[JackSpratts]

‘Oh My God, Can You Rent the Colosseum?’
Peter Kiefer

ROME

UNDER a dawn sky and the watchful eyes of two stray calico cats, Doug Liman turned out last month for an experience that only a handful of filmmakers had ever known. He was to shoot for three days in the Colosseum.

No props. No lights. Not even a video cart was permitted to touch the ground. But Mr. Liman, his actors and a small crew from the science fiction thriller “Jumper” — granted unprecedented access even to the amphitheater’s labyrinthine guts, where gladiators and doomed beasts once waited — were to shoot their pivotal love scene on a stage that still belongs more to the dead than the living.

For the 41-year-old director, a very American two-word expletive was inevitable. “We have this place to ourselves,” he continued, as Hayden Christensen, Rachel Bilson and a dozen crew members went to work.

Mr. Liman’s Roman moment was just one stop for an unusually peripatetic film whose locations include Paris, China, Egypt, the Sahara, Toronto, New York, Michigan and Tokyo. Scheduled for release by 20th Century Fox in the spring of 2008, “Jumper” is based on the Steven Gould novel about a young man who learns that he has the power of teleportation.

That his story should land in the middle of quite so difficult a space is a tribute both to the persistence of Mr. Liman’s producers and to a new openness on the part of Roman officials, led by Mayor Walter Veltroni, an unabashed cinephile with a soft spot for Hollywood glitz.

Mayor Veltroni dined with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes on the eve of their Italian wedding, and was primarily responsible for creating the Rome Film Fest, which took place for the first time in October. On the business front, his administration has streamlined the process for getting filming permits, and authorizes more than 2,000 shoots in the city each year.

Even so, Rome’s bureaucrats remain protective when it comes to the Colosseum, the most imposing of the city’s ancient landmarks. Only a few films have had access to the stadium — even Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” settled for a re- creation built in Malta. “They certainly don’t rent it out cavalierly,” said Lucas Foster, one of the producers of “Jumper.” The red tape included months of personal appeals and back-and-forth correspondence about his vision for the film.

An employee of the Rome Film Commission, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter, said hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees had changed hands. Mr. Lucas declined to discuss figures. “It was never about the money,” he said. “It came down to respect. And I wouldn’t film a sex scene or do something that could embarrass Italy.”

Yet shooting in the stadium was never essential to the movie. “The scene was originally written for the Pantheon,” acknowledged Simon Kinberg, one of the film’s writers, as he watched Dave and Millie (the characters played by Mr. Christensen and Ms. Bilson) walk to the southern promontory of the Colosseum’s ground level.

“The idea to come here was hatched in Doug’s apartment in New York about a year ago,” said Mr. Foster, who reunited with Mr. Liman and Mr. Kinberg on “Jumper” after the three collaborated on “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” which was partly shot in Ravello, just hours from Rome. “We were originally interested in the Pantheon. And we were like, ‘Oh my God, can you rent the Pantheon? Can you rent the Colosseum?’ ”

It seems like a silly question coming from Mr. Foster, whose credits include big-budget action fare like “Man on Fire,” “Crimson Tide” and “Van Helsing.” But the interior of the Colosseum — in its heyday the setting for mock sea battles, animal hunts and countless gladiatorial battles — had a Holy Grail aura to it.

“We are extremely mindful that they opened their doors to us,” Mr. Liman said during a lunch break on the second day of shooting in Rome; later, the crew would migrate to the Pantheon for some exterior shots. “I don’t want to be the film that shut them down to other people filming. Locations get burned all the time.”

With access came stipulations. For three days, the crew could work from 6:30 to 8:30 a.m., then for another two hours from 3:30 p.m. until dusk. When time expired, they had to clear out immediately without disturbing the thousands of other daily visitors to the Colosseum. To avoid putting anything on the ground, the sound crew wore harnesses. Lighting was limited to the Mediterranean sun.

“It forces you to be superorganized and plan things out in the dark,” said Mr. Liman, for whom the experience called on the resourcefulness he had learned as the director of low-budget films like “Swingers.”

“It’s by far the most stressful environment I’ve ever filmed in, because you can never go back,” he added. “You have to get it right and this is a critical scene in the performance point of view and it flies a little contrary to my style of filmmaking. I like to shoot and reshoot.”

When they weren’t hustling to get their setups inside the Colosseum, the members of the “Jumper” crew were dealing with the crowds outside.

“Most of the tourists have no idea a movie is being shot, so I do try to take advantage of that, but it’s tough,” Mr. Liman said. “We have 90 people that work for us as extras, and there are another 300 people out there at any given time who don’t work for us, so I am trying to move people.”

That night, the producers got word from city officials that for the first time they would allow shooting in the subterranean level.

“It’s hard to describe, but it is up there with one of the cooler things I’ve ever done,” said Mr. Christensen, moments after shooting the scene the next day. “Your imagination goes crazy and you think of all the blood that was shed in this arena. You feel the brick, and it feels historic and there is this sense of wonder.”

That afternoon, a Friday, the crew was setting up for the last day of interior shots. Max Liebowitz, a 21-year-old classics student from Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., and his friend Jeff Soffer were the last two visitors passing by as they made their way to the exit.

“It’s bizarre. It certainly takes away from the ancient feel of it,” Mr. Liebowitz said. “And to have Rachel Bilson standing over there definitely changes the feel.” It was unclear if he was complaining.

On Monday the crew left town, off to the next shoot in Toronto. Days at the Colosseum returned to normal: thousands of visitors streaming in and out to get their own sense of the structure, tourists taking photos of the decaying walls, and, of course, those two calico cats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/movies/17kief.html





On Demand and on DVD at the Same Time
Geraldine Fabrikant

In an attempt to bolster consumer interest in paid video on demand, Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, has introduced an experimental program to release films on demand simultaneously with their release on DVDs.

The experiment, which will run on Comcast systems in Pittsburgh and Denver, would let customers pay $4 to see a movie the same day they could buy it at a neighborhood store for about $25, or rent it for about the same price as the on-demand service.

As new methods of movie distribution proliferate, the companies that create programming continue to experiment. Now that video on demand is in 30 million homes, and the sales of DVDs have slowed, it is hardly surprising that cable companies are seeking to take advantage of their clout and that the movie studios are willing to tweak the timing of releases.

The experimental simultaneous release of DVDs and on-demand service closes a normal 30- to 45-day gap between DVD release and on-demand release. “This is a sampling mechanism for the title,” said Andrew Mellett, vice president for the video-on-demand division of Warner Digital Distribution, which is offering “Superman Returns” and other movies via Comcast. “I don’t expect it to cannibalize sales on DVD. What we are really interested in seeing is whether this increases the buy rates.”

Comcast has declined to comment on the project, although it has been advertising films’ availability in local newspapers.

The company has been the industry leader in offering free and paid video on demand, compiling a library of 8,000 movies and television episodes to lure subscribers and to distinguish itself from satellite TV.

On-demand service has been a success compared to pay-per-view, industry experts say. On-demand service lets consumers see movies when they want, while pay-per-view lets them see movies on a predetermined schedule. That lack of flexibility has hurt the pay-per-view business as video on demand has grown.

“Comcast has done really well with video on demand,” Mr. Mellett said. He added that once customers get used to free programming on demand, they will pay for the shows they really want to see.

Blockbuster, which could be hurt by the success of simultaneous release, said that the sales and rentals of DVDs represent the largest revenue stream for the studios and “we believe that they will be very cautious in introducing any new less profitable service that could be cannibalistic to the rental and retail channel.”

The experiment is a result of pressure by the cable industry to test paid video on demand so that it could get a slice of the revenues immediately after theater release.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/te...y/18cable.html





Blurring the Line in the Bleak Sands of Iwo Jima
A. O. Scott

There are certain assumptions that American audiences, perhaps without realizing it, are likely to bring to a movie about World War II. The combat picture has been a Hollywood staple for so long — since before the actual combat was over — that it can sometimes seem as if every possible story has already been told. Or else as if each individual story, from G.I. Joe to Private Ryan, is at bottom a variation on familiar themes: victory against the odds, brotherhood under fire, sacrifice for a noble cause.

But of course there are other, contrasting stories, a handful of which form the core of “Letters From Iwo Jima,” Clint Eastwood’s harrowing, contemplative new movie and the companion to his “Flags of Our Fathers,” which was released this fall. That film, partly about the famous photograph of American servicemen raising the flag on the barren volcanic island of Iwo Jima, complicated the standard Hollywood combat narrative in ways both subtle and overt. It exposed the heavy sediment of individual grief, cynicism and frustration beneath the collective high sentiments of glory and heroism but without entirely debunking the value or necessity of those sentiments.

“Letters,” which observes the lives and deaths of Japanese soldiers in the battle for Iwo Jima, similarly adheres to some of the conventions of the genre even as it quietly dismantles them. It is, unapologetically and even humbly, true to the durable tenets of the war-movie tradition, but it is also utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights.

In December 2004, with “Million Dollar Baby,” Mr. Eastwood almost nonchalantly took a tried and true template — the boxing picture — and struck from it the best American movie of the year. To my amazement, though hardly to my surprise, he has done it again; “Letters From Iwo Jima” might just be the best Japanese movie of the year as well.

This is not only because the Japanese actors, speaking in their own language, give such vivid and varied performances, but also because the film, in its every particular, seems deeply and un-self-consciously embedded in the experiences of the characters they play. “Letters From Iwo Jima” is not a chronicle of victory against the odds, but rather of inevitable defeat. When word comes from Imperial headquarters that there will be no reinforcements, no battleships, no air support in the impending fight with the United States Marines, any illusion of triumph vanishes, and the stark reality of the mission takes shape. The job of these soldiers and their commanders, in keeping with a military ethos they must embrace whether they believe in it or not, is to die with honor, if necessary by their own hands.

The cruelty of this notion of military discipline, derived from long tradition and maintained by force, is perhaps less startling than the sympathy Mr. Eastwood extends to his characters, whose sacrifices are made in the service of a cause that the American audience knows to be bad as well as doomed. It is hard to think of another war movie that has gone so deeply, so sensitively, into the mind-set of the opposing side.

Since the fighting that Mr. Eastwood depicts is limited to a single, self-contained piece of the Japanese homeland, the bloody roster of Japanese atrocities elsewhere in Asia and the South Pacific remains off screen. But this omission in no way compromises the moral gravity of what takes place before our eyes. Nor does it diminish the power of the film’s moving and meticulous vindication of the humanity of the enemy. (Mr. Eastwood also, not incidentally, exposes some inhumanity on the part of the American good guys, a few of whom are shown committing atrocities of their own.)

Any modern military organization depends, to some extent, on the dehumanization of its own fighters as well as their adversaries. (In “Flags of Our Fathers” the Japanese are all but faceless, firing unseen from bunkers and tunnels dug into the mountainside; in “Letters From Iwo Jima” we see the grueling work and strategic inspiration that led to the digging of those tunnels.)

An army needs personnel, not personalities, and one of the functions of the art and literature of war — especially on film, which exists to consecrate the human face — is to compensate for this forced anonymity by emphasizing the flesh-and-blood individuality of the combatants. Think of the classic Hollywood platoon picture, with its carefully distributed farm boys and city kids, its quota of blowhards and bookworms, all superintended by a wise, crusty commander. Even as they approach stereotype, those characters give names, faces and identities to men who have gone down in history mainly as statistics.

Historians estimate that 20,000 Japanese infantrymen defended Iwo Jima; 1,083 of them survived. (The Americans sent 77,000 Marines and nearly 100,000 total troops, of whom close to 7,000 died and almost 20,000 were wounded.) The Japanese commander was Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, whose illustrated letters to his wife and children, recently unearthed on the island, were a source for Iris Yamashita’s script. Played by Ken Watanabe, Kuribayashi, who arrives on Iwo Jima with a pearl-handled Colt and fond memories of the years he spent in America before the war, is a dashing, cosmopolitan figure. He arouses a good deal of suspicion among the other officers for his modern ideas and for the kindness he sometimes displays toward the low-ranking soldiers.

The general is a practical man (those tunnels are his idea) in an impossible circumstance, and Mr. Watanabe’s performance is all the more heartbreaking for his crisp, unsentimental dignity. He anchors the film — this is some of the best acting of the year, in any language — but does not dominate it. Much as the Imperial Army may have been rigidly hierarchical, Mr. Eastwood’s sensibility is instinctively democratic. As the battle looms, and even as the bombs, bullets and artillery shells begin to explode, he takes the time to introduce us to Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a guileless baker with no great desire to give his life for the glory of the nation; Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura), who will settle for nothing else; Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an Olympic equestrian who once hobnobbed with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks; and Shimizu (Ryo Kase), who Saigo suspects is an agent of the secret police.

It is customary to use the word epic to describe a movie that deals with big battles, momentous historical events and large numbers of dead. But while some of Mr. Eastwood’s set pieces depict warfare on a large scale, the overall mood of “Letters From Iwo Jima,” as the title suggests, is strikingly intimate. Even though the movie has a blunt, emphatic emotional force, Mr. Eastwood also shows an attention to details of speech and gesture that can only be described as delicate.

He is as well acquainted as any American director (or actor) with the language of cinematic violence, but he has no equal when it comes to dramatizing the ethical and emotional consequences of brutality. There is nothing gratuitous in this film, nothing fancy or false. There is the humor and the viciousness of men in danger; there is the cool logic of military planning and the explosive irrationality of behavior in combat; there is life and death.

As in “Flags of Our Fathers,” nearly all the color has been drained from the images, a technique that makes the interiors of the caves and tunnels look like Rembrandt paintings. The anxious faces seem to glow in the shadows, illuminated by their own suffering. At other times, in the hard outdoor light, Tom Stern’s cinematography is as frank and solemn as a Mathew Brady photograph.

A few scenes serve as hinges joining this movie to “Flags of Our Fathers.” While “Letters From Iwo Jima” seems to me the more accomplished of the two films — by which I mean that it strikes me as close to perfect — the two enrich each other, and together achieve an extraordinary completeness. They show how the experience of war is both a shared and a divisive experience, separating the dead from the living and the winners from the losers, even as it binds them all together.

Both films travel back and forth in time and space between Iwo Jima and the homelands of the combatants. In “Flags of Our Fathers” the battle itself happens mainly in flashback, since the movie is in large measure about the guilt and confusion that survivors encountered upon their reluctant return home. In “Letters From Iwo Jima” the battle is in the present tense, and it is home that flickers occasionally in the memories of men who are certain they will not live to see it again.

“Letters From Iwo Jima” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes extremely graphic combat violence.

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA

Opens today in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Directed by Clint Eastwood; written (in Japanese, with English subtitles) by Iris Yamashita, based on a story by Ms. Yamashita and Paul Haggis; director of photography, Tom Stern; edited by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach; music by Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens; production designers, Henry Bumstead and James J. Murakami; produced by Mr. Eastwood, Steven Spielberg and Robert Lorenz; released by Warner Brothers Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures. Running time: 141 minutes.

WITH: Ken Watanabe (Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi), Kazunari Ninomiya (Saigo), Tsuyoshi Ihara (Baron Nishi), Ryo Kase (Shimizu), Shidou Nakamura (Lieutenant Ito) and Nae (Hanako).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/12/2...lett.html?8dpc





Return of That Fighter With a Soft Heart Inside a Hard Body
Stephen Holden

Aw, ya can’t help but love da big Palooka! Under all dem muscles the champ’s still got a heart o’ gold.

Who else could that be but Rocky Balboa? Sylvester Stallone’s endearing alter ego with the droopy eyes and dungeon-master croak has slouched back onto the screen, bowed but unbroken, to fight the good fight one more time. Since he was last seen 16 years ago in “Rocky V,” this two-time former heavyweight champion, now pushing 60 (Mr. Stallone’s age), has evolved a philosophy of the ring that befits an older, slower athlete.

The measure of a prizefighter is not how much punishment you can give but how much you can take, he declares more than once. In other words, heroism equals masochism; no gain without pain. Mel Gibson would understand.

Mr. Stallone’s body is a sight. A weightlifter’s slab of aged meat, knotted with tiny hard veins popping out of the shoulders, it is just this side of muscle-bound and somewhat grotesque. It is something you might see hung in the window of a steak house and wonder what kind of carnivore would order such a leathery, sinewy carcass.

When I first learned of this film, presumably the final episode in the “Rocky” franchise, the idea of the 60-year-old Rocky going at it one last time sounded risible. Reports of audiences snickering derisively at trailers for the movie seemed to confirm my expectations.

Surprisingly “Rocky Balboa,” is no embarrassment. Like its forerunners it goes the distance almost in spite of itself. It’s all heart and no credibility except as a raw-boned fable. From the very beginning Rocky Balboa was about as lifelike a character as Popeye pumped up with spinach. But that may be the point of a series that peddles the notion that if you dream it hard enough, you can live it.

For what T. S. Eliot wrote about humans being unable to bear “too much reality” is doubly true for moviegoers. Most of us go to the movies to sit in the dark and dream the impossible dream, whether it’s fighting a heavyweight bout or playing love scenes with Brad and Angelina.

Like “Rocky,” the Bicentennial fantasy that inaugurated the series, “Rocky Balboa” is a skeletal movie, a live-action cartoon that operates on cartoon logic. Don’t ask why this former heavyweight champion still lives in squalor in South Philadelphia while owning a popular restaurant named after his sainted wife, Adrian (now five years gone from cancer)? Don’t ask why his whiny son, Robert (Milo Ventimigilia), a charmless yuppie manqué with a chip on his shoulder, does not bear the slightest resemblance to his father.

Be happy to relive the good old times and to appreciate the touchstones that are dutifully trotted out. Here comes Rocky’s combative brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young), a character seen in every Rocky movie and looking much the worse for wear, to loiter disconsolately at the restaurant for no particular reason. And here comes Bill Conti’s familiar blaring theme music when the action finally picks up.

Now more than ever Rocky Balboa seems a throwback to the era of the chaste noble athlete who is too pure for sex. He’d rather pray at the shrine of his dead wife than think of finding a new one. When the possibility of romance presents itself in the person of Marie (Geraldine Hughes), a barmaid and single mother, who in the original “Rocky” was a teenager who hurled abuse at him, he is oblivious. But she too is a throwback. Wide-eyed and pug-faced, tough but understanding, she is a true-blue sidekick for a Dead End Kid, and Rocky, in his infinite generosity, invites her to work in his restaurant.

“Rocky Balboa” drags its feet for a dangerously long time before the main course sashays onto the screen. When a computer-simulated match between Rocky (in his fighting prime) and the current heavyweight champion Mason (The Line) Dixon (the light heavyweight Antonio Tarver), determines that Rocky would win, people get excited. Dixon, though undefeated, has earned so little respect after a series of easy victories that his management decides that an exhibition match in which Dixon holds back his full power would be good for his career.

A grunting and heaving training montage follows, and finally the bout, a 10-round cliffhanger in Las Vegas with every bell and whistle activated, in which neither fighter holds back. And that’s it. Gonna fly now.

“Rocky Balboa” is rated PG (Parental Guidance suggested). It has violence, but it’s confined to the ring.

ROCKY BALBOA

Opens today nationwide.

Written and directed by Sylvester Stallone; director of photography, Clark Mathis; edited by Sean Albertson; music by Bill Conti; production designer, Franco-Giacomo Carbone; produced by Charles Winkler, William Chartoff and David Winkler; released by MGM Pictures. Running time: 102 minutes.

WITH: Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa), Burt Young (Paulie), Geraldine Hughes (Marie), Milo Ventimiglia (Robert Balboa Jr.), Antonio Tarver (Mason “The Line” Dixon), James Francis Kelly III (Steps) and Tony Burton (Duke).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/12/2...es/20rock.html





An Alluring 'Perfume'

The film adaptation of Patrick Süskind's cult novel has the power to nauseate as well as captivate.
Jessica Au

Dec. 18, 2006 issue - Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is out roaming the dark streets of 18th-century Paris when something catches his nose. Sniffing the air, he follows the intoxicating aroma down a deserted alley to find that it belongs to a young girl sitting at a table peeling plums. Grenouille creeps up behind her; the girl turns around, startled to find him smelling her hair. Before she has a chance to scream, he drags her off into the shadows and impulsively strangles her. But her virginal scent consumes him. He rips open her dress, trying to preserve her scent in his memory by sniffing her naked corpse. Before long the aroma vanishes, leaving a distraught Grenouille lusting for more.

Part erotic killer-thriller, part morbid fairy tale, Tom Tykwer's new film "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" is a visual feast that is both oddly captivating and deeply uncomfortable to watch. Based on the 1985 international best seller by Munich writer Patrick Süskind, "Perfume" is the tale of an olfactory genius who becomes obsessed with distilling the scent of virgins in his murderous pursuit to create the perfect perfume. Tykwer ("Run, Lola, Run") and producer Bernd Eichinger (who wrote the screenplay for last year's Oscar-nominated drama "Downfall") combine a lush score with breathtaking sets. But the film falls short in achieving on screen what Süskind did so adroitly on the page: conjuring the world of smells.

Budgeted at more than $60 million—a record for European art-house cinema—"Perfume" is already a runaway hit in Tykwer's native Germany. It is set for wider release later this month, though Tykwer is aware that the story of a man without morals—and the grotesque scenes of animal slaughter—may not be to everyone's taste. "Some people will be disgusted by it," he says. "Some will hate it. Then there will be those who will be strangely moved by it. I like my films to inspire debate."

That seems likely. Orphaned at birth, Grenouille (newcomer Ben Whishaw, in a compelling performance) spends his childhood slaving away in a tannery before stumbling across the fading parfumier Baldini (an offbeat Dustin Hoffman), who enlists him as his apprentice. When Gre-nouille, who has a highly developed sense of smell, discovers that the scent of the living cannot be bottled, he sets off to the town of Grasse to further his studies. En route he becomes besotted with the vestal aroma of local beauty Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood). Soon Grenouille turns to mass murder in his quest to capture the world's most elusive fragrance: love.

Süskind is keeping stumm about the reworking of his best seller. Born in 1949, the author has written a handful of plays and novels, of which "Das Parfum" was by far his biggest hit. It has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide and been translated into 45 languages. For years, directors—including masters of darkness Stanley Kubrick and Tim Burton—sought the film rights, but Süskind refused to bite. Eichinger, however, wouldn't give up. "The publishing house told me that Patrick didn't want to sell the rights, not only not to me but not to anybody," says the producer. "It took him 15 years to change his mind."

Süskind himself remains an enigmatic character. "He's like the German equivalent of J. D. Salinger," says Tykwer, who met the elusive author once, shortly before filming began in 2005. "He shook my hand and wished me good luck. Then he said: 'Now please, leave me alone'." Even Eichinger, who has long considered the reclusive writer a good friend, cannot say for sure whether he's seen the film: "If he has, he was probably sitting at the back of a dark Bavarian theater wearing a wig and glasses!"

Left to their own devices, Tykwer, Eichinger and screenwriter Andrew Birkin ("The Cement Garden") reworked Süskind's historical tale into a modernist fable, which will offend hard-core enthusiasts of the book. The film's second half gets bogged down in confusion before picking up speed once Grenouille arrives in Grasse. Still, Tykwer's decision to use hundreds of extras instead of special effects—in one epic scene, 750 half-naked bodies are squeezed into a single shot—adds realism. And Tykwer & Co. deserve credit for an extraordinarily ambitious piece of work that gives a whole new perspective to a bottle of Chanel No. 5.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16127618/site/newsweek/





Do you want to play a game?

My Battle with MGM Over Wargames.Com
Rogers Cadenhead

For the past three months I've been privately engaged in a time-consuming dispute with Nathan J. Hole, a lawyer representing MGM Studios who claims that Wargames.Com, a domain that I've owned since April 16, 1998, is the rightful property of the film company because it produced the 1983 movie WarGames and registered it as a trademark.

I received an e-mail this morning indicating that MGM has filed a legal complaint with the National Arbitration Forum to take the domain name away from me.

I registered the domain to sell military wargames like Axis & Allies and Battle of Britain and was able to realize these plans earlier this year. I've never run my own business, so figuring out sales taxes and licensing, finding suppliers, running a secure web server and setting up ecommerce software took around two years.

My store has nothing to do with the film WarGames or any other movie, but attempting to convince MGM there's no infringement has been utterly fruitless. I suspect this is because the film studio is filming a WarGames sequel for 2007 release.

Hole's an intellectual property attorney who appears to be making a name for himself by going after domain name owners using the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP), an arbitration process that governs domain disputes. All domain owners agree to be bound by the UDRP when they register or renew a domain name.

In my research on the UDRP, I found that Hole has been the complainant's attorney on nine arbitration cases:
Dell Inc. v. Innervision Web Solutions for the domain dellcomputersucks.com
Dell Inc. v. SZK.com for the domains dellcustomersupport.com and wwwdellcomputer.com
Dell Inc. v. David Wong for the domains dellwork.com and dellworks.com
Dell Inc. v. Siims for the domains delldvr.com, delldvr.net, delldvrs.com and delldvrs.net
Dell Inc. v. Superpennysaver for the domains dellsite.com and dellsite.net
Dell Inc. v. Steve Kerry d/b/a North West Enterprise Inc. for the domains wwwdell4me.net, wwwdellcom.com, wwwdellcom.net, dell4mecom.net and wwwdell4mecom.com
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Michael McGreevy for the domain rocky.com
Dell Inc. v. Dynamix Inc. c/o Dynamix for the domain dellpromos.com
Alienware Corporation v. SZK.com for the domain wwwalienware.com

He's won all nine, but in six of the cases the domain owner didn't file a response, which gives the complainant the domain names by default. Most of them appear to be clear examples of cybersquatting, where a domain owner had no legitimate, non-infringing plans for the domain.

Fighting one of these arbitrations is expensive in both money and time, but I'm operating my store legally and have a well-documented history of owning domains in good faith -- as you can confirm with the Vatican. I've spent at least 1,000 hours developing Wargames.Com and have rejected dozens of offers over the years to sell the domain, including one for $30,000. My goal is to turn the business into something I can give my sons when they're old enough to run it.

I'll cover the legal battle here on Workbench. With the help of my attorney Wade Duchene, I'm learning how honest domain name owners can defend themselves from a grab like this, but you have to take steps to protect yourself before you hear from an attorney like Hole.

Once I received Hole's first letter on Sept. 11, the only actions that could end up saving my domain are the ones I took before that date.
http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/n...er-wargamescom





Teen Finds, Returns $24K in Movie Theater
Erik German


Christopher Montgomery

Imagine stumbling upon $24,000 cash. What would you do with the money?

The untraceable wad of $100 bills, rubber-banded together inside a zippered bank pouch, tumbled unnoticed from the purse of RoseMarie Limoncelli, 39, as she sat Friday inside the AMC Fantasy theater in Rockville Centre.

Christopher Montgomery, 19, found the money as he was cleaning between seats.

The Lynbrook student returned it. Every dollar.

"I was shocked," Limoncelli said. "It's so commendable to see a teenager do something so wonderful for someone else. My life could have been flipped upside down."

Montgomery, a liberal arts student at Nassau Community College, yesterday was reluctant to talk about his choice.

"He won't come out; he's not the type of kid that likes attention," said his mother, Donna Montgomery, 49, outside the family's Lynbrook home. "He said, 'It's no big deal.' I think he's embarrassed."

But for the Hewlett woman who nearly lost the $24,000, it was a very big deal indeed. Before recovering the cash, Limoncelli endured what amounted to a brief waking nightmare.

Limoncelli runs a business, and like many this time of year, she's been a bit harried lately.

"It's the holidays and I'm running in all different directions and trying to do my shopping in between," she said.

On Friday, she still hadn't made it to the bank when it came time to accompany her 8-year-old daughter, Sabrina, to see "Happy Feet" at 7:15 p.m.

Halfway through the film, Sabrina climbed onto Limoncelli's lap. To make room for her daughter, Limoncelli slid the purse under her seat, where it tipped over. The bank pouch must have fallen out in the dark, she said.

On the way home, mother and daughter stopped for ice cream. In line at the cash register, pint of Häagen-Dazs in hand, Limoncelli made the the blood-chilling discovery. The deposit bag was gone.

"My heart stopped," she said. "My whole body was shaking."

Frantic, she called her husband at home. The money wasn't there. She dialed information for the movie theater's number -- and was apoplectic when they placed her on hold.

"It was like the longest two minutes of my life," she said. "I screamed at the operator when she tried to give me the address and I said, 'I don't care, just give me the number!' ... I was hysterical, crying."

When she called the theater, Limoncelli experienced the holiday miracle she will likely recount for years to come.

After examining the cash, Christopher Montgomery had handed the pouch over to his manager.

Limoncelli said he refused a cash reward, but she hopes he'll at least accept a gift certificate to P.C. Richard & Son.

"I always tell my kids, 'I believe: a good deed -- you do one, you get one in return,'" Donna Montgomery said.
http://www.newsday.com/news/yahoo/ny...,2600559.story





From Film to Fetish Object: The Year’s Noteworthy DVDs
Dave Kehr

DVDs are more than just plastic discs with movies tucked inside. At their best these strangely compelling objects owe their appeal to a combination of elements, one that might begin with a movie but also includes the extras: the packaging, the program notes, the menu design, the commentary tracks and a wide range of supplementary material, from deleted scenes to entire features. Aligning all these things requires genuine editorial skill, just as getting what are often dirty, faded old prints to look and sound sharp and new again demands technical ability and artistic judgment.

This list of 10 of the year’s most notable DVD releases is meant to acknowledge the contributions of those frequently anonymous technicians and designers who create these alluring fetish objects. And rather than simply concede the field to the Criterion Collection and Warner Home Video, which lead the pack in presentation and breadth of selection, I’ve tried to spread things out among several companies striving for quality, whether linked to major studios or operated as labors of love out of basements and back rooms.

Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales

Criterion, the company that introduced directors’ commentaries and supplementary material in the laser disc days, is still on top of the heap. And its commitment to the highest standards in visual quality, value-added supplements and scholarship has seldom been more strongly represented than by this boxed-set edition of six Rohmer films (including “My Night at Maud’s” and “Claire’s Knee”), which represent one of the signal accomplishments of the French New Wave. Mr. Rohmer supervised the transfers, which for the two early, short films came from delicate 16-millimeter prints, and also subjected himself to a rare on-camera interview with his former star and producer Barbet Schroeder. A handful of other early Rohmer shorts, including the sublime “Nadja in Paris,” are included, as well as “On Pascal,” a sample of the educational films he has never stopped making for French television. One stand-alone book includes the short stories, written by Mr. Rohmer long before they were filmed, on which the “Moral Tales” are based; another contains essays by prominent critics, including Kent Jones and Molly Haskell. Fully the equivalent of an academic edition of a great author’s work, with some of the cinema’s most deliciously erotic moments thrown in at no extra charge. (Criterion, $99.95)

John Wayne-John Ford Film Collection

Bringing together eight of the Ford-Wayne films now controlled by Time Warner, this terrific set chronicles one of the most fruitful (and neurotically complex) director-star collaborations in American film. The big dog is “The Searchers,” the 1956 film publicly dismissed by Ford (along with many critics of the time) as “a potboiler” that has slowly assumed its rightful position as a legitimate contender for the Great American Movie, plunging straight to the heart of this country’s great crimes and great glories. The collection includes a remastered edition of “Stagecoach,” the 1939 film that put Wayne on the road to stardom after a decade in B westerns, and the DVD premieres of “The Long Voyage Home” (1940), “The Wings of Eagles” (1957) and “Fort Apache” (1948), the first of Ford’s “cavalry trilogy.” “They Were Expendable,” the hauntingly muffled, melancholic film that Ford made upon his return from his service in World War II, speaks directly to Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima.” (Warner Home Video, $79.98)

Phantom

The independent company Flicker Alley has released only three DVDs in its short history, each a dedicated attempt to recapture the exquisite visual quality of silent cinema. Most scholars would place “Phantom” (1922) — the tale of a failed poet (Alfred Abel) obsessed with an unattainable upper-class woman — among the secondary works of its director, F. W. Murnau. But the Flicker Alley presentation, based on one of the restorations of German silents sponsored by the F. W. Murnau Foundation, which have produced mixed results, is glowingly alive. Care was taken with the transfer to video, and the tasteful color tinting for once does not overpower the tonal range of the black-and-white images. (Flicker Alley, $29.98)

Wanda

It isn’t only silent films that need restoration and revival. Barbara Loden’s groundbreaking independent film was made in 1970 and has been practically impossible to see since; the fledgling distributor Parlour Pictures has discovered an excellent copy of this astonishing work, about a desperate woman from the Appalachian coal country (played by Ms. Loden) who gets mixed up with a petty crook, and reassembled it into the great achievement in American neorealism that it is. Ms. Loden, who died of cancer in 1980, never made another film, but “Wanda” secures her place in the pantheon. (Parlour Pictures, $24.95)

The Valerio Zurlini Box Set: The Early Masterpieces

What you always hope for when you slip in an unknown DVD: the revelation of a major filmmaker you have barely heard of. This two-feature set from the Italian-American company NoShame includes two films by Mr. Zurlini: “Violent Summer,” a 1959 romantic drama set during the last days of Fascism that clearly influenced Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Conformist,” and the glowing “Girl With a Suitcase” (1961), starring the 23-year-old Claudia Cardinale as a failed cabaret singer who reluctantly falls under the protection of a naïve teenage boy from a wealthy family. Copious supplementary material helps to fill in the portrait of this unjustly neglected filmmaker, as does NoShame’s other Zurlini release this year, the mournful epic “Desert of the Tartars” (1976). (NoShame, $29.95)

Lubitsch in Berlin

More restorations from Germany’s busy Murnau Foundation, these early features — “The Oyster Princess” and “I Don’t Want to Be a Man” (on one disc); “Sumurun,” “Anna Boleyn” and “The Wildcat” — by the future master of sophisticated Hollywood comedy aren’t in quite as good shape as “Phantom,” but they offer an engaging portrait of an artist in development. From the broadly satirical comedy of “The Oyster Princess” (1919) to the historical drama of “Anna Boleyn” (1920), Ernst Lubitsch can be seen refining his technique, continually paring away the inessential and overstated, moving toward the mastery of saying so much with so little that characterized his American-made masterpieces like “Trouble in Paradise” (1932). (Kino, $29.95 each disc)

Reds

Paramount, which sold most of its rich pre-1948 holdings to MCA-Universal for a mess of pottage, probably has the thinnest library of the major studios. And to judge from the no-frills DVDs it has been publishing, the video division does not have the backing of Paramount’s corporate masters. But when the opportunity is there, as it was with Warren Beatty’s tragicomic epic of early-20th-century radical politics, Paramount can rise to the occasion: this two-disc set offers magnificent color and an immaculate image, as well as a lengthy documentary directed by Laurent Bouzereau that covers every aspect of the film’s making. With this release, “1900,” “The Conformist” and the first volume of the Martin and Lewis Collection, Paramount is finally stepping up to the plate; here’s hoping it finds marketers who are better able to exploit its still quite compelling library of 1950s and ’60s features, which includes long unseen work by Frank Tashlin, Leo McCarey, Anthony Mann, Phil Karlson, Blake Edwards, Otto Preminger and Howard Hawks. (Paramount Home Video, $19.99)

Mr. Moto Collection, Vol. 1

Fox’s DVD division has been moving up fast in the last few years, and when it puts time and money into a project, as it did with this set and its excellent film noir series, the results are spectacular. Unlike the movies in Fox’s Charlie Chan series, now in its second volume of superlative restorations, the Moto films were not whodunits but highly entertaining exotic espionage adventures set in a studio-constructed Far East, starring Peter Lorre (with fake eyelids and buck teeth) as a mysterious international operator of Japanese origin. Fox is to be thanked for sinking so much effort into the digital restoration of these relatively obscure films, and helping to revive both the reputation of the series and the standing of its principal director, Norman Foster. (Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, $59.98)

Cary Grant: Screen Legend Collection

With the Universal library and the pre-1948 Paramount titles, Universal Home Video has the richest unexploited film holdings in Hollywood. It’s unfortunate that so many of its movies have fallen out of distribution, making it impossible to see (legally at least) masterpieces like Frank Borzage’s “Little Man, What Now?” and Josef von Sternberg’s “American Tragedy,” not to mention hundreds of unknown, unexplored films, among which would certainly be items of tremendous interest if anyone were allowed to get to them. But with the “Franchise Collection” series, Universal has found an economic and appealing way of slipping some of its lesser-known titles into the marketplace. I pick the Cary Grant collection just as an example. Here, spread out on three discs, are five films, including the pre-Code comedies “Thirty Day Princess” and “Kiss and Make-Up” (both 1934), that could never have stood on their own, but together make a must-have set. Other collections have been devoted to John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Bing Crosby, Mae West, Carole Lombard and Cecil B. DeMille (as well as, inexplicably, Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule); I hope they keep it up forever. (Universal Home Video, $29.98)

Beyond the Rocks

Sheer altruism on the part of Milestone Film and Video, one of the finest of the boutique labels. This 1922 feature, the only film to pair two of the silent era’s biggest stars, Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, was rescued from the chaos of a private collection by the Nederlands Filmmuseum and restored to excellent shape. Milestone has packaged it with a second feature, the 1919 “Delicious Little Devil”; an 85-minute radio interview with Swanson recorded in 1955; documentaries about the rediscovery and reconstruction of “Beyond the Rocks”; and your choice of two orchestral scores. It hardly matters that the movie, the work of the perennially dull Sam Wood, isn’t a masterpiece. This significant bit of film history, which otherwise would have been seen by only a handful of academics and museumgoers, is now available to an audience far beyond the big cities where such things usually play. And that may be the ultimate justification for the DVD format: spreading the word beyond the happy few who live within subway distance of the Museum of Modern Art. (Milestone, $29.95)

Milestone isn’t the only boutique doing terrific work: I wish I had room to more thoroughly plug Koch Lorber Films, Synapse Films, Mondo Macabro, IFC Films, First Run Features, Facets, VCI Entertainment, Other Cinema, Palm Pictures, Alpha Video and Dark Sky Films, among others. How will video on demand alter this idyllic landscape? By the end of next year we should start to know.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/22/movies/22dvd.html?





Analyst Warns of DVD Sales Drop in 2007
Paul Bond

Persistent year-over-year declining sales of DVDs at Best Buy and Circuit City stores might portend trouble for the movie industry, according to a Wall Street analyst report released Wednesday.

Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield, who raised concerns about the home video industry in October with a report titled "DVD Party is Over" and again last week, said Wednesday that "2007 appears even more ominous for film studios."

His latest beef comes courtesy of Circuit City Stores Inc., which reported a $16 million quarterly loss Tuesday, sending its shares tumbling 17.5% that day.

While many Wall Street observers focused on falling prices for flat-panel television sets, Greenfield keyed in on DVD sales at Circuit City and at its archrival Best Buy, which reported better-than-expected quarterly results last week.

"Based on company reports over the past four quarters at each retailer, five of those eight reported quarters have experienced negative year-over-year DVD (comparisons)," Greenfield said.

The analyst said that he is "increasingly confident that 2007 will be the first year that consumer spending on DVDs declines domestically."

With that prediction, Greenfield is at odds with other researchers.

PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the U.S. market for DVD sales and rentals, combined, will climb to $24.8 billion next year from $24.1 billion this year. When digital streaming and "other rentals" are added to the mix, the industry grows to $27 billion domestically from $25.8 billion.

Greenfield is underwhelmed by the prospect of digital downloads, fearful that movie companies are embracing the concept too quickly and will end up cannibalizing their DVD sales.

"We are concerned about the long-term damage the industry could incur from expanding the rental market via digital downloads (that expire) and/or video-on-demand (VOD)," the analyst wrote in his Wednesday report.

"While the studios need the VOD/rental industry to support failed movies, we do not believe a greater emphasis on VOD/rental (vs. retail) is the answer to the industry's problems heading into 2007," he wrote.

The analyst is predicting good fourth-quarter results for movie companies "given a great DVD release schedule." It is 2007 and 2008 that worries him, and sales of next-generation DVDs, be they Blu-ray Disc, HD-DVD or both, won't help, either, at least not in the near term.

"Bottom line, keep an eye on 2007 film industry profits," he wrote. "We suspect the risk to expectations is increasingly to the downside, with downside risk growing into 2008 unless there is a notable acceleration in next-gen DVD sales and/or a more attractive business model emerges for digital movie distribution."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061221/.../dvdsales_dc_1





Joseph Barbera, Half of Cartoon Duo, Dies at 95
Dave Itzkoff

Joseph Barbera, an innovator of animation who teamed with William Hanna to give generations of young television viewers a pantheon of beloved characters, including Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and the Flintstones, died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95.

A spokesman for Warner Brothers said he died of natural causes, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Barbera and the studio he founded with Mr. Hanna, Hanna-Barbera Productions, became synonymous with television animation, yielding more than 100 cartoon series over four decades, including “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?,” “Jonny Quest” and “The Smurfs.”

On signature televisions shows like “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons,” the two men developed a cartoon style that combined colorful, simply drawn characters (often based on other recognizable pop-culture personalities) with the narrative structures and joke-telling techniques of traditional live-action sitcoms. They were television’s first animated comedy programs.

Before that, Mr. Barbera and Mr. Hanna had worked together on more than 120 hand-drawn cartoon shorts for MGM, dozens of which starred the archetypal cat-and-mouse team Tom and Jerry. The Hanna-Barbera collaboration lasted more than 60 years. The critic Leonard Maltin, in his book “Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons,” wrote that Mr. Barbera’s strength was more in his drawing and gag writing while Mr. Hanna had a good sense of comic timing and giving characters warmth.

“I was never a good artist,” said Mr. Hanna, who died in 2001. But Mr. Barbera, he said, “has the ability to capture mood and expression in a quick sketch better than anyone I’ve ever known.”

Born Joseph Roland Barbera on March 24, 1911, in the Little Italy section of Manhattan and raised in Flatbush, Brooklyn, Mr. Barbera tried his hand at banking, playwriting and amateur boxing before the successful sale of a sketch to Collier’s magazine encouraged him to pursue a career as a cartoon artist. He wrote a letter to Walt Disney, then a rising star of California’s animation industry, in search of employment; Mr. Disney apparently promised to look Mr. Barbera up on a subsequent visit to New York, but the proposed meeting never took place.

Instead, Mr. Barbera began his animation career on the East Coast. After a four-day stint with the animator Max Fleischer, he began writing gags and drawing cartoon cels for the Van Beuren Studios in 1932. When the studio shut down in 1936, he found work at the Terrytoon Studios in New Rochelle, N.Y., but one year later was lured away to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s animation unit in Culver City, Calif.

It was at MGM that Mr. Barbera was first paired with Mr. Hanna, a veteran cartoon writer and musical composer and lyricist. After toiling on a short-lived series of animated shorts based on the Katzenjammer Kids comic strips, the two men formed a plan to produce their own material.

As Mr. Barbera recalled in an interview in Michael Mallory’s book “Hanna-Barbera Cartoons,” “In desperation one time, we were sitting in a room waiting for the place to fold, and I said to Bill: ‘Why don’t we try a cartoon of our own?’ ”

Their first such project for MGM, a 1940 theatrical short called “Puss Gets the Boot,” introduced audiences to a relentless cat named Jasper, perpetually frustrated in his pursuit of a crafty mouse called Jinx. It was nominated for an Academy Award. Over the next 17 years, the occasionally sadistic antics that Mr. Barbera and Mr. Hanna devised for their anthropomorphic rivals — rechristened Tom and Jerry — would earn MGM another 13 Oscar nominations and seven statuettes.

Though MGM put Mr. Barbera and Mr. Hanna in charge of its animation division in 1955, the studio closed the unit two years later. So the two turned to their side company, H-B Enterprises, which they had established to produce animated television commercials, and began working full time on television programs.

Their first series, “The Ruff & Ready Show,” had its debut on NBC in December 1957. That was followed in 1958 by “The Huckleberry Hound Show,” about a powder-blue pooch who spoke and sung (badly) with a Southern drawl. That series later won an Emmy and yielded a spinoff show for one of its supporting characters, an Ed Norton-like forest denizen named Yogi Bear.

Mr. Barbera and Mr. Hanna revisited the template of “The Honeymooners” in 1960 to create their most popular series, “The Flintstones,” a half-hour animated sitcom about two families living in the Stone Age suburb of Bedrock. It appeared in prime time on ABC and was a top-20 show in its first year.

Despite its fanciful setting, “The Flintstones” hewed to sitcom conventions, using sight gags and one-liners that centered on the domestic squabbles of the prehistoric couple Fred and Wilma Flintstone. Propelled by a catchy, brassy theme song, “Meet the Flintstones” (introduced in the show’s third season), and Fred’s thunderous yell, “Yabba-dabba-doo!” “The Flintstones” ran for 166 episodes over six seasons.

In the succeeding years, Hanna-Barbera produced numerous prime-time, syndicated and Saturday-morning cartoon shows, from 1962’s futuristic family comedy “The Jetsons” to the 1973 adventure series “Super Friends” to such 1980s-era toy tie-ins as “Shirt Tales” and “Challenge of the GoBots.” The studio also produced eclectic projects like the 1978 television special starring the heavy-metal rock band KISS and a 1973 film adaptation of E. B. White’s novel “Charlotte’s Web.”

In 1990, Hanna-Barbera was acquired by Turner Broadcasting (now part of Time Warner), where it continued to produce animated programming for syndication and for the Cartoon Network cable channel, including “Dexter’s Laboratory” and “The Powerpuff Girls.” In 1998, Hanna-Barbera’s studios were moved to a Warner Brothers office building, and by 2001, the company had been absorbed by Warner Brothers’ animation division.

Mr. Barbera remained active in animation. He worked as an executive producer on such recent television series as “What’s New, Scooby-Doo?” He was also a writer, director and storyboard artist on the 2005 cartoon “The KarateGuard,” his first theatrical Tom and Jerry short in more than 45 years.

His survivors include his wife, Sheila, and three children from a previous marriage: Jayne, Lynne and Neal.

Mr. Barbera’s influence can be found today in prime-time animated series like “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy” and in cartoons that satirize the Hanna-Barbera style, including “The Venture Brothers” and “Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.” His own work continues to be seen on the cable channel Boomerang, which broadcasts vintage Hanna-Barbera programming 24 hours a day.

Though he was often asked to explain the enduring popularity of his cartoons, Mr. Barbera was reluctant to subject his life’s work to close analysis. “To me it makes little sense to talk about the cartoons we did,” he wrote in a 1994 autobiography, “My Life in ‘Toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century.” “The way to appreciate them is to see them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/ar...rtner=homepage





AOL Chief Has a View, a Long One
Richard Siklos

If AOL were being dressed up for a sale, as has been rumored on and off for several years, Randy Falco is an odd choice to be the new chief executive.

As Mr. Falco notes, he is hardly a short-term guy. Before starting at Time Warner’s AOL unit this month, he spent every day of his career since college — 31 years — working for NBC Universal. And he has been married for the same number of years.

“I’m very devoted,” he said, having no trouble finding more ways to emphasize the point. “I’m very loyal. I’m not in here for a short ride. I’m not a one-off guy.”

Mr. Falco and his new deputy, Ron Grant, made their first moves yesterday to run AOL for the long haul by doing something its employees have become accustomed to in the six tumultuous years since the company merged with Time Warner: reorganizing the executive suite.

Mr. Falco will have eight people report directly to him, including Mr. Grant and AOL’s vice chairman, Ted Leonsis, as well as the top executives in areas like human resources, legal and finance, according to a memo sent yesterday to AOL employees. Mr. Grant, the president and chief operating officer, will oversee seven operating businesses, including products, platforms, programming, advertising sales, international, and the company’s large but declining business for selling Internet access.

This time, Mr. Falco says, the company is properly configured to capitalize on a strategy it began following in August: focusing on free services for broadband Internet users supported by advertising.

The new lineup will not only clarify who does what after the recent departure of several top executives, Mr. Falco said, it will also illustrate a clearer emphasis. (A few positions are still open, including new slots for chief marketing and “innovation” officers, he said).

The company, he said, will focus on attracting a bigger audience, selling more advertising and increasing the amount of time people spend on its Web pages and using services like instant messaging.

“At the center of all of this is product innovation,” he said. “It makes everything else work.”

Only three weeks ago, Mr. Falco was the president and chief operating officer of NBC Universal Television, the biggest division of the media conglomerate NBC Universal, which is majority-owned by General Electric. A tall New York native bearing a glancing physical resemblance to Howard Stringer, the Sony chairman, Mr. Falco was “the quiet giant” at NBC, said a longtime colleague, David M. Zaslav, now chief executive of Discovery Communications.

It was at NBC’s headquarters that Mr. Falco and some colleagues, including Bob Wright, the chairman of NBC Universal, met in August with Time Warner’s president, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, and Mr. Grant to discuss offering NBC’s programming on Time Warner’s cable systems on a video-on-demand basis.

Mr. Bewkes said he had been instantly impressed by Mr. Falco, whom he thought best understood the video plan and could be a champion for it within NBC and at other TV companies. At a couple of follow-up lunches, Mr. Bewkes began thinking of Mr. Falco for a senior role within Time Warner.

From Mr. Falco’s perspective, it had become clear that his immediate boss, Jeff Zucker, was the internal candidate most likely to succeed Mr. Wright, whose retirement loomed. Mr. Falco reasoned that at age 52, if he aspired to be chief executive, it would be easier for him to move to another company before Mr. Wright retired.

Mr. Bewkes, meanwhile, had been developing AOL’s strategy shift with Jonathan F. Miller, the chief executive, but the men did not see eye to eye. Among Mr. Bewkes’s concerns, he said, was that the company needed a strong operating executive to make the strategy work. With that in mind, he even recommended that Mr. Miller have a drink with Mr. Falco in November, and they did.

Mr. Falco was not interested in anything but a chief executive’s position — otherwise he would have happily stayed at NBC Universal — but he was surprised when Mr. Bewkes offered him the job of running AOL. With digital distribution and the Internet the current obsession of all media executives, Mr. Falco did not see his lack of direct management of a Web business as an impediment.

“I’m not sure that convergence is the issue anymore,” he said. “There is a shift going on, and it’s dramatic; the consumer is living on the Net and as a result, the advertisers are on the Net."

Mr. Bewkes said he did not look specifically for a so-called traditional media executive for AOL. "I just wanted the best executive I could get. If there was an Internet executive as qualified as Randy, I would have hired that person,” he said.

After Mr. Falco accepted the job, he told Mr. Bewkes that he wanted Mr. Grant as his deputy. Mr. Grant, 40, had worked as Mr. Bewkes’s chief adviser on digital strategy and operations for the last four years. Before that, he spent five years at AOL. He was one of only a handful of executives who remained from the company’s business affairs unit, which made deals that resulted in accounting scandals.

Mr. Bewkes — who as the head of Time Warner’s HBO division clashed with AOL’s leaders shortly after the merger — said Mr. Grant’s survival of that experience and subsequent success was evidence of his integrity and knowledge. Mr. Grant said, "I believed in AOL then as I do now.”

On seeing Mr. Grant in the halls at Time Warner headquarters, Mr. Falco turned to him and joked: “This is my computer.”

Having Mr. Grant’s familiar face back at AOL’s campus in Dulles, Va., has not dulled the shock of Mr. Miller’s sudden and unexpected firing last month, several executives at the company said. In carrying out the new strategy, the company also decided to eliminate 5,000 jobs.

But on his first day on the job, Dec. 4, Mr. Falco met as many employees as he could, and had lunch in one of the campus’s four cafeterias.

“The first message was: the change in strategy that we just announced was not in question,” he said. Taking his typically long view, Mr. Falco said that one of his main goals was to “develop a winning culture” at AOL, a company that pioneered the popularization of the Internet and is still one of its major participants but has been knocked around more than Rocky Balboa.

“I can’t imagine that Time Warner will want to sell or get out of AOL,” he said. “It is an integral part of Time Warner.”

Saul Hansell contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/technology/19aol.html





News Corp. Swaps DirecTV With Liberty
Seth Sutel

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. will swap its controlling stake in the satellite TV broadcaster DirecTV Group Inc. with Liberty Media Corp. in exchange for Liberty's 16 percent stake in News Corp., the companies announced Friday.

The deal settles a long-simmering dispute between Murdoch, News Corp.'s chairman and CEO, and Liberty's Chairman John Malone, who surprised Murdoch two years ago by suddenly building up a large stake in the global media conglomerate that Murdoch built.

Under the deal, which had been expected, News Corp. will give Liberty its 38.4 percent stake in DirecTV, three regional sports cable networks and $550 million in cash.

In return, News Corp. will receive Liberty's entire stake in News Corp., which is worth 16.3 percent of the company's value. News Corp. said in a statement that the deal will amount to a buyback of about $11 billion of its own stock.

The deal is subject to various regulatory approvals and must also be approved by a majority of the holders of News Corp.'s Class B voting shares, excluding the Murdoch family and Liberty.

With the deal with Liberty complete, News Corp. said it expected to cancel its "poison pill" antitakeover measure, which had faced objections from shareholders. News Corp. also said it would consider eliminating its staggered board, in which not all of the company's directors stand for election each year.

Discussions between News Corp. and Liberty had been dragging on for months, and other possible scenarios for exchanging Liberty's stake had also emerged. By arranging the exchange as a swap of assets instead of a purchase, both sides will avoid enormous tax bills.

The tensions between Murdoch and Malone dated back to 2004, when Malone -- a cable industry pioneer and a longtime powerhouse in media investing -- surprised Murdoch by taking advantage of active trading in News Corp. stock as it relocated its headquarters from Australia to the United States to quickly accumulate a large voting stake in the company.

Malone's stake is currently worth about 16 percent of News Corp., but since many of the shares are the Class B voting shares, Malone's voting power was about 19 percent, potentially rivaling the Murdoch family's voting power of about 30 percent.

In addition to the 38.4 percent stake in DirecTV, Liberty will also receive three regional sports networks -- FSN Northwest, FSN Pittsburgh, and FSN Rocky Mountain.

For News Corp., the deal with Liberty removes a potential threat to the Murdoch family's control of the company, a major global media conglomerate that includes the Twentieth Century Fox movie and TV studio; the Fox broadcast network; the Fox News Channel and FX cable networks; a large portfolio of newspapers in the United Kingdom and Australia as well as the New York Post; and the social networking site MySpace.

For Liberty, the deal further simplifies a complex financial structure for the Englewood, Colo.-based company, which holds stakes in a number of other companies, and gives it another operating business to run. Liberty owns the home shopping network QVC and the pay TV channel Starz. DirecTV has 15.6 million subscribers.

Liberty shares rose $3.21, or more than 3 percent, to $96.85 in morning trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market. News Corp. shares rose 13 cents to $21.71 on the New York Stock Exchange.
http://www.newsday.com/business/nati...ness-headlines





Virtual Rock Is Real Hit for MTV
Bill Carter

For MTV, a new association with a video game called Guitar Hero is opening a path back to that network’s roots in music.

But it doesn’t mean there won’t soon be some kind of reality television version of the hugely popular game.

The second edition of Guitar Hero is one of the hottest-selling games this gift-giving season, with stores finding it hard to keep it in stock. Reviews have been largely ecstatic, and encomiums have been pouring in from real-life rock stars, including Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails to Jack Black of Tenacious D.

Ed Robertson, the guitarist for Barenaked Ladies, said he was “totally addicted to the game on our last tour.” He played constantly, he said, by himself and in contests against crew members.

It got so bad, Mr. Robertson said, that at one concert, “I was just finishing up the expert level on a song when the band wrangler came in and said I had to go on stage right at that moment. I said, ‘Wait man, I’m in the last solo of “Free Bird.” ’ I went right from Guitar Hero to running up on stage to perform for real.”

Mr. Robertson said that the game is now all but standard equipment on the tour buses of many rock bands. And Guitar Hero even played a role in this year’s baseball playoffs.

The Detroit Tigers got worried about the performance of their star reliever Joel Zumaya during the American League Championship Series when he was afflicted with wrist and forearm inflammation, until they learned it did not come from his pitching motion but from playing too many hours of Guitar Hero.

The game, which is available on PlayStation 2, is the product of a company called Harmonix, which specializes in music-oriented video games. MTV executives became interested in acquiring the company this year after seeing how well the original version of Guitar Hero sold last holiday season, and after playing the game themselves.

“We were impressed with how they had cracked the code on the music game,” said Van Toffler, the president of MTV’s music group. “They figured out a way to make the music gaming experience truly emotive, just like the experience of really playing music.” MTV purchased Harmonix in September.

In the game a player manipulates a toy model of a guitar that uses buttons rather than frets to produce notes, which are color coded on the screen to match the buttons. The music accompanies a rock song with the player simulating the experience of being onstage with the band. The player can move up from an easy level to tougher tests until he reaches the expert level, which takes a high degree of expertise.

That Guitar Hero has appealed to real artists came as a bit of a surprise to the creators. Alex Rigopulos, the chief executive of Harmonix, said he expected it would appeal mainly to “those of us who want to experience what it feels like to play rock music.”

But he said, “We started getting all this fan mail from real artists.”

Partly, the game simply touched the competitive streak in a lot of musicians. Mr. Robertson said he had played against a “really techy geek” in a competition in Denver. “And he beat me.” That night Mr. Robertson invited his opponent to watch a Barenaked Ladies concert and he razzed him from the stage. “I bet you can’t come up here and try it with a real one,” he said.

Artists also simply enjoy the experience of playing someone else’s music. Mr. Robertson said he was so excited to learn the Foo Fighters song “Monkey Wrench” that he went out and bought three of the band’s CDs.

For MTV the expanding popularity of the game is fueling all kinds of ideas for future applications. (One that already has emerged: The Guitar Hero wedding, with a competition at the reception.)

Mr. Toffler said MTV is looking into ways to adapt the game into its television programming. One application that fits nicely is an inclusion of the game in the online “virtual world” MTV is building on shows like “Laguna Beach.”

Mr. Toffler said MTV would incorporate Guitar Hero into a virtual world accompanying its annual Video Music Awards, where the avatar (self-created character) of the computer user would play the game before entering the audience for the awards show.

“We have all kinds of ideas for expanding the experience into television shows,” Mr. Toffler said.

Mr. Robertson, who said he has enjoyed playing video games “all the way back to Pong,” said this one had done something extraordinary. “It took a very simple idea and executed it perfectly,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/ar...ic/19guit.html





Censored ‘SNL’ Sketch Jumps Bleepless Onto the Internet
Jacques Steinberg

The nearly three-minute digital film, shown on “Saturday Night Live” last Saturday, was a parody of two boy-band singers (including one played by the real Justin Timberlake) crooning a holiday song about making a gift to their girlfriends of their male anatomy, which they appeared to have wrapped in boxes (strategically placed) and then topped with bows.

Given the subject matter, it was little surprise that NBC bleeped a recurring word in the chorus 16 times. But soon after the broadcast concluded at 1 a.m. Sunday, viewers who’d seen the bit on TV (and others who had just heard about it) could find the uncensored version online. That’s because the network itself had placed it on its own Web site (nbc.com) and YouTube.com, under the headings “Special Treat in a Box” or “Special Christmas Box.”

In less than a week the official uncensored version of the video has been viewed by over two million people on YouTube alone. In the process “Saturday Night Live” appears to have become the first scripted comedy on a broadcast network to use the Web to make an end-run around the prying eyes of both its internal censors and those of the Federal Communications Commission, whose jurisdiction over “Saturday Night Live” effectively ends at the Web frontier.

Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer of “Saturday Night Live,” cautioned in an interview that the strategy of treating Internet users to the equivalent of an authorized “director’s cut” of his late-night show “will be the exception” going forward. But he also predicted that other shows and networks, time and money permitting, would surely follow NBC’s lead in making available material that was deemed not ready for prime time, or even late night. “My sense is that, as always, now that the door has been opened, some things will go through it,” he said.

For “Saturday Night Live” the ubiquity of “Special Treat” on the Web this week has proved to be yet another digital stake planted firmly in unexplored ground. Almost a year ago a rap parody from the show (featuring two characters waxing rhapsodic about eating cupcakes and watching “The Chronicles of Narnia” on the Upper West Side) became one of the first bootleg videos to demonstrate the vast potential of YouTube, the portal through which millions of viewers were able to see it. (While NBC quickly ordered YouTube to take down the video, which was titled “Lazy Sunday” and protected by copyright, the network later reached agreement with the Web site to showcase copyrighted material from its shows, including “The Office” and “Saturday Night Live,” on a dedicated page stocked by the network itself.)

The common denominator in “Special Treat” and “Lazy Sunday” — as well as another “Saturday Night Live” favorite on You Tube featuring the actress Natalie Portman and her supposed bad-girl side — is a performer on the show, Andy Samberg, and a supporting cast of producers he brought with him to “Saturday Night Live” from a pioneering Web site called Lonely Island.

The idea for “Special Treat” was hatched, Mr. Samberg said, when Mr. Michaels called him into his office last Tuesday and asked that he try to write something funny that would showcase the singing skills of Mr. Timberlake, who was both the host and musical guest.

Mr. Samberg and his colleagues — including Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone — presented a rough draft of the song to Mr. Timberlake on Thursday afternoon, and after they reworked it to his specifications, they recorded the voice track on special equipment in Mr. Samberg’s office around midnight. They spent Friday and much of Saturday filming the video in and around New York, and not until 4 p.m. Saturday — less than eight hours before the show was to go live — was the video in sufficient shape to be shown to the NBC executive responsible for late-night programming, Rick Ludwin.

While the show’s producers had already concluded on their own that the video would have to be bleeped to be broadcast, they had a special request for Mr. Ludwin: Would he permit the uncensored version to be made available on the Web?

“My first instinct, without having seen anything, was that we probably shouldn’t do that,” Mr. Ludwin said later in an interview. “My thought was that even though it’s going on the Internet, it’s still representing NBC. But I hadn’t seen it yet. So I said it would depend on how dirty it was.”

Drawing close to a monitor adjacent to the show’s vaunted eighth-floor studio, Mr. Ludwin watched as Mr. Timberlake (in a blond wig) and Mr. Samberg (decked out with a close-cropped beard that made him look like the pop singer’s twin brother) sang of the various holidays on which they wanted to present their special gift (including Hanukkah and Kwanzaa) and the various settings (including backstage at the Country Music Association Awards.)

“We were all laughing,” said Mr. Ludwin, who had been accompanied by a representative from the NBC legal department. And then Mr. Ludwin said he had a change of heart.

“Those people who go on the Internet will not be shocked by this,” Mr. Ludwin recalled thinking. “Obviously there are some people who will be offended. Those people are probably unlikely to go searching for it on the Internet. It’s just funny.”

Still, the material was touchy enough, Mr. Ludwin said, that he sought final approval for the Web version of the video from the highest echelons of NBC, including Kevin Reilly, the president of NBC Entertainment , and Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal Television Group.. Both approved the idea, he said. Another executive suggested that a disclaimer be placed before the Web-only version of the video that warned of its explicit content, a proposal that was immediately accepted.

As yet another production featuring Mr. Samberg spreads like electronic wildfire, the performer said he was pleased that the show was becoming so adept at finding alternate routes to viewers, beyond the 6.5 million who, on average, watch the show on NBC each Saturday night, according to Nielsen Media Research. (A figure that is down slightly since last year at this time.)

“A sign now of success with a certain audience when you do a short comedy piece, anywhere, is that it gets on YouTube and gets around,” Mr. Samberg said. “It’s always something you’re thinking about unconsciously. It’s not our main objective. But there’s no part of us that doesn’t want to be on YouTube.”

Which is not to say that NBC intends to make such decisions lightly in the future. “We’re still not going to put just anything out there,” said Jeff Gaspin, president of digital content for NBC Universal. “We still have to protect the brands.”

Seth Meyers, the show’s head writer, said that he and Mr. Michaels were also mindful that sometimes the funniest material — whether on their show, or Howard Stern’s radio show — was borne of butting up against boundaries, either from the outside or self-imposed.

Sizing up the two versions of the “Special Treat” video, Mr. Meyers observed, “The most interesting thing is that it’s actually not funnier uncensored.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/ar...on/21sket.html





Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity
Charles Isherwood

THE predilections of Sebastian Venable, the gothic ghost who haunts Tennessee Williams’s “Suddenly Last Summer,” were so unspeakable that they essentially went unspoken in the text of the play. Dark hints about his taste for young men bloom all through the lyrical foliage of Williams’s dialogue, but the actual subject of homosexuality is never explicitly mentioned.

Nobody would have called the doomed poet a gay man, although that’s what all the tortuous innuendo essentially amounts to. The play, which was teamed with a curtain-raiser actually called “Something Unspoken” when it had its premiere in 1958, was written in an era when the word “gay” had not come into common parlance, and the word “homosexual” had a clinical and disreputable ring. (The “something” in “Something Unspoken” was lesbianism, by the way.)

The coyness about the subject in “Suddenly Last Summer,” written by a playwright who was famously uncoy about matters of sex and sexuality, firmly dates the play. Today neutral terms describing homosexuality are commonplace, having long since joined the vocabulary list deemed fit and proper to be spoken in front of the footlights. But as “The Little Dog Laughed,” “Regrets Only” and “Borat” have lately shown, old-school mockery, refitted for a new, post-politically-correct era, is making a comeback.

In “The Little Dog Laughed,” Douglas Carter Beane’s Hollywood satire at the Cort Theater, the central character, a ruthless female agent played with verve by Julie White, uses the following terms, among others, to refer to her client, a closeted gay movie actor: “that pansy,” “Mary” and “Miss Nancy,” “little fairy Tinkerbell” and “little fruit.” Coining her own variation on derogation, she calls another character “St. Francis of the Sissies.”

At the performance I recently attended, virtually every one of those lines got a laugh. As they were meant to. For the character’s noxious vocabulary isn’t meant to mark her as a bigot. The epithets, generally employed in acerbic monologues addressed to the audience, are meant to establish her as a funny gal, if maybe a little soulless. It seems for most people they do.

Little notice has been taken of Mr. Beane’s comic exploitation of what is, in other contexts, called hate speech. But he seems to be aware that he is treading on tender turf: how else to explain the agent’s opening announcement that she’s a lesbian? Her sexuality then disappears until a passing reference in the last scene. But it’s enough to inoculate her (and perhaps him) against accusations of homophobia: she’s on the team, so she’s allowed, and we’re allowed to chuckle. (For the record, Mr. Beane is an openly gay man.)

The play raises a question that has been brought to the forefront of the cultural chatter recently in another context: Who is and is not allowed to use — and to laugh at or milk laughs from — derisive names for minorities? On a Broadway stage, Ms. White is warmly applauded for tossing out those nasty words. At a multiplex near you, Sacha Baron Cohen, playing a fictional anti-Semite, has ’em rolling in the aisles. But Michael Richards, also an entertainer, repeatedly uses a derogatory term for African-Americans in a stand-up act that queasily devolves into a fit of pique, and his offense makes headlines and cripples his career, possibly for good.

Is it all about context? Certainly Mr. Richards’s ghastly rant was not a scripted piece of entertainment, nor was it designed to provoke a discussion of slang and semantics. In savaging a heckler, he used the word the only way it was once used: as a weapon meant to demean and hurt. (Likewise, Mel Gibson got into trouble for his anti-Semitic rant because it appeared to be an expression of personal animus.) But at some point in his tirade Mr. Richards also tried to frame his attack as a political challenge. Muttering grimly in response to the audience’s obvious displeasure, he said, “You see, there’s still those words, those words.”

Lenny Bruce was the first comic to start a conversation about “those words” on the nightclub stage. In one of his most famous, and controversial, routines, he asked if there were any African-Americans in the house — using the usual offensive term. He went on to run down a litany of bigoted epithets. His point was that by keeping the words taboo, we unwittingly preserve their power to hurt. He ended the bit by suggesting that if they were allowed to fully enter the cultural conversation, their batteries would go dead.

History has proved him to be at least half right. Gays and blacks took the language meant to demean them and put it to sly new use when speaking among themselves. Lately, as attitudes have relaxed, it has become easier for the rest of America to join the parties. (The character of Jack in the popular sitcom “Will & Grace” was pure minstrelsy, but by the time he minced onto the airwaves, in the context of a gay-friendly show, his dizziness and effeminacy hardly raised an eyebrow.)

What is disappointing about Mr. Beane’s flippant use of provocative language in “The Little Dog Laughed” is how provocative it isn’t. Mr. Beane is not pushing boundaries to get his audiences to examine their own prejudices, or jolt them into an awareness of its lingering prevalence in the culture. He’s just pushing the classic put-down button, used to garner laughs on sitcoms — and in life — from time immemorial.

Because he knows his audience is overwhelmingly made up of the gay and the gay-friended, Mr. Beane can safely use words that in other contexts would still call down opprobrium. But it doesn’t make the humor any smarter, and as the snipes kept coming and I stopped counting, the barking of those words in viperish tones began to push a few of my buttons. (Let’s just say that, as a gay man, I don’t look back on my suburban junior high school years with unalloyed fondness.)

“Regrets Only,” the new comedy by Paul Rudnick at Manhattan Theater Club, similarly exploits our new comfort with old stereotypes for some easy laughs. (Mr. Rudnick is also an openly gay playwright.) The plot turns on the notion that a Manhattan wedding would be stopped in its tracks if the city’s gay men went out on strike. No flowers, no one to pin the baby’s breath in the bride’s hair and tell her she looks fabulous. Mr. Rudnick includes lawyers and doormen and elevator operators in his legions of gay protesters, but mostly the humor turns on the sudden absence from the city’s working populace of florists and hairdressers and dress designers, occupations that haven’t made for clever antigay jokes since the days of “Match Game.”

Wrapped in a comfy pashmina of preachment about the issue of gay marriage, the conceit is hardly going to offend, but the general mediocrity of “Regrets Only” suggests that Mr. Rudnick may have played with gay stereotypes a little too long: the play has far fewer good gags than his riper efforts in this sphere, like “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told” and the short solo plays “Mr. Charles of Palm Beach,” about a quintessentially queeny cable-access host, and “Pride and Joy,” about a matron from Massapequa laying claim to the title of “most accepting, most loving mother of all time, bar none.”

For a dose of truly discomfiting — and provocative — comedy trading on man’s universal tendency to sort by group and sneer at the guys in the other camp, you’ll have to look not to the stage but to the movies, where a certain boob from Kazakhstan reigned this fall. In contrast to the tame, middlingly funny and rather retrograde flavor of “The Little Dog Laughed” and “Regrets Only,” the often uproarious “Borat” has the harsh sting of just-distilled vodka.

Mr. Cohen is himself Jewish, so Borat’s smiling anti-Semitism is a con mostly used to seduce the clueless rednecks and drunk frat dudes. But I wonder what would happen if Borat trained the cameras on a cross section of the audiences delighting in his easy evisceration of the all-American boob. Do the millions of people in on the Borat joke really think they’re immune from even the smallest trace of bigotry? Unless they are among the unlucky few who meet Mr. Cohen’s next alter ego, they may never have to acknowledge their laughter’s unfunny origins.

When we are done laughing at Ms. White’s nasty cracks and Borat’s victims, and clucking at Mr. Richards’s freakish tirade, we should recognize the uncomfortable truth of that peppy homily sung in the Broadway musical “Avenue Q”: “Everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/theater/17ishe.html





Eye opening analysis

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
Peter Gutmann

Executive Summary
-----------------

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Executive Executive Summary
---------------------------

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

Introduction
------------

This document looks purely at the cost of the technical portions of Vista's content protection. The political issues (under the heading of DRM) have been examined in exhaustive detail elsewhere and won't be commented on further, unless it's relevant to the cost analysis. However, one important point that must be kept in mind when reading this document is that in order to work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry wishes it were possible. This conundrum is displayed over and over again in the Windows content-protection specs, with manufacturers being given no hard- and-fast guidelines but instead being instructed that they need to display as much dedication as possible to the party line. The documentation is peppered with sentences like:

"It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond the strict letter of the specification and provide additional content-protection features, because this demonstrates their strong intent to protect premium content".

This is an exceedingly strange way to write technical specifications, but is dictated by the fact that what the spec is trying to achieve is fundamentally impossible. Readers should keep this requirement to display appropriate levels of dedication in mind when reading the following analysis [Note A].

Disabling of Functionality
--------------------------

Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be sent over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in. Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format). Most newer audio cards, for example, feature TOSlink digital optical output for high-quality sound reproduction, and even the latest crop of motherboards with integrated audio provide at least coax (and often optical) digital output. Since S/PDIF doesn't provide any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing protected content. In other words if you've invested a pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from a digital output, you won't be able to use it with protected content. Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by Vista's content protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed from component video.

Indirect Disabling of Functionality
-----------------------------------

As well as overt disabling of functionality, there's also covert disabling of functionality. For example PC voice communications rely on automatic echo cancellation (AEC) in order to work. AEC requires feeding back a sample of the audio mix into the echo cancellation subsystem, but with Vista's content protection this isn't permitted any more because this might allow access to premium content. What is permitted is a highly-degraded form of feedback that might possibly still sort-of be enough for some sort of minimal echo cancellation purposes.

The requirement to disable audio and video output plays havoc with standard system operations, because the security policy used is a so-called "system high" policy: The overall sensitivity level is that of the most sensitive data present in the system. So the instant any audio derived from premium content appears on your system, signal degradation and disabling of outputs will occur. What makes this particularly entertaining is the fact that the downgrading/disabling is dynamic, so if the premium-content signal is intermittent or varies (for example music that fades out), various outputs and output quality will fade in and out, or turn on and off, in sync. Normally this behaviour would be a trigger for reinstalling device drivers or even a warranty return of the affected hardware, but in this case it's just a signal that everything is functioning as intended.

Decreased Playback Quality
--------------------------

Alongside the all-or-nothing approach of disabling output, Vista requires that any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that passes through it. This is done through a "constrictor" that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality one, then up-scales it again back to the original spec, but with a significant loss in quality. So if you're using an expensive new LCD display fed from a high-quality DVI signal on your video card and there's protected content present, the picture you're going to see will be, as the spec puts it, "slightly fuzzy", a bit like a 10-year-old CRT monitor that you picked up for $2 at a yard sale. In fact the spec specifically still allows for old VGA analog outputs, but even that's only because disallowing them would upset too many existing owners of analog monitors. In the future even analog VGA output will probably have to be disabled. The only thing that seems to be explicitly allowed is the extremely low-quality TV-out, provided that Macrovision is applied to it.

The same deliberate degrading of playback quality applies to audio, with the audio being downgraded to sound (from the spec) "fuzzy with less detail".

Amusingly, the Vista content protection docs say that it'll be left to graphics chip manufacturers to differentiate their product based on (deliberately degraded) video quality. This seems a bit like breaking the legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can hobble on crutches.

Beyond the obvious playback-quality implications of deliberately degraded output, this measure can have serious repercussions in applications where high-quality reproduction of content is vital. For example the field of medical imaging either bans outright or strongly frowns on any form of lossy compression because artifacts introduced by the compression process can cause mis-diagnoses and in extreme cases even become life-threatening. Consider a medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer (the CDROM drives installed in workplace PCs inevitably spend most of their working lives playing music or MP3 CDs to drown out workplace noise). If there's any premium content present in there, the image will be subtly altered by Vista's content protection, potentially creating exactly the life-threatening situation that the medical industry has worked so hard to avoid. The scary thing is that there's no easy way around this - Vista will silently modify displayed content under certain (almost impossible-to-predict in advance) situations discernable only to Vista's built-in content-protection subsystem.

Elimination of Open-source Hardware Support
-------------------------------------------

In order to prevent the creation of hardware emulators of protected output devices, Vista requires a Hardware Functionality Scan (HFS) that can be used to uniquely fingerprint a hardware device to ensure that it's (probably) genuine. In order to do this, the driver on the host PC performs an operation in the hardware (for example rendering 3D content in a graphics card) that produces a result that's unique to that device type.

In order for this to work, the spec requires that the operational details of the device be kept confidential. Obviously anyone who knows enough about the workings of a device to operate it and to write a third-party driver for it (for example one for an open-source OS, or in general just any non-Windows OS) will also know enough to fake the HFS process. The only way to protect the HFS process therefore is to not release any technical details on the device beyond a minimum required for web site reviews and comparison with other products.

Denial-of-Service via Driver Revocation
---------------------------------------

Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will cease to function (details on this are a bit vague here, presumably some minimum functionality like generic 640x480 VGA support will still be available in order for the system to boot). This means that a report of a compromise of a particular driver or device will cause all support for that device worldwide to be turned off until a fix can be found. Again, details are sketchy, but if it's a device problem then presumably the device turns into a paperweight once it's revoked. If it's an older device for which the vendor isn't interested in rewriting their drivers (and in the fast-moving hardware market most devices enter "legacy" status within a year of two of their replacement models becoming available), all devices of that type worldwide become permanently unusable.

The threat of driver revocation is the ultimate nuclear option, the crack of the commissars' pistols reminding the faithful of their duty [Note B]. The exact details of the hammer that vendors will be hit with is buried in confidential licensing agreements, but I've heard mention of multimillion dollar fines and embargoes on further shipment of devices alongside the driver revocation mentioned above.

Decreased System Reliability
----------------------------

Vista's content protection requires that devices (hardware and software drivers) set so-called "tilt bits" if they detect anything unusual. For example if there are unusual voltage fluctuations, maybe some jitter on bus signals, a slightly funny return code from a function call, a device register that doesn't contain quite the value that was expected, or anything similar, a tilt bit gets set. Such occurrences aren't too uncommon in a typical computer (for example starting up or plugging in a bus-powered device may cause a small glitch in power supply voltages, or drivers may not quite manage device state as precisely as they think). Previously this was no problem - the system was designed with a bit of resilience, and things will function as normal. In other words small variances in performance are a normal part of system functioning. Furthermore, the degree of variance can differ widely across systems, with some handling large changes in system parameters and others only small ones. One very obvious way to observe this is what happens when a bunch of PCs get hit by a momentary power outage. Effects will vary from powering down, to various types of crash, to nothing at all, all triggered by exactly the same external event.

With the introduction of tilt bits, all of this designed-in resilience is gone. Every little (normally unnoticeable) glitch is suddenly surfaced because it could be a sign of a hack attack. The effect that this will have on system reliability should require no further explanation.

Content-protection "features" like tilt bits also have worrying denial-of- service (DoS) implications. It's probably a good thing that modern malware is created by programmers with the commercial interests of the phishing and spam industries in mind rather than just creating as much havoc as possible. With the number of easily-accessible grenade pins that Vista's content protection provides, any piece of malware that decides to pull a few of them will cause considerable damage. The homeland security implications of this seem quite serious, since a tiny, easily-hidden piece of malware would be enough to render a machine unusable, while the very nature of Vista's content protection would make it almost impossible to determine why the denial-of-service is occurring. Furthermore, the malware authors, who are taking advantage of "content-protection" features, would be protected by the DMCA against any attempts to reverse-engineer or disable the content-protection "features" that they're abusing.

Even without deliberate abuse by malware, the homeland security implications of an external agent being empowered to turn off your IT infrastructure in response to a content leak discovered in some chipset that you coincidentally happen to be using is a serious concern for potential Vista users. Non-US governments are already nervous enough about using a US-supplied operating system without having this remote DoS capability built into the operating system. And like the medical-image-degradation issue, you won't find out about this until it's too late, turning Vista PCs into ticking time bombs if the revocation functionality is ever employed.

Unnecessary CPU Resource Consumption
------------------------------------

In order to prevent tampering with in-system communications, all communication flows have to be encrypted and/or authenticated. For example content to video cards has to be encrypted with AES-128. This requirement for cryptography extends beyond basic content encryption to encompass not just data flowing over various buses but also command and control data flowing between software components. For example communications between user-mode and kernel-mode components are authenticated with OMAC message authentication-code tags, at considerable cost to both ends of the connection.

In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the underlying hardware ever 30ms to ensure that everything appears kosher. This means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted drivers has to wake up thirty times a second just to ensure that... nothing continues to happen. In addition to this polling, further device-specific polling is also done, for example Vista polls video devices on each video frame displayed in order to check that all of the grenade pins (tilt bits) are still as they should be.

On-board graphics create an additional problem in that blocks of precious content will end up stored in system memory, from where they could be paged to disk. In order to avoid this, Vista tags such pages with a special protection bit indicating that they need to be encrypted before being paged out and decrypted again after being paged in. Vista doesn't provide any other pagefile encryption, and will quite happily page banking PINs, credit card details, private, personal data, and other sensitive information, in plaintext. The content-protection requirements make it fairly clear that in Microsoft's eyes a frame of premium content is worth more than (say) a user's medical records or their banking PIN.

In addition to the CPU costs, the desire to render data inaccessible at any level means that video decompression can't be done in the CPU any more, since there isn't sufficient CPU power available to both decompress the video and encrypt the resulting uncompressed data stream to the video card. As a result, much of the decompression has to be integrated into the graphics chip. At a minimum this includes IDCT, MPEG motion compensation, and the Windows Media VC-1 codec. As a corollary to the "Increased Hardware Costs" problem above, this means that you can't ship a low-end graphics chip without video codec support any more.

The inability to perform decoding in software also means that any premium- content compression scheme not supported by the graphics hardware can't be implemented. If things like the Ogg video codec ever eventuate and get used for premium content, they had better be done using something like Windows Media VC-1 or they'll be a non-starter under Vista or Vista-approved hardware. This is particularly troubling for the high-quality digital cinema (D-Cinema) specification, which uses Motion JPEG2000 (MJ2K) because standard MPEG and equivalents don't provide sufficient image quality. Since JPEG2000 uses wavelet-based compression rather than MPEG's DCT-based compression, and wavelet-based compression isn't on the hardware codec list, it's not possible to play back D-Cinema premium content. Because *all* D-Cinema content will (presumably) be premium content, the result is no playback at all until the hardware support appears in PCs at some indeterminate point in the future. Compare this to the situation with MPEG video, where early software codecs like the XingMPEG en/decoder practically created the market for PC video. Today, thanks to Vista's content protection, the opening up of new markets in this manner would be impossible.

The high-end graphics and audio market are dominated entirely by gamers, who will do anything to gain the tiniest bit of extra performance, like buying Bigfoot Networks' $250 "Killer NIC" ethernet card in the hope that it'll help reduce their network latency by a few milliseconds. These are people buying $500-$1000 graphics and sound cards for which one single sale brings the device vendors more than the few cents they get from the video/audio portion of an entire roomful of integrated-graphics-and-sound PCs. I wonder how this market segment will react to knowing that their top-of-the-line hardware is being hamstrung by all of the content-protection "features" that Vista hogties it with?

More – Required reading – Jack.





Oz Jr.

Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill
Stephen's Blog

Part One: Background and Context

Finally we have some movement on the revision of New Zealand's copyright laws with the arrival in the house of the "Copyright (New Technololgies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill."

The time taken to revise laws means we're not going to get another chance to improve our copyright law here in New Zealand any time soon so its important that any changes position New Zealanders strongly.

If anything is certain, it is that new technologies are going to continue to challenge our understanding of content and the existing distribution channels are going to fight to retain the status quo as much as possible, so we, as consumers and voters need to be ready to fight back.

This is going to be a long post as its going to take a fairly detailed look at what is proposed, in order to manage the length, I'll post it in several sections focusing on the key aspects of the Bill.

Background and Context

• In July 2001 the Ministry of Economic Development released Digital Technology and the Copyright Act 1994: A Discussion Paper. The intention was to canvas opinions on three questions:
• Is there a need to amend the Copyright Act 1994 in light of developments in digital technology and the Internet? If so, what are the key issues that should be addressed?
• What changes should be made (if any) to ensure that copyright regime continues to provide an appropriate balance between the interests of copyright owners and users?
• Should New Zealand implement the requirements of the WIPO Copyright Treaty 1996 and those aspects of the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty 1996 that relate to the rights of phonogram producers, and ultimately accede to those treaties? If so, what changes need to be made to the Copyright Act 1994 over and above those required by the Treaties?

The need to consider the impact of technology was explicit in both the title of the paper and the focus in its contents on specific issues. These included the rights to communicate copyright works over the internet, liability of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the use of Technologial Prevention Measures (TPMs), protection of databases, and, most relevant to the average consumer, whether new exceptions or permitted uses were appropriate as a consequence of technolgical innovation.

Five and half years later we finally have a bill before Parliament getting its first reading. The time take is an issue when you think about the range of new issues that have arisen - projects like Google books, new services like Flickr and YouTube, but it also gives us a valuable set of international experiences as the US grapples with the DMCA, Australia with the consequences of dealing with the devil (AKA the Free Trade Agreement with the US) and the UK struggles with the interface between the English and European copyright traditions.

Its interesting that the Bill starts with this statement: "Copyright is a property right that exists in original works." This is a key part of the Copyright Act 1994 and is required if copyright is to draw upon the legal traditions of property law. Don't make the mistake of thinking that the key word is "original", even more so than ever under a digital world this term is legally almost meaningless. Despite phrases in the Bill's reamble like "The key principle that guides copyright reform in New Zealand is the enhancement of the public interest" copyright law is an economic law primarily and in our English tradition the presumption that the public interest is best served by promoting financial growth is both explicit and implicit.

As with all law, you need to read all of the clauses and statements like "the Act seeks to provide incentives to ensure the creation, production, and distribution of new creative works in a manner that meets society's needs" are placed in a context that protects the economic status quo: "It is not intended to change the balance between protection and access already established in the Act." This is absolutely not an attempt to create a legal system reflecting the political movements for free and open information.

In the Bill's Regulatory impact statement the motives of the Government are expressed directly.

"With the development of digital technology, 3 problems arise:

• there is increased risk of the production and distribution of high quality infringing copies of copyright works;
• there is a significant degree of uncertainty regaring the application of provisions of the Act to digital works;
• the Act is not consistent in all areas with our major trading partners and with emerging international standards."

For "major trading partners" I assume we are meant to read the US. Given the way they use trade laws to protect their own internal markets from NZ goods and services I fail to understand why we should help them make money from their dominance of the information economy in New Zealand in any way not actually required by our treaty obligations. Australia is now discovering the hooks within the free trade agreement they signed with the US and consequently their consumers are suffering while their legislators passively offer the treaty as an excuse for inaction.

Its interesting to see the Regulatory impact statement focuses in some detail on the economic imapct of infringement.

"... industry figures suggest significant annual losses (music industry: US$4.3 billion worldwide; NZ$114 million in New Zealand; computer industry: US$11 billion worldwide; motion picture industry: US$3 billion for the US, US$4 million for New Zealand)"
This repeats the time-worn whines of the existing media companies despite there being significant criticism of the accuracy of these figures and the considerable debate over impact of copying on music sales as opposed to an industry slump in the publishing of popular music for purchase. The information also appears to be significantly out of date as the music figure appears to come from 2002 and the movie figure appears to date from 2004.

Much of the economic damage from music and movie piracy also appears to arise from the production and sale of counterfeit CDs and DVDs, something that is already easy prosecuted under the existing laws and of no relevance to digital copyright whatsoever. Its worrying to see the Government serve up industry propaganda as fact in this way and it suggests a passive acceptance of the position stated by commercial interests rather than a deeper analysis of the facts.

In the next posts I'm going to pick up on some key sections of the proposed Bill:
http://artemis.utdc.vuw.ac.nz:8000/p...975996276.html





Why Most Artists Profit from Piracy

Piracy is not all that bad for musicians. In fact, research has shown that less popular artists actually profit from piracy. This can be concluded from, and is supported by several studies. Frustrated as they are, the music industry claims that they lose millions a year due to piracy, but is this really the case?

Two facts:

• Album sales are declining.
• 75% of all artists profit from filesharing.

We will try to explain these two seemingly contradicting facts, and list three factors that may help us understand what’s going on…

Artists sell more albums thanks to piracy
Several studies have shown that most artists actually profit from unauthorized sharing of files. They sell more albums because people have the opportunity to download songs and entire albums for free. A study by Blackburn (2004), a PhD student from Harvard, found that the 75% of the artist actually profit from piracy. Blackburn reports that the most popular artist (top 25%) sell less records. However, the remaining 75% of all artists actually profit from filesharing. The same pattern was found by Pedersen (2006, see graph), who analyzed the change in royalties paid by the Nordisk Copyright Bureau between 2001 and 2005.

But why do these artists sell more? Well, there are a couple of possible explanations.

• Music from highly popular artists is widely available on filesharing networks. If pirates mainly download albums from these artists, they will have more money left to buy albums of less popular artists.

• People have the opportunity to discover new music for free. It is thus easier to find new, and less popular artists. It is likely that people will buy albums from these artists as well if they like what they hear.

• It is not only piracy that makes it easier to discover new artists, social music services like Last.fm and Pandora also contribute to this phenomenon. The rise in income from concerts shows that the interest in music is increasing instead of declining.

LPs, CDs, DVDs and MP3s
The increased album sales in the late 90’s may very well have been caused, at least in part, by the shift from cassettes and LPs to CDs (and not just piracy!). CD players were getting more and more popular and a lot of people were exchanging their LP collections for CD collections. After 2000, CDs were not that special anymore, and the number of albums sold normalized (see graph below). It’s also likely that the decline in CD sales was influenced by the increased popularity of DVDs and MP3s.

This argument is also mentioned in a research paper by Hong (2004):

“The results indicate that transition from LPs to CDs might describe the increase in music sales during the 1990’s.”

And in a report from Pedersen (2006):

“the period 1995-2000 represents a truly unique situation in the modern history of Danish record sales and 10 million units sold in 2004 is more likely a return to regular conditions than a sign of crisis.”

This graph plots the number of albums sold in Denmark, and shows that the decline in sales after 2000 is not that special, but the uprise in the late 90’s is (Source: Pedersen, 2006).

The Internet is changing the way people experience music
Like we mentioned before, the Internet opened up a ton of possibilities for people to discover new artists and music. Not only illegal downloads, but also legal downloads, or paid downloads with the possibility to preview songs make it easier to discover new artists.

Social communities, and music services like Last.fm and Pandora also play a big role in the evolution of our music experience. Before the Internet, people had only a few possibilities to discover new music. Friends, radio stations and record stores are three of them, where the last two are in part sponsored by the marketing campaigns of the music industry. Today people are less dependent on what the music industry is campaigning for.

Wait a minute… the music industry and the RIAA always say that they are losing huge amounts of money because of filesharing. Isn’t this true?
Well, the fact is that there are less albums sold in total compared to some of the years when album sales were booming. However, it is hard to attribute this decline in sales to piracy (alone). From the research that has been done on this topic we can conclude that the effect of piracy on the music industry’s lost income lies somewhere between 0 and 30% (of the decline in sales, not of the sales in total). Pollock (2006) gives a comprehensive overview of these studies and concludes:

“The basic result is that online illegal file-sharing probably has some negative impact on traditional sales but the effect is appears to be quite small. The size of this effect is debated, and ranges from 0 to 100% of the sales decline in recent years, but a figure of between 0 and 30% would be a reasonable consensus value (i.e. that file-sharing accounted for 0-30% of the decline in sales not a 0-30% decline in sales). At the same time there is still substantial disagreement in the literature with the most impressive paper to date (Oberholzer and Strumpf 2005) estimating no impact from file-sharing.”

One of the things we can be pretty sure of is that the music industry is starting to lose control over their customers. A great deal of their income was generated by overly promoted albums and artists. It are those artists and albums that suffer the most from piracy. It gets harder and harder for the music industry to market artists to the top position of the charts now the customers heva all kinds of alternative ways to discover new music.

In conclusion we could say that music is more alive than ever before, that piracy is a tool to build a fanbase, and that the times when the music industry could dictate what we were listening to are over.

And that’s a good thing…
http://torrentfreak.com/why-most-art...t-from-piracy/





Rockers Sue Over Sales of Memorabilia

Led Zeppelin, the Doors and other musicians say Wolfgang's Vault has no right to profit from the vintage items.
Geoff Boucher and Martin Zimmerman

The Summer of Love is long gone. Here comes the Winter of Litigation.

Led Zeppelin, the Doors, the Grateful Dead and Carlos Santana — a rock 'n' roll dream team, circa 1970 — are suing Wolfgang's Vault, a Bay Area seller of classic-rock memorabilia and reproductions that also streams vintage concerts on the Web.

Wolfgang's Vault launched three years ago as an Internet merchant for the vast trove of memorabilia amassed by the late, iconic concert promoter Bill Graham. In November, the website ignited considerable fan excitement when it began streaming hundreds of rare concert moments that Graham filmed and archived during the glory days of rock.

The complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco claims that the memorabilia sales and streaming of performance footage are clear exploitations of the intellectual property and artistic success of the plaintiffs, who are described in the suit as "among the most legendary recording and performing artists of all time." The sales of items have continued despite "repeated demands" by the artists that the company stop, the suit alleges.

The lawsuit names as defendant William E. Sagan, the former head of a Minnesota healthcare company who became a rock entrepreneur when, for about $6 million, he acquired a warehouse piled high with Graham's relics. Born Wolfgang Grajonca in Germany, Graham died in 1991 in a helicopter accident. Since then, the trove changed hands several times before Sagan got it.

"Sagan simply doesn't have the legal rights to exploit and profit from the extraordinary success of these musicians," said attorney Jeff Reeves, who represents the musicians and works in the Irvine offices of Los Angeles law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. "This memorabilia was created in the first place for the purposes of promoting concerts and as gifts for fans and concert crew. Graham himself did not have the right to sell, reproduce or otherwise exploit these materials as a promoter, and neither does Sagan, who was not authorized to purchase these materials and who has absolutely no connection to the artists or their music."

The lawsuit requests a permanent injunction barring Wolfgang's Vault from selling any of the plaintiffs' memorabilia or recordings and demands that "all merchandise and goods" bearing the musicians' "names, voices, likenesses, photographs, identities, trademarks or copyrights" be handed over to the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs also want to be paid all of the profits made from the sale of their memorabilia, as well as punitive damages.

Sagan said the company was contacted this year by "one or two" of the plaintiffs.

"They wrote us a letter, we wrote them a letter, and we never heard back," he said.

Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek said he and his two surviving bandmates, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore, along with the estate of lead singer Jim Morrison, believe they deserve royalties whenever Sagan exploits the Doors' legacy.

"That's how artists make money, and it's OK for artists to make money and they should make money when people are selling their name and their image," Manzarek said. "If people are buying something because it says the Doors on it then, you know, you should give the Doors some of the money. Look, I need to pay my electric bill. I play an electric keyboard."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...home-headlines





Chatterbox

December 19th,
2006
3:21 pm

OOOH, I’m worried about my collection now. Who’s gonna come looking for me when I sell my Tuesday Night Jam poster? The pig??

— Posted by Tommy

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200...-love-for-you/





The Year in Music
Jody Rosen

All right, show of hands: Who's listened to the High School Musical soundtrack? When I last checked with Soundscan a few days back, High School Musical was still the No. 1 album of 2006, half a million up on the next-best seller, Rascal Flatts' Me and My Gang. And let's not forget Disney's The Cheetah Girls, or the Hannah Montana soundtrack, which crushed next-generation rock gods My Chemical Romance's opus The Black Parade when both records were released back in October.

It feels tacky to start our discussion of the year in pop with sales stats, but Topic A in '06 was the continuing slow-motion collapse of the record business, a process that was accelerated this year by YouTube and MySpace and online leaks and peer-to-peer mischief, and dramatized by the triumph of Disney pop. What does it mean for popular music when 7-year-olds are the most reliable record buyers? I'm certainly no expert on this stuff, but you can tease out some interesting demographic trends from the Billboard charts. Pop and hip-hop album sales are way down (just ask Janet Jackson); country album sales are up; the only rock band that is really selling big is Nickelback (whose audience and aesthetics might warrant some discussion here).

So, who's buying albums? Little kids (or, rather, their parents), not-so-wired red staters, boomers who just have to hear Rod Stewart tackle the Bob Seeger songbook? Meanwhile, downloads of individual tracks continue to boom—at the mega-pop level at least, the long-forecast death of the album may well be nigh. I had a fascinating discussion a few weeks back with a major label A&R guy, who glumly told me that big pop stars have realized that records themselves are no longer a significant revenue stream—that the CDs are just promotional tools to help move the real moneymaking product: the ringtone, the key chain, the concert T-shirt, the clothing line, the reality TV show. I'm not sure how all this industry tumult is going to affect the music I love, from Usher to scruffy little local bands here in Brooklyn. I have a sneaking suspicion that anything bad for a music exec is by definition good for a music fan. But I do know that I'll miss shopping at actual record stores.

Biz talk aside, my verdict on 2006 is: not half bad. I probably listened to more music this year than any previous, but the sheer volume of the stuff available—if not at Tower Records, then certainly at the click of a mouse—has punctured even the vaguest feeling of confidence in surveying the year. It's not just that I've slept on some important records this year—I've missed whole genres. Resolutions for '07: must listen to more metal, more dancehall, more, um, "freak folk," and more of der elektronische Tanzmusik.

Anyway, for those keeping score, here are my top 10 albums and, because I couldn't narrow it down, top 25 singles of 2006.

Albums

1. Justin Timberlake, FutureSex/LoveSounds (Jive)
2. Joanna Newsom, Ys (Drag City)
3. Bob Dylan, Modern Times (Sony)
4. Lil Wayne, Dedication 2 (Gangsta Grillz)
5. Mary J. Blige, The Breakthrough (Geffen)
6. Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury (Re-Up Gang/Zomba)
7. Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (Domino)
8. My Chemical Romance, Welcome to the Black Parade (Reprise)
9. Matmos, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast (Matador)
10. Willie Nelson and the Cardinals, Songbird (Lost Highway)

Singles

1. Gnarls Barkley, "Crazy"
2. Justin Timberlake featuring T.I., "My Love"
3. Ne-Yo, "So Sick"
4. Keyshia Cole, "Love"
5. T.I., "What You Know"
6. Christina Aguilera, "Ain't No Other Man"
7. Aventura, "Los Infieles"
8. Mary J. Blige, "Be Without You"
9. Lupe Fiasco, "Kick, Push"
10. Chamillionaire featuring Krayzie Bone, "Ridin' "
11. Beyoncé, "Irreplaceable"
12. Amerie, "Take Control"
13. Julie Roberts, "Men & Mascara"
14. Nelly Furtado featuring Timbaland, "Promiscuous"
15. Panic! At the Disco, "I Write Sins Not Tragedies"
16. Tego Calderon, "Los Mate"
17. I'm From Barcelona, "We're From Barcelona"
18. Eric Church, "Two Pink Lines"
19. Corinne Bailey Rae, "Like a Star"
20. The Pack, "Vans"
21. The Klaxons, "Gravity's Rainbow"
22. Tony Matterhorn, "Dutty Wine"
23. Peter, Bjorn, and John, "Young Folks"
24. The Rapture, "Whoo! Alright Yeah ... Uh-Huh"
25. Todd Snider, "You Got Away With It (A Tale of Two Fraternity Brothers)"

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2006 Gummy Award Winners

Glad you guys could join us for this, the presentation of the 25th annual Gummy Awards! We promise we'll keep this thing under three hours (har). It's time for us to honor those characters in the indie rock world that drew our heartfelt admiration and tapped our deepest snark; these are the albums that rocked our worlds, the bands that wouldn't go the fuck away, and the rockers that we thought about inappropriately and at inappropriate times. But of course, when we say "us," we mean you! Y'all hit the poll booths hard, and you (mostly) showed your good taste. We're proud of ya! And we're psyched to finally have someone to talk about the Gummy results with. So without further ado ...


ALBUM OF THE YEAR

30 COLD WAR KIDS
Robbers & Cowards (Downtown)

29 FINAL FANTASY
He Poos Clouds (Tomlab)

28 BOB DYLAN
Modern Times (Sony)

27 CLIPSE
Hell Hath No Fury (Re-Up Gang / Star Trak)

26 THE KILLERS
Sam's Town (Island)

25 LIARS
Drum's Not Dead (Mute)

24 THE THERMALS
The Body, The Blood, The Machine (Sub Pop)

23 YEAH YEAH YEAHS
Show Your Bones (Interscope)

22 TAPES 'N TAPES
The Loon (XL)

21 GIRL TALK
Night Ripper (Illegal Art)

20 REGINA SPEKTOR
Begin To Hope (Sire)

19 MIDLAKE
The Trials Of Van Occupanther (Bella Union)

18 SUNSET RUBDOWN
Shut Up I Am Dreaming (Absolutely Kosher)

17 GNARLS BARKLEY
St. Elsewhere (Downtown)

16 THOM YORKE
The Eraser (XL)

15 HOT CHIP
The Warning (Astralwerks)

14 BELLE & SEBASTIAN
The Life Pursuit (Matador)

13 BEIRUT
Gulag Orkestar (Ba Da Bing)

12 CAT POWER
The Greatest (Matador)

11 JENNY LEWIS WITH THE WATSON TWINS
Rabbit Fur Coat (Team Love)

10 M. WARD
Post-War (Merge)

9 THE KNIFE
Silent Shout (Mute)

8 BAND OF HORSES
Everything All The Time (Sub Pop)

7 DESTROYER
Destroyer's Rubies (Merge)

6 NEKO CASE
Fox Confessor Brings The Flood (Anti)

5 THE DECEMBERISTS
The Crane Wife (Capitol)

4 JOANNA NEWSOM
Ys (Drag City)

3 GRIZZLY BEAR
Yellow House (Warp)

2 TV ON THE RADIO
Return To Cookie Mountain (Interscope)

1 THE HOLD STEADY
Boys And Girls In America (Vagrant)

Love 'em or hate 'em, The Holdy Steady bring out the vote! And as we know, they're the most polarizing act in indie rock (see below). Sufjan was last year's big winner with Illinoise, but the outtakes and Xmas boxed set didn't make a dent this year. Way to not forget about Destroyer! We're curious to see if you guys are as prescient as you were last December; in addition to Soof, the Top 5 included Wolf Parade, Bloc Party, Clap Your Hands, and Spoon. Even if you don't agree with the picks, gotta admit those records are still hot-buttons, getting loved and lambasted all the way through '06. Joanna Newsom still inspiring high praise and hatred in '07? It's a good bet.

More

The website contains links to lots of free mp3s and music streams - Jack.





Sony BMG to Pay $4.25 Million in Settlement With 39 States
Alex Veiga

Sony BMG Music Entertainment will pay $4.25 million as part of a settlement with 39 states to resolve investigations into problems caused by music CDs loaded with hidden anti-piracy software.

Under terms of Thursday's agreement, which also applies to the District of Columbia, the record company will reimburse consumers whose computers were damaged while trying to uninstall the anti-piracy software.

Sony BMG also said it will no longer distribute any compact discs loaded with copy-protection software that hinders computer users from easily locating it or removing it from their PCs.

The office of Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly took the lead in brokering the multistate agreement, which was expected to be filed Thursday in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston.

"If companies want to use technology to protect their interests, they need to be up front with consumers, and give consumers the opportunity to make informed choices about buying and using these products," Reilly said in a prepared statement.

Thirteen states that started the settlement process with Sony BMG will each receive $316,538, while the rest will get $5,000, Reilly's office said.

New York-based Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG, said it was pleased to reach the agreement.

It covers CDs loaded with one of two types of copy-protection software - MediaMax or XCP. The record label began including MediaMax on some of its discs in August 2003 and introduced XCP in January 2005.

Last year, the record company shipped more than 12 million compact discs on 52 Sony BMG titles, each loaded with one of the two programs. About 4 million CDs with the MediaMax software and about 3 million CDs loaded with the XCP software were sold.

Both programs restricted the number of copies of a disc that a user could make, but the programs caused problems for some users when they played the CDs on their computers.

The XCP software concealed itself to thwart computer users from finding it and attempting to delete it. It also ended up opening a potential security hole on PCs running on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Operating System, making them vulnerable to viruses or other threats.

Some who used certain antispyware software to remove the programs ended up with a glitch that disabled their CD-ROM drives.

As word spread on the Internet in late 2005 that the CDs carried hidden software, some suggested the company was using the technology to spy on consumers.

Sony BMG maintained it did not use the software to collect personal data about consumers without their consent - an assertion backed up by an outside company commissioned by the company to audit its use of the copy-protection software.

Sony BMG ultimately recalled the discs with XCP in November 2005 and released a way to remove the files from users' computers. It also released a software patch to fix a potential security hole from the MediaMax 5.0 program.

Customers will be able to file a claim with Sony BMG to receive refunds of up to $175, but claims must include a description of how their computer was harmed and documentation of repair expenses.

The refund policy will also apply to states that were not a party to the settlement.

The latest settlement closes out the states' investigations into the problem.

On Tuesday, Sony BMG reached a separate settlement with California and Texas, agreeing to pay $1.5 million to the states and reimburse consumers for PC damage. The company earlier settled a class-action case over the episode.

In addition to Massachusetts, the states that were a party to Thursday's settlement are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-21-17-02-32





Copyright Tool Will Scan Web For Violations
Kevin J. Delaney

To deal with the mounting copyright issues swirling around video and other content online, a start-up founded by some respected Silicon Valley executives is taking a novel approach: combing the entire Web for unauthorized uses.

Privately held Attributor Corp. of Redwood City, Calif., has begun testing a system to scan the billions of pages on the Web for clients' audio, video, images and text -- potentially making it easier for owners to request that Web sites take content down or provide payment for its use.

The start-up, which was founded last year and has been in "stealth" mode, is emerging into the public eye today, at a time when some media and entertainment companies' frustration with difficulties identifying infringing uses of their content online is increasing. The problem has intensified with the proliferation and increasing usage of sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube, which lets consumers post video clips.

Media and entertainment companies have so far relied on a combination of technology and their own scanning to protect their content online -- but with mixed results. Media companies have used digital-rights management technology designed to make it hard to copy or transfer files. But such measures have often proved to be clumsy, despised by consumers or quickly thwarted. That's the case for DRM technology built into DVDs to prevent them from being ripped onto computers, for example. Entertainment and media companies have also relied on their own staff to scan Web sites for infringing content. But even when such content is spotted and taken down, the companies often see the content pop up in the same places or elsewhere soon after.

"We all know that as soon as somebody comes up with a way to secure a piece of property, somebody else will come within days and crack it," says Lawrence Iser, a partner at law firm Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert in Santa Monica, Calif., who represents musical artists and other entertainment industry clients.

Though its service isn't out yet, Attributor appears to go further than existing techniques for weeding out unauthorized uses of content online. While companies are tackling parts of the same problem -- Indigo Stream Technologies Ltd., based in Gibraltar, offers a free service called Copyscape that analyzes a Web page and then uses Google's search engine to see whether the text is duplicated elsewhere on the Web -- Attributor's approach is seemingly more comprehensive.

Its co-founders, former Yahoo Inc. executive Jim Brock, and Jim Pitkow, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has sold companies to Google and VeriSign Inc., claim to have cracked the thorny computer-science problem of scouring the entire Web by using undisclosed technology to efficiently process and comb through chunks of content. The company says it will have over 10 billion Web pages in its index before the end of this month.

"If it works, it's a fantastic invention," Mr. Iser says.

It's unclear whether such a service will be welcomed by Internet companies that allow users to post content. YouTube, News Corp.'s MySpace and others already face copyright lawsuits. In some cases, they're building systems to identify pirated materials consumers upload to their sites, and say they're open to sharing revenue with content owners.

Attributor plans to announce today that it has received about $10 million in funding to date from investors including Sigma Partners, Selby Venture Partners, Draper Richards, First Round Capital and Amicus Capital.

Attributor analyzes the content of clients, who could range from individuals to big media companies, using a technique known as "digital fingerprinting," which determines unique and identifying characteristics of content. It uses these digital fingerprints to search its index of the Web for the content. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The company claims to be able to spot a customer's content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video. It will provide customers with alerts and a dashboard of identified uses of their content on the Web and the context in which it is used.

The content owners can then try to negotiate revenue from whoever is using it or request that it be taken down. In some cases, they may decide the content is being used fairly or to acceptable promotional ends. Attributor plans to help automate the interaction between content owners and those using their content on the Web, though it declines to specify how.

Company executives believe its system will provide transparency and accountability to encourage more owners to put their content online with confidence they'll be able to police its use, and share in any profits.

"We believe that we can provide an infrastructure that will support all kinds of outcomes and remedies, which will align the interests of content owners, content hosts and search engines around legitimate syndication and monetization," says Mr. Brock, Attributor's chief executive.

"We see this as a way to take us out of the course we've been on, which is more litigation," says Mr. Pitkow, who is chief technology officer.

Attributor has begun testing the system, and won't release it officially until the first quarter of next year. The co-founders' track records, however, lend credibility to their claims. As Yahoo's first outside counsel, Mr. Brock tackled Internet copyright issues for the Internet company as far back as 1994 and later oversaw some of its core businesses as a senior vice president. Mr. Pitkow is a computer science Ph.D. who worked at Xerox's legendary PARC research facility. In 2001, he helped to sell the intellectual property of Outride Inc., where he was president and chairman, to Google. Last year, he sold Moreover Technologies, where he was CEO and chairman, to VeriSign.

"They're real guys who have solved hard-core problems," says Ali Aydar, chief operating officer of Snocap Inc., a digital-music registry start-up. Snocap and Attributor share a backer in Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway. "Content owners I've talked to outside of the music business would love a system which tells them where their content is being utilized," Mr. Aydar adds.

Attributor executives decline to say how frequently they will update their Web index, a key factor in their ability to stay on top of postings. They also say they won't at least initially monitor peer-to-peer file swapping systems, where large amounts of pirated music, movies, TV shows and software are traded.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





Face-Hunting Software Will Scour Web for Targets
Tom Simonite

A search engine that uses sophisticated facial recognition to allow users to identify and find people in online images will launch next month. But civil liberties groups say the biometric-style tool could compromise the privacy of anyone who has their picture online.

Search engine Polar Rose reconstructs the 3D shape of a person's face and then combines that with characteristics of their features to generate a unique "face print". This can then be used to search other photos for a match.

In January users will be able to download a plugin for their browser that allows users to enter information about faces they recognise in online images. This data is then sent to a central server allowing anyone looking at an image containing that particular face print to tell who it is. Users can also search the web for more photos containing that face.

Online image search engines usually work much like their text counterparts. "They find images on pages that contain the words you search for," says Jan Erik Solem, whose PhD project at Malmö University College, Sweden, led to the new company. "Search engines are blind to images, Polar Rose is not."

Third dimension

"Some biometric companies are using 3D laser scans of faces to aid identification from photos," Solem says. "We've developed a way to work backwards; we can create a 3D model of a face from a 2D image."

That allows Polar Rose to recognise people even when the pose or lighting has changed, he says. The technique was developed using a database of around two thousand 3D face-scans paired with normal 2D photos.

"We used statistical methods to work out the relationship between the two," explains Solem. A video on the Polar Rose website (avi format) shows the technique being used to reconstruct actor Tom Cruise's face.

Broadband explosion

The 3D shape is combined with colour and shape data from the 2D picture to generate the face print that serves as a unique identifier.

Solem says he cannot give figures on the search engine's accuracy until it is tested by the public. It works on any image with a face at least 100 pixels (35 millimetres) across, as broadband becomes more common, more and more pictures will fit the bill, he predicts.

Earlier this year, another visual search engine called Riya launched. It has a less biometric approach, instead relying on the context of a person's face – such as clothes and objects around them – to search images for a specific person.

Privacy concerns

Polar Rose and future developments that make facial recognition available to the masses risk encroaching on people's privacy, warns Yaman Akdeniz, director of the UK non-profit group Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties.

"Although this sounds like a great idea, I would not like to be searchable in this way, or so easily tracked without my consent," says Akdeniz. The database compiled by Polar Rose is similar to the kind of biometric database some governments wish to use, he points out.

"I wonder whether they have a right to build such a database," says Akdeniz, he suggests people think twice before embracing such potentially intrusive tools, and consider which photos of themselves they allow online.

Simon Davies, director of the campaign group Privacy International and a specialist in technology and privacy at the London School of Economics, UK, agrees face searching technology could raise privacy issues. "No one denies the value of these tools, but they need to be used in a responsible way," he says.

Davies fears Polar Rose could help identity thieves, stalkers or even the police to track protesters. "Forces could get access the database or use the service to find where people have been, what their activities are, or who they associate with," he explains.

A way for users to tag their photos as out of bounds to search services is the way forward, says Davies. "There should be a way to put code in webpage that signals you want to opt out," he told New Scientist.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/arti...r-targets.html





Activists Hijack Public CCTV Signal

A team of Austrian computer activists have demonstrated a method of hijacking police CCTV cameras, in protest over increased surveillance of public areas in their country's capital.

A group called Quintessenz used an off-the-shelf satellite receiver to intercept the video signal transmitted by a surveillance camera overlooking a busy square in the capital Vienna. The feed had been crudely scrambled by modifying the analogue video signal but the activists were able to unscramble it using commercial video processing software.

This enabled them to view everything recorded by the camera, and revealed both its capabilities and shortcomings. "The funny thing was, the camera wasn't able to see right below itself," says Christian Moch, a spokesman for Quintessenz, "so people could carry out drug deals underneath it without being seen".

Moch says Quintessenz decided to hijack the camera to protest over a law introduced in Austria in 2005 permitting police to install surveillance equipment in public places without obtaining a warrant. "They're watching our every move and that's just wrong," he told New Scientist. "It's too close to the book 1984."

Part of the stunt saw the activists experiment with different ways to block the video camera's view – they found that laser pointers and balloons were both effective. Since they carried out the prank, the police have started using cameras that transmit their video feed via a cable instead of using a radio link.

Magic bullet

Quintessenz members Martin Slunksy and Adrian Dabrowski demonstrated the camera trickery at the 22nd annual Chaos Communication Congress, an event for computer security buffs held in Berlin, Germany, between 27 and 30 December. The event is coordinated by the German Chaos Computer Club, a renowned European activist group.

Campaign groups in the UK have similar concerns over CCTV surveillance. The UK has 4 million public CCTV cameras – more than any other country in Western Europe.

"On occasion it can be very useful," says Doug Jewell, campaign coordinator at the UK organisation Liberty. "But we don't think it's the magic bullet that the government thinks it is."

Jewell says studies have shown that changing street lighting can have a bigger impact on crime reduction than the introduction of CCTV cameras. He adds that those who live in London are likely to be captured on CCTV cameras up to 300 times a day. "It's also the databases that accompany these systems that are concerning," he warns.

In December 2005, the British government disclosed plans to track all vehicles with software that recognises registration plates. Records of these vehicle movements may then be kept on a database for between two and five years.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn8530





Surveillance System Scrambles People's Faces
Lakshmi Sandhana

An intelligent video surveillance system that automatically scrambles people's faces to protect them from unwarranted monitoring has been developed by a Swiss company.

Developed by EMITALL Surveillance, based in Montreux, Switzerland, the technology singles out any people in a video feed, on the basis of their movement, and disguises them digitally while leaving the rest of the scene intact. Video clips of the system in action can be viewed here, here and here (Windows Media Player required).

The system can be used as an add-on to a normal video surveillance feed. At its core is an algorithm that scrambles the relevant parts of a video feed using an encryption key that can be kept secret. This means the resulting video can then be viewed by anyone, but only those in possession of the encryption key can unlock the scrambled regions and identify the people shown on-screen.

CCTV abuses

Its developers say the system could let law enforcers use closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras without invading the privacy of those being watched. For example, a video stream could remain anonymous until its operators realise that a crime has been committed. The video could then be unscrambled by authorities with the necessary encryption key.

"If the system works as described, it's certainly a big improvement over video surveillance systems that allow arbitrary monitoring of people's behaviour," says Ian Brown of Privacy International and the Foundation for Information Policy Research in London, UK.

Brown cites the prosecution in the UK of two CCTV operators in January 2006 for spying on a woman in her flat. "Masking the appearance of individuals until explicitly requested by the courts under a search warrant would reduce some of the CCTV abuses we have seen recently," he says.

Different faces

The system can even use different encryption keys to scramble the identity of particular people under surveillance, says Touradj Ebrahimi, founder of EMITALL Surveillance and a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

"Imagine you have scrambled the faces of three persons in a video under surveillance," Ebrahimi says. "Unless you have the secret key for face number two, you cannot unscramble that face."

Ebrahimi adds that a descrambling key can be broken up and shared between different authorities to reduce the odds of misuse. He says two European governments plan to use the technology for public surveillance, but he declines to name them as the contracts have yet to be signed.

However, some experts are not impressed by the new system, saying the real issue is government accountability. "In the end, if people are opposed to government video surveillance, making the government decrypt its own video images prior to viewing them doesn't make citizens less wary of official abuse," says James McQuivey, an expert on surveillance at Boston University in Massachusetts, US.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9276





From November

Inboxes Drowning in 'Image Spam'
Justin Mullins

Computer security experts are struggling to cope with a new type of spam sweeping the internet. The emails can bypass conventional spam filters because they contain images of messages rather than actual words and sentences.

"The level of image spam has increased dramatically this year," says Carole Theriault, a senior consultant at Sophos, an IT security company based in London, UK. Sophos estimates that, at the beginning of the year, image spam accounted for only 18% of unsolicited mail but that this has since risen to 40%. "That's a big increase," she says.

Conventional spam filters work by analysing the content of emails, looking for words and phrases known to be associated with unsolicited mail, such as "herbal Viagra" or "penis enlargement". The filter then uses this and other information to decide whether the mail is spam.

But when the message is sent as an image rather than as text, this technique cannot be used. Spam filters then have to fall back on other techniques. "We see a lot of image spam and we know which computers are sending it," says Paul Bacca, a spam and virus researcher, also at Sophos. Simply blocking mail from these computers is surprisingly successful. "We think we catch about 80% of image spam using these conventional techniques," he says.

Randomly generated

That still leaves a sizeable volume of unwanted image spam, however. And spammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in getting around filtering techniques. One filtering method involves matching images with ones held in a database.

Unfortunately, spammers have learnt to get around this by using a layer of text on top of a layer of a randomly generated background for each new image. From the point of view of a spam filter, each image is different, although the human eye easily recognises the written message.

The same technique is often used by computer security experts to prevent "spambots" – automated Webcrawling programs – from signing up for services such as free email. A sign-up form displays an image of a series of characters that are distorted in a way that is hard for a computer to see but relatively easy for a human to pick out.

The technique, known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), was developed by Luis von Ahn and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, US. "It's a great irony that spammers are now using the same technique to beat spam filters," he says.

Scanner signature

The good news, however, is that image spam has a weakness that spam filters are beginning to exploit. Many of the images are scanned into a computer and therefore contain information associated with the scanner used, such as the number of colours or pixels it uses. The filter then looks for these colours and the number of pixels when rating emails as potential spam.

But the greater goal is to develop optical character recognition (OCR) techniques that can actually read any message contained within the image, so that conventional filtering techniques can then be applied. Of course, the fact that such a breakthrough could also be used to get around CAPTCHA is unlikely to have been lost on spammers.

OCR is a long way from being able to do this, says von Ahn. "You're looking at technology that is anything from 10 to 30 years away." Even if could be made to work well, it would be computationally expensive to carry out in real time on the millions of emails that pass through spam filters, warns Bacca. "This is one of the major research goals for computer security companies. Everybody is working on it," he says.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn10605





Software to Spot 'Phishers' Irks Small Concerns
Riva Richmond

Joy Viren Murphy will be getting a lump of coal in her stocking this year.

The entrepreneur has been selling handmade Christmas stockings for 12 years, the last eight of them online. Working from the attic of her three-story Rock Island, Ill., Victorian house, Ms. Murphy makes a couple of thousand stockings a year. During the busy months, October through December, her sister and niece come over to help her cut, tack and stitch.

But her business, Aunt Joy's Personalized Christmas Stockings, is facing a new, high-tech hurdle, thanks to Microsoft Corp's. new Internet Explorer 7 Web browser. IE7 has a security feature that will turn Web-address bars green and display owners' identities when consumers visit secure sites from businesses verified as legitimate. The color change will be a boon for consumers, who have been barraged in recent years with "phishing" scams designed to lure them to fake versions of popular Web sites, like eBay or their bank, to filch their account numbers. The hope is that the program will help reduce fraud, lift trust and boost e-commerce.

But browsers won't turn green when customers visit Ms. Murphy's site. That's because sole proprietorships, general partnerships and individuals won't be eligible for the new, stricter security certificates that Microsoft requires to display the color. There are about 20.6 million sole proprietorships and general partnerships in the U.S., according to 2003 and 2004 tax data from the Internal Revenue Service, though it isn't clear how many are engaged in e-commerce.

Ms. Murphy, a sole proprietor, worries what will happen once consumers grow accustomed to the new bars. "Green means go shop with confidence. What does not having the green bar mean?" Ms. Murphy asks. "For that new customer, are they going to pass me by because I don't have a green bar?"

She'll know soon enough. Already available to those who have the Windows XP operating system, the browser's use will mushroom when Microsoft rolls out its long-delayed Vista system to consumers next month. And the green bar will go into action shortly after the Vista rollout begins.

Microsoft says green shouldn't be considered a seal of approval, but rather a sign that the site owner is a legitimate business. The display of company names in the bar will allow consumers to confirm they're on the site they intended to visit.

But Ms. Murphy and others say people will likely think green signals "go," particularly once they start using Microsoft's related Phishing Filter, a free, optional service for online shoppers that turns address bars yellow on suspicious sites and red on confirmed phishing sites. The Phishing Filter was made available Oct. 18 to current XP users with the IE7 browser.

When Microsoft has no information about a site, presumably for businesses like Aunt Joy's, the bar will be standard white.

Clearly, it will take time before the program infiltrates the consumer consciousness. Many computer users will have to download IE7 and many businesses will have to get the new certificates, which were only introduced last week. But eventually, "are people going to trust the green more than white? Yes, they will," says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner Inc. and an expert on online payments and fraud. "All the business is going to go to the greens, it's kind of obvious."

Small businesses are largely unaware of the issue today, but that seems destined to change after Vista reaches the market. "This is a ticking time bomb that is going to explode," says Champ Mitchell, chief executive of Network Solutions LLC, a Herndon, Va., Web-hosting company and certificate authority whose clients include Aunt Joy's.

"The Internet has been great for American small business," by giving them wide exposure at a low cost, he says. "Microsoft all by itself is getting ready to tilt that field again at an 80-degree angle toward large business."

Microsoft says the number of companies left out will be minimal, noting that limited-liability companies and partnerships, as well as S and C corporations, will be able to get the certificates and thus green bars. In the future it expects certificate authorities to bring more types of businesses into the scheme.

(An S corporation meets Internal Revenue Service requirements to be taxed under Subchapter S of the Internal Revenue Code, thereby giving a corporation with 100 shareholders or less the benefit of incorporation while being taxed as a partnership; a C corporation, which is the designation of most major companies, has an unlimited number of shareholders.)

And Microsoft argues the green-yellow-red program will do tremendous good by striking a blow against phishing. "This is a great step forward for the Internet," says Markellos Diorinos, a product manager on Microsoft's Internet Explorer team.

The new certificates, called extended validation secure-sockets-layer certificates, or EV SSL for short, are affidavits from a certificate authority both that private data are being encrypted and that the business operating the site has been confirmed as real. By contrast, current SSL certificates -- the technology that encrypts data and puts a small lock on visitors' browsers -- can be obtained with little more than a credit card and are considered ripe for abuse by con artists.

"SSL is great technology for secure communication, but it says nothing about the identity" of the site's owner, Mr. Diorinos says. Scammers today are creating bogus sites that look highly authentic, which has created a real need for an identity component.
Guidelines for obtaining the new certificates were established by the CA/Browser Forum, an industry group, after 18 months of debate. The Forum excluded sole proprietorships, general partnerships and individuals because its members couldn't agree on criteria for validating them effectively, something some members said can be difficult. They decided it was better to move ahead with a plan that would cover many companies, and particularly those large companies most often targeted by phishers, rather than further delay the rollout of the certificates.

"We will come forward with a draft that will include these organizations," perhaps within six months, says Spiros Theodossiou, senior product manager for SSL at VeriSign Inc., a certificate authority. "Consumers online are afraid to transact business, and we want to make it safer for online users. We believe the current set of guidelines move us toward that."

But the inability of some legitimate companies to get green bars in IE7 soon could rile small companies just as Microsoft is trying to woo them as customers. Last month, the company promoted a new accounting-software product with a search for the "most creative small-business idea in country." The winner, to be chosen by a panel of celebrity judges in March, will get $100,000 in seed money and one free year's rent in Manhattan.

Greg Waldron, chief executive officer of Waldron Co. LLC, which sells water fountains online as Visual Water, is miffed even though he'll be able to get a certificate as a limited-liability company. "This is a huge benefit for the Amazons and Overstocks of the world," he says. Small businesses are "a huge part of [Microsoft's] customer base, and they make a lot of money off us, but they don't give us a second thought."

Mr. Waldron notes that there are plenty of fly-by-night e-commerce sites that look safe but exist to gather credit-card numbers. "They are making every small unincorporated company look like one of those second type of phishing sites."

Ms. Murphy concurs. She made her first online stocking sale to an American living in Japan on Dec. 11, 1998.

"The Internet made the world so big for small people like me," she says. But now, having to contend with green bars and the like, Ms. Murphy feels her horizons have shrunk. Her verdict on the stoplight system: "It just seems like an excuse to shut out the small business like myself and make sure we don't take too many of the dollars from the big boys."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...l?mod=rss_free





Lawsuit Challenges Government's Right to Read Your e-Mail

A seller of "natural male enhancement" products sued after a fraud indictment based on evidence gleaned from his electronic mail.
John Reinan

The government needs a search warrant if it wants to read the U.S. mail that arrives at your home. But federal prosecutors say they don't need a search warrant to read your e-mail messages if those messages happen to be stored in someone else's computer.
That would include all of the Big Four e-mail providers -- Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and Google -- that together hold e-mail accounts for 135 million Americans.

Twenty years ago, when only a relative handful of scientists and scholars had e-mail, Congress passed a law giving state and federal officials broad access to messages stored on the computers of e-mail providers.

Now that law, the Stored Communications Act of 1986, is being challenged in federal court in Ohio by Steven Warshak, a seller of "natural male enhancement" products who was indicted for mail fraud and money laundering after federal investigators sifted through thousands of his e-mails.

The government isn't saying it has unfettered access to e-mail. But e-mail users should not expect privacy when they allow an outside party to store their messages, prosecutors argue. In fact, many e-mail providers require their customers to sign agreements acknowledging that the provider may release customer information as required by law.

E-mail providers also routinely screen messages for spam, viruses and child pornography. That further undermines claims to the privacy of e-mail, government attorneys say.

Advocates for Internet privacy and civil liberties are watching the Warshak case closely. In their view, e-mail deserves the same protection as snail mail, which can't be opened by government agents without a search warrant.

"This points to a very scary future unless we fix it," said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a brief in support of the challenge. "The average person expects that no one is going to read their e-mail except the person they send it to."

E-mail for 'Smiling Bob'

As the use of e-mail continues to grow, so do questions about how it can be sought as evidence in legal cases, criminal and civil. In 2000, for example, Northwest Airlines got permission to look for private e-mails stored in the home computers of flight attendants as part of its claim of illegal labor practices.

The legal challenge is being mounted by Warshak, a Cincinnati businessman who made a fortune selling Enzyte, a "male enhancement product" made of ginseng root, ginkgo biloba and horny goat weed.

Warshak pitched his product aggressively on TV with ads starring "Smiling Bob," a dorky suburbanite whose life takes a turn for the better after he uses Enzyte.

Warshak became the target of a federal investigation for mail fraud, money laundering and other crimes. During the investigation, agents obtained court orders allowing them to collect thousands of Warshak's e-mails from Yahoo and another e-mail provider. A court order requires a lesser burden of proof than a search warrant.

Warshak sued in federal court, claiming that the search of his e-mail violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures.

In July, a U.S. district judge agreed, ruling that e-mails stored on the server of a commercial Internet service provider can't be read without a search warrant. The judge's order applies only in the Southern District of Ohio, where the case was filed.

The government appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which has yet to rule on the case. E-mail users are protected from overzealous investigators, the government argues, because a search of stored e-mail still requires a subpoena from a prosecutor or a court order from a judge.

Warshak's appeal attracted support from a number of quarters, including a brief filed by 15 law professors.

In September, Warshak and his company, Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, were indicted on 107 federal counts of conspiracy, money laundering and mail, wire and bank fraud.

A return to snail mail?

The case highlights how difficult it is for the law to keep up with technology. When the Stored Communications Act was passed, few Americans had e-mail, and e-mail operated differently than it does today, said Mike O'Connor, a St. Paul technology consultant.

"The actual technical architecture of the mail is different now," said O'Connor, who in the early '90s founded Gofast.net, one of Minnesota's first Internet service providers.

In the early days of e-mail, computer storage was limited and expensive, O'Connor said. E-mail providers didn't routinely store messages on their servers. Instead, recipients downloaded the e-mail to their own computers and opened it there. The e-mail was then deleted from the server to conserve space.

But as computer technology progressed, storage space grew cheap and plentiful. And as e-mail became more widespread, users wanted the ability to get their e-mail from any computer, O'Connor said. Parking the mail on a central server allowed them to access it from anywhere.

Although Americans have come to rely on corporate e-mail providers, they shouldn't be expected to give up their privacy in return, Bankston said.

"We're looking at a future in which almost all of our private papers are in the hands of third parties and not protected by the Fourth Amendment," Bankston said.

"I think it would be very backwards for the law to force us to use snail mail and phones, instead of the Internet, for our private communications," he said. "But that is the result if you follow the government's theory."
http://www.startribune.com/789/story/884388.html





Investigators: No Evidence of Crime in Web Site Crash
AP

State and federal investigations have cleared Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont and his supporters from any involvement in the crash of Sen. Joe Lieberman's Web site.

The U.S. attorney's office and state attorney general have found no evidence of a crime in the cash of Lieberman's campaign Web site hours before August's Democratic primary.

"The investigation has revealed no evidence the problems the Web site experienced were the result of criminal conduct," Tom Carson, spokesman for U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor, said Tuesday.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal confirmed the joint investigation "found no evidence of tampering or sabotage warranting civil action by my office."

Lieberman's site, http://www.joe2006.com , crashed the afternoon before the Aug. 8 primary, which he lost to Lamont. Lieberman won a fourth term in November's general election as a petition candidate.

Dan Geary, who developed Lieberman's site, had classified the problem as a denial-of-service attack under which access is blocked to a site by overwhelming it.

Denial-of-service attacks are hard to trace because they often commandeer computers infected with certain viruses.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-20-07-58-29




S.E.C. Says Russian Trader Used Stolen Online Passwords
Floyd Norris

Pump-and-dump schemes in the stock market are an old way of making money from gullible investors, but they require persuading the investor to buy an overpriced stock.

A Russian trader, operating through an Estonian brokerage firm, found a simpler way to pump and dump stocks, the Securities and Exchange Commission said yesterday.

The S.E.C. said that the trader, Evgeny Gashichev, who was trading though an account of Grand Logistic, a Belize corporation based in Estonia, used the Internet to steal passwords of account holders at online brokerage firms, among them E*Trade Securities, TD Ameritrade and Scottrade.

The commission said Mr. Gashichev would buy, through his own account, shares in a thinly traded company. Immediately after that, he would use the accounts of victims to buy large quantities of the stock, driving up the price. He would then sell his shares into that demand. In some cases, he would then sell the stock short, profiting further when the price declined.

The S.E.C. complaint said that Mr. Gashichev “initially funded the Grand Logistic account with $30,000, and, in approximately seven weeks, realized $353,609 in profits from his fraudulent scheme.” It said the trades, from Aug. 28 through Oct. 13, were in 21 securities.

Daniel M. Hawke, administrator of the S.E.C. district office in Philadelphia, said: “The S.E.C. has become aware of a dramatic increase in the number of intrusions into online brokerage accounts. We have been working closely with other regulators and brokerage firms in an effort to ensure that online brokerage trading is safe and secure.”

He added that “brokerage firms are typically covering the intrusion-related losses of their customers.”

The commission said a federal judge in New York barred taking the profits from the trades out of the United States, and ordered repatriation of the money already taken.

Amy J. Greer, an S.E.C. lawyer, said in an interview that the money had been sent to Estonia, but that authorities there had frozen the account. “The Estonian authorities have been very cooperative,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/bu...ss/20pump.html





Feds: NJ Worker Put 'Bomb' in Computers
Wayne Parry

A computer administrator upset over the possibility of losing his job planted an electronic "bomb" in the systems of one of the nation's largest prescription drug management companies, prosecutors said Tuesday.

If the so-called "logic bomb" had gone off at Medco Health Solutions Inc., it would have wiped out critical patient information, authorities said.

Even after surviving a round of layoffs, Yung-Hsun Lin, 50, kept the code in the system and tinkered with it in an attempt to set it off, prosecutors said. The bug eventually was discovered and neutralized by the company.

U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said the bomb could have caused widespread financial damage to the company, and possibly harmed a large number of patients.

Among the targeted databases was one that tracked patient-specific drug interaction conflicts, prosecutors said. Before dispensing medication, pharmacists routinely examine that information to determine whether conflicts exist among a patient's prescribed medicines.

"The potential damage to Medco and the patients and physicians served by the company cannot be understated," Christie said. "A malicious program like this can bring a company's operations to a grinding halt and cause millions of dollars in damage from lost data, system downtime, recovery and repair."

Lin was arrested at his home Tuesday morning by FBI agents, and was to appear before a federal magistrate Tuesday afternoon. His arraignment is scheduled for Jan. 3. He is charged with two counts of computer fraud.

His lawyer, Raymond Wong, said Lin denies introducing any malicious programming into the computer system. Wong said his client would have known that such an action could be quickly linked to him.

"He is an administrator; if something happened, it could be traced back," said Wong, who added Lin has years of "excellent performance reviews."

Medco spokeswoman Soraya Balzac said the arrest "sends a strong message that there is zero tolerance for this type of conduct."

The indictment alleges that Lin, who worked in the company's Fair Lawn office, planted the computer bomb in Medco's servers. It would have wiped out critical data stored on more than 70 servers, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Erez Lieberman. He could not estimate how many patients could have been affected.

In addition to the drug-interaction information, other data on the targeted servers included patients' clinical analyses, rebate applications, billing and managed-care processing.

Prosecutors said that when Franklin Lakes-based Medco was spun off from Merck & Co. in 2003, Lin feared that layoffs would affect him.

Authorities said that on Oct. 3, 2003, Lin created the bomb designed to delete virtually all data from the 70 targeted servers by modifying existing computer code and adding new code. It allegedly was set to detonate automatically on April 23, 2004 - his birthday.

Due to a programming error, it didn't go off. Even after surviving a round of layoffs, prosecutors said, Lin modified the bomb's code to have it detonate on his next birthday. But the company found and disabled it before it could cause any damage.

Last week, a former UBS PaineWebber systems administrator in New Jersey was sentenced to eight years and one month in prison for attempting to profit by detonating a logic-bomb program that caused millions of dollars in damage to the brokerage's computer network in 2002. The ex-employee, Roger Duronio, also was ordered to pay $3.1 million in restitution to his former employer, now known as UBS Financial Services Inc., part of the Swiss banking company UBS AG.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...y/16275148.htm





Glue up those USB ports

Consumer Technologies are Invading Corporate Computing

IN OCTOBER, shortly after taking over as head of information technology (IT) at Arizona State University, Adrian Sannier gave the nod to his contact at Google, the internet giant known for its search engine, and with one flick of the proverbial switch 65,000 students had new e-mail accounts. Unlike the university's old system, which stores e-mails on its own server computers, the new accounts reside on Gmail, Google's free web-based service. Mr Sannier is not forcing anybody to change but has found that the students, many of whom were already using Gmail for their private e-mail, have been voluntarily migrating to the new service at a rate of 300 an hour. Crucially, they can take their “asu.edu” e-mail addresses with them.

The service, part of a bundle called “Google Apps for Your Domain” that also includes instant messaging (IM) and a web-based calendar, has not even been officially launched yet. It began running in a test (or “beta”) form in August. But Dave Girouard, the boss of Google's small but growing enterprise division, says that “tens of thousands” of organisations have already signed up to use Google's web-based tools in place of traditional in-house e-mail systems and other software.

Using Google's services has several advantages for companies. Most employees already know how to use web-based software, and thus do not need training. They can access the services through any web browser, regardless of what kind of computer (or telephone) they use. Like the consumer service, the corporate product is free. (Mr Sannier pays for support—“less than $10,000”—but most organisations do not.) And in-house IT staff need do absolutely nothing, since the data and software reside on Google's server computers.

For Mr Sannier, however, a bigger reason than money for switching from traditional software to web-based alternatives has to do with the pace and trajectory of technological change. Using the new Google service, for instance, students can share calendars, which they could not easily do before. Soon Google will integrate its online word processor and spreadsheet software into the service, so that students and teachers can share coursework. Eventually, Google may add blogs and wikis—it has bought firms with these technologies. Mr Sannier says it is “absolutely inconceivable” that he and his staff could roll out improvements at this speed in the traditional way—by buying software and installing it on the university's own computers.

In the past, innovation was driven by the military or corporate markets. But now the consumer market, with its vast economies of scale and appetite for novelty, leads the way. Compared with the staid corporate-software industry, using these services is like “receiving technology from an advanced civilisation”, says Mr Sannier. He is now looking at other consumer technologies for ideas. He is already using Apple's iTunes, a popular online-music service, to store the university's podcasts.

Mr Sannier is ahead of his time because most IT bosses, especially at large organisations, tend to be sceptical of consumer technologies and often ban them outright. Employees, in return, tend to ignore their IT departments. Many young people, for instance, use services such as Skype to send instant messages or make free calls while in the office. FaceTime, a Californian firm that specialises in making such consumer applications safe for companies, found in a recent survey that more than half of employees in their 20s and 30s admitted to installing such software over the objections of IT staff.
Executive toys

Consumer technologies such as IM usually make employees more productive, says Kailash Ambwani, FaceTime's boss, so IT bosses should concentrate not on stopping them but on making them secure. In the case of IM and some kinds of file-sharing, the risks are that viruses or spyware could come into the corporate network from the outside, or that employees could ship vital information outward.

With Google Apps for Your Domain and other software services that are accessed through a web browser, the security issues are more subtle. Since the software and the data reside on the service provider's machines, the danger is of losing control of sensitive data, which is now in somebody else's hands. Most IT bosses find this scary. Not so Mr Sannier. He remembers a picture that Google showed him of one of its data centres burning to the ground; it looked awful. The point, however, was that no users of Google services anywhere even noticed, because Google's systems are built to be so robust that even the loss of an entire data centre does not compromise anybody's data.

“I have a staff of about 30 people dedicated to security,” says Mr Sannier. “Google has an army; all of their business fails if they are unable to preserve security and privacy.” Google's Mr Girouard says a similar evolution in trust occurred when people reluctantly accepted that their money was safer in a bank than under a mattress.

This trend could cause problems for traditional software firms such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. Already, start-ups such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite provide “software as a service”, supplying sales-force automation, accounting, payroll and other features via the web. (Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, had the idea for his firm while browsing on Amazon's online store one day. Why, he wondered, could business software not be delivered the same way?) Other firms, including Google, provide web-based e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and databases.

Big companies will probably keep “mission critical” systems in-house. But as everything else migrates to web-based services, software will increasingly resemble the web technologies of the consumer market, says Mr Benioff. Those enterprise firms, such as his own, that follow the lead of consumer-oriented websites will do well in this environment, he argues.

Security concerns, Mr Benioff implies with a wink, are red herrings thrown by ageing IT bosses trying to justify their salaries. They will, after all, be out of a job if companies no longer maintain their own big data centres. Mr Sannier agrees. The old IT bosses “can't possibly embrace this idea unless they're getting ready to retire,” as his own predecessor did after decades in the job. But at 45, Mr Sannier believes the trend is inevitable, and his job requires him to get on top of it.
http://www.economist.com/business/di...ory_id=8450071





Former Wurld Media Employees Sue Company
Alan Wechsler

Four former employees of Wurld Media Inc. of Saratoga Springs have filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, claiming it owes them pay since March.

The claim, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Albany, also claims the company kept money from the employees’ paychecks that was for a 401(k) plan.

The former employees, Julie Vittengl, Benjamin deGonzague and Thomas Borst of Saratoga County and Sarah Kays of Warren County, said in the complaint that they did not know how many other workers were also owed payment.

The suit seeks unspecified relief.

Wurld Media operates a peer-to-peer music file-sharing network that allows for the downloading of music and videos on the Internet. Last June, the company announced a deal with several major television studios to offer downloading of movies and TV shows.
http://blogs.timesunion.com/business/?p=583





Imbalance in Net Speeds Impedes Sharing
Anick Jesdanun

Blame the Internet's legacy systems if Jay Glatfelter falls asleep Thursday mornings. Co-host of an online audio show about "Lost," Glatfelter must wait about 40 minutes to finish posting his program to the Internet in the hours after ABC's Wednesday night broadcast. If he were downloading it as his listeners do, the same file would take only a few minutes over a cable modem.

"At 3 in the morning, that's really brutal," said Glatfelter, 21, who lives in Raleigh, N.C. "It's an extra 40 minutes and you want to go to sleep."

The information superhighway isn't truly equal in both directions. Cable and phone companies typically sell asymmetrical Internet services to households, reserving the bulk of the lanes for downloading movies and other files and leaving the shoulders at most for people to share, or upload, files with others.

The imbalance makes less sense as the Internet becomes truly interactive. Users are increasingly becoming contributors and not just consumers, sharing photos, video and in Glatfelter's case, podcasts. In a nod to the trend of user-generated content, Time magazine recently named "You" _ everyone who has contributed _ as its Person of the Year.

It's a little-known fact because advertisements for cable and DSL services generally focus on download speeds. Glatfelter, like other Internet content providers, is stuck unless he shells out hundreds of dollars a month for business-grade services that provide equal speeds upstream and downstream.

YouTube's rapid rise in 2006 _ and Google Inc.'s November purchase of the video-sharing site for $1.76 billion _ "clearly points to symmetric traffic as being important," said John Cioffi, a Stanford engineering professor and pioneer in DSL technology.

Furthermore, people also are increasingly sharing among themselves, rather than through central servers that normally absorb the upload pressures. In recent months, Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures, Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. and other movie studios began embracing the BitTorrent file-sharing system to more economically distribute online movies.

It's only a matter of time before people will want to retrieve digital media from home while vacationing at a beach house.

Yet the ability to upload still lags _ in some cases, downloads are 10 to 15 times faster.

"The system is a hangover of the old mass media days," said Paul Saffo, a technology analyst in Palo Alto, Calif. "Some consumers are uploading a tremendous amount of information and that's the thing the establishment just doesn't get."

Cable and phone providers insist they are keeping up with demand, in many cases increasing both upload and download speeds, but they say they haven't had a huge clamoring for symmetry.

"Speed has not been an issue for most of our customers, or we'd hear about them," said Mark Harrad, spokesman for Time Warner Cable.

AT&T Inc. spokesman Michael Coe said customers may indeed be sharing more files, but "the majority of their time is spent downloading. As needs change, we'll look at offerings that meet customers' needs, whether it's symmetric service or it's just higher upload speeds."

He said AT&T tripled its upload speeds within the past two years, but downloads remain four times faster for its middle-tier DSL service. The gap is wider for higher-priced plans.

Even Verizon Communications Inc.'s superfast FiOS initiative brings download speeds 2.5 to 7.5 times faster than uploads.

The origins of the imbalance are technical. Too much uploading can interfere with download signals on DSL services, while cable TV providers must squeeze uploading within the broadcast spectrum below television's Channel 2.

But even as engineers overcome the limitations, it's unclear how much service providers will allocate to uploads. More bandwidth for sharing means less for television, video on demand and the like.

"In any kind of revenue-generating model, the consumer is willing to pay to receive something," said John Chapman, a distinguished engineer with Cisco Systems Inc. "A lot less consumers are willing to pay for the privilege of contributing" video and other media.

Phil Leigh, senior analyst at Inside Digital Media, said cable and phone companies both see the Internet as threats to their traditional holds in video and voice.

For many Internet users, the imbalance still synchs with their needs.

YouTube visitors, for instance, view more than 100 million video clips a day but upload only 65,000. Elsewhere, the few uploads that people do send tend to be small files _ an e-mail attachment or text to a discussion board.

Furthermore, uploads aren't often time sensitive. Internet users can send photos and other items in the background, but want to watch the movie clip right away.

Americans can usually pay more if they need symmetric services, but many aren't even convinced they need high-speed service at all, said Maribel Lopez, a vice president with Forrester Research.

Sondra Lowell, 62, who uploads several video items a week to promote an independent movie she's producing in Los Angeles, only recently abandoned dial-up for a low-end DSL plan.

"I'm not doing too badly for their pricing," she said. "It's not like I'm uploading 100 a day where I really do need the speed."

And faster upload speeds won't always translate into performance, said Mike Baldwin, senior product manager for Symantec Corp.'s pcAnywhere remote-access software, which can generate data-heavy transfers. Other factors include computer speeds, available memory and bottlenecks elsewhere in the network, even the parts designed for symmetric traffic.

But most experts agree that demand for better upload speeds _ if not symmetric _ will only increase with time.

"We hear a lot about the dial-up wait," said John Horrigan, associate director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. "If broadband providers aren't planning appropriately to increase uploads speed, broadband wait may be emerging in the next several years."

Dave Burstein, editor of the industry newsletter DSL Prime, said 10 minutes of camcorder footage would take more than eight hours to send at the highest resolution. As more people buy camcorders, he said, they will grow increasingly frustrated.

Telecommuters, meanwhile, want to send PowerPoints and other files as quickly as they can to their offices, and emerging tasks like online backups, video conferencing and telemedicine will tax systems even more, experts say.

"Users every year get a little more demanding," said Jake Soder, director of product management with broadband provider Speakeasy Inc.

Broadband options are already better in many countries outside the United States, thanks to better government incentives and fewer rural regions that are difficult to reach. There, residents have access to a wider range of symmetric services.

Gary Bachula, a vice president with the super-speedy, next-generation Internet2 network for government agencies and universities, said users in the United States might not even realize yet what they are missing. Service providers, he said, should be nudging customers toward data-intensive applications and realize they will pay more for value.

"Cable companies have been busy trying to offer telephone services, and telephone companies are trying to duplicate the cable TV model," Bachula said. "They should stop focusing on 20th century services and realize it's the 21st century. There are exciting new advanced services they could make money from."
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2006Dec...alance,00.html





Net Imbalance Stem From Tech Constraints
Anick Jesdanun

For years, the Internet's technical constraints went hand-in-hand with the realities of Internet usage.

At first, most people viewed Web pages but did little to create or change them. Web journals, photo sites and video sharing didn't come until later. Even when users had a need to send information — an e-mail here, a shopping transaction there — the amount of data was small.

High-speed Internet services that offered relatively slow speeds for sending, or uploading, data served most consumers fine.

But as those consumers evolve into contributors and require better upload speeds, many of the old technical constraints remain.

Consider DSL services from phone companies.

The souped-up phone lines were originally developed for video on demand. Most of the traffic goes from the service provider to the home. Users only need to send occasional commands to buy and start shows.

So engineers felt justified in designing a system that largely sent traffic in one direction.

In doing so, they were able to limit interference between the two signals — one for each direction — sharing the line, said John Cioffi, a Stanford engineering professor and pioneer in DSL technology. It would have been possible to give both signals equal treatment, he said, but that would have reduced the line's overall capacity.

Think of it as two people next to each other, both shouting while trying to listen to something from a distant location. "All you can hear is your neighbor," Cioffi said.

"If your neighbor is only allowed to shout very infrequently, then most of the time you can listen," he said.

In other words, limit traffic from the home to the central office so that everyone can get good download speeds.

Similar limits exist for cable, though for different technical reasons.

Decades ago, the Federal Communications Commission assigned broadcasters a range of frequencies, starting with 54 megahertz for Channel 2. Cable operators had to squeeze upstream data into the space below, said John Mattson, a senior marketing director for Cisco Systems Inc.'s cable products.

Although nothing required upstream allocations to be contiguous, splitting the channels would have added cost, John Chapman, a distinguished engineer with Cisco's cable unit.

"Every time you change directions, you have to add additional (equipment) to accommodate," he said.

Satellite Internet services, meanwhile, have their own constraints. Some systems send data in one direction only, meaning you'd need a regular — and slow — phone line for uploading.

Techniques are being developed to address some of the uploading constraints.

Cioffi said newer flavors of DSL can eliminate the signal interference, similar to how noise-cancellation headsets can intercept unwanted sounds and transmit their opposites to cancel each other. But he said the technique will require phone companies to install new equipment at central offices — and that equipment isn't commercially available yet.

Likewise, cable companies can upgrade their systems to boost upload capacity. Over the past few years, they have gradually been deploying modems and other equipment using a system called DOCSIS 2.0, which transmits data more efficiently, doubling the capacity within the existing frequencies, Chapman and Mattson said.

DOCSIS 3.0 was recently approved, allowing service providers to use a wider range of frequencies. Once the equipment becomes available, upstream bandwidth can increase right away — and even more if the FCC releases the analog spectrum after broadcasters fully move to digital in a few years.

"We have a good technical road map for the next five to 10 years," Chapman said. "It's all a matter now of economics."
http://business.bostonherald.com/tec...ticleid=172703





WiMAX IPOs Are on the Way

Wireless upstarts NextWave and Clearwire have both filed to go public. But Clearwire has a blueblood telecom pedigree
Olga Kharif

Let the WiMAX gold rush begin.

On Dec. 18 and 19, two wireless upstarts—NextWave and Clearwire—filed to go public with the Securities & Exchange Commission. Based on their S-1 forms, both companies hope to make their fortunes on WiMAX, a broadband-wireless technology expected to start making significant inroads in the telecom market next year. Market researcher Gartner Dataquest expects the North American WiMAX services market to swell from 30,000 connections in 2006 to 21.2 million by 2011.

What's the appeal of WiMAX? The wireless technology could provide consumers with a new source of high-speed broadband services, threatening to displace digital subscriber lines (DSL), cable modems, and today's slower cellular and Wi-Fi services. For WiMAX operators, product suppliers, and software vendors, the technology represents a huge opportunity to shake up the telecom market—one that Clearwire and NextWave are hoping investors will be quick to appreciate.

Strong Investor Appetite

But will investors snap up Clearwire and NextWave's offerings? The answer could differ by company, even though, at first glance, the two outfits appear to be very similar: Both are swimming in operating losses. (Appropriately, NextWave plans to trade under the symbol WAVE.) And both hope eventually to make their money, at least in part, from building out WiMAX networks.

The two companies also expect to go public in early 2007, capitalizing on a revival of the tech initial public offering market—the strongest it's been since year 2000, says IPO expert Tom Taulli (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/19/06, "IPOs: More Market Mojo in '07?"). On Sept. 21, wireless broadband gear maker Riverbed Technology (RVBD) priced above its expected range, and the company's shares have rallied 210% since, to $30.19, indicating strong investor appetite for wireless broadband-related stocks.

Yet Clearwire's shares, expected to be listed under symbol CLWR, might receive a different reception, and attract very different investors, than NextWave. One reason: Clearwire has A-list investors: chipmaker Intel (INTC) and cell phone manufacturer Motorola (MOT). It also has legendary telecom executive Craig McCaw at the helm. "There's a natural comfort that comes with the fact that Intel and Motorola are interested, and McCaw runs it," says Michael Mahoney, managing director at EGM Capital hedge funds in San Francisco. Years ago, McCaw cobbled together the U.S.'s first nationwide cellular empire, which he sold to old AT&T for $11.5 billion in 1994.

Spectrum Speculators?

How much Clearwire could raise in an IPO is yet unclear. Some estimates suggest the figure could be around $400 million (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/24/06, "A Wake-Up Call from Craig McCaw"). Clearwire, which originally planned to go public earlier this year but withdrew its application due to adverse IPO market conditions, already has 188,000 subscribers, up from 1,000 users in 2004. Its network is deployed in 34 markets in the U.S. and in certain locales abroad. And it has $1.25 billion in cash, equivalents, and short-term investments, according to documents filed with the SEC. Clearwire officials did not respond to requests for an interview.

NextWave is famed in its own right, but for different reasons. Until 1995, when he founded NextWave Telecom, CEO Allen Salmasi was a board member and chief strategic officer at wireless-technology powerhouse Qualcomm (QCOM). At the helm of NextWave Telecom, Salmasi purchased some wireless spectrum and attempted to build out a network based on Qualcomm technology. But the company was forced into bankruptcy when it couldn't make payments on the spectrum. After some legal wrangling that reached the Supreme Court, the outfit finally sold its share of spectrum to carriers that included Verizon Wireless—and netted its investors a hefty profit. The transaction earned Salmasi and NextWave a reputation as spectrum speculators. "They are seen as opportunists in the industry," says Andrew Cole, president of telecom consultancy CSMG-Adventis.

Today's reincarnation, NextWave Wireless, is a spin-off of that original company, created with a portion of the spectrum sale proceeds. Once again Salmasi is trying to cobble together a wholesale network, selling capacity to carrier partners, who will resell the service under their own brand. This time around, though, NextWave hopes to be more involved in all aspects of the business. "We are not in the business of speculating on spectrum," Roy Berger, NextWave's chief marketing officer, tells BusinessWeek.com. "We develop wireless technology."

Intermediate Step

Still, his company's reputation as a spectrum flipper persists. Analysts believe the stock could attract a different kind of investor. In fact, NextWave's Nasdaq listing may simply be an intermediate step to being acquired by a larger player, such as a telco, satellite, or cable company, or even search giant Google (GOOG), which might use a WiMAX network as an alternative way to distributing its content, say analysts. What's more, NextWave doesn't expect to raise much—possibly, any—money from this public offering, as it only involves a resale of shares by people who received NextWave's warrants issued back in July.

NextWave's WiMAX chips, meanwhile, are still being developed and no commercial product has been announced. And it has yet to conduct its first WiMAX service market trial. Some analysts doubt whether the company has the resources to get the service off the ground nationwide. While deploying WiMAX costs less than construction of some other wireless networks, Sprint Nextel (S), for instance, plans to spend some $2 billion in the next two years on its WiMAX effort.

NextWave only has $222 million in cash, equivalents, and short-term investments, according to its filing. Yet its network build-out costs could run higher than Sprint's. Unlike the latter, which is able to reuse its existing cell sites for the new deployment, NextWave might have to start from scratch. Leasing and building out cell sites accounts for more than half of a typical network's cost. NextWave plans to find partners to jointly build out the network and share the costs, but it's made no announcements so far.

Mish-Mash of Different Bands

Meanwhile, NextWave's network build-out might be further complicated by the fact that the company's main asset, wireless spectrum used for sending cell phone calls and data—NextWave won a bid for a chunk of spectrum in the Federal Communication Commission's Auction 66 earlier this year—is a mish-mash of different bands. Using different frequencies, this spectrum might require more complex—and more expensive—equipment to deploy, a problem Clearwire might encounter as well, says Sharon Armbrust, an analyst with JupiterResearch. This spectrum also might take a while to deploy, as the airwaves purchased in Auction 66, for example, may have to be cleared of existing tenants.

Some analysts also question whether NextWave has enough spectrum to deploy a nationwide WiMAX network. While the company has as much as 40Mhz of spectrum in certain areas, its holdings in other markets hover closer to 10Mhz. Compare that with Sprint, which averages 80Mhz to 85Mhz of spectrum per market. "The minimum you need to have for a true broadband experience is 60Mhz," says Ali Tabassi, Sprint Nextel's vice-president of technology development.

That's because WiMAX networks are expected to not only allow for wireless calls but also for bandwidth-thirsty wireless-video viewing and music downloads. While Clearwire doesn't own as much spectrum as Sprint, it claims to hold the nation's second-largest chunk of valuable 2.5Ghz spectrum used for WiMAX.

Clearwire and NextWave appear to be on par in one area: losses. NextWave's subsidiary, PacketVideo, already provides mobile device software to Verizon Wireless, and is seeing steady revenue growth. Yet neither company is in the black: For the nine months ended Sept. 30, NextWave reported a $65.5 million loss on $22 million in sales. In the same period, Clearwire says it lost $192 million on $76.4 million in revenues. And both companies claim they may require lots more investment, to hire employees and acquire more spectrum, to ramp up the business.

On the plus side, NextWave's capital requirements, thanks to its partner strategy, could end up being lower than Clearwire's. Additionally, instead of competing directly with giant service-providers such as Sprint, as Clearwire currently does, NextWave hopes its approach will turn some of today's telecom industry giants into its customers, says Berger.

And if Clearwire's IPO goes well, NextWave's public debut will be met with more enthusiasm, says Taulli. "If Clearwire has a good IPO, then you have a benchmark to work from," he says.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...c.g3a.rss1220p





Phone Carriers As Pay-TV Providers Get Favorable Ruling From The FCC
Reinhardt Krause

The Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday approved new rules making it easier for phone companies — mainly AT&T (T) and Verizon Communications (VZ) — to jump into the pay-TV business versus cable firms.

The new rules affect how local TV licenses are awarded by thousands of cities and towns across the U.S.

The FCC's order gives local governments 90 days to act on TV license applications. If the review process drags on longer, phone companies would get a TV license automatically or with court approval.

Telecom companies would prefer to get blanket approval from states or from the federal government, if a major law could be passed. The FCC ruling putting pressure on local governments is a win for the phone companies, but how big a win depends on likely looming litigation.

"This does give the telcos more leverage in local negotiations because the clock will be running on the 90 days," said David Kaut, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus. "But the big question is whether the FCC order will be overturned on appeal. There will be court cases."

AT&T and Verizon have complained to regulators and lawmakers that the local licensing process takes too long. But eight states — including California, Texas, New Jersey, and Virginia — have passed laws giving phone companies statewide TV licenses.

AT&T and Verizon have lobbied hard in Congress, but bills that would open the door for them nationwide have not passed.

A divisive issue — Net neutrality rules — derailed efforts to forge a compromise among Republicans and Democrats on a telecom bill. Net neutrality proponents want rules that would guarantee that all Web content get the same treatment on broadband networks. Some telecom firms have broached the idea of charging more for providers of content, such as video, that uses a lot of bandwidth.

The FCC voted 3-2 in favor of the new TV licensing rules. Three Republicans supported the order on TV licenses, while two Democrats opposed it.

Before voting, the FCC released a report on cable TV price hikes that said rates have climbed more than 90% over the past 10 years. It said competition from satellite TV broadcasters hasn't slowed cable price hikes.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said the new licensing rule would likely lower what consumers pay for TV.

The cable TV industry disagrees with the FCC's conclusion that there is not enough TV competition to hold down rates. Consumers are paying less for a package of services — TV, Internet access and phone services — Kyle McSlarrow, president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, said in a conference call with reporters after the FCC vote.

A key lawmaker in Congress, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., says the FCC doesn't have the legal authority to get involved in local TV franchising. Dingell will become chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in January.

Dingell, in a letter to the FCC, said the agency would "usurp congressional prerogative to reform the cable TV local franchising process" by issuing new rules.

Phone companies, for now, have few TV customers. Verizon offers TV services in parts of seven states. It expects to have about 175,000 subscribers by year's end.

AT&T sells TV services only in two markets, San Antonio and Houston. In October, AT&T said it had 3,000 TV customers in San Antonio. AT&T had hoped to roll out TV services to parts of 15 markets in 2006, but time is running out to hit that total.

Phone companies, though, have had success reselling TV services from satellite TV broadcasters DirecTV Group (DTV) and EchoStar. (DISH)

BellSouth, (BLS) which provides DirecTV's service, had 756,000 satellite TV customers as of Sept. 30. Verizon, also a DirecTV reseller, had 496,000 satellite customers. AT&T, which partners with EchoStar, had 583,000 satellite TV subscribers.

Some analysts speculate that phone companies could acquire satellite TV broadcasters. UBS analyst John Hodulik, in a report on Monday, suggested AT&T may buy DirecTV
http://www.investors.com/editorial/I...issue=20061220





Offline Involuntarily
Susan Stellin

Five years ago, the main challenge for data-hungry business travelers was finding a hotel that offered high-speed Internet access. Then came a shift to wireless and even free connections.

But these days, the top priority for many is simply getting consistent, reliable access to the Internet, regardless of the cost or type of connection. That, it turns out, is not as easy as one might think.

Travelers’ complaints about spotty Internet service are varied. Sometimes the wireless signal works in Room 347 but not Room 219; other times the connections are too slow to download large files, do not work with corporate security settings or inexplicably disconnect every few minutes.

And when it comes to troubleshooting problems, most hotels direct guests to a toll-free number offered by their Internet service provider, which can be a frustrating exercise in navigating automated menus, waiting on hold or wasting time following instructions that do not provide a fix.

“I was on the phone with the 800 number at 11:30 at night, but I never did get connected,” said Charlene Baumbich, an author who had trouble getting online at four out of the five hotels she used during a recent book tour. “I lost sleep when I needed sleep trying to get online.”

Mark Lawrence, an engineer who travels two or three times a month with a Macintosh computer, started having problems connecting about six months ago; his Safari browser would crash during the sign-up process.

“When this first happened, I was shocked because I had been connecting for a year or so with no problems whatsoever” at various hotels, he said. “I was just beating my head against the wall, trying to connect again and again.” (He finally found a solution by connecting with a Firefox browser instead.)

Will Allen III, an organizational development consultant who travels most weeks, attributes growing connectivity problems to the shift to wireless access, estimating that he has trouble with Wi-Fi service in hotels about 50 percent of the time, in contrast to 5 percent of the time with a wired connection.

“Wireless is just not reliable yet, and hotels are just catching up to the fact that they’ve got to be on top of this,” he said, noting that he has turned down free upgrades to a room with Wi-Fi in favor of a wired connection in a lesser room. And if he is planning a long-term stay, he and his colleagues will test a hotel’s Internet service in advance.

“We can’t stay at a hotel unless the Internet works,” he said. “It’s like oxygen — we have to have it.”

The challenge for hotels is that more people are using the Internet for more things these days, not just to check e-mail messages, but to make phone calls, download TV shows and do videoconferencing, all of which require more bandwidth and more tech support when things do not work. Add to the mix the quirks of different operating systems, Web browsers and corporate security settings, not to mention travelers who are not necessarily tech-savvy themselves, and it is no surprise that hotels are struggling to provide reliable service.

One problem is that most large hotel chains work with dozens of Internet service providers, some of them small local operations, leading to an inconsistent service experience for guests. Hoping to rein in this chaos, the Hilton Hotels Corporation is in the process of bringing the management and customer support aspects of its Internet service in-house, through a program called Stay Connected @ Hilton.

John Flack, vice president for hotel broadband services at Hilton, said the program was aimed at making it easier for guests to be connected by offering a consistent sign-up process, ensuring reliable network performance by upgrading equipment and monitoring demand, and handling problems through a help desk run by Hilton staff members.

“We see the need to provide consistent service across all our family of brands,” Mr. Flack said, noting that up to 35 percent of guests use the Internet at Hilton’s full-service hotels, with peaks occurring midweek from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Brian Gullbrants, vice president for operations at Ritz-Carlton, where 10 percent of guests typically go online, said the hotel chain had moved away from relying on a single “technology butler” at each property and now trains most on-site employees to handle basic connectivity questions. “You don’t have to be a tech expert to figure it out, but you have to understand how our system works,” he said, adding that more complicated problems are handled by the hotel’s information technology staff.

Larry Dustin, president of the United States hotels group for iBahn, which provides Internet service to more than 2,000 hotels, said one source of frustration is that many hotels are not aware of problems with the quality of their network, especially as travelers’ technology habits evolve. “With bandwidth-intensive applications like video, a relatively few number of guests can drop the speed of the network to dial-up or less,” Mr. Dustin said.

Other problems he mentioned are building materials like concrete, steel and glass, which can block wireless signals; an inadequate number of Internet protocol addresses for all guests who need them to connect through their employer’s security software; and not enough antennas to accommodate growing wireless traffic.

But travelers say they should not have to worry about which company provides a hotel’s Internet service, and whether it is reliable.

“If I’m staying in a Tier 1 hotel, I should expect a Tier 1 experience,” said Andy Abramson, a communications consultant who writes a blog about Internet telephony. “I might be working in my hotel for 12 to 14 hours one day. To me, that hotel is an extension of my office — it’s not just a place to sleep and shower.”

That may mean that hotels, and ultimately their guests, have to pay more for better Internet service.

Some travelers, especially those putting access fees on expense accounts, say they do not mind paying for reliable service. But as Mr. Allen pointed out: “If you sell it to me, it better work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/bu...19connect.html





Lippis Report Issue 73: Mega Industry Trends for 2007

Peer-to-peer networking: The client-server model of computing is on its last legs and will be replaced by a peer-to-peer model. You can thank Microsoft for that as it desires to diminish the value of Linux servers by embedding peer-to-peer hooks into its much awaited Longhorn operating system. This shift will have large consequences as traffic patterns will shift significantly requiring many network/IT business decision makers to re-architect their networks.

So 2007 may bring about a huge structural change to the industry as private equity concerns do their investment diligence and decide if it’s worth tens of billions to stitch up a networking powerhouse. For sure the industry will continue down the road of the big acquiring the small with a few spectacular IPOs in 2007. 2006’s transitional year set up the third and strategic phase of IP telephony which is driving networking into a more strategic corporate asset role.

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Interview with iFind
Sian Liu

François Proulx is the coordinator and lead developer at MIT's iFind project. iFIND is MIT's new location-based application for "friendspotting" and among other things, serves to bring Web 2.0 social networking into the academic realm. To find out more about this upcoming talent, turn your attention to his blog or his flickr page.

How did iFind get started?

Exactly a year ago, the SENSEable City Lab at MIT launched a project called iSPOTS. iSPOTS studied the usage of the Wi-Fi network on the MIT campus. A year ago, I heard about the iSPOTS launch and I was very interested because I am an active developer in one of the largest Wi-Fi community groups in Canada. So I got in touch with the SENSEable City Lab and after our discussions, they offered me an internship.This idea has been growing inside SENSEable City Lab for the past 12 months and they had one or two prototypes, but none of them was ever released. I started working in the lab in September of ‘06 and in October we started building iFIND.We first started by developing the “location algorithm” on a Pocket PC.

What are some of the major problems your team faced with iFind and how did you address them? What do you envision as some of the major obstacles to iFind’s future successes?

From the start, we really wanted to address the privacy issue. This is one of the most significantly different features of iFIND when you compare it to other locations-based social software today. It took us some time to figure out a secure peer-to-peer scheme. We focused on a distributed data approach and so data was client-driven as opposed to server-driven (central server). The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. As for major obstacles we envision, it is to see a similar system grow outside of a closed-campus. Because in order for that to happen, we need to enhance 802.11 to include location data. A very interesting document is RFC 3825 which talks about adding location data to DHCP responses.

The biggest advantage I can see with iFind is it solves the privacy issue of data location sensitivity, with a distributed data approach. How does that tie in with this secure peer-to-peer scheme you mention?

You can always choose to whom you will disclose your location, but what is really important is to ensure you are authenticating the receiving end.So public key cryptography is essential. As a result, we built our own public key infrastructure for iFIND. iFIND generates a unique certificate for each new user.We still need a central server to store sessions and exchange IP addresses between friends but after that, each user is “free” to talk in their “own” peer-to-peer environment. We make it a point to only keep the last session and no location data whatsoever.

To realize MIT’s Information Services & Technology’s goal of creating a fully wireless campus, for any other coordinators behind campus or city projects that are trying to do the same thing, what skillset do you recommend for the team to have or what needs to be in place?

Some of the tools to build this software are really cutting edge so we needed a team of people who not only are constantly looking for the latest developments and improvements but more importantly possess the skillset we need in using those tools efficiently and creatively. When I say tools, I mean libraries. Having a team of people proficient in tools like Sun's SwingX-WS project was critical to this project’s success.
http://www.folksonomy.org/2006/12/in..._with_ifind_1/





ShakesPeer
WebBlurb

ShakesPeer is a p2p (peer to peer) file sharing program. It is a client for the Direct Connect protocol. The main goal of ShakesPeer is to create a fully featured client, compatible with DC++, that runs on Mac OS X with a native Aqua GUI.

WHAT'S NEW
Version 0.9.3:

* Fixed overwriting standard hub menu items with custom user-commands
* Fixed crash during reconnection
* Split shakespeer.db into multiple databases (queue.db, tth.db)
* Added Keychain support (from Alimony)
* Remember transfer drawer state and height (from Alimony)
* Major speedup in incoming TTH searches
* Added Growl notification for finished downloads
* Reworked the download queue completely (incompatible, queue lost)
* Reworked the share system completely (incompatible, need rehashing)
* Reworked the bookmarks view (from Alimony)
* All tables can now be right-clicked to select visible columns (from Alimony)
* Added Open and Reveal in Finder menu items in queue view
* Use unified toolbar instead of metal look
* more...Universal Binary
* Stability fixes
* much more...

http://mac.sofotex.com/download-130869.html





The NPD Group: Peer-to-Peer Digital Video Downloading Outpacing Legal Alternatives Five to One
Press Release

8 percent of Internet using households downloading from Peer-to-Peer (P2P) compared to 2 percent who paid to download a video file; Adult-oriented content most popular genre among those who download video files via P2P

Increased levels of broadband access, powerful and speedy PCs equipped with DVD readers and writers, portable video devices and next generation file sharing services are working in concert to make downloading of video content easier. According to The NPD Group, a leading consumer and retail information company, among U.S. households with members who regularly use the Internet, 8 percent (six million households) downloaded at least one digital video file (10MB or larger) from a P2P service for free in the third quarter of 2006. Nearly 60 percent of video files downloaded from P2P sites were adult-film content, while 20 percent was TV show content and 5 percent was mainstream movie content.

“While video P2P downloading is less pervasive right now than for music, it is a crucial issue for the film industry to keep track of,” said Russ Crupnick, vice president and senior industry analyst for The NPD Group, “Even though right now the majority of downloaded video content is adult-film content, the amount of intellectual property stolen from mainstream movie studios, networks, and record labels will continue to rise, unless strong and sustained action is taken to prevent piracy.”

The offerings in the paid video download arena have also made inroads with consumers. In Q3 2006 2 percent of U.S. households (1.2 million) with Internet access paid for a video download from an online download store. Apple’s iTunes led the market for paid digital video downloads, with nine in 10 downloads occurring on that site, followed by Vongo (5 percent), Movielink (3 percent) and less than one percent for CinemaNow. Sixty-two percent was TV program content, 24 percent was music video content and 6 percent was mainstream movie content.

“Paid usage could double or triple within the next year as more content comes online, consumers acquire more video-enabled players and movies are offered that consumers can actually burn to DVD,” Crupnick noted. “The competition between Apple’s iTunes/iPod juggernaut and Microsoft’s Zune platform will whet consumers’ appetites for digital video, though it will be quite a long time before we see consumers completely abandon the DVD in favor of digital downloads.”

Source: NPD VideoWatch Digital tracking service provides in-depth information on legal digital video download services, file sharing sites, ripping, burning, watching/playing, uploading to portable players, email/IM and file deletion. NPD monitors digital video activity (movies, TV shows, music videos, etc.) on the home computers of more than 12,500 U.S. households that have agreed to install NPD’s proprietary tracking software. Households are weighted and projected to reflect the Internet population.
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/...&newsLang =en





File Sharing Still Popular in Sweden

One in five Swedish Internet users has used a peer-to-peer file sharing programme at some point, according to a new report.

Downloading music, games and films for free online is most popular among men aged 16-34. According to the report from Statistics Sweden, SCB, 1.3 million Swedes have used a peer-to-peer file-sharing application at least once in their lives.

Sweden’s government last year made it illegal to download copyrighted films, music and games without permission.

The survey looked at the online habits of Swedes during the first quarter of 2006. The most common reasons to log on were to check email and to search for information and services.

Almost 80 percent of male Internet users between 16 and 74 use it to look for information and services. The figure for women is 70 percent. Some 75 percent of men and 72 percent of women use the net to send and receive emails.

The Internet is most popular among men between the ages of 25-34. Some 55 percent of women between 16 and 74, and 67 percent of men in the same age group, use the Internet daily.

Other popular uses for the Internet, according to the report, include banking, shopping and making travel reservations. Around 3.7 million Swedes reported having access to a broadband connection at home. Those who do not have Internet access at home said this was because they did not want it, not because they couldn't afford it.

The figures in the report had changed only slightly from last year.
http://www.thelocal.se/5836/20061218/





Censorship and Blocks

The past ten days we have been blocking a whole swedish ISP (Perspektiv Bredband) from accessing The Pirate Bay.

The reason for doing this was a very important one for us - the ISP decided to censor all traffic in their network to the russian site allofmp3.com - without the site actually being illegal according to Swedish law.

Censoring the internet is a very bad road to go down and we will stand up for our right of free internets!

There has been some press about the block-initiative we took together with our friends in Piratbyrån and the Pro Piracy Lobby. Today, Perspektiv Bredband did something that made us very happy - they reconsidered and removed all the censorship of allofmp3.com!

More information can be found (in Swedish) on the Piratbyrån Forum

Merry X-mas and a happy new year btw!
http://thepiratebay.org/blog/46





Local news

Tech-Savy Massachusetts Cardinal Starts Podcasts

Boston's Cardinal Sean O'Malley is going high-tech. He already has his own blog, now he plans to start podcasting to the masses, beginning with downloadable Christmas messages.

The video messages _ in English, Spanish and Portuguese _ are part of a broader effort by the Boston Archdiocese to embrace new technology as a way to spread the church's message.

The archdiocese is overhauling its newspaper and television Web sites, including offering the downloadable podcasts. It has assigned e-mail addresses to all priests, a handful of whom have resisted using computers. It also has an intranet site that officials expect will replace the monthly mailings to clergy.

O'Malley, a Capuchin Franciscan friar who has taken a vow of poverty and is a frequent critic of consumer culture, is emerging as an unlikely technology pioneer.

His Web log, Cardinalseansblog.org, is already considered a hit by archdiocesan officials, who say they are getting positive feedback from around the world.

"The cardinal wants us to utilize the tremendous tools that we have at our disposal and to expand the reach of those tools, so that we can bring the message of the church and the good works of the church to the Catholic community," said archdiocese spokesman Terry Donilon.

The cardinal's first downloadable podcast messages will be available Christmas Eve at Boston Catholic Television's revamped Web site. They will be followed by regular video messages from O'Malley starting in the new year, Donilon said.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...n/4418112.html





Top Viruses, Worms and Malware in 2006

As it does every year, Panda Software is publishing its annual list of those malicious codes which, although they may not have caused serious epidemics, have stood out in one way or another:

- The most moralistic. This award goes to the spyware Zcodec which, among other actions, monitors whether users access certain web pages with pornographic content. This may simply be a way of determining whether the user is a frequent visitor to these types of pages in order to send personalized advertising. On the other hand, perhaps the author of the spyware just has voyeuristic tendencies.

- The worst job applicant. The Eliles.A worm sends out CVs all over the place. It even sends them out to users’ cell phones. It would seem that it has little confidence in its own job prospects.

- The most sensationalist. Sensational headlines have always made an impact, now they are even being used by viruses. Of all those that appeared in 2006, Nuwar.A wins hands down with its declaration of the start of the Third World War.

- The most tenacious. They say that all good things come to an end. It's a shame that the creators of the Spamta worms haven’t heard the saying. Otherwise, they might have stopped sending wave after wave of almost identical variants of this malicious code.

- The most competitive. Once the Popuper spyware has installed itself on a computer, it runs a pirate version of a well-known antivirus application. Far from trying to do the user a favour, it is actually trying to eliminate any possible rival from the computer. It seems that the fight for supremacy has also reached the world of Internet threats.

- The most diligent. In general, phishing messages are aimed at gathering confidential information such as credit card numbers or account access details in order to steal money. However, this isn't the case with BarcPhish.HTML, which goes much further, collecting information including expiry dates, CVVs (Card Verification Value), last names, membership numbers, five-digit codes, account numbers, etc. No doubt the creator was thinking “better too much than too little…”

- The biggest snooper. In this case, it was not a difficult choice. WebMic.A is a malicious code that can record sounds and images, using a microphone and WebCam connected to the computer. Of course this is not the sort of uninvited guest you would like to have on your PC.

- The most mischievous. Nedro.B is a worm that seems to get bored after it has infected a computer. Perhaps that's why it decides to change icons, prevent access to tools, hide file extensions, delete options from the Start menu... and basically cause chaos. Maybe this seems entertaining to someone, but it certainly isn't for the users.

- The most chaste. Malicious codes that spread across P2P networks use enticing filenames in order to get users to download them voluntarily on to their computers. For this reason, many of these names have pornographic connotations. However, among the more than 37,000 different names used by FormShared.A, none of them make any reference to sex. That’s some kind of record.

- The most archaic. Seemingly there are still some retro virus creators around. Whoever created the DarkFloppy.A worm appears not to have heard of e-mail, instant messaging or P2P systems, as the propagation methods they've chosen to spread this malicious code is… floppy disks. Not much chance of a massive epidemic then, is there?

-The most promiscuous. This title goes without doubt to Gatt.A. This malicious code can infect any platform that it is run on: Windows, Linux, etc.

- The most deceitful. SafetyBar supposedly offers security information and anti-spyware downloads. However, the problem is that once downloaded, these programs then warn the user that the computer is infected by non-existent threats.
http://www.net-security.org/virus_news.php?id=724





Are You Suffering From 'Mouse Rage Syndrome?
W. Gardner

A phenomenon as monumental as the Internet should have an ailment of its own. Indeed, the Web appears to be breeding its very own disease, a medical syndrome recognizable by a quickening of the heart, profuse sweating, and furious clicking and bashing of the mouse. In extreme cases, the ailment can be identified by loud screaming at video screens.

It's Mouse Rage Syndrome, and it infects all Internet users sooner or later, according to a study of 2,500 Web users that was released Tuesday. Conducted by the Social Issues Research Centre in the United Kingdom, the study identified key factors that can negatively affect cardio functions, as well as the immune and nervous systems.

What's the root cause of Mouse Rage Syndrome? It's primarily caused by badly designed and hosted Web sites, according to the research center.

All Web surfers are familiar with the causes: slow-loading pages, layouts that are difficult to navigate, pesky pop-ups, and unnecessary ads, including banners. And, of course, the killer cause: site unavailability.

"The test results indicate that users want Google-style speed, function, and accuracy from all of the Web sites they visit, and they want it now," according to the SIRC report. "Unfortunately, many Web sites and their servers cannot deliver this."

In a test, the SIRC used as a control what it called "the Perfect Web site," one that functioned well. Study respondents were then presented with a stream of "crazy graphics and slow-loading pages." While a small sampling remained calm, others "showed very distinct signs of stress and anxiety," according to the study.

The report stated, "Some changes in muscle tension were quite dramatic While this was happening, the participants faces also tensed visibly, with the teeth clenched together and the muscles around the mouth becoming taught. These are physically uncomfortable situations that reduce concentration and increase feelings of anger."

Rackspace Managed Hosting commissioned the study. The U.K. firm's managing director, Jacques Greyling, said the study shows that businesses selling online have a duty to provide an Internet experience "as stress-free as possible." He added, "The message is clear: Businesses need to provide simple and easy-to-navigate layouts, whilst focusing on speed and uptime."
http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArtic...imes_ne wsRSS

















Until next week,

- js.



















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Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. Questions or comments? Call 213-814-0165, country code U.S.. Voicemails cannot be returned.


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