[JackSpratts]

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

Never Mind the Singularity, Here's the Science
Gary Wolf

Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, is trim, balding, and not very tall. With his perfect posture and narrow black glasses, he would look at home in an old documentary about Cape Canaveral, but his mission is bolder than any mere voyage into space. He is attempting to travel across a frontier in time, to pass through the border between our era and a future so different as to be unrecognizable. He calls this border the singularity. Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives.

Kurzweil's notion of a singularity is taken from cosmology, in which it signifies a border in spacetime beyond which normal rules of measurement do not apply (the edge of a black hole, for example). The word was first used to describe a crucial moment in the evolution of humanity by the great mathematician John von Neumann. One day in the 1950s, while talking with his colleague Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann began discussing the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, which, he said, "gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue."

Many years later, this idea was picked up by another mathematician, the professor and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who added an additional twist. Vinge linked the singularity directly with improvements in computer hardware. This put the future on a schedule. He could look at how quickly computers were improving and make an educated guess about when the singularity would arrive. "Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence," Vinge wrote at the beginning of his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. "Shortly after, the human era will be ended." According to Vinge, superintelligent machines will take charge of their own evolution, creating ever smarter successors. Humans will become bystanders in history, too dull in comparison with their devices to make any decisions that matter.

Kurzweil transformed the singularity from an interesting speculation into a social movement. His best-selling books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near cover everything from unsolved problems in neuroscience to the question of whether intelligent machines should have legal rights. But the crucial thing that Kurzweil did was to make the end of the human era seem actionable: He argues that while artificial intelligence will render biological humans obsolete, it will not make human consciousness irrelevant. The first AIs will be created, he says, as add-ons to human intelligence, modeled on our actual brains and used to extend our human reach. AIs will help us see and hear better. They will give us better memories and help us fight disease. Eventually, AIs will allow us to conquer death itself. The singularity won't destroy us, Kurzweil says. Instead, it will immortalize us.

There are singularity conferences now, and singularity journals. There has been a congressional report about confronting the challenges of the singularity, and late last year there was a meeting at the NASA Ames Research Center to explore the establishment of a singularity university. The meeting was called by Peter Diamandis, who established the X Prize. Attendees included senior government researchers from NASA, a noted Silicon Valley venture capitalist, a pioneer of private space exploration, and two computer scientists from Google.

At this meeting, there was some discussion about whether this university should avoid the provocative term singularity, with its cosmic connotations, and use a more ordinary phrase, like accelerating change. Kurzweil argued strongly against backing off. He is confident that the word will take hold as more and more of his astounding predictions come true.

Kurzweil does not believe in half measures. He takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn't have time to organize them all himself. So he's hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses, which he carries everywhere in plastic bags. Kurzweil also spends one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments. The reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century, it would be a shame to die in the interim. To perish of a heart attack just before the singularity occurred would not only be sad for all the ordinary reasons, it would also be tragically bad luck, like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments before the armistice was proclaimed.

In his childhood, Kurzweil was a technical prodigy. Before he turned 13, he'd fashioned telephone relays into a calculating device that could find square roots. At 14, he wrote software that analyzed statistical deviance; the program was distributed as standard equipment with the new IBM 1620. As a teenager, he cofounded a business that matched high school students with colleges based on computer evaluation of a mail-in questionnaire. He sold the company to Harcourt, Brace & World in 1968 for $100,000 plus royalties and had his first small fortune while still an undergraduate at MIT.

Though Kurzweil was young, it would have been a poor bet to issue him life insurance using standard actuarial tables. He has unlucky genes: His father died of heart disease at 58, his grandfather in his early forties. He himself was diagnosed with high cholesterol and incipient type 2 diabetes — both considered to be significant risk factors for early death — when only 35. He felt his bad luck as a cloud hanging over his life.

Still, the inventor squeezed a lot of achievement out of these early years. In his twenties, he tackled a science fiction type of problem: teaching computers to decipher words on a page and then read them back aloud. At the time, common wisdom held that computers were too slow and too expensive to master printed text in all its forms, at least in a way that was commercially viable.

But Kurzweil had a special confidence that grew from a habit of mind he'd been cultivating for years: He thought exponentially. To illustrate what this means, consider the following quiz: 2, 4, ?, ?.

What are the missing numbers? Many people will say 6 and 8. This suggests a linear function. But some will say the missing numbers are 8 and 16. This suggests an exponential function. (Of course, both answers are correct. This is a test of thinking style, not math skills.)

Human minds have a lot of practice with linear patterns. If we set out on a walk, the time it takes will vary linearly with the distance we're going. If we bill by the hour, our income increases linearly with the number of hours we work. Exponential change is also common, but it's harder to see. Financial advisers like to tantalize us by explaining how a tiny investment can grow into a startling sum through the exponential magic of compound interest. But it's psychologically difficult to heed their advice. For years, an interest-bearing account increases by depressingly tiny amounts. Then, in the last moment, it seems to jump. Exponential growth is unintuitive, because it can be imperceptible for a long time and then move shockingly fast. It takes training and experience, and perhaps a certain analytical coolness, to trust in exponential curves whose effects cannot be easily perceived.

Moore's law — the observation by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every 18 months — is another example of exponential change. For people like Kurzweil, it is the key example, because Moore's law and its many derivatives suggest that just about any limit on computing power today will be overcome in short order. While Kurzweil was working on his reading machine, computers were improving, and they were indeed improving exponentially. The payoff came on January 13, 1976, when Walter Cronkite's famous sign-off — "and that's the way it is" — was read not by the anchorman but by the synthetic voice of a Kurzweil Reading Machine. Stevie Wonder was the first customer.

The original reader was the size of a washing machine. It read slowly and cost $50,000. One day late last year, as a winter storm broke across New England, I stood in Kurzweil's small office suite in suburban Boston, playing with the latest version. I hefted it in my hand, stuck it in my pocket, pulled it out again, then raised it above a book flopped open on the table. A bright light flashed, and a voice began reading aloud. The angle of the book, the curve of its pages, the uneven shadows — none of that was a problem. The mechanical voice picked up from the numerals on the upper left corner — ... four hundred ten. The singularity is near. The continued opportunity to alleviate human distress is one key motivation for continuing technological advancement — and continued down the page in an artificial monotone. Even after three decades of improvement, Kurzweil's reader is a dull companion. It expresses no emotion. However, it is functionally brilliant to the point of magic. It can handle hundreds of fonts and any size book. It doesn't mind being held at an angle by an unsteady hand. Not only that, it also makes calls: Computers have become so fast and small they've nearly disappeared, and the Kurzweil reader is now just software running on a Nokia phone.

In the late '70s, Kurzweil's character-recognition algorithms were used to scan legal documents and articles from newspapers and magazines. The result was the Lexis and Nexis databases. And a few years later, Kurzweil released speech recognition software that is the direct ancestor of today's robot customer service agents. Their irritating mistakes taking orders and answering questions would seem to offer convincing evidence that real AI is still many years away. But Kurzweil draws the opposite conclusion. He admits that not everything he has invented works exactly as we might wish. But if you will grant him exponential progress, the fact that we already have virtual robots standing in for retail clerks, and cell phones that read books out loud, is evidence that the world is about to change in even more fantastical ways.

Look at it this way: If the series of numbers in the quiz mentioned earlier is linear and progresses for 100 steps, the final entry is 200. But if progress is exponential, then the final entry is 1,267,650,600,228,229,400,000,000,000,000. Computers will soon be smarter than humans. Nobody has to die.

In a small medical office on the outskirts of Denver, with windows overlooking the dirty snow and the golden arches of a fast-food mini-mall, one of the world's leading longevity physicians, Terry Grossman, works on keeping Ray Kurzweil alive. Kurzweil is not Grossman's only client. The doctor charges $6,000 per appointment, and wealthy singularitarians from all over the world visit him to plan their leap into the future.

Grossman's patient today is Matt Philips, 32, who became independently wealthy when Yahoo bought the Internet advertising company where he worked for four years. A young medical technician is snipping locks of his hair, and another is extracting small vials of blood. Philips is in good shape at the moment, but he is aware that time marches on. "I'm dying slowly. I can't feel it, but I know its happening, little by little, cell by cell," he wrote on his intake questionnaire. Philips has read Kurzweil's books. He is a smart, skeptical person and accepts that the future is not entirely predictable, but he also knows the meaning of upside. At worst, his money buys him new information about his health. At best, it makes him immortal.

"The normal human lifespan is about 125 years," Grossman tells him. But Philips wasn't born until 1975, so he starts with an advantage. "I think somebody your age, and in your condition, has a reasonable chance of making it across the first bridge," Grossman says.

According to Grossman and other singularitarians, immortality will arrive in stages. First, lifestyle and aggressive antiaging therapies will allow more people to approach the 125-year limit of the natural human lifespan. This is bridge one. Meanwhile, advanced medical technology will begin to fix some of the underlying biological causes of aging, allowing this natural limit to be surpassed. This is bridge two. Finally, computers become so powerful that they can model human consciousness. This will permit us to download our personalities into nonbiological substrates. When we cross this third bridge, we become information. And then, as long as we maintain multiple copies of ourselves to protect against a system crash, we won't die.

Kurzweil himself started across the first bridge in 1988. That year, he confronted the risk that had been haunting him and began to treat his body as a machine. He read up on the latest nutritional research, adopted the Pritikin diet, cut his fat intake to 10 percent of his calories, lost 40 pounds, and cured both his high cholesterol and his incipient diabetes. Kurzweil wrote a book about his experience, The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life. But this was only the beginning.

Kurzweil met Grossman at a Foresight Nanotech Institute meeting in 1999, and they became research partners. Their object of investigation was Kurzweil's body. Having cured himself of his most pressing health problems, Kurzweil was interested in adopting the most advanced medical and nutritional technologies, but it wasn't easy to find a doctor willing to tolerate his persistent questions. Grossman was building a new type of practice, focused not on illness but on the pursuit of optimal health and extreme longevity. The two men exchanged thousands of emails, sharing speculations about which cutting-edge discoveries could be safely tried.

Though both Grossman and Kurzweil respect science, their approach is necessarily improvisational. If a therapy has some scientific promise and little risk, they'll try it. Kurzweil gets phosphatidylcholine intravenously, on the theory that this will rejuvenate all his body's tissues. He takes DHEA and testosterone. Both men use special filters to produce alkaline water, which they drink between meals in the hope that negatively charged ions in the water will scavenge free radicals and produce a variety of health benefits. This kind of thing may seem like quackery, especially when promoted by various New Age outfits touting the "pH miracle of living." Kurzweil and Grossman justify it not so much with scientific citations — though they have a few — but with a tinkerer's shrug. "Life is not a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study," Grossman explains. "We don't have that luxury. We are operating with incomplete information. The best we can do is experiment with ourselves."

Obviously, Kurzweil has no plan for retirement. He intends to sustain himself indefinitely through his intelligence, which he hopes will only grow. A few years ago he deployed an automated system for making money on the stock market, called FatKat, which he uses to direct his own hedge fund. He also earns about $1 million a year in speaking fees.

Meanwhile, he tries to safeguard his well-being. As a driver he is cautious. He frequently bicycles through the Boston suburbs, which is good for physical conditioning but also puts his immortality on the line. For most people, such risks blend into the background of life, concealed by a cheerful fatalism that under ordinary conditions we take as a sign of mental health. But of course Kurzweil objects to this fatalism. He wants us to try harder to survive.

His plea is often ignored. Kurzweil has written about the loneliness of being a singularitarian. This may seem an odd complaint, given his large following, but there is something to it. A dozen of his fans may show up in Denver every month to initiate longevity treatments, but many of them, like Matt Philips, are simply hedging their bets. Most health fanatics remain agnostic, at best, on the question of immortality.

Kurzweil predicts that by the early 2030s, most of our fallible internal organs will have been replaced by tiny robots. We'll have "eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain."

In outlining these developments, Kurzweil's tone is so calm and confident that he seems to be describing the world as it is today, rather than some distant, barely imaginable future. This is because his prediction falls out cleanly from the equations he's proposed. Knowledge doubles every year, Kurzweil says. He has estimated the number of computations necessary to simulate a human brain. The rest is simple math.

But wait. There may be something wrong. Kurzweil's theory of accelerating change is meant to be a universal law, applicable wherever intelligence is found. It's fine to say that knowledge doubles every year. But then again, what is a year? A year is an astronomical artifact. It is the length of time required by Earth to make one orbit around our unexceptional star. A year is important to our nature, to our biology, to our fantasies and dreams. But it is a strange unit to discover in a general law.

"Doubling every year," I say to Kurzweil, "makes your theory sound like a wish."

He's not thrown off. A year, he replies, is just shorthand. The real equation for accelerating world knowledge is much more complicated than that. (In his book, he gives it as: .)

He has examined the evidence, and welcomes debate on the minor details. If you accept his basic premise of accelerating growth, he'll yield a little on the date he predicts the singularity will occur. After all, concede accelerating growth and the exponential fuse is lit. At the end you get that big bang: an explosion in intelligence that yields immortal life.

Despite all this, people continue to disbelieve. There is a lively discussion among experts about the validity of Moore's law. Kurzweil pushes Moore's law back to the dawn of time, and forward to the end of the universe. But many computer scientists and historians of technology wonder if it will last another decade. Some suspect that the acceleration of computing power has already slowed.

There are also philosophical objections. Kurzweil's theory is that super-intelligent computers will necessarily be human, because they will be modeled on the human brain. But there are other types of intelligence in the world — for instance, the intelligence of ant colonies — that are alien to humanity. Grant that a computer, or a network of computers, might awaken. The consciousness of the this fabulous AI might remain as incomprehensible to us as we are to the protozoa.

Other pessimists point out that the brain is more than raw processing power. It also has a certain architecture, a certain design. It is attached to specific type of nervous system, it accepts only particular kinds of inputs. Even with better computational speed driving our thoughts, we might still be stuck in a kind of evolutionary dead end, incapable of radical self-improvement.

And these are the merely intellectual protests Kurzweil receives. The fundamental cause for loneliness, if you are a prophet of the singularity, is probably more profound. It stems from the simple fact that the idea is so strange. "Death has been a ubiquitous, ever-present facet of human society," says Kurzweil's friend Martine Rothblatt, founder of Sirius radio and chair of United Therapeutics, a biotech firm on whose board Kurzweil sits. "To tell people you are going to defeat death is like telling people you are going to travel back in time. It has never been done. I would be surprised if people had a positive reaction."

To press his case, Kurzweil is writing and producing an autobiographical movie, with walk-ons by Alan Dershowitz and Tony Robbins. Kurzweil appears in two guises, as himself and as an intelligent computer named Ramona, played by an actress. Ramona has long been the inventor's virtual alter ego and the expression of his most personal goals. "Women are more interesting than men," he says, "and if it's more interesting to be with a woman, it is probably more interesting to be a woman." He hopes one day to bring Ramona to life, and to have genuine human experiences, both with her and as her. Kurzweil has been married for 32 years to his wife, Sonya Kurzweil. They have two children — one at Stanford University, one at Harvard Business School. "I don't necessarily only want to be Ramona," he says. "It's not necessarily about gender confusion, it's just about freedom to express yourself."

Kurzweil's movie offers a taste of the drama such a future will bring. Ramona is on a quest to attain full legal rights as a person. She agrees to take a Turing test, the classic proof of artificial intelligence, but although Ramona does her best to masquerade as human, she falls victim to one of the test's subtle flaws: Humans have limited intelligence. A computer that appears too smart will fail just as definitively as one that seems too dumb. "She loses because she is too clever!" Kurzweil says.

The inventor's sympathy with his robot heroine is heartfelt. "If you're just very good at doing mathematical theorems and making stock market investments, you're not going to pass the Turing test," Kurzweil acknowledged in 2006 during a public debate with noted computer scientist David Gelernter. Kurzweil himself is brilliant at math, and pretty good at stock market investments. The great benefits of the singularity, for him, do not lie here. "Human emotion is really the cutting edge of human intelligence," he says. "Being funny, expressing a loving sentiment — these are very complex behaviors."

One day, sitting in his office overlooking the suburban parking lot, I ask Kurzweil if being a singularitarian makes him happy. "If you took a poll of primitive man, happiness would be getting a fire to light more easily," he says. "But we've expanded our horizon, and that kind of happiness is now the wrong thing to focus on. Extending our knowledge and casting a wider net of consciousness is the purpose of life." Kurzweil expects that the world will soon be entirely saturated by thought. Even the stones may compute, he says, within 200 years.

Every day he stays alive brings him closer to this climax in intelligence, and to the time when Ramona will be real. Kurzweil is a technical person, but his goal is not technical in this respect. Yes, he wants to become a robot. But the robots of his dreams are complex, funny, loving machines. They are as human as he hopes to be.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/m...04/ff_kurzweil





Patriot Act Haunts Google Service
Simon Avery

Google Inc. is a year into its ground-shifting strategy to change the way people communicate and work.

But the initiative to reinvent the way that people use software is running headlong into another new phenomenon of the information technology age: the unprecedented powers of security officials in the United States to conduct surveillance on communications.

Eighteen months ago, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., had an outdated computer system that was crashing daily and in desperate need of an overhaul. A new installation would have cost more than $1-million and taken months to implement. Google's service, however, took just 30 days to set up, didn't cost the university a penny and gave nearly 8,000 students and faculty leading-edge software, said Michael Pawlowski, Lakehead's vice-president of administration and finance.

U.S.-based Google spotlighted the university as one of the first to adopt its software model of the future, and today Mr. Pawlowski boasts the move was the right thing for Lakehead, saving it hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual operating costs. But he notes one trade-off: The faculty was told not to transmit any private data over the system, including student marks.

The U.S. Patriot Act, passed in the weeks after the September, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, gives authorities the means to secretly view personal data held by U.S. organizations. It is at odds with Canada's privacy laws, which require organizations to protect private information and inform individuals when their data has been shared.

At Lakehead, the deal with Google sparked a backlash. "The [university] did this on the cheap. By getting this free from Google, they gave away our rights," said Tom Puk, past president of Lakehead's faculty association, which filed a grievance against Lakehead administration that's still in arbitration.

Professors say the Google deal broke terms of their collective agreement that guarantees members the right to private communications. Mr. Puk says teachers want an in-house system that doesn't let third parties see their e-mails.

Some other organizations are banning Google's innovative tools outright to avoid the prospect of U.S. spooks combing through their data. Security experts say many firms are only just starting to realize the risks they assume by embracing Web-based collaborative tools hosted by a U.S. company, a problem even more acute in Canada where federal privacy rules are at odds with U.S. security measures.

"You have to decide which law you are going to break," said Darren Meister, associate professor of information systems at the Richard Ivey School of Business, who specializes in how technology enhances organizational effectiveness. "If I were a business manager, I would want to be very careful about what kind of data I made accessible to U.S. law enforcement."

Using their new powers under the Patriot Act, U.S. intelligence officials can scan documents, pick out certain words and create profiles of the authors - a frightening challenge to academic freedom, Mr. Puk said.

For instance, a Lakehead researcher with a Middle Eastern name, researching anthrax or nuclear energy, might find himself denied entry to the United States without ever knowing why. "You would have no idea what they are up to with your information until, perhaps, it is too late," Mr. Puk said. "We don't want to be subject to laws of the Patriot Act."

Google's free Web tools are advertising-based and they automatically extract information from personal content to build a profile for advertisers. Lakehead professors also object to this feature, although Mr. Puk says Google has refrained from attaching ads until the grievance is settled.

The privacy issue goes far beyond academia. In Toronto, at SickKids Foundation, which has the largest endowment of any Canadian hospital, employees have been keen to use Google tools. But the foundation's IT department blocked access for two reasons.

"Wherever possible, we keep our donor and patient records in Canada, as trying to enforce privacy laws in other jurisdictions is complex and expensive," said Chris Woodill, director of IT and new media at SickKids Foundation. Second, free hosted software offers limited support and no formal legal contract, limiting an organization's ability to demand additional privacy or security measures, he said.

Google says it has a strong track record in regard to protecting customers' data. The firm cites a court case it fought in 2006 against attempts by the U.S. Justice Department to subpoena customer search records. "We will continue to be strong advocates on behalf of protecting our users' data," said Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel.

But the Mountain View, Calif.-based company will not discuss how often government agencies demand access to its customers' information or whether content on its new Web-based collaborative tools has been the subject of any reviews under the Patriot Act.

Montreal security strategist Jeffrey Posluns says Google's software suite may suit some small businesses because cost savings are significant. But he warns that the deciding factor should be the sensitivity of the organization's information.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...echnology/home





Google to Push Privacy Initiatives in U.S.
Grant Gross

Google is working with other companies to push consumer privacy legislation in the U.S. Congress and will work with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to fine-tune online advertising principles the agency proposed in December, the company's top privacy executives said Wednesday.

In addition, Google is reaching out to privacy advocates in an effort to allay concerns about its acquisition of online advertising vendor DoubleClick, company officials said.

Privacy is of such concern for Google that it embeds privacy lawyers with product teams, Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel, told reporters in Washington, D.C. Google, in its own products and in policy discussions, has focused on three privacy principles: transparency of privacy policies, security of data and user choice, and control over how data is used, she said.

"People don't like binary choices about how to use data," Wong said. "They want to be [online] on their own terms."

This week, Google hosted a meeting of the Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum, a group of companies focused on getting a consumer privacy bill passed in the U.S. Congress. The group, formed in 2006, doesn't expect legislation to pass this year, but is working toward consensus on privacy issues, said Jane Horvath, Google's senior privacy counsel. The group plans to run its ideas past privacy groups and the FTC before pushing for legislation, she said.

In addition, Google plans to file formal comments about the FTC's proposed privacy principles for online behavior advertising, added Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel. Among the FTC proposals: Web sites should provide clear and prominent statements that data is being collected to provide targeted ads, and companies should obtain consumer consent before using data in a different way from what the companies promised when they collected the data.

Google supports the FTC's work on the privacy principles, Fleischer said, but it will raise some questions when it files its comments. For example, the FTC has asked for comments on what constitutes "sensitive data" and whether it should prohibit the use of sensitive data.

For example, an anonymous search on Google for health care providers that treat AIDS may be sensitive, but it's not personally identifiable, he said. In most cases, IP (Internet Protocol) addresses are not personally identifiable -- Web sites cannot connect IP addresses to individuals in most cases, he said.

The debate over what constitutes personally identifiable information is the "hardest question" in privacy, Fleischer said. "There's a grey area in between [the obvious cases], and that's what we're struggling with right now," he said.

Asked about the controversy over whether Google's DoubleClick acquisition threatens people's privacy, Fleischer said one issue was lost in the debate: DoubleClick doesn't collect personally identifiable information when it serves ads. Instead, DoubleClick does collect IP addresses that give general location of the computer users and other information such as the language of the users, he said. "DoubleClick does its ad targeting anonymously," Fleischer said.

Privacy groups, including the Electronic Information Privacy Center and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), unsuccessfully pushed the FTC to reject the Google purchase of DoubleClick, saying the combined company would hold massive amounts of personal data.

Jeff Chester, CDD's executive director, was among the privacy advocates who met with Google executives this week. He praised Google for having "thoughtful" employees willing to discuss the issues, but said Google still doesn't seem to understand the privacy concerns that are part of the DoubleClick deal.

"It's clear that several of the Google privacy staff don't fully comprehend the privacy implications of DoubleClick," he said.
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008...nitiatives-u-s





PrivacyFinder.org: Search, But with Privacy
Peter Eckersley

The level of privacy offered by search engines is generally woeful. Last year, the three big players (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) made some improvements by limiting the duration for full retention of logs about who has searched and what they've searched for. That means that after a year or two, it would be harder — though probably not impossible — for the major search engines and their advertising partners to reconstruct a complete history of your searches.

Ask.com went further with their AskEraser feature, which allows users to have their logs deleted and to opt-out of being tracked (Ask.com could have done better by finding a way for opt-out to be available without a cookie).

Despite these improvements, the average Internet user still has very little privacy for their search history. We have documented the measures you can take to protect yourself, but they aren't all that simple.

So it's exciting to report that one small search engine is experimenting with ways to be an aide, rather than a threat, to privacy. PrivacyFinder is a research project at the CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (full disclosure: Lorrie Cranor, who heads the lab, is also on the EFF Board). It offers an interface to Yahoo! and Google, but with two notable improvements: an excellent logging/data retention policy, and a feature that shows the user information about sites' privacy policies along with the search results. That way, if two sites offer the same service but one of them is better from a privacy point of view, the user will see that quickly. The PrivacyFinder researchers tell us they've observed that people will, for instance, pay more for an item from an online store if they can see that it has an excellent privacy policy.

PrivacyFinder seems to be making productive use of P3P, an old privacy standard that has, in many other respects, fallen short of expectations. If you run a search on the site, you can quickly see when one result matches your standards and others don't.

Privacyfinder's logging policy is amongst the best in the industry (Ixquick is also first-rate). Privacyfinder only keeps search records for a week, unless the user explicitly opts in to being tracked. Because the CMU Laboratory wants to do research on the use of search engines, it's offering prizes for people who are willing to be tracked for research purposes. That's the way we like to see it done.

Meanwhile, several other developments are in the works. New York State legislators have been talking about taking parts of the search privacy problem into their own hands. There are rumors of new startups planning to enter the "privacy search" market. And EFF is working on a scorecard for systematically evaluating the effectiveness of various privacy measures at search engines. Stay tuned to Deeplinks for future developments!
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/03/search-privacy





Antigua Threatens to Allow Piracy

Gov't hopes to settle trade dispute with US
William Triplett

The government of Antigua is likely to abrogate intellectual property treaties with the U.S. by the end of March and authorize wholesale copying of American movies, music and other "soft targets" if the Bush administration fails to respond to proposals for settling a trade dispute between the two counties, according to the lawyer representing the Caribbean island nation.

The Motion Picture Assn. of America has been closely following the case with tremendous concern, an org official said, fearing that the copying could be extensively damaging and that -- worse -- a dangerous precedent could be set for other small countries angry at U.S. trade policy.

"It is not our preferred option to punish the MPAA or others for the U.S. government's intransigence, but the U.S. has refused to negotiate fairly," said Mark E. Mendel, who represents Antigua.

Goods and materials that would be copied include "virtually everything from pharmaceuticals to music, anything with IP protection that can be duplicated, though we'll go for softer targets first," Mendel said.

Antigua has previously suggested it might retaliate as such -- with approval from the World Trade Organization -- but has never stipulated when. So far, the U.S. Trade Representative has dismissed that threat simply as a negotiating ploy.

"Antigua would be breaking the law if it did that," said USTR spokesman Sean Spicer.

The WTO ruled last year that Antigua was entitled to $21 million in damages because of a dispute with the U.S. over Internet gambling. But Antigua has not received WTO approval to procure its damages via reproducing and selling domestically U.S.-copyrighted goods and materials, Spicer added.

"They continually engage in disinformation," Mendel responded. "The reality is, yes, we have to go before WTO and request their authorization for IP sanctions against the U.S., but we can do that at any time and the WTO will agree. That is 100% guaranteed."

Mendel acknowledged his client would like such entities as the MPAA, the recording industry and Microsoft -- orgs that depend on IP protection -- to pressure the Bush administration into negotiating a "preferred" settlement, which would allow Internet gambling between Antigua and the U.S.

But he insisted the threat was neither idle nor empty. "Perhaps the U.S. doesn't think we're serious," Mendel said. "We are."

The case dates back to 2003, when Antigua claimed that the U.S. unlawfully prevented Antigua's online gambling operators from accessing American markets although the U.S. allowed domestic online bets for horse racing. Antigua claimed $3.4 billion in losses and took its grievance to the WTO, which agreed, but awarded only $21 million in damages.

Mendel said his client has been trying ever since to work out an agreement that would allow online gambling between the two countries, but instead the U.S. has responded by "using every possible appeal, counterattack and side attack it could think of. We've been through five separate full-blown WTO proceedings on this and have won every step of the way."

The most recent victory was in December, when the WTO ruled that Antigua could exact damages by ignoring IP agreements with the U.S. should a negotiated settlement fail.

Mendel said the U.S. promised then to respond to proposals for settling the dispute. "We have been waiting for three months already and there's been nothing," he said. "If the U.S. doesn't come in with something by the end of March, my suggestion to the Antiguan government will be to forge ahead and impose IP sanctions."

In a letter to the USTR about the potential effects of Antigua's retaliation, sent prior to December's ruling granting $21 million in damages, the MPAA wrote: "The proposed retaliation would be impossible to manage. The real and resulting economic harm would vastly exceed any amount the (WTO) might approve, even the grossly exaggerated amount ($3.4 billion) for which Antigua seeks approval, plus the economic harm would extend to other WTO members.

"MPAA believes it would be very difficult to insulate other WTO members from the effects of Antigua's proposed retaliation," the letter continued. "The unfortunate reality is that the failure to offer or enforce adequate protection of intellectual property rights in Antigua could foster abuses in other countries."
http://www.variety.com/article/VR111...ryid=1338&cs=1





Mukasey: Piracy Funding Terror
Jordan Robertson

Attorney General Michael Mukasey warned Friday that the huge profits generated from piracy and counterfeiting are increasingly flowing into the coffers of terrorist groups.

In remarks to Silicon Valley executives at the Tech Museum of Innovation, Mukasey said the economy and national security of the United States are increasingly threatened by violations involving copyrighted software code, patented inventions and trademarked properties.

Terror groups are taking their cues from organized crime and increasingly funding their operations from counterfeiting and piracy, he said.

Mukasey said his department is devoting more resources to prosecuting intellectual property crimes, which led to a 7 percent increase in the number of IP cases filed in 2007 over the year before and a 33 percent increase over 2005.

"Criminal syndicates, and in some cases even terrorist groups, view IP crime as a lucrative business and see it as a low-risk way to fund other activities," Mukasey said. "A primary goal of our IP enforcement mission is to show these criminals that they're wrong."

Before Friday's speech, he met privately with representatives from companies including Apple Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc.

Mukasey did not elaborate on the topics discussed in that meeting. The attorney general also met with entertainment industry executives in Los Angeles a day earlier during this three-day California trip, and did not discuss those talks.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080328/...ctual_property





How YOUR Tech Blog Posts are RIPPED OFF While You Sleep!
Mike Duncan

You work hard on your posts…

So you get an idea for a blog post. You mull it over, finally commit to it, and start to get down to work. Now that you’re in it for the long haul there’s probably a good time sink involved. Depending on your writing style your work involved might be something like:

• Researching the topic so you understand it really as well as you think you do.
• Thinking about the points you are going to make, what order makes some sort of sense.
• Collecting and wiring up good outbound links to more authoritative, encylopedic reference for your readers to continue on with.
• (HOLY CRAP, DON’T READ THIS!!!) Thinking up a good magnetic headline to grab some interest.
• Thinking about how to break up your content into manageable, scannable bits.
• Searching for / creating / farming-out some for some pithy images to break the monotony of endless text.

If you are into copywriting, a slow worker, disturbed by animals, etc, this process may be long and soul crushing.

And the payoff is….

You birth your creation into the wild. You lord it over your friends, shamelessly promote it on a few social networks, get your mom to check it out, etc. As people add comments and you watch the visitors count in your analytics, you get that satisfying ego-boost you had hoped for. You can feel your social capital on the rise. Rad.

And then, YOU ARE RIPPED OFF!

Ok, so here’s my story. As avid readers of www.mikeduncan.com you’ve undoubtedly read my scintillating post SQLite on .NET - Get up and running in 3 minutes. Catchy, isn’t it? It was birthed into the world as the timestamp clearly reminds us on January 15th, 2008. People seemed to dig it, a good time was had by all. Maybe *too good* of a time.

TWO DAYS after my post was out in the wild, I started seeing some interesting inbound links coming in from InfoQ, a tech news - paid story aggregator type site. While not somewhere I go often, their site is indeed large, thriving, and as it turns out, morally bankrupt. It seems that one Robert Bazinet has a story on the front page of the 250,000 unique visitors per month, page rank 7, mega-site that is InfoQ.com cleverly titled:

Up and Running with SQLite on .Net in 3 Minutes

Come on,…… really? That’s really what its called? You bet. So what do we find in this lovely post? You got it, exactly my post, just stripped of its sexy mikeduncan.com voice and replaced with a few business buzzwords.

• The steps of what to do are the same.
• And in the same order.
• And the arbitrary number of minutes is the same.
• And the links to the further sources are the same.
• And the footer says "InfoQ.com and all content copyright © 2006-2007" !!!

You’re damn right Jackie!

Ok, to set the record straight, they do give a shout-out to me briefly mentioning I have a post similar to this on my site, and if you bothered to go to my site, you’d see that they are maybe-admittedly re-hashing my post? Or maybe you wouldn’t.

The Pros and Cons of this intellectual larceny…

So let’s see what to make of this situation in inverse pro/con order (to build suspense)

Cons:

• My personal work and time invested in this post is being leveraged for InfoQ / Robert Bazinet’s big-uppance.
• Organic search traffic relating to SQLite on .net will ultimately be split between mikeduncan.com and InfoQ. As a corporate, constantly updated entity, they have a lot of page rank that will flow down into their version of my story, probably trumping mine in the SERPs in the long run.

Pros:

• InfoQ will send me some traffic I might not otherwise get from regular infoq readers who don’t already know about my post from DotNetKicks, Google, my blog feed, etc.
• I gain greater *perceived authority* (if thats even possible) by being linked to from a supposedly authoritative, news publishing source.
• My ego still gets boosted in some small way in that someone thought my post was worth paraphrasing and submitting. Perhaps they got $20 out of it.

The *real* pro though, is I have now have this very topic to write about on mikeduncan.com, which I’m sure will be identifiable to a lot of other folks. Looking through InfoQ, there are indeed many stories just like this one that are just paraphrased versions of other bloggers hard work. Many other people are knowingly or not, in the same boat. (Maybe it’s time to do a search on InfoQ ey?)

You WILL be next!!!

Clearly any blog is up for thievery a source of inspiration. If indeed you as a writer get a kickback for stories are accepted on InfoQ, why not scan DotNetKicks, maybe DZone, looking for catchy stories you can paraphrase into cold, hard Jacksons? A quick look through Infoq shows a number of posts that are similarly just paraphrased summaries of bloggers work. Just picking the first one on the front page that that I recognized by the title,

Implementing NOLOCK with LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities for instance is just a Scott Hansleman post rehashed. Again, Scott is quickly credited, but then pretty much his whole post is just copied over into the Infoq system. Scott, on one hand, being in a tech evangelist role and all around Dude, is probably fine with getting the word out however he can. On the other hand, Scott does have advertisers and runs diabetes research fundraising campaigns through his site. A part of his fundraising ability relies upon the popularity of and traffic to his authoritative site based on his original content. Maybe Scott is OK with this, maybe not. Either way I doubt InfoQ told him they were rehashing his posts.

My direct boss and good friend is a lawyer, but does not play one on tv. He advised me that I could certainly send them a letter asking for the post to be removed, but would probably not really be worth his time as he had compelling video games scheduled to be played. Thinking about the above mentioned pros and cons I think I’m ok with the net gain on this one.

What do YOU think?

Ok, the internet is all about learning, communicating, extending what has come before, standing on the shoulders of giants, blah blah blah. I’m not really trying to push for some sort of copyright policing, I like the wild west days we are in. At the same time, when it happens to you, it’s kind of phony / corny in a Catcher In the Rye way. Particularly the InfoQ.com and all content copyright © 2006-2007 footer.

What do you, esteemed readers, think? Should I just quit complaining and consider it flattery? Or is this something that as tech writers / bloggers we should be more in tune with. With Gawker Media type bloggers making 9K a month, perhaps this isn’t just bitching. Original content is certainly some kind of currency these days be it devalued US dollars, career credibility, or promoting charities. Tell me your tales!

If you don’t post comments, I’ll just cut and paste some from your blogs into here anyway, copyright 2008 mikeduncan.com. Man, you’ve read this far, if you feel like it, hook a humble blogger up with some diggs or whatever. Your awesomeness will be embiggened, I promise.
http://www.mikeduncan.com/tech-post-ripoff/





‘Good’ Pirates Help Companies Sell More Products
enigmax

If you are downloading stuff you wouldn’t have bought in the first place, according to economist Karen Croxson, you are probably doing the company that created the product a big favor. You, Mr ‘Good’ Pirate, are telling your friends, adding to the media ‘buzz’ and driving up sales.

Imagine a situation in the future where Internet pirates are accepted - maybe even recruited - to replace expensive marketing and consumer awareness teams when bringing a product to market. Imagine the reward for the pirate was a free copy of the software/media he agrees to promote. According to an economist, it could be happening right now.

In her talk at the Annual Conference of the Royal Economic Society, Oxford economist Karen Croxson says that when people copy software, music and movies, it may actually help the producer.

“Digital piracy has been claimed to endanger whole industries” said Ms Croxson. “A natural question to ask is: Why do some companies develop water-tight technology to safeguard their intellectual property when others appear more relaxed about copying?”

Many pirates say that they would never have bought much of the stuff they downloaded or copied. If you fall into this category, you might be a ‘good’ or ‘promotional’ pirate. Croxson says that piracy is only a threat to sales when people who originally intended to buy, didn’t, and pirated instead. The others - of which there a many, many millions - never intended to buy and these, says Croxson, cannot possibly harm the seller.

Far from the “all pirates are evil” cry, these pirates tell their friends, and they tell their friends and so the priceless product ‘buzz’ is generated. This consumer ‘buzz’ is difficult to put a price on, but needless to say it’s very valuable indeed. Even if companies ‘paid’ a pirate with a free copy of their product in exchange for him spreading the word about the product, it’s still a fantastic deal - especially if these ‘promotional’ pirates weren’t going to buy the product in the first instance.

Also considered by Croxson are the reasons why people are tempted to copy something, which include value put on time, concerns about being caught and moral issues. Using these and other factors enables Croxson to discover piracy’s true threat to sales of a product and suggest the best responses.

Due to computer games being most popular in the youth market, they are heavily protected. Although young people place a lot of value on games, they have fewer fears when it comes to copying and have more time than most to do so. It’s suggested that this could be ‘bad’ piracy, in that these activities negatively affect sales, without the ‘promotional’ benefits.

On the other hand, business software companies put a lot less effort into anti-piracy measures. It’s suggested that people who use software in the course of their business place higher value on it, have less time to pirate and worry more about the legal aspects, so are less likely to pirate.

Croxson said: ‘With valuable users shying away from copying, the sellers in the business software market find themselves more naturally insulated against lost sales. Those more inclined to pirate, perhaps students, probably wouldn’t have bought the product anyway, so represent virtually free promotion. This helps explain why business software companies do not put as many resources into protection as computer games manufacturers.”

“Building a theoretical model of `promotional piracy’,” says Croxson, “it is possible to distinguish markets that are best advised to put considerable resource into safeguarding their products from others which may live quite comfortably with a higher incidence of digital piracy.”
http://torrentfreak.com/good-pirates...roduct-080324/





60% of Photoshop Users are PIRATES!
Brian Auer

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.
We pillage, we plunder, we rifle, and loot,
Drink up, me ‘earties, yo ho.
We kidnap and ravage and don’t give a hoot,
Drink up me ‘earties, yo ho.

So here it is… the one week results from our previous poll on software piracy. In that short time, we’ve had nearly 500 photographers cast their votes and the outcome is quite interesting. It looks like Adobe’s high-end photo editing software packages (like Photoshop and Lightroom) are hot items in the pirated software market.

I’m not here to make judgments or anything — I’m just presenting the results from our little study. I’d also like to mention that my computer is 100% free of pirated or “borrowed” software and that the poll results are no indication of my own habits.

Each of the results below have two graphs. The first is a measure of how many of us use a particular piece of software: users versus non-users. The second graph takes the users and splits them into pirates and non-pirates. Also, I’m going to leave the polls running for a while to see how things progress over time.

Wow… I expected the number of Photoshop pirates to be high, but not quite that high! 58%?!? So for every legal copy of Photoshop, there’s a pirated counterpart… and then some! An equally interesting observation from the poll is that 87% of the people who read this blog are Photoshop users of some sort. I’m sure we represent a higher density population of Photoshoppers, but my guess is that well over 50% of digital photographers have access to Photoshop.

Although Lightroom isn’t quite as popular as Photoshop with the general public (with only 58% of the voters), the users of Lightroom are just as willing to pirate the software. I assumed that Lightroom would be less pirated because it’s newer software and because the price is slightly lower than that of Photoshop. I assumed wrong. Then again, if you’re going to pirate a copy of Photoshop, why not Lightroom too?

We have quite a few “other software” users in the mix too. I didn’t break down the polls into every piece of software on the market, so I clumped everything other than Photoshop and Lightroom into this category. Interestingly, the rate of piracy (at 38%) is much lower than with the high-end Adobe products. I can’t imagine that other software would be more difficult to steal, so this lower number is probably a factor of popularity, price, and availability.

And out of the four groups in the poll, this was the only one with absolutely no piracy. Go figure. I’m actually impressed at how many people use free and open source software for photo editing — 64%! And only 19% of those are using the software that came with their cameras. The rest is all open source and freeware/shareware. Good for you guys! Although, there’s probably some percentage of free software users who have pirated copies of commercial software.

What do you guys think? Are the results surprising? Should Adobe care about this? I’m sure they’re aware of Photoshop and Lightroom being pirated, but I wonder what their position is on the topic.
http://blog.epicedits.com/2008/03/28...s-are-pirates/





GT-R Waiting Game About to End
Paul Duchene

HARDLY a model year goes by without the debut of at least one new car that sets off a frenzied run on dealers’ showrooms. In the last decade, introductions for vehicles as disparate as the Volkswagen New Beetle, Chrysler PT Cruiser, Mini Cooper and Ford GT each resulted in months-long waiting lists, accompanied by gigabytes of Internet speculation.

So far in 2008 that must-have car seems to be the Nissan GT-R, a 480-horsepower sports coupe with all-wheel drive and a full-time cheering section. It will be available in the United States in June, starting around $70,000. Nissan plans to import 2,500 GT-Rs this year and about 1,500 annually in the future.

Typically, the cars that set off these stampedes carry names steeped in history or, at the least, a design that gestures to a beloved icon of the past. Why, then, is a car whose predecessors Nissan has never sold in the United States proving such a phenomenon?

The 2009 GT-R may be the first car whose reputation was forged primarily in the virtual world, at least in the minds of young American enthusiasts. The GT-R is a mainstay of leading video games, notably the Gran Turismo series that Sony PlayStation fans devote hours to, and was a featured star of a promotion that linked the introduction of the actual GT-R at the 2007 Tokyo auto show with the release of a special prologue edition of Gran Turismo 5.

To a much smaller group of fans in the United States — those who follow international sports car racing series — the GT-R is a high-performance hero of long standing, a car closer to meeting the definition of a supercar than any earlier effort by a Japanese automaker.

While sports cars like the Toyota 2000GT and Acura NSX were memorable, they did not attain the same level of performance — or incite the same degree of lust — as European exotics. The GT-R could be different.

The GT-R comes by its reputation honestly, having matured from Skyline models that trace their roots back to the late 1960s. The first GT-R version of the Skyline made its debut in 1969, lasting only a few years before oil shocks put the whole idea on hiatus.

Though it was nearly two decades before the model name reappeared, the GT-R’s reputation went on to worldwide recognition, mainly on the strength of its racing successes in Japan and Australia. (Until now, the GT-R was sold only with right-hand drive.)

Driving a GT-R a few years ago (the fourth-generation R34 model produced in 1999-2002 that had a role in “The Fast and The Furious” films) I came to appreciate this special machine as the automotive equivalent of a samurai sword. It seemed to be something created with such intense focus and precision that it generated its own presence.

Nissan uses the sword metaphor to describe the latest GT-R, too, pointing to the “aero blade canopy” of the passenger cabin’s roofline and describing the curved form of the rear roof pillar as a sword edge.

William Scott Wilson, a Florida-based writer and teacher who lived in Japan and has translated classics like “The Book of Five Rings” by the 17th-century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, helped put the Japanese design discipline into perspective for me. Mr. Wilson recalled living in a village of craftsmen in Japan and visiting an 80-year-old sword maker, where he learned the history of the curved samurai sword, or katana, developed in the 10th century by folding and tempering steel many times to create a razor-sharp edge on a flexible blade.

“When a man makes a sword, there’s kinetic energy in the steel — a spirit of deep respect for what the swordsman is doing that infuses his product,” Mr. Wilson said. “By the time it has been tempered and washed, the sword gets the spirit of the man.”

Part of what makes the new GT-R so special may be the spirit of the research and development team inside Nissan that developed the car’s technology.

The designers are a tight-knit group. Peter Bedrosian, Nissan’s North American product manager for the GT-R, said. “They all wear special badges and sign secondary nondisclosure forms.

“Everything has to be perfect on these cars,” he said. “They took great pains to keep this new car a secret. We’ve had V.P.’s go to Japan, request to see the model and be told they can’t.”

The association of the GT-R with the video game world turns out to be a two-way relationship.

Not only did Nissan give GT-R data to the Sony PlayStation designers and the software developers at Xanavi Information to make sure the cars in the Gran Turismo games would be accurate, the game producers returned the favor, helping to create the car’s 11 instrument panel display screens.

Mr. Bedrosian said this relationship provides a link between generations.

“If you’re over 30, you have to be a real car nut to know about the GT-R,” he explained. “If you’re under 25, Gran Turismo has exposed you to it already.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/au...issan-gtr.html





Indonesia Passes Bill to Block Porn Sites

Indonesia plans to restrict access to pornographic and violent sites on the Internet after the country's parliament passed a new information bill, officials said on Tuesday.

The Southeast Asian country has had a vigorous debate over pornography in recent years, exposing deep divisions in the Muslim-majority nation.

"I think we all agree there's no way we can save this nation by spreading pornography, violence and ethnic hostility," Information Minister Mohammad Nuh told reporters.

Nuh said that members of the public had asked the government to block sites with violent and pornographic content, concerned about their negative impact as more Indonesians gain access to the Internet.

The new legislation, the Electronic Information and Transactions Law, will allow courts to accept electronic material as evidence in cases involving Internet abuse, officials said.

Under the law, anyone found guilty of transmitting pornographic material, false news or racial and religious hate messages on the Internet could face up to six years in prison or a fine of 1 billion rupiah ($109,000).

Edmon Makarim, an adviser for the information ministry, said the government hoped to start implementing restrictions on sites containing banned material next month using special software.

Software for blocking sites would be made available for downloading on the ministry's Web site (www.depkominfo.go.id), he said, adding that it was also looking at the possibility of direct blocking.

Indonesia's parliament has yet to pass a controversial pornography bill, which aims to shield the young from pornographic material and lewd acts.

Earlier draft versions contained provisions that could jail people for kissing in public and criminalize many forms of art or traditional culture that hinge on sensuality, sparking criticism it could curb freedoms and hurt Indonesia's tolerant tradition.

The bill has since been watered down.

A court cleared the editor of Playboy Indonesia last year for distributing indecent pictures to the public and making money from them.

The editor had argued the magazine was good for developing a pluralistic society, while the prosecution and Islamic hardliners said he had "harmed the nation's morals".

About 85 percent of Indonesia's more than 220 million population follow Islam.

(Reporting by Telly Nathalia; Editing by Ed Davies)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/techno...K8242120080325





Syria Tightens Internet Monitoring, Jails Bloggers
Zeina Karam

Syria is cracking down more on Internet use, imposing tighter monitoring of citizens who link to the Web, as well as jailing bloggers who criticize the government and blocking YouTube and other Web sites deemed harmful to state security.
The tighter hand is coming even as Syrian officials show off a press center with fast Internet access and wireless technology for journalists covering this weekend's Arab League summit. The clampdown doesn't appear to be tied to the summit.

In recent days, authorities extended restrictions on Web use by requiring owners of Internet cafes to keep detailed logs of their customers, apparently to make it easier to track down anyone deemed to be a threat.

The rules, conveyed orally by security agents, require Internet cafes to record a client's full name, ID or passport number, the computer used and the amount of time spent on the device. The logs must be available to show to security agents upon demand.

"It's a new form of psychological pressure and part of the state's systematic intimidation of Internet users," said Mazen Darwish, a journalist who heads the independent Syrian Media Center.

"It works to a certain extent in the sense that it creates a kind of self-censorship among users," he told The Associated Press.

Darwish has been targeted in a crackdown on journalists. He was arrested in January as he reported on unrest over a murder in Adra, near Damascus, and is on trial before a military court for allegedly defaming state institutions. He faces up to a year in jail if convicted, he says.

President Bashar Assad, who succeeded his late father, Hafez Assad, in 2000, relaxed his father's iron grip a bit by introducing the Internet and cell phones. But he has also cracked down on dissent by jailing writers and democracy activists. Almost all print and broadcast media remain state-controlled.

In 2006, the group Reporters Without Borders ranked Syria among 13 "enemies of the Internet," calling it the Middle East's "biggest prison for cyber-dissidents."

According to the Syrian Media Center and other rights group, there are at least 153 Web sites blocked by Syrian authorities. They include sites run by the Syrian opposition, newspapers critical of the regime and networking and video-sharing sites.

Among the most popular are Facebook, which was blocked in late December, YouTube, Skype and Google's blogging engine.

Users who try to access online versions of the Lebanese anti-Syria newspapers An-Nahar and Al-Mustaqbal and the Saudi-owned daily Asharq al-Awsat get blank pages.

Lebanon's official Web site for slain former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri also is blocked. Lebanese political factions opposed to Syria's influence accuse Syria of being behind Hariri's assassination, a charge the Damascus denies.

The Syrian government does not comment on its Internet restrictions, but reports in Syrian media at the time Facebook was blocked said the ban was put in place to prevent Israeli users from infiltrating Syrian social networks.

Ahed al-Hindi, a 23-year-old who was hauled from an Internet cafe in handcuffs and a blindfold in late 2006 for criticizing the regime on an online forum, said security services often ask cafe owners to spy on clients, providing them with software for the task.

He was let go after spending a month in jail without trial, but left Syria three months later because of "nonstop harassment and intimidation" by security agents, he said.

"They made life impossible and I decided to leave the country," said al-Hindi, an economics student now living in Lebanon.

Rami al-Saadi, who manages an Internet cafe in Damascus, said it bothers him when security agents stop in to check on his business. "This is wrong. Of course I don't like it," he said.

Still, he said Syria has come a long way in just a few years, and believes it is progress that the Internet is now available in Syria.

"I remember only few years ago when we didn't even know what the Internet was," he said.

The New York-based activist group Human Rights Watch said in a recent report that around 1 million of Syria's 18 million people have online access, compared to just 30,000 in 2000.

"There is progress in the sense that it's become easier to be online," said Rasha Ibrahim, 24, a psychology graduate.

She also argued that government controls tend to backfire. "Everything forbidden becomes more tempting," she said.
http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/231330





Dutch Anti-Islamic Film's Internet Site Suspended
AFP

An American network provider Sunday said it had suspended a website that Dutch MP Geert Wilders had reserved to post his anti-Islamic film, which has sparked wide condemnation and fears of a backlash.

"Network Solutions has received a number of complaints regarding this site that are under investigation," the provider said a message posted on the Internet.

Although his website is offline, Wilders on Sunday insisted he still wants to put the movie "on the internet quickly" but did not specify how.

He also told the Dutch ANP news agency that he would not allow anyone to see the film before it was broadcast.

Until Sunday, his site (www.fitnathemovie.com) had shown the cover of a Koran on a black background with the text: "Coming soon: Finta".

Network Solutions said it investigating whether the website conforms to its guidelines, saying it cannot allow "any material in violation of any applicable law."

This includes material deemed harassing, hate propaganda, threatening, harmful or "otherwise objectionable."

The service provider also cites technical reasons for possibly taking the site offline including "excessive use of services which shall impair the fair use of other Network Solutions customers".

Far-right lawmaker Geert Wilders plans to release a movie attacking Islam and the Koran, despite complaints from religious groups and warnings that it could provoke violent protests around the world.

Wilders said in November that the 15-minute film would show the Koran was a "fascist book", a claim which has already drawn complaints from several Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Iran and Afghanistan.

No one has seen the film in its entirity yet but a Dutch paper which has seen some of the opening images from the film, said it shows the cover of the Koran and then images of "a decapitation in Iraq, a stoning in Iran and an execution in Saudi Arabia, where sharia (Islamic law) is applied".

Dutch officials have unsuccessfully urged him to drop the project, fearing a repeat of the violent protests that erupted in many countries when European newspapers printed cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed.

Wilders has said that he will release the film "before April 1", posting it on the Internet because he cannot find a broadcaster willing to carry it.

Computer experts have warned that controversy surrounding the movie could cause network mayhem once it is put online, if too many people try to view it at the same time.

Wilders has repeatedly stated that the content of his film will not violate Dutch law.

On Friday a Dutch Muslim association filed a legal claim asking a court to appoint a panel of censors to view the film before it is aired in order to see if there is a reason to ban it.

The court is set to deliver its ruling next Friday but Wilders has said that he would try to release the film before than to avoid having to show it to censors.

Dutch film-maker and polemicist Theo Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic extremist in Amsterdam in 2004 after he made a short film attacking Islam's treatment of women.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...XyoHS5KGajzC9Q





Dutch Critic of Islam Launches Anti-Koran Film
Emma Thomasson and Alexandra Hudson

Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders launched a film on Thursday that accuses the Koran of inciting violence and warns that Muslim immigrants threaten the West, prompting the government to appeal for calm.

The film "Fitna" was posted on his Freedom Party's Web site (www.pvv.nl), which crashed soon afterwards. But it could still be viewed on a file-sharing Web site in English and Dutch.

Dutch broadcasters had refused to show the film and a U.S.-based web service which Wilders had planned to use deactivated the site at the weekend after receiving complaints.

The Dutch government is anxious to avert the kind of Muslim backlash Denmark suffered in 2006 over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said on Thursday he rejected the film's attempt to link Islam with violence.

Wilders has been under heavy guard because of Islamist death threats since the 2004 murder of Dutch director Theo van Gogh, who made a film critical of Islam's treatment of women.

"Fitna," a Koranic term sometimes translated as "strife," intersperses shots of the September 11, 2001 attacks and other bombings with quotations from the Koran.

"Prepare for them whatever force and cavalry ye are able of gathering to strike terror, to strike terror in the hearts of the enemies of Allah and your enemies," the first quote reads.

The film warns that the rising number of Muslims in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe threatens democratic values.

After the caption "The Netherlands in the future?" the film shows images of gay men being executed, children with bloody faces, a woman being stoned and another of genital mutilation.

It shows an image of the Koran followed by the sound of ripping paper: "The sound just heard was a page being torn from a phone book, as it is not for me but for Muslims themselves to tear out the hate-filled verses from the Koran," a caption says.

After the words "Stop Islamisation. Defend our freedom," the film concludes with a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb under his turban that was originally published in Danish newspapers, accompanied by the sound of ticking.

"We believe it serves no purpose other than to cause offence," Balkenende told a news conference. "But feeling offended should never be used as an excuse for aggression and threats."

He added he was heartened by the initial restraint of Dutch Muslims.

Propaganda?

Brahim Bourzik, a spokesman for a Dutch Moroccan group, said mosques would open their doors on Friday to help defuse tension.

"It is not a film -- it is propaganda. All the elements have been seen before, there is nothing new in it," he said, adding he hoped there would not be an angry reaction at home or abroad.

Demonstrators have already taken to the streets from Afghanistan to Indonesia to burn Dutch and Danish flags, while the governments of Pakistan and Iran have sharply criticized the film. About a thousand people protested against Wilders in Amsterdam on Saturday.

NATO had expressed concern the film could worsen security for foreign forces in Afghanistan, including 1,650 Dutch troops.

Earlier this month, Dutch security officials raised the national risk level to "substantial" because of the Wilders film and perceptions of an increased al Qaeda threat.

Van Gogh's killing by an Islamist militant triggered a wave of unrest in the Netherlands, home to almost 1 million Muslims out of a total population of 16 million.

Wilders, a right-winger, said he hoped the film would not put Dutch people at risk: "If something should happen, which I hope won't be the case, then the people who use threats or violence, they are responsible."

Dutch exporters have expressed fears of a possible boycott in the Muslim world, though trade with such countries makes up only a small amount of total exports. There is also concern for 25,000 Dutch citizens living in Muslim countries.

(Additional reporting by Niclas Mika, Foo Yun Chee and Gilbert Kreijger; editing by Andrew Roche)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032702082.html





Czech Far-Right Party Offers to Post Dutch Anti-Quran Film

A Czech far-right party has offered to help a Dutch lawmaker distribute an anti-Quran film on the Internet if it is banned from being released in the Netherlands.

The offer was made after a U.S. company that provides Web hosting services suspended the site promoting Geert Wilders' 15-minute film, which has sparked demonstrations in the Netherlands even before it has been shown.

Hosting provider Network Solutions said it had suspended the promotional Web site until its sponsor could show that the plans for the site did not violate the service's standards.

"Over the last month, Network Solutions received a number of complaints," prompting it to seek reassurance about the content, it said in a statement. "We are still waiting to hear from our customer. In the interim, we have temporarily suspended the site."
The move has been criticized in tech circles, but the company denied it was "taking any action to limit freedom of speech or to preemptively censor content," saying that it was responding to complaints in this case. The statement did not elaborate on the nature of the complaints.

Dutch officials fear the movie could prompt violent protests in Muslim countries, similar to those two years ago after the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper.

The Czech Republic's small National Party offered to release the film on the Internet using one of its servers, the party said in a message posted on its Web site.

The exact contents of the movie, due to be released by March 31, are unknown, but Wilders has said it will underscore his view that Islam's holy book is "fascist." He has said he will release his movie on the Internet after television stations refused to air it.

Thousands demonstrated in central Amsterdam against Wilders' film Saturday in a protest intended to show that he does not represent the whole country.

Wilders heads a reactionary party with nine seats in the 150-member Dutch parliament, elected on an anti-immigration platform.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8691339





China Orders Shutdown of 25 Video Entertainment Web Sites
AP

China has ordered more than two dozen video entertainment Web sites to shut down under new rules governing such sites, a broadcast regulator said on its Web site Friday.

The new rules, which took effect Jan. 31, bans providers from broadcasting video that involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography. Providers are required to delete and report such content under the rules.

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, or SARFT, said in a statement on its Web site Friday that officials have completed a two-month audit on video entertainment and video sharing Web sites based on the new rules and decided to shut down 25.

Another 32 have been slated to be "punished" - although it wasn't immediately clear what that entailed. Popular video sharing Web site Tudou.com was one of those listed for punishment. The list included few major players.

SARFT said in its statement dated Thursday that most of the punished sites broadcast video containing pornography or violence, or showed movies or documentaries that "endangered national security and national interest."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Cyber Attacks Target Pro-Tibet Groups
Brian Krebs

Human rights and pro-democracy groups sympathetic to anti-China demonstrators in Tibet are being targeted by sophisticated cyber attacks designed to disrupt their work and steal information on their members and activities.

Alison Reynolds, director of the Tibet Support Network, said organizations affiliated with her group are receiving on average 20 e-mail virus attacks daily. Increasingly, she said, the contents of the messages suggest that someone on one or more of the member groups' mailing lists has an e-mail account or computer that has already been compromised.

On March 18, as protests in Tibet intensified, a technology specialist working with Reynolds's group sent a message to members warning them to expect a sharp increase in e-mail and other cyber attacks against groups rallying the international community against China's crackdown. Less than 24 hours later, Reynolds said, someone sent the exact same message out to the list, urging recipients to review an attached Microsoft Word document for online safety instructions (file-named "cyberattack.doc"). The attachment included a Trojan horse program that opened a "backdoor" on any computer used to open the file, giving the senders remote access over the system.

"If successful, these attacks can impact the safety of the people we work with, but the other part of this is it seems they're trying to make it more difficult for us to function effectively, to disrupt our activities," Reynolds said.

Sharon Hom, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights in China, said the group's 25 member organizations worldwide have reported a marked upswing in the number and sophistication of e-mail virus attacks. In 2006, the group intercepted just two targeted e-mail attacks, and by the end of last year that number had grown to 40. In the first three months of 2008, the group's members have received more than 100 such targeted attacks.

Experts say attributing such attacks to any one group or government is extremely difficult, as computer systems that appear to be the source of malicious activity online often are controlled by persons or groups using computers in completely different locations. But Reynolds said these types of sustained, targeted attacks suggest a level of organization, tenacity and degree of commitment not typically seen in attacks by individual hackers.

"They're really trying to disrupt the Tibetan movement, and whoever is perpetrating this is doing it on full-time basis," she said.

A handful of recent targeted attacks shared the same Internet resources and tactics in common with those used in a spate of digital assaults against number of major U.S. defense contractors, said Maarten Van Horenbeeck, an incident handler with the SANS Internet Storm Center, Bethesda, Md.-based organization that tracks online security trends.

According to a January article in Air Force Online, a series of e-mail attacks originating in China targeted 28 defense contractor locations in the United States late last year. The story named specific Beijing-based Internet addresses that the FBI later determined were the origin of the attacks.

Van Horenbeeck, who provides security and technical advice to several Tibetan groups, said he has uncovered evidence that those same numeric Internet addresses were used in targeted attacks against Students For a Free Tibet, another New York-based human rights group.

The attacks on pro-Tibet organizations are not the first to be tied to computers in China. The Washington Post reported March 21 that the FBI is investigating whether hackers in China targeted a group working for human rights in Darfur, the war-torn province of Sudan. China has economic and strategic interests in the African nation's oil fields.

Van Horenbeeck said the danger with the e-mail viruses involved in the attacks is that they are so hand-crafted and new that they usually go undetected by dozens of commercial anti-virus scanners on the market today.

"Last week, I had two of these samples that were detected by two out of 32 different anti-virus scanners, and another that was completely undetected," he said.

The specificity of information sought in the targeted attacks also suggests the attackers are searching for intelligence that might be useful or valuable to a group that wants to keep tabs on human rights groups, said Nathan Dorjee, a graduate student who provides technology support to Students for a Free Tibet.

Dorjee said one recent e-mail attack targeted at the group's members included a virus designed to search victim's computers for encryption keys used to mask online communications. The attackers in this case were searching for PGP keys, a specific technology that group members routinely use to prevent outsiders or eavesdroppers from reading any intercepted messages.

Dorjee said the attacks have been unsettling but ineffective, as the Students for a Free Tibet network mostly operates on more secure platforms, such as Apple computers and machines powered by open source operating systems.

"The fact that we're being attacked with the same resources thrown at multi-billion defense contractors is flattering," said Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet. "It shows that we really are an effective thorn in the side of a repressive regime."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032102605.html





FBI Opens Probe of China-Based Hackers
Ellen Nakashima and Colum Lynch

The FBI has opened a preliminary investigation of a report that China-based hackers have penetrated the e-mail accounts of leaders and members of the Save Darfur Coalition, a national advocacy group pushing to end the six-year-old conflict in Sudan.

The accounts of 10 members were hacked into between early February and last week, and the intruders also gained access to the group's Web server and viewed pages from the inside, the group said yesterday.

The intruders, said coalition spokesman M. Allyn Brooks-LaSure, "seemed intent on subversively monitoring, probing and disrupting coalition activities." He said Web site logs and e-mails showed Internet protocol addresses that were traced to China.

The allegation fits a near decade-old pattern of cyber-espionage and cyber-intimidation by the Chinese government against critics of its human rights practices, experts said. It comes as calls for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics have been mounting since China's crackdown on Tibetan protesters last week.

The coalition, headquartered in Washington, has been a vocal critic of China's support for the Sudanese government and its refusal to allow anyone to pressure Khartoum to end the conflict. The group has urged China -- Sudan's chief diplomatic sponsor, major weapons provider and largest foreign investor and trade partner -- to use its position as a member of the U.N. Security Council to bring peace to the region.

"Someone in Beijing is clearly trying to send us a message," coalition President Jerry Fowler said. "But they're mistaken if they think these attacks will end efforts to bring peace to Darfur."

A senior Chinese official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the allegation is false.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032003193.html





Bell Canada Throttles Wholesalers, Doesn't Bother To Tell Them
Karl

Users of the Canadian family-run ISP Teksavvy (which we profiled last year) have started noticing that Bell Canada is throttling traffic before it reaches wholesale partners. According to Teksavvy CEO Rocky Gaudrault, Bell has implemented "load balancing" to "manage bandwidth demand" during peak congestion times -- but apparently didn't feel the need to inform partner ISPs or customers. The result is a bevy of annoyed customers and carriers across the great white north. Says Gaudrault in our forums:

After some discussions with Bell, while doing upgrades to zones that are under capacity, it looks like they've now started to implement a type of load balance system of sorts...As a side note, we have no plans to throttle anything, so if anyone is experiencing anything remotely related to this, it would be before it hits our side...Our concerns are that they are doing it without telling us. That we don't know where they are doing it. That we don't know if and when it will end. What are the plans to add capacity... what's going on? what are we getting for our money? what can we tell our customers?

It appears that Teksavvy has scheduled a meeting for tomorrow with Bell to discuss the network changes, which Bell still hasn't publicly admitted to doing. Whatever they've implemented, it's impacting more than just P2P traffic. An anonymous Canadian ISP employee retells his murky conversation with a Bell Nexxia rep in a different thread in our Canadian broadband forums:

I work for an ISP, and I deal with Sympatico/Bell everyday, dealing with tickets and troubles...

Just got off the phone, started with a Nexxia rep telling me that bandwidth is being shapped/slowed down for Sympatico AND DSL Resellers in regards to P2P traffic... I asked for confirmation, she placed me on hold, and came back saying that yes, this is true. Then I asked for a manager... she said she couldn't transfer me, but gave me a name and number to call, talked to that person, and she wouldn't come right out to say yes this is all true, but is not denying it, and tried to explain the impact P2P traffic has on all customers, whether they are on resellers or not...

As an aside, users in our Teksavvy forum have starting using Google Maps to track which users are having problems.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/B...ell-Them-92915





Can We Police Canadian Content on the Internet?

That's a thorny question the CRTC is mulling over as pressure mounts from producers and unions to protect their material
Chris Sorensen and Rita Trichur

Nearly a decade after adopting a strict hands-off approach to the Internet, Canada's broadcast watchdog is once again mulling the thorny issue of regulating Canadian content online as people across the country turn to their computers for news and entertainment.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has drawn up a draft report on "new media," obtained by the Toronto Star, calling for further "discussion and validation" of the issue amid pressure from Cana- dian-content creators who are concerned about traditional programming that's increasingly finding its way to the unregulated Web.

Such developments, observers say, were not clearly envisioned in 1999 when the CRTC essentially ruled that the Internet was to be a regulatory-free zone.

"I think that they (CRTC) feel that being stuck back in 1999 makes them look kind of foolish," said Tim Richardson, an electronic-commerce and technology expert at the University of Toronto.

But the mere notion of regulating online content in 2008, regardless of the motive, is certain to draw howls of protest from those who believe the heavy hand of government has no place on the Internet, where a "Wild West" ethos is often credited for encouraging innovation, personal choice and the free exchange of ideas.

Richardson said Canadians are "incredibly" fixated on the regulation of Canadian content and questioned enforceability of such so-called Can-con rules given that the Internet is effectively borderless.

"You know, Canadians want to have rules and regulations about things. The Americans will say: `Well, basically, if nobody is being killed, let's let it be.'"

While the CRTC has not yet committed to taking action, the regulator nevertheless acknowledges in its report that "there is minimal investment in producing ancillary or new online broadcasting content," although it says broadcasters are repurposing their content for online consumption.

The report cites research that shows that 19 of the top 20 websites visited by Canadians originate outside the country's borders.

"Canadians have an increased ability and opportunity to effectively participate in the new media broadcasting environment and to see themselves reflected in this global environment," said the document, which was distributed to stakeholders and will be followed by a final report in May. Public hearings will also be scheduled.

The CRTC goes on to ask how Canadian programming has "flourished in the new media environment" and whether there is a need to "measure new media broadcasting performance indicators."

Should its exemption be reversed, the CRTC's mandate would likely be limited to potentially overseeing online content offered by TV networks or radio stations. So-called "user-generated content" – personal videos uploaded to YouTube, for example – would be unaffected by any policy change.

A CRTC spokesperson declined to comment on the document, which hasn't been released publicly.

CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein told the International Institute of Communications last October that when the CRTC first looked at new media in 1999, "it offered little competition to traditional broadcasters and there seemed no need to stimulate its carriage of Canadian content." He also conceded "a lot has changed" since then.

"For us at the CRTC, the guiding principle in our approach to new media will be exactly the same one that we have followed in our approach to the traditional media: to regulate as effectively as we can to further the two primary goals of the Broadcasting Act – Canadian content and full access to the system for all Canadians," he said.

Vast improvements in both computer technology and high-speed broadband availability means Canadians are today more likely to use the Internet as a source of broadcast media by downloading music, podcasts and even full TV episodes, according to the draft report.

It says more than half of Canadians with an Internet connection now download videos, with younger Canadians now spending roughly the same amount of time online as they do watching TV – about 15 to 17 hours a week.

Broadcasters, meanwhile, have been compelled to push more of their content online as they try to adapt to the changing viewing habits of their audiences, with advertisers following closely behind.

That has left Canadian content creators concerned about an industry shift from a regulated environment to one where few rules exist.

"We're not looking for regulation, per se, but rather incentives to promote Canadian production on the Internet," said Stephen Waddell, national executive director of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, or ACTRA.

"If there's no opportunity for Canadian programming or content on the Net, where will Canadian performers, writers and directors be able to work?"

ACTRA is one of several stakeholders proposing a levy on Internet service providers, or ISPs, to help fund the creation of digital content in the same way that satellite and cable TV providers are required to use a portion of their revenues to help fund Canadian television programs.

But critics say placing a "regressive tax" on ISPs is the wrong approach, since it could limit access to the Internet among lower-income Canadians.

"I'm a huge fan of Canadian content and I think we do need to subsidize it," said Philippa Lawson, the director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. "But that subsidy should come through the general tax system rather than a surcharge on what has really become a basic service."

Officials at Rogers Communications Inc. and Bell Canada Inc., two of the country's largest Internet providers, declined to comment before a final report is published.

Even if the CRTC were to decide to regulate Canadian content online, some say, the issue would be a non-starter with the current federal Conservative government and its free-market ideology.

As well, the CRTC is expected to issue a final decision this year on reforming the Canadian Television Fund, which could include, among other proposals, establishing new funding up to $25 million from current revenues to support Canadian new media programming.
http://www.thestar.com/article/349575





Fingerprint Scheme at Heathrow's Terminal 5 Challenged

BAA's plan to require fingerprints from both international and domestic passengers who use the terminal may violate the U.K. Data Protection Act; Thursday's opening of the £4.3 billion terminal may be delayed

Plans to fingerprint millions of passengers at Heathrow's new Terminal 5 could be illegal and have been challenged by the U.K. data protection watchdog. The Information Commissioner's Office warned airport operator BAA that the security measure, designed to stop terrorists getting into the country, may breach the Data Protection Act. The Telegraph's Nick Allen writes that the move led to fears the planned operational opening of the £4.3 billion terminal on Thursday could be delayed causing flight chaos. Terminal 5 was officially opened by the Queen on 16 March. BAA said it was in negotiations with the Commissioner over fingerprinting but insisted there was no prospect of the row delaying the opening.

Under the plan all four million domestic passengers using Terminal 5 annually will have their fingerprints taken when they first go through security. They will then be checked again at the gate. BAA said the measure was required because Terminal 5 will host domestic and international passengers who will be sharing lounges and public areas after checking in. Without fingerprinting, terrorists, criminals, and illegal immigrants could arrive at Heathrow on a transit flight then exchange boarding passes with a colleague in the departure lounge and join a domestic flight to enter the U.K. without being checked by immigration authorities. Deputy Information Commissioner David Smith questioned why BAA needed to use fingerprinting at Heathrow when other airports like Gatwick and Manchester rely on photographs to ensure security at their common departure lounges. He said photographs were "less intrusive" and BAA's case for fingerprinting at Heathrow had not been made. Smith said: "If we find there is a breach of data protection legislation we would hope to persuade them to put things right. If that is not successful we can issue an enforcement notice. If they don't comply, it is a criminal offence and they can be prosecuted."

A leading barrister has already informed BAA that he will refuse to give his fingerprints, describing the process as an "Orwellian" abuse of civil liberties. Nigel Rumfitt QC, a specialist in serious crime including terrorism, said it was a move toward a "database state" and Britain would become a nation that "restricts the internal movement of its citizens". BAA said it would destroy information from fingerprinting within 24 hours, in accordance with the Data Protection Act, and it would not be passed on to police. A spokesman said: "It does not include personal details nor is it cross-referenced with any other database." The airport operator said that once common departure lounges had been decided on, fingerprinting was the "most robust" way of ensuring security. The Home Office said BAA was required to ensure that arrangements at Terminal 5 did not breach border security but there was no requirement for that to involve fingerprinting. A spokesman said: "Our primary concern is that the UK border is secure and we won't allow BAA to have a common departure lounge unless they ensure the border is secure. They presented us with this plan, which we are happy secures the border. The design of the plan is a matter for BAA."
http://hsdailywire.com/single.php?id=5809





CCC Publishes the Fingerprints of German Interior Minister

A guide shows how to collect fingerprints.

With a spectacular protest action of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) against the progressive recovery of biometric data. In the current edition of the club magazine The Datenschleuder publish the hacker's fingerprint by German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble.

The hackers want to be against the increasing collection of biometric data to defend themselves. Especially the storage of fingerprints in the E-Pass bad encounters the CCC. "We want to work with the publication of a warning signal," explains CCC spokesman Dirk Engling towards heise online. Fingerprints were not so sure how the policy claims Engling said: "They do not belong in safety application - and certainly not in the E-Pass."

The hacker did not at the footprint of Schäuble's fingerprint respectively - the issue is also a completed fingerprint dummy. The thin foil is glued to the tip of the finger, for example, fingerprint scanners to deceive. "We recommend that the imprints on erkennungsdienstlichen treatments, a visa to enter the United States, for the intermediate landing at Heathrow, but also in the local supermarket, and - prophylactically - at the touch of many possible glass surfaces using" says Engling.

The CCC assured that the published fingerprint was genuine. A sympathizer of the club have a glass of the hackers transferred from the interior minister, during a panel discussion drunk. The hacker secured the fingerprint and produced in small nächtelanger work dummies for the booklet. A total of 4000 copies of the booklet have been printed - more than 2000 of them are currently on the road to the members of the CCC.

Schäuble is not the only politician on whose fingerprint is the hacker apart. In a "biometric scrapbook" published a wish list of politicians whose fingerprints they still want to publish. Besides Schäuble will include German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Bavarian Prime Minister Guenther Beckstein on the list. Open sight light of the CCC says it seriously: In addition to the biometric scrapbook, the hackers published a guide on how to fingerprints and ideally secure the club through the post.

The publication of the fingerprint involves not only political but also legal explosives. That the Chaos Computer Club with the publication may violate the federal Privacy Act and other laws, provides Engling left. So just the Federal Interior Ministry before the introduction of the e-passport stressed that it was very little difference between a passport photograph and fingerprint electronically stored there. Prior to the publication of the club had also brought legal advice, "Our lawyer does not handle against the publication of the fingerprint in the Datenschleuder."

The view is not shared by all lawyers. "I can well imagine that the affected politicians and prosecutors will attempt to publish with the usual presserechtlichen tools to prevent and to bring a charge," explained Ulrich Wehner of the Berlin law firm Buchheim and partners. "With the collection of fingerprints and their use to produce a Fingerabdruckattrappe there is a risk an administrative or even a criminal offence." At the same time, the attorney attested to the Chaos Computer Club an impressive examination of the internal security issue: "If journalists and citizens to do what the government millions and increasingly through collection and use of biometric data happens under circumstances is the prosecutor at the door."

Update: In a first opinion on Saturday afternoon indicated the Federal Interior Ministry unimpressed: "That one fingerprints of a glass can decrease, it has been known for years," said a spokeswoman of the Ministry towards heise online. The concept of e-passport will not be questioned. Whether the actual fingerprint to the Wolfgang Schauble, the Ministry could not yet confirm. Also possible legal action against the CCC would not exclude the spokeswoman. (Torsten Kleinz) / (db / c't)

This page was automatically translated from German. View original web page.





Intelligent Wireless Networks Promoted by European Consortium

The proliferation of wireless communication-enabled embedded systems will have significant effects in areas from emergency management to critical infrastructure protection to healthcare and traffic control; European consortium to promote idea

From traffic lights to mobile phones, small computers are all around us. Enabling these embedded systems to create wireless communications networks automatically will have significant effects in areas from emergency management to critical infrastructure protection to healthcare and traffic control. Networks of mobile sensors and other small electronic devices have huge potential, ICT Results reports. Applications include emergency management, security, helping vulnerable people to live independently, traffic control, warehouse management, and environmental monitoring. One scenario investigated by European researchers was a road-tunnel fire. With fixed communications destroyed and the tunnel full of smoke, emergency crews would normally struggle to locate the seat of the blaze and people trapped in the tunnel. Wireless sensors could cut through the chaos by providing the incident control room with information on visibility, temperatures, and the locations of vehicles and people. Firefighters inside the tunnel could then receive maps and instructions through handheld terminals or helmet-mounted displays.

For this vision to become reality, mobile devices have to be capable of forming self-organizing wireless networks spanning a wide variety of communications technologies. Developing software tools to make this possible was the task of the RUNES project (for Reconfigurable Ubiquitous Networked Embedded Systems).

Ad-hoc mobile networks are very different from the wireless computer networks in homes and offices, explains Dr. Lesley Hanna, a consultant and dissemination manager for RUNES. Without a human administrator, an ad-hoc network must assemble itself from any devices that happen to be nearby, and adapt as devices move in and out of wireless range. While office networks use powerful computers with separate routers, the building blocks of ad-hoc mobile networks are low-power devices which must do their own wireless routing, forwarding signals from other devices that would otherwise be out of radio range. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. A typical network could contain tens or even hundreds of these embedded systems, ranging from handheld computers down to "motes": tiny units each equipped with a sensor, a microcontroller, and a radio that can be scattered around an area to be monitored. Other devices could be mounted at fixed points, carried by robots, or worn as "smart clothing" or "body area networks." Wireless standards are not the issue: Most mobile devices use common protocols, such as GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee. The real challenge, suggests Hanna, is to build self-managing networks that work reliably on a large scale, with a variety of operating systems and low-power consumption.

The EU-funded RUNES covered twenty-one partners in nine countries. RUNES was led by Ericsson, but it had an academic bias, with twice as many universities as industrial partners, and most of the resulting software is publicly available. RUNES set out to create middleware: Software which bridges the gap between the operating systems used by the mobile sensor nodes, and high-level applications that make use of data from the sensors. RUNES middleware is modular and flexible, allowing programmers to create applications without having to know much about the detailed working of the network devices supplying the data. This also makes it easy to incorporate new kinds of mobile device, and to re-use applications. Interoperability was a challenge, partly because embedded systems themselves are so varied. At one end of the spectrum are powerful environments, such as Java, while at the other are simple systems designed for wireless sensors. For devices with small memories, RUNES developed middleware modules that can be uploaded, used to carry out specific tasks, and then overwritten. Project partners also worked on an operating system and a simulator. Contiki is an open-source operating system designed for networked, embedded systems with small amounts of memory. Simics, a simulator allowing large networks to be tested in ways that are impractical with real hardware, is commercially available from project partner Virtutech.

Back to the tunnel fire scenario: It was valuable in demonstrating what networks of this kind can achieve. Using real sensor nodes, routers, gateways, and robots developed during the project, a demonstration setup showed how, for instance, a robot router can manoeuvre itself to cover a gap in the network’s wireless coverage. “A lot of people have been looking at embedded systems networking, but so far there has been a reluctance to take the plunge commercially,” says Hanna. “RUNES’ open-source model is an excellent way to stimulate progress, and it should generate plenty of consultancy work for the academic partners.”
http://hsdailywire.com/single.php?id=5798





Satellite Radio Merger Gets Antitrust OK
Peter Kaplan and Randall Mikkelsen

Sirius Satellite Radio's (SIRI.O: Quote, Profile, Research) $4.59 billion purchase of rival XM Satellite Radio (XMSR.O: Quote, Profile, Research) was given antitrust clearance on Monday as the Justice Department concluded consumers have many alternatives, including mobile phones and personal audio players.

Investors sent shares of both companies sharply higher even though the Federal Communications Commission must still approve the combination of the only two U.S. providers of satellite radio, a deal first announced in February 2007.

In a victory for Sirius Chief Executive Mel Karmazin, who lobbied hard for the deal, the Justice Department agreed the satellite radio companies face stiff competition from traditional AM/FM radio, high-definition radio, MP3 players and programming delivered by mobile phones.

"Competition in the marketplace generally protects consumers and I have no reason to believe that this won't happen here," Justice Department antitrust chief, Thomas Barnett, told a conference call with reporters.

The traditional radio industry, consumer groups and some U.S. lawmakers had criticized the deal, which would bring entertainers such as talk show host Oprah Winfrey and shock-jock Howard Stern under one roof.

The National Association of Broadcasters, which fought against the deal, said the Justice Department had granted XM and Sirius a "monopoly" and called the decision "breathtaking."

Sirius and XM, which are losing money, each currently charge subscribers about $13 a month for more than 100 channels of news, music, talk and sports.

New York-based Sirius' programming includes lifestyle guru Martha Stewart and NFL Football while Washington, D.C.-based XM is home to Bob Dylan's radio show and Major League Baseball.

The Justice Department said the combination would lead to "substantial" cost saving steps such as consolidating the line of radios they offer. It said those savings would "most likely to be passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices."

XM stock ended Monday up 15.5 percent to $13.79, while Sirius closed up 8.6 percent to $3.15, both on Nasdaq. At that price for Sirius' stock, the deal, in which 4.6 shares of Sirius are to be exchanged for each XM share outstanding, is worth $4.59 billion.

AWAITING FCC DECISION

The antitrust decision shifts the spotlight to the FCC, which must determine whether the XM-Sirius is in the public interest, and whether to enforce its 1997 order barring either satellite radio company from acquiring the other.

A source at the FCC said Chairman Kevin Martin has yet to make a proposal either approving or opposing the XM-Sirius combination, but has asked the agency's staff to draft documents for different possible outcomes.

This source said the FCC could be strongly influenced by the Justice Department decision. "I think it would be hard to go in the complete opposite direction," said the source.

Analysts at Stifel Nicolaus said the FCC could impose conditions, such as requiring the companies to adhere to promises Karmazin made to Congress last year.

Karmazin promised lawmakers that a combined company would offer packages of channels that customers could pick on an "a la carte" basis, and that customers would be able to block adult channels and get a refund for those channels.

In addition, Stifel Nicolaus said, the FCC also may require Sirius and XM to promise that all existing satellite radios will continue to work after the companies are combined.

David Bank, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, was optimistic about FCC approval. "Now it's past DOJ, and we feel pretty optimistic it will get through the FCC," he said.

The Justice Department's decision provoked immediate criticism from a key lawmaker in Congress, Senate antitrust subcommittee chairman Sen. Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat.

Kohl took the department to task for "failing to oppose numerous mergers which reduced competition in key industries, resulting in the Justice Department not bringing a single contested merger case in nearly four years."

"We urge that the FCC find the merger contrary to the public interest and exercise its authority to block it," Kohl said in a statement.

Sirius and XM said in a brief statement that they had received antitrust clearance and that their deal was still subject to FCC approval.

(Additional reporting by Diane Bartz; editing by Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...00918420080325





Banks Balk at Paying for Clear Channel Deal
Michael J. de la Merced and Andrew Ross Sorkin

The $19.5 billion sale of the radio broadcaster Clear Channel Communications to two private equity firms is in jeopardy.

This time, however, instead of the buyers balking, the banks that had agreed to finance the deal have become apprehensive. Clear Channel and the private equity buyers may go to court to try to force the banks to complete the buyout, according to people briefed on the negotiations, who were given anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the deal.

The legal threat is the latest indication that the banks have become reluctant to put up the money for the sale, these people said. Earlier, the banks proposed that the buyers — Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners — put down more cash and agree to stricter repayment terms. The buyout firms have refused.

Among the lenders are Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia.

Negotiations continued on Tuesday night, these people said, but if a deal is not reached, Clear Channel and the two private equity firms are expected to file their lawsuit, possibly as soon as Wednesday.

Clear Channel’s problems are the most recent instance of a private equity deal tumbling into court, as the squeeze in the credit markets has disrupted the buyout world. The cheap debt that powered the recent two-year buyout boom has disappeared, forcing the banks to sell those loans and bonds at steep discounts. At the same time, the acquisition business has cooled with private equity firms largely sidelined because they are unable to get financing from the banks.

The backlog of unsold debt from already completed deals — estimated at $130 billion for the loans alone — has forced banks to take billions of dollars in write-downs. While those write-downs have been only a small part of the losses that the banks have reported so far, many analysts expect problems with leveraged loans to grow.

Already, several other buyouts have ended in court, including those for Sallie Mae, the student-loan lender, and United Rentals, the equipment rental company. Sallie Mae settled with its buyers while a Delaware judge ruled that United Rentals could not force its buyer, Cerberus Capital Management, to finish the deal.

Many investors have long regarded the sale of Clear Channel, first announced in late 2006, as one of the private equity deals most likely to fall apart. That has been reflected in its stock price, which has seesawed despite the buyers’ insistence that the deal would go through.

A cornerstone of the buyers’ argument is that the financing was rock solid, with few outs for the lenders.

It is possible that the banks are willing to take their chances in court, given the estimated $20 billion in debt needed to complete the deal. The breakup fee is $660 million.

By financing the deal, the banks would likely record an immediate loss of $3 billion based on the 15 percent discount that buyout-related debt is trading at in the markets, these people said.

Clear Channel, the nation’s No. 1 owner of radio stations and based in San Antonio, sued another buyout firm, Providence Equity Partners, earlier this year to complete the purchase of its television unit. That was quickly settled, but was replaced by another lawsuit — this time by Wachovia, which was financing the television station sale, against its client, Providence. That second lawsuit was settled little more than a week ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/bu...6radio.html?hp





FCC Allows DIRECTV and Dish to Downconvert Broadcast HD

FCC chairman Kevin Martin originally wanted satellite operators to offer full HD carriage by February 2009. However, DIRECTV and the Dish Network complained his proposed rule would damage their ability to compete with cable.

DIRECTV and Dish Network won a major victory last week when the FCC allowed them to downconvert the high-definition signals of broadcast stations, in an effort to save bandwidth..

The satellite operators, with a combined 30 million subscribers, persuaded FCC officials that they lacked the channel capacity to provide every eligible station in high-definition immediately. They insisted that they needed several years to prepare for a full HD carriage requirement.

Under the new ruling, the “carry one, carry all in HD” principle kicks in when a satellite company starts carrying local signals in high-definition. The satellite operators have until 2013 to carry all stations in HD within any market where they have elected to carry any station’s signal in the high-definition format.

The satellite deal is far better than the one offered to cable operators by the FCC. The commission did not announce the vote or release the text of the rules, though an FCC official said it was a unanimous vote.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin started off negotiations by requiring the satellite operators to offer full HD carriage next February, coupled with a market-by-market waiver process. However, he scrapped his original plan after DIRECTV and the Dish Network complained his proposed rule would damage their ability to compete with cable.

As part of the new deal, the FCC demanded that DIRECTV and Dish comply with its benchmarks. For example, by Feb. 17, 2010, the operators need to provide full HD carriage in 15 percent of their HD markets. Dish Network has 35 HD markets today. If a 15 percent quota were in place today, EchoStar would have a “carry one, carry all in HD” obligation in five markets.

The benchmark jumps to 30 percent in the second year, 60 percent in the third and 100 percent in the fourth. Because the FCC didn’t specify the markets that had to be served, DIRECTV and Dish Network are free to pursue a large-market strategy, which could keep rural consumers waiting a long time for their local TV signals in HD via satellite.

Cable, for now, gets a much poorer deal. The commission requires cable carriage of TV signals in digital and analog formats for three years for any station that demands cable carriage after Feb. 17, 2009. In some cases, this leads to triple carriage.

In February, C-SPAN, Discovery Communications and The Weather Channel sued the FCC in a federal appeals court over the digital TV station carriage mandates.
http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv...ctv_dish_0324/





Proposal Would Curb Web Tracking for Advertisements
Louise Story

After reading about how Internet companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo collect information about people online and use it for targeted advertising, one New York assemblyman said there ought to be a law.

So he drafted a bill, now gathering support in Albany, N.Y., that would make it a crime - punishable by a fine to be determined - for certain Web companies to use personal information about consumers for advertising without their consent.

And because it would be extraordinarily difficult for the companies that collect such data to adhere to stricter rules for people in New York alone, these companies would probably have to adjust their rules everywhere, which could effectively turn the New York legislation into national law.

"Should these companies be able to sell or use what's essentially private data without permission? The easy answer is absolutely not," said the assemblyman who sponsored the bill, Richard L. Brodsky, a Democrat.

Brodsky is not the only lawmaker with this idea. In Connecticut, the General Law Committee of the state assembly has introduced a bill that focuses on data collection rules for ad networks, the companies that serve ads on sites they do not own.

The New York bill, still a work in progress, is shaping up as much broader. Although it is likely to see some tinkering before it comes to a vote - which Brodsky hopes will happen this spring - it aims to force Web sites to give consumers obvious ways to opt out of advertising based on their browsing history and Web actions.

If it passed, computer users could request that companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, which routinely keep track of searches and surfing conducted on their own properties, not follow them around. Users would also have to give explicit permission before these companies could link the anonymous searching and surfing data from around the Web to information like their name, address or phone number.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8676030





The Buzz on the Bus: Pinched, Press Steps Off
Jacques Steinberg

As Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama debated in Cleveland on a snowy evening in late February, 650 journalists descended on the city to follow every jab and parry, albeit on enormous televisions in two makeshift filing centers.

But early the next morning, as the two candidates set off for engagements across Ohio and Texas, representatives of only two dozen or so news organizations tagged along.

For most of the others, the price of admission — more than $2,000 for just one person to travel on Mr. Obama’s charter flights that day — was too steep, in an era in which newspapers in particular are slashing costs and paring staff, and with no end in sight to a primary campaign that began more than a year ago.

Among the newspapers that have chosen not to dispatch reporters to cover the two leading Democratic candidates on a regular basis are USA Today, the nation’s largest paper, as well as The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Houston Chronicle, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald and The Philadelphia Inquirer (at least until the Pennsylvania primary, on April 22, began to loom large).

Traveling campaign reporters say they try to do more than just regurgitate raw information or spoon-fed news of the day, which anyone who watches speeches on YouTube can do. The best of them track the evolution and growth (or lack thereof) of candidates; spot pandering and inconsistencies or dishonesty; and get a measure of the candidate that could be useful should he or she become president.

Deep and thoughtful reporting is also being produced by journalists off the trail. And some news organizations that can afford it are doing both. But the absence of some newspapers on the trail suggests not only that readers are being exposed to fewer perspectives drawn from shoe-leather reporting, but also that fewer reporters will arrive at the White House in January with the experience that editors have typically required to cover a president on Day 1.

For anyone familiar with “The Boys on the Bus,” Timothy Crouse’s rollicking account of the reporters from papers large and small who provided blanket coverage of the 1972 presidential campaign — or with later accounts that noted the prominence of girls on the bus, and the swapping of typewriters for laptops by nerds on the bus — the presence of relatively few print reporters on the candidates’ buses and planes this year is striking.

In the weeks leading up to the 22 Democratic nominating contests on Feb. 5, and in the weeks since, few newspapers beyond The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have sought to shadow the candidates on a near-daily basis.

For firsthand, daily dispatches from the campaign trail, most of the others have relied heavily on reports from the wire services, including The Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters; a handful of Web sites; and video captured by camera-toting producers from the television networks and cable news channels.

“We’d all like to be able to be out there,” said Lee Horwich, a senior editor at USA Today who oversees political coverage. “Given the reality of the costs and various priorities, not just political priorities but across the rest of the newspaper, it just isn’t realistic for us.”

The vacuum left by the news organizations that have stayed home this year has often been filled by bloggers, who may travel part time, if at all. Their kitchen is often their bus, where they can watch a candidate speak on YouTube and then pick up supplemental information from the conference calls staged daily by the candidates’ press aides, before ruminating online.

To some, the pullback by mainstream news organizations was overdue. S. Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, said the confluence of a long, expensive campaign with the tightening of editors’ wallets had forced a welcome development: the receding of the one-story-suits-all pack journalism depicted in “The Boys on the Bus” and criticized in other quarters ever since

“I’m not sure too much is lost,” Mr. Lichter said. “There used to be a self-defined cadre of campaign reporters. Now the news comes from everywhere — from bloggers, maybe some guy with a video camera. Anyone can generate news and everyone can generate news. What’s the advantage of being the 50th guy on the bus?”

In the past, one advantage for those reporters who committed to spend as many as two years on the campaign trail was that they were often vaulted into the White House press room; many of those assigned to cover the next president will not have had the benefit of such seasoning, or exposure to the new president’s advisers.

Not so at Newsweek. Jon Meacham, the editor, long ago assigned at least one writer (doing double duty for print and the Web) to ride full-time on the Obama and Clinton planes — at a cost that can exceed $30,000 a month per person.

“We have a commitment to getting as firm an understanding as we possibly can, as nuanced an understanding as we possibly can, of these candidates and their staffers,” Mr. Meacham said. “The only way to do that is to be there with them.”

Like Newsweek, CNN has felt it could not afford not to travel with the candidates, who may touch down in several states in one day. Mrs. Clinton is trailed virtually every moment by Peter Hamby, a CNN producer with a digital camera. Among his responsibilities is to be there when Mrs. Clinton wanders back to the press section of the plane.

“You are the eyes and ears of every other producer and reporter at the network,” Mr. Hamby said by phone from the Clinton bus last Wednesday, between bites of a cheese steak.

Those news organizations that have chosen to observe the campaign mostly from outside the bubble have hardly shied from original reporting.

The Morning News, which had a reporter at George W. Bush’s side in 2000 and 2004, has this year focused on issues of particular resonance to Texans. Mark Edgar, a deputy managing editor, said his reporters had strayed off the trail in California to write about the Hispanic vote, “and how that was different than the Texas Hispanic vote.”

“Not being in the bubble is sometimes better,” he said.

Still, in the days leading up to the vote in Texas on March 4, reporters for The Morning News paid to climb on the planes ferrying Senators Clinton and Obama, as well as Senator John McCain.

Similarly, The Inquirer — which for years had bureau chiefs in Houston, Chicago and Los Angeles travel with the candidates in their regions but has since shuttered those bureaus — has two full-time reporters covering the race, and sometimes riding the candidates’ planes.

William K. Marimow, the paper’s editor, said he considered a newspaper’s “pulling out all the stops on a presidential race” to be in service of “a core purpose of the First Amendment.” “But ‘all the stops,’ ” he added, “is defined in part by the resources available.”

Mr. Crouse, the Rolling Stone writer who introduced the nation to “The Boys on the Bus,” has long since retired from the campaign trail to North Carolina, where he writes short stories. When asked in an interview to size up the changes on the bus this year, he declined, saying, “I am following the campaign more or less, but not in any deep way.”

Had he boarded the Obama campaign bus before 7 a.m. the day after the Cleveland debate, Mr. Crouse would have encountered a scene much like those he chronicled more than 35 years ago. Among the bleary-eyed souls rousing in the fabric-lined seats was Mark Z. Barabak of The Los Angeles Times, who has been riding the bus more or less since Gary Hart and Walter F. Mondale ran for president in 1984. Dressed in a tan patterned suit and Façonnable shirt, Mr. Barabak, 48, poured hot water from a thermos onto a tea bag.

“What you have lost,” he said, panning the other seats and seeing few faces from previous campaigns, “is the benefit of getting 6, 12, 15 different perspectives.”

“Now you may get three or four,” he said, before adding, “they may be very good.”

Among those leading the new generation is Mr. Hamby, 26, who was born a decade after Mr. Crouse’s book came out. Asked if there was any remnant of the carousing that was so prominent in Mr. Crouse’s rendering of the campaign, Mr. Hamby said it depended on when the candidate knocked off for the night.

“The younger producers and reporters are more likely to stay up and have a couple of drinks,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t finish working till 1 in the morning. Then it’s impossible to stay awake.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/us.../26bus.html?hp





Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On
Brian Stelter

Senator Barack Obama’s videotaped response to President Bush’s final State of the Union address — almost five minutes of Mr. Obama talking directly to the camera — elicited little attention from newspaper and television reporters in January.

But on the medium it was made for, the Internet, the video caught fire. Quickly after it was posted on YouTube, it appeared on the video-sharing site’s most popular list and Google’s most blogged list. It has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, been linked by more than 500 blogs and distributed widely on social networking sites like Facebook.

It is not news that young politically minded viewers are turning to alternative sources like YouTube, Facebook and late-night comedy shows like “The Daily Show.” But that is only the beginning of how they process information.

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

“There are lots of times where I’ll read an interesting story online and send the U.R.L. to 10 friends,” said Lauren Wolfe, 25, the president of College Democrats of America. “I’d rather read an e-mail from a friend with an attached story than search through a newspaper to find the story.”

In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth. Jane Buckingham, the founder of the Intelligence Group, a market research company, said the “social media generation” was comfortable being in constant communication with others, so recommendations from friends or text messages from a campaign — information that is shared, but not sought — were perceived as natural.

Ms. Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group where one of her subjects, a college student, said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

A December survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press looked broadly at how media were being consumed this campaign. In the most striking finding, half of respondents over the age of 50 and 39 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds reported watching local television news regularly for campaign news, while only 25 percent of people under 30 said they did.

Fully two-thirds of Web users under 30 say they use social networking sites, while fewer than 20 percent of older users do. MySpace and Facebook create a sense of connection to the candidates. Between the two sites, Mr. Obama has about one million “friends,” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, has roughly 330,000, and Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, has more than 140,000. Four out of 10 young people have watched candidate speeches, interviews, commercials or debates online, according to Pew, substantially more than people 30 and older.

Young people also identify online discussions with friends and videos as important sources of election information. The habits suggest that younger readers find themselves going straight to the source, bypassing the context and analysis that seasoned journalists provide.

In the days after Mr. Obama’s speech on race last week, for example, links to the transcript and the video were the most popular items posted on Facebook. On The New York Times’s Web site, the transcript of the speech ranked consistently higher on the most e-mailed list than the articles written about the speech.

The way consumers filter their news is being highlighted now that a generation of Americans is coming of age in the midst of a campaign that has generated intense interest and voter involvement. Exit polls in 22 states estimate that more than three million voters under the age of 30 participated in Democratic primaries this year, up from about one million four years ago.

In three of the most populous states — California, Texas and Ohio — the share of voters under 30 who turned out for Democratic primaries increased to 16 percent, up from less than 10 percent in 2004, according to exit polls by Edison/Mitofsky. In the Republican primaries, the increases in most states have been less striking but still visible.

“Young people are particularly galvanized in this campaign, and they have a new set of tools that make it look different from the enthusiasm that greeted other politicians 30 years ago,” said Lee Rainie, director for the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “They read a news story and then blog about it, or they see a YouTube video and then link to it, or they go to a campaign Web site, download some phone numbers, and make calls on behalf of a candidate.”

Media companies are benefiting from the heightened interest. CNN, which drew about 60,000 viewers ages 18 to 34 a night in February 2007, drew 218,000 on an average night this February, numbers that were increased by coverage of several presidential debates. Fox News and MSNBC also posted gains among young viewers last month, with both networks averaging more than 100,000 young viewers in prime time, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Although some college seniors may say they learned about Mr. Obama’s speech about race on CNN, more are likely to have seen it on YouTube, where it has been viewed almost 3.4 million times, or on Facebook, where it remains among the most shared links.

Candidates are capitalizing on this social development, and so are their supporters. A youth-minded music video called “Yes We Can” has been perhaps the biggest beneficiary. A musical version of Mr. Obama’s campaign speech made by the singer will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and a bevy of celebrities, it was released on YouTube three days before the series of coast-to-coast nominating contests on Feb. 5. Counting hits on YouTube and other sites, the video has been viewed more than 17 million times.

To a lesser extent, videos of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain have also been traveling through the online networks. A video of Mr. McCain asking citizens what issues matter most in the election has been viewed 300,000 times.

Rather than treating video-sharing Web sites as traditional news sources, young people use them as tools and act as editors themselves.

“We’re talking about a generation that doesn’t just like seeing the video in addition to the story — they expect it,” said Danny Shea, 23, the associate media editor for The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com). “And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message.”

Marjorie Connelly contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/us.../27voters.html





Houston Mayor Plans 10 'Bubbles' of Free WiFi

Mayor targets low-income areas and eyes citywide coverage in future
Brad Hem

Houston is aiming to turn EarthLink's lemons into the city's lemonade.

The company had to pay the city $5 million after defaulting on a contract to build a citywide wireless Internet network last year. On Monday, Mayor Bill White announced the city will use about $3.5 million of that money to build 10 free wireless network "bubbles" in low-income parts of Houston to give residents access they otherwise might do without.

The long-term possibility, White said, is that the bubbles could be connected and the areas between them added to the network, providing WiFi access across the city.

"It's a matter of connecting those bubbles," White said.

Monday's announcement launched the first bubble in the densely populated Gulfton area of southwest Houston. The city is establishing a committee to determine where future networks will be located. Build-out is expected to happen over the next two years.

Upload and download speeds on the network are about 3 megabits per second, said Nicole Robinson, director of the city's Digital Inclusion Project. Comparable DSL service can cost $29 a month.

Several cities, including Philadelphia, San Francisco and Chicago, have struggled in the past few months to create municipal WiFi networks after EarthLink abandoned that part of its corporate strategy and paid millions in default fees, said Craig Settles, an independent municipal wireless consultant and author of two books on city WiFi.

Various financial and operational models are emerging. Settles said the new Houston model could be successful because it limits some cost by locating network transmitters on government-owned property. And by focusing on low-income areas, the plan is more politically acceptable and possibly open to future funding — either from government sources or private companies interested in boosting philanthropy, he said.

"I think where the city is going makes a lot of sense," he said.

To expand the network beyond the first 10 bubbles will require partnerships with other private businesses, said Settles. He suggested deals with area hospitals, which tend to be spread throughout the city and might have interest in establishing a network to communicate with ambulances, clinics, doctors and patients citywide.

Last week, the city finished the formal process of requesting information from potential service providers about how it might build out the network, said Richard Lewis, director of the city's information technology department. The city likely will ask for bids to build the remaining nine networks, maintain them, provide technical support for users and create a system for businesses to advertise on the network, potentially building revenue for operational costs, he said.

Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Verizon Wireless and Tropos Networks — which donated equipment for the Gulfton network — are pilot sponsors. HP will help develop an "affordable computer purchase plan," according to a news release.

In addition to installing Internet service, the city is working with social service groups to provide computer access and training for users. Each bubble will include about 15 public access points at schools, city facilities and community organizations within the area.

The pilot network in the Gulfton area includes access points at Family Road Literacy Center, Sylvan Rodriguez Elementary School and Burnett Bayland Community Center.

Most city libraries already provide free wireless hot spots, and the new library branch location at Discovery Green downtown will provide wireless service throughout the new park when it opens in April.

With most new jobs requiring at least a familiarity with computers, White said it is critical the city helps people learn basic computer skills.

"Allowing somebody to have access to computers and to feel confident with them ... you will open a whole horizon for that individual from which they can pull themselves up," he said.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5645574.html





Wireless Disruption

Sebastopol officials reject offer of free Wi-Fi downtown due to health concerns; proponents say that's ridiculous
Robert Digitale

Concerned about possible health effects from wireless Internet networks, Sebastopol officials have reversed course and turned down a free Wi-Fi area network.

The City Council voted 4-0 last week to rescind an agreement with Sonic.net that would have allowed the Santa Rosa-based Internet provider to install the network in the city center as it has done in the downtowns of Santa Rosa and Petaluma.

Sebastopol Mayor Craig Litwin thanked Sonic for a "very nice gesture" but said citizens had voiced concerns that "create enough suspicion that there may be a health hazard."

Sonic CEO Dane Jasper said his company is sympathetic to those who blame radiofrequency signals for their health problems.

But he maintained that the exposure from a Wi-Fi network would be "a drop in the bucket" compared to the amount that people receive daily from TV, radio and cellular phone signals.

Moreover, he said, downtown Sebastopol already has plenty of businesses emitting Wi-Fi signals. In a one-block radius around the town's central intersection of Bodega Avenue and Main Street, Jasper detected 25 such signals. His company had proposed to add one more signal at that intersection.

"Wi-Fi is pretty much everywhere," he said.

Jasper and Wi-Fi critics strongly disagree on what is known about the possible health risks from radiofrequency, or RF, signals.

Jasper cited the World Health Organization. Its Internet site concludes: "Considering the very low exposure levels and research results collected to date, there is no convincing scientific evidence that the weak RF signals from base stations and wireless networks cause adverse health effects."

But critics said good studies exist that show ill effects to both adults and children from such signals. And they disputed Jasper's contention that one more wireless network will have a negligible effect on Sebastopol residents.

"A little bit more is going to cause a little more problems," said Jeffrey Fawcett, president of the Sustainable Health Institute, an educational nonprofit based in Camp Meeker.

Last fall the council reached agreement with Sonic to install the network, which would allow wireless Internet connections for people with Wi-Fi-enabled devices, such as laptop computers and cell phones.

Sebastopol resident Sandi Maurer gathered support to persuade the council to reconsider the matter.

Maurer, who said she is sensitive to electricity much as some people are sensitive to chemicals, worked with others to gather roughly 500 signatures from people concerned about the effects of Wi-Fi signals.

Sebastopol Councilwoman Linda Kelley requested that the issue come back to the council last week, giving Maurer and other critics a chance to successfully plead their case.

"I feel very grateful to the City Council, to Linda Kelley," Maurer said.
http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/articl...0314/1033/NEWS





Turn Your PC into a DVD Ripping Monster

Commercial DVDs are far too expensive to let scratches turn your video into a glorified coaster, but most people still don't back up their DVD collection. Once upon a time, the four to eight gigabyte footprint of a DVD on your hard drive was prohibitively large. But since the price of a gigabyte has plummeted, ripping your entire DVD collection to your computer is not just possible, it's prudent—and it's easy. Let's take a look at the best ways to back up and play any DVD rip on your home computer, along with how to burn a DVD rip back to a playable DVD.

What You'll Need

All you need is a PC with a DVD drive and a hard drive with some extra space. If you're working on a computer with limited space, that doesn't rule you out. You can find huge internal hard drives for cheap (like this 500GB drive for $99), and installing that hard drive is a breeze.

You only need a DVD drive capable of burning DVDs if you want to burn your backups back to a disc you can play in a DVD player. DVD burners are crazy cheap at under $30, and they install just as easily as hard drives.

I'm focusing on Windows solutions for this article. That doesn't mean there aren't methods available for other operating systems—it just means that the scope of this feature is limited to Windows users.

Set Up Painless DVD Ripping to Your Hard Drive

There are several methods for ripping your DVDs on your Windows computer, but lets run down a couple of the best below.

Rip DVDs in One-Click with DVD Rip and DVD Shrink

Our first and favorite option for ripping DVDs to your hard drive is DVD Rip, a free, open source application built in the Lifehacker workshop designed to make backing up DVDs to your hard drive as simple as possible. DVD Rip works in conjunction with another tool called DVD Shrink, a freeware application that rips and compresses the DVD image. DVD Shrink does all the heavy lifting—DVD Rip just makes it super-simple to use.

Pros: DVD Shrink compresses your rips so they take about half the space on your hard drive, so despite the fact that storage is cheap, you can still get more bang from your buck. Also, using DVD Rip in conjunction with DVD Shrink is designed to be simple enough that anyone in your family could use it. DVD Rip is also designed to work well with DVD Play, another helper app (mentioned below), for playing back your DVDs.

Cons: If you want your backups to be exact copies of your DVDs, the shrinking aspect of DVD Shrink probably isn't for you. It saves space, but it skimps on some video fidelity to do it. The space versus quality trade-off is one I'm comfortable making with most DVDs, but you may want to try it out yourself to be sure.

NOTE: DVD Shrink can break the copy protection on most DVDs without issue, but if you're having a problem, try running previously mentioned DVD43, which promises to remove copy protection from virtually any DVD, before you start DVD Shrink.

DVDFab HD Decrypter

Like DVD Shrink, DVDFab HD Decrypter breaks copy protection and rips the DVD contents to your hard drive. Unlike DVD Shrink, DVDFab does not compress the rip, so it's going to be the same quality as the original. DVDFab is actually a shareware app, but the trial version does full DVD rips and will even rip only the main movie.

Pros: DVDFab has a great reputation for cutting through copy protection, and it results in full quality rips.

Cons: Full quality rips mean lots of hard drive space per movie—around 8GB. If that's not a problem, more power to the full rip. If it is, DVD Shrink (with or without DVD Rip) will half that to about 4 or 5GB and might be more your taste. You might also consider ripping just the main movie with DVDFab if you don't want or need the extra features to save space.

Play Back Your Rips

Now that you've set up your computer to inhale any and every DVD you throw its way, you want to play these ripped DVDs. You could go one step further and encode them to popular compressed formats like DivX, but the rips you've already set up have their own charm for a couple of reasons.

First, ripping DVDs to the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders (the default output for these methods) means you retain the entire DVD structure, so watching the rip works just like if you were watching the DVD, complete with menus and special features. Second, these folders can easily be burned back to DVDs so that—in the event that one of your physical discs is damaged—you can just burn the backup and never miss a beat. Here are a few methods and apps you can use to play back these DVDs on your computer and burn new DVDs from the rips.

Play Back Ripped DVDs with DVD Play and VLC

Similar to DVD Rip, DVD Play is a helper application that works in conjunction with the popular open source media player, VLC, to help you navigate and play back your ripped DVDs. To get a look at how DVD Play works in action, check out the video below.

In this video DVD Play is playing back a DVD ripped using DVD Rip and DVD Shrink. All you have to do is point DVD Play at the folder where you're ripping all of your DVDs, and it provides a nice interface for browsing and playing back those ripped DVDs.

Play Back Ripped DVDs in Windows Media Center

If you're a Windows Media Center user, you can play back these ripped DVDs from directly within Media Center. In pre-Vista versions of Media Center, you can just add your rips folder to your My Videos library and they'll automatically show up as playable. The DVD library feature is turned off by default in Vista's Media Center, but all it takes is one small tweak to enable it.

Burn Your Backups to a New DVD with ImgBurn

Finally, if your physical disc gets damaged, you can always burn a new DVD from your backup (again, with DVD menus and all the extra features). This time, we're using a freeware application called ImgBurn. To burn one of your backups to a new DVD, just fire up ImgBurn and enter Build mode by selecting Mode -> Build from the ImgBurn menu. Now just click browse folder icon beneath the source dropdown and point ImgBurn to the folder of the ripped DVD you want to burn.

After you've selected the folder, insert a blank DVD and then click on ImgBurn's Calculate button to determine if your DVD has enough space to burn the backup. If you want to back up DVDs you ripped using DVDFab (all 8GBs), you'll need a dual-layer DVD burner capable of burning to 8GB dual-layer DVDs. If you've just got a regular old DVD burner that can only burn to 4GB single-layer discs (which I suspect is most of us), the DVD Shrink method above is your best choice.

Now, assuming you've got a DVD big enough to handle your DVD rip, just click the Build button (pictured) and let 'er burn. Note: If your Build button does not look like the button pictured, you need to switch to Device Output mode by clicking the small button to the left of the Build button to switch to Device Output mode—otherwise ImgBurn will want to create an ISO file on your hard drive rather than burn the disc.
http://lifehacker.com/371636/turn-yo...ipping-monster





Social Site’s New Friends Are Athletes
Tim Arango

Late last year, Pamela Firestone, the mother of Tony Parker, the San Antonio Spurs point guard, went rooting through her home in Paris and dug up a VHS tape of a 9-year-old Tony on a Parisian basketball court with his two brothers.

“O.K., let’s start,” the future N.B.A. star says in French. “It’s going to be the Chicago Bulls versus the San Antonio Spurs.”

In most families such artifacts are merely heirlooms, their value measured in memories. For the Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency and the hedge fund Pequot Capital, these are assets to be exploited.

Photos and videos showing blue-chip athletes like Mr. Parker, LeBron James, Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning will be part of a new venture that C.A.A. and Pequot along with the Internet arm of Major League Baseball are expected to announce today.

The venture, WePlay.com, a social networking site for youth sports — something like Facebook for young athletes — is expected to start in mid-April. The site caters to youth athletes, parents and coaches — a vast audience. About 52 million children a year participate in organized sports leagues, according to the National Council of Youth Sports.

Young athletes will be able to set up a profile, post pictures, communicate with friends and share videos of games. Parents will be able to get practice schedules, coordinate car pools and find out which equipment to purchase. Coaches will be able to communicate with their players and parents, as well as learn about strategy and other skills.

“Two hundred forty million people in America are one degree of separation from youth sports,” said Steve Hansen, the chief executive of WePlay. “Youth sports is held together by e-mails, phone calls and clip boards. We want to change that.”

The videos of the athletes as children, as well as footage from recent shoots — a camera crew will join LeBron James at his high school gym in the coming weeks, for example — will surround the more traditional features of social media. The site will be mostly advertiser supported, initially in the form of sponsorships integrated in to the site, and later, banner ads.

Madison Avenue has long seen the value of aligning with sports teams, and over the years has been reaching further down the athletic food chain: first professional, then college, and more recently high school. Takkle, a social-networking site for high school athletes, is partially owned by Sports Illustrated. With WePlay, advertisers will have the chance to go even younger.

At the same time, WePlay can also be seen as an attempt on the part of the professional athletes to gain more control over how their images are used commercially — in other words, why let ESPN run video of their Little League games free, when they can do so and sell advertising alongside it?

The idea originated at C.A.A., which about 20 months ago began a sports division and whose agents have been trying to find ways beyond the traditional endorsement deal to increase an athlete’s earning potential, by starting companies in which the players can be owners.

“One of the reasons they chose to come here was so their clients could have these opportunities,” said David Rone, co-head of C.A.A. Sports, the division of the talent agency that represents athletes. “They can be the best agents they can be by exposing themselves to the rest of the disciplines we have at C.A.A..”

Other athletes involved in WePlay.com have been looking for their own relics of early stardom. In a spare bedroom at her home in New Orleans, Olivia Manning collected relics from her son Peyton’s days as a child quarterback to be copied and digitized by an employee from Major League Baseball Advanced Media.

Mr. James’s mother rustled up old photos and videos of her son from a storage area in her garage. And in New Jersey, Mr. Jeter’s mother found a video of her son playing Little League — a treasure whose value was diminished 10 minutes into the film because someone in the Jeter family taped over it with the movie “RoboCop.”

“This is really the quintessential execution of what we’d like to do on behalf of our clients,” Mr. Rone said. “All of them want to move beyond holding soda cans or holding a Big Mac in their hands.”

So for players like Mr. Jeter, who will make about $20 million this year playing shortstop for the Yankees, being a hired promotional gun is not enough. Mr. Jeter, who in addition to receiving equity in WePlay in exchange for his involvement also invested some of his own money (he will not say how much), began filming clips for the site in mid-December. Having equity, Mr. Jeter said in a telephone interview, is “very important, because you can really feel good about something if you help build it.”

The focus of the business also fits with Mr. Jeter’s own philanthropy. “What it boils down to is, it’s a really outstanding idea,” he said. “I have my own foundation, and we are trying to get kids to be active and play sports. Kids today spend too much time playing video games, and there’s a huge obesity problem in this country.”

Inside C.A.A., agents liken the venture to the sports version of the Web site FunnyOrDie.com, a partnership between C.A.A., the actor Will Ferrell and a Silicon Valley venture firm.

“These are assets — content — that our athletes control,” Mr. Rone said. “The content that all our athletes control is somewhat limited. We want to build businesses around that content. We hope we can help them properly monetize that content. Otherwise it’s just sitting on a shelf.”

The last time a group of famous athletes linked up on the Web, the result was a bust. In 1999, a group led by the Silicon Valley venture firm, Benchmark Capital, sunk $65 million in to MVP.com, an Internet venture involving John Elway, Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky.

“It was a big flameout,” said Mr. Hansen, an Internet veteran who was formerly chief operating officer of GeoCities, a Web-hosting firm. He said MVP.com did not work because an athlete’s name alone isn’t enough for success. “It can’t just be P.R.,” he said. “It can’t just be, give me Peyton’s name and likeness and that will be enough for my site.”

One advertiser that has already signed on is the trading card company Upper Deck, which will offer online trading games for youngsters and access to a digital trading card library.

“We believe very strongly in the deep integration of a small number of advertisers in a contextual way,” said Mr. Hansen.

The investment in WePlay so far is $4.5 million — much more modest than the investment in MVP.com — and the financial backers are already thinking about other niche-oriented social networking sites.

“There’s no reason to believe that the organizing principles that are applied here to sports can’t be applied elsewhere, such as to religious organizations,” said Rick Heitzmann, managing director at Pequot Ventures, the venture arm of Pequot Capital Management. “So you could go from WePlay to WePray.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/technology/26caa.html





Sony BMG, Warner Near Deal with Myspace
Brian Garrity

MySpace's plan to launch a digital-music joint venture with the major record companies is picking up steam, as the social networking giant nears deals with Sony BMG and Warner Music Group, multiple sources familiar with the situation told The Post.

The agreements could be signed as soon as this week. The service is expected to launch later this year.

"Everybody's operating with a sense of urgency to try to close it out," said one industry insider close to the talks.

MySpace, News Corp. (which also owns The Post), Sony BMG, and Warner all declined to comment.

Unlike most music licensing agreements, which require upfront advances, no money is expected to change hands. Instead, the labels are trading content rights in exchange for minority equity stakes in MySpace Music and the chance to participate in the advertising revenues that News Corp. hopes to generate from the service.

MySpace attracts more than 15 million unique monthly visitors to its existing music portal, a sub-site within MySpace that specializes in new music promotion and tour date information, rather than commerce.

In addition, MySpace claims more than 5 million individual artist pages attracting Web traffic not counted as part of its total music traffic tracked by comScore.

The new MySpace Music is expected to be a mix of pay-per-download and ad-supported video and audio.

"The concept of the joint venture is to bring in all forms of [making money from digital music] and much more tightly integrate them," said one person familiar with the negotiations.

Users could expect to buy digital downloads in the MP3 format, see and hear ad-supported streaming video, and buy such products as downloadable videos and ringtones.

Jamba - a mobile entertainment service that News Corp. owns jointly with VeriSign - is expected to play a role in MySpace Music's cellphone commerce strategy, a source said.

Record companies are looking to maximize available revenue opportunities, and expand the number of alternatives to Apple's iTunes music store. iTunes is the second-largest music retailer in the US behind Wal-Mart, with 4 billion songs sold since its April 2003 launch.

Collectively, the record companies are expected to hold less than a 50 percent stake in the MySpace venture. Just how large a piece each label gets in MySpace Music will be determined by market share, sources said. Sony BMG and Warner currently rank as the world's second- and third-largest music companies, respectively.

Further behind in the negotiating process are Universal Music Group, the industry's largest record company, and EMI.

Universal is currently suing MySpace for copyright infringement associated with its viral video offering - one of the biggest hubs of user-generated video on the Web behind Google's YouTube. The two sides first need to settle that fight before a deal can be struck for the MySpace Music joint venture.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03242008...iny_103302.htm





Sony BMG Eyeing All-Inclusive MP3 Service
FMQB

Sony BMG is taking steps to launch its own digital music service that would give users unlimited access to its digital catalog for a monthly fee. In an interview with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, chief executive Rolf Schmidt-Holtz said, "We are working on an online music subscription service. The simplest option would be a flat rate under which a monthly payment would provide access to our entire music catalog for all digital players, including Apple's iPod."

He suggested that the cost would be around 6 to 8 euros ($9 to $12 per month) for unlimited access to Sony BMG's entire music catalog. "It is even possible that clients could conserve some songs indefinitely, that they would own them even after the subscription expired," he added.

Schmidt-Holtz didn't give an exact timetable for the project, but it could get off the ground sometime this year. He said that the company is in talks with other music distributors on the subject, and that cooperation agreements with mobile phone manufacturers is also possible.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=630946





Innocent Man Pinched by RIAA Asks SCOTUS for Attorney's Fees
Eric Bangeman

Cliff Thompson, a San Antonio resident sued by the RIAA for copyright infringement, has asked the Supreme Court to decide whether the record labels should be forced to pay attorneys' fees in cases where they voluntarily dismiss copyright infringement cases. Thompson was sued by the RIAA in 2006 for allegedly using KaZaA to distribute music, but the labels dismissed their case against him once it became apparent that his adult daughter was the KaZaA user in question.

Thompson sought an award of attorneys' fees, arguing that since he was the prevailing party in the copyright infringement lawsuit, he was entitled to have his legal bills paid for by the RIAA. The problem is that different courts do not handle attorneys' fees in copyright infringement cases uniformly. The judge in Virgin v. Thompson denied his request, citing a "purported lack of responsiveness," and Thompson was thwarted once again at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Citing a 1997 Supreme Court ruling, the appeals court decided that attorneys' fees awards are "not automatic." Instead, courts must take a number of factors into consideration, including "frivolousness, motivation, objective unreasonableness... and the need in particular circumstances to advance considerations of compensation and deterrence," noted the opinion.

In contrast, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has held that a simple "material alteration of the legal relationship of the parties" is sufficient for an attorneys' fees award. That decision, which involved a copyright infringement lawsuit between video poker game manufacturers, was based on a 2001 Supreme Court ruling.

Midwest Electronic Specialties was entitled to legal fees once the case against it was dismissed, said the appeals court. "Midwest obtained a favorable judgment," wrote the judges. "That this came about when Riviera threw in the towel does not make Midwest less the victor than it would have been had the judge granted summary judgment or a jury returned a verdict in its favor. Riviera sued; Midwest won; no more is required."
Attorney: the Supreme Court should end the recording industry's gambling

In the petition for certiorari filed with the Supreme Court, Thompson's attorney Ted Lee lays out the RIAA's legal strategy and notes what he describes as the "inherent unfairness" of the lawsuits. "Clearly, the industry has gambled that defendants will make the financially-rational decision of settling the lawsuits—regardless of culpability—rather than risk financial ruin in a knock-down, drag-out legal fight," reads Lee's petition. "More often than not this strategy works, as the vast majority of these defendants never see the inside of a courtroom in these lawsuits, simply because even if the innocent defendant were to win his case on the merits, he more than likely would lose in his pocket book."

Lee focuses on a 1994 Supreme Court decision in Fogerty v. Fantasy Inc., which appeals courts throughout the US have interpreted differently. He argues that federal courts have "latched on to one footnote" from the case and only look at "frivolousness, motivation, objective unreasonableness, and the need to advance considerations of compensation and deterrence" when making a decision on attorneys' fees. The Fogerty factors are inherently unfair to prevailing defendants, says Lee. "Simply put, it is impossible for a court to apply the factors mentioned in Fogerty to prevailing plaintiffs and prevailing defendants in an evenhanded manner," reads the petition. "For example, the trial court's opinion gave no consideration to the merits of Thompson’s defense, but essentially concluded, contrary to the tenor of Fogerty, that because the plaintiffs' cause was not "frivolous," no attorney's fees should be awarded to Thompson."

That logic flies in the face of the Supreme Court's finding that innocent defendants should be encouraged to fight back in court, says Lee. "There is a clear and present need for this Court's intervention and guidance on this important issue of copyright law," Lee concludes. "Moreover, an absence of uniformity between the circuits, concurrent with an onslaught of litigation by the music companies against internet account holders, only serves to provide innocent defendants with even little, if any, incentive to fully litigate any meritorious defenses they may have, contrary to the policies this Court has recognized."

Obviously, no one outside of the nine justices can say whether or not the Supreme Court will hear this case. But there are some significant reasons why the Court may be interested in taking up this case. First, there is a conflict at the Appeals Court level, as at least two circuits are interpreting the same ruling and law very differently. Second, and more significantly, there's a lot at stake here. The fight between the RIAA and alleged copyright infringers is inherently unbalanced due to the vast financial resources available to the record labels. The risk-reward ratio for defendants is seriously out of kilter, and mandating that a successful defense—even if it comes from the RIAA's decision to voluntarily dismiss a case—results in the record labels picking up the tab would even things out.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...neys-fees.html





Fee for All

Jim Griffin will lead Warner Music's fight to tame the Web's lawless music frontier.
Sam Gustin

Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s Warner Music Group has tapped industry veteran Jim Griffin to spearhead a controversial plan to bundle a monthly fee into consumers' internet-service bills for unlimited access to music.

The plan—the boldest move yet to keep the wounded entertainment industry giants afloat—is simple: Consumers will pay a monthly fee, bundled into an internet-service bill in exchange for unfettered access to a database of all known music.

Bronfman's decision to hire Griffin, a respected industry critic, demonstrates the desperation of the recording industry. It has shrunk to a $10 billion business from $15 billion in almost a decade. Compact disc sales are plummeting as online music downloads skyrocket.

"Today, it has become purely voluntary to pay for music," Griffin told Portfolio.com in an exclusive sit-down this week. "If I tell you to go listen to this band, you could pay, or you might not. It's pretty much up to you. So the music business has become a big tip jar."

Nothing provokes sheer terror in the recording industry more than the rise of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. For years, digital-music seers have argued the rise of such networks has made copyright law obsolete and free music distribution universal.

Bronfman has asked Griffin, formerly Geffen Music's digital chief, to develop a model that would create a pool of money from user fees to be distributed to artists and copyright holders. Warner has given Griffin a three-year contract to form a new organization to spearhead the plan.

Griffin says he hopes to move beyond the years of acrimonious record-industry litigation against illegal file-swappers, college students in particular.

"We're still clinging to the vine of music as a product," Griffin says, calling the industry’s plight "Tarzan" economics.

"But we're swinging toward the vine of music as a service. We need to get ready to let go and grab the next vine, which is a pool of money and a fair way to split it up, rather than controlling the quantity and destiny of sound recordings."Warner Music Share Price

In the last year, the Recording Association of America, the industry group that represents the major labels, has sent 5,400 threatening letters to students at more than 150 schools, and reached settlements with more than 2,300 them. It has filed formal lawsuits against 2,465 others, who did not respond.

"I don't think we should be suing students and I don't think we should be suing people in their homes," says Griffin. "We want to monetize the anarchy of the internet."

Griffin says Warner Music is "totally committed to this." The fundamental issue, he says, is whether music consumers will buy songs and albums individually, or whether they will subscribe monthly to access a "universal" database of songs.

Will Tanous, Warner Music's communications chief, said Griffin's initiative is part of Warner's "ongoing effort to explore new business models in the music industry."

In recent weeks, major music industry players have signaled their interest in the "music as a service" model.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment is said to be developing an online music subscription service that would give users unlimited access to its catalog.

Apple is reportedly negotiating with the major record labels to offer consumers free access to the entire iTunes library in exchange for paying a premium for Apple hardware.

Warner's plan would have consumers pay an additional fee—maybe $5 a month—bundled into their monthly internet-access bill in exchange for the right to freely download, upload, copy, and share music without restrictions.

Griffin says those fees could create a pool as large as $20 billion annually to pay artists and copyright holders. Eventually, advertising could subsidize the entire system, so that users who don't want to receive ads could pay the fee, and those who don't mind advertising wouldn't pay a dime.

"Ideally, music will feel free," says Griffin. "Even if you pay a flat fee for it, at the moment you use it there are no financial considerations. It's already been paid for."

While few of the plan's details have emerged, critics have begun their attacks.

David Barrett, engineering manager for peer-to-peer networks at Web content-delivery giant Akamai, says he's opposed to it on principle. Griffin's plan, he says, is tantamount to extortion, because it forces everyone to join.

"It's too late to charge people for what they're already getting for free," says Barrett. "This is just taxation of a basic, universal service that already exists, for the benefit a distant power that actively harasses the people being taxed without offering them any meaningful representation."

Griffin, who in 1994 was part of the team that made Aerosmith's "Head First" the first song available on the internet, goes to great pains to emphasize that the collective licensing plan is not "his" plan.

"This isn't my idea," says Griffin. "While I would gladly take the credit, blanket licensing has over 150 years of history behind it."

"Collective licensing is what people do when they lose control, or when control is no longer practical or efficient," Griffin says. "A pool of money and a fair way to split it up replaces control."

Griffin was quick to point out that the $5 figure is arbitrary.

"We negotiate in every place," Griffin says. "Clearly $5 per month would be an insane number in China or India. If you could get a nickel a month you could grow the business tenfold in those countries. In another country that had a high G.D.P., a nickel per month would be ridiculously cheap. So you negotiate. Fair is whatever you agree upon."

Griffin says Bronfman and Michael Nash, the company's digital-strategy chief, brought him into Warner to create an organization to negotiate collective licensing deals. But Griffin's ambitions extend far beyond just Warner Music.

"We're building a [as yet unnamed] company inside Warner that is not intended to be solely owned by Warner," Griffin says. "We hope all of the rights holders will come in and take ownership with us, and Warner will not control it. Our goal is to create a collective society for the digital age."

Meanwhile, critics have already attacked the plan as a kind of mandatory "culture tax."

"Jim will vehemently deny the 'tax' label," says Akamai's Barrett. "But it's a tax nonetheless. It'll be a government-approved cartel that collects money from virtually everyone—often without their knowledge—and failure to pay their tax will ultimately result in people with guns coming to your door.

"Jim's proposal does nothing but direct money to the very people that tried to prevent this future from coming to be," Barrett adds, "while further legitimizing the terror being waged in the courtrooms against their members."

Griffin dismisses such criticism.

"I understand what David is thinking, but I assure you, we have no such interest in government running this or having any part of it," he says.

Griffin says that in just the few weeks since Warner began working on this plan, the company has been approached by internet service providers "who want to discharge their risk."

"But more important than the risk for an I.S.P. is the marketing," Griffin says, drawing a comparison to Starbucks' marketing of "fair trade" coffee.

"I.S.P.'s want to distinguish themselves with marketing," Griffin says. "You can only imagine that an I.S.P. that marketed a 'fair trade' network connection would see a marketing advantage."

Gerd Leonhard, a respected music-industry consultant who has advised Sony/BMG, which recently announced plans for a flat-rate-subscription model for digital music, rejects Barrett's argument that the monthly fee amounts to a tax.

"This is not a tax," says Leonhard. "It's bundled into another charge."

"People should not be too harsh on Jim for trying to get the ball rolling," says Leonhard. "At this point, 96 percent of the population is guilty of some sort of infringement, whether they're streaming or downloading or sharing.

"What we have here is the widespread use of technology that declares all of the population to be illegal."
http://www.portfolio.com/news-market...s-New-Web-Guru





Smashing Pumpkins Sue Virgin Records
FMQB

Smashing Pumpkins have sued Virgin Records, the band's home for the majority of their career, claiming the label damaged their credibility by using their name and music in a recent promotion.

According to TMZ, the Pumpkins (who are essentially frontman Billy Corgan and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin) sued Virgin over their use in the recent "Pepsi Stuff" promotion between Pepsi and Amazon. The band have filed a breach of contract lawsuit in Los Angeles, stating they have "worked hard" to build their credibility with their fanbase and Virgin has hurt their "artistic integrity."

The Pumpkins are asking for profits from the Pepsi promotion as well as an injunction against Virgin using their name and music in the future.

It should be noted, however, that the Pumpkins' song "That's The Way (My Love Is)" was just featured prominently in a Ford commercial. Though that song appeared on the band's comeback album, 2007's Zeitgeist, which was released by Reprise Records.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=631079





Web Scout Exclusive! Rick Astley, King of the 'Rickroll,' Talks About His Song's Second Coming

Astley talks about discovering the "Rickroll"

On a frosty Canadian morning, a masked crusader tromps across a parking lot, over a snow bank and onto the sidewalk. He has a loudspeaker strapped ominously to his chest.

He halts, aiming the speaker toward the building across the street. “This is a song by some dead guy,” he says. And then, music booms forth:

“Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you.”

It’s an anti-Scientology protest, and across the street, a dozen or so warmly dressed young people begin to dance and sing along, waving their picket signs in rhythm to the familiar tune.

“It’s a bit spooky, innit?” said Rick Astley, the singer who made the song famous in 1987 and who is not dead. With considerable help, including assists from RCA Records, the webmaster of Astley’s U.K. fan site, and his manager at Sony BMG, I tracked down Astley at his home in London last weekend. He spoke for the first time about the phenomenon called Rickrolling, best described by example: You are reading your favorite Hollywood gossip blog and arrive at a link urging you to “Click here for exclusive video of Britney’s latest freakout!!” Click you do, but instead of Britney, it’s a dashing 21-year-old Briton that pops onto the screen. You, sir, have been Rickroll’d.

Over the last year or so, Astley has watched with puzzled amazement as “Never Gonna Give You Up” has been mocked, celebrated, remixed and reprised, its original music video viewed millions of times on YouTube, all by a generation that could barely swallow its Gerber carrots when the song first topped the pop charts.

“I think it’s just one of those odd things where something gets picked up and people run with it,” Astley said. “But that’s what brilliant about the Internet.”

Saying he thought "Anonymous" Rickrolling Scientology was "hilarious"

Search for Astley’s name on YouTube and you’ll find dozens of instances of the campy, infectious video, which features a heavily coiffed Astley bobbing and swaying behind oversized sunglasses. He’s flanked by two blond backup dancers (one of whom apparently didn’t have the footwork down), and a male bartender in short shorts who excels at spontaneous back flips.

Rickrolling is an example of an Internet “meme” (defined by Wikipedia as “any unit of cultural information ... that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another"). Its less sophisticated memetic forebear is the “duckroll,” where the roll-ee is misdirected to an image of a duck on wheels. And the Rickroll has sired many memelets, including the Fresh Prince roll, the rainroll (plopping you in front of a video of Tay Zonday’s "Chocolate Rain") and even the Reichroll, where Astley’s song is spliced with footage of Adolf Hitler for an unsettling sort of lip sync.

With all the online momentum it’s gathered, the Rickroll has now trundled its way into the real world, too. The spectacle of trench-coated pranksters blaring the song into unsuspecting crowds has become a symbol of harmless, geeky rebellion. As the blog LAist.com noted last week, and the New York Times reported Tuesday, a recent basketball game at Eastern Washington University was interrupted by a dancing Astley imitator, and there’s now a small YouTube library of the anti-Scientology group “Anonymous” Rickrolling different church locations.

Why have people picked up on the song so much?

For his part, Astley was nothing if not modest about his new cultural role. “If this had happened around some kind of rock song, with a lyric that really meant something -- a Bruce Springsteen, "God bless America" ... or an anti-something kind of song, I could kind of understand that,” Astley said. “But for something as, and I don’t mean to belittle it, because I still think it’s a great pop song, but it’s a pop song; do you know what I mean? It doesn’t have any kind of weight behind it, as such. But maybe that’s the irony of it.”

Astley would never put the song down, mind you. It’s just that, as he says, “If I was a young kid now looking at that song, I’d have to say I’d think it was pretty naff, really.”

(Wikipedia on “naff”: British slang for “something which is seen to be particularly ‘cheesy’ or ‘tacky’ or in otherwise poor aesthetic taste.”) “For me it’s a good example of what some of the ’80s were about in that pop sort of music way. A bit like you could say Debbie Gibson was absolutely massive, but if you look back at it now ... do you know what I mean?”

Yes, I think we do. But even still, with all the renewed attention to his work and his — albeit 20-year-old — image, does Astley have any plans to cash in on Rickrolling, maybe with his own YouTube remix?

“I don’t really know whether I want to be doing that,” he said. “ I’m not being an ageist, but it’s almost a young person’s thing, that.”

“I think the artist themselves trying to remix it is almost a bit sad,” he said. “No, I’m too old for that.”
Astley, who will be touring the U.K. in May with a group of other ’80’s acts, including Bananarama, and Nick Heyward, Heaven 17, Paul Young and ABC, sums up his thoughts on his unexpected virtual fame with characteristic good humor:

“Listen, I just think it’s bizarre and funny. My main consideration is that my daughter doesn’t get embarrassed about it.”
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/webs...stley-kin.html





Anti-Emo Riots Break Out Across Mexico
Alexis Madrigal

Riot police have taken to the streets of several cities in Mexico to ... defend emo kids?

A series of attacks on dyed-hair, eye-makeup-wearing emo kids began in early March when several hundred people went on an emo-beating rampage in Querétaro, a town of 1.5 million about 160 miles north of Mexico City.

The next week, shaggy-haired emo teenagers were harassed again by punks and rockabillys in the capital, prompting police protection and a segment on the TV news. Most recently, a Mexican newspaper reported that metal heads and gangsters have warned Tijuana's emo kids to stay away from the town's fair next month.

But the so-called emos are organizing, too. Last week, they demonstrated against the violence, pictured above, and Wednesday some met with police in Mexico City.

"They're organizing to defend their right to be emo," wrote Daniel Hernandez of LA Weekly on his personal blog, which has provided stellar coverage of the whole affair.

Music-based subcultures have permeated Mexico's major cities for decades, fueled by constant migration from rural cities. But only in the past year have emos begun to make their presence felt in the streets. In response, many of the established so-called tribus urbanas like punks and metalheads are responding with violence. The emo-punk battles are reminiscent of earlier subculture fights among various factions, like the Hell's Angels fighting hippies at the Altamont Music Festival or the Mods taking on the Rockers.

But while videos of Mexican teenagers with pompadours advancing on equally baby-faced emo rockers seem like scenes from a south-of-the-border version of John Waters' Crybaby, there are ugly undercurrents to the story.

First, by some accounts, the emo subculture is identified with homosexuality in Mexico. As Mexico City youth worker Victor Mendoza told Time.com: "At the core of this is the homophobic issue. The other arguments are just window dressing for that."

Gustavo Arellano, the author of Ask a Mexican and an editor at OC Weekly, said that the sexual ambiguities cultivated by emo fashion helped set the group up for targeting by more macho groups.

"What do you do when you are confronted with a question mark about sexuality in Mexico?" Arellano said. "You beat it up."

Forum posts show similar sentiments. One person wrote on a government youth-website forum, "detesto a los emosexuales," which translates as "I hate emosexuals." Emosexual is an obvious play on homosexual, especially in Spanish, where the H is silent.

Many of the attacks have been planned, or at least fomented, on violently anti-emo websites like Movimiento Anti Emosexual, which features videos of physical violence sprinkled liberally with anti-gay sentiment. Last.fm's Anti Emo Death Squad group has almost 4,000 members.

But Arellano said he thought the riots could have a positive impact here in the US.

"It's a great clusterfuck for the American mind's idea of Mexico," Arellano said. "This teaches the rest of the world that Mexico is not just a bunch of cactuses and sombreros."
http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008...emo-riots.html





Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
Jody Rosen



For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.

Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.

But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers.

David Giovannoni, an American audio historian who led the research effort, will present the findings and play the recording in public on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

Scott’s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back.

Mr. Giovannoni’s presentation on Friday will showcase additional Scott phonautograms discovered in Paris, including recordings made in 1853 and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to capture the sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott’s machine was at that time imperfectly calibrated.

“We got the early phonautograms to squawk, that’s about it,” Mr. Giovannoni said.

But the April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.

The hunt for this audio holy grail was begun in the fall by Mr. Giovannoni and three associates: Patrick Feaster, an expert in the history of the phonograph who teaches at Indiana University, and Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey, owners of Archeophone Records, a label specializing in early sound recordings. They had collaborated on the Archeophone album “Actionable Offenses,” a collection of obscene 19th-century records that received two Grammy nominations. When Mr. Giovannoni raised the possibility of compiling an anthology of the world’s oldest recorded sounds, Mr. Feaster suggested they go digging for Scott’s phonautograms.

Historians have long been aware of Scott’s work. But the American researchers believe they are the first to make a concerted search for Scott’s phonautograms or attempt to play them back.

In December Mr. Giovannoni and a research assistant traveled to a patent office in Paris, the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle. There he found recordings from 1857 and 1859 that were included by Scott in his phonautograph patent application. Mr. Giovannoni said that he worked with the archive staff there to make high-resolution, preservation-grade digital scans of these recordings.

A trail of clues, including a cryptic reference in Scott’s writings to phonautogram deposits made at “the Academy,” led the researchers to another Paris institution, the French Academy of Sciences, where several more of Scott’s recordings were stored. Mr. Giovannoni said that his eureka moment came when he laid eyes on the April 1860 phonautogram, an immaculately preserved sheet of rag paper 9 inches by 25 inches.

“It was pristine,” Mr. Giovannoni said. “The sound waves were remarkably clear and clean.”

His scans were sent to the Lawrence Berkeley lab, where they were converted into sound by the scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell. They used a technology developed several years ago in collaboration with the Library of Congress, in which high-resolution “maps” of grooved records are played on a computer using a digital stylus. The 1860 phonautogram was separated into 16 tracks, which Mr. Giovannoni, Mr. Feaster and Mr. Martin meticulously stitched back together, making adjustments for variations in the speed of Scott’s hand-cranked recording.

Listeners are now left to ponder the oddity of hearing a recording made before the idea of audio playback was even imagined.

“There is a yawning epistemic gap between us and Léon Scott, because he thought that the way one gets to the truth of sound is by looking at it,” said Jonathan Sterne, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and the author of “The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.”

Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for “appropriating” his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but “writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means.”

In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own. There is no evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott’s work to create his phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound.

“Edison is not diminished whatsoever by this discovery,” Mr. Giovannoni said.

Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., praised the discovery as a “tremendous achievement,” but called Edison’s phonograph a more significant technological feat.

“What made Edison different from Scott was that he was trying to reproduce sound and he succeeded,” Mr. Israel said.

But history is finally catching up with Scott.

Mr. Sterne, the McGill professor, said: “We are in a period that is more similar to the 1860s than the 1880s. With computers, there is an unprecedented visualization of sound.”

The acclaim Scott sought may turn out to have been assured by the very sonic reproduction he disdained. And it took a group of American researchers to rescue Scott’s work from the musty vaults of his home city. In his memoir, Scott scorned his American rival Edison and made brazen appeals to French nationalism. “What are the rights of the discoverer versus the improver?” he wrote less than a year before his death in 1879. “Come, Parisians, don’t let them take our prize.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html





Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer
Kevin Poulsen

Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security.

"We are seeing people affected," says Ken Lowenberg, senior director of web and print publishing at the Epilepsy Foundation. "It's fortunately only a handful. It's possible that people are just not reporting yet -- people affected by it may not be coming back to the forum so fast."

The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs.

The attackers turned to a more effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that redirected users' browsers to a page with a more complex image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics.

RyAnne Fultz, a 33-year-old woman who suffers from pattern-sensitive epilepsy, says she clicked on a forum post with a legitimate-sounding title on Sunday. Her browser window resized to fill her screen, which was then taken over by a pattern of squares rapidly flashing in different colors.

Fultz says she "locked up."

"I don't fall over and convulse, but it hurts," says Fultz, an IT worker in Coeur d'Alene, Ohio. "I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn't move and couldn't speak."

After about 10 seconds, Fultz's 11-year-old son came over and drew her gaze away from the computer, then killed the browser process, she says.

"Everyone who logged on, it affected to some extent, whether by causing headaches or seizures," says Browen Mead, a 24-year-old epilepsy patient in Maine who says she suffered a daylong migraine after examining several of the offending posts. She'd lingered too long on the pages trying to determine who was responsible.

Circumstantial evidence suggests the attack was the work of members of Anonymous, an informal collective of griefers best known for their recent war on the Church of Scientology. The first flurry of posts on the epilepsy forum referenced the site EBaumsWorld, which is much hated by Anonymous. And forum members claim they found a message board thread -- since deleted -- planning the attack at 7chan.org, a group stronghold.

Fultz says the attack spawned an uncommonly bad seizure. "It was a spike of pain in my head," she says. "And the lockup, that only happens with really bad ones. I don't think I've had a seizure like that in about a year."

But she's satisfied with the Epilepsy Foundation's relatively fast response to the attack, about 12 hours after it began on Easter weekend. "We all really appreciate them for giving us this forum and giving us this place to find each other," she says.

Epilepsy affects an estimated 50 million people worldwide, about 3 percent of whom are photosensitive, meaning flashing lights and colors can trigger seizures.
http://www.wired.com/politics/securi...08/03/epilepsy





Whatever you say pops

Turn Off the Lights!
John C. Dvorak

The April 2008 issue of the magazine is all worked up about things green. I admire the efforts, especially in a tech industry that is based on all forms of waste—from planned obsolescence and hazardous materials to impossible-to-recycle miniaturized components and landfill issues. To make us feel better about the whole thing, let's buy Energy Star products exclusively. Yay!

Hey, I have an idea: Grow up and learn to turn off the darn lights in the house! Talk about leaving lights on; I have a view of San Francisco from my home. The place is lit up 24/7 like a Roman candle. Turn off some lights! Why am I the one hassled by all this politically correct green blather while these lights are on?

I can only imagine what a nightmarish, overlit world we will inhabit once low- energy LED lights dominate. The worst part is that most of the light isn't used for public safety—or anything else—since it is going into space in what astronomers call "light pollution." From an airplane at 35,000 feet you can see lights everywhere.

And what about turning off the computer at night? This would reduce energy use and spam too, since over half the machines left on all night are doing nothing but turning into zombies to send spam all over the place. Of course, this would be easier if computers had an instant-on boot mechanism. Exactly how much energy do you think is wasted when a computer spends 5 minutes booting up?

What bothers me most about the green movement is the arrogance—the greener-than-thou attitude—of many participants. Combine these people with the dummies who just go along with the flock regarding what is best for mankind—er, personkind—and you have a dunce brigade telling everyone what to do.

One of my favorites is the movement toward cheap, Chinese-made compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs). These things do save energy, but at what cost to the environment? They are loaded with mercury, which I can assure you will end up in landfills leaching mercury into the water and fish that the greeners so dearly love. Seldom will these lightbulbs be "disposed of properly." Exactly what does that mean, anyway? Who do you call? The mercury-removal company? To most people, "dispose of properly" means throw it in the recycle bin, where it will get busted up and contaminate everything in the bin.

One specious argument says that using CFLs will reduce the need for electricity, thus reducing the mercury from coal-powered electric plants for a net mercury loss. In fact, people will just keep these lights on all over the place. When has anything taming the overall demand for electricity resulted in burning less coal? We wouldn't need CFLs if we just turned off the blasted lights!

Personally, I do not like CFLs because they do not generate any heat. I like my bulbs hot so they can kill the stray mosquito that accidentally gets into the house and wanders toward the light. There are always a few odd dead bugs around a good 100-watt incandescent bulb. This is disease prevention as far as I'm concerned. And the heat from the bulbs helps warm the house in the winter, saving on fuel costs. Heat does warm the air, right? It's not a complete waste, as the CFL lobby wants you to believe.—Next: Back to Computers >

But let's get back to computers, since I will never win the lightbulb argument. And don't get me started about using food—corn, that is—to make fuel for cars.

How about this for an energy-saving idea: Turn off the computer when you are not using it. Hook all your gear to a good UPS and turn everything off when you go to bed or leave the office, and boot the machine and peripherals only when you are working on something. Leaving desktop computers, laser printers, and other gear on is like leaving a 1,500-watt hair dryer going all day. Part of the problem is that in the late 1980s and early 1990s people were advised to leave their machines on.

Being responsible doesn't mean you have to buy a Prius or wear a green badge or ride a bike. It's the little things you get no credit for that make a difference, like buying perfectly good used products, insulating the water heater, turning off the computer, and cooking with pressure cookers. Most of today's greenies are in it for the accolades from fellow travelers who also like to brag about their green accomplishments.

The green scene is as good a hobby as a Barnes & Noble book club, but little of it is well directed or realistic. There seems to be a lot of posturing, clichés, pontification, hot air, and out-and-out BS. Welcome to 2008, the Year of the Green. Meanwhile, turn off your lights and computers!
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2276127,00.asp


















Until next week,

- js.



















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