[JackSpratts]

"It doesn't surprise me that the MPAA would be against bills that protect privacy, and the MPAA has shown that they are willing to pay lots of money to intrude on privacy. I do think there needs to be better laws in place that would deter such conduct and think that it would probably be useful if our elected officials would not be intimidated by the MPAA when trying to pass laws to protect privacy." – Ira Rothken


"People want to live vicariously through their kids, to rediscover music with them. They want to be more than a cog in the cultural wheel, and I salute them for it. If I ever stop being a kid with my kids, you can shoot me." – Tor Hyams


"Our generation, as much as we were once intuitive discoverers of music, we have lost that intuition. And now we need to be spoon fed." – Gary Borman


"Well, [Universal Music Group CEO Doug] Morris is just a big, clueless idiot, of course. Do you honestly want morons like him to have power over your music player? [If so] then go ahead and buy a Zune. You'll find that the Zune Planet orbits the music industry's Bizarro World, where users aren't allowed to do anything that isn't in the industry's direct interests. The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Throw in the Zune's tail-wagging relationship with music publishers, and it almost becomes important that you encourage people not to buy one." – Andy Ihnatko


"I think best in foam." – Douglas Martin


"Those who misuse copyright should know that they can be sued for doing so. This settlement should send a message to those who want to use copyright law as a pretext for censorship." – Corynne McSherry


"We're proud to be Maryland. We're proud to be the prison industry for Maryland." – Jeff Beeson


"To me, Office 2007 is a complete non-event. I have no interest in an upgrade. Most of what I like about computing now lives online." – Antonio Rodriguez


"Much of the mind-boggling technological sophistication available in some parts of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world was simply not transmitted further. The gear-wheel, in this case, had to be reinvented." – François Charette


"Twenty-five percent of every black comic’s act is gay-bashing and none of you have done anything about that." – Jason Stuart





































December 2nd, '06







Say it ain’t so, Boris

Russia Agrees To US Request To Shut Down AllofMP3.com
Natali Del Conte

An official document posted to Digg today summarizes an agreement between the U.S. and Russia in which Russia has agreed to close down AllofMP3.com, and any sites that “permit illegal distribution of music and other copyright works.”

The agreement is dated November 19 and posted to the Web site for the Office of the United States Trade Representative. It summarizes the joint efforts of the two countries to fight content piracy, an issue known to be centered in Russia and Eastern Europe.

“This agreement sets the stage for further progress on IPR issues in Russia through the next phase of multilateral negotiations, during which the United States and other WTO members will examine Russia’s IPR regime,” states the document.

The document specifically names AllofMP3.com as an example of the types of Web sites that they will shut down. We contacted AllofMP3.com and the company sent us an official statement stating their legality. It says that the company has offered to remove illegal music at the copyright holders’ requests.

“For months, AllofMP3 has stated the company will comply with the request from any copyright holder to remove any music from the site. However, the company has not heard from the Russian Licensing Societies or the record labels. Perhaps, opt-out requests are not being made because the record labels can’t clear the rights.”

Still, the company is being made an example of for all to see. Russia is instructed to terminate leases for companies that facilitate online piracy, as well as inspect plants regularly, and take criminal action where there is evidence of commercial sale piracy. The government will be expected to begin complying by June 1, 2007.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/28...n-allofmp3com/





Maybe it ain’t

AllofMP3: We're Not Going Anywhere
Nate Anderson

After receiving years of press so bad that the US Trade Representative is now calling for its head by name, AllofMP3.com has launched a press offensive of sorts. After giving their first press conference earlier this year to counter the mounting criticism, AllofMP3 has given another one, this time to address the new bilateral trade agreement between the US and Russia that looks set to put them out of business.

John Kheit, an IP attorney for Chadbourne & Parke in New York, is representing AllofMP3, and he had one basic point to make in the wake of the trade agreement: AllofMP3 is legal, and it's not going anywhere. Although the agreement indicates quite clearly that the Russians have agreed to brand AllofMP3 an illicit site, Kheit points out that diplomats can talk as much as they want, but AllofMP3 isn't illegal until judges decide. "Legality is not decided by a legislative branch or an executive branch. It's decided by a court," he said in response to a question from Ars Technica. And no such ruling has been handed down.

The company also believes it is legal for US consumers to use, and has issued a lengthy statement outlining its position.

Kheit believes that AllofMP3 is currently legal under Russian copyright law, and he points to Article 39 of that law as proof. The article, headed "Use of a Published Phonogram for Commercial Purposes Without Consent from the Phonogram Producer and the Performer" in its English translation, appears to allow collection societies like ROMS to issue licenses for music, even when they do not have the permission of the copyright holder. That right only applies in three circumstances, though: public performance, broadcasting, and the "communication of the phonogram to the public by cable." It does not cover "the communication of the phonogram to the public." What does that mean, exactly? We'll leave it to Russian IP attorneys to work that out, but section 39 provides the legal basis for AllofMP3's claims of legitimacy.

The bilateral trade agreement specifies that Russia will change its laws by the middle of 2007 so that collection societies cannot act without the approval of copyright holders. A plain reading of this condition indicates that AllofMP3, whether legal now or not, will no longer be able to offer most of its music once the law is changed. Still, Kheit insists, the company will abide by the law and will adapt as conditions warrant.

Also of interest was the claim that AllofMP3 has not been as badly damaged by the inability to accept Visa and MasterCard payments as many would suspect. That's because most users have credit with the site and only use it over time. But as it grows increasingly difficult to add more money to one's account, the company will start to feel the squeeze in the months to come unless they can work out alternative payment systems that are as safe and easy as paying directly by credit card.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061130-8330.html

Thanks Multi!

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061130-8330.html





Audible Magic has Anti-Piracy Technology
Alex Veiga

The maker of software to thwart unauthorized online file-sharing has obtained technology that can scan video files and block computer users from making copies.

Audible Magic Corp. said it plans to incorporate the technology it has licensed, dubbed Motional Media ID, into its suite of anti-piracy tools early next year.

The rise of video-sharing sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube has boosted demand for better ways to police online video. Apart from amateur video clips, often shot with video-capable digital cameras or mobile phones, YouTube and similar sites are rife with unauthorized clips from TV shows, movies and music videos.

Motional Media ID - created by a former technology executive with the Recording Industry Association of America - can scan any type of moving video image and identify its content in seconds, the Los Gatos-based company said.

To scan a video, the system looks for signature vectors - such as a unique digital fingerprint - and compares them with vectors stored in a database.

If the video turns out to be from a movie or other copyright material, the technology gives the film studio or video owner the ability to predetermine whether it can be copied.

Until now, Audible Magic has been scanning only the audio, even for video files.

"These capabilities will enable a new period of control for legitimate rights-holders in digital media," said Vance Ikezoye, Audible Magic's chief executive.

Audible Magic did not name any customers who will be using the system.

YouTube has said it is developing technology that will streamline the process by which copyright owners identify their content on the site and then determine whether they want to have it removed. The technology, expected to be in place by the end of this year, will scan only the audio and compare it against databases.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-18-29-24





MPAA Kills Anti-Pretexting Bill
Ryan Singel

A tough California bill that would have prohibited companies and individuals from using deceptive "pretexting" ruses to steal private information about consumers was killed after determined lobbying by the motion picture industry, Wired News has learned.

The bill, SB1666, was written by state Sen. Debra Bowen, and would have barred investigators from making "false, fictitious or fraudulent" statements or representations to obtain private information about an individual, including telephone calling records, Social Security numbers and financial information. Victims would have had the right to sue for damages.

The bill won approval in three committees and sailed through the state Senate with a 30-0 vote. Then, according to Lenny Goldberg, a lobbyist for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the measure encountered unexpected, last-minute resistance from the Motion Picture Association of America.

"The MPAA has a tremendous amount of clout and they told legislators, 'We need to pose as someone other than who we are to stop illegal downloading,'" Goldberg said.

Consequently, when the bill hit the assembly floor Aug. 23, it was voted down 33-27, just days before revelations about Hewlett-Packard's use of pretexting to spy on journalists and board members put the practice in the national spotlight.

Legislature records confirm that the MPAA's paid lobbyists worked on the measure. An aide to Bowen, who was forced out of the legislature by term limits and was elected Secretary of State, said the MPAA made its displeasure with the bill clear to lawmakers.

"The MPAA told some members the bill would interfere with piracy investigations," the aide said. The association "doesn't want to hamstring investigators."

The MPAA declined to comment for this story.

California went on to pass a much more narrow bill that bans the use of deceit to obtain telephone calling records, and nothing else. A similarly tailored bill languished in Congress this year, despite high-profile congressional grillings of senior HP employees.

Sean Walsh, past president of the Califonia Association of Licensed Investigators and an investigator for 27 years, said his group opposed SB1666 because it was too vague and would have tied the hands of investigators looking into insurance fraud, child support cases and missing children.

"There's a public reason and benefit for some of this information to be available to legitimate licensed investigators," Walsh said. "Should it be available to everyone out there? Probably not. There are people that have legitimate need for getting this information in terms of an investigation, enforcing a court order and helping to return a child. Those are all very legitimate reasons and by excluding that you do grave disservice to the average citizen and to large corporations."

Walsh also said groups like the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of America hire investigators who use pretexting to ferret out copyright infringers, such as vendors on the street who are selling bootleg copies of CDs or DVDs. In that case, investigators may use some ruse to find out where the discs originated. (Records do not indicate that the RIAA had a position on the bill.)

Ira Rothken, a prominent technology lawyer defending download search engine TorrentSpy against a movie industry copyright suit, says he didn't know about the lobbying, but can guess why the MPAA got involved. Rothken is suing (.pdf) the MPAA for allegedly paying a hacker $15,000 to hack into TorrentSpy's e-mail accounts.

"It doesn't surprise me that the MPAA would be against bills that protect privacy, and the MPAA has shown that they are willing to pay lots of money to intrude on privacy," Rothken said. "I do think there needs to be better laws in place that would deter such conduct and think that it would probably be useful if our elected officials would not be intimidated by the MPAA when trying to pass laws to protect privacy."

For his part, private investigator Walsh, whose current firm specializes in protecting the privacy of corporate clients, said he hopes lawmakers in 2007 take their time.

"Everyone wants a quick fix, but they don't see the ripple effect until much later," Walsh said. "Our organization has been successful at educating legislators by saying, 'Wait a minute, but look at how it effects X, Y and Z.' They have to see those tangents so that if they are going to go ahead and pass legislation, they do it in a responsible and educated way."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...l?tw=rss.index





With Economics in Mind, City Takes Aim at Movie Piracy
Sewell Chan

Alarmed by New York City’s status as a global center of film and video piracy, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has embraced a proposal that would criminalize unauthorized recording in movie theaters.

At first glance, the proposal, which is before the City Council, might seem unnecessary. A federal law signed by President Bush in April 2005 made recording a film with a video camera in a movie theater a felony, punishable by up to three years in prison for the first offense. And in Albany the Legislature is weighing bills, supported by Mr. Bloomberg, that would make recording a film inside a theater a crime statewide.

Nonetheless, powerful industry groups are pushing New York City to adopt its own anti-recording statute, hoping that such a law would spur the Police Department to crack down on piracy and minimize the economic damage it does.

“Piracy robs New York City of tax revenue, cheats trademark holders and undermines the creative community, which is a vital sector of our economy,” said John A. Feinblatt, the mayor’s criminal justice coordinator. “We have a responsibility to fight this crime at every level: city, state and federal.”

In November 2004 a report by City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. estimated that the counterfeit trade in the city totaled $23 billion a year and cost the city more than $1 billion a year in lost taxes: $380 million in sales taxes, $360 million in personal income taxes and $290 million in business income taxes.

At a Council hearing on Thursday, Vans Stevenson, a senior vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America, testified that 43 percent of movies illegally recorded with camcorders in the United States last year were copied in New York City theaters.

Movies pirated in the city also made their way to 48 countries and 100 Internet sites, Mr. Stevenson said.

The bill before the Council would make unauthorized recording in a movie theater a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $5,000, as well as a civil penalty up to $5,000.

Currently, under the state penal code, illegally recording a movie is only a violation, punishable by up to 15 days in jail or a fine of up to $250. (However, related crimes, like trademark counterfeiting and failing to disclose the origin of a recording, are felonies under state law.)

In Albany the State Senate has twice passed a bill that would make unauthorized recording in a movie theater a misdemeanor for the first offense and a felony for subsequent offenses, but the Assembly has not acted on a companion bill. At least 39 states have laws against the use of recording devices in theaters, according to the motion picture association.

Mr. Stevenson said the city law would improve enforcement. “Right now an illegal recording in a theater has to occur in the presence of a police officer in a darkened theater,” he said. “If this legislation passes, just like shoplifters in retail stores, movie thieves can be observed and detained by theater employees until police officers arrive to make the arrest.”

Mr. Bloomberg said on Oct. 23 that his Office of Special Enforcement would use civil nuisance abatement laws to hold building owners liable for movie-piracy activities on their properties, a tactic that has been used successfully against counterfeiting in the apparel industry.

The Police Department, which created a Trademark Infringement Unit in 1994, is also preparing to crack down on film piracy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/02/movies/02pira.html





Consolidations

EMI Says Gets Bid Approach, Shares Soar

British music company EMI Group Plc said on Tuesday it had received a bid approach, which one newspaper said could be worth 2.5 billion pounds ($4.8 billion) or more.

The Financial Times said Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Goldman Sachs were believed to be among the potential bidders for EMI, which is home to artists including Robbie Williams and Coldplay.

"EMI announces that it has, this morning, received a preliminary approach for the company which may or may not lead to an offer," the group said in a statement.

EMI shares rose 10.3 percent to 289-1/2 pence by 1154 GMT, valuing the group at around 2.3 billion pounds.

EMI declined to named its suitors. KKR and Goldman Sachs could not immediately be reached to comment.

Earlier this year, EMI was locked in a $4.6-billion takeover battle with Warner Music, with each company trying to buy the other.

But hopes of a deal were quashed in June when a European court annulled approval of the 2004 merger of Sony Corp.'s Sony Music and Bertelsmann's BMG.

The ruling cast doubt on whether an EMI-Warner deal would get regulatory clearance, and the companies abandoned talks until there was more clarity from competition regulators. (additional reporting by Mathieu Robbins)
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...R-UPDATE-2.XML





Finally

Plans for ABBA Museum Unveiled in Sweden
Mattias Karen

An ABBA museum dedicated to the music, clothing and history of the legendary Swedish pop group and its four members will open in Stockholm in 2008, organizers said Tuesday.

The interactive museum will feature original outfits and instruments used by the group, handwritten song lyrics, a display of different awards, and "all other things we can think of and find," said Ulf Westman, an event consultant who is spearheading the project with his wife Ewa Wigenheim-Westman.

The museum will also feature a studio where visitors can record their own ABBA songs, and an interactive experience that "will recreate the feeling of being at Wembley stadium and seeing ABBA live with 50,000 others," Westman said.

Organizers are still searching for a suitable location for the museum, but said it will open somewhere in central Stockholm during 2008.

Wigenheim-Westman said the idea was inspired by the Beatles museum in London, but that it took nearly two years to convince the former ABBA members _ Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Reuss _ that it was a good idea.

"It is nice that someone feels compelled to take on our musical history," the four members said in a joint statement. "We think this will be a fun and swinging museum to visit."

The band members will donate the material for the exhibits, but will otherwise not be involved in the project, which will be funded by company sponsors, Westman said.

Stockholm's mayor Kristina Axen Olin said the museum _ which is expected to draw 500,000 visitors a year _ will make the Swedish capital a more popular tourist attraction for the millions of ABBA fans around the world.

"As a Stockholmer, this is what you have been missing," Axen Ohlin said at a news conference to unveil the plan. "We are convinced that this is important both for Stockholm citizens and for marketing the city."

ABBA is one of the most successful bands in history, having sold more than 370 million albums. While the group has not performed together since 1982, it continues to sell nearly 3 million records a year and the musical "Mamma Mia!" _ written by Andersson and Ulvaeus and based on the group's hits _ has been seen by more than 27 million people around the world.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...ertainmentnews





Google Suffers Setback in Copyright Case
AP

Yahoo Inc. has rebuffed Google Inc.'s attempt to learn more about its efforts to create digital copies of books, dealing the Internet search leader another setback as it prepares to fight against a copyright infringement suit.

In rejecting Google's request, Yahoo adopted the same stance taken last month by Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc.

Google believes it can defend its plans to provide online access to millions of library books by obtaining more details about similar projects involving some of its biggest rivals.

A group of publishers and the Authors Guild sued Google in a New York federal court last year, alleging the Mountain View-based company didn't get proper approval to make copies of books available to anyone with an Internet connection.

As its gathers evidence for its case, Google has subpoenaed Amazon.com, Yahoo and Microsoft Corp., among others.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft are part of a large alliance of businesses and libraries working together to create a digital database of books. Amazon.com has scanned a large number of books so consumers can read excerpts from books that they may want to buy.

Like Amazon.com, Yahoo lashed out at Google's request as a brazen attempt to pry into its trade secrets.

"There is simply no need for Google to be peering into the minds and computers of Yahoo employees," Yahoo's lawyer wrote in a 17-page list of objections delivered to Google last week.

Sunnyvale-based Yahoo provided The Associated Press with a copy of its objections Wednesday. The objections eventually may become public record if Google asks a judge to force Yahoo to comply with its subpoena.

As of late Wednesday, Google hadn't responded to a request for comment about Yahoo's objections.

Microsoft declined to discuss its response to Google's subpoena.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-30-00-11-37





Hold Everything

Google: 'iPod Will Hold all the World's TV in 12 Years'

The future of music inspires the future of mobile
Jo Best

The idea of fitting your entire music collection into a single device the size of a packet of cigarettes might have seemed outlandish 15 years ago. But that was before the iPod. Now, one Google exec is predicting the iPod will lead a further media transformation of similar magnitude in the coming decade.

Speaking at the FT World Communications Conference, Nikesh Arora, Google's VP of European operations, told delegates that, in the coming years, the plummeting price of storage and its increasing volume-to-size ratio will give iPods almost unlimited potential to hold music and video.

Arora said, by 2012, iPods could launch at similar prices to those on sale now and yet be capable of holding a whole year's worth of video releases. Around 10 years down the line that could be expanded, creating iPods that can hold all the music ever sold commercially.

He said: "In 12 years, why not an iPod that can carry any video ever produced?" The Google exec said tech is now pursuing a price volume game - searching for the price point at which content will take off for the mainstream.

He added: "It's clearly begun happening," citing iTunes' 99¢ per song download model.

And, Arora believes, mobile is likely to follow the same path. "Mobile is not going to be a different thing," he added - and if the mobile industry is to capitalise on the growth of content, it would be wise to ape the development of the internet.

He said: "The mobile industry has to go through the same phases the internet has gone through... Mobile will have the same learning curve. It would be somewhat foolish to leapfrog the stages the internet went through.

"But before they get there, they will need to satisfy the basic things people are used to doing on the internet."

As a result, the Google VP believes, there will be greater convergence between mobile and internet, as consumers expect to be able to access traditional web content and services on the mobile platform.

Google has already begun to exploit the union by expanding its ad sales business to the world of mobile, after signing deals with operators in Asia and Europe.

The search giant's CEO believes advertising will eventually go on to play a greater role in the mobile industry: eventually doing away with subscriptions in favour of users agreeing to watch targeted advertising.
http://hardware.silicon.com/storage/...9164360,00.htm





Microsoft to Roll Out New Version of WGA
Eric Lai

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday released a revamped version of its Windows Genuine Advantage tool that it hopes will reduce complaints arising from paid-up users of Windows XP caught in the dragnet of the controversial anti-piracy program.

The main change in WGA Notifications is a new category of results for PCs with Windows installations of questionable validity.

The change addresses a problem raised by the other half of Microsoft's anti-piracy program, WGA Validation, which was introduced in mid-2005. PCs that were scanned by WGA Validation and failed to prove to Microsoft’s satisfaction that they were running non-counterfeit copies of Windows XP were formerly labeled as "non-genuine" by Microsoft.

That caused WGA Validation to disallow access to certain Microsoft software, and WGA Notifications to send periodic messages asking users to reinstall XP or buy a legitimate license for it, leading to "nagware" complaints from some users.

Many users also claimed that WGA, due to technical glitches or other issues, mislabeled their genuine copies of Windows XP as pirated. Microsoft has maintained throughout that the rates of such "false positive" errors were very low.

At the same time, its online forum for WGA-related problems has registered nearly 20,000 postings from aggrieved users.

Yesterday’s change in WGA Notifications is aimed at addressing complaints from users who have yet to pass WGA by creating a new "indeterminate" category for copies of XP that failed to prove they were genuine yet did not use a license of XP known by Microsoft to be pirated.

Microsoft keeps a database of pirated XP licenses, most of which are stolen from corporations using a single volume license to install multiple Windows on multiple PCs.

Users with copies of XP labeled "indeterminate" are also provided with more information to troubleshoot the problem, according to a Microsoft spokeswoman.

The majority of Windows XP users, whose copies of XP have already passed Microsoft's WGA program, can safely ignore the updated tool.

Microsoft initially tested WGA Notifications this summer as a "high-priority" fix via Automatic Updates, a category typically reserved for security and bug fixes. Many users were surprised to get WGA Notifications downloaded automatically along with their security updates and complained, saying that Microsoft was acting no different than a purveyor of spyware.

Microsoft subsequently changed WGA Notifications to nag users less often and allowed them to uninstall it. But it was kept as a high-priority update.

According to David Lazar, director of Genuine Windows for Microsoft, the revamped WGA Notifications still remains a "high-priority" update, though users will be able to deselect it from being downloaded and installed. Users running copies of XP that Microsoft has already determined to rely on one of four pirated Windows license keys are now being asked to download the revamped tool. That will be gradually expanded to include other users over the "next several weeks and months," according to Lazar.

The new version of WGA Notifications will also not incorporate a "kill switch" that cripples PCs that fail to prove that they are running genuine copies of Windows XP. That more aggressive feature, called Reduced Functionality Mode (RFM), is being introduced in the upcoming Windows Vista OS.

The release also features a new installation wizard and will display validation results as soon as the tool has been installed. The software doesn't need to be rebooted after its installation, Microsoft said.

Microsoft plans to update the tool every 90 to 120 days, as a way to react to re-evaluation of the software and any changes in software piracy.

China Martens of IDG News Service contributed to this report.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9005498





Vista: No CableCARD Streaming to Other PCs
Nate Anderson

Vista + CableCARD = Digital Cable Goodness.

That's how the equation was supposed to go, but as more details about the Vista CableCARD implementation are revealed, more limitations become apparent. The newest one concerns streaming—Windows Vista will only allow CableCARD-decrypted video to be streamed to official Media Center Extenders.

Consumers who hoped to use their new Vista boxes to blast recorded TV content to other PCs on their home network or to a laptop while traveling (much like a SlingBox) will be disappointed, as Vista engineers bowed to the cable industry's demand for content protection by enabling streaming only to Media Center Extenders. The story first appeared at CE Pro, which learned of the limitations from some Microsoft folks in attendance at the recent Electronic House Expo. Ars Technica has been able to confirm this with sources in the know, but official public relations channels aren't commenting.

The limitation means that right now, only one device can pull down content recorded from digital cable broadcasts: an Xbox 360. Sources tell us that other Media Extenders will also support such content, including devices from D-Link, Linksys and others. Existing devices will need updates to support the latest DRM, however.

For many people, this won't be a huge deal, but it is another telling reminder of who's in control when it comes to using content (hint: it's not end users). The new revelation is only the latest in a long series of unpleasant truths about using CableCARDs that have emerged in the last year. Most egregiously, CableCARDs will only function in setups tested and certified by CableLabs, for instance, dealing a death blow to hopes of building a DIY media center PC with CableCARD support. CableLabs also holds all of the cards when it comes what can and cannot be streamed or moved from device to device.

And because CableCARDs still support only one-way access (and it's looking increasingly likely that two-way CableCARDs will be supplanted by a DCAS system), consumers won't be (legally) streaming pay-per-view or video-on-demand titles around the house, no matter what technology they're using.

If Vista makes it easy to synchronize digital cable recordings to a portable media player like the Zune (maybe) or the iPod (not likely), then CableCARD support could still be an attractive feature. But bloggers like Chris Lanier are already reporting that Vista will not allow CableCARD-decrypted content to be transferred to portable devices at all. It's hard to believe that Microsoft wouldn't enable this at least for the Zune (which currently has no way to transfer video back off the device, making it "safe" for content owners), but it's not clear exactly which parties are behind which restrictions. Lanier doesn't seem to know, either, or at least isn't saying. When we contacted Microsoft, a spokesperson simply told us that Zune does not currently support such transfers.

It has been said that the living room PC was dead on arrival, and while we don't entirely agree, we are happy to put a great deal of the blame for the current state of affairs on CableLabs. Thanks to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, cable companies had only to encrypt their data streams to give them almost complete control over what happens to content once it reaches the home, and CableLabs holds the reins.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061128-8300.html





Microsoft to Release Pro Vista Today
Brian Bergstein

For the first time in five years, Microsoft Corp. is finally unveiling a new system for operating personal computers. Now the company must persuade PC buyers that the launch really matters to them.

Beginning Thursday, businesses that buy Windows licenses in bulk have first crack at the new operating system, called Vista. Consumers can get Vista on home PCs beginning Jan. 30.

Microsoft and computer vendors contend that Vista will make Windows machines more secure, powerful and graphically dynamic, especially when combined with other products Microsoft is releasing simultaneously. Those include new back-end server software for businesses, as well as Office 2007, which brings sweeping changes to widely used programs such as Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint.

Much is at stake for Microsoft. Most of its revenue and almost all of its profit comes from Windows and Office, funding the company's sexier ventures in video games and music players.

But even with all the touted improvements, analysts expect Vista to only gradually emerge, especially in big organizations where upgrading can be a costly, complicated affair. Gartner Dataquest predicts that it will be 2010 before Vista outnumbers the previous operating system, Windows XP, on business computers.

A company with 10,000 employees, for example, likely has 1,000 business applications, many of which need to be tested on Vista before a company can switch its PCs to the new operating system, said Gartner analyst Michael Silver. That process often takes 12 to 18 months and lots of labor by the technology staff. (In other words, for a large business to implement Vista right away would probably require it to have been an eager-beaver type that experimented with Vista during its "beta" phase that began in mid-2005).

In the meantime, the last operating system, Windows XP, works just fine for most companies - especially with a security-enhancing patch known as Service Pack 2 that Microsoft released in 2004.

PC makers say Vista will enable computers to do things that previously were difficult or costly. For example, Lenovo Group Ltd., the world's No. 3 PC maker, says Vista greatly enhances data-backup tools it builds into its machines.

"All those capabilities are going to be one step better with Vista," said Clain Anderson, Lenovo's director of software peripherals.

But many buyers want more dramatic reasons to change their PCs.

Kamal Anand, chief technology officer for TradeStone Software Inc., a Gloucester, Mass.-based provider of supply-chain software, examined test versions of Vista and Office and found "no compelling need" to upgrade his company's 100 PCs and laptops anytime soon. Instead, Anand expects Vista and Office to slowly permeate TradeStone as it buys new PCs for employees in coming years.

"Nobody wants to go through the extra time and effort and money to upgrade an existing, well-working system," he said.

The programs in Office 2007 have been overhauled in many ways. Generally they can make it easier for people to collaborate on documents and to manage information from multiple sources. Excel in particular packs a wallop, with vastly increased number-crunching abilities. The Outlook e-mail program performs noticeably faster searches for tidbits buried in messages.

Some Office programs also have scrapped their familiar menu structure in favor of a "ribbon" atop the screen that reorders how command choices are presented to the user. While that new interface unlocks many features that were hard to find in previous generations of Office software, it will require some time to get used to, which might give tech buyers pause.

Another potential drag for Office is that the world has changed considerably since the last major release in 2003. Inexpensive, open-source alternatives to Office have gained traction. And rivals such as Google Inc. are increasingly delivering spreadsheets, word processing and other tools for free over the Internet, an attractive choice for smaller companies.

At Tabblo Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that lets people assemble, print and share online photo collections, CEO Antonio Rodriguez expects to upgrade many, though not all, of the company's 25 PCs to Vista throughout 2007. Tabblo's staff expects Vista to make it easier to back up files and synch data over multiple computers. Rodriguez and crew also have energetically adopted Microsoft's latest Web browser, Internet Explorer 7.

But Office 2007 holds few such attractions for his company. Tabblo employees have largely abandoned Excel and Word for free programs on the Web, praising the flexibility that comes with having files stored online. Just about the only Office program Rodriguez still uses is PowerPoint for presentations.

"To me, Office 2007 is a complete non-event. I have no interest in an upgrade," he said. "Most of what I like about computing now lives online."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-30-08-51-22





Will Vista make an impact?

Commentary: It's Just Not the Same as Earlier Windows Releases
John C. Dvorak

Investors want to know if there will be any effect on the market during the rollout of Microsoft's new operating system Vista. Will sales of computers jump? What about peripherals? Anything?

If you talk to the suppliers of components, manufactures and even the average geek, the answer is no, no and no. Worse the buzz surrounding Vista is nothing like the buzz that surrounded Microsoft's Windows 95, 98, Win NT and even Windows 2000 and XP.

It's possible that some buzz will evolve, but it's beginning to look like a pretty standard news story rather than anything like the marketing events we've seen in the past. I have to assume that the promoters who put on a worldwide show for Windows 95, for example, have long since left the company (MSFT : 29.49, -0.08, -0.3% ) .

It looks like the best Microsoft can do is provide us with an incredibly bland façade that seems more like something coming from General Electric during the announcement of a new afterburner technology for a jet engine. As an example of how peculiar this all is, can you look at the Microsoft Vista Web site and determine the message? See the Microsoft site.

The site, if you were uncertain as to the nature of the product, looks like an advertisement for an expensive prescription drug for constipation. Seriously, that's exactly what it looks like.

While there is no way that Vista will be a flop, since all new computers will come with Vista pre-installed, there seems to be no excitement level at all. And there does not seem to be any compelling reason for people to upgrade to Vista.

In fact, the observers I chat with who follow corporate licensing do not see any large installations of Windows-based computers upgrading anytime soon. The word I keep hearing is "stagnation."

Industry manufacturers are not too thrilled either. One CEO who supplies a critical component for all computers says he sees a normal fourth quarter then nothing special in the first quarter for the segment. Dullsville.

Apparently there is no increased demand, nobody is ramping up anything and it's expected that horrible bugs or some mediocre reviews will actually have a negative effect on the business until the second half of next year.

When will things perhaps perk up? Would you believe August?

Microsoft is not helping with its lack of enthusiasm. This is further complicated by a confusing array of Vista offerings. There is Vista Home Basic, Vista Starter, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

What is the point of so many editions? People will not know what to choose, so they'll skip it.

One of the interesting things I'm seeing is the relative ignorance of the computer-using public in general about the system requirements for Vista. Most obvious is the complete lack of knowledge regarding the next generation hard disk that is required to make Vista perform well.

These drives, called hybrid hard disks (or HHD) contain a few gigabytes of flash memory for instant-on and certain operating system enhancements. Vista talks to these special disk drives directly.

Knowledgeable folks who should know about these drives never heard of them except in some relation to laptop battery life which seems to be the only promotion done so far. The only reason I know so much about them was by an odd coincidence of moderating a panel that discussed the drives in great detail.

This secret seems to be a tip of a knowledge iceberg. Nobody seems to know anything about the operating system except some vague generalities coming from Microsoft and that miserable Web site.

Eventually this will settle down and we'll all be using Vista. But between now and then do not expect it to set the world on fire. From what I can tell there will be no major impact from this offering on any tech segment. Sorry.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/stor...FF5%7D&siteId=





Apple Gains Control of Critical Digital Download Patent
Kasper Jade

A recent out-of-court settlement between Apple Computer and a Vermont-based inventor has landed Apple the rights to a prestigious software design patent that may allow the company to seek royalties on a broad spectrum of digital downloads.

Michael Starkweather, a lawyer and author of the 10-year old patent, issued a statement on Thursday calling it a "billion dollar patent" that will have affects on the future of the "cell phone, iPod and PDA" industries.

"I believe that, with this patent in hand, Apple will eventually be after every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer to pay royalties on every download of not just music but also movies and videos," he said.

Starkweather, who wrote the patent in 1996 for David Contois of Essex Junction, Vt.-based Contois Music Technology, said the inventor originally didn't show interest in patenting the idea nor did he understand its value.

The initial concept consisted of a desktop computer holding multiple songs with an interface that allowed a hotel guest to select three songs and play them on an electric grand piano.

Realizing that downloading movies was an obvious variation to downloading music, Starkweather broke the patent into three elements; remote music storage, selection of music to download and playing music on a music device.

"Sometimes it's easy to break an invention down to its key components," he said. "That's why patent writing is an art, not a science, and requires creativity."

In June of 2005, Contois asked a Vermont District Court to issue a preliminary and permanent injunction barring Apple from further distributing its iTunes software. In a 10-page complaint, which was first reported on AppleInsider, lawyers charged the Cupertino, Calif.-based iPod maker with "copying" and "willfully infringing" on Contois design patent in developing the digital jukebox software.

The suit stated that Contois conceived and developed a computer interface for playing music on an internal or external computer-responsive music device, which he then exhibited at the 1995 COMDEX trade show and the 1996 NAMM music industry trade show. According to the filing, people who were at the time employed by or later became employed by Apple were present at both trade shows and viewed Contois' software. The suit alleged Apple later "copied" the invention and used the design ideas in the interface for iTunes.

Specifically, the filing documented 19 interface aspects of the Apple software that it claimed were in direct violation of Contois' patent. The areas included iTunes' menu selection process to allow the user to select music to be played, the ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player, and search capabilities such as sorting music tracks by their genre, artist and album attributes.

Following a 15-hour negotiating this September, Contois and Apple ended their dispute by reaching an out-of-court settlement. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2275





Supreme Court Weighs the Meaning of ‘Obvious’
Linda Greenhouse

To be eligible for a patent, an invention must be novel, useful and, according to the statute, not “obvious” to a person of “ordinary skill” in the field. While the meaning of the term “obvious” might appear to be obvious, a lively and surprisingly entertaining Supreme Court argument on Tuesday demonstrated that it is anything but.

The question was how patent examiners and judges should evaluate the obviousness of a new product that combines, albeit in a novel way, two or more existing products. Since most inventions use elements of what patent law calls “prior art,” this case presents the court with what is widely viewed as its most important patent case in years.

The patent in dispute is for an adjustable gas pedal, designed to work in vehicles equipped with electronic engine controls. In the past, gas pedals that could be adjusted for the driver’s comfort worked mechanically. The new version, produced by a Canadian company, the KSR International Company, under contract to General Motors, combined an adjustable pedal with an electronic sensor.

Claiming that it had already patented such a product, a rival company, Teleflex Inc., sued. KSR argued that Teleflex’s patent was invalid because the combination of the two elements was obvious. A federal district judge in Detroit agreed, and dismissed the infringement suit.

But the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has jurisdiction over all patent appeals, overturned that decision. It ordered the district court to reconsider the case under a test that makes obviousness harder to prove — and therefore makes patents easier to obtain and defend. It is the validity of that test that is at issue in the case, KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc., No. 04-1350.

The Federal Circuit’s test for obviousness is usually referred to as the teaching-suggestion-motivation test. Under the test, a patent cannot be rejected as obvious unless the party challenging it can show that at the time of the invention, there existed a “teaching, suggestion, or motivation” that would have led a person familiar with the field to put existing products together. Meeting that test often requires a jury trial, making patent litigation prolonged and expensive.

James W. Dabney, the lawyer representing KSR, told the justices that the Federal Circuit had improperly displaced “skill and ingenuity” as the benchmark for obtaining a patent and replaced it with what amounted to an “entitlement” to patent protection. But the Supreme Court itself “has rejected time and time again the notion that someone who was the first simply to take advantage of the known capability of technology was entitled to a patent,” he added.

The federal Patent and Trademark Office agrees with the critique and entered the case on the side of KSR. Thomas G. Hungar, a deputy solicitor general, told the justices that “as the sole means of proving obviousness, the teaching-suggestion-motivation test is contrary to the Patent Act, irreconcilable with this court’s precedents, and bad policy.”

Mr. Hungar added, “It asks the wrong question and, in cases like this one, it produces the wrong answer.”

But as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. pointed out, the Federal Circuit had a rationale for adding its distinctive gloss to the concept of obviousness. “They say obviousness is deceptive in hindsight,” the chief justice observed to Mr. Dabney. “In hindsight, everybody says, ‘I could have thought of that,’ ” he said, adding that in the Federal Circuit’s view, “if you don’t have the sort of constraint that their test imposes, it’s going to be too easy to say that everything was obvious.”

The chief justice’s comment came early in the argument; any implication that he was sympathetic to the appeals court proved premature. When it came time for the lawyer for Teleflex, Thomas C. Goldstein, to take the podium, Chief Justice Roberts made clear his disdain for the Federal Circuit’s approach.

The test “adds a layer of Federal Circuit jargon that lawyers can then bandy back and forth,” he said, adding, “It seems to me that it’s worse than meaningless because it complicates the inquiry rather than focusing on the statute.”

When Mr. Goldstein noted that “every single major patent bar association in the country has filed on our side,” the chief justice interjected: “Well, which way does that cut? That just indicates that this is profitable for the patent bar.” And when Mr. Goldstein referred to experts who had testified that the Teleflex patent was not obvious, the chief justice asked: “Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something’s not obvious? I mean, the least insightful person you can find?”

Chief Justice Roberts made the comments with a smile, and the courtroom audience responded with laughter. Mr. Goldstein, an experienced Supreme Court advocate, was unfazed at finding himself the straight man in a courtroom comedy. He kept returning to his theme, which was that the Federal Circuit’s test, properly understood, served the function of focusing the inquiry.

“Invention isn’t at the end when you put the two things together,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Invention is finding the problem, deciding what pieces of the prior art to use, and deciding how to put them together.” He warned that there would be “genuine, dramatic instability” if the court disavowed the approach the Federal Circuit has used nearly since its creation in 1982.

Congress created the centralized court for the purpose of reducing instability in the patent system. Underlying the legal arguments was the deeper question of how patent law has fared in the court’s hands — whether, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer put it, “they’ve leaned too far in the direction of never seeing a patent they didn’t like.” There was, Justice Breyer said, “a huge argument going on.” With that observation, Mr. Goldstein readily agreed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/bu...9bizcourt.html





RIAA Subpoenas Neighbor's Son, Calls His Employer
Zonk

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes
"To those who might think that I might be exaggerating when I describe the RIAA's litigation campaign as a 'reign of terror', how's this one: in UMG v. Lindor, the RIAA not only subpoenaed the computer of Ms. Lindor's son, who lives 4 miles away, but had their lawyer telephone the son's employer. See page 2, footnote 1."

From Ray's comments:

"You have a multi-billion dollar cartel suing unemployed people, disabled people, housewives, single mothers, home healthcare aids, all kinds of people who have no resources whatsoever to withstand these litigations. And due to the adversary system of justice the RIAA will be successful in rewriting copyright law, if the world at large, and the technological community in particular, don't fight back and help these people fighting these fights."
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/28/1549242





A.M.D. Receives Federal Subpoena
AP

Advanced Micro Devices said late Thursday that it had received a subpoena from the Justice Department regarding an investigation into possible antitrust violations in the graphics processor and card business.

A.M.D., based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is a leading maker of microprocessors that act as the calculating engines of personal computers. It entered the graphics chip market this summer, agreeing to acquire ATI Technologies for $5.4 billion.

That move was seen as a strategic blow to Intel, A.M.D.’s much larger rival, and one that would allow A.M.D. to broaden its product portfolio in a continuing attempt to banish an image as a small competitor that sold microprocessors and flash memory chips. The deal was completed in October.

A.M.D. said that the Justice Department had not made any specific accusations against it or ATI, and that it intended to cooperate with the investigation. A spokesman declined to comment further.

The scope of the Justice Department investigation was unclear. A call to a spokesman for the other leading maker of graphics chips, Nvidia, of Santa Clara, Calif., was not immediately returned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/te...y/01micro.html





Subpoenas and the Press
David Carr

Like the rest of us, Eve Burton, general counsel at the Hearst Corporation was itching to get out the door last Wednesday. Every Thanksgiving, she makes the journey to Chatham Center in upstate New York to make dinner for 10 bachelor farmers in the area, aged 84 and up. Instead, she was stuck at headquarters most of the day, performing what has become a chronic, grinding task: keeping Hearst reporters out of jail.

She and the rest of the legal team were finishing an appeal, to be filed this Friday, of a judge’s decision to sentence two San Francisco Chronicle reporters, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, to up to 18 months in jail for their refusal to reveal who leaked grand jury information in the Balco steroids case.

The underlying case is finished, but District Judge Jeffrey S. White said the reporters belonged in jail for refusing to comply with subpoenas. The appeal hearing will be held on Feb. 12 and the pair faces longer prison terms than any of the actual Balco defendants.

“The government is apparently willing to spend three years and millions of dollars putting two reporters in jail,” Ms. Burton said. “They won’t get the information they want. These guys made a promise and they are going to keep it.”

The view from her 42nd floor office at Hearst — Central Park and beyond — was breathtaking, but Ms. Burton, who has been working in First Amendment law for 20 years, sees nothing but trouble on the legal horizon. She has been to Seattle, Albany, Baltimore and, of course, San Francisco, putting out fires and defending the ability of journalists to work without being subject to subpoenas that dig into their reporting.

“This is what we do now,” she said. “The culture of the press as an independent body is now under attack and if this continues, will come to be seen as an investigative arm of the government.” (On Friday, attorneys for The New York Times asked the Supreme Court to bar a federal prosecutor from reviewing the phone records of two reporters — Judith Miller and Philip Shenon — in another effort to obtain the identities of their confidential sources.)

In the last 18 months, she says, her company has received 80 newsgathering subpoenas, for broadcast stations, newspapers and magazines. “But that was after the Judy Miller case,” she said, mentioning the case in which the former New York Times reporter went to jail to protect a source. “In the two years before that, we had maybe four or five subpoenas. We didn’t even keep track.”

In the Balco case, the two reporters uncovered information that suggested steroid use was rampant in baseball despite statements to the contrary, and which implicated big-name stars like Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi. President Bush praised their work at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2005, saying, “you’ve done a great service.”

The four defendants in the underlying case — two Balco executives, a track coach and a personal trainer — received light sentences or probation, with the most severe punishment, four months in prison, going to Victor Conte, president of Balco. But government prosecutors, in the name of protecting the sanctity of the grand jury process, are still trying to throw Mr. Williams and Mr. Fainaru-Wada in jail for 18 months.

Within the news business, there is a consensus that the roof is caving in on the legal protections for working journalists. But the general public does not hold the craft in much esteem lately. Years of journalistic mis- and malfeasance have left many people thinking the Fourth Estate could use a little oversight, regardless of where it comes from.

“It’s true there have been some changes in the way the law has been interpreted,” said Mark Feldstein, an associate professor of media at George Washington University. “But it has occurred in part because there is a political environment in which journalists are no longer viewed as heroes, as they were after Watergate, while now they are sometimes seen as villains.”

“The Bush administration views the media as one more special interest, as an elite,” he added. “And journalists have played into that in the way that they have framed the issues. The legal concept is called the ‘reporter’s privilege,’ not the ‘people’s privilege.’ It reinforces that sense of elitism.”

Ms. Burton knows first-hand that her indignation is not widely shared by the public.

“My 15-year-old is constantly reminding me that no one cares about this stuff but reporters, but I don’t think the public understands what is at stake here,” Ms. Burton said. “Everyone knows that what was revealed in that story about Major League Baseball and steroids was important, but I don’t think that they understand that they could lose that. That story could not be told today.”

In the appeal, the reporters’ lawyers will argue that courts have a duty to look at every case on its merits and that the federal effort is out of step with the state courts, including California, which guard reporters against fishing expeditions by prosecutors.

“This is the single biggest case I have ever been involved in,” she added. “In terms of the public’s right to know what the government does and doesn’t do, it is huge. If the government wins in this case, every reporter’s notebook will be available to the government for the asking.”

For years, Ms. Burton advised her reporters on how to stay out of jams in civil cases and defended those who ended up on the wrong end of libel suit.

Now, in between telling working reporters to avoid e-mail messages and any other records of their phone calls and reporting — all of which is readily available to a prosecutor with subpoena power — she is spending an enormous amount of time defending remaining press freedoms against an administration she believes has “a strong ideological view that the executive branch should be able to proceed mostly unimpeded.”

“It is not limited to the press,” she said. “If you look at the briefs they have filed all over the country, whether it is N.S.A. or wiretapping, or leaks to the press, everybody and everything that relates to the rights of the individual, they would like to have the right to make whatever decisions they want about whoever they want whenever they want.”

And because the same administration that makes the laws selects the judges, this shift represents more than just one swing of the pendulum. What will be lost, she believes, are the kind of investigations where confidential sources play a critical role.

“You won’t get the Watergate story, you won’t get the Pentagon Papers,” she said.

Not that her Thanksgiving guests care. “They just wanted to know why I was late,” she said. “One of them told me that stuff could wait — that the food on the back porch was going to freeze if I didn’t get it inside.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/bu...ia/27carr.html





The GinGrinch

Gingrich Raises Alarm at Event Honoring Those Who Stand Up for Freedom of Speech
Riley Yates

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich yesterday said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism.

Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a "different set of rules" may be needed to reduce terrorists' ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.

"We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade," said Gingrich, a Republican who helped engineer the GOP's takeover of Congress in 1994.

Gingrich spoke to about 400 state and local power brokers last night at the annual Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment award dinner, which fetes people and organizations that stand up for freedom of speech.

Gingrich sharply criticized campaign finance laws he charged were reducing free speech and doing little to fight attack advertising. He also said court rulings over separation of church and state have hurt citizens' ability to express themselves and their faith.

Last night's event, held at the Radisson Hotel-Center of New Hampshire, honored a Lakes Region newspaper and a former speaker of the House for work in favor of free expression.

The Citizen of Laconia was given the Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment Award, which is named after the longtime President and Publisher of the Union Leader Corporation, owner of New Hampshire's statewide newspaper.

The Citizen scrutinized the Newfound Area School Board beginning last year over a series of e-mail discussions held before public meetings. It also used the right-to-know law to uncover costly decisions by the town of Tilton this year.

Executive Editor John Howe said the decision to pursue the stories led to at least one advertiser canceling its business with the paper.

"We try to practice what we preach, even if it costs us business," Howe said. "And it has and it will in the future.

Also honored was Marshall Cobleigh, former House speaker and a longtime aide to former Gov. Meldrim Thomson.

Cobleigh introduced an amendment to the state Constitution defending free speech. He also helped shepherd the state's 1967 right-to-know law through the Legislature.

Gingrich's speech focused on the First Amendment, but in an interview beforehand, he also hit upon wide-ranging topics.

• Gingrich said America has "failed" in Iraq over the past three years and urged a new approach to winning the conflict. The U.S. needs to engage Syria and Iran and increase investment to train the Iraqi army and a national police force, he said. "How does a defeat for America make us safer?" Gingrich said. "I would look at an entirely new strategy." He added: "We have clearly failed in the last three years to achieve the kind of outcome we want."

• Political parties in Presidential primary states should host events that invite candidates from both parties to discuss issues, said Gingrich, who criticized the sharpness of today's politics.

• Gingrich said voters unhappy with the war, the response to Hurricane Katrina and pork barrel spending were the main drive behind the GOP's rejection at the polls. But he argued Republicans would have retained the Senate and just narrowly lost the House if President Bush had announced the departure of embattled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld before, instead of after, the election.

• Gingrich said he will not decide whether he is running for President until September 2007.

The event last night was sponsored by the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications. The school was founded in 1999 to promote journalism and other forms of communication.
http://www.unionleader.com/article.a...0-bbcd5baedd78





New Rules Compel Firms to Track e-Mails
AP

U.S. companies will need to keep track of all the e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees thanks to new federal rules that go into effect Friday, legal experts say.

The rules, approved by the Supreme Court in April, require companies and other entities involved in federal litigation to produce "electronically stored information" as part of the discovery process, when evidence is shared by both sides before a trial.

The change makes it more important for companies to know what electronic information they have and where. Under the new rules, an information technology employee who routinely copies over a backup computer tape could be committing the equivalent of "virtual shredding," said Alvin F. Lindsay, a partner at Hogan & Hartson LLP and expert on technology and litigation.

James Wright, director of electronic discovery at Halliburton Co., said that large companies are likely to face higher costs from organizing their data to comply with the rules. In addition to e-mail, companies will need to know about things more difficult to track, like digital photos of work sites on employee cell phones and information on removable memory cards, he said.

Both federal and state courts have increasingly been requiring the production of relevant electronic documents during discovery, but the new rules codify the practice, legal experts said.

The rules also require that lawyers provide information about where their clients' electronic data is stored and how accessible it is much earlier in a lawsuit than was previously the case.

There are hundreds of "e-discovery vendors" and these businesses raked in approximately $1.6 billion in 2006, Wright said. That figure could double in 2007, he added.

Another expense will likely stem from the additional time lawyers will have to spend reviewing electronic documents before turning them over to the other side. While the amount of data will be narrowed by electronic searches, some high-paid lawyers will still have to sift through casual e-mails about subjects like "office birthday parties in the pantry" in order to find information relevant to a particular case.

Martha Dawson, a partner at the Seattle-based law firm of Preston Gates & Ellis LLP who specializes in electronic discovery, said the burden of the new rules won't be that great.

Companies will not have to alter how they retain their electronic documents, she said, but will have to do an "inventory of their IT system" in order to know better where the documents are.

The new rules also provide better guidance on how electronic evidence is to be handled in federal litigation, including guidelines on how companies can seek exemptions from providing data that isn't "reasonably accessible," she said. This could actually reduce the burden of electronic discovery, she said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-01-06-25-13





Web Tool Said to Offer Way Past the Government Censor
Christopher Mason

Deep in a basement lab at the University of Toronto a team of political scientists, software engineers and computer-hacking activists, or “hactivists,” have created the latest, and some say most advanced tool yet in allowing Internet users to circumvent government censorship of the Web.

The program, called psiphon (pronounced “SY-fon”), will be released on Dec. 1 in response to growing Internet censorship that is pushing citizens in restrictive countries to pursue more elaborate and sophisticated programs to gain access to Western news sites, blogs and other censored material.

“The problem is growing exponentially,” said Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which designed psiphon. “What might have started as censorship of pornography and Western news organizations has expanded to include blogging sites, religious sites, health information sites and many others.”

Psiphon is downloaded by a person in an uncensored country (psiphon.civisec.org), turning that person’s computer into an access point. Someone in a restricted-access country can then log into that computer through an encrypted connection and using it as a proxy, gain access to censored sites. The program’s designers say there is no evidence on the user’s computer of having viewed censored material once they erase their Internet history after each use. The software is part of a broader effort to live up to the initial hopes human rights activists had that the Internet would provide unprecedented freedom of expression for those living in restrictive countries.

“Governments have militarized their censorship efforts to an incredible extent so we’re trying to reverse some of that and restore that promise that the Internet once had for unfettered access and communication,” Dr. Deibert said.

When it opened in 2000, the Citizen Lab, which is one of four institutions in the OpenNet Initiative (opennetinitiative.org), was actively monitoring a handful of countries, mainly China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that censored the Internet. But citing increased filtering by governments, the lab now monitors more than 40 countries.

The program’s designers say existing anticensorship programs are too complicated for everyday computer users, leave evidence on the user’s computer and lack security in part because they have to be advertised publicly, making it easy for censors to detect and block access to them.

“Now you will have potentially thousands, even tens of thousands, of private proxies that are almost impossible for censors to follow one by one,” said Qiang Xiao, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

Instead of publicly advertising the required login and password information, psiphon is designed to be shared within trusted social circles of friends, family and co-workers. This feature is meant to keep the program away from censors but is also the largest drawback because it limits efforts to get the program to as many people as possible.

The software is also designed to allow users to post on blogs and other Web sites like Wikipedia, which has been a problem for some other anticensorship programs. By requiring only login information and no installation, psiphon is intended for anyone with basic computer knowledge because psiphon functions much the same as any typical browser.

“So far it’s been tech solutions for tech people,” said Dmitri Vitaliev, a human rights activist in Russia who has been testing psiphon in countries where the Internet is censored. “We have not had very good tools so everyone has been eagerly awaiting psiphon.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/te...rssnyt&emc=rss





Pro-Peace Symbol Forces Win Battle in Colorado Town
Kirk Johnson



Peace is fighting back in Pagosa Springs.

Last week, a couple were threatened with fines of $25 a day by their homeowners’ association unless they removed a four-foot wreath shaped like a peace symbol from the front of their house.

The fines have been dropped, and the three-member board of the association has resigned, according to an e-mail message sent to residents on Monday.

Two board members have disconnected their telephones, apparently to escape the waves of callers asking what the board could have been thinking, residents said. The third board member, with a working phone, did not return a call for comment.

In its original letter to the couple, Lisa Jensen and Bill Trimarco, the association said some neighbors had found the peace symbol politically “divisive.”

A board member later told a newspaper that he thought the familiar circle with angled lines was also, perhaps, a sign of the devil.

The peace symbol came to prominence in the late 1950s as the logo for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a British antiwar group, according to the group’s Web site. It incorporates the semaphore flag images for the letters in the group’s name, a “D” atop an “N.”

Other people have said the upright line with arms angled down, commonplace in the United States in the Vietnam War, especially, has roots in the early Christian era, representing a twisted or broken cross.

Mr. Trimarco said he put up the wreath as a general symbol of peace on earth, not as a commentary on the Iraq war or another political statement.

In any case, there are now more peace symbols in Pagosa Springs, a town of 1,700 people 200 miles southwest of Denver, than probably ever in its history.

On Tuesday morning, 20 people marched through the center carrying peace signs and then stomped a giant peace sign in the snow perhaps 300 feet across on a soccer field, where it could be easily seen.

“There’s quite a few now in our subdivision in a show of support,” Mr. Trimarco said.

A former president of the Loma Linda community, where Mr. Trimarco lives, said Tuesday that he had stepped in to help form an interim homeowners’ association.

The former president, Farrell C. Trask, described himself in a telephone interview as a military veteran who would fight for anyone’s right to free speech, peace symbols included.

Town Manager Mark Garcia said Pagosa Springs was building its own peace wreath, too. Mr. Garcia said it would be finished by late Tuesday and installed on a bell tower in the center of town.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/us...5&ei=5087%0 A





BitTorrent Expands Movie, TV Downloads
Alex Veiga

BitTorrent Inc., developer of a popular online file-sharing tool, said Tuesday it has reached licensing deals that will boost the number of movies and TV shows it can offer as part of a video download service launching next year.

The privately held company said it signed agreements with Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures, News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, Palm Pictures and Kadokawa Pictures USA.

The San Francisco-based BitTorrent also inked content deals with cable television networks G4 and Starz Media along with several Viacom-owned networks, including MTV Networks, VH1, SpikeTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Logo.

Financial terms of the licensing agreements were not disclosed.

Added to BitTorrent's lineup were films such as "X-Men The Last Stand," "Saw III" and "Mission: Impossible III," and TV shows "Star Trek," "Laguna Beach" and "South Park."

Earlier this year, BitTorrent announced content deals with Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, Egami Media, Hart Sharp, Koch Entertainment and The Orchard.

Unlike other video-on-demand services, which distribute movies stored on their own servers directly to computer users, BitTorrent uses a peer-to-peer technology that assembles files from separate bits of data downloaded from other computer users across the Internet.

The technology makes the distribution of large files faster and less expensive.

BitTorrent plans to debut the commercial video service in February and expects to offer thousands of video titles in addition to music and software.

The company has yet to disclose a pricing scheme but has said individual TV shows could be priced as low as $1, and movies will be sold for about the price of a DVD.

TV shows and most films can be purchased and burned on a backup DVD, although the copy will only play on the computer used to buy the original and not on standard DVD players.

Some films will only be available for viewing a limited number of times.

Last year, BitTorrent agreed to remove links to pirated versions of movies from its Web site and eliminate online links leading to unauthorized content owned by the seven studios that are members of the Motion Picture Association of America.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-06-42-51





Time-Warner Plans 'Download-to-Burn' Movies

Time Warner Inc., the world's largest media company, plans to offer services that let consumers download movies from the Internet that can be burned onto DVDs in 2007, its top executive said on Tuesday.

The company would likely make these movies available for such services, including one service with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., on the same day its DVDs go on sale.

"I expect we will be in a download-to-burn mode in 2007—It will be a part of next year's offerings," Richard Parsons, chief executive and chairman of Time Warner, said at the third annual Reuters Media Summit in New York.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2065121,00.asp





Latest Toe in the Movie Download Pond? Wal-Mart
Caroline McCarthy

Wal-Mart Stores has entered the fledgling but growing market of movie downloads with a new service that bundles a digital copy of a film with the purchase of a hard copy of the DVD.

The movie download program, announced Tuesday, begins with sales of the DVD of the Warner Bros. flick Superman Returns. Starting Tuesday, when customers purchase the disc from Wal-Mart, they will be able to choose from one of three options for a digital copy: $1.97 for a download formatted for portable devices, $2.97 for one that's compatible with computers, and $3.97 for one that works on both portable devices and PCs. Then, upon returning to their computers, buyers of the Superman Returns bundled DVD can enter a redemption code on Wal-Mart's beta video download site and obtain the digital version.

Wal-Mart hopes to eventually expand this service to more DVD-digital download packages, as well as to standalone downloads of movies and TV shows in the coming months.

As for compatibility, there is some fine print. The Wal-Mart downloads that are compatible with portable devices will be in Windows Media Player format, which means that they'll play on all devices that accept that format--including Microsoft's new Zune--but not Apple's iPods. And the PC-compatible downloads will require the Windows XP operating system and Windows Media Player 10. Mac and Linux users, at least for now, need not apply.

The market for digital video downloads is tempting but often volatile for even the sturdiest of retailers. For many of the new services, like AOL Video, it's really too early to gauge success, or lack thereof.

But some movie download services have already received distinctly negative reviews. The blogosphere didn't take kindly to Amazon's "Unbox" software. And less than a week ago, Microsoft's highly anticipated Video Marketplace feature of its Xbox Live service experienced a noticeably rocky launch.
http://news.com.com/Latest+toe+in+th...3-6138907.html





Blockbuster: High Def Will Slow Movie Downloads

Blockbuster is looking for partners in an online movie download service, but believes such services will not siphon off sales of high-definition DVDs until the speed and quality of downloads improve, Chief Executive John Antioco said on Tuesday.

"We think packaged media remains king for a long time," Antioco told the Reuters Media Summit in New York.

Antioco said sales of movie downloads will reach about $1 billion by 2009, or less than half a percent of overall film industry revenue.

It is going to be difficult to develop a library of high-quality, high-definition download movies partly because the movie studios are locked in lucrative, long-term agreements that govern when movies can appear in pay-per-view, cable and DVD "windows," he said.

Still, the download market is not something the company can ignore: "We can't afford not to be in it," Antioco said.

He said he "wouldn't be surprised" if Blockbuster announced its own movie download service as early as 2007, either through its investment in online movie download company CinemaNow or in conjunction with a cable or satellite provider.

Rival Netflix has said it will release details of its upcoming download service in the first quarter of 2007.

Although he declined to give specifics about a Blockbuster download service, Antioco said he disagreed with conventional wisdom that dictates that consumers do not want to buy set-top boxes to download movies.

He said the company's new Total Access program, which allows Blockbuster Online subscribers to swap movies at the company's stores, reinvigorated discussions with potential partners in a download service.

"I think there are plenty of opportunities for discussion now," he said. "Total Access ... clearly provides an additional layer of value to a potential partner. Blockbuster can offer a partner ... essentially unlimited movies, many of which are in the home video (distribution) window that they really can't (air)."

Antioco said packaged DVD sales will remain the most profitable way for movie studios to reap revenue from releases and those profits will get more dramatic with the spread of high-definition offerings over the next five years.

By comparison, movie downloads will likely lag that growth largely due to the time it will take the average broadband user to download a high-definition movie, he said. It can take hours to download a high-definition film but most consumers do not have enough broadband capacity to even attempt it.

Despite the challenges to downloading high-definition content, Antioco said, "it's a business that we will need to be in both for competitive reasons and for consumer reasons, to have a full-service brand."

He reiterated the company's previous forecast of reaching 2 million subscribers by year's end for Blockbuster Online to become the nation's fastest-growing online DVD rental service--a title now claimed by Netflix, which has 5.7 million subscribers.

The company's store-based business will contract in the coming two years to 5,000 stores from 5,400, he said, while online rental takes up the slack.

"We probably closed more stores this year than we will close in future years based on some of the trends I see happening," Antioco said. "The advent of Total Access, the importance of the stores in that and the pressures that some of our competitors are under."
http://news.com.com/Blockbuster+High...3-6139041.html





As Many Software Choices as Languages to Learn
Jane L. Levere

DIANA ROHINI LaVIGNE of Foster City, Calif., edits a magazine for Indian-Americans and is married to a Hindi-speaking software architect, but until recently she could not speak Hindi herself.

Not knowing the language prevented her from communicating with her mother-in-law, who travels every year from Bhopal, India, to California to visit. “I can share more with her if I have the basics of her language,” Ms. LaVigne said. “She’s an expert cook, and she can’t teach me to cook if we can’t share her language.”

So this year, Ms. LaVigne bought a Hindi course from Rosetta Stone, a company that uses computer software to teach languages. She has been studying at least 30 minutes a day since late August, working from her laptop. Her husband, Vikramaditya Gupta, helps her if she has questions.

Ms. LaVigne is among a growing number of adults who are turning to language courses, many of which incorporate new technologies. Some buyers of these courses want to improve communication with family and friends, co-workers or other business contacts. Others want to achieve some language proficiency before traveling to a new country, either for pleasure or for business.

Sellers say demand is strong. Mike Ferrari, director of merchandising for language products at Barnes & Noble stores, says percentage sales growth for language-related items exceeded that for overall sales in the 2005 fiscal year.

Erick Vincent, manager of the software category in North America for Amazon.com, says sales of language products have been growing much faster than the software business in general in the last two years. “This growth has us very focused on this particular category,” he said.

Mr. Ferrari said Chinese and Korean courses had been generating the fastest-growing sales at Barnes & Noble, “driven by the reality of immigration patterns and commerce.” And he said Italian was outperforming other European languages, in terms of percentage gains, because Italy is such a popular vacation destination.

There is also a strong market for more obscure languages. Chuck McGonagle, senior vice president of Transparent Language, which offers software-related courses, says Vietnamese, Bulgarian, Irish, Hebrew, Czech, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Tagalog were each responsible for 1 per cent of its online sales this past September.

Consumers have a dizzying number of choices in teaching systems, technologies and levels of interactivity. Courses can be taught with old-fashioned workbooks, or on CDs, CD-ROMs, DVDs and the Internet. From the Internet, they can be downloaded to a computer or personal players like iPods. One course, Playaway’s Learn Anywhere series, published by Penton Overseas, comes with its own portable digital player.

In shopping for courses, consumers should keep in mind why they want to study a language and what level of proficiency they want to achieve. The Internet can help: many companies, like Berlitz, Simon & Schuster and Rosetta Stone, allow people to sample their programs on their Web sites.

Transparent Language will let potential students download free versions of its Before You Know It series that teach some 150 words in more than 40 languages; the more advanced version is $49.95.

Audible.com, which sells products on its Web site and through iTunes.com, lets people sample all its language courses. Prices range from $5.95 to $146.95 and include most lines. Amazon.com sells both new and used courses, while Audible.com offers discounts to people who sign up for its various membership plans. These Web sites also contain user reviews, as do blogs and various online discussion groups.

For travelers who want a quick introduction to a language, an intensive language course that can cost hundreds of dollars may not be worth the expense. But courses specifically for travelers, and costing much less, are offered by many companies. They include the Penton Overseas Visual Passport Cultural Immersion Experience. It is offered in four languages, costs $39.95 and features learning and travelogue DVDs and vocabulary and music CDs. The Walk and Talk Audio Guides, at $19.98, from Gildan Audio, are offered in French and Italian and feature CDs with walking tours, maps and words and phrases, for visitors to Rome, Venice, Florence and Paris.

Berlitz’s Rush Hour series, which sells for $24.95 for each of five languages, comes with three CDs and a workbook. The Earworms Rapid Languages courses are $28.99 and come with a CD and a phonetics booklet. Both use songs to teach languages.

Courses for serious language students are more elaborate and expensive. The Rosetta Stone courses, which are available on CD-ROM or can be downloaded from the Internet, come in three levels of difficulty and range in price from $49.95 to $499.

Those overwhelmed by the newer choices may be comforted by the familiar name of Berlitz, which has been providing language courses since the late 19th century and has expanded into audio programs and computer-based courses. Simon & Schuster sells courses based on the well-established Pimsleur method, which encourages students to learn through conversation.

The Michel Thomas audio programs from McGraw-Hill teach students short phrases that they can string together into full sentences. Random House’s Living Language series and Barron’s Educational Series also offer courses in print and via computer.

People who have taken the more intensive courses say that it is wise to keep expectations realistic.

Woodie Neiss, chief financial officer of FlavoRx, a company in Bethesda, Md., that sells flavors for medicines, is a fan of the Rosetta Stone courses. But he says they have their limits. Mr. Neiss, 37, studied Japanese for five years when he was younger and spent a college year in Japan. He is now studying Brazilian Portuguese through Rosetta Stone to help FlavoRx enter the Brazilian market.

Although he feels that he can “communicate on a basic level in business, which builds rapport with the people I’m working with,” he also says the course will not make him fluent in Portuguese. “If you’re going to go for complete fluency, you need to immerse yourself in these countries and their cultures,” he said. “A course of CDs will not let you do it on your own.”

For those who have the time, a traditional classroom setting, with a teacher who can provide individual attention, is often the best way to learn a language.

Classroom courses are preferable for beginners who are serious about learning a language, said Mike Ledgerwood, director of the language learning and research center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “CD-ROM and technology-based courses work better if someone has had exposure” to languages previously, he said, adding, “If anyone has had a second language and progressed beyond the beginning level, the knowledge of how to learn a language should transfer to any other language studied.”

For people like Ms. LaVigne, a computer course has been a satisfying alternative to a class. The Rosetta Stone program has enabled Ms. LaVigne to speak with her mother-in-law by phone; she says it has also helped her at the magazine she edits for Indian-Americans.

“Hindi is a difficult language,” she said, “and I think the people at work really appreciate my effort.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/bu...6language.html





Zuned out

Avoid the Loony Zune
Andy Ihnatko

Y es, Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

"Avoid," is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity.

The setup process stands among the very worst experiences I've ever had with digital music players. The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, "Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?"

But there it was, right on the Zune's tech support page. Is this really what parents want to be doing at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning? That might not be Zune's fault. After about a year of operation, it's almost as if a Windows machine develops some sort of antibodies that prevent it from recognizing new hardware. But what's Microsoft's excuse for everything else?

Only the Zune software can sync music, video and pictures onto the device; Zune is incompatible with Windows Media Player, the familiar hub of the Windows desktop media experience.

The Zune app doesn't even have as many features as WMP. And why (for the love of God) doesn't it support podcasts? That's pure insanity.

It's incompatible with Microsoft's own PlaysForSure standard, too.

You'll have to buy all-new content from the new Zune Marketplace.

Oh, and the Zune Marketplace doesn't even take real money, proving that on the Zune Planet there's no operation so simple that it can't be turned into a confusing ordeal. The Marketplace only accepts Zune Points, with an individual track typically costing the equivalent of the iTunes-standard 99 cents.

By forcing users to buy blocks of Zune Points (with a $5 minimum), the Marketplace only has to pay one credit-card processing fee.

Zune Points will also make it easier for the Zune Marketplace to institute variable pricing. The music industry wants it desperately. The industry has been pressuring Apple to abandon its flat 99 cent pricing and start charging more for "hot" tracks.

Apple has stood firm against this, insisting that low, uniform prices keep sales high and discourage the iTunes Store's users from downloading music illegally.

I'm certain Microsoft will cave on this one. It has already given the music industry the other thing the industry has been demanding from Apple: a kickback on every player sold.

"These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it," said Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group. "So it's time to get paid for it."
Well, Morris is just a big, clueless idiot, of course. Do you honestly want morons like him to have power over your music player?

Then go ahead and buy a Zune. You'll find that the Zune Planet orbits the music industry's Bizarro World, where users aren't allowed to do anything that isn't in the industry's direct interests.

Take the Zune's one unique and potentially ginchy feature: Wi-Fi. You see this printed on the box and you immediately think "Cool. So I can sync files from my desktop library without having to plug in a USB cable, right? Maybe even download new content directly to the device from the Internet?"

Typical, selfish user: How does your convenience help make money for Universal? No wonder Doug despises you.

No, the Zune's sole wireless feature is "squirting" -- I know, I know, it's Microsoft's term, not mine -- music and pictures to any other Zune device within direct Wi-Fi range. Even if the track is inherently free (like a podcast) the Zune wraps it in a DRM scheme that causes the track to self-destruct after three days or three plays, whichever comes first.

After that, it's nothing more than a bookmark for purchasing the track in the Zune Marketplace. It amounts to nothing more than free advertising.

The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Toshiba's Gigabeat player, for example, is far more versatile, it has none of the Zune's limitations, and Amazon sells the 30-gig model for 40 bucks less.

Throw in the Zune's tail-wagging relationship with music publishers, and it almost becomes important that you encourage people not to buy one.

The iPod owns 85 percent of the market because it deserves to. Apple consistently makes decisions that benefit the company, the users and the media publishers -- and they continue to innovatively expand the device's capabilities without sacrificing its simplicity.

Companies such as Toshiba and Sandisk (with its wonderful Nano-like Sansa e200 series) compete effectively with the iPod by asking themselves, "What are the things that users want and Apple refuses to provide?"

Microsoft's colossal blunder was to knock the user out of that question and put the music industry in its place.

Result: The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.
http://www.suntimes.com/technology/i...Andy23.article





Analysts: iPod Nothing to Fear From Slow-Starting Zune
Elizabeth Montalbano

Financial analysts watching the consumer electronics space report that early sales of Microsoft Corp.'s Zune player should give little reason for iPod loyalists and Apple Computer Inc. to fear this holiday season.

Since its retail debut on Nov. 15, customer interest in Zune has been lackluster, analysts report. Early reviews of the product have been less than stellar as well.

According to a research note published Tuesday by PiperJaffray senior research analyst Gene Munster, only 8 percent of 40 retailers surveyed by the firm recommend the Zune to customers, while 75 percent recommend Apple's iPod.

Moreover, some MP3 salespeople hadn't even heard of Zune, even though the players are being sold at their stores, he wrote in his report.

Quotes from retail clerks cited in Munster's report range from them claiming they don't know what the Zune is, to comments that Zune is a good option if a customer does not use Apple's iTunes software.

"To be honest, I don't really know much about the Zune," one clerk is quoted as saying in Munster's report. Another said, "I don't suggest the Zune because it is really heavy," according to the report.

Zune also did not fair well against other MP3 players and Apple's iPod even during its initial week of sales, when the hype surrounding the product was at its peak.

According to Munster's report, during its launch week on Nov. 16, Zune held the seventh spot on online retailer Amazon.com's top 10 best-selling MP3 players list, and it fell from that spot to 13 on the list only five days after launch, on Nov. 20.

"The buzz that Microsoft was able to generate for the Zune's launch clearly helped the player in its first week, but much of the publicity took the form of Zune/iPod comparisons," Munster wrote. He added that these comparisons show that Zune "failed to match up in the eyes of most reviewers" to the iPod, a fact that negatively affected sales of the device.

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore wrote Monday that the iPod continues to be a strong seller going into the busy holiday shopping season, and the 30G-byte video iPods -- with which Zune competes -- "appear to be immune to the Zune." He said both the 30G-byte video iPods and the new 4G-byte iPods nanos currently are popular with consumers.

A note about Apple's performance from financial firm UBS IT hardware analyst Ben Reitzes also said that Zune does not appear to be any threat to iPod at this time.

To be fair, Apple has a five-year head start in the music and video player market, and no one expected Microsoft's first entry would be comparable right away to the immensely popular iPod. Microsoft has said it plans to invest significantly in the Zune over the next several years, and the device is expected to become more competitive.

Microsoft's 30G-byte Zune costs US$249.99, the same as Apple's video iPod, but is different from the iPod in two key ways. Zune includes an FM tuner and wireless capability that allows users to share songs between devices.
http://www.itworld.com/Tech/5051/061...une/index.html





Don't Cry for the Zune Just Yet

Microsoft's challenger to the iPod takes second place in digital audio player market in first sales week, according to report.
David Ellis

Reports of lackluster sales of Microsoft's Zune that surfaced earlier this week might be a bit premature.

Microsoft's newest MP3 player, which launched just over two weeks ago, took second place in the portable digital player market in its first four days of sales, according to numbers generated by the market research firm NPD Group.
Microsoft's new Zune MP3 player did not fare as poorly as some predicted during its first week of sales.

"Considering it is a new brand, it's a very good first-week showing," said Ross Rubin, director of industry for NPD Group.

Microsoft's (up $0.15 to $29.54, Charts) Zune took 9 percent of digital player sales, according to NPD, edging out Sandisk (down $0.85 to $43.92, Charts), but behind Apple (down $1.09 to $90.72, Charts), whose iPod models have long dominated the MP3 player market.

Another research agency, Current Analysis, reported a somewhat similar sales reading during the same week. For the same week ending November 18, 2006, the Zune took 7 percent of the MP3 player market, falling behind both Apple and Sandisk.

Zune vs. iPod: the battle begins

While the two reports look strictly at sales at major U.S. electronics retailers, online sales of the Zune appear not to be as favorable.

As of midday Wednesday, Zune ranked as the 18th most popular MP3 players sold at Amazon.com (down $0.81 to $40.11, Charts), behind most models of the iPod.

Shawny Chen, a research analyst for Current Analysis, says that in order to become a serious contender against Apple, Microsoft will have to make further adjustments to the Zune, especially considering the number of unfavorable reviews the device has received so far.

"Microsoft will have to come out with an improved Zune that touches on the very features that people are disappointed with this model, such as the limited WiFi capability," said Chen.

Kathleen Maher, a senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research, notes that even if the Zune is off to a slow start in the MP3 player market, Microsoft has had a lot of success launching a new product, tweaking it and ultimately satisfying consumers.

"It doesn't bug them to dump a bunch of money into an experiment and rejigger it along the way," said Maher, pointing at the success of the Xbox. "It's worked reasonably well."
http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/29/tech...zune/index.htm





Universal Music May Seek Royalty Deal With iPod

Universal Music Group Chief Executive Doug Morris said on Tuesday he may try to fashion an iPod royalty fee with Apple Computer Inc. in the next round of negotiations in early 2007.

Universal, the world's largest music company, owned by French media giant Vivendi, was the first major record label to strike an agreement with Microsoft Corp. to receive a fee for every Zune digital media player sold.

"It would be a nice idea. We have a negotiation coming up not too far. I don't see why we wouldn't do that... but maybe not in the same way," he told the Reuters Media Summit, when asked if Universal would negotiate a royalty fee for the iPod that would be similar to Microsoft's Zune.

"The Zune (deal) was an amazingly interesting exercise, to end up with a piece of technology," he added.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...industryNews-1





A la mode

Apple releases OS X Security Update 2006-007
Jason D. O'Grady

Apple yesterday released Security Update 2006-007 for Mac OS X 10.3.9 through 10.4.8. The update, which is available in Software Update and from Apple Downloads, weighs in at 23.9 MB (for Intel) and is available in several flavors.

Despite Apple's policy that it "does not disclose, discuss, or confirm security issues until a full investigation has occurred and any necessary patches or releases are available," some pretty good information about the 2006-007 update is posted on the "About the security content" page.

According to CNet's Joris Evers the update repairs 31 vulnerabilities, including a zero-day Wi-Fi hijack flaw:

Other flaws addressed by the Apple update could let Macs be compromised through malicious sites, rigged compressed files or malicious font files, Apple said. The update also fixes four flaws in the Mac OS X Security Framework, the worst of which could crash Macs or display expired security certificates as still valid, Apple said.

Security Update 2006-007 is recommended for all users and improves the security of the following components:

AirPort
ATS
CFNetwork
Finder
Font Book
Font Importer
Installer
OpenSSL
PHP
PPP
Samba
Security Framework
VPN
WebKit
gnuzip
perl

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/index.php?p=342





Bell Labs' History of Inventions
Linda A. Johnson

It's the birthplace of the transistor, the laser, the solar cell and the fax machine. Its researchers were the first to hear the echoes of the Big Bang. And now this American legend is part of a French company.

Bell Labs was founded in 1925 as the research arm of AT&T's national telephone business. Sixty years later, it was spun off as part of Lucent Technologies Inc., which on Thursday was acquired by Paris-based Alcatel SA.

Murray Hill-based Bell Labs employs about 9,000 researchers and engineers in seven countries, down from a peak of 24,000 in 1998 before Lucent drastically downsized.

Its scientists have collectively have won six Nobel Prizes in Physics, nine U.S. Medals of Science, seven U.S. Medals of Technology, two Draper Prizes and a Grammy award, for many achievements in sound technology.

The lab has been granted 32,031 U.S. patents, 15,000 of which are still active.

A look at some key advances:

-1925: First demonstration of a facsimile machine sending pictures over telephone wires.

-1926: First synchronization system for sound movies.

-1927: First long-distance television transmission, sending live images of President Hoover from Washington, D.C., to New York.

-1937: First electronic speech synthesizer (re-created human speech).

-1939: First binary digital computer.

-1947: John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invent the transistor, leading to the electronic-age of portable radios, touchtone phones, computer microchips and color and high-definition television; they share 1956 Nobel Prize.

-1951: Direct dialing of domestic long-distance calls.

-1954: Solar battery cell to convert sunlight into electricity.

-1956: First transatlantic telephone cable, handling up to 36 calls.

-1958: Arthur Schawlow and brother-in-law Charles Townes invent the laser (short for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), now used in fiber-optic communications networks and as a cutting tool in surgery and industry. Each later won a Nobel related to the research.

-1962: Demonstrated cellular technology, tested the first paging system, produced the first orbiting communications satellite (Telstar I) and invented light-emitting diodes, now widely used in imaging systems.

-1965: Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson stumble upon cosmetic background radiation while using a highly sensitive "horn antenna" in radio astronomy experiments; they win 1978 Nobel Prize. The static noise they heard was the strongest evidence supporting the Edwin Hubble/George Lemaitre theory the universe was created in a "Big Bang" explosion.

-1969: UNIX operating system, software that made open computer systems possible and became the Internet's foundation.

-1979: Digital signal processor, enabling cellular phones and modems.

-1980: Digital cell phone technology.

-1988: First fiber-optic transatlantic cable, handling up to 40,000 phone calls at once.

-1992: Invented compression technology needed for digital radio.

-1995: First prototype system supporting wireless Internet.

-1998: First switch allowing Internet telephone traffic, faster Internet access.

-2005: First Internet Protocol transmission at 100 gigabits per second, 10 times the current speed and critical for future services such as IPTV.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-30-16-57-04





Google Reaches Deal in Belgian Dispute
AP

Google Inc. said Tuesday it has struck a content-sharing deal with two organizations to partly settle a dispute in Belgium over news articles available through the Internet search engine.

But Google still faces a bid by Belgian newspapers - spearheaded by copyright protection society Copiepresse - to get the company to pull the news content unless it paid the newspapers or received their permission. A judge for the Brussels-based Court of First Instance said she would deliver her verdict in early January.

France-based multimedia authors' rights group SCAM and Sofam, which represents Belgian photographers and visual artists, withdrew their support for Copiepresse's case before the Belgian judge heard arguments from both sides last week.

Google spokeswoman Jessica Powell said the company was "pleased to see they would not pursue litigation," but insisted the deal was not new and was part of an ongoing dialogue with publishers and authors' rights groups.

"We won't go into the details," she said, refusing to say when the agreement was signed and what exactly it covered apart from allowing the search engine "extensive use of content" and "innovative new ways beyond what copyright allows without the permission of authors."

In September, the Belgian court ruled against Google after it failed to appear at an earlier hearing. That judgment forced the Mountain View, Calif., company to remove newspaper content from its news index, threatening daily fines of $1.3 million until it complied. The court later agreed to give Google another hearing to put its side.

Google's lawyers insist the company had not broken copyright law by showing headlines, a few lines of text and a link to the original story.

But Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing the country's French-language editors, argued that Google hurt the rights of authors because it effectively gave away for free older articles that they sell on a subscription basis.

Most Belgian newspapers offer fresh articles to readers for free but charge for access to their archives of stories.

This was not the first time Google's automatically generated news aggregation pages have irked content providers. The French news agency AFP is suing Google for at least $17.5 million in federal court in Washington, D.C., arguing that the Google service essentially replicates for free what AFP subscribers pay for.

Separately, Google has agreed to pay The Associated Press for stories and photographs. Neither Google nor New York-based AP have disclosed financial terms or other details.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-00-20-26





2 Google Execs Probed Over Abuse Video
Colleen Barry

Italian authorities are targeting two Google executives over videos the site displayed showing a disabled youth being abused.

Although users post items on Google Inc.'s video service without the company's prior approval, Milan prosecutors are targeting the executives for failing to control content on their sites. The case comes despite European law, adopted by Italy in 2003, specifying that Internet providers are not responsible for controlling content published on their service.

The executives are not named, but are identified as the legal representatives for Google Italia Srl, the Mountain View, Calif., company's Italian arm.

The probe has prompted a proposal in Italy to limit Internet postings of images by youths under the age of 17, while others warn of stifling innovation.

"As far as I understand, the entire European Union has decided there is no responsibility for the Internet provider for content,"

"You can't blame the Internet for being a means of diffusing something whose causes lay somewhere else," said Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffe, president of Assodigitale, a think-tank on digital technology. "You can't blame the manufacturer of paper because someone prints an insult on it."

Maffe said such problems create "a strong disincentive to invest in this country, to develop value-added services on the Internet or on the mobile."

The Milan investigation was sought by Vividown, an advocacy group for Downs Syndrome. Vividown was alerted to the pair of videos in early September by someone who had come across them on Google Italia's video site.

In one, an autistic youth is being mistreated, and someone puts in a mock telephone call to Vividown.

The video was shot in a classroom in the northern city of Turin, and four youths involved are the subject of a criminal investigation.

Vividown President Edoardo Cenzi said that although Google removed the content within 12 hours after they reported its existence to authorities, the group took further action because "we don't believe these videos should be circulated without controls."

Stefano Hesse, a spokesman for Google Italia, said Google was cooperating with authorities.

"From a legal point of view, there is a European law that says we are not responsible for content," Hesse said. "We don't want to hide behind laws. We want to do the best thing for our users."

Google is developing technologies to help identify illegal or offensive content, Hesse said, but said that at the moment the most effective filter are users who flag material they deem inappropriate.

"We have clear policies about content and we always remove what we think is illegal content and what our users flag as illegal content," Hesse said. But he acknowledged that sometimes what is deemed offensive varies by culture.

"It could be religious. It could be pornography. It depends on the culture or the way of thinking of the people looking at the video, since it is a worldwide platform," Hesse said.

He declined to comment further on the Milan investigation, saying he had not yet received the court documents or been formally informed of the identities of the executives being investigated. Hesse said he believes they are based at Google's headquarters in the United States.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-28-15-57-14





Verizon Wireless to Feature YouTube Videos
Bruce Meyerson

YouTube videos will be viewable on cell phones for the first time under a deal with Verizon Wireless, which will also allow users to upload videos shot with their camera phones.

The partnership to be announced Tuesday marks the first big distribution deal for YouTube since the young video-sharing Web site was acquired earlier this month by Google Inc. for $1.76 billion.

The mobile YouTube service, to be launched in early December, will be offered for no additional fee as part of Verizon's V Cast service, which costs subscribers $15 per month or $3 per day. The companies declined to provide an exact launch day, saying the technologies being employed are still being tested.

Like the rest of V Cast, but unlike YouTube's Web site, the mobile service will be ad-free. The companies declined to discuss any financial terms to the partnership except to say that Verizon Wireless will have exclusive U.S. rights to cellular distribution of YouTube videos for an undisclosed period.

Verizon Wireless will feature a YouTube channel in its V Cast application, which is available on 14 of the company's handset models. The channel will offer categories such as the most viewed or most discussed videos from the YouTube site, said Robin Chan, director for entertainment programming for Verizon Wireless.

To upload a video shot on a Verizon handset to the YouTube Web site, users will use the same function that's used to share pictures with friends, known as multimedia messaging service or MMS. Users will enter a short numeric code to send the video.

Notably, while YouTube executives stressed the appeal of watching videos on the go, Verizon Wireless sees the uploading feature as a significant draw.

"All things happen in real time in real world, and the mobile phone is a terminal where you can capture that on video, so it is a core device for user-generated content," said Chan, calling current modes of uploading videos to the Web cumbersome.

YouTube executives said the company will ensure that the clips offered will be screened to include only those that meet with Verizon Wireless content guidelines. Those guidelines forbid Verizon's partners from transmitting copyrighted material and "adult" content.

That's a key restriction, as YouTube's immense success has hinged on a combination of "homemade" user-generated content as well as volumes of copyrighted video.

Although YouTube has promptly removed pirated videos from its site whenever copyright owners complain, questions linger about the site's vulnerability to a barrage of potential law suits, especially now that it has Google's deep pockets behind it.

To lessen the risk, YouTube recently forged partnerships with Universal Music Group, CBS Corp., Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group Inc. The truce with Universal was a significant breakthrough because the world's largest record company had threatened to sue for copyright infringement.

Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of New York-based Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC of Britain.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-28-02-56-11





Verizon Adds Revver to User Videos

A day after saying it will bring YouTube videos to cell phones, Verizon Wireless is announcing a similar deal with Revver.com, a Web site that shares ad revenue with the people who upload the video clips.

The mobile Revver service to be announced Wednesday will be launched in early December. It will be available for no additional fee on Verizon's V Cast multimedia download service, which costs subscribers $15 per month or $3 per day.

Revver has tried to distinguish itself from YouTube by sharing with uploaders half of the ad revenue generated any time their clips are viewed.

Revver.com shows ads at the end of each video clip, but that won't be the case on V Cast. Instead, Revver said, uploaders whose videos are played will share in the licensing arrangement with Verizon.

The companies did not disclose any financial terms of the deal, which gives Verizon exclusive rights to show Revver content on cell phones in the United States.

"This is a breakthough for our creative base in that they will be paid 50 percent of all the revenue that's generated from this relationship with Verizon Wireless," said Steven Starr, founder and chief executive of Revver, which he said has 40,000 content contributors.

As with the YouTube deal announced Tuesday, the Revver channel will be featured under the "entertainment" category on V Cast, which is available on 14 Verizon handsets. The Revver channel will be broken down into five categories: editor's picks, viral video classics, laughs, animation and cute overdose.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-06-44-37





Nokia Cuts Operating Margin Targets
AP

Nokia Corp. on Tuesday cut its operating margin targets, blaming increased exposure to the network infrastructure business. It also predicted global sales of mobile phones would grow by 10 percent in 2007.

The world's largest cell phone maker said its closely watched operating margin will suffer from the start of the Nokia Siemens Networks operations, a joint venture that will combine Nokia's network business group and Siemens' carrier-related operations.

As a result, it lowered its target margin to 15 percent for the next one to two years, down from the 17 percent it set in December 2005.

Nokia also tightened targets for its mobile phone and multimedia division, saying it would aim for a 17 percent operating margin over the next two years rather than the 17 percent to 18 percent set out last December.

Nokia's American depositary shares fell 25 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $20.06 on the New York Stock Exchange.

At its Capital Markets day presentation in Amsterdam, the Finnish company also said industrywide shipments of mobile phones will be up 10 percent next year from the 970 million units it estimates will be sold in 2006.

Nokia also presented four new handsets.

The new phones will hit the market early next year and include three mid-range units that will cost $260 to $425. It also showed off a $99 phone aimed at customers in emerging markets, Nokia said.

The models include the half-inch thin 6300 camera phone, which features a slim design that's likely meant to compete with Motorola Inc.'s compact RAZR model. The 6290 handset, meanwhile, was billed by Nokia as its first midlevel 3G smart phone.

"To enjoy the full benefits of the continuing growth of the global device market that Nokia expects, we've made a number of important strategic moves and organizational changes, and have put our marketing and design efforts into a sharper focus," Nokia Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in a statement.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-28-10-16-27





1 in 5 Parents Say Kids Online Too Much
Anick Jesdanun

One in five American parents believe their kids are spending too much time on the Internet, though most say the online activities haven't affected grades either way.

In a study to be released Wednesday by the University of Southern California, 21 percent of adult Internet users with children believe the kids are online too long, compared with 11 percent in 2000. Still, that's less than the 49 percent who complain their kids watch too much TV.

About 80 percent of the children say the Internet is important for schoolwork, although three-quarters of the parents say grades haven't gone up or down since they got Internet access.

Forty-seven percent of the adults say they have withheld Internet use as a form of punishment. Banning television is still more popular, reported by 57 percent of adults surveyed.

The study, meanwhile, found that although only 27 percent of cell phone owners use them for text messaging, photo transmitting and other non-voice functions, the figure grows to 54 percent among those 18-24 and 45 percent among those under 18.

The study has been conducted most years since 2000. Over that time, researchers have seen Internet use grow to 78 percent, from 67 percent. Access at home increased to 68 percent, from 47 percent.

In one of the few surveys to look at why people are offline, the study found the lack of a working computer most often to blame. Of the 22 percent of Americans who do not currently use the Internet, more than a quarter are former users who dropped out.

"Almost nobody drops out out of dissatisfaction," said Jeffrey Cole, director of USC's Center for the Digital Future. "The reason most people drop off is they change jobs or their computer breaks."

But more than half the former users have no intention of returning online, the most ever. Overall, 60 percent of non-users have no plans to go online within the next year.

Cole said the numbers raise the prospect of a permanent subclass of non-users.

"Internet penetration has largely plateaued," he said.

Americans 66 and over remain the most disconnected, with only 38 percent online. For all other age groups, at least 74 percent are online, with penetration hitting 99 percent for those 18 and under, likely because most U.S. schools now have some form of Internet access.

On average, users spend 14 hours a week online, compared with 9.4 hours in 2000.

Thirty-seven percent of home Internet users still have dial-up accounts, compared with 26 percent for high-speed cable modems and 24 percent for DSL. Eleven percent of Internet users go online through mobile devices - not necessarily exclusively - averaging two hours a week.

The study revealed little change in the effect on television. Thirty-six percent of home Internet users say they have spent less time watching TV since they started using the Internet, roughly the same as the 33 percent who said that in a 2001 survey.

Cole said the increased use of high-speed connections has a lot to do with that.

When people were on dial-up, they were accessing the Internet 20 or 30 minutes at a time - "generally time not spent watching television," Cole said. "Broadband changed all that. They are on 30, 40, 50 times a day for two or three minutes at a time. It's not a big bucket of time displacing television."

People may be paying less attention to television commercials, though, fitting in online use during program breaks, he said.

That said, 41 percent of veteran users - those online for more than nine years - say they have spent less time watching television, compared with only 23 percent among those who have joined the Internet within the year.

The study found nearly a quarter of online users - especially newcomers to the Internet - say they spend less time reading.

The telephone survey of 2,269 U.S. households was conducted in English and Spanish from February to April and included follow-up interviews with respondents to his previous studies. The study has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-06-42-03





Opera Updates Browser for Cell Phones
AP

Opera Software ASA released a new version of its mini browser for mobile phones Tuesday.

The free Opera Mini 3.0 makes it easier to post photos to Web journals from a handset and enhances security for banking and shopping by encrypting information, the company said. It also supports Really Simple Syndication, a technology that notifies users when Web sites are updated.

The Oslo-based company first released Opera Mini in January. Opera said about 8 million people downloaded the earlier versions in the first 10 months.

"I think the main reason for Mini's success is that it, for the first time, allows millions of people to use their mobile phones to access the same Web sites they do from their desktop," said company Chief Executive Jon von Tetzchner.

Opera's browser has won praise as being fast and compact, and has been gaining ground in mobile phones and handheld computers.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-28-16-35-36





Store 256GB on an A4 Sheet
Chris Mellor

How much information can you store on an A4 sheet? Well, according to some new technology designed by an Indian engineering student, an extraordinary 256GB.

New "rainbow technology", devised by Sainul Abideen who has just completed an MCA degree in Kerala, data can be encoded into coloured geometric shapes and stored in dense patterns on paper.

Files such as text, images, sounds and video clips are encoded in "rainbow format" as coloured circles, triangles, squares and so on, and printed as dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch. The paper can then be read through a specially developed scanner and the contents decoded into their original digital format and viewed or played. The encoding and decoding processes have not been revealed.

Using this technology an A4 sheet of paper could store 256GB of data. In comparison, a DVD can store 4.7GB of data. The Rainbow technology is feasible because printed text, readable by the human eye is a very wasteful use of the potential capacity of paper to store data. By printing the data encoded in a denser way much higher capacities can be achieved.

Paper is, of course, bio-degradable, unlike CDs or DVDs. And sheets of paper also cost a fraction of the cost of a CD or DVD.

Abideen has demonstrated a 45-second video clip being encoded on paper, termed by him, a rainbow video disk - RVD - and then played back through a computer with an RVD scanner attached. In another demonstration he has shown 432 A4 pages of paper rainbow format-encoded and stored on a two-inch by two-inch square of paper.

He says that smaller scanners could fit inside laptop computers or mobile phones, and read SIM card-sized RVD's containing 5GB of data.

The recording media could be either paper or plastic sheets. Such media are making a comeback - witness yesterday's story about re-writable paper.
http://www.techworld.com/storage/new...fm?newsID=7424





Businesses Split on Patent Case
Christopher S. Rugaber

Some of the largest companies in the United States are facing off in a Supreme Court case over gas pedals, with one side hoping the justices will put the brakes on an out-of-control patent system.

The court is scheduled to hear arguments Tuesday on what's obvious when older inventions are combined to create something new. The law says an invention that's "obvious" isn't patentable, but the definition isn't clear despite decades of litigation.

The ambiguity, critics say, has led to an explosion of patents as companies stake claims on everything in sight, from strategies for avoiding taxes to golf ball designs. The result has been extensive and costly legal wrangling as companies of all sizes fight over who's infringing what. In some cases, small companies acquire patents not to develop new products but to sue for a quick windfall.

Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and other New Economy companies have filed briefs calling for a change to the system.

But Johnson & Johnson, GE and DuPont, have filed their own brief arguing that major changes to the patent system would jeopardize billions of dollars invested in product innovation. They want to protect pharmaceutical and chemical products from generic manufacturers and counterfeiters, attorneys involved in the case said.

Patent law experts consider KSR International v. Teleflex Inc. one of the most important cases in years.

"It's extraordinarily likely that the case will be a landmark ruling," said Thomas Goldstein, a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and counsel to Teleflex.

The KSR case _ which has attracted an unusually high number of friend-of-the-court filings from corporations, the government and academia _ involves a dispute over a brake pedal designed for pickup trucks.

Canada-based KSR manufactures gas pedals for General Motors Corp. It made a pedal that can be adjusted for the height of the driver and uses electronic signals rather than a mechanical cable to accelerate when the pedal is pushed.

Both features were developed separately _ the adjustable pedal over 25 years ago _ but Teleflex, a manufacturer based in Limerick, Pa., sued KSR in 2002, claiming that KSR's combination of the two features infringed on a patent it was issued in May 2001.

KSR argued that the patent should be invalidated because the combination of the two features is obvious.

The question of "obviousness" has long been a contentious area of patent law because it is the most subjective, patent experts say. Many inventions can seem obvious in hindsight. For example, 3M Co.'s Post-It Notes "may seem to be obvious, but that is only because they have been nearly ubiquitous in our daily lives for 25 years," the GE and DuPont brief said. 3M also signed onto that brief, which supports the status quo.

"Upending nearly a quarter-century of jurisprudence at this point would throw into question the validity of millions of issued patents, cause the reassessment of patent licenses worth billions of dollars, make patent litigation more difficult to settle, and inevitably create more litigation for the courts," the brief said.

Gerald J. Mossinghoff, a former commissioner of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, said 85 percent to 90 percent of the office's work focuses on determining obviousness. Yet the Supreme Court has not ruled on obviousness since 1976, adding to the importance of the case.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which was set up to consider patent cases in 1982, developed the "teaching, suggestion, or motivation" test in an effort to set an objective standard for determining whether an invention is obvious.

The test says that where existing elements are combined to create an invention _ such as combining an adjustable brake pedal with an electronic one to create an adjustable, electronic brake pedal _ there should be evidence that someone else might have come up with the same combination in order to determine that the invention is obvious and therefore not worthy of a patent.

For example, the evidence could be references in previous patents or written comments in a technical journal.

Critics of the Federal Circuit argue that this has made it too difficult to prove that a claimed invention is obvious and therefore too easy to obtain a patent, because if a potential invention is obvious then technical experts may not have written anything about it.

In addition, Microsoft and Cisco said in their brief that the Federal Circuit's test lowers patent standards and actually hinders innovation, rather than spurring it, as patents are intended to do.

The companies said the current system has led to "large numbers of obvious patents" that make "inadvertent infringement" more likely, and therefore patent infringement lawsuits more common.

This has spurred companies like Cisco to seek "hundreds of patents for defensive purposes," the brief said.

Patent litigation is expensive, industry observers say. Emery Simon, counselor to the Business Software Alliance, a trade group, said that patent cases typically cost $2 million to $4 million per year and can take several years to resolve.

These expenses can be passed onto consumers through higher product prices, the companies said.

"A network router, a golf club, a software program, a ribbon bow, a bra all become more expensive as more and more patent holders must be paid royalties, and unnecessarily so where these obvious patents contribute no innovation to the product being sold," Microsoft and Cisco's brief said.

But companies that support the Federal Circuit's test argue that it is effective in countering the problem of "hindsight bias."

John Duffy, a George Washington University professor who helped prepare KSR's Supreme Court filings, said that if the Supreme Court overturns the Federal Circuit's standard, it would make it easier for businesses to defend themselves against patent infringement suits by invalidating questionable patents. That could result in less patent litigation overall, he said.

Most legal experts expect the Supreme Court to modify the Federal Circuit's standard in some way. Goldstein said the court could even set a new standard for determining what's obvious.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...112400736.html





China's Biggest Porn Site Operator Jailed for Life
AP

The creator of China's largest pornographic Web site was ordered imprisoned for life, state media reported this week.

Xinhua News Agency said judges at the Taiyuan Intermediate People's Court in Shanxi province gave the life sentence to Chen Hui and handed down terms of 13 months to 10 years to eight others after they were convicted of profiting from pornographic dissemination.

Mr. Chen, 28, and his accomplices started the Qingseliuyuetian (Pornographic Summer) Web site in 2004 and opened three other porn sites, attracting more than 600,000 users.

Xinhua reported the police said it was difficult to know the exact amount of profits the Web site earned. Police found about $25,000 in the bank accounts of the nine.

When the site was closed in October 2005, it contained more than 9 million pornographic images and articles, police said.

China has the world's second-largest population of Internet users after the United States, with more than 123 million people online.

The government encourages Internet use for education and business but strictly controls content and tries to block access to material deemed pornographic or subversive.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06328/740532-96.stm





Company Markets Products, Services to Airline Passengers
Susan Tuz

Thomas McClain, left, and Jeffrey McChesney has started Jetera, a media program for air passengers that recently won an avaiation award.

When Jeff McChesney and Tom McClain met, it was the meeting of like minds.

The two men, both Ridgefield residents, saw a future in providing one-on-one marketing to airline passengers and began brainstorming the idea.

The end result was creating a company called Jetera. In five years, they hope to see Jetera generating in excess of $2 billion profit annually. And improving income potential for airlines participating in the program.

"Since the moment we came up with the novel patent idea of One-to-One Media, I haven't slept," McChesney said. "My mind is going constantly with ideas."

Jetera will change the way airlines serve customers, in its creators' view. It will change the way passengers experience air travel and the way advertisers sell to prospective customers. It will also change the way businesses perform many tasks, McClain said.

Jetera will use its patent-pending "One-to-One Media" technology to market products to airline passengers.

It will target each passenger by gender, age, marital status and profession. Then, knowing who is flying when and where and in what seat on what plane through airline reservation information, Jetera will send an information and entertainment stream on the small screens found on airplane seats. The program will be geared to each individual passenger.

"We remain invisible, in the background," McClain explained. "We're like 'Intel Inside.' All transactions are in the name of the airline."

Jetera's creators see airport kiosks also carrying marketing information. When a passenger uses a kiosk to access his ticket, a message may come up asking him to go to an in-airport store and then take a survey on how he found service inside the store.

"That passenger would be offered, say $25, for participating in the survey," McClain said. "It could be in the form of a credit to his credit card, or as frequent flyer points or having a check sent to his home."

The media stream sent on these small screens during flights would offer the ability to read the top newspaper stories in the city the passenger was flying to -- or view articles from top magazines in the country on topics of interest to him. Best sellers, hobby articles and how-to tapes could be viewed.

McClain and McChesney see a myriad of possibilities.

"If you don't wish to be entertained on a flight, you can opt out," McClain said. "Just push the button at the bottom of the screen."

The possibilities seem endless, they said. For instance, discount coupons for kitchenware might be sent to the home address of a passenger who viewed a cooking segment on the small screen.

"Say you're flying from New York to Chicago, then changing planes to fly on to Seattle on the same airline," McChesney said. "You could start listening to a best seller on the first flight, change planes and pick up with the second half of the book on the second flight."

Jetera was developed from McChesney's company, e-JITI, created in 2003. That company delivers technical information to pilots in the cockpit, relieving them from carrying paperwork to the flight.

McChesney combined that technology's delivery system with McClain's idea to market individually to airline passengers.

McChesney and McClain's data indicates that 600 million domestic passengers will fly on the 17 largest U.S. airlines in 2006. It projects the number of domestic passengers in 2015 to be at 1 billion.

That equates into 105 billion pre-flight, in-flight and post-flight impressions that can be made on the domestic passenger market of the 17 major airlines annually, they said.

McClain brings marketing and advertising sales experience to Jetera. He was senior vice president at Reuben H. Donnelly, the company that produces yellow pages directories.

McChesney brings his background in aviation as a professional pilot and head of operations for an air cargo company, as well as pioneering digitized information delivery to pilots in airplane cockpits.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1023497





What’s the frequency?

Lost in Transit No More

Sydney Airport is investigating high-tech tagging methods for baggage handling, which could greatly reduce the number of bags that go missing each year.

Industry experts say that baggage mishandling costs the industry globally $US1.7 ($2.17) billion each year, and that much of this cost is due to failures in the barcode-based tagging system that's currently in use at most airports worldwide.

A spokesman for Sydney Airport said it had sent staff to look at overseas airports already using the electronic tagging technology - dubbed "radio frequency identification" (RFID) - and that it would be commencing its own trials shortly.

"Sydney Airport is actively looking at RFID," said the spokesman.

"We have sent staff to visit the Hong Kong and Las Vegas airports that have the system at the moment, and are about to commence a series of trials here as well. The trials will establish the benefits of the new system in increasing the accuracy of the baggage sorting system."

Pending the results of its trial, Sydney Airport would release a "timetable to take Sydney Airport to RFID", the spokesman said.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA), which last year introduced a global standard for RFID baggage tags, said approximately 1 per cent of the 1.7 billion bags that passed through the system every year were mishandled, costing the industry on average $US100 for each instance.

IATA projects that, if its RFID standard is adopted on a global scale, the annual industry savings would be $US760 million.

The problem with the current barcode-based tagging method is that the laser barcode scanners, used to track the movements of baggage, are prone to failure.

This is because, if the barcode tag attached to a bag is dirty or wet, it won't be read by the scanner, which itself is also prone to dirt and dust.

According to IATA, the success rate of barcode-based tag reading is just 85 per cent, while an electronic RFID system would increase this read rate to between 95 and 99 per cent.

IATA said of the new tagging method: "RFID is a technology incorporated into a silicon chip that emits a radio signal which matches a user-defined serial number with an item, in this case a piece of baggage."

With RFID, Sydney Airport could constantly track the status of bags at a distance using an antenna, said IATA.

But while RFID would undoubtedly reduce mishandling costs, each RFID tag costs on average 21 US cents, which is up to ten times more than a printed barcode label.

A recent ABI Research report suggests that this factor will hinder the take-up of RFID by the airline industry.

"One of the barriers to adoption of RFID for airline baggage tagging has been the tag price," said research analyst Robert Foppiani.

"Because the tags must be disposable, they must be cheap."

IATA expects that continued investment in RFID technology will help drive RFID tag prices down in future.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technolog...777706811.html





Boarding Pass Follies

Good News and Bad News
Christopher Soghoian

The Good.

One of my lawyers flew into Indianapolis on Nov 14th and we met with two FBI cybercrime agents, as well as an assistant US Attorney. The short version of things, is that they've stopped the investigation, due to a lack of evidence of criminal intent on my part. They've given me back my passports, my computers, and I'll be getting the rest of my stuff back shortly. Essentially, I'm a free man - with no charges filed. I've been represented by two amazing lawyers throughout this mess - Stephen Braga and Jennifer Granick. Without them - this would not have ended so quickly, or with such a fantastic outcome.

The Feds (at least those that I met) fundamentally disagree with me on many subjects - the role that researchers, academics, and common citizens take in studying, criticizing and pointing out the flaws in our security systems. I have been laying the groundwork for some Tor related research at Indiana University (pending approval from the University Counsel) - in fact, two of Tor's designers are visiting researchers at IU this year. It was made perfectly clear during the meeting that parts of the US government, at least the two represented at the meeting, strongly disapprove of Tor - and in particular, thought that research universities such as IU, MIT, Georgia Tech, Harvard and others have no business supporting such projects.

It is difficult for me to properly express how deep the divide was at this meeting - between the positions and opinions expressed by the feds, and of the "common values" shared by most researchers in my field and those taught to me in university settings. However, in spite of this, after talking for a few hours, they came to understand that although in my own way, I'm trying to work towards the same thing as them: A safer flying experience.

Also - my lawyers tell me that it's now OK to do interviews.

The Bad.

The forced take down of my website a few weeks ago has not improved airport security. The bigger and more interesting question, is if putting the site up in the first placed made airport security any more vulnerable.

There are currently multiple goals of the airport security system in the US.

1. Make sure there are no weapons/bombs on-board an airplane.
2. Make sure that the people who 'should not' be flying do not get on airplanes.

Goal number one is easy enough:

TSA representatives have stated multiple times since my boarding pass generator went live that passengers are not placed at any additional risk when fake boarding passes are used. This is true. As long as the TSA checkpoint staff do their jobs, then evil-doers should not be able to bring bad things on-board. Recent reports seem to indicate that TSA is having a bit of trouble with their screening process, but at least for this discussion, let us imagine a world where TSA is able to actually stop every single knife, gun, binary chemical explosive device and box cutter from being smuggled on-board.

Goal number two - the no-fly list - is problematic for a number of reasons.

1. Terrorists do not pre-register themselves before committing their crimes. There are no repeat offender suicide bombers - and thus it should not be too difficult for terrorist organizations to recruit people with clean criminal records.

2. Terrorists evolve to avoid detection. If ethnic profiling is used, they recruit from local mainstream, or less-suspected ethnic groups (for example, the Jamaician/British "shoe bomber" and then the use of British born, south Asian Muslims in the London attacks). When gender profiling is used, women are recruited (see: Palestine, Sri Lanka, Chechnya). If we rely upon a watch list to find terrorists, they'll conduct 'dry runs' before the real event, to figure out who will be forbidden from participating in the real attack itself. The futility of using ethnic profiling to detect terrorists has been discussed at length by researchers from MIT, where they prove that random searches are far more effective.

3. You can legally refuse to show ID at the airport. They will let you board the plane, without a single piece of ID.

4. The implementation of the no-fly and mandatory-selectee lists is flawed, secretive and in no way transparent. Senator Ted Kennedy was put on the list for a while, Cat Stevens, the wife of the Senator made famous for stating that the "Internet is a series of tubes" has been repeatedly delayed at airports, due to the fact that she shares a name with the now-Muslim singer, and any passenger named Robert Johnson or John Smith is severely inconvenienced when they fly. Yet, at the same time, the 9/11 hijackers, all of whom are dead, are still on the list, while the names of the London liquid bombers were not placed on the list - due to the chance a boarding denial at the airport could tip them off to the fact that they were under investigation.

What to do with the no-fly list?

We, as a nation, must decide a few things. If we want no-fly, and mandatory search lists, we have to decide how effective we want them to be.

If we want to bar those who are on the no-fly list from boarding a plane, we must institute checks of ID at the gate. Airport staff, or TSA agents with access to the airlines' computers, must be able to scan a boarding pass, look at the name on the computer, and see that it matches the name on the passenger's ID. Looking at the printed boarding pass is not enough - the name in the reservation system must be verified and matched. This, will, of course, cost money - as someone will have to be paid to perform this check.

If we want to bar those no-fly list passengers from boarding the plane and from getting into the 'secure' area past the TSA checkpoint, then the TSA must be able to match the boarding pass and ID to a computer reservation at the security checkpoint. This would require barcode scanners/ticket readers at the checkpoint. Furthermore, TSA would either need to find a way to interface with every airlines' computer systems, or the airlines would need to get together, publish the data, and agree upon a common, computer readable and verifiable standard for boarding passes (Hint: this is where a bit of government guidance/regulation could be useful).

Each of these two computer based boarding pass/ID checks would make impossible the current and widely reported airport security vulnerability, which has been documented at length on Senator Schumer's website.

Let us imagine that the government rolls out computer boarding pass checks at the TSA checkpoint. One problem remains: You can fly without ID. You can either refuse to show ID, citing a right affirmed by the US appeals court, or tell the TSA staff that you've forgotten your ID. Sure, you will be subjected to a more vigorous search - but if your aim is to bypass the no-fly list (and not to sneak a weapon past security), then you'll have succeeded in your goal.

The domestic no-fly list and the ability to fly without ID simply cannot co-exist. The former is made completely useless by the latter. If we want to have a no-fly list, we must require ID to be shown. Otherwise, a passenger simply purchases a ticket in a fake name, refuses to show ID at the checkpoint, and then can successfully board the plane.

As things stand right now, Checking ID at the security checkpoint does nothing to stop people who are on the no-fly list from actually flying. It merely inconveniences regular passengers who play by the rules. A security system that "keeps the honest honest" doesn't work when the attackers you're worried about are intelligent, well funded and willing to kill themselves to get the job done. The question of forcing passengers to show ID for domestic flights is one that is currently working its way up to the US Supreme Court. This issue, and a larger discussion surrounding the no-fly list should be publicly debated by Congress and in the newspapers. The ability, right now, to fly without ID creates a gigantic loophole in a no-fly list that arguably wasn't doing so well to begin with.

We need to figure out, as a nation where the majority of people do not support a national ID, if we want a no-fly list in the first place and if we are willing to be forced to present our papers when we want to fly/ride a train/get on a greyhound bus.

How many 4-year old children, and countless John Smiths and Robert Johnsons are we willing to let the government search and inconvenience in the name of "security".
http://slightparanoia.blogspot.com/2...-bad-news.html





Government Rates Travelers for Terrorism
AP

For the past four years without public notice, federal agents have assigned millions of Americans and other international travelers computer-generated scores assessing the risk they pose of being terrorists or criminals.

The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments. And the government intends to keep them on file for 40 years.

Earlier in November, the government disclosed the existence and details of the Automated Targeting System (ATS) for the first time in the Federal Register. Privacy and civil liberties lawyers, congressional aides and even law enforcement officers said they thought the ATS had been applied only to cargo.

The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving the United States after computers assess their travel records, including where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meals they ordered.

The Homeland Security Department notice called it ''one of the most advanced targeting systems in the world'' and said U.S. ability to spot criminals and other security threats ''would be critically impaired without access to this data.''

Still, privacy advocates view ATS with alarm. ''It's probably the most invasive system the government has yet deployed in terms of the number of people affected,'' David Sobel, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group devoted to electronic data issues, said in an interview.

A similar DHS data-mining project for domestic air travelers -- now known as Secure Flight -- caused a furor two years ago in Congress, which has barred its implementation until it can pass 10 tests for accuracy and privacy protection.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...Screening.html





Play Again, Mr. Redstone?
Geraldine Fabrikant

Sumner Redstone, the 83-year-old media mogul, had always relished talking about his empire. But there is one investment that the billionaire will not comment about: his family’s holding of Midway Games, the ailing video game maker.

In what should be a golden time for video game makers, Midway’s stock had plummeted to $8.53 a share on Friday from a five-year high of $23.16 last December. (Currently, Mr. Redstone and entities controlled by his family hold 88 percent of the outstanding shares.) During the same time, shares in rivals like Electronic Arts and Activision have risen — by 11.6 and 23.2 percent respectively — in part because the next generation of video game consoles, the new Sony PlayStation and Wii from Nintendo, are just arriving in stores.

Midway’s continued slump is a cautionary tale for old-style media companies looking to cross-pollinate with new technology without fully understanding the underlying business. Mr. Redstone began gathering up Midway shares based on his firmly held belief in convergence between games and other media properties. And indeed, Midway has struck deals with Paramount Pictures and MTV, both divisions of Mr. Redstone’s Viacom empire.

But within the game industry itself, Midway has struggled. Its biggest hit, “Mortal Kombat,” a gory fighter game, is more than a dozen years old and the company has not been able to leverage it or another early success from the company’s arcade days, “Gauntlet,” to appeal to new generations of gamers.

Midway has largely avoided getting into license auctions for big movie or sports properties, a trait which indirectly led to one recent hit: “Blitz,” a violent football game that has not been approved by the National Football League. Other marquee projects, like a deal with the film director John Singleton and the rapper Snoop Dogg to develop a game set in South Central Los Angeles, have either been canceled or flopped.

If the company’s guidance is a useful measure, this year Midway games will generate $86 million in revenues, the highest revenue it has had since the fourth quarter of 1999. It will finally post a small profit — about $2 million — for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2004, according to guidance from the chief executive, David Zucker, who joined the company in May 2003.

How bad are things at Midway? Edward Williams, an analyst at Broadgate, points out that Midway’s stock, even at its depressed level, is still trading at five times sales, a premium over other game makers. But Ivan Feinseth, an analyst at Matrix Investment Research, had a less positive outlook. “Even if Midway reports an accounting profit, it is still earning less on its capital than the cost of that capital,” he said.

“I cannot understand Mr. Redstone’s focus on the company,” Mr. Feinseth said. “In the past year it has lost significant value.”

In a telephone interview last week, Mr. Zucker said the company was now poised for a turnaround as it prepared to introduce a number of new games, like one called “Stranglehold” from John Woo, the film director (“Face/Off” and “Mission: Impossible II”) and another called “The Wheelman,” which will be heavily promoted on MTV. “The games that we are making for the next generation of consoles are more ambitious: they have more driving, shooting,” Mr. Zucker said. “We will have fewer titles but the company has made a significant investment in them.”

So far this year, Midway has introduced “Mortal Kombat: Armageddon” and it is set to introduce “Happy Feet,” based on the new Warner Brothers movie. The company also has plans to use other Viacom properties under Mr. Redstone to help in cross-promotion. Shari Redstone, Sumner Redstone’s daughter, who is vice chairman of Midway and who also oversees the Redstone family’s movie theater business, said she planned to sell the “Happy Feet” video game at theaters.

“We are focusing on fewer and better games, and we have positioned ourselves very well for the next cycle,” she said.

But a number of analysts remain skeptical of Midway’s potential. Mr. Zucker has yet to prove he can revive the company, and his sale of shares just as the stock declined early this year attracted investor attention.

Last December, for example, Mr. Zucker sold 650,000 shares within a month just as the stock began to plunge.

To some corporate governance experts those sales raised timing questions. On Dec. 8, government records show, Mr. Zucker registered under a Securities Exchange Commission rule 1 that allows corporate insiders to sell shares in many situations where they would otherwise be prohibited from doing so by insider-trading rules.

At the time, Midway’s stock was near its five-year high of $22.41 a share, helped by the fact that Mr. Redstone had been buying shares aggressively in the fall and early winter. A week later, on Dec. 16, the company announced that it was laying off employees and taking a $20 million write-off. By the end of the year, Mr. Redstone stopped acquiring shares. Midway’s stock began a slide that brought the stock to a low of $6.06 a share on June 14.

Mr. Zucker declined to comment on the timing of his sales. Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant said: “When the timing is so compressed between creating the plan and selling, it often raises questions. If Mr. Zucker was going to sell anyway, why didn’t he create the plan earlier?”

Mr. Redstone’s holdings continue to provide support for the share price. That is one reason that Mr. Williams of Broadgate is neutral on Midway. “The main issue that I have with the company is that the valuation of the equity already discounts a significant level of success,” he said.

But Mr. Redstone is unlikely to keep buying shares. If his holdings were to exceed 90 percent of the stock, then owners of its convertible bonds would be entitled to additional equity with a value of about $6 million. Mr. Redstone has said in the past that he believes the importance of owning Midway was its appeal to young male audiences that used to watch TV. If he is right, the company will ultimately become very profitable. But at some of his other companies, Mr. Redstone seems to have grown increasingly impatient for results.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/bu.../27midway.html





More-Savvy Web Retailers Expect More Holiday Profits
Bob Tedeschi

NEARLY a decade into the e-commerce era, the growth in online holiday shopping has shown few signs of slowing down, executives and analysts said. Fueled by Web searches for iPods, Elmos, gift cards and video game consoles, among many others, online retailers are expecting sales to increase by about 20 percent this year, or about the same amount as in 2005.

This holiday season is likely to be punctuated by more aggressive online promotions, new refinements in Web merchandising and a continued migration of shoppers to online options. And because retailers are smarter about marketing their sites, analysts said, they could also emerge from this holiday season with more profits than in years past.

“Companies are getting much more efficient in how they use their ad budgets,” said John Aiken, an analyst with Majestic Research, a New York-based investment firm. “It should bode well for profits.”

In particular, Mr. Aiken said retailers were buying more ads on Google and Yahoo than in years past, catching consumers at the point where a growing number of them begin their shopping. But instead of bidding aggressively for the right to display an ad on Google whenever someone searched for something generic, like “toys” or “electronics,” Mr. Aiken said retailers were buying ads alongside results of more specific search terms, like “stuffed bears” or “brown Ugg boots,” which are more likely to result in a sale.

Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst with JupiterResearch, a technology consulting firm, said online sales this year would reach the $100 billion threshold for the first time. Online sales, she added, would probably constitute 6 percent of total holiday merchandise sales.

Some of that online growth comes from new shoppers. According to a recent Jupiter survey, 114 million online users planned to buy something online this holiday season, a 6 percent jump from last year. The National Retail Federation said 47 percent of consumers would make at least one holiday purchase online this year, up from 36 percent three years ago.

Free shipping promotions and aggressive price cuts on specific items are also part of the story. Two years ago, 64 percent of online retailers offered free shipping on at least some of their items, according to Shopzilla.com, a comparison shopping service. This year, 83 percent of retailers will do so.

Online retailers are taking a more coordinated approach to offering promotional sales. The National Retail Federation, and its Shop.org online division (which represents online retailers) last year dubbed the Monday after Thanksgiving “Cyber Monday,” in recognition of an increase in shopping traffic akin to what offline stores experience on Black Friday.

Despite all that online traffic, though, Cyber Monday sales lagged those of many other holiday-season days. To convert browsers to shoppers, 400 retailers have posted sales and shipping promotions on CyberMonday.com, which will feature deals throughout the holiday season.

Among other sites offering promotions this last weekend, Delias.com, which sells apparel and accessories, offered $25 off, plus free shipping on orders of more than $75 through Nov. 30, Amazon offered $25 off orders of more than $150 through Dec. 1, and Nascar’s shopping site, Store.Nascar.com, offered 10 percent discounts on orders of more than $100 through Nov. 30.

To make those sales, of course, the sites will have to remain accessible, a task not all online merchants were up to on Friday. According to Keynote Systems, a mobile and Internet technology measurement firm, most e-commerce sites performed well over the last several days, but Walmart.com, Macys.com and Footlocker.com all shut down at least temporarily, either because of technology glitches or because the sites were overwhelmed by traffic.

Walmart.com’s problems peaked around midday Friday and the site was shut down after nine hours of extremely slow performance. A Walmart.com spokesman, Ravi Jariwala, attributed the problem to higher-than-expected traffic. Macy’s and Footlocker representatives did not immediately return phone calls Sunday seeking comment.

Even in the absence of sales, and occasional site glitches, consumers are growing more comfortable with online shopping, analysts said, as they spend more time online and as Internet merchants further refine their Web sites.

During the Internet boom, e-commerce sites made it easy on customers by following a standard method for presenting merchandise — namely, Amazon’s method — with distinct pathways to items, a brief description of the item and an easy checkout process.

Now, said Ms. Evans of Jupiter, online retailers are “creating different browsing experiences for different product categories.”

“They’re getting past the one-size-fits all philosophy,” she said.

Walmart.com, for one, recently updated its site to include more bundled product assortments in categories like toys, baby goods and furniture. Carter Cast, Walmart.com’s president, said the company had looked at purchase patterns among customers to find what items they naturally bought together, and had combined them on the site, often with discounts. “It just makes it easier for customers to buy,” he said.

Walmart.com is also showing more, and bigger, pictures of item combinations, the way department stores might display, say, a bedroom set. In previous versions of the site, Mr. Cast said, Walmart.com “did a lot more merchandising of separate items.”

“That’s still very important, but now we start off by telling a story and then getting into the items,” he said.

Meanwhile, on product pages for digital cameras and other electronic goods, Walmart.com provides much more information than for other kinds of items. Among other things, the company now provides product reviews and buying advice from CNet, an online publisher of technology-related information.

Ms. Evans of Jupiter said retailers were also refining their approaches in more subtle ways — for instance, offering customers the ability to buy items now and have them delivered on a day closer to Hanukkah or Christmas. “For anybody who’s worried about a package sitting in their garage or getting lost or opened too early, it’s great,” she said.

RedEnvelope.com, the online gifts retailer, offers the service, as does Build-A-Bear Workshop (Buildabear.com), which sells plush toys and accessories. Nancy Schwartz, Build-A-Bear’s director of advertising and direct marketing, said the feature was one of several the company has implemented to simplify the customer experience.

The company has also reduced the amount of text and graphics on the Web site’s home page, while also simplifying its drop-down menus. “We’ve gone to a cleaner, much more streamlined look than in the past,” Ms. Schwartz said. “We wanted to outline exactly where to go, so guests have the least amount of clicks possible.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/te...gy/27ecom.html





Black Friday Turned Green at the Malls Before Dawn
Michael Barbaro

The clock struck midnight. Then the mall struck back.

Early openings, deep discounts and resurgent department stores appeared to give merchants at the mall an edge over discount retailers during the holiday weekend, a reversal of fortune from 2005.

ShopperTrak RCT, which measures purchases at 45,000 mall-based stores, found that sales for the day after Thanksgiving rose 6 percent from last year, to $9 billion. On the same day last year, sales at stores monitored by ShopperTrak dropped 0.9 percent.

Discount chains, with their 5 a.m. openings and $70 portable DVD players, typically dominate the opening day of the holiday shopping season, known as Black Friday, because it was traditionally when retailers started turning a profit, or moved into the black.

But Wal-Mart, by far the nation’s biggest discount chain, threw cold water on that legacy this weekend, estimating that sales in November — including Black Friday — fell 0.1 percent, below its expectations.

Retail analysts and industry executives credited the strong performance of mall stores to an unusually aggressive posture this holiday season. Badly beaten in 2005, they stole a page from their discount rivals, pushing up their openings by as much as six hours, to 12 a.m., and offering bigger early-morning deals.

The tactics succeeded in drawing crowds but could come back to haunt the chains if consumers snatched up the bargains and skipped over the full-priced merchandise.

Gap offered 30 percent off purchases of $50 or more until noon Friday and the Limited Too promoted a buy-one-get-one-half-off sale.

Mall retailers “turned up the dial a full notch this year,” said John D. Morris, senior retail analyst a Wachovia Securities, who deployed aides across the country to track business at chains like Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch and Aéropostale.

Strong early-morning traffic, he said “did not drift off around noon. Stores were holding the attention of customer.”

An experiment with 12 a.m. openings bolstered mall traffic across the country. The crowds swelled to 15,000 at the Fashion Place Mall in Murray, Utah; 20,000 at the Christiana Mall in Newark, Del.; and 50,000 at the Maine Mall in Portland, Me.

Wally Brewster, the head of marketing at General Growth Properties, which owns the three malls, said stores that opened at midnight reported “significantly higher sales” than those that waited until 6 a.m.

Sixty percent of the stores at malls like Fashion Place opened at midnight but, because of the turnout, stores that sat it out were already planning to participate next year, Mr. Brewster said.

Emily Spendlove, 35, drove 45 minutes to wait in line outside the Fashion Place Mall on Thursday night, skipping sleep “to be part of the excitement.” Once inside, she spent $120 at an athletic clothing store called Fanzz, buying four Chicago Bears football products — two helmets, a beach towel and a photo montage.

Ernest Speranza, the chief marketing officer at KB Toys, a mall-based chain, said customers showed up for the discounts but walked out with full-priced merchandise. KB marketed Barbie dolls at 30 percent off, yet thousands of customers still bought higher-priced Bratz dolls. “I think the customer is in the mood to spend,” he said. “They seem very up, very positive.”

Visa USA said preliminary data, culled from spending by its cardholders, supported its forecast that holiday sales would increase 7.5 percent this year, compared with an 8.3 percent increase last year. Wayne Best, senior vice president of economic analysis for the company, said the average amount spent on Visa-branded credit and debit cards Friday grew 9 percent, compared with the same day last year.

Unlike in years past, Visa did not divulge detailed data about spending, but it did report that electronics and home furnishings stores experienced the biggest growth over the weekend. “They really stole the show,” Mr. Best said.

As always, stores outside the mall, like Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target, drew large crowds by dangling deals like 42-inch flat-screen TVs for less than $1,000. But the November results from Wal-Mart have dampened the outlook for big-box retailers.

The chain’s troubles are, in part, unique. It has built hundreds of supercenters so close together that individual store sales have dropped and its plans to carry more fashionable clothing have hit a snag.

But analyst said the success of department stores, which have experienced a revival over the last six months, could not be discounted as a factor.

For the first time in years, they said, discounters faced stiff competition from the mall. In its Black Friday circular, J. C. Penney advertised 35 pages of “doorbuster” deals that expired at noon, and Macy’s put a $10 coupon on the front of its print advertisements.

J. C. Penney, in a statement, reported “brisk traffic” at its stores on Friday, while Terry J. Lundgren, the chief executive of Federated Department Stores, the owner of Macy’s, said “we are off to a strong start.”

Mr. Brewster, of General Growth Properties, predicted “it is going to be a very strong season for the mall.”

Martin Stolz contributed reporting from Murray, Utah.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/bu... tner=homepage





Here’s My Number (for Today)
Anna Jane Grossman

THERE is no shortage of ways to reach Airin McClain, a singer who lives in Philadelphia. She has a Web site, an instant messenger account, a MySpace page, four e-mail addresses and two mobile phones.

Good luck getting one of those phone numbers, though. She would sooner tell you her weight.

“Why would I give out my cell?” said Ms. McClain, 23. “I don’t need a guy I met at a bar one night calling me every day for the next two weeks begging me to go out. I want to filter out the people I don’t need to have contact with.”

In an age of information oversharing, the mobile-phone number is one of the few pieces of personal information that people still choose to guard. Unwanted incoming calls are intrusive and time-consuming and can suck precious daytime cell-plan minutes. And the decision to give out a cell number can haunt you for years, as people now hold on to the numbers longer than their land-line numbers.

Some people have found a way to avoid compromising the sanctity of their cellphone without committing the modern sin of being unreachable. Instead of giving out her cell number, Ms. McClain has recently been dispersing what has become known as a “social phone number.”

This is a free number that is as disposable as a Hotmail address. A handful of Web sites are creating these mask numbers, which can be obtained in nearly every area code (users can either have a number in their own region, or make it look as if they have an office in New York City when they are actually operating out of rural Maine).

These sites buy numbers in bulk at a discount, then generate profit by displaying ads and getting users of the free service to upgrade to billable plans with features like call forwarding, call blocking and outbound calling.

For those who sign up, a recording prompts callers to leave a voice-mail message, and a text or e-mail message is then sent to the recipient to announce a new message, which can be picked up on the Web, by e-mail or by phone.

Matt Wisk, creator of the social phone number provider PrivatePhone.com (and chief marketing officer of the site’s parent company, United Online), said he got the idea to protect mobile numbers in 2005 when Paris Hilton’s cellphone was hacked into, spilling her contacts’ phone numbers all over the Internet.

“I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way,’ ” he said.

PrivatePhone.com made its debut in May, with the paradoxical tagline “My number is so private, I can make it public.” AOL introduced a similar service around the same time. SimpleVoiceBox.com, J2.com, and K7.net are other sites that offer similar services free, albeit without the benefit of customizable area codes.

Mr. Wisk said a person’s cell number has become the most personal, “the last one you’d give out.”

“Now for so many people,” he said, “it’s the only number, and it corresponds to an object you have on you at all times. It can be a disruptive technology. Having a number that goes straight to voice mail is less intrusive.”

Before cellphones became so dominant, phone numbers were among the most public pieces of personal information. They are right there in that directory at home or in the office and on the business cards stacked on a desk.

People have always been so willing to share numbers that they would ink them on cocktail napkins or even scrawl them in the occasional bathroom stall. There was solace in the fact that if and when you moved, you would start fresh with a new number.

But cellphones are inherently more private because the numbers are not in the white pages. And industry data shows that we hold on to our cell numbers longer than our home numbers. This is particularly true for young people, who increasingly have no home phone at all.

The trend is borne out in research by the Federal Communications Commission, which found that in 2004 the number of cellphones in the United States surpassed the number of land lines.

The margin continues to grow rapidly as the generation that suckled on cells opts out of getting home phones in their dorms or first apartments. The National Center for Health Statistics estimates that five million adults under 25 live in cellphone-only households, and nearly 20 percent of non-homeowners of all ages in America use cellphones exclusively.

“People are keeping the same cellphone number from high school, through college, and then into their years in the work force,” said James Katz, chairman of the communication department at Rutgers and author of “Magic in the Air: Mobile Communication and the Transformation of Social Life.”

“But it’s a number that many live to regret having given out. With e-mail or instant messaging, you can handle communication when you want to handle it, as opposed to being forced into a voice-to-voice situation. An incoming cellphone call can be an uncontrollable irritation.”

“What’s more,” he said, “you are paying for the minutes used up by someone you don’t want to speak to.”

And who wants to talk on the phone these days anyway? “Voice mails are an easy transfer of information,” said Todd Rice, a 39-year-old actor in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., who uses PrivatePhone.com. “The person doesn’t go on for 20 minutes. They don’t need to kibitz. It’s like a verbal text message, without the smiley faces.”

Of course, even if you use a social phone number, your hidden digits are likely to be announced through caller ID to anyone you deign worthy of calling back.

For that, a Web site called Jangl.com offers users the ability to create new, free numbers for every person they want to call. It works by giving the user and the person being called the same social number to call each other.

“Historically, phone numbers were assigned to a destination, like a home or work phone,” explained one of Jangl’s founders, Michael Cerda. “Then they were assigned to a device, like a cell. What we are doing is assigning numbers to specific relationships. We offer a shared, mutually anonymous number.”

Vincent Colombi, 29, is a San Francisco insurance broker who uses a Jangl number when meeting women on Match.com. “In online dating, the cellphone is like the holy grail of contact information,” he said. “It just feels aggressive to ask someone for it.”

Mr. Colombi has used his Jangl number effectively with several women he has met online. But sometimes, anonymity is a turnoff: Dating is a little like picking up a call from a restricted number; sometimes you just have to take that risk. “Last time,” Mr. Colombi said, “the woman was like, ‘Um, why can’t I just use a real number?’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/fa...30numbers.html





The Air Is Free, and Sometimes So Are the Phone Calls That Borrow It
Matt Richtel

Gary Schaffer looked out his window here last week to discover a reporter standing on his lawn, pirating his wireless Internet access to test a new mobile phone.

The phone, made by Belkin, is one of several new mobile devices that allow users to make free or low-cost phone calls over the Internet. They are designed to take advantage of the hundreds of thousands of wireless access points deployed in cafes, parks, businesses and, most important, homes.

The technology’s advocates say that as long as people are paying for high-speed Wi-Fi access in their homes, they should be able to use it as a conduit for inexpensive calls and an alternative to traditional phone service.

But, in a twist that raises some tricky ethical and legal questions, the phones can also be used on the go, piggybacking on whatever access points happen to be open and available, like that of Mr. Schaffer.

A retired business teacher, Mr. Schaffer seemed affably cautious about the idea of having his bandwidth borrowed.

“If you’re a friend, I’d say, let’s give it a try,” he said. “If you’re a stranger, probably not, unless you had to make an emergency call.”

The call made from Mr. Schaffer’s lawn went through but was quickly disconnected, apparently because of a weak signal. Mr. Schaffer did not seem to feel he owed any apology for the spotty coverage, though he did express concern for the person on the other end of the line.

“I know what it’s like to have a call dropped,” he said.

For all its limitations, the technology is starting to emerge commercially, with companies like Vonage, Skype (owned by eBay) and T-Mobile (a unit of Deutsche Telekom) now selling or supporting mobile devices that use Wi-Fi networks.

In some cases, the voice service is free. A Belkin phone that works with the Skype calling service costs about $180; calls to Skype users on computers are free, as are outgoing calls to domestic phone numbers, at least through the end of the year. Incoming calls from phones cost extra. Vonage charges $90 for a phone and $15 a month for 500 minutes of talk time.

One big hurdle is that the Wi-Fi radio frequency spectrum is unlicensed and not maintained by any one company, so call quality can be unreliable. Moving a few yards can require finding a new network to connect to. In other words, when you place free or low-cost calls — especially on a stranger’s network — you sometimes get what you pay for.

“There are a lot of dropped calls,” said Roger Entner, a telecommunications industry analyst with Ovum Research. But he said the new technology had at least one impressive ability: getting people to appreciate their old-fashioned cellular service.

“Everybody who tries a Wi-Fi phone will get down on their knees and thank the wireless phone people for the good job they’ve done on coverage,” he said.

Wi-Fi is also a power-hungry technology that can cause phone batteries to die quickly — in some cases, within an hour or two of talk time.

“When you turn on the Wi-Fi it does bring the battery life down,” said Mike Hendrick, director of product development for T-Mobile. But he said the technology was improving rapidly.

T-Mobile is letting customers in Seattle participate in a test of phones that can switch between its mobile network and Wi-Fi. The company is betting that this flexibility will come in handy if the customer is out of the network’s reach, offering another way to get online and stay connected.

More generally, the technology could threaten the dominance of traditional telecommunications networks by giving people an alternative pipe for their voice and data transmissions.

But some carriers are not convinced that the technology is ready for the market.

“We can totally understand that people want even more ubiquity from cellphones,” said Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless. But Wi-Fi devices “aren’t where they need to be,” he said.

Mr. Hendrick of T-Mobile said the new phones were good enough to provide an alternative.

“If you can’t get access because you’re buried in the basement of a metal-encased building, you can go to an open wireless network,” he said. Or it could be useful “if you’re out in the suburbs, in the basement, and you have Wi-Fi in the house.”

But what if you’re just on somebody’s lawn? How do people feel about a passer-by using their bandwidth to place free phone calls?

For his part, Mr. Schaffer said he would mind only if it had an adverse effect on him — which in theory it could, if the voice data caused congestion on his network. There is no clear indication to a network’s owner that a phone call is taking place, so most will not have the chance to object.

Not everyone is so open to walk-by talkers. “I don’t like it,” Kevin Asbra, another San Franciscan, said. “It’s an abuse of the system. I pay my bills. Why should you call for free?”

His wife, Karen Seratti, begged to differ. A Web site usability tester, she says she regularly looks for open access points so she can check e-mail when she is traveling or away from the office.

“I walk around with my Mac all the time looking for access,” she said. “When you have to send an e-mail, you have to send an e-mail.”

Sometimes she must scavenge from within her own house, as when the family’s Internet connection goes down. She offered a neighborly tip: “Walk into the alley — you can find the network called Fido265.”

Finding an open access point might prove challenging in some places, but not in San Francisco, where the spread of Wi-Fi networks has outpaced even that of yoga studios and organic produce shops.

In a walk through the Inner Sunset district, a phone’s display showed that most wireless networks in range were protected, requiring a password for access.

There were, however, enough unsecured ones that it was possible to get online every half a block or so. Because the Wi-Fi phone looks like a standard cellphone, it is much less conspicuous than a laptop on the street. The proliferation of Wi-Fi laptops and, in turn, hunters of free Internet access has already raised questions about whether borrowers of bandwidth are breaking any laws.

“There’s a big debate going on right now,” said Jennifer S. Granick, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Ms. Granick said some people believed that using a connection without permission constituted unauthorized access to computers, which is a crime, while others disagree.

Traditional analogies are hard to come by, she said, adding that she does not believe using Wi-Fi is the same as trespassing, since the signals travel beyond property limits. “People say that you can’t go inside somebody’s house; but I say, you can sit outside and listen to the radio,” Ms. Granick said.

She added that the situation was different when the owner of a wireless network chose to require a password. “If it’s secured, it’s marked as off-limits,” she said.

Alex Milowski, an executive at a technology start-up who was out for a walk last week with his infant son, Max, said that it was fine for Wi-Fi phone users to jump onto an open network. Would he teach Max that swiping bandwidth without permission was O.K.?

“By the time he’s worried about it, access will be free,” Mr. Milowski said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/te...gy/27wifi.html





The Socket Seekers
Christopher Elliott



Just when travelers thought they had run out of things to complain about at the airport, their fading laptops and cellphones have signaled yet another problem: a shortage of power outlets.

Airport concourses, particularly older ones, were never known for their abundance of electrical sockets. But a convergence of factors — including new wireless Internet access in terminals, stricter airport security measures and the proliferation of power-hungry gadgets — has added to the deficit of outlets. Airports are rushing to add new ones.

“You can’t help but notice business travelers hovering above the outlets at the airport, waiting for their turn,” said Joanne Paternoster, a former assistant director of customer service for the aviation department of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and now a consultant for Maritz Research. “People are arriving earlier at the airport so that they have enough time to make it through security, and there are just not enough outlets to go around.”

Judy Bonghi, a human resources manager in Philadelphia, experienced the plug problem firsthand recently at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. She needed to recharge her DVD player on a stopover, but every outlet in the waiting area was occupied. “I ended up sitting on the floor at a gate — not my gate, since nothing was available there — to plug it in,” she recalled. “And I was sitting next to another person doing the same thing with his laptop.”

Atlanta’s airport, the nation’s busiest, is adding new outlets to accommodate customers like Ms. Bonghi. “With today’s technology, there’s definitely an increase in demand for outlets,” said Ashraf Demian, chief electrical engineer for Hartsfield-Jackson.

How many sockets are enough? Generally speaking, the number of outlets needs to be doubled, from one every 25 feet to one every 12 feet, according to Mr. Demian. But that can be costly. The price for each outlet in a renovated concourse — like Atlanta’s new international terminal, which is expected to open in four years — is $150 to $200. But in an existing structure, tearing out walls to add sockets can cost thousands per outlet, he said.

Atlanta is not the only airport to recognize the energy crisis. Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport recently converted some of its pay phones into free laptop recharging stations. Salt Lake City International Airport has installed new power outlets in its public seating areas and contracted with Smarte Carte of St. Paul to offer a recharging station for mobile phones and hand-held computers, at $3 a charge. And Eppley Airfield, near Omaha, just wired its snack bar in the north boarding area with new sockets.

But as in Atlanta, most of the new airport power outlets are being added gradually, as part of a renovation. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport recently remodeled its busy Terminal 4, creating several new areas where computer users can place their laptops on a shelf and plug into an outlet. Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport is currently renovating its A and B Concourses, and plans to add new outlets to the gate lounges.

Travelers are usually reluctant to complain about the scarcity of outlets. That is because they are unsure if they are allowed to use the sockets, which sometimes appear to be there for the exclusive use of airlines and cleaning crews. (At most airports, passengers are permitted to use the outlets, although they are rarely invited to do so.)

And while some domestic business and first-class seats have built-in power ports, most economy-class seats are powerless.

But for this year’s holiday travel period, as travelers arrive at the terminal even earlier to get through the security checkpoints, and with record numbers of passengers expected to use the nation’s airports, officials are anticipating a surge in complaints.

“When the terminal is full, and you have a weather delay, and everyone is trying to hook up their cellphones and laptop computers, that’s when you hear about it,” said Fredrick Piccolo, the chief executive of Sarasota Bradenton International Airport in Florida.

Airports are at least partly to blame for the outlet shortage. For the last several years, they have been busy adding wireless Internet hot spots to their terminals. In effect, these wireless access points have encouraged business travelers to use their laptops and data-enabled cellphones but have not given them the power needed to do so.

“Airport Wi-Fi has gotten a lot of attention from airports,” said Scott Wintner, a spokesman for Airports Council International-North America, an airport trade group. “But there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about power plugs,” even as Wi-Fi has created new demand for power in terminals.

Business travelers are not helping the situation, either. While it is true that more people are traveling with the latest devices, the real power hogs tend to be yesterday’s gadgets — aging laptops and batteries unable to hold a charge.

“My laptop will barely make it through boot-up before the battery is spent,” said George Armstrong, a sales engineer from Green Cove Springs, Fla., who frequently finds himself with a lifeless laptop at the airport. “I probably should get replacement batteries. Hopefully, road warrior requests will reach the powers that be in the airports, and they’ll accommodate us.”

Savvy air travelers rely on their instincts to sniff out the nearest power. “The easiest way to find a power outlet is to think like the cleaning lady,” said Robert Cowen, a frequent traveler who also publishes a Web site for travelers called InternetTravelTips.com. “Where do they plug in the vacuum cleaner? The answer to that is where you’ll find a power plug. Very often, it’s in a pillar or behind a row of seats on the wall.”

But finders are not necessarily keepers. Christina Zimmel, an education specialist for a hospital in Clawson, Mich., recently witnessed a dispute over a power outlet. “I actually saw one business traveler get in a shouting match with a maintenance worker who needed an outlet for the vacuum cleaner while he needed it for his laptop,” she said.

Edwin Kelley, an engineer from Los Angeles, may have the most sensible interim solution: an extension cord with three outlets and a readiness to ask other travelers to share. “I’ve never been refused,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/business/28plug.html





A Layered Look Reveals Ancient Greek Texts
Felicia R. Lee

An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from the fourth century B.C. What is slowly coming to light, scholars say, represents the most significant discovery of Hyperides text since 1891, illuminating some fascinating, time-shrouded insights into Athenian law and social history.

“This helps to fill in critical moments in ancient classical Greece,” said William Noel, the curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum here and the director of the Archimedes Palimpsest project. Hyperides “is one of the great foundational figures of Greek democracy and the golden age of Athenian democracy, the foundational democracy of all democracy.”

The Archimedes Palimpsest, sold at auction at Christie’s for $2 million in 1998, is best known for containing some of the oldest copies of work by the great Greek mathematician who gives the manuscript its name. But there is more to the palimpsest than Archimedes’ work, including 10 pages of Hyperides, offering tantalizing and fresh insights into the critical battle of Salamis in 480 B.C., in which the Greeks defeated the Persians, and the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., which spelled the beginning of the end of Greek democracy.

The palimpsest is believed to have been created by Byzantine monks in the 13th century, probably in Constantinople. As was the practice then, the durable and valuable vellum pages of several older texts were washed and scraped, to remove their writing, and then used for a medieval prayer book. The pages of the older books became the sheaths of a newer one, thus a palimpsest (which is pronounced PAL-imp-sest and is Greek for “rubbed again”).

After the Christie’s sale the manuscript was left at the museum by the private collector for conservation and study. This year imagers at Stanford University used powerful X-ray fluorescence imaging to read its final pages, which are being interpreted, transcribed and translated by a group of scholars in the United States and Europe.

The new Hyperides revelations include two previously unknown speeches, effectively increasing this renowned orator’s body of work by 20 percent, said Judson Herrman, a 36-year-old professor of classics at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa. He is one of a handful of classicists who have written doctoral dissertations on Hyperides.

Hyperides lived from 390 or 389 B.C. until 322 B.C. and was an orator who made speeches at public meetings of the citizen assembly. A contemporary of Aristotle and Demosthenes, he wrote speeches for himself and for others and spoke at important political trials. In 322 B.C. Hyperides was executed by the Macedonians for participating in a failed rebellion.

“It’s a spotlight shining on an important moment in history,” said Mr. Herrman, currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C. Until the new leaves were found in the palimpsest, most scholars believed only fragments of Hyperides survived beyond the Classical period. The mystery of Archimedes’ treatise on combinatorics, the Stomachion, was solved in 2003 by deciphering the palimpsest. Now W. Robert Connor, the president of the Teagle Foundation, which provides education and financial resources for education, called the discovery of new Hyperides text a “tour de force of the first order.”

A combination of high-tech imagery and old-fashioned deciphering, sometimes letter by letter, was used to resurrect the older text, revealing a slice of Athenian history in the days after its devastating defeat by Philip II, king of Macedonia and the father of Alexander the Great, Mr. Connor said. “The number of times you get a new text is very small,” Mr. Connor, a former professor of classics at Princeton said. “It’s like hearing an old violin played at a superb level.”

Cecil Wooten, a professor of classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who attended a Hyperides presentation by Mr. Herrman on Nov. 13, called the discovery “interesting and significant.”

“Although Hyperides is a very important fourth-century Greek orator, one of the canon of 10, we have very little of his speeches, and much of that is fragmentary,” Professor Wooten said in an e-mail message.

Michael Gargan, a professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “Every bit we get is important.” Mr. Gargan, a major scholar on ancient Greek law, noted that Hyperides wrote many speeches and had a leading reputation in antiquity, but only about six of his speeches survive.

“This obviously will contribute a great deal more,” he said. “I eagerly await seeing the text.”

In one recently discovered speech, Hyperides talks about the number of boats (220) — a number not previously clear— belonging to the Greek side in the Salamis battle, Mr. Judson said. In another speech, after the Battle of Chaeronea, he argues that the tragic defeat was the result of chance, not bad policy. In a political case Hyperides supports the Demosthenes policy that led to the Athenian defeat.

“For we chose the noblest policy and we believed it necessary to free the Greeks by taking on the risks ourselves, just like before,” Hyperides argues in a passage translated by Mr. Herrman and transcribed by Natalie Tchernetska of Riga, Latvia, a project scholar and specialist in Greek palimpsests, whom Mr. Herrman credits with first identifying the material.

“One must assign the start and the suggestion of every risk to those who make the motion, but the outcome of these things is to be assigned to chance,” Hyperides argues in the speech. “Diondas proposes the opposite happen: not that Demosthenes be praised for his policy but that I give a defense because of chance.”

Professor Herrman said the material also gives new information about inheritance laws in Athens and suggests a different timing for the Demosthenes case.

Historians had always believed that the trial of Demosthenes took place before the battle of Chaeronea, which Athens lost to the Macedonians, but the newly discovered speech shows that it was after the battle, Mr. Herrman said. “We had no idea of what the content of the trial was,” he said. “Now we have an Athenian view of their own defeat.”

Mr. Herrman recently visited the Walters, where he was able to look at the small, barely legible pages of the palimpsest under a microscope. He also met with Mr. Noel; Abigail Quandt, the senior conservator of manuscripts and rare books; and specialists in imaging techniques. “Three weeks ago I discovered I can read things in person that I can’t get on the digital images,” Mr. Herrman said.

Ms. Quandt said she took almost four years to take the palimpsest apart. The day of Mr. Herrman’s visit, pages of the text were laid on a table where fiber optic lights on either side revealed aspects of the manuscript. Ultraviolet, strobe and tungsten lights were used to enhance the visibility of the text. After computer processing, the hypertext appeared red, and the prayer book text appeared black.

The palimpsest contains about 120 printed pages of Archimedes text, in addition to the Hyperides material, a philosophical commentary on Aristotle, a neo-Platonic philosophical text, pages from a liturgical book on the life of a saint and at least five pages so well-erased it is impossible to determine what they are, Mr. Noel said.

Most of the palimpsest has been translated, and it will probably be available to scholars by 2008, followed by an exhibition at the museum, Mr. Noel said. The entire list of scholars for the Archimedes Palimpsest project, as well as detailed reports on the finding, can be found at archimedespalimpsest.org.

“This book is the most important palimpsest in the world,” Mr. Noel said. “We’re learning about the nuts and bolts of ancient medieval history and gaining a new understanding of the early history of the calculus and of our understanding of ancient physics. The prayer book is made up of five other books. Another of these books seems to be an early Christian — second or third century — commentary on ancient views of the soul and why they were incorrect.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/arts/27greek.html





The Gore of Greece, Torn From a Comic
Robert Ito

THE story of “300” — the popular comic book mini-series and, soon, a film from Warner Brothers — began when Frank Miller, the series’s creator, was 6. The year was 1963, and “The 300 Spartans” was in theaters. In this telling of the battle of Thermopylae, Richard Egan played the Greek king Leonidas, who in 480 B.C. led 300 warriors in a doomed battle against the much larger Persian army, and David Farrar, regal in robes of purple and green, was the Persian king Xerxes. The film’s dialogue and staging may seem a bit quaint now. But the young Mr. Miller was stunned as he watched its climax, in which the few remaining Spartans are slaughtered in a hail of arrows.

“It was a shocker, because the heroes died,” Mr. Miller said in a recent telephone interview. “I was used to seeing Superman punch out planets. It was an epiphany to realize that the hero wasn’t necessarily the guy who won.”

As a young comic book artist and writer, Mr. Miller would return again and again to the concept of heroic, often seppuku-like sacrifice. In “The Dark Knight Returns,” which many credit with reinvigorating the Batman franchise, an aging Bruce Wayne goes out in a blaze of glory in an outmatched battle against his old pal Superman. In “Sin City” one hero shoots himself in the mouth to protect a loved one; another is executed by a corrupt system after ridding the world of not one but two cannibals.

“I tend to be drawn to characters who might die disgraced to the world, who technically lose whatever combat they’re in but win the moral victory,” Mr. Miller said.

Over the years the story of the famous confrontation at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. stuck in his mind. In the mid-’90s, Mr. Miller started work on what was to become “300.” He researched the battle, spoke with scholars and traveled to Greece, to the site of Leonidas’ last stand. He studied the armor and philosophies and fighting methods of the Spartans, and finally, working with the colorist Lynn Varley, created a series that in 1999 won three Eisners and two Harveys, awards considered among the comics industry’s most prestigious.

In delivering “300” to the screen in March, Warner Brothers will face the challenge of realizing Mr. Miller’s distinctive vision of the bloody battle while avoiding any sense that it is simply extending a series of Greek-theme epics that began with Wolfgang Petersen’s “Troy” and Oliver Stone’s “Alexander,” both released in 2004.

Zack Snyder, the 40-year-old director who is now completing postproduction work on “300,” is only too aware of the danger that some viewers might find it hard to distinguish his movie from its more star-driven predecessors, neither of which had a spectacular run at the box office. “I could see Hollywood not wanting to do it,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to do it.”

Sitting in his office in an editing facility in Burbank, Mr. Snyder was surrounded by Spartan helmets, a shield peppered with puncture holes and, as a reminder of the precedents, swords from “Alexander” and “Troy.” “We got them from the Warner Brothers prop department,” he said, grabbing one, feeling its heft. “The ones from ‘Troy’ were better.”

To judge from excerpts Mr. Snyder screened this day, he and his co-writers, Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon, have managed to evoke anything but a classic battle epic. The film’s high-flying acrobatics and over-the-top combat scenes remind one of Zhang Yimou’s “House of Flying Daggers”; its fantastical computer-generated beasts evoke the “Lord of the Rings” series or “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.” As for the Persians, no tired robes and goofy hats here. These warriors sport chrome Kabuki-style masks and gold rings in their brows, noses and nipples. And then there are the pitched battles, with spears ramming through eye sockets and innards, all played out against a perpetually overcast sky.

All of this is perhaps truer to Mr. Miller’s work than to history. Mr. Miller says that while he strove for historical accuracy whenever possible, art won out in certain areas. The real Spartans, for instance, wore heavy body armor, clunky stuff that weighed about half as much as they did: handy in a pitched battle, but hardly sexy or eye-grabbing, certainly not for an action comic.

“My first versions of the soldiers looked like beetles,” he said. “They looked like they couldn’t move faster than two miles an hour.”

So Mr. Miller ditched the armor in favor of a more natural look. In his series, Leonidas and his warriors wear red capes and little else; when in battle, they cover their privates in what appear to be leather Speedos. “When you look at the ancient Greek vase paintings, you’ll see that soldiers are drawn nude, for the same reason I did,” Mr. Miller said.

For his part, Mr. Snyder, an admirer of Mr. Miller’s work, went to great lengths to reproduce the look and texture of the comic books. He photocopied the series, cut out all the frames, then glued favorites into notebooks, one per page. He would then sketch what he thought might happen before each frame, and what might happen immediately after. Voilà: instant storyboard. He pulled out a notebook to show how it was done. “So this frame is the shot,” he said, revealing a picture of the Spartans pushing an army of Persians off the edge of a cliff. “So now I have to figure out, how do I get there? And what happens next?”

Mr. Snyder began his push to make “300” after releasing his remake of the cult horror film “Dawn of the Dead” in 2004. The next year he created a test shot for the proposed film. It was three minutes long, he said, with “lots of killing.”

Mr. Miller recalled that he was not thrilled initially about the idea of a film adaptation of “300,” which he called the “crown jewel” of his career. “ ‘300’ means an awful lot to me, so to see it homogenized into something like ‘Troy,’ which manages to turn the Iliad inside out, would betray it,” he said. Mr. Miller was wowed by the test shot, however, and, after repeated prodding by Gianni Nunnari and Mark Canton, two of the film’s producers, Mr. Miller agreed to let the project proceed, while reserving the right to consult on the script.

Mr. Snyder remembers things a bit differently. “I think he gave it to us because he thought no one else was going to do it,” he said. “It seems unmakable, in some ways.” Whatever the reason, Mr. Snyder got the project, and preproduction began in the summer of 2005.

To mold his Spartans into fighting form Mr. Snyder enlisted Mark Twight, the author of “Extreme Alpinism” and founder of Gym Jones, an invitation-only workout center in Salt Lake City that is more torture chamber than Sports Club/L.A.: squats and dead lifts, not treadmill runs, supply the cardio. Under Mr. Twight’s tutelage, the actors and stunt people endured a two-and-a-half-month boot camp before the cameras rolled. The diet was brutal — meat, leaves and berries, Mr. Twight said — and the workouts even worse.

Vincent Regan, who plays a Spartan captain, dropped 40 pounds in 16 weeks; his dead lift jumped to 355 pounds from 205. In contrast to the relatively doughy physiques on display in “The 300 Spartans,” the warriors of “300” are ripped. “I told everyone, ‘You guys have got to be in crazy shape, in superhero shape,’ ” Mr. Snyder said. To inspire the troops, he had T-shirts made that read, “I died at Thermopylae.”

To recreate the appropriately gloomy backgrounds — Mr. Miller, it seems, never met an overcast day he didn’t like — he shot almost entirely against a blue screen, then added the settings and weather. To complete the vision of Mr. Miller’s shadowy world, digital effects people went for heavy contrast: the light areas really blown out, the dark areas very, very black.

Much of the zip in the action sequences was also achieved in postproduction: warriors leap and slash in slow motion, seemingly freeze in midair, then speedily dart away. The most visually stunning action sequences, however, had little to do with computer-generated images. Real actors staged the scenes of phalanx warfare, in which tightly formed troops lock shields, forming a nearly impenetrable wall. The Spartans would then thrust their spears out of the openings, or use their mass of shields to push back their enemies.

“It was row upon row of men pushing and shoving and slipping in the mud and stabbing with spears,” Mr. Miller said of the tactic. “It wasn’t one hero alone in a chaotic battle, swinging wildly. They were machines.”

In July Mr. Snyder went to San Diego to pitch his film at Comic-Con, the mecca of the comic book industry. The convention, which drew more than 100,000 fans this year, has become a bubbling cauldron of buzz: if you showcase something good, the news will spread to hundreds of blogs, chat rooms and fan sites the next day; anger the faithful, and you might as well slink back to the editing room.

Two of the film’s stars, Gerard Butler and David Wenham, attended the event, but the audiences really came to see the clips. Mr. Snyder created a special R-rated teaser for the event. Attendees saw scenes of mass carnage, a topless oracle and King Leonidas kicking a Persian emissary down a well. “All gore, all the time,” Mr. Snyder said. The crowd went nuts, compelling organizers to show the teaser three times.

Of course the big question is whether the film will attract an audience not already predisposed toward tales of brave warriors in capes. “The Frank Miller crowd, they’re there no matter what,” Mr. Snyder said. “The trick is getting the average moviegoer to go: ‘What the hell? That’s not normal. I’ve got to go see what that’s about.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/movies/26ito.html





To Web Fans, Peter Jackson Is the One True Director
Sharon Waxman

When it comes to power games, some in Hollywood are beginning to learn a basic lesson of digital politics: the Internet plays rough.

Such is the case with a growing spat between New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson, the A-list director of the “Lord of the Rings” movies and a savvy player when it comes to the power of the Web. Last week Mr. Jackson posted a letter on a fan Web site, theonering.net, explaining that he had been dumped by New Line from “The Hobbit,” a movie based on the book by J. R. R. Tolkien, and still in the planning stages.

“This outcome is not what we anticipated or wanted, but neither do we see any positive value in bitterness and rancor,” Mr. Jackson wrote with his producing partner and wife, Fran Walsh. “We now have no choice but to let the idea of a film of The Hobbit go and move forward with other projects.”

But to legions of avid Jackson and Tolkien fans, the news was a bombshell that went whizzing through cyberspace.

“This is a big blow to the LOTR community, I feel like there has been a death in the family,” wrote a Web master called Xoanon, referring to the “Lord of the Ring” trilogy by its initials. “Why couldn’t New Line come to an agreement with P J? Is there really a time option on the film rights for New Line? Who will they get to direct?”

Within hours thousands of other fans weighed in on lordotrings.com, onering.com and other sites, worrying about the future of the Tolkien enterprise and asking New Line, which has an option to produce the film until 2009, to back down. Theonering.net was among those calling for a boycott of any Hobbit film not made by Mr. Jackson.

“The fan community as a whole is up in arms about the way Peter Jackson has been treated,” said Chris Pirrotta, a founder of theonering.net site, which has faithfully followed Mr. Jackson for years, even posting his video diary during the making of last year’s “King Kong.” “Fans are very distraught to see someone who’s created something so wonderful being treated so poorly by the studio.”

On the heels of the protest, reporters and entertainment bloggers called the studio to ask about the film’s fate. In what was once an insular club of power brokers and back-stabbers, the voices of outsiders — dancing across the globe at the speed of a modem — have begun to penetrate.

New Line declined to comment on “The Hobbit,” but said in a statement to The Times that the situation was complicated by the lawsuit of Mr. Jackson’s company, Wingnut Films, against the studio over revenues from the “Lord of the Rings,” which New Line produced.

“We are in litigation with Wingnut Films, and have been unsuccessful despite a formal mediation, as well as discussions with Wingnut directly to settle the matter; therefore, we cannot comment at this point,” the studio said this week.

But anxiety continued to reverberate in cyberspace. Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf in the Rings series, wrote on his Web site, mckellen.com: “I’m very sad as I should have relished revisiting middle Earth with Peter again as team-leader. It’s hard to imagine any other director matching his achievement in Tolkien country.”

And Saul Zaentz, the veteran producer who holds the underlying rights, was quoted on yet another Web site, this one in German, saying Mr. Jackson would indeed direct “The Hobbit,” which still has no script, no budget, no cast and no production date.

In an interview from Italy Mr. Zaentz said he was misquoted, but that Mr. Jackson should be the one to direct “The Hobbit.” “We would like to see it done, of course with Peter Jackson,” he said. “He’s a good film director. He’s the right guy. He knows it too. But it’s a hard thing to do, when you feel you didn’t get the money you were supposed to get.”

The contretemps over “The Hobbit,” those involved say, is really about the lawsuit over revenues from the “Lord of the Rings” series, which has taken in a staggering $2.9 billion in box office receipts alone.

In February 2005 Mr. Jackson sued New Line, saying he was owed money from the trilogy. Mr. Jackson has said he sued over profits from “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” after he was unable to get New Line to submit to an independent audit of its books. The lawsuit, which was unsuccessfully mediated, still has no court date, and so far no audit has taken place. New Line executives have complained that Mr. Jackson has become vastly wealthy from the Tolkien trilogy and is unjustifiably portraying himself as a victim.

In his letter Mr. Jackson said New Line was holding the new movie hostage to his lawsuit, saying that Michael Lynne, the New Line co-president, told Mr. Jackson’s manager, Ken Kamins, “that the way to settle the lawsuit was to get a commitment from us to make the Hobbit, because ‘that’s how these things are done.’ ”

Mr. Jackson added: “Michael Lynne said we would stand to make much more money if we tied the lawsuit and the movie deal together and this may well be true, but it’s still the worst reason in the world to agree to make a film.”

Neither Mr. Jackson nor the studio would comment publicly on the lawsuit.

The final straw in continuing tensions between the two sides came earlier this month, when Mr. Jackson declined to contribute a video salute to New Line for the celebration of the 40th anniversary of its founding, planned for next year, according to two people familiar with the matter. Days later a New Line executive called Mr. Kamins to say that the studio would be seeking another director for “The Hobbit.”

So while New Line accused Mr. Jackson of trying to negotiate the lawsuit through the Internet, Mr. Jackson’s camp accused the studio of brinksmanship in a fit of pique.

It was left to another studio entirely, MGM, which owns the distribution rights to “The Hobbit,” to step in and calm the raging waters — and the Web sites.

“We expect to partner with New Line in financing ‘The Hobbit,’ ” a spokesman for MGM said. “We support Peter Jackson as a filmmaker, and believe that when the dust settles, he’ll be making the movie. We can’t imagine any other result.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/movies/29hobbit.html





Web Catalog Offers Prison-Made Products
David Dishneau

Internet shopping knows no boundaries, not even for products made behind bars. Maryland Correctional Enterprises, the manufacturing division of the state Division of Correction, has put its 182-page catalog online. Now anyone can see, if not buy, hundreds of items the agency offers for sale to government agencies and Maryland nonprofit organizations. The catalog is at http://www.dpscs.state.md.us/mcem .

The products include institutional clothing, bedding, clocks, signs - and lots of furniture. Nearly half the pages are filled with furniture, including the Slammer table, designed for correctional environments and named "because they put 'em in the slammer," said Jeff Beeson, executive director of Maryland Correctional Enterprises' board of directors.

Topping the furniture offerings is the Traditional Veneer Line, with prices up to $1,885 for a U-shaped desk.

There's pure Maryland pride in the Canton Collection. It features nearly three dozen pieces made from scratch - unlike some of the other lines that are merely assembled at the prisons. The pieces are designed by furniture plant manager Rusty Hyatt, who lives in - where else? - Canton.

The list of seating options reads like a Maryland geography lesson: Silver Spring, Chesapeake, Potomac, New Windsor, Frederick, Bel Air, Crisfield, Monkton, Hampstead, Ellicott, Allegany and Woodbine.

"We're proud to be Maryland. We're proud to be the prison industry for Maryland," Beeson said.

He said MCE employs about 1,600 inmates at nine prisons and in warehouse, delivery and photocopying jobs outside prison walls. They are paid a base rate of $1.10 to $2.60 a day, Beeson said.

The agency sold $42.8 million worth of goods last year, making it 10th among prison industries in sales in the United States.

Beeson said inmates who work in the plants tend to re-offend and return to prison at about half the rate of those who don't. Inmates must have a high-school diploma or GED to work for the agency, which can help with their schooling.

"We truly believe we're doing something good here," Beeson said.

Private furniture makers aren't as keen on prison industries. The Independent Office Products and Furniture Dealers Association, based in Arlington, Va., supports a bill passed in September by the U.S. House of Representatives that would require Federal Prison Industries Inc. to compete on a more even footing with the private sector for federal contracts. A 2004 law ended its monopoly on supplying office furniture and other items to federal agencies, but left it with some advantages, said Michael Ochs, the trade group's director of government affairs.

He said the association has concentrated on the federal, not the state level. But Ochs said state prison industries - and every state has such an agency - also cut into private industry sales.

"We would like to see open and fair competition where the industry can compete on an equal footing," Ochs said.

Maryland law requires state agencies to buy from Maryland Correctional Enterprises any goods or services it can provide at prices at or below the prevailing average market price.

Beeson said Maryland Correctional Enterprises tries to limit its negative economic impact on the private sector by producing things not made by Maryland companies.

"Every year we study it, and for the whole state of Maryland, we constitute less than 3 percent of anyone's business in any one category," he said.

One category in which the agency has no competition is license plates. It makes every tag sold in Maryland, accounting for $3.8 million in sales.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-25-17-30-53





Shorthand for a Holiday: Ralphie, the BB Gun and the Flagpole
Stuart Elliott

AS the holiday shopping season begins, Madison Avenue is paying tribute to a movie that has become a perennial for the generations that grew up after popular Christmas films like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on 34th Street.”

The movie is “A Christmas Story,” in which the humorist Jean Shepherd offers a rueful look back at his boyhood, circa 1940. The film presents the comic misadventures of Ralphie Parker, whose most fervent wish — nay, obsession — is to receive an “official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle” as a Christmas gift from his parents.

“A Christmas Story” was no huge success when it came out in 1983. Some were put off by its wry, even sardonic tone, so at odds with traditional holiday fare.

But in the last decade, the film has become as much a part of Christmas as “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” and jokes about fruitcake. A big reason is the annual marathon showing by the TBS cable network, which starts each Christmas Eve; in 24 hours, the movie is shown a dozen times in a row.

In 2003, Macy’s, which figures centrally in “Miracle on 34th Street,” saluted “A Christmas Story” in a holiday window of its flagship store in Herald Square. This year in particular, advertisers and agencies are demonstrating how much the movie inspires them.

A commercial for Cingular Wireless by the Atlanta office of BBDO Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, recreates the central narrative of the film in 30 seconds, replacing the BB gun that Ralphie desires with a cellphone.

Adults in the movie discourage Ralphie from insisting on the air rifle by declaring, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” In the commercial, the refrain becomes, “You’ll run the bill up.” A happy ending ensues when Ralphie’s parents buy him a prepaid Cingular cellphone, the GoPhone.

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And among 20 whimsical holiday games that will be sponsored online by Office Max, the retail chain, one is called “Don’t Shoot Your Eye Out” (dontshootyoureyeout.com), featuring the “Red Wrangler authentic pump action saddle carbine” BB gun.

Another Office Max online game, “Stuck to a Pole” (stucktoapole.com), evokes a scene from “A Christmas Story” in which a classmate of Ralphie’s, Flick, gets his tongue stuck to a metal flagpole on a frigid day. The Office Max online games are created by a New York boutique agency, Toy.

The ads inspired by “A Christmas Story” are another example of the persistent interplay between advertising and popular culture. That interaction is becoming increasingly common as marketers seek to capture the attention of distracted consumers by infusing ads with entertainment value.

“We are always looking for ideas for holiday ads,” said Rich Wakefield, executive vice president and executive creative director at BBDO Atlanta, “and who in America hasn’t seen ‘A Christmas Story’?”

In creating the Cingular commercial, Mr. Wakefield said, BBDO Atlanta obtained rights from Time Warner, which owns “A Christmas Story,” and from the Shepherd estate. “It was one of the easiest shoots,” he said of the production of the spot. “We screened the movie and said, ‘Here’s the scene; let’s play it,’ and matched it shot for shot.”

Since the commercial began running on Nov. 14, “I’ve gotten a ton of great response,” Mr. Wakefield said, adding that the spot was scheduled to appear through the holidays.

The commercial for Cingular Wireless, a unit of AT&T and BellSouth, also seems popular with visitors to video-sharing Web sites. Comments on YouTube include presumably sincere remarks like “Best Christmas commercial this year” and “This is one funky parody.”

Bob Thacker, senior vice president for marketing and advertising at Office Max, recalled a popular promotional campaign some years ago when he worked at Target, centered on the 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“For the ‘greatest generation,’ ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was their ‘Christmas Carol,’ ” Mr. Thacker said, referring to the veterans of World War II. “The zeitgeist has changed.”

“Fun is a big part of what our culture is,” Mr. Thacker said, contrasting the humor of “A Christmas Story” with the sentiment of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The humorous approach of the online games helps the company “connect in a more meaningful way” with consumers, he said.

The online games, presented under the rubric “Spread the cheer. Office Max,” are being promoted in grass-roots fashion. The Web addresses are appearing in Office Max holiday circulars and bag stuffers, said Anne Bologna, partner and president at Toy, and on banner ads on Web sites like AOL, MSN and Yahoo.

The “Stuck to a Pole” game will have a page on two social-networking Web sites, Facebook and MySpace, she added. That game and three others will be the subject of teaser video clips to be available on youtube.com.

“An office-supply store as a gift destination wasn’t exactly an easy leap,” said Ari Merkin, partner and executive creative director at Toy. “If we were going to ask people to get a gift at Office Max, we felt we would have to start by doing a little giving of our own.”

The other games satirize various seasonal mainstays like themed apparel (myholidaysweater.com), snow globes (shaketheglobe.com) and meal choices (roastaturkey.com).

Several games are inspired by the nonhuman characters that populate the holidays, including reindeer (everythingsareindeer.com, reindeerarmwrestling.com) and elves (yougotelfed.com, elfyourself.com and elfinterviews.com).

This year’s marathon of “A Christmas Story” will begin on TBS at 8 p.m. Dec. 24. It will be the 10th annual presentation, said Ken Schwab, senior vice president for programming at TBS in Atlanta, part of the Turner Broadcasting System division of Time Warner.

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The viewership during the marathon last year was the largest to date, Mr. Schwab said, as 45.4 million people tuned in during the 24 hours to watch all or part of the movie.

One reason TBS started the marathon, Mr. Schwab acknowledged, was that its parent owns the film. But a more compelling reason was that the movie has always “showed some recurring strength” in the ratings, he said. “We run thousands and thousands of movies, and usually ratings tend to drop off as they’re repeated,” Mr. Schwab said. “But the ninth time for ‘A Christmas Story’ was the most watched.”

He added that “it plays across all age groups,” because the older viewers appreciate the nostalgia and “the kids like a little bit of attitude.”

The marathon will be sponsored by the Weinstein Company, promoting the coming film “Arthur and the Invisibles.” Weinstein sponsored the 2005 marathon with commercials promoting the movie “Hoodwinked.”

Advertisers may like “A Christmas Story” because of all the brand names in the film. Besides Red Ryder, there are references to vintage products like Lifebuoy, Lux, Ovaltine, Palmolive and Tinker Toys.

And Ralphie’s traumatic confrontation with Santa Claus and his helpers takes place at Higbee’s, a department store that, alas, unlike Macy’s, is not around for Christmas 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/bu...a/27adcol.html





Online Shopping Season Begins With Deals
Anne D'Innocenzio

After jamming malls on Friday for discounted flat-screen TVs and toys, shoppers clicked onto their computers at work Monday as retailers ushered in the start of the online shopping season with bargains and marketing hype.

With an increasing number of online players trying to outdo each other, shoppers are being bombarded with even more generous discounts, free shipping offers and other enticements this holiday season.

For the Monday after Thanksgiving, coined Cyber Monday by the National Retail Federation, plenty of retailers like Circuit City Stores Inc. offered special one-day coupons. Meanwhile, Walmart.com began on Monday a five-day special on such online-only items as certain flat-screen TVs and cashmere scarves. And Barnesandnoble.com is wooing shoppers with a free tote bag if they spend $75 or more.

"It is a very promotional holiday shopping season," said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, the online arm of the National Retail Federation. "Many are using today as the platform to launch promotions." He noted that more retailers offered incentives starting as early as last week.

To fuel the hype surrounding Cyber Monday, NRF launched a new site last week called CyberMonday.com, which pulls together online discounts for both Cyber Monday and through the holiday season from nearly 400 retailers.

So far, the incentives seemed to be working, according to early reports.

Jewelry retailer ice.com reported a 60 percent increase in traffic and an 80 percent increase in sales through noon Monday, compared to the same period a year ago, according to Pinny Gniwisch, founder of ice.com. Walmart.com reported a 60 percent increase in traffic through noon Monday compared to a year ago.

While the first Monday after Thanksgiving kicks off the online holiday shopping season, it's not the busiest day for retailers. Internet research firm comScore Networks Inc. expects that honor to fall to either Dec. 11 or Dec. 12, making Cyber Monday either the ninth or tenth busiest online shopping day. Last year, the first Monday after Thanksgiving was the ninth busiest day.

Still, Cyber Monday marks the first big online shopping surge for many merchants for the season.

ComScore, which excludes travel, auctions and corporate purchases in its results, expects online sales to increase by at least 24 percent to $599 million, from $484 million a year ago. ComScore reported a better-than-expected 42 percent increase in sales to $434 million on the day after Thanksgiving, from the same day a year ago.

The online shopping surge Monday follows a strong start to the holiday shopping season for brick and mortar stores over the Thanksgiving weekend.

One exception was Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which announced Saturday that November's same-store sales would be more disappointing than expected. The glum outlook sent its stocks down on Monday, as investors worried about the strength of the retail sector.

Nevertheless, analysts are expecting a robust holiday season for stores and in cyberspace, though business will be slower than a year ago. The National Retail Federation expects total sales for the November and December period to be up 5 percent, but not as high as the robust 6.1 percent pace seen a year ago.

As for online holiday sales growth, JupiterResearch forecasts an 18 percent increase for online sales to $32 billion. That is slightly below the 23 percent pace in the previous year.

Analysts are carefully monitoring the rivalry between online-only stores and brick and mortar stores, which are overtaking the lead in the online market share wars. According to comScore, from 2003 to 2005, sales growth for brick and mortar stores' online divisions grew twice the rate of that of online-only merchants.

Stores that operate both e-commerce sites and physical stores are realizing they can "use the Internet to not only sell product but also drive traffic to their stores, " said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore Networks.

Consumer electronics retailer Circuit City offered special coupons just for Monday, including additional savings of $100 on TV purchases of $1,700 and up, as well as an additional $50 savings on home audio systems purchases of $400 and up.

Throughout the holiday season, Circuit City is giving $24 gift cards to customers if their online order is not ready for pick up at the stores in 24 minutes.

Walmart.com, which redesigned its Web site earlier in November, unveiled Monday 50 online only specials offers, from cashere scarves to flat-panel plasma TVs, that will be available through Dec. 1. Carter Cast, CEO of walmart.com, said it will be replacing sold-out items with new offers this week.

Among the most popular items Monday on walmart.com were $289 GPS units by Garmin and 3 megapixel digital cameras by Philips.

The pure online players are fighting back with free shipping and other deals.

Online retailer Amazon.com pushed shoppers to get started early by holding an ongoing poll to select one steeply discounted gift item to be offered in limited supplies beginning on Thanksgiving day, on top of other deals.

Online jewelry retailer Bluenile.com is offering for the first time free overnight shipping to its best customers, a program that will run through Valentine's Day. It also sent out e-mails Monday offering 10 percent discounts to customers through Dec. 7.

Online closeout retailer Overstock.com for the first time offered free shipping offers, which started Thanksgiving Day and ends Tuesday, according to Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com.

"We're all competing on shipping promotions," Byrne said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-27-23-20-24





Apple: Cool Enough For Your Granny

Silver surfers biggest Mac owners
Jo Best

In its latest batch of adverts, Apple painted the Mac as the young, cool face of desktop computing. But now research has found it's the silver surfers who have a yen for Cupertino's goods - while the kids are opting for cheap Windows machines.

According to a report from industry watchers MetaFacts, nearly half of Mac owners are 55 and older - that's almost double the share for average home-PC users.

For the digital youth, high-street box shifter Gateway is the brand of choice, taking the number-one slot among PC buyers aged between 18 and 25.

Dan Ness, principal at MetaFacts, said in a statement: "Apple can claim long-time loyalists but its future among the young technoliterati is an interesting dynamic."

Apple has in past ad campaigns hoped to trade on the cachet and cool of the iPod to persuade Windows users to switch to Macs, explicitly marketing the device as from the people behind the iPod.

The Mac maker is also reportedly investigating the true nature of the so-called iPod halo effect, where owning an iPod causes users to switch from PC to Mac. While the Mac's market share remains in single figures, Apple has said that it is seeing more first-time buyers picking up its kit.

The halo effect is given credence by MetaFacts' research, which reports that more than two-thirds of Macs in current use were bought since 2004. By comparison, when looking at all computers in current use, only half were bought since 2004. The iPod was first introduced in 2001.

The report did find Apple users are ahead of the curve in mobility, with a far higher percentage of users who prefer laptops to desktops. More than half of Apple households have laptops, compared to the 30 per cent of computer users as a whole who use a notebook as their primary computer.
http://hardware.silicon.com/desktops...9164472,00.htm





1987 Computer Serving a Site From Floppy!
SeBBBe

This old 286 computer running at 8 MHz, with 1 MiB ram and no hard drive (the OS, all software and the site is on a single floppy!) still serves a purpose by acting as a fully functional web server running DR-DOS. Also includes a description of how to build your own server on an 8088 or newer, and links to all software required!
http://www.digg.com/hardware/1987_co...te_from_floppy

Video





Early Astronomical ‘Computer’ Found to Be Technically Complex
John Noble Wilford

A computer in antiquity would seem to be an anachronism, like Athena ordering takeout on her cellphone.

But a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.

The instrument, the Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the world’s first computer, has now been examined with the latest in high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography. A team of British, Greek and American researchers deciphered inscriptions and reconstructed the gear functions, revealing “an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period,” it said.

The researchers, led by the mathematician and filmmaker Tony Freeth and the astronomer Mike G. Edmunds, both of the University of Cardiff, Wales, are reporting their results today in the journal Nature.

They said their findings showed that the inscriptions related to lunar-solar motions, and the gears were a representation of the irregularities of the Moon’s orbital course, as theorized by the astronomer Hipparchos. They established the date of the mechanism at 150-100 B.C.

The Roman ship carrying the artifacts sank off the island of Antikythera about 65 B.C. Some evidence suggests it had sailed from Rhodes. The researchers said that Hipparchos, who lived on Rhodes, might have had a hand in designing the device.

In another Nature article, a scholar not involved in the research, François Charette of the University of Munich museum, in Germany, said the new interpretation of the mechanism “is highly seductive and convincing in all of its details.” It is not the last word, he said, “but it does provide a new standard, and a wealth of fresh data, for future research.”

Technology historians say the instrument is technically more complex than any known for at least a millennium afterward. Earlier examinations of the instrument, mainly in the 1970s by Derek J. de Solla Price, a Yale historian who died in 1983, led to similar findings, but they were generally disputed or ignored.

The hand-operated mechanism, presumably used in preparing calendars for planting and harvesting and fixing religious festivals, had at least 30, possibly 37, hand-cut bronze gear-wheels, the researchers said. A pin-and-slot device connecting two gear-wheels induced variations in the representation of lunar motions according to the Hipparchos model of the Moon’s elliptical orbit around Earth.

The numbers of teeth in the gears dictated the functions of the mechanism. The 53-tooth count of certain gears, the team said, was “powerful confirmation of our proposed model of Hipparchos’ lunar theory.” The detailed imaging revealed more than twice the inscriptions recognized earlier. Some of these appeared to relate to planetary and lunar motions. Perhaps, the team said, the mechanism also had gearings to predict the positions of known planets.

Dr. Charette noted that more than 1,000 years elapsed before instruments of such complexity are known to have re-emerged. A few artifacts and some Arabic texts suggest that simpler geared calendrical devices had existed, particularly in Baghdad around A.D. 900.

It seems clear, he said, that “much of the mind-boggling technological sophistication available in some parts of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world was simply not transmitted further.”

“The gear-wheel, in this case,” he added, “had to be reinvented.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/sc...rssnyt&emc=rss