Surveillance
Police Still Using Matrix-Type Database
David Royse
When the federal government in April stopped funding a database that lets police quickly see public records and commercially collected information on Americans, privacy advocates celebrated what they saw as a victory against overzealousness in the fight against terrorism.
But a few states are pressing forward with a similar system, continuing to look for ways to quickly search through a trove of data - from driver's license photos to phone numbers to information about people's cars. Their argument in seeking to keep the Matrix database alive in some form: it's too important for solving crimes to give up on.
Florida, Ohio, Connecticut and Pennsylvania still use software that lets investigators quickly cull through much of the data about people that reside in cyberspace. However, without the federal grant for the Matrix data-sharing system, they won't be routinely searching through digital files from other states - at least for now.
Privacy advocates still don't like the idea, saying government shouldn't have easy access to so much information about people who haven't done anything wrong.
But law officers bent on keeping the Matrix alive say the information is already out there anyway for companies to use for less noble purposes. Law enforcement has always used such information; it just never had a big computer search tool to quickly find links between people and places.
"The media uses that data, attorneys use it, banks use it," said Mark Zadra, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent in charge of the system. "We've been using online data like that for 10 to 15 years. What this does is link those. ... What took law enforcement so long to use technology and get into the 21st century?"
Matrix - the ominous name is shorthand for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange - was born as an anti-terrorism tool in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Created by Florida law enforcement officials working with a one-time drug-running pilot-turned-millionaire computer whiz named Hank Asher, it was conceived as a way for states to combine data they have on people - driving records and criminal histories, for example - with similar records from other states.
The company that Asher founded but no longer works for, Seisint Inc., also added to Matrix information gathered in the private sector, including some of what credit card companies collect, such as names, addresses and Social Security numbers - though actual credit histories were not included.
Together, the program would give states a powerful tool that could link someone to several addresses or vehicles, and possibly to other people who lived at those same houses or drove the same car.
Those links could help thwart terrorism or solve crimes in which witnesses could provide only partial information, like half of a license plate and the make of a car. The technology is credited in part with helping police crack the Washington, D.C., sniper case in 2002.
"It very quickly allows you to identify identities, associates, things like that," said Lt. Col. Ralph Periandi, deputy commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police. "Two or three other people who might be connected."
Matrix impressed federal officials enough that the program was seeded with $12 million from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. Thirteen states eventually signed on or expressed interest in feeding their data into the system, representing half the U.S. population.
But over time, several states pulled out, partly because of concerns about the cost or laws governing the transfer of data out of state. California's attorney general decided Matrix "offends fundamental rights of privacy."
Those objections were nothing compared to the criticism Matrix encountered from the right and the left, including from the American Civil Liberties Union.
"It is essentially an electronic file on everyone whether they are suspected of criminal activity or not," said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU in Florida. "I can't think of anything more un-American."
When the federal grant for Matrix ended in April - there is dispute over whether the privacy issues may have killed the government's interest - the database itself officially ended as well. But Florida and the three other states are still using its database- searching software. Florida is continuing to seek out companies that can help them build another, larger cache of information. And officials envision one day sharing that data with other states again.
In addition to contracting for searching software from Seisint - now part of information giant LexisNexis - Florida has requested information from companies on what data they could provide that the police could add to their database. The proposal says Florida police are interested in such privately available data as insurance, financial, property and business records.
Although Matrix was designed as a terrorism tool, Zadra said its main value has been for solving more ordinary crimes. He cites success stories ranging from kidnapping to frauds and theft. In fact, in Florida the system is most often queried in fraud investigations, followed closely by robbery, state records show.
To support those efforts, the Florida police envision getting what's known as "credit header information" - basic identifiers for people - from private credit rating agencies. That's led to fears that police would looking into people's credit.
"Absolutely not true," Zadra said. What the agency wants from credit agencies is the up-to-date addresses that creditors are famously aggressive about getting.
"We don't get their account numbers, we don't get their expenditures, we don't track and monitor anybody," Zadra said. "We don't know what library books you're checking out, what X-rated videos people are renting."
The agency also wants to limit the searches to information generally available either to the public or to law enforcement without a search warrant, Zadra said. For example, one of the databases the system searches is the FDLE's own registry of sex offenders - which has become a popular Web site for members of the general public to search for people in their neighborhood.
For many privacy advocates Matrix raises the larger question of why so much of this information is already out there in databases for law enforcement to covet.
"Technology operates at the speed of light and privacy protection is at a snail's pace," the ACLU's Simon said. "Governments like the state of Florida have not enacted privacy legislation and aren't limiting the circulation of information about you without your knowledge and consent."
Zadra said the FDLE is keenly aware of concerns about how the data are used - but noted that ultimately the files are mostly public data that people have freely given out. He points to the long lines of people at sporting events who will give away information on themselves by filling out a credit application just for a free T-shirt.
"They've given their private and personal information to somebody they have no idea about, but when they hear law enforcement wants to use it to solve a crime ... they can't believe it," Zadra said.
"We're doing exactly what the public asked us to do after Sept. 11. They said, `My goodness, how did the law enforcement community allow this to happen?'"
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS
Enhanced In-Air Internet Surveillance Sought
Jonathan Krim
Federal law enforcement agencies are seeking enhanced surveillance powers over Internet service on airplanes, an effort to shape an emerging technology to meet the government's concerns about terrorism.
Authorities want the ability to intercept, block or divert e-mail or other online communication to and from airplanes after obtaining a court order. Internet providers would have to allow government monitoring within 10 minutes of a court order being granted, be able to electronically identify users by their seat numbers and be required to collect and store records of the communications for 24 hours.
Such capabilities would go far beyond the government's current ability to monitor Internet traffic on land.
The FBI, Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security jointly made the requests in a filing last week with the Federal Communications Commission, which is examining mostly technical changes to rules for satellite-based Internet services in hopes of spurring more deployment on airplanes. The service is available on some international airlines, but domestic carriers have not yet launched it.
The law enforcement agencies say they support giving travelers the ability to surf the Web and communicate via e-mail or instant messaging in the air but also fear that terrorists could use the services to coordinate an attack among themselves on a single plane, between aircraft or with people on the ground. The government also fears terrorists could use Internet-connected devices to detonate explosives via remote control.
"There is a short window of opportunity in which action can be taken to thwart a suicidal terrorist hijacking or remedy other crisis situations aboard an aircraft, and law enforcement needs to maximize its ability to respond to these potentially lethal situations," according to the filing, which was first reported by Wired News.
The petition comes at a time of ongoing controversy over how deeply security agencies should be able to penetrate private life in efforts to protect against terrorism.
"It does sort of make your head snap back," said James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital rights policy group. "Basically this is the full ability to control all communications into and out of" a particular spot.
Congress is wrestling with competing plans to renew the parts of the Patriot Act that expire at the end of the year. Civil liberties advocates say the law, which passed shortly after the 2001 attacks, is overly intrusive and want it scaled back, while law enforcement and the Bush administration want it renewed and in some ways expanded.
One proposal, passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee last month, would make it easier for the FBI to open mail and issue subpoenas without a judge's approval in terrorism probes. A House panel, meanwhile, voted to limit the FBI's ability to seize library and bookstore records during terrorism investigations.
For more than a year, the FCC has been separately considering whether companies that provide Internet access and carry Web traffic should be required to build surveillance capability into their networks.
Telecommunications carriers are required to do so under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, and law enforcement agencies argue that the same standard should apply to any type of Internet communication, whether via cable lines, wireless, satellites or other technologies.
But the petition for in-flight rules goes well beyond the provisions in that 1994 law.
For example, Internet providers currently are not required to capture and store logs of Internet communications on their networks, which can carry hundreds of millions of e-mails per day.
Dempsey said the proposals -- such as the ability to disable the Internet use of some passengers while maintaining it for law enforcement or airline personnel on a plane - - amount to government-mandated design of the technology.
And if the proposals are approved, he said, he would expect law enforcement to argue that the same capabilities are needed on land.
A spokesman for the Justice Department said the agencies would not comment on the proposals pending congressional testimony scheduled for tomorrow by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Laura H. Parsky.
The business of providing Internet service on airplanes is just taking shape. Boeing Co. is the largest worldwide provider, but competitors are beginning to emerge, with Europe's Airbus SAS and Germany's Siemens AG announcing a partnership this week to create a similar service.
Boeing will abide by any government rules, company spokesman Terrance Scott said. But he added that the company questions whether the FCC's technical review of satellite services is the proper venue for examining surveillance rules, rather than Congress or the courts.
He said Boeing is still evaluating how much it would cost to comply with the proposed rules as well as the impact on the airlines and customers. Expense remains an issue for many U.S. carriers in deciding whether to offer the service, Scott said. The airlines split installation costs with Boeing and then share in revenues.
The Boeing Connexion service currently ranges in price from $9.95 for one hour to $29.95 for flights longer than six hours, Scott said. Customers sign on to and use the system in much the same way as commercial services provided at outdoor cafes, in airline terminals or other wireless "hot spots."
Much of the world is covered by satellites that transmit the signals, although some areas such as Australia and the South Pacific lag behind.
To date, Scott said, the service is not profitable.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...071201435.html
Parties Failing in Joint Effort to Review Patriot Act
Eric Lichtblau
Efforts in Congress to reach a bipartisan compromise over the future of the USA Patriot Act appear to have splintered, with Republican leaders on the Senate and House Judiciary Committees moving ahead on their own with proposals to extend the government's counterterrorism powers under the hotly debated law.
Some Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee said they thought they had reached a tentative compromise in recent weeks on a joint bill that would have extended the law while imposing tougher restrictions on the government's ability to use some surveillance powers against terror suspects.
While negotiations to broker a bipartisan deal continued late Monday, Democratic officials said the compromise appeared to have stalled because of disagreement over whether to impose new restrictions on the government's ability to demand library records and other powers.
Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and other Republicans on the panel are planning to introduce a proposal as early as Tuesday. No Democrats have signed on in support of the proposal, which would make permanent provisions of the law that are set to expire at the end of the year.
On the House side, meanwhile, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee, introduced a similar proposal on Monday.
Frictions on the House Judiciary Committee over the act spilled into public view a month ago at a hearing on the law that degenerated into chaos, as Mr. Sensenbrenner gaveled the session to an end prematurely and stormed out after Democrats made accusations about the administration's policies on torture.
House Democratic officials said Monday that while they were actively involved in negotiations on the original passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001, they felt shut out now.
"There's an incredible contrast this time around," said a senior Democratic aide on the House Judiciary Committee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of political tensions surrounding the issue.
"This time, the Republicans have told us for some time they are working on a bill, they asked for our suggestions, and they ended up saying that none of our suggestions were acceptable," the aide said. "So they're now dropping a bill that we see as a total reauthorization of the Patriot Act with only very slight tweaks."
The Sensenbrenner bill and the proposal that Mr. Specter is expected to introduce this week represent largely a continuation of current powers under the act.
The Judiciary Committee proposals do not contain the type of expanded counterterrorism powers that would be granted under a competing proposal already passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, including the F.B.I.'s expanded use of terrorism subpoenas without a judge's approval and its expanded monitoring of certain mailings.
And the judiciary proposals would incorporate some concessions sought by Democrats on relatively narrow points, officials said. These include provisions to ensure that people served with certain types of subpoenas can legally challenge them and that information demanded by the authorities is "relevant" to terror and intelligence investigations.
But Lisa Graves, a senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, which is pushing for restrictions, said Monday, "We consider these really cosmetic changes that don't go to the heart of the concerns that people around the country have about the government's powers."
A compromise appeared to have been reached weeks ago between Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee on a plan that would have incorporated further restrictions, but the plan was scuttled at least temporarily when Mr. Specter made plans to move ahead on his own with a bill that would largely re- authorize the existing law, Congressional officials said.
Some Democrats attributed the breakdown to a Justice Department effort to expand government powers further, while Republicans said changes sought by aides to Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the panel, scuttled the plan.
The White House has made renewal of the antiterrorism law a top priority, and President Bush pushed again for its extension in a speech Monday at the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, Va.
"The terrorist threats against us will not expire at the end of this year," he said, "and neither should the protections of the Patriot Act."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/po...12patriot.html
Bush Picks Tech Lawyer For Security Post
Declan McCullagh
President Bush has chosen Stewart Baker, one of Washington's most influential technology lawyers, to be assistant secretary for policy in the Homeland Security Department.
Baker's new job, which requires Senate confirmation, would place him in the prominent position of shaping policy on topics from data mining to the department's planning for "what if" scenarios far off in the future. It also could include evaluating existing department functions for efficiency and creating a national strategy to prevent terrorists from entering the United States.
The nomination, announced Wednesday, is part of a sweeping reorganization of the department that Secretary Michael Chertoff announced Wednesday. "Creation of a DHS policy shop has been suggested by members of Congress, (former Secretary Tom Ridge), and numerous outside experts," Chertoff said. "Now is the time to make this a reality."
Baker is currently a partner at the Steptoe and Johnson law firm--which counts many technology companies as clients--and has been an important but polarizing fixture in many privacy debates during the last 15 years.
Baker served as the general counsel of the National Security Agency--the bane of many civil libertarians--during the early 1990s. At the time, the NSA was busy defending the Clipper Chip, intrusive export controls on encryption products, and "key escrow" rules that would encourage encryption backdoors for police convenience.
In a famous article published in the June 1994 issue of Wired Magazine, Baker warned against the ready availability of strong, secure encryption products without backdoors. "One of the earliest users of (Pretty Good Privacy) was a high-tech pedophile in Santa Clara, California," Baker wrote. "He used PGP to encrypt files that, police suspect, include a diary of his contacts with susceptible young boys using computer bulletin boards all over the country."
After the Senate approved what would become the Patriot Act in September 2001, Baker said privacy advocates were overreacting: "We may be missing some opportunities to improve privacy law, but it's hard to say that the privacy sky is falling."
Those kind of statements have not endeared Baker to privacy advocates, who reacted with dismay when hearing news of the announcement Wednesday.
"For the civil liberties community, this could be a troubling appointment," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Stu Baker often stood on the other side of important national debates on protecting privacy and preserving open government."
The simultaneous announcements Wednesday by Bush and Chertoff appear to be inspired by a December 2004 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation that urged a shakeup at the Department of Homeland Security. It recommended the creation of a "unified policy planning staff headed by an undersecretary for policy."
But because the creation of a policy undersecretary post would require Congress to rewrite the law--which could take months at best--Baker was picked for the newly created post of assistant secretary for policy. That post requires Senate confirmation but not a change to the law.
Baker recently served as general counsel for the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, and represents Internet service providers as general counsel of a trade association. He received his law degree from UCLA and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
http://news.com.com/Bush+picks+tech+...3-5787520.html
UK Lobbies For Data Rentention
Graeme Wearden
Charles Clarke wants email and phone records kept for up to three years to aid police investigations, but critics have claimed the scheme is expensive and unwieldy
Britain will renew its efforts this week to get fellow European Union members to agree to the introduction of new controls for the retention of telecommunications data, following last week's bombings in London.
Under the proposals, telecoms operators and Internet service providers would have to keep records of emails, telephone calls and text messages for between 12 months and three years. Law enforcement agencies would be able to see who had sent and received these communications, although the content of these communications would not be stored.
Home secretary Charles Clarke claims that the powers would help to establish links between individuals.
"Telecommunications records, whether of telephones or of emails, which record what calls were made from what number to another number at what time are of important use for intelligence," said Clarke, according to reports.
The UK is one of several countries advocating the introduction of such measures over recent months. Other EU members have opposed them, fearing they would erode civil liberties.
Back in June the European Parliament rejected draft legislation introduced by France, Ireland, Sweden and the UK, amid fears that the proposals were illegal.
"There are sizable doubts on the choice of the legal basis and the proportionality of the measures. It is also possible that the proposal contravenes Article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights," the report from the parliamentary committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs says.
The committee also criticised the proposal because the data would be difficult to analyse and criminals could find a way around it.
"Given the volume of data to be retained, particularly Internet data, it is unlikely that an appropriate analysis of the data will be at all possible," the report says. "Individuals involved in organised crime and terrorism will easily find a way to prevent their data being traced."
The European Parliament's civil liberties committee has estimated that the proposals could cost large ISPs and telcos up to £120m to set up, and millions of pound a year to run.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050711/152/fn318.html
Coast to coast
UConn Finds Hacking Program in Server
AP
HARTFORD - The University of Connecticut is notifying 72,000 students, staff and faculty as a precaution after officials found a computer-hacking program in a server at the school.
The server contains names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers and addresses for anyone with an account that allows access to the school's computer network. The personal information was not in a readable format, officials said.
University officials found the computer-hacking program this week and said it had been placed in a server at the school in 2003. They do not believe any information was compromised although there was an opportunity for someone to access it.
An e-mail was sent to all users at the University of Connecticut and the University of Connecticut Health Center on Friday, and the university was contacting people without e-mail accounts by mail, spokeswoman Karen Grava said.
The security breach was discovered Monday after a university vendor reported that someone tried to access its server with an illegal password.
Technology staff discovered that a program known as a rootkit had been installed on the server. The server was immediately taken off-line, chief information officer Michael Kerntke said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...st omwire.htm
U-S-C Tells 270-Thousand Applicants A Hacker May Have Accessed Their Records
AP
LOS ANGELES - Online applications at the University of Southern California may have been scrutinized by more than just admissions officers.
University officials say hackers may have been able to read the files submitted online over the past eight years. The school is contacting about 270-thousand people who used its online application system during that period to warn them of the potential security breech. One hacker took advantage of a security flaw he discovered while trying to use the U-S-C Web site, and reported the flaw to an online security magazine, SecurityFocus. The publication then informed U-S-C. Officials believe the hacker looked at only about ten files. Katharine Harrington, U-S-C's dean of admission and financial aid, says "the scope of this is pretty small," but the school is "taking it very seriously."
http://www.wlbt.com/global/story.asp?s=3574055
Coalition Issue Definitions for 'Spyware'
Anick Jesdanun
Anti-spyware vendors and consumer groups took a stab at issuing uniform definitions for "spyware" and "adware" on Tuesday in hopes of giving computer users more control over their machines.
The definitions seek clarity that could help improve anti-spyware products, educate consumers and fend off lawsuits from developers of software that sneaks onto computers.
It's not clear what, if anything, the taxonomy itself might accomplish in ending the deception involved in placing intrusive and damaging programs on people's computers.
The 13-page document is silent, for instance, on what developers must do to obtain consent from consumers. Nor does the document, still formally a draft, clearly state how specific programs might fall under a certain category.
"It's not the end game but it's a great starting point," said Dave Cole, director of product management at Symantec Corp., a member of the coalition that spent three months crafting the terms. "You've got to have a foundation, a common vocabulary to start with ... and have all of us speak the same language."
Forty-three percent of adult U.S. Internet users say they've been hit with spyware, adware or both, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. More than 90 percent of Internet users have changed their online behavior, meanwhile, to try to avoid becoming victimized.
The coalition flags as potential threats - an umbrella definition that includes spyware, adware and other categories such as "hijackers" and "cookies" - programs that:
-impair users' control over their systems, including privacy and security;
-impair the use of system resources, including what programs are installed on their computers; or
-collect, use and distribute personal or otherwise sensitive information.
By classifying "adware" as falling under the umbrella term, "Spyware and Other Potentially Unwanted Technologies," the coalition avoided a key dispute that has led to lawsuits: Is adware a form of spyware or are the two separate?
The coalition recognized that not all advertising software is unwanted and restricted the use of "adware" to the potentially unwanted kind. It created a separate category for "hijackers" that change browser settings and noted that some data files, or "cookies," have legitimate uses for saving preferences.
The industry can now discuss and define how specific technologies or practices harm users, said Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology, which led the coalition. He said more specific guidelines are expected this fall.
The definitions themselves could undergo revision after a one-month period for public comment.
Release of the definitions comes as Microsoft Corp. acknowledges that it has revised its treatment of adware made by Claria Corp., formerly known as Gator Corp.
Instead of putting the programs in "quarantine," Microsoft's anti-spyware tool recommends users "ignore" the items it detects. Microsoft said the change was unrelated to speculation that Microsoft has been in talks to buy Claria (Neither company would comment on any talks).
The three months that the coalition spent discussing the terms, Edelman said, could have been better used to get to the heart of the problem: Clarifying what constitutes a user's consent to allow spyware or adware to be installed on a personal computer.
The coalition did, however, provide tips for consumers, including advice on how to read license agreements and other "fine print" where consent is often sought.
Adware vendors said they welcome clearer rules on what's acceptable, though they consider definitions a good start.
"Is it perfect? No, but any kind of refinement, any added clarity is going to be helpful," said Sean Sundwall, a spokesman for 180solutions Inc. "50 percent is way better than 0 percent."
Bill Day, chief executive of WhenU.com Inc., said the terms "will tend to add structure to what has now been unstructured conversations" with anti-spyware vendors.
Schwartz said nothing in the definitions or the upcoming "best practices" guidelines will eliminate all differences among makers of anti-spyware programs.
"Companies are going to make decisions, and people are going to have to decide which anti-spyware tool is best for them," Schwartz said. "Each company itself will have to make decisions about whether something is unwanted or unexpected."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS
Porn sting yields results
Man Netted In Cyper Sweep To Plead Guilty
Amy Raisin Darvish
A child pornography sting spanning two counties netted a Stevenson Ranch man who has agreed to plead guilty to possessing thousands of images of child porn on his home computer, officials said.
Jesus Rojero Gurrola, 39, agreed to plead guilty and is expected to appear in court in the coming weeks, according to Thom Mrozek, public affairs officer for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles.
Law enforcement officials on Wednesday announced charges against 28 defendants in Los Angeles and Orange counties, nine of whom -- including Gurrola -- have agreed to plead guilty.
Gurrola is suspected of using a peer-to-peer computer file-sharing system to download more than 10,000 images of child pornography, many of which depicted children younger than 12 engaging in sexually explicit acts, according to a statement from Mrozek's office.
In March 2004, an undercover Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent investigating Internet distribution of child pornography downloaded four motion picture files from a file-sharing service that showed young boys performing sex acts. The agent traced the source of the images to Gurrola's home computer, officials said.
Wednesday's cases resulted from independent investigations involving the FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Secret Service and the California Department of Justice's Bureau of Investigation.
The cases announced Wednesday are the latest in nearly 100 child exploitation cases filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California in the last 2 years.
"This aggressive sweep of child pornographers will bring some justice to the...children who have been exploited," U.S. Attorney Debra Wong Yang said in a statement. "These cases should send a strong message that law enforcement will act to protect our children."
Gurrola's plea agreement includes one count of possession of child pornography, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison.
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1...963848,00.html
CBS News to Expand Web News Component
David Bauder
CBS News is aggressively expanding its Internet capabilities to offer a 24-hour news network with a "video jukebox" that allows consumers to construct their own online newscasts, the network announced Tuesday.
The revamped CBSNews.com site also includes a Web log, "Public Eye," where CBS News executives and journalists respond to questions and complaints from the public.
The advertiser-supported Web site gives consumers free access to more than 25,000 video clips. CBS journalists will be encouraged to frequently contribute video reports to the site instead of simply waiting for the next television broadcast.
"It's increasingly clear that the future of CBS News is not just as a practitioner of broadcast journalism but of broadband journalism," CBS News President Andrew Heyward said.
CBS has lagged behind ABC, the other major broadcast network that does not have an affiliated cable news network, in moving onto the Web. CBS claimed it will offer a more viewer-controlled experience than ABC, which has more elements of a traditional television newscast put on the Web.
Its newly designed home page has a feature called "The EyeBox," which allows viewers to build their own newscast from exclusive Web video, material already broadcast on the network and archival material.
CBS hopes the redesign can also help attract more young people to its news product. Television news viewers tend to skew old, and CBS generally has the oldest audience. CBS News is also still seeking a new format and replacement for Dan Rather on its struggling flagship broadcast, the "CBS Evening News."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS
AOL, XM Form Joint Entertainment Venture
Anick Jesdanun
Live and on-demand concerts and comedy shows will be the foundation of a new joint venture announced Tuesday for delivering entertainment via the Internet, satellite, wireless and other platforms.
The joint venture involves America Online Inc., XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. and Anschutz Corp.'s AEG unit, which owns sports and entertainment arenas and produces concerts and other shows.
Formation of the company, called Network Live, follows AOL's success in delivering seven separate feeds from the Live 8 concerts - all without any meltdowns common with early high-interest events online. Some 5 million people viewed the July 2 shows online, and AOL broke its own records with a peak of 175,000 simultaneous users.
Kevin Wall, who oversaw production of the Live 8 video broadcasts for AOL and other outlets worldwide, will serve as Network Live's chief executive.
"We're creating the network of the future, being able to access entertainment digital content anytime, anywhere on any particular device," Wall said.
Revenues will come from ads and licensing fees, with no current plans to charge for shows on a pay-per-view basis, Wall said. Officials did not disclose other financial terms, besides saying all three companies and Wall have equity stakes.
Network Live is but the latest venture into online video programming.
Earlier Tuesday, CBS News announced it would offer a 24-hour news network over high-speed broadband lines, and Nickelodeon last week launched an on-demand service promising up to 20 hours of new programming for kids every week.
Companies are embracing online video as more than half of U.S. Internet users now have broadband connections at home and technology can deliver programming streams without the jerkiness and graininess typical early on.
AOL already offers free concerts and other video programs on the Internet, both live and on demand, and the new venture will expand on the numbers and types. Shows seen at AOL.com will also be available to XM's 4.4 million subscribers - live and through rebroadcasts - on XM's existing satellite radio channels.
Network Live will also try to license programming for distribution on wireless, HDTV and other platforms, though AOL said no deals have been struck yet.
Much of the programming will come from arenas owned by and concerts produced by AEG, which owns or controls the Staples Center in Los Angeles, the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif., the Nokia Theatre at Grand Prairie, Texas, and the Manchester Evening News Arena in Manchester, England.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS
Samsung, LG Nudge Wireless-VoIP Calling
Bruce Meyerson
Internet telephone service tiptoed a few more steps into the wireless realm on Tuesday as Skype and Boingo unveiled a service to enable Voice- over-Internet calls over Wi-Fi hot spots, while Samsung and LG announced plans to develop mobile phones that combine cellular and Wi-Fi technologies.
Skype Zones, costing $8 per month, allows laptop users to make phone calls using Skype Technologies SA's popular Internet phone services whenever they're near one of Boingo Wireless Inc.'s 18,000 transmitters in public locations such as coffee shops, airports and hotels.
Calls using Skype's basic computer-to-computer service, which bypasses the public telephone network, will remain free. Skype Technologies SA will still charge extra for calls dialed to a regular phone number or received from a regular phone number.
The fee for Skype Zones does not include access to the Internet and e-mail, which still costs $22 a month for unlimited usage from Boingo. But compared with the Internet package, where there are extra roaming charges in certain countries, the Skype service includes free access to all of Boingo's hot spots in about 40 nations.
Also Tuesday, Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Inc. of Korea both announced deals to use a new hybrid wireless technology from Kineto Wireless Inc. to develop mobile phones that can pass a call from a cellular network to a Wi-Fi network without interrupting the connection.
Samsung is licensing the technology to develop new mobile phones, while LG said it will be collaborating with Kineto on new hybrids. The companies did not say when they expect to introduce the new phones.
The new technology, known as UMA for Unlicensed Mobile Access, is designed to provide better call quality indoors, where cellular signals turn weak and short-range Wi-Fi signals are strong. UMA also may lighten the load on crowded cellular networks by allowing carriers to divert phone calls from their towers.
While live trials are already underway, wireless service providers have been hesitant about embracing UMA.
One reason may be that when a cellular call is handed off to a Wi-Fi network, the conversation is transmitted using Voice-over-Internet Protocol, or VoIP - a technology users associate with cheaper fees than mobile phones.
But despite the apparent benefits in terms of call quality and network capacity, it is unclear whether cellular carriers might be willing to provide such discounts.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS
Air Heads
Play That Funky ... Oh, Never Mind
Dan Crane
FOR a small but passionate group of men and women, myself included, Thursday will be the biggest night of the year.
For weeks I've been windmilling in front of mirrors and limbering up my neck in preparation for excessive head banging. I'm watching my carbs and hitting the hay early. Because in four days, at the Key Club in Los Angeles, I will be representing New York against some of the fiercest competitors ever to take the stage in one of the most important events of our lives: The U.S. Air Guitar Championships.
I know the glory of dressing up and fanatically playing an invisible instrument in front of a crowd is not something that everyone immediately grasps. When I tell people I've spent more than two years as a competitive air guitarist, they often look at me bewildered, like a dog tilting its head at an unfamiliar command. Or they just laugh at me. Following a segment about a competition, Jack Cafferty, a CNN anchor, once scoffed: "That's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Air guitar?"
And in his book "Air Guitar," Dave Hickey, a professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, likens air guitar to art criticism, which he says cannot replace the original work but merely "bob after it, like a dinghy in the wake of a yacht."
But I'm here to tell you that air guitar is more than a bobbing dinghy. Up on stage you only have 60 seconds to convince the judges of your airisimilitude, and in those 60 seconds you must take everything you know about rock 'n' roll, boil it down to its essence, drink it and then spit it over the crowd like blood from the mouth of Alice Cooper.
In the words of the two-time (2002 and '03) world air guitar champion, Zac Monro (known as the Magnet), "Air guitar is the purest art form there is left."
So what does it take to win an air guitar competition? After suffering continual losses for three seasons in eight official competitions from New York to Denver to Los Angeles to Oulu, Finland - and coming in second place four times - I found out on May 21 at the New York regional air guitar competition. To paraphrase Nietzsche (an idol to many an air guitarist) my losses only made me stronger.
Wearing a silver jumpsuit and star-spangled armbands filled with dry ice, and rocking under the moniker Björn Türoque (pronounced tu-RAWK), I froze out the other contenders with my explosive rendition of "Set Me Free" by Sweet (an obscure yet classic glam-rock anthem). Advanced airmanship to be sure.
Air guitar is not about pretending to be a rock star. You must be that rock star. You might not need to put dry ice in your armbands to create smoky contrails as you strum, but it helps. As far as other wardrobe options go, nudity is an obvious attention-getter and has become a performance staple, but so far it hasn't won any competitions. And to paraphrase Twain, clothes make the air guitarist.
Another key component is your stage name. Puns are good, like Air Lingus (an Irish-American competitor), Air-Do-Well, and Air-satz. Something simple and to the point, like the Shred, works too. And don't go with a slow song, as I mistakenly did last year with Air Supply's ballad "Making Love Out of Nothing at All," which, when up against the lightning-fast licks of "Queen in Love" by Yngwie Malmsteen, quickly deflated. You may want a track with which the audience is familiar, but avoid clichés like Van Halen's "Eruption" (the air guitar equivalent to playing "Stairway to Heaven" in a guitar store) or Jimi Hendrix's rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Finally, air guitar is an instrument, but it's an entirely different instrument from the so-called "real" guitar. So don't focus on your fingering too much as you play. Remember, if you hit a bad note only you will know. Instead, engage the crowd: make eye contact, perch yourself on the monitor and flutter your tongue; make fans get out their air lighters.
Though air guitar is probably as old as rock 'n' roll itself (Elvis surely inspired teeny-boppers to imitate his swaggering strums), it didn't come out of the bedroom to gain cultural cachet until Tom Cruise, in briefs, strummed a fire poker to Bob Seger in the 1983 film "Risky Business." Six years later Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, playing empty-headed American teenagers raised on arena rock, air-plucked their way through "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure."
Today air guitar is everywhere: even Britney Spears, who has never performed with an actual instrument, imitates the fans who imitate rock stars when she strums the air wildly in her 2005 video "Do Somethin' "; Will Arnett of "Arrested Development" recently played air guitar to the theme of "Law & Order" on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien"; and Will Farrell plays air guitar while serenading Nicole Kidman in the current film "Bewitched."
There is also, of course, the world crown. In 1996 the first Air Guitar World Championship took place in Oulu, Finland, with just seven local competitors. This year's competition is on Aug. 26 with national champions from 13 countries, from Australia to the United Arab Emirates, as well as the additional last-minute entrants who trek to Oulu (as I did in 2003) on a whim and a prayer.
The grand prize is a handmade Finnish guitar and an amplifier signed by Brian May of the band Queen. What an air guitarist will do with an actual guitar is anybody's guess.
And though performers from the United States only started competing in 2003, we've reigned air supreme: festooned with a Hello Kitty breastplate and crimson kimono, the Brooklynite C-Diddy won the world crown in 2003, and his female protégé, Sonyk-Rok, also from Brooklyn, tied for the title with a New Zealander in 2004.
This year, as the reigning New York champ, I am confident I can do my city proud. I've certainly paid my dues. But my air guitar chops weren't always so well honed. Growing up in the hardscrabble suburbs of Denver, I always did my air guitar in private, for fear of torment by my older brother and the public at large.
I had no idea that jumping up and down on my bed, wielding an imaginary ax in imitation of my rock 'n' roll heroes, would years later become an internationally recognized pursuit, or much less that I'd be good at it. Now, I dedicate part of my life to sharing the skills I've learned with the world.
There is no air guitar school (though there is an annual training camp prior to the world championship in Finland) and no secret formula, but I have established a monthly Aireoke night (see aireoke.com for details), which recently moved to Trash Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Think of it as a farm system for the major leagues.
With qualifying events in seven cities where thousands of fans cheer on scores of contestants, it is clear that competitive air guitar is on our shores to stay. As Kriston Rucker, an organizer of the U.S. Air Guitar Competition, put it, "If there's one thing that Americans deserve to dominate, it's competitive air guitar."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/fa...les/10AIR.html
Expanding Your Mac's Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Options
Anne Zieger.
Because Mac users are largely overlooked when it comes to getting new products from software producers, most of them (happily) missed the Napster fallout. Plenty of safer (and legal) options are now available for Mac peer-to-peer sharing; Anne Zieger covers the possibilities you should be considering.
When the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing revolution first hit the scene, Macintosh software was something of an afterthought. When Mac technology existed, it was often created as a backhanded, less-functional port of a PC product.
Today, with P2P software playing a much larger role in personal computing generally—and expanding beyond the boundaries of file sharing—the development community has responded. Over the past year or two, Macintosh clients have grown more robust, and the list of pure-Mac software (originating for OS X rather than ported) has grown longer. Few of the Mac clients have the kind of big-bucks support given the leading PC clients—in fact, many are small open-source projects—but at least the clients are rolling out.
Not only have Mac versions emerged for popular file-sharing clients such as LimeWire, but for other types of applications such as IP telephony client Skype. A growing list of Mac-native applications have even been released for other key functions, such as instant messaging, including Apple's own iChat AV.
Why should it even matter whether your latest download uses P2P communications? In some cases, of course, P2P is the predominant protocol on the network you want to access (such as Gnutella). In others, such as instant messaging, P2P communications can speed up processes that might be deadly slow when an intervening server is involved. And P2P meshes of host computers can sometimes dramatically speed up large downloads.
Ready to look around at the Mac P2P universe? Here's an overview of what's hot in some of the key areas of Mac P2P software.
Popular File-Sharing Options
Mac users still don't have access to absolutely everything that PC users do. In fact, Mac users have been passed over completely by developers of some of the most mature and widely used file-sharing clients. For example, while PC users have downloaded the Kazaa Media Desktop file-sharing program nearly 390 million times, this software still isn't available for Mac users. Nor is a Mac version available for Morpheus, another highly popular file-sharing client with more than 130 million downloads to date.
However, a wide variety of file-sharing clients are available for Mac, running on each of the major file-sharing networks. Among the most frequently used is LimeWire, which runs on Gnutella. LimeWire's creators have gone out of the way to make the product cross-platform (for PC, Mac, and Linux), and to address the sensibilities of each community. They've also promised never to bundle any sort of spyware into their product.
If you're tired of using clients that were designed for the PC world, give Xfactor a try. While your system must be up to date to use the latest version (written for OS X 10.3), Xfactor offers many features that should please Mac users, including P2P file sharing, an iTunes-like interface, an internal theater for previewing movies, iTunes and Finder integration, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
Other popular clients for Mac:
The popular Poisoned's open source, up-to-the-moment Mac client requires OS X 10.2 or better.
MLdonkey is an Overnet/eDonkey network client.
For fun, use MLdonkey with mlMac, a graphical user interface for the MLdonkey client.
XNap is a free open-source client for the OpenNap network.
A Different Approach
Want to try a slightly different approach to file sharing? How about a directly connected, user-controlled network? NeoModus' Direct Connect offers a version designed for OS X. Direct Connect's network doesn't rank with the big boys, statistically (it has roughly 400,000 users rather than millions) but NeoModus claims that users collectively share a petabyte of entertainment content—triple what the other networks offer.
Another option is BitTorrent, a tool designed to help pull down large files through distributed downloads. Unlike with the other clients, the software doesn't seek and download for you; Bit Torrent helps you locate the files, but you have to download them yourself. This may be less convenient than using tools such as LimeWire, but can offer substantial time savings if you want to download a really big file.
If you're a complete geek—or just like simple clients—there's Mutella, which works from a command-line interface. No pretty graphics here, but Mutella supports all key Gnutella node functions, including file search, downloads, and sharing.
Conferencing Choices
A growing list of communications clients offer a P2P-based Mac option. Perhaps the most widely used comes from Apple itself. Mac OS X Tiger is bundled with Apple's iChat AV, a videoconferencing and IM client. iChat IM is compatible with both AOL Instant Messenger and Jabber Instant Messaging. iChat isn't inherently a P2P-based tool, but it can be set up to establish P2P connections with other users who have iChat, using Apple's Bonjour connectivity technology (formerly known as Rendezvous). This works across an established network or over an ad hoc 802.11b network if your laptop is set up properly.
If you're up for a mixed-media session, another option for Mac P2P messaging is Bitwise IM. Like many other IM packages, Bitwise offers not only messaging but Voice over IP (VoIP) calling, file sharing, and whiteboarding options.
You might also try ineen, a combined audio/video conferencing and IM platform. While it was still in beta at the time of this writing, ineen offers several of the richest features available on a VoIP client, including call transfer, call recording, and speakerphone mode. Exploiting the inherent advantages of the P2P network architecture, ineen offers a unique feature that (theoretically) enables you to include an unlimited number of people in your voice or video conference. (Ordinarily, the limit for Ineen conferences is 10 participants.) Distributed conferencing can handle more visitors, because each participant in the P2P mesh is also a host for 10 participants, each of the 10 participants can host 10 people, and so on.
Just Talk
What if you want to avoid all of the complexities of multimedia conferencing and just have an old-fashioned voice chat? Mac P2P clients can offer this option as well.
If you're primarily interested in talk, one of the more popular VoIP options comes from up-and-coming P2P telephony software startup Skype. Created by the inventors of Kazaa, Skype is a wildly popular PC-phone client that has been downloaded more than 104 million times. Now Mac aficionados (along with Pocket PC and Linux users) can join the party. To use the free version of Skype, you must have a sound card, speakers, and a microphone—and you can only speak to other PCs.
For more flexibility, consider Buzzfon p2p 01, which offers free PC-to-PC, PC-to-phone, and even phone-to-phone conversations. Bear in mind, however, that Buzzfon is shareware, and early-release shareware at that, so it won't have the level of support that a well-funded company like Skype can offer.
P2P Collaboration
And then there's P2P collaboration to consider. Over the past few years, a lot of effort has been put into creating platforms for peer- to-peer collaboration—in some cases, attempts to create a new model for information sharing to rival Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange/SharePoint.
To date, none of the P2P collaboration platforms we're aware of have provided a Mac option. The most widely used P2P collaboration platform, the Groove Virtual Office, is built around Microsoft-standard technologies—and despite years of talk, publisher Groove Networks doesn't seem ready to release a Mac OS-compatible version. (Microsoft acquired Groove in March 2005.)
Users who are sincerely interested in Mac-based P2P models might want to try Near-Time Flow, which uses a P2P distribution mechanism to share documents, web pages, images, and files among groups. Unlike most of the products discussed in this article, Flow isn't free; it starts at $99/unit.
Another option is Java-based collaboration frameworks such as Onobee, a distributed collaboration and secure, real-time communications suite; or Colloquia, which is software designed to facilitate group working and group learning through shared workspaces.
Growing Acceptance
Realistically, just as in any other software category, Mac P2P software development is likely to stay a step behind the PC world. But you can help keep the pressure on by making sure that the Mac community stays involved and interested.
You know the score. If you want to P2P-power your Mac, the best way to encourage that possibility is to try the new applications being floated out there by small entrepreneurial companies. If you're a developer, another alternative is to jump in and contribute to some of the Mac-based or platform-neutral open source projects on the P2P front.
Whether on PC or Mac, P2P platforms are an important approach to using networked resources—one for which the benefits have only begun to be tapped. If you're a Mac user or developer, now is the time to make sure that your platform of choice doesn't get left behind.
http://www.informit.com/articles/pri...y.asp?p=380159
Judge In EU-Microsoft Case Removed
The European Union's second highest court has taken the Microsoft antitrust case away from the judge to whom it was originally assigned and given it to a panel of 13 judges, a court official said on Friday.
"I can confirm that the case has been moved to the Grand Chamber," said a court official, who asked not to be identified.
The official also confirmed that the panel or chamber will be headed by Court of First Instance President Bo Vesterdorf and that the case itself will be handled by Judge John Cooke.
But Judge Hubert Legal, who had been in charge of a panel of five judges handling the case, will no longer participate, the court official said. Sources have said Legal was removed, because he wrote a controversial article that angered fellow judges.
Vesterdorf had proposed a change in judges after Judge Legal created an uproar by writing a piece that used the words "ayatollahs of free enterprise" in connection with law clerks and suggested they might have undue influence on some judges.
The European Commission found in March 2004 that Microsoft competed unfairly against rivals, fined it 497 million euros ($605 million) and ordered it to change some of its business practices.
Now the 13-judge panel will decide whether to uphold the Commission's decision or reject all or part of it.
The decision to change judges comes only a few days before the court is set to take its summer break.
In the past, those familiar with the case have estimated that a change in judges may lead to a delay of anything between three months and a year beyond June, 2006, when a decision had originally been expected.
http://news.com.com/Judge+in+EU-Micr...3-5780389.html
Court Holds Microsoft Liable For Infringement
A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday upheld a lower court decision that Microsoft was liable for infringing on an AT&T patent for converting speech into computer code in copies of Windows sold overseas.
The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals said that the world's largest software maker was liable for the unauthorized distribution of codec technology, used to compress speech signals into data, in copies of Windows overseas.
Last year, Microsoft settled most of the telephone company's outstanding claims, and both agreed to appeal the unresolved issue over the distribution of the technology overseas, which Microsoft said it was not liable for.
Terms of the March 2004 settlement were not disclosed.
Representatives from AT&T and Microsoft were not immediately available for comment.
http://news.com.com/2100-1014_3-5787044.html
China Makes More Pledges on Piracy
But no deal is reached on textile exports to U.S.
Peter S. Goodman
U.S. and Chinese trade officials concluded a day-long session of high-level talks here Monday with a pledge that Beijing will crack down on rampant traffic in pirated goods by prosecuting more people engaged in the enterprise. But the talks ended with no change on a major source of discord -- the flood of Chinese-made textiles reaching American shores.
In a sign that trade tensions between the two countries are likely to intensify, China's exports surged in June while import growth slowed, according to Chinese government figures released Monday. The result is a $9.7 billion overall Chinese trade surplus with the world -- its third-largest monthly surplus on record.
Always complex, commercial relations between the United States and China have grown more contentious in recent months. Beijing has denounced the Bush administration's decision to choke incoming shipments of Chinese textiles as an anathema to free trade. U.S. trade groups accuse China of keeping the value of its currency too low, making its goods unfairly cheap on world markets. Recent weeks have seen escalating tensions as the state-owned Chinese energy business CNOOC Ltd. pursues the U.S. firm Unocal Corp. in a takeover battle with Chevron Corp. -- a spectacle that has ramped up U.S. fears about China's emerging force in the global economy.
Even as trade frictions worsen, corporate ties between the United States and China continue to develop, linking the two giant economies while bringing U.S. capital and management to bear on China's transition from communism to free enterprise. This week came reports that Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the U.S. investment bank, has joined with the German financial firm Allianz AG to seek the purchase of a $1 billion stake in China's largest state-owned bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. China's leaders are keen to sell shares in its biggest financial institutions to foreign investors as they seek to modernize a lending culture that has left banks with an estimated $500 billion in bad loans. Meanwhile, China Petroleum and Chemical Corp., known as Sinopec, one of China's three largest energy companies, is forging a venture with Exxon Mobil Corp. and Saudi Arabian Oil Co. aimed at delivering a $3.5 billion expansion to an oil refinery in southern China.
But as a high-level U.S. trade delegation met with Chinese counterparts here in China's capital, officials focused on a long-sought and vexing goal -- curbing the widespread trade of counterfeit and pirated goods that U.S. companies say costs them billions of dollars a year in lost sales. U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman and Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez said the meetings had produced merely incremental gains.
"I did not have high expectations for major breakthroughs," Portman said in an interview late Monday. "I thought we made measured progress in a number of areas. I'm not satisfied with process. It should be about outcomes."
Experts were dubious about China's pledge for stricter enforcement against piracy, noting that Beijing routinely hands out such promises as parting gifts to visiting U.S. officials, while the trade remains brazen as ever. On the streets of every Chinese city, peddlers and shops openly offer products including Prada handbags, Windows software and new Hollywood movies selling for less than $1. The illicit trade is a major source of employment, and factories are often protected by local officials, some of whom own stakes in them.
"The Chinese government does not have the power to stop piracy," said Tao Xinliang, dean of the department of intellectual property at Shanghai University. "The government closes a lot of factories, but lots of others keep opening."
One senior Chinese official on Monday suggested that the government is doing all it can to combat piracy. At a morning briefing, Li Dongsheng, vice minister of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, said that in the first half of the year, the government investigated more than 2,400 cases involving illegal use of foreign trademarks while shutting down hundreds of factories.
"Some nations have criticized China for lax trademark and anti-counterfeit efforts," Li said. "Many foreign investors don't understand China's law or how our enforcement system works. But the statistics speak for themselves."
In simple terms, Washington's trade dispute with Beijing boils down to a single number -- the $162 billion trade surplus China enjoyed with the United States in 2004. Chinese officials argue that the gap proves that its companies have proved adept at making goods Americans desire. Trade groups in the United States point at the same figure as a sign of foul play, arguing that the Chinese juggernaut manipulates its currency, exploits workers and steals intellectual property.
Limiting the trade deficit with China has become a major goal of the Bush administration. At an evening news conference, Gutierrez said the administration would use the size of the deficit as an indicator of China's progress on combating piracy and removing barriers to U.S. goods.
"That's one of the measures we will look at," he said. "What we will focus on very intensively is our exports to the Chinese market. China has full access to our market. What we want is full access to the Chinese market."
He and Portman highlighted a pledge from Beijing that it will set aside a current draft of procurement regulations that would mandate that a slice of the government's software purchases must go to Chinese companies -- a market they said could be worth as much as $8 billion to U.S. firms.
But if the size of the deficit is to gauge the U.S.-China trade relationship, Monday's data signaled continued turbulence ahead. Over the first six months of the year, China's exports worldwide rose 33 percent compared with the same period a year earlier, exceeding $342 billion, while imports increased by 14 percent, to $302.7 billion. Most economists expect that trend to continue, with some predicting that China's surplus with the world could exceed $100 billion for 2005, more than triple last year's surplus.
"The U.S. deficit with China is going to be growing," said Jonathan Anderson, chief economist at UBS Investment Research in Hong Kong. "It's going to look uglier."
Economists say the slowdown in China's import growth is the result of clamps the government imposed on investment to choke off the threat of inflation, combined with a surplus of factory capacity that has diminished the need to buy goods abroad. Until recently a major importer of steel, China became a net exporter this year -- the result of exuberant investment in an abundance of steel mills.
The textile trade has been a primary irritant between Beijing and Washington. Since the expiration on Jan. 1 of a global system of quotas that limited how much any one country could ship to the United States or Europe, Chinese-made goods have swamped the U.S. market. In May, the Bush administration imposed "safeguard" quotas on seven categories of Chinese textiles -- a move the United States can pursue under the terms of China's entry to the World Trade Organization. U.S. manufacturers filed petitions Monday seeking new quotas on additional categories of textiles.
At the meetings, China did not offer a proposal aimed at settling the textile dispute. A U.S. trade official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak on the matter said the Chinese were holding off, cognizant that Washington is in no position to deal as Congress considers passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...071100296.html
Gag me, eh
Harry Potter Books Sold by Accident
AP
A handful of people in Canada got a sneak peak of the latest Harry Potter book, but a British Columbia Supreme Court judge ordered them to keep it a secret.
The book was sold to 14 people who snagged a copy of J.K. Rowlings' much anticipated "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," when it landed on shelves last Thursday at a local grocery store.
The book, officially set for release this coming Saturday, has been shrouded in secrecy and its debut has been highly orchestrated to enable everyone - readers, reviewers, even publishers - to crack it open all at once. It's the sixth in Rowling's seven-book fantasy series on the young wizard.
But the store slipped up and sold 14 copies before realizing its mistake.
"It was an inadvertent error on behalf of one of our staff," said Geoff Wilson, a spokesman for the Real Canadian Superstore. He said the books were quickly removed.
Justice Kristi Gill last Saturday ordered customers not to talk about the book, copy it, sell it or even read it before it is officially released at 12:01 a.m. July 16.
The order also compels them to return the novel to the publisher, Raincoast Book Distribution Ltd., until the official release. At that time it will be returned to them.
As an added incentive, Raincoast will include Rowling's autograph and a gift pack.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...M&SECTION=HOME
Downloading Trouble At The BBC
Anthony Barnes
The BBC has been lambasted by classical music labels for making all nine of Beethoven's symphonies available for free download over the Internet.
This week the BBC will announce there have been more than a million downloads of the symphonies during the month-long scheme. But the initiative has infuriated the bosses of leading classical record companies who argue the offer undermines the value of music and that any further offers would be unfair competition.
http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article298067.ece
Neuron Network Goes Awry, and Brain Becomes an iPod
Carl Zimmer
Seven years ago Reginald King was lying in a hospital bed recovering from bypass surgery when he first heard the music.
It began with a pop tune, and others followed. Mr. King heard everything from cabaret songs to Christmas carols. "I asked the nurses if they could hear the music, and they said no," said Mr. King, a retired sales manager in Cardiff, Wales.
"I got so frustrated," he said. "They didn't know what I was talking about and said it must be something wrong with my head. And it's been like that ever since."
Each day, the music returns. "They're all songs I've heard during my lifetime," said Mr. King, 83. "One would come on, and then it would run into another one, and that's how it goes on in my head. It's driving me bonkers, to be quite honest."
Last year, Mr. King was referred to Dr. Victor Aziz, a psychiatrist at St. Cadoc's Hospital in Wales. Dr. Aziz explained to him that there was a name for his experience: musical hallucinations.
Dr. Aziz belongs to a small circle of psychiatrists and neurologists who are investigating this condition. They suspect that the hallucinations experienced by Mr. King and others are a result of malfunctioning brain networks that normally allow us to perceive music.
They also suspect that many cases of musical hallucinations go undiagnosed.
"You just need to look for it," Dr. Aziz said. And based on his studies of the hallucinations, he suspects that in the next few decades, they will be far more common.
Musical hallucinations were invading people's minds long before they were recognized as a medical condition. "Plenty of musical composers have had musical hallucinations," Dr. Aziz said.
Toward the end of his life, for instance, Robert Schumann wrote down the music he hallucinated; legend has it that he said he was taking dictation from Schubert's ghost.
While doctors have known about musical hallucinations for over a century, they have rarely studied it systematically. That has changed in recent years. In the July issue of the journal Psychopathology, Dr. Aziz and his colleague Dr. Nick Warner will publish an analysis of 30 cases of musical hallucination they have seen over 15 years in South Wales. It is the largest case-series ever published for musical hallucinations.
"We were trying to collect as much information about their day-to-day lives as we could," Dr. Aziz said. "We were asking a lot of the questions that weren't answered in previous research. What do they hear, for example? Is it nearby or is it at a long distance?"
Dr. Aziz and Dr. Warner found that in two-thirds of the cases, musical hallucinations were the only mental disturbance experienced by the patients. A third were deaf or hard of hearing. Women tended to suffer musical hallucinations more than men, and the average patient was 78 years old.
Mr. King's experience was typical for people experiencing musical hallucinations. Patients reported hearing a wide variety of songs, among them "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" and "Three Blind Mice."
In two-thirds of the cases, the music was religious; six people reporting hearing the hymn "Abide With Me."
Dr. Aziz believes that people tend to hear songs they have heard repeatedly or that are emotionally significant to them. "There is a meaning behind these things," he said.
His study also shows that these hallucinations are different from the auditory hallucinations of people with schizophrenia. Such people often hear inner voices. Patients like Mr. King hear only music.
The results support recent work by neuroscientists indicating that our brains use special networks of neurons to perceive music. When sounds first enter the brain, they activate a region near the ears called the primary auditory cortex that starts processing sounds at their most basic level. The auditory cortex then passes on signals of its own to other regions, which can recognize more complex features of music, like rhythm, key changes and melody.
Neuroscientists have been able to identify some of these regions with brain scans, and to compare the way people respond to musical and nonmusical sounds.
Only a handful of brain scans have been made of people with musical hallucinations. Dr. Tim Griffiths, a neurologist at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in England, performed one of these studies on six elderly patients who developed musical hallucinations after becoming partly deaf.
Dr. Griffiths used a scanning technique known as PET, which involves injecting radioactive markers into the bloodstream. Each time he scanned his subjects' brains, he asked them whether they had experienced musical hallucinations. If they had, he asked them to rate the intensity on a scale from one to seven.
Dr. Griffiths discovered a network of regions in the brain that became more active as the hallucinations became more intense. "What strikes me is that you see a very similar pattern in normal people who are listening to music," he said.
The main difference is that musical hallucinations don't activate the primary auditory cortex, the first stop for sound in the brain. When Dr. Griffith's subjects hallucinated, they used only the parts of the brain that are responsible for turning simple sounds into complex music.
These music-processing regions may be continually looking for signals in the brain that they can interpret, Dr. Griffiths suggested. When no sound is coming from the ears, the brain may still generate occasional, random impulses that the music-processing regions interpret as sound. They then try to match these impulses to memories of music, turning a few notes into a familiar melody.
For most people, these spontaneous signals may produce nothing more than a song that is hard to get out of the head. But the constant stream of information coming in from the ears suppresses the false music.
Dr. Griffith proposes that deafness cuts off this information stream. And in a few deaf people the music-seeking circuits go into overdrive. They hear music all the time, and not just the vague murmurs of a stuck tune. It becomes as real as any normal perception.
"What we're seeing is an amplification of a normal mechanism that's in everyone," Dr. Griffiths said.
It is also possible for people who are not deaf to experience musical hallucinations. Epileptic seizures, certain medications and Lyme disease are a few of the factors that may set them off.
Dr. Aziz also noted that two-thirds of his subjects were living alone, and thus were not getting much stimulation. One patient experienced fewer musical hallucinations when Dr. Aziz had her put in a nursing home, he said, "because then she was talking to people, she was active."
There is no standard procedure for treating musical hallucinations. Some doctors try antipsychotic drugs, and some use cognitive behavioral therapy to help patients understand what's going on in their brains. "Sometimes simple things can be the cure," Dr. Aziz said. "Turning on the radio may be more important than giving medication."
Despite these treatments, many people with musical hallucinations find little relief. "I'm just living with it," Mr. King said. "I wish there was something I could do.
"I do silly things like talking to myself, hoping that when I stop talking, the tune will stop. But it doesn't work that way."
More studies may help researchers find new treatments. Prof. Diana Deutsch, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, is planning a new scanning study of musical hallucination on people who are not deaf, using functional M.R.I. Unlike the PET scanning used by Dr. Griffiths, functional M.R.I. is powerful enough to catch second-by-second changes in brain activity.
"It might be awhile before we have results, but it's certainly something I'm very excited about," Dr. Deutsch said. "We'll see where it takes us."
Dr. Aziz also believes that it is necessary to get a better sense of how many people hear musical hallucinations. Like Mr. King, many people have had their experiences dismissed by doctors.
Dr. Aziz said that ever since he began presenting his results at medical conferences last year, a growing number of patients have been referred to him.
"In 15 years I got 30 patients," he said, "and in less than a year I've had 5. It just tells you people are more aware of it."
Dr. Aziz suspects that musical hallucinations will become more common in the future. People today are awash in music from radios, televisions, elevators and supermarkets. It is possible that the pervasiveness of music may lead to more hallucinations. The types of hallucinations may also change as people experience different kinds of songs.
"We have speculated that people will hear more pop and classical music than they do now," said Dr. Aziz. "I hope I live long enough to find out myself in 20 years' time."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/he...gy/12musi.html
Until next week,
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js.
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