible difference between download-only version of In Rainbows and a "high-quality" MP3: 0

» First-week sales for Britney Spears' Blackout: 289,712

» Total number of times I was convinced Britney Spears would be dead within the next two days, and therefore refrained from writing mean things about her in my column: 289,712

» Number of conversations I had with fellow employees about Rihanna, Hannah Montana and/or Jordin Sparks that were borderline disturbing/illegal, given the age of the subjects: 98

» Number of pornographically harrowing/amazing blog posts written by Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox: 65

» Number of said posts that were actually pornographic: 1

» Number of Bigger Than the Sound columns published in 2007: 35

» Number that didn't contain petty, somewhat baseless insults hurled at Panic! at the Disco, Gym Class Heroes, New York Jets running back Thomas Jones and/or Rivers Cuomo: 6

» Number that disappeared from the Internet soon after complaints from publicists at large and a multinational corporation that rhymes with "Tunaversal Fusic Troop": 1

» Number of angry e-mails I received from radio DJs with names like Spike, Lazlo or Dash after the Why Are Radio DJs So Dumb column of June 6: 55

» Number of angry e-mails I got from a Thrice fan/employee at the Guitar Hangar in Brookfield, Connecticut, that encouraged me to "go [eat] sh-- from a dying whale's ass" and were signed "Someone with far better musical taste than you": 1

» Number of apologetic e-mails I received from the owner of Guitar Hangar after he read his employee's e-mail and "spoke to him about sending out this kind of e-mail from our company's e-mail system": 1

Cleaning Out My Inbox (Or "Interactivity, While A Touchstone Of So-Called 'New Media,' Is Actually Overrated And Kind Of A Waste Of Time")

Like I said, last week I dropped my 20 Best Albums of 2007 list. And I asked for your feedback. What I got was a couple of angry e-mails (one from a really indignant dude with an AOL account named after a Thursday record who chided me about "only focus[ing] on supposedly 'indie' records that are packed with just enough hooks and retro influence to gain attention from the undeservedly pretentious 'blogosphere,' " then included a list containing several of said "indie" records) and a bunch of really good lists. I've compiled some of them below.

1. The National, Boxer
2. Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
3. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
4. Apples in Stereo, New Magnetic Wonder
5. Jens Lekman, Night Falls Over Kortedala
6. The Rosebuds, Night of the Furies
7. The Good, the Bad & the Queen, The Good, the Bad & the Queen
8. Menomena, Friend and Foe
9. Georgie James, Places
10. Radiohead, In Rainbows
-Rusty, Stranded in Stereo

1. M.I.A., Kala
2. Wu-Tang Clan, 8 Diagrams
3. Boys Noize, Oi Oi Oi
4. Jesu, Conqueror
5. Underworld, Oblivion With Bells
6. The End, Elementary
7. Atreyu, Lead Sails Paper Anchor
8. White Stripes, Icky Thump
9. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Baby 81
10. Hail Social, Modern Love & Death
11. Ulrich Schnauss, Goodbye
12. Patrick Wolf, The Magic Position
13. El-P, I'll Sleep When You're Dead
-Corey, New York City

1. Silverchair, Young Modern
2. Kenna, Make Sure They See My Face
3. Ween, La Cucaracha
4. Radiohead, In Rainbows
5. Lily Allen, Alright, Still
6. Lyle Lovett and His Large Band, It's Not Big, It's Large
7. The Projection People, Monotony Forgotony
8. Malajube, Trompe-L'Oeil
9. The Sleepy Jackson, Personality
10. Björk - Volta
-Tyler, Madison, Wisconsin

1. Radiohead, In Rainbows
2. Thrice, The Alchemy Index, Vol. I and II
3. Caspian, The Four Trees
4. The National, Boxer
5. Moving Mountains, Pnuema
6. Crime in Stereo, Is Dead
7. Look Mexico, This Is Animal Music
8. Battles, Mirrored
9. A Wilhelm Scream, Career Suicide
10. Daggermouth, Turf Wars
11. Jesu, Conqueror
12. Cassino, Sounds of Salvation
13. Maritime, Heresy and the Hotel Choir
14. Modern Life Is War, Midnight in America
15. Say Anything, In Defense of the Genre
16. Crippled Black Phoenix, A Love of Shared Disasters
17. The American Dollar, The Technicolour Sleep
18. The Kidcrash, Jokes
19. The Allstar Project, Your Reward ... A Bullet
20. Sunset Rubdown, Random Spirit Lover
-Angry dude with Thursday-inspired AOL address, somewhere in the wilds of the Internet (but probably Sayreville, New Jersey)
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/157...50_cent.jhtml#





Ten Worst Telco Moments of 2007
Timothy Karr

A few years ago, President Bush pledged that every corner of America would have high-speed Internet by 2007. Well, the year is drawing to a close, and millions of Americans still do not have access. The United States has dropped from fourth to 15th in the world in broadband penetration in the past five years -- a result of a telco stranglehold on both broadband markets and broadband policy that puts their profits before innovation and the public good.

But that's not all. Even when Americans can get online, an open and neutral Internet is not guaranteed. In the past year, phone and cable companies have been throttling the free flow of information on the Internet and cell phones -- giving us a harrowing glimpse of a world without Net Neutrality.

A review of the 10 Worst Telco Moments of 2007 (in no particular order):

1. White House Declares 'Mission Accomplished' for the Internet

"We have the most effective multiplatform broadband in the world," the Bush administration's top technologist, John Kneuer, told skeptical Web experts and the media in June, despite several international surveys that place the United States far behind countries in Asia and Europe.

Kneuer says the real problem is not bad policy, but faulty data in the surveys. While the Bush White House seemed over eager to declare broadband success, America's failing report card told a story of a larger systems breakdown. "Previous generations put a toaster in every home and a car in every driveway as signs of economic progress," Sen. John Kerry wrote in September. "To stay competitive, we should strive to do the same with nationwide broadband."

Let's hope our next president understands that ubiquitous broadband access needs to be more than a mirage.

2. Telcos Spy on Millions of Americans

For several years now, the nation's largest telecommunications companies have been spying on their own customers without a warrant. In the process, they delivered to the federal government the private records of millions of Americans. Their excuse -- national security in the face of a known terrorist threat -- holds little weight when one considers that they've been spying on us with the NSA well in advance of the September 11 attacks.

Now, they are pushing a bill -- "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" -- that would grant complicit phone companies retroactive amnesty from prosecution for violations of our civil liberties. While a few, brave senators have stood in the way of the bill and refused to let the telcos off the hook, the legislation still stands a good chance of getting through.

3. Comcast is Busted for Blocking BitTorrent

In October, an Associated Press investigation revealed that Comcast - technically a cableco - was secretly blocking peer-to-peer file sharing programs like BitTorrent and Gnutella. Comcast's blocking is a glaring violation of Net Neutrality.

BitTorrent is rapidly emerging as one of the most successful online platforms for the sharing of large files. Comcast has a natural incentive to keep customers watching movies and television shows through their system, not the Internet.. Despite the evidence, Comcast's David Cohen told Ars Technica that Comcast does not block access to file sharing applications and that their practice is just "content shaping." In response, SavetheInternet.com members filed a petition urging the FCC to stop Comcast from blocking Internet traffic and fine them for their violations.

And what can you do if you find out that you've been blocked by Comcast? Switch to AT&T or Verizon and suffer with slow DSL speeds and their own draconian terms of service. Free Press has sifted through the agreements of several Internet and cell phone providers and found similar language that reserves their right to cut off users on a whim.

4. AT&T and Verizon Censor Free Speech

In September, Verizon Wireless blocked NARAL Pro-Choice America's efforts to send mobile text messages to its members. After a New York Times expose, the phone company reversed its policy, claiming it was a glitch.

A month earlier, during the live Lollapalooza webcast of a Pearl Jam concert, AT&T muted lead singer Eddie Vedder just as he launched into a lyric criticizing President Bush. AT&T launched its own bungled PR response after a flurry of criticism. But both companies refused to change internal policies which allowed them to censor in the future.

Their apologies aren't cutting it anymore. Censorship by AT&T and Verizon is further proof that these corporate giants simply cannot be left at the controls of Internet content. These same providers handed customer phone records over to the NSA without a subpoena and are now strong-arming Congress for retroactive immunity (see No. 2). And they want us to trust them with the Internet?

5. Caught Red-Handed, Telcos Change Their Tune

For some time, phone and cable companies and their shills and lobbyists had been spinning Net Neutrality as a "solution in search of a problem." But 2007 brought us a series of violations of Internet freedom which brought the "problem" into vivid relief for millions.

Undaunted, the shills quickly changed their tune, admitting that indeed some mistakes were made, but the telcos were merely implementing "reasonable network management" (aka content discrimination) to bring us the Internet that we all love and cherish. The moral of this story: Follow what the telcos do, not just what they say.

6. Media Insiders Suffer Telco-Vision

Don't always believe the purveyors of conventional wisdom in Washington media. Some of these pundits are so steeped in their own "knowledge" that they get stuck spinning in place when faced with evidence to the contrary. This was the case for a chosen few who in 2007 hunkered down behind their laptops to write commentaries to convince the world that Net Neutrality was dead and gone. The issue is a "fading memory," one crowed. It "barely raises a yawn" said another.

Their view of the world, however, rarely extends beyond the Potomac, where the Net Neutrality issue was leading the news and being vigorously debated along the campaign trail. Indeed, Net Neutrality emerged as the No. 1 issue that thousands of visitors to TechPresident selected to be answered by all the presidential candidates. So the next time an insider tells you that Net Neutrality is dead, I advise you to check his pulse instead. Then point out the more than 1.5 million Americans who are taking action to protect the free and open Internet.

7. The iPhone Gets Shackled

The introduction of the iPhone over the summer highlighted both the promise and the problems of America's wireless marketplace. On the one hand, it demonstrated the promises of a truly mobile Internet. On the other hand, the iPhone raised serious questions about the fact that most every mobile phone consumer is locked into a long-term contracts, using a phone that has been "crippled" by carriers, with significant penalties for switching to a new provider.

The iPhone was shackled to AT&T. The reason? We have allowed carriers to exert almost complete gatekeeper control over all devices, services and content in the wireless sector -- a move that has left U.S. innovation generations behind other nations. Reviewing the state of the wireless market in America, New York Times blogger David Pogue called American carriers "calcified, conservative and way behind their European and Asian counterparts." Despite recent efforts to open devices, the lockdown of cell phones remains the dominant characteristic of most every user agreement in the country.

8. Bush's Justice Dept. Files Against Net Neutrality

In September, departing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales filed a brief with the Federal Communications Commission, urging the agency to oppose Net Neutrality. The DOJ stated that broadband companies like AT&T should be able to erect toll booths and filter traffic -- upending the even playing field that has made the Web an unrivaled engine of democratic discourse and new ideas.

The DOJ move once again proved the point: Powerful corporate and government gatekeepers are working together to dismantle Internet freedoms and impose their will upon the Web. By moving against Net Neutrality, Gonzales was merely pulling last-minute favors for friends in high places. Soon thereafter, Free Press submitted a FOIA request to shed light on the DOJ's recent hit job against Net Neutrality and uncover whether industry lobbyists or White House politics had a hand in this unusual action. We're still waiting for a response.

9. FCC's Rosy Broadband Report Wilts Under Scrutiny

In February, the FCC released its biannual report on the U.S. broadband market. On the surface, the numbers sounded good. High-speed Internet lines increased by 26 percent during the first half of 2006, and broadband was reportedly available in 99 percent of all U.S. ZIP codes. But the broadband reality is much darker. According to Free Press Research Director Derek Turner, the FCC used an "absurd standard" to measure broadband -- 200 kilobits per second. "That was barely fast enough to surf in 1999, but is far below what's needed to enjoy streaming video, VoIP, flash animation or other common Internet applications."

Indeed, speeds are much slower than what's available in the rest of the world. Half of all U.S. broadband connections are slower than 2.5 megabits per second -- yet in countries like Japan and South Korea, they're rolling out 100 megabit services. And there's no real competition. 98 percent of high-speed residential lines in America are provided by incumbent cable or telecom companies. Using ZIP codes alone vastly overstates the availability and competition for broadband services. While the FCC's data has been widely debunked, the telco lobby crowed that the FCC had proven beyond a doubt that the American broadband marketplace was a haven of free-market competition -- which leads us to our final "worst moment."

10. More Astroturf Sprouts Up, Speads Lies

Washington policymaking has spawned a cottage industry of phony front groups put in place by phone and cable companies eager to spread misinformation about anything that threatens their control over the network. Nowhere is this more evident than in their campaign to defeat open Internet initiatives.

Throughout the year, companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have funneled millions of dollars toward "Astroturf" front groups such as the disingenuously named NetCompetition.org, Hands Off the Internet and The Future Faster. For example, Hands Off the Internet -- which sounds like a citizens group to protect the Internet from gatekeepers -- is actually a telco-backed lobbying group that spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on video PSAs and "grassrootsy" Web campaigns aimed at eliminating efforts to restore Net Neutrality protections and spread open access.

True to form, these front groups spent much of 2007 cranking out phony PR, mouthing telco taking points and casting doubt against any effort to ensure that the Internet is open, neutral and free of interference by gatekeepers. And these groups aren't going away soon. Expect to see them on our worst moments list at the end of 2008.

-- Co-authored by Lynn Erskine
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timoth...o_b_77748.html





Year's Top Quotes: 'Don't Tase Me, Bro'
Susan Haigh

It was the plea heard round the world. ''Don't tase me, bro'' -- shouted by a Florida college student as officers removed him from a speech by Sen. John Kerry -- tops this year's list of most memorable quotes, compiled by the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations.

Second on the list is a quote from Lauren Upton, the Miss Teen USA contestant who gave a confused and mangled response to a question about why one-fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a map.

''I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and Iraq and everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us,'' Upton said.

The words of both young people were immortalized in videos posted on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site.

''These new media are spreading these things,'' said editor Fred R. Shapiro, 53, associate librarian and lecturer in legal research at the Yale Law School. ''I'm not listing the most admirable quotes, the most eloquent quotes. It's the most memorable quotes.''

President Bush dominated last year's list with quotes about the Iraq war, but this year he didn't break into the top 10.

That doesn't mean politicians didn't say anything memorable this year.

Third on the list is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's comment at Columbia University in New York: ''In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country.''

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, took eighth place with ''(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom,'' his explanation for his foot touching the foot of an undercover police officer in an airport men's room.

Shapiro released his Yale Book of Quotations last year after six years of research. It contains about 13,000 quotes, each extensively researched to verify its origin.

He expects to add roughly 1,000 more quotes -- mostly modern -- for the next edition in about five years, and in the meantime he plans to keep issuing annual top 10 lists.

He relies on suggestions from quote-watchers throughout the world, plus his own choices from songs, the news and movies, and then searches dababases and the Internet to determine the popularity of the quotes.

In the case of ''Don't tase me, bro'' -- uttered shortly before the student was shocked with a Taser -- he discovered the phrase was even printed on T-shirts and used as a cell phone ring tone.

''It's not Shakespeare, but there is a kind of folk eloquence in that. It wouldn't be a quote if he didn't say 'bro,''' Shapiro said. ''That had just the right rhythm to make it memorable.''

Shapiro said he struggled before deciding to include radio personality Don Imus' ''nappy-headed hos'' comment about the Rutgers University women's basketball team. The quote ended up fourth on his list.

''My book does mix the most eloquent and magnificent quotes with the sordid and sleazy materials from recent times. There are some real jarring juxtapositions there,'' he said. ''I wanted to include the whole culture -- the high and the low, the old and the new.'' http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...e/5392564.html

5. "I don't recall." -- Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' repeated response to questioning at a congressional hearing about the firing of U.S. attorneys.

6. "There's only three things he (Republican presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani) mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11." -- Sen. Joseph Biden, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate.

7. "I'm not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody (Vice President Dick Cheney) who has a 9 percent approval rating." -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat.

8. "(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom." -- Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig's explanation of why his foot touched that of an undercover policeman in a men's room.

9. "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man." -- Biden describing rival Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

10. "I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history." -- Former President Jimmy Carter in an interview in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper. http://www.reuters.com/article/lifes...54456920071220





O.K. to Fire on Godzilla, Japanese Official Says
Martin Fackler

The minister of defense caused a media squall after joking about invasions by space aliens and movie monsters. Responding to a question at a news conference, the minister, Shigeru Ishiba, told reporters that he was studying whether the nation’s pacifist Constitution would limit a military response to an attack by space aliens. “There are no grounds to deny that there are unidentified flying objects and some life forms that control them,” Mr. Ishiba said, smiling at first, but then delivering a straight-faced explanation. “If Godzilla attacked, that would probably be a natural disaster relief operation,” making military action legally permissible, he said. The comments came days after Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Nobutaka Machimura, who is the government’s top spokesman, professed belief in U.F.O.’s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/wo...-godzilla.html





‘I Am Legend’ DVD Screener Leaks! Will Smith's Oscar Chances Sunk?

For your consideration: Dog for Best Supporting Actor.

A DVD screener for Will Smith's new I Am Legend leaked onto BitTorrent sites last night, causing some to wonder (us, at least) why the heck one ever existed in the first place. Generally, at this time of year, the only promotional screeners mailed out are for movies that studios think might actually win Academy Awards (promo copies of The Kite Runner, I'm Not There, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and Eastern Promises have been sent to critics, and all are currently making the rounds on file-sharing sites).

Could Warner Bros. actually have been serious about pushing Will Smith for a Best Actor Oscar? We hope they've learned their lesson!
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment...ner_leaks.html





MPAA Censors Torture Documentary, Gleefully Approves of Fake Torture
Robbo

ThinkFilm is releasing Alex Gibney's documentary "Taxi To The Dark Side" and submitted a poster for MPAA approval which featured a photo of two soldiers leading away a handcuffed and hooded man. The MPAA rejected it as being "not suitable for audiences of all ages".

The hypocrisy of this, in the face of posters for horror/slasher flicks like "Saw" and "Hostel", is astounding. Censorship pure and simple.

The photo used in the proposed poster is derived from an actual photograph which the army also tried to censor. The MPAA has also rejected a one-sheet for Roadside Attractions "The Road To Guantanamo" which featured a hooded man hanging by his wrists from handcuffs.

MPAA message? Torture for entertainment is suitable for all ages. Torture examined in a documentary is not.

ThinkFilm is appealing.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/20...s-torture.html





Student Punished for Wearing Pro-Gay T-Shirt Gets Apology
Michael Beder

The Spencer-Van Etten Central School District in New York agreed to make a public statement supporting students' right to wear T-shirts with controversial messages, satisfying demands made by civil liberties advocates after a student was punished for wearing a shirt supporting gay rights.

Heathyre Farnham, a 16-year-old student at Spencer-Van Etten High School, was sent home Sept. 21 because Principal Ann Sincock believed Farnham's T-shirt — which read "gay? fine by me" — would spark a disruption by prompting anti-gay responses.

District officials, including school district attorney Jim Young, later acknowledged that Sincock's action was a mistake and that Farnham's T-shirt was a form of protected expression. Barrie Gewanter, director of the Central New York chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, pressed the school board at an Oct. 23 board meeting to issue an apology to Farnham and a public statement to students that district schools would respect students' free-expression rights.

The school board did not grant either request at the meeting. But after further negotiations with the NYCLU, the district agreed to both. According to a Dec. 6 NYCLU press release, a Nov. 2 message read over the high school's public address system said the school dress code "does not prohibit students from displaying controversial or political messages," and that among the "wide range" of acceptable messages are those "supportive of lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender people." The announcement did note that the dress code bans obscene or profane words and images, as well as messages promoting the use of drugs, alcohol or tobacco.

Sincock also apologized to Farnham privately, Farnham told the Student Press Law Center.

Superintendent Steven Schoonmaker declined to comment on the details of the agreement, saying only that the issue had been resolved.

"Everyone seems to be happy and we're going to go back to educating children," he said.

Farnham said she is satisfied with the resolution of the controversy.

"It wasn't storybook, but it turned out OK," she said, adding that "everything's pretty much back to normal."

Gewanter said the public statement directly to students was important to dispel the chilling effect of Farnham's initial punishment.

"You can't cure the chill of censorship with silence," Gewanter said. Farnham's punishment was troubling not only because it infringed on students' free-speech rights, but also because censoring a message supportive of gay and lesbian students called the school's support for those students into question, Gewanter said.

"We are very happy that the school district decided to cure the message of censorship with a message of tolerance," she said.
http://www.splc.org/newsflash.asp?id=1659&year=





Student Told to Cover Up Lesbian T-Shirt
Dionne Walker

A lesbian high school student says she was asked by a teacher to cover up a lesbian-themed T-shirt or face suspension, and now a civil liberties group has taken up her cause.

Bethany Laccone, 17, said she was asked to cloak a logo of two interlocked female symbols while attending a hotel management class this month at I.C. Norcom High School in Portsmouth. She's a senior at nearby Woodrow Wilson High School, where she has not faced a similar ultimatum.

In a letter sent Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia asked Norcom administrators to remove any mention of the incident from Laccone's records and agree not to similarly censor other students.

ACLU leaders want administrators to clarify that students can express political views. The school's dress code prohibits "bawdy, salacious or sexually suggestive messages."

The ACLU gave the school until Jan. 11 to respond or possibly face further action.

"What's happening to Bethany Laccone is a clear-cut case of unconstitutional censorship," said Kent Willis, executive director of the Virginia chapter.

School officials did not respond to repeated messages left by The Associated Press. However, Joseph L. Wiggins, the district superintendent's executive assistant, told The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk that while he didn't know what Laccone had been told, "The concern could be that we are training students to go out into the business world."

After Laccone's teacher asked her to cover the shirt, she said she zipped up her jacket. One week later, she again wore the bright red shirt, which she said is her favorite.

Laccone said her teacher again asked her to cover her shirt or go to the assistant principal's office. Once there, Laccone said she was given a choice.

"I could either zip up my jacket, turn my shirt inside out, or get suspended," said Laccone, who covered the shirt, but told her parents what had happened.

According to the ACLU, administrators later told Laccone's father the shirt had upset a conservative instructor and interfered with her ability to teach.

In Thursday's letter, they argue the T-shirt "intended to convey a particularized, political message that lesbian identity should be celebrated and is a source of pride."

Laccone said she just wants to wear her shirt.

"I don't feel like I should have to hide my sexuality," she said.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...hLP0QD8TM5UDO1





At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star
Sara Rimer

Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.
Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise.

“Through your inspiring video lectures i have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL Physics is, both astounding and simple,” a 17-year-old from India e-mailed recently.

Steve Boigon, 62, a florist from San Diego, wrote, “I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes.”

Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits. He is part of a new generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and even, without charge, on iTunes U, which went up in May on Apple’s iTunes Store.

In his lectures at ocw.mit.edu, Professor Lewin beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks and a pith helmet — nerd safari garb — he fires a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall.

He rides a fire-extinguisher-propelled tricycle across his classroom to show how a rocket lifts off.

He was No. 1 on the most downloaded list at iTunes U for a while, but that lineup constantly evolves. The stars this week included Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Leonard Susskind, a professor of quantum mechanics at Stanford.

Last week, Yale put some of its most popular undergraduate courses and professors online free. The list includes Controversies in Astrophysics with Charles Bailyn, Modern Poetry with Langdon Hammer and Introduction to the Old Testament with Christine Hayes.

M.I.T. recently expanded on the success of its online classes by opening a site aimed at high school students and teachers.

Judging from his fan e-mail, Professor Lewin, who is among those featured on the new site, appeals to students of all ages. Some of his correspondents compare him to Richard Feynman, the free-spirited, bongo-playing Nobel laureate who popularized physics through his books, lectures and television appearances.

With his halo of wiry grayish-brown hair, his tortoiseshell glasses and his intensity, Professor Lewin is the iconic brilliant scientist. But like Julia Child, he is at once larger than life and totally accessible.

“We have here the mother of all pendulums!” he declares, hoisting his 6-foot-2, 170-pound self on a 30-pound steel ball attached to a pendulum hanging from the ceiling. He swings across the stage, holding himself nearly horizontal as his hair blows in the breeze he has created.

The point: that a period of a pendulum is independent of the mass — the steel ball, plus one professor — hanging from it.

“Physics works!” Professor Lewin shouts, as the classroom explodes in cheers.

“Hi, Prof. Lewin!!” a fan who identified himself as a 17-year-old from China wrote. “I love your inspiring lectures and I love MIT!!!”

A fan who said he was a physics teacher from Iraq gushed: “You are now my Scientific Father. In spite of the bad occupation and war against my lovely IRAQ, you made me love USA because you are there and MIT is there.”

Professor Lewin revels in his fan mail and in the idea that he is spreading the love of physics. “Teaching is my life,” he said.

The professor, who is from the Netherlands, said that teaching a required course in introductory physics to M.I.T. students made him realize “that what really counts is to make them love physics, to make them love science.”

He said he spent 25 hours preparing each new lecture, choreographing every detail and stripping out every extra sentence.

“Clarity is the word,” he said.

Fun also matters. In another lecture on pendulums, he stands back against the wall, holding a steel ball at the end of a pendulum just beneath his chin. He has just demonstrated how potential energy turns into kinetic energy by sending the ball flying across the stage, shattering a pane of glass he had bolted to the wall.

Now he will demonstrate the conservation of energy.

“I am such a strong believer in the conservation of energy that I am willing to risk my life for it,” he says. “If I am wrong, then this will be my last lecture.”

He closes his eyes, and releases the ball. It flies back and forth, stopping just short of his chin.

“Physics works!” Professor Lewin shouts. “And I’m still alive!”

Chasing rainbows hooked Mr. Boigon, the San Diego florist. He was vacationing in Hawaii when he noticed the rainbow outside his hotel every afternoon. Why were the colors always in the same order?

When he returned home, Mr. Boigon said in a telephone interview, he Googled rainbows. Within moments, he was whisked to M.I.T. Lecture Hall No. 26-100. Professor Lewin was in front of a few hundred students.

“All of you have looked at rainbows,” he begins. “But very few of you have ever seen one. Seeing is different than looking. Today we are going to see a rainbow.”

For 50 minutes, he bounds across the stage, writing equations on the blackboard and rhapsodizing about the “amazing” and “beautiful” physics of rainbows. He explains how the colors always appear in the same order because of how light refracts and reflects in the water droplets.

For the finale, he creates a rainbow by shining a bright light into a glass sphere containing a single drop of water.

“There it is!” Professor Lewin cries.

“Your life will never be the same,” he tells his students. “Because of your knowledge, you will be able to see way more than just the beauty of the bows that everyone else can see.”

“Professor Lewin was correct,” Mr. Boigon wrote in an e-mail message to a reporter. “He made me SEE ... and it has changed my life for the better!!”

“I had never taken a course in physics, or calculus, or differential equations,” he wrote to Professor Lewin. “Now I have done all that in order to be able to follow your lectures. I knew the name Isaac Newton, but nothing about Newtonian Mechanics. I had heard of the likes of Einstein, Galileo.” But, he added that he “didn’t have a clue on earth as to what they were all about.”

“I walk down the street analyzing the force of a boy on skateboard or the recoil of a carpenter using a nail gun,” he wrote. “Thank you with all my heart.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/ed...hysics.html?hp

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