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Old 06-02-08, 08:55 AM   #2
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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Listen to Songs, Free, Online
Jack

This search service, registered through a Scottsdale Arizona proxy and hosted by Liquidweb, lets you stream any song with just a simple song/artist querry. No fee, no subscription, no registration, no malware, no ads, no limits. It doesn't have every song, but it seems to have a fair amount, including some obscurities. Other services do this too but I like the clean new interface. Via SeeqPod/SpinJay.

Songerize
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=24422





Vudu Test Confirms HD Download Worries (Plus: What Needs to Be Done)

Over the weekend, I checked out three versions of the Transformers movie: standard-def and high-def instantaneous downloads to the Vudu box with 4-Mbps net connection, as well as the HD DVD of the movie, playing through the Xbox 360. As you can see in the image above, the so-called HD experience from Vudu wasn't one that could come close to comparing with the HD DVD playback. In fact, it was awfully hard to see a vivid difference between that and the perfectly fine (and $2 cheaper) SD download.

A lot of people (including Steve Jobs) like to talk about the imminent arrival of HD downloads, a magic talisman that will help peace-loving technophiles avoid the atrocities of the last shiny-silver-disc format war. But as we've discussed and others have researched, bandwidth, and not resolution, determine final quality.

It's a no-brainer, and one that Vudu is well aware of, especially as it enters its newest round of content offerings. To its credit, the company decided that it's more important to offer high-quality downloads instantly, rather than make people wait for the 8+ hour download that might look more like video from a Blu-ray or HD DVD disc. But can we still call them HD?

In the frames above, you see snapshots I took all at the same time depicting Vudu paused in standard-def and high-def playback, as well as more or less the same frame paused on the HD DVD as well. One could argue that the frames look funny because of the way Vudu pauses, so let me be clear: the difference in playback between the HD DVD and the HD download was huge. My wife laughed, saying "Even I can see the difference." The difference between the SD and HD Vudu downloads was not significant at all. In fact, it was not especially noticeable. Again, to Vudu's credit, the standard def version looks really nice, and both videos started playing the instant I rented them.

The bottom line is that HD downloads are a novelty item now, and they'll probably stay that way until:

• Higher bandwidth permits the rapid download of huge files
• A quality-assurance system is agreed upon where "HD" refers to specific attributes that go beyond frame resolution
• Hollywood deems it fit to start releasing mainstream videos in great quantities in HD—remember, those dudes hold the keys, now and forever, whether we like it or not.
http://gizmodo.com/352392/vudu-test-...eds-to-be-done





Nature Giving Way to Virtual Reality
Randolph E. Schmid

As peopleAs people spend more time communing with their televisions and computers, the impact is not just on their health, researchers say. Less time spent outdoors means less contact with nature and, eventually, less interest in conservation and parks.

Camping, fishing and per capita visits to parks are all declining in a shift away from nature-based recreation, researchers report in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

''Declining nature participation has crucial implications for current conservation efforts,'' wrote co-authors Oliver R. W. Pergams and Patricia A. Zaradic. ''We think it probable than any major decline in the value placed on natural areas and experiences will greatly reduce the value people place on biodiversity conservation.''

''The replacement of vigorous outdoor activities by sedentary, indoor videophilia has far-reaching consequences for physical and mental health, especially in children,'' Pergams said in a statement. ''Videophilia has been shown to be a cause of obesity, lack of socialization, attention disorders and poor academic performance.''

By studying visits to national and state park and the issuance of hunting and fishing licenses the researchers documented declines of between 18 percent and 25 percent in various types of outdoor recreation.

The decline, found in both the United States and Japan, appears to have begun in the 1980s and 1990s, the period of rapid growth of video games, they said.

For example, fishing peaked in 1981 and had declined 25 percent by 2005, the researchers found. Visits to national parks peaked in 1987 and dropped 23 percent by 2006, while hiking on the Appalachian Trial peaked in 2000 and was down 18 percent by 2005.

Japan suffered similar declines, the researchers found, as visits to national parks there dropped by 18 percent between 1991 and 2005.

There was a small growth in backpacking, but that may reflect day trips by some people who previously were campers, wrote Pergams and Zaradic. Pergams is a visiting research assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, while Zaradic is a fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program, Delaware Valley, in Bryn Mawr, Pa.

While fishing declined, hunting held onto most of its market, they found.

''This may be related to various overfishing and pollution issues decreasing access to fish populations, contrasted with exploding deer populations,'' they said.

The research was funded by The Nature Conservancy.

^------

On the Net:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pnas.org

The Nature Conservancy: http://natureconservancy.org

http://www.journalgazette.net/apps/p...template=apart





Spies' Battleground Turns Virtual

Intelligence officials see 3-D online worlds as havens for criminals
Robert O'Harrow Jr.

U.S. intelligence officials are cautioning that popular Internet services that enable computer users to adopt cartoon-like personas in three-dimensional online spaces also are creating security vulnerabilities by opening novel ways for terrorists and criminals to move money, organize and conduct corporate espionage.

Over the last few years, "virtual worlds" such as Second Life and other role-playing games have become home to millions of computer-generated personas known as avatars. By directing their avatars, people can take on alternate personalities, socialize, explore and earn and spend money across uncharted online landscapes.

Nascent economies have sprung to life in these 3-D worlds, complete with currency, banks and shopping malls. Corporations and government agencies have opened animated virtual offices, and a growing number of organizations hold meetings where avatars gather and converse in newly minted conference centers.

Intelligence officials who have examined these systems say they're convinced that the qualities that many computer users find so attractive about virtual worlds -- including anonymity, global access and the expanded ability to make financial transfers outside normal channels -- have turned them into seedbeds for transnational threats.

"The virtual world is the next great frontier and in some respects is still very much a Wild West environment," a recent paper by the government's new Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity said.

"Unfortunately, what started out as a benign environment where people would congregate to share information or explore fantasy worlds is now offering the opportunity for religious/political extremists to recruit, rehearse, transfer money, and ultimately engage in information warfare or worse with impunity."

The government's growing concern seems likely to make virtual worlds the next battlefield in the struggle over the proper limits on the government's quest to improve security through data collection and analysis and the surveillance of commercial computer systems.

Virtual worlds could also become an actual battlefield. The intelligence community has begun contemplating how to use Second Life and other such communities as platforms for cyber weapons that could be used against terrorists or enemies, intelligence officials said. One analyst suggested beginning tests with so-called teams of cyber warfare experts.

The IARPA paper concurred: "What additional things are possible in the virtual world that cannot be done in the real world? The [intelligence community] needs to 'red team' some possible scenarios of use."

The CIA has created a few virtual islands for internal use, such as training and unclassified meetings, government officials said.

Some veterans of privacy debates said they believe that law enforcement and national security authorities are preparing to make a move, through coercion or new laws, to gain access to the giant computer servers where virtual worlds reside.

Jim Dempsey, policy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonpartisan group that monitors privacy issues, said he heard the same worries from the government when cell phones became popular in the 1980s and again when mainstream American logged on to the Internet in the 1990s.

Dempsey said the national security fears are overblown, in part because the country already has legal and technical mechanisms in place to give the government access to digital records it needs.

"They want to control this technology and make it even easier to tap than it already is," Dempsey said. "When the government is finished, every new technology becomes a more powerful surveillance tool than the technology before it."

Questions about the impact of innovations in communications technology are nothing new. Criminals, terrorists and others have used Web sites for more than a decade to recruit, operate scams and trade pornography. Law enforcement and intelligence authorities responded to new technologies by repeatedly seeking out new surveillance authorities.

Intelligence officials said, however, that the spread of virtual worlds has created additional challenges because commercial services do not keep records of communication among avatars. Because of the nature of the systems, the companies also have almost no way of monitoring the creation and use of virtual buildings and training centers, some of them protected by nearly unbreakable passwords.

"Virtual environments provide many opportunities to exchange messages in the clear without drawing unnecessary attention," the IARPA paper said. "Additionally, there are many private channels that can be employed to exchange secret messages."

And there are the numbers. Some marketers and technology observers are predicting explosive growth in the use of virtual worlds in coming years. As more people create avatars, it will become harder to identify bad guys, intelligence officials said. As in the real world, one of the central difficulties is establishing the identity of individuals.

"The challenge that we face is to be able to distinguish the fanatics from the average person looking for some simple enjoyment," said the IARPA paper.

One intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had no evidence of activity by terrorist cells or widespread organized crime in virtual worlds. There have been numerous instances of fraud, harassment and other virtual crimes. Some computer users have used their avatars to destroy virtual buildings.

Last month, Second Life operators shut down a dozen online banks holding virtual currency worth an undetermined amount of actual dollars, after computer users raised questions about whether the banks were paying promised interest.

National security officials have begun working informally to take stock of virtual worlds. That research likely will take on more urgency this year, as companies in other countries prepare to unveil their own virtual worlds.

One such world, called HiPiHi, is being created in China. HiPiHi founders said they want to create ways for avatars to be able to travel freely between its virtual world, Second Life and other systems -- a development that intelligence officials say make it doubly hard to track down the identity of avatars.

In promotional material, HiPiHi officials said that they believe that virtual worlds "are the next phase of the Internet."

"The residents are the Gods of this virtual world; it is a world of limitless possibilities for creativity and self-expression, within a complex social structure and a full functioning economy," the promotional material says.

"Virtual worlds are ready-made havens," said a senior intelligence official who declined to be identified because of the nature of his work. "There's no way to monitor it."

The popularity of virtual worlds has grown despite the technology being in an early stage of development. The systems don't work well on older computers or those with relatively slow connections to the Internet. Though Second Life has more than 12 million registered users, only about 10 percent of those accounts are active. About 50,000 people around the world are on the system at a given moment, according to Linden Lab, which operates Second Life.

Officials from Linden Lab have initiated meetings with people in the intelligence community about virtual worlds. They try to stress that systems to monitor avatar activity and identify risky behavior are built into the technology, according to Ken Dreifach, Linden's deputy general counsel.

Dreifach said that all financial transactions are reviewed electronically, and some are reviewed by people. For investigators, there also are also plenty of trails that avatars and users leave behind.

"There are a real range and depth of electronic footprints," Dreifach said. "We don't disclose those fraud tools."

Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of IBM Entity Analytic Solutions, who has been examining developments in virtual worlds, which have attracted some investment from the company, said there's no way to predict how this technology will develop and what kind of capabilities it will provide -- good or bad. But he believes that virtual worlds are about to become far more popular.

"As the virtual worlds create more and more immersive experiences and as global accessibility to computers increases, I can envision a scenario in which hundreds of millions of people become engaged almost overnight," Jonas said.

Jonas said it's almost a certainty that clandestine activity associated with real criminals and terrorists will flourish in these environments because of the ease, reach and obscurity they offer.

"With these actors there will be organized criminal planning and behavior," he said. "The likelihood that somebody is recruiting, strategizing or planning is almost a certainty."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020503144.html





Satellite Spotters Glimpse Secrets, and Tell Them
John Schwartz

When the government announced last month that a top-secret spy satellite would, in the next few months, come falling out of the sky, American officials said there was little risk to people because satellites fall out of orbit fairly frequently and much of the planet is covered by oceans.

But they said precious little about the satellite itself.

Such information came instead from Ted Molczan, a hobbyist who tracks satellites from his apartment balcony in Toronto, and fellow satellite spotters around the world. They have grudgingly become accustomed to being seen as “propeller-headed geeks” who “poke their finger in the eye” of the government’s satellite spymasters, Mr. Molczan said, taking no offense. “I have a sense of humor,” he said.

Mr. Molczan, a private energy conservation consultant, is the best known of the satellite spotters who, needing little more than a pair of binoculars, a stop watch and star charts, uncover some of the deepest of the government’s expensive secrets and share them on the Internet.

Thousands of people form the spotter community. Many look for historical relics of the early space age, working from publicly available orbital information. Others watch for phenomena like the distinctive flare of sunlight glinting off bright solar panels of some telephone satellites. Still others are drawn to the secretive world of spy satellites, with about a dozen hobbyists who do most of the observing, Mr. Molczan said.

In the case of the mysterious satellite that is about to plunge back to earth, Mr. Molczan had an early sense of which one it was, identifying it as USA-193, which gave out shortly after reaching space in December 2006. It is said to have been built by the Lockheed Corporation and operated by the secretive National Reconnaissance Office.

Another hobbyist, John Locker of Britain, posted photos of the satellite on a Web site, galaxypix.com.

John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a private group in Alexandria, Va., that tracks military and space activities, said the hobbyists exemplified fundamental principles of openness and of the power of technology to change the game.

“It has been an important demystification of these things,” Mr. Pike said, “because I think there is a tendency on the part of these agencies just to try to pretend that they don’t exist, and that nothing can be known about them.”

But the spotters are also pursuing a thoroughly unusual pastime, one that calls for long hours outside, freezing in the winter and sweating in the summer, straining to see a moving light in the sky and hoping that a slip of the finger on the stopwatch does not delete an entire night’s work. And for the adept, there is math. Lots of math.

“It’s somewhat time consuming and tedious,” Mr. Molczan said, acknowledging that the very precise and methodical activities might seem, to the uninitiated, “a close approximation to work.”

When a new spy satellite is launched, the hobbyists will collaborate on sightings around the world to determine its orbit, and even guess at its function, sharing their information through the e-mail network SeeSat-L, which can be found via the Web site satobs.org.

From his 23rd-floor balcony, or the roof of his 32-floor building, Mr. Molzcan will peer through his binoculars at a point in the sky he expects the satellite to cross, which he locates with star charts. When the moving dot appears, he measures the distance it travels across the patch of sky over time, which he can use to calculate factors like speed and direction.

Mr. Molzcan declined a request to visit him in Toronto and to be photographed for this article, saying: “No offense intended, but this is beginning to sound like more of a human interest story than one about the substance of the hobby. My preference is for the latter. Also, I prefer not to have photos of myself published.”

Mr. Locker, who favors a telescope for his camerawork, said that people like him and Mr. Molczan were not, as he put it, “nerdy buffs who lie on our backs and look into the sky and try to undermine governments.” Spotting, he said, is simply a hobby.

“There are people who look at train timetables and go watch trains,” he said. People are drawn to what interests them, he said, and “it’s what draws people to any hobby.”

While recent news coverage has focused on the current satellite’s threat to people when it falls from above, that threat is, statistically, very small. Even when the space shuttle Columbia broke up over Texas five years ago and rained debris over two states, no one on the ground was injured.

Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, noted that 328 satellites had come down in the past five years without injury to anyone. While Mr. Johndroe declined to divulge much about the current satellite aside from the fact that it carries no nuclear material, he said that the government would take responsibility in the remote chance of damage or injury.

The government’s relationship with the hobbyists is not a comfortable one. Spokesmen for the National Reconnaissance Office have stated that they would prefer the hobbyists not publish their information, and suggest that foreign countries try to hide their activities when they know an eye in the sky will be passing overhead.

The satellite spotters acknowledge that this may be so, though they doubt that such tactics are effective. Mr. Molczan said he believed that the hobbyists hurt no one but that “you can’t say with absolute certainty what effect you’re having.”

Mr. Pike said the officials who complained about the hobbyists “don’t like it, but they’ve got to lump it.” Despite the many clever ways that the spy agencies try to minimize the likelihood that their satellites will be spotted, he said, they will be. And that, he said, is a valuable warning: a world with so many eyes on the skies renders deep secrets shallow.

“If Ted can track all these satellites,” Mr. Pike said, “so can the Chinese.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/sc...otters.html?hp





Quantum Teleporting, Yes; the Rest Is Movie Magic
Dennis Overbye

In a battle waged with popcorn, floodlights, chalk and star power, science and art squared off at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology one night last month.

On one side of a vaunted cultural divide were Doug Liman, director of the coming movie “Jumper,” about a young man who discovers he can transport himself anywhere he wants just by thinking about it, and Hayden Christensen, the film’s star.

On the other were a pair of the institute’s physics professors, Edward Farhi and Max Tegmark, experts on the type of physics the movie was purporting to portray, who had been enlisted to view a few scenes from it and talk about science.

In the middle were hundreds of M.I.T. students who had waited for hours to jam into a giant lecture hall known as Room 26-100 and who proved that future scientists and engineers could be just as rowdy and star-struck as the crowds outside the MTV studios in Times Square.

“I guess I wasn’t expecting such a lively group,” Mr. Christensen said.

The evening was the brainchild of Warren Betts, a veteran Hollywood publicist who has helped promote a number of movies with scientific or technological themes, including “Apollo 13.” Mr. Betts said he had gotten excited after a Caltech physicist told him that teleportation was actually an accomplished fact in the quirky realm of quantum physics.

Mr. Betts arranged for clips from the movie, scheduled for a Feb. 14 release, to be shown, and then inveigled Dr. Farhi, an expert on quantum computers, and Dr. Tegmark, a cosmologist, to participate in a panel discussion. They agreed, as long as they could talk about real physics.

“What do I know about movie production?” asked Dr. Farhi, calling himself “clueless.” He said, “If the students learn something, it’s fine, I’m happy.”

The corridor outside M.I.T.’s venerable lecture hall was transformed for the occasion into a red carpet — sans the actual red carpet — lined with television cameras and reporters. At the appointed hour, Mr. Christensen, who played the young Anakin Skywalker in “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones,” and “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith,” began to proceed slowly down the line.

Mr. Liman, the director, meanwhile, confessed to being nervous. “We’re about to see a couple of M.I.T. professors rip me to shreds,” he said. “I hope they appreciate that I tried to respect the physics of the planet we live on.”

Mr. Liman, who directed “The Bourne Identity,” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” said he had been a “physics prodigy” in high school, which had gotten him into Brown University despite a checkered adolescence. He never took a physics class in college, however. “Being good at it made it a little boring,” he said.

He said he had fallen in love with the “Jumper” script — adapted by David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg from a series of young adult novels by Steven Gould — because of its honesty. The first thing the new superhero does with his powers is rob a bank. “The story was as honest as it could be,” Mr. Liman said.

He said he had spent a lot time trying to figure what teleportation would actually look like, never mind what causes it. If a body suddenly disappeared, for example, there would be a rush of air into the vacuum left behind.

Physics, Mr. Liman said, is more connected to filmmaking than one might expect. “I liked problem solving,” he said. “A film,” he added, “is one big problem.”

An hour later, Dr. Farhi and Dr. Tegmark, true to their words, let the air out of the “Jumper” balloon.

In real experiments recently, Dr. Farhi told the movie fans, physicists had managed to “teleport” a single elementary particle, a photon, which transmits light, about one and a half miles, “a little less exotic than what you see in the movie.”

What is actually teleported in these experiments, he explained, is not the particle itself but all the quantum information about the particle.

To accomplish this is no small matter. Among other things, the teleporters have to create a pair of so-called entangled particles, which maintain a kind of spooky correlation even though they are separated by light years. Both of them exist in a kind of quantum fog of possibility until one or the other is observed. Measuring one particle instantly affects its separated-at-birth twin no matter how far away. If one is found to be spinning clockwise, for example, the other will be found to be spinning counter clockwise.

In order to use this magic to “teleport” a third particle, Dr. Farhi emphasized, you have to send a conventional signal between the entangled twins, and that takes time, according to Einstein. “You cannot get that thing over there faster than the speed of light,” Dr. Farhi said, to cheers from the crowd.

The real lure, he said, is not transportation, but secure communication. If anybody eavesdrops on the teleportation signal, the whole thing doesn’t work, Dr. Farhi said. Another use is in quantum computing, which would exploit the ability of quantum bits of information to have different values, both one and zero, at the same time to perform certain calculations, like factoring large prime numbers, much faster than ordinary computers.

As Dr. Tegmark said, “Nobody can hack your credit card, and then you can build a quantum computer and hack everybody else’s card.”

One student asked the physicists if they rolled their eyes at the scientific miscues in movies. That was too much like work, protested Dr. Farhi, who said he was more interested in the acting and the characters. Dr. Tegmark said that even inaccurate science fiction movies could inspire scientists to think. You could see something that you think is impossible, he said, but that might start you thinking. “Why is that impossible? It can trigger a train of thought,” he said.

“The hard part of science is finding the right questions,” Dr. Tegmark said.

Asked if science mattered, Mr. Liman said that he always tried to get to know the reality behind a film, but that it was not always so easy. One professor he approached for advice about “Jumper” threw him out of his office, he said.

He went on to describe his attempts to portray the teleportation jumps realistically. Wind would rush to fill the vacuum left by the departing body, he said, and papers would fly around.

“Yeah,” Dr. Tegmark said.

Under some conditions moisture would condense out of the air into clouds.

The physicists nodded. “In any other place, I would sound very scientific,” Mr. Liman said, to laughter and applause.

By now the divide between the two cultures was getting as fuzzy and blurred as some quantum fog.

Dr. Tegmark asked what scientists could do to help the movie makers.

“Watch ‘Jumper,’ ” Mr. Christensen answered, “and then get to work and figure out how to do it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/science/05mit.html





And the award goes to…

Taiwan Group Guilty of 90 Percent of Microsoft Piracy
Simon Burns

Microsoft claims that a small group led by a recently jailed Taiwanese man was the source of almost all high quality pirated copies of its software up until his arrest in 2004.

The claim suggests that Microsoft practically wiped out commercial piracy of its products with the arrest of Huang Jer-sheng, the owner of Taiwan-based software distributor Maximus Technology.

Microsoft announced today that Huang and his associates were responsible for the "production and distribution of more than 90 percent of the high-quality counterfeit Microsoft software products either seized by law enforcement or test-purchased around the world".

Huang was recently sentenced to four years in jail by a Taiwanese court. Three co-defendants received between 18 months and three years in jail. Six individuals were originally arrested in the case.

Microsoft named two CD replication plants in Taiwan (Chungtek Hightech Enterprise and Cinway Technology) as the main producers of CDs for the piracy ring. Counterfeiters in southern China were also involved.

"After Chungtek was raided for intellectual property infringements in October 2001, Maximus ended the partnership and shifted its illegal operation to underground optical disk plants in the Shenzhen and Dongguan areas," said Taiwan's Intellectual Property Office.

Even holographic labels were duplicated. "A laser label expert was hired to conduct technology transfer of copying laser labels of the legal products," Taiwanese authorities reported after Huang was arrested.

"The finished products with their professionally made packaging, laser labels, warranty cards and instruction manuals made them impossible for consumers to question their authenticity."

Microsoft said in a statement released today: "The prosecutions of this international ring of counterfeiters, led by Huang Jer-sheng, mark the culmination of a number of complex global investigations conducted over a six-year period which resulted in the total dismantling of this criminal counterfeiting syndicate."
http://itnews.com.au/News/69505,taiw...ft-piracy.aspx





Pirating the 2008 Oscars (Now with 6 Years of Data)
Waxy

Every year, the Academy tries to stop Oscar films from leaking online. And every year, they leak all the same. I've been tracking Oscar piracy since 2004, but I've decided to up the ante, releasing all the underlying data and extending it to 2003. Six years of Oscar piracy data on all 186 nominated films from 2003 to 2008 -- including US release dates for Academy screeners, cams, telesyncs, R5/telecines, screener leaks and retail DVD rips -- can all be viewed or downloaded below.

This year, all but six of the 34 nominated films were available in DVD quality by the last week of January. This is about consistent with past years, but we're seeing a shift towards studios releasing DVDs closer to their theatrical date. This trend, combined with the new availability of high-quality Region 5 rips from overseas, is making the screener leak less meaningful. After all, why bother releasing the screener if the retail DVD or a direct-from-film transfer is already out?

Collecting this data took me all day, so I'm going to publish my analysis and pretty charts tomorrow.
http://www.waxy.org/archive/2008/02/04/pirating.shtml





Horror Auteur Is Unfinished With the Undead
Katrina Onstad

WE get the zombies we deserve.

Over five films and four decades the director George A. Romero’s slack-jawed undead have been our tour guides through a brainless, barbaric America that seems barely hospitable to the living. They lurch across a bigoted civil-rights-era countryside (“Night of the Living Dead,” 1968), claw at a suburban shopping mall (“Dawn of the Dead,” 1978) and wander dazed in an anxious post-9/11 world (“Land of the Dead,” 2005).

Mr. Romero is now 68, and his influence has long saturated the cultural mainstream, but he’s exhumed his living dead yet again for “Diary of the Dead,” opening Friday. The zombies’ — and Mr. Romero’s — current bugaboo? The blogging, uploading, navel-gazing infotainment age.

“It’s scary out there, man,” Mr. Romero said, gesturing at a laptop as he sat in his apartment here, chain-smoking Marlboros. “There’s just so much information, and it’s absolutely uncontrolled. Half of it isn’t even information. It’s entertainment or opinion. I wanted to do something that would get at this octopus. It may be the darkest film I’ve done since ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ ”

The only sign that Mr. Romero, the world’s foremost zombie auteur, lives in the small, cat-toy-filled apartment was a framed photo by the front door showing him in a group hug with some cheerful ghouls. “My little friends,” he said.

Since Mr. Romero’s head-eating friends made their debut four decades ago in the cult classic “Night of the Living Dead” — now in the National Film Registry — zombie variations have kept coming. Last year alone brought “I Am Legend”; Robert Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” in “Grindhouse”; “Resident Evil: Extinction”; and “28 Weeks Later.”

Mr. Romero’s latest offering seems modest in comparison. “Diary of the Dead” is about a group of Pittsburgh college students shooting a cheapo mummy movie in the woods when the zombies start swarming. These kids will go down filming, and the result is metazombie; a film within the film is called “The Death of Death.”

Shot for under $4 million in Toronto (Mr. Romero’s hometown for three years or so, since he decamped from Pittsburgh) and starring a largely unknown Canadian cast, “Diary of the Dead” also marks a return to Mr. Romero’s signature filmmaking style: cheap, local and studio free. After the $16 million Universal production “Land of the Dead,” starring Dennis Hopper, Mr. Romero decided to scale back. (The movie made about $21 million domestically.)

“It was a grueling shoot, and it was all getting too big, too ‘Thunderdome,’ ” Mr. Romero said. “I wanted to make something with some film students, find a dentist that would put up a quarter of a million and do it way under the radar for DVD release.”

Instead Mr. Romero’s producing partner, Peter Grunwald, showed the script to the Los Angeles company Artfire Films, which put up the money. “But we had absolute control,” Mr. Romero said, emphatically. The Weinstein Company bought North American distribution rights.

“Diary of the Dead” enters a horror market dominated by all-gore-all-the-time franchises like “Saw” and “Hostel.” “I don’t get the torture porn films,” Mr. Romero said. “They’re lacking metaphor. For me the gore is always a slap in the face saying: ‘Wait a minute. Look at this other thing.’ ”

The man who made entrails-chomping a horror staple shows restraint in “Diary of the Dead.” Sure, a daughter catches her mom devouring her dad’s heart, but Mr. Romero doesn’t linger on it. The moderation was partly a function of the plot: the film is supposedly shot by a film student running for his life, with no time for close-ups. But Mr. Romero said he also felt little need to add to the landslide of violent images in the news.

“I was glad to back off the gore in the current political climate,” Mr. Romero said. “I thought that because we were using the subjective camera, it would be spookier to stay away, not to get too close. Being removed from the horror is what’s scary, like watching an accident.”

Using stock footage from recent disasters like Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Romero makes a dark joke out of a zombified, politically inert populace. The video gamer kids in the movie are either watching horror or recording it, forever at a distance.

“I always thought of the zombies as being about revolution, one generation consuming the next,” said Mr. Romero, who has a gentle hippie quality about him (gray ponytail, propensity to use the word “man”). “But I wasn’t trying to come down hard on these kids particularly. This blogosphere thing is our time. All my films are snapshots of North America at a particular moment. I have an ability within the genre to be able to do that.” Among the masters of horror, Mr. Romero joked, he has the “the Michael Moore slot.”

Mr. Romero was raised in the Bronx, a horror-comic fan and self-described “film freak” who would ride the subway into Manhattan to rent the reels of “The Tales of Hoffmann” (1951), an outsized Moira Shearer musical based on the Jacques Offenbach opera. On those rare occasions when the movie wasn’t available, he was told that the only other person who took it out was around his age. “And that kid was Martin Scorsese,” Mr. Romero said, grinning.

He briefly studied film and drama at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (then Carnegie Institute of Technology), landing his first paid directing gig shooting documentary segments for the public television children’s show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” “Mr. Rogers Gets a Tonsillectomy” may have been his first experiment with gore.

In 1967 Mr. Romero and a group of friends pulled together $114,000 and ventured into the woods south of Pittsburgh to shoot “Night of the Living Dead,” a black-and-white horror film inspired by the Richard Matheson novel “I Am Legend.” (Mr. Romero said he hasn’t seen the recent Will Smith version.) The book, about the last man alive in Los Angeles, was more vampire than zombie; Mr. Romero drafted his own mythology of the undead.

“Before George zombies in movies were voodoo,” said Max Brooks, author of “The Zombie Survival Guide.” “He redefined the zombie as a flesh eater created from science, not magic. He took the zombie from fringe horror to apocalyptic horror. Suddenly they could be anywhere.”

Mr. Romero also tacked social commentary to the genre’s escapism, initially by accident. Because he gave the best audition, a black actor, Duane Jones, was cast as the heroic lead, a role never intended for an African-American. Mr. Jones plays a good man protecting (mostly) odious white people; for his selfless actions he’s rewarded with a fatal gunshot from a lynchlike mob.

“We started to realize the casting had changed the meaning of the film while we were making it,” Mr. Romero said. “The night we finished, we’re driving to New York, with the print in the trunk of the car, and heard on the radio that Martin Luther King had been shot. We went, ‘Oh, no, this is good for us.’ ”

A decade later, after “Night of the Living Dead” had been championed in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema and established a following, Mr. Romero set the sequel in a shopping mall. “Dawn of the Dead” is poppy and cartoonish, with zombie escalator gags and canned-music-theme slayings.

“Other zombie movies don’t match George’s eye for satire or wit,” the actor Simon Pegg wrote in an e-mail message. Mr. Pegg was a writer and star of the 2004 zombie sendup “Shaun of the Dead.” “Even films such as ‘28 Days Later,’ which I really enjoyed, delivered the allegory but with a very straight face. George seems able to scare, disgust, challenge and amuse, simultaneously.”

Mr. Pegg’s voice can be heard in “Diary of the Dead” as a Cronkite-esque announcer booming doom across the airwaves. Mr. Romero also got Wes Craven, Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro and Stephen King to contribute their voices — a Who’s Who of nerd-boy film.

“He’s the kind of director other directors really admire, the last baby boomer who has yet to sell out,” Mr. Brooks said of Mr. Romero. “He appeals to the rest of us who would love to be that pure but who still like to pay our bills.”

Mr. Romero said he’s never seen much money from his films. He’s had many failures too, like the Reagan-era “Day of the Dead” and most of his nonzombie films, including “Monkey Shines” (1988) and “The Dark Half” (1993). (An exception is the 1982 film “Creepshow.”)

Sealing his indie credibility, or his financial fate, he left Pittsburgh for Toronto. Mr. Romero filmed a straight-to-DVD movie called “Bruiser” there in 2000 and liked the crews so much that he eventually moved there. He is separated from his wife and former collaborator, the actress Christine Forrest, and now lives with his girlfriend.

In Toronto and everywhere he goes in the iMovie age he satirizes, people slip Mr. Romero homemade zombie movies. “There’s enough of them out there already,” he said with a sigh, though he admitted that he’s working on a sequel to “Diary of the Dead.” “It always comes down to: ‘Well, what’s your idea? What’s the film about?’ Because zombies alone. ...” He laughed. “Like, get off it, man.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/movies/10onst.html





Will Disney Keep Us Amused?
Brooks Barnes

VISIT Disney’s California Adventure — a 55-acre theme park next door to the fabled progenitor of the modern amusement Mecca, Disneyland — and you will find a noisy reminder of what happens when a company loses its focus and cuts corners.

The Walt Disney Company built the park on the cheap in 2001, and many rides are copies of familiar carnival workhorses like the Ferris wheel. A lack of landscaping can leave guests sweltering. Outdoor shows were borrowed from other Disney properties. And the theme, built around tributes to California, is modest except for an occasionally unintentional ghost-town atmosphere: The park draws about 6 million visitors a year, a trickle compared with the 15 million who swarm Disneyland.

Now, Disney is embarking on a $1.1 billion, five-year effort to get California Adventure on track. The blueprints call for ripping out ho-hum rides and adding elaborate new ones, rebuilding the park’s entrance — a hodgepodge of turnstiles, a miniature Golden Gate Bridge and pastel tile murals — to shift the focus to Disney iconography.

In June, Disney will unveil a glimpse of the shoot-for-the-moon bet it is making on California Adventure’s makeover, with the introduction of a ride called Toy Story Mania. More than three years in the making, and estimated to cost about $80 million, the attraction essentially puts guests inside a video game.

Riders, wearing 3-D glasses, board vehicles that career through an old-fashioned carnival midway, operated by characters from the popular “Toy Story” film franchise. Vehicles stop at game booths — 56 giant screens programmed with 3-D animation from Pixar — and riders play virtual-reality versions of classic carnival games.

But much more is riding on the attraction than a complex turnaround of just one theme park. Toy Story Mania, which Disney is also installing in Florida, reflects the larger pressures and challenges facing the company’s $10.6 billion parks and resorts business. To stay relevant to younger, digitally savvy visitors while also delivering growth to investors, Disney, the company that invented the modern theme park, knows that it has to devise a new era of spectacular attractions rooted in technology.

One-upmanship increasingly drives this intensely competitive business, and Disney’s rivals are also trying harder to gain market share. Universal Studios, part of NBC Universal, has more than quadrupled its spending on new rides, introducing attractions in California and Florida that are based on “The Simpsons.” Universal is teaming up with Warner Brothers to bring a small Harry Potter-theme park to Florida in late 2009. Niche players like SeaWorld and Legoland are also muscling in on Disney’s territory.

At its core, however, Toy Story Mania represents an effort to solve a puzzle that poses a much larger threat to Disney and the broader amusement park business. The quickening pace of daily living, advances in personal technology and the rapidly changing media landscape are combining to reshape what consumers expect out of a theme park, Disney executives say.

Toy Story Mania, which carries a modest price tag compared with some other Disney efforts, demonstrates one way that the company is fighting back, said Jay Rasulo, the chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts.

“Bigger and more expensive is not necessarily the answer,” Mr. Rasulo said. “You want people leaving thinking, ‘Wow, only Disney could do that.’ ”

Consumers’ fixation on instant gratification and personalization has been reshaping the entertainment industry for some time, but it has finally caught up to the theme park business in visible ways. For instance, Disney has spent much more effort — and money — developing ways to entertain people as they stand in line for Toy Story Mania.

An animatronic figure with an estimated $1 million price tag will sing songs and interact with guests as they wait. Employees dressed as “Toy Story” characters will stroll among the crowds.

“There’s an erosion of patience,” said Bruce Vaughn, the chief creative executive for Walt Disney Imagineering, the company’s development group. “People’s tolerance for lines is decreasing at a rapid rate.”

Mr. Rasulo said that younger visitors, in particular, expect customized entertainment. So Toy Story Mania’s computers will accommodate riders of various skill levels.

“Guests are pretty much no longer interested in being passive viewers,” Mr. Rasulo said.

To address shifting tastes, the broader amusement park industry will have to rewrite its operating rules, said Jerry Aldrich, the founder of Amusement Industry Consulting. “Disney is already there, but a lot of parks are just waking up to this,” he said.

The health of the parks and resorts unit is crucial to Disney’s overall performance. Its lucrative sports unit, ESPN, makes more money, and its movie studio basks in Hollywood glamour. But the parks, where people interact with Mickey and his pals, are the reason that the Disney brand is so powerful, analysts say. As the theme parks go, so goes Disney.

Lately, Wall Street has been sounding alarm bells about the unit — and not just about California Adventure. While Disneyland and the cluster of Florida parks that make up Disney World have been churning out record profits on strong increases in attendance, some investors worry that the troubled domestic economy will tear a hole in the business. In late January, a Citigroup analyst downgraded Disney’s stock to a sell, citing concern about lower demand for hotel rooms at the resorts.

DISNEY strongly rejects the skepticism, and some other analysts agree. Disney’s chief financial officer, Thomas O. Staggs, said the company saw no indication that consumers were cutting back. “We are pleased with the current pace of business at our parks, particularly given the record attendance we achieved last year,” he told analysts on Tuesday during a conference call, held as the company released fiscal first-quarter earnings.

Vacationers from Europe and Asia, benefiting from a weak dollar, could pick up some of the slack in the event of an economic downturn, but that could lead to cannibalization — Disney needs those same visitors to patronize theme parks in Paris, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Although its performance has drastically improved from its early days, Disneyland Resort Paris is still struggling after 10 years of changes and heavy capital investment. The park in Japan is cruising right along, but attendance at nearby Hong Kong Disneyland, the company’s newest park, has fallen more than 25 percent since its 2005 opening. Disney told analysts on Tuesday that attendance in Hong Kong has recently “improved significantly” because of new promotions.

To make certain that Toy Story Mania is a hit — part of a strategic effort to keep mining revenue from the 13-year-old “Toy Story” franchise — Disney is pulling every lever in its vast arsenal.

Pixar, the Disney-owned studio working on “Toy Story 3” for a 2010 release, contributed animation and general creative advice. Disney VR Studios, the company’s video game unit, customized software, while the parks and resorts unit handled the heavy lifting of design and construction. The media networks division, which includes ABC, will help publicize the ride once it opens — along with hundreds of other promotional partners.

“We have an incredible number of engines at this company, and every one is firing around this franchise,” Mr. Rasulo said.

WORK on Toy Story Mania got under way on a stiflingly hot September day in 2005, when a team of Disney creative developers went to the Los Angeles County Fair. The goal was to research how carnival games operate.

Two developers, Kevin Rafferty and Robert Coltrin, had devised an idea for a new California Adventure ride that would juxtapose the old-fashioned romance of a carnival midway with high-tech video game elements. They had a hunch that “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2,” the Pixar films about toys coming to life, would provide a good theme. But they didn’t know much about carnival games.

“We looked at each other and said, ‘Are the games we remember from our childhoods even relevant anymore?’ ” Mr. Coltrin said.

At the fair, the two were thrilled as they walked through rows of game booths — wooden structures that carnival operators call “stick joints” — to find crowds enjoying classic games like the ring toss and water guns. “We were like, ‘Score!’ and gave each other a high-five,” Mr. Coltrin recalled.

Using digital cameras, members of the development team documented details, from the colors of the canvas covering each booth — red and yellow — to how far apart the games were spaced. They quickly ruled out some games as options for the ride. “Toss a coin in a cup didn’t really do it for us,” said Chrissie Allen, a senior show producer.

But other games, like one in which customers threw darts at balloons, piqued their interest. “We thought, ‘This just might work,’ ” Ms. Allen said.

Reassembling at Disney’s offices in Glendale, Calif., the team worked on the concept that would become Toy Story Mania. Because carnivals sell commotion, there would be lots of flashing lights, barkers trying to capture riders’ attention, buzzers and bells.

Mr. Rafferty and Mr. Coltrin dreamed up a fanciful story: The classic toys in “Toy Story” had come to life and staged a carnival under their owner’s bed while he was away at dinner. Little Bo Peep would operate the balloon darts; Ham, the talking piggy bank, would cheer riders as they tossed virtual eggs at barn animals. The culmination would be “Woody’s Rootin’ Tootin’ Gallery,” a twist on old-fashioned shooting galleries.

They would use full-scale 3-D animation, a first for a Disney ride. That, Mr. Vaughn said, would make riders feel as if they were inside a video game or a virtual world. “We look at it as gaming meets immersive storytelling,” he said.

While Mr. Vaughn and his colleagues were cogitating in the fall of 2005, Disney had its hands full. Robert A. Iger had just taken over the company after the exit of Michael D. Eisner and was working to extend Disney’s partnership with Pixar, an effort that would result in a $7.4 billion acquisition.

When Mr. Rasulo and his team presented Mr. Iger with plans for Toy Story Mania, Mr. Iger was interested but cautious. Would that dovetail with much larger efforts to overhaul the entire park? The ride could handle up to 1,500 riders an hour. Was that enough? An improved relationship with Pixar looked promising, but what if a deal couldn’t be reached? Would that hinder plans to build a lavish ride around Pixar’s core creative property?

But Mr. Iger liked a couple of the important parts of the proposal. Imagineers (Disney’s term for creative developers) suggested building versions of the ride at the same time in California and Florida — a Disney first — to leverage the development costs. Another component involved the ease with which the ride could be rethemed every season.

“The chance to take simple games that people have loved playing for generations and pairing them with cutting-edge technology just sounded exhilarating to everybody,” Ms. Allen said.

BUILDING elaborate models is among the first formal steps in creating a Disney attraction. Engineers, paying attention to scale and sight lines, want to find out how a planned addition would affect the existing park.

Models are built on large tables equipped with wheels. The company keeps room-size models of entire parks, and engineers will eventually wheel the new model into that area to see how it looks.

To give birth to Toy Story Mania, Mr. Rafferty and Mr. Coltrin went to work turning drawings of the ride into foam models, toiling in the same 1950s-era building in suburban Los Angeles where Walt Disney himself once tinkered.

Tweaks started to happen. The team added turrets to the top of the ride for a more dramatic flair. They shifted the direction of the facade by a few degrees to make it more visible from the park entrance. “And we knew at this stage that we wanted a little piece of magic out in front as a tease to people as they waited in line,” Mr. Coltrin said.

Upstairs, designers entered blueprints for the ride into a computer program. This would allow them to start building and refining the entire project, which is made up of 150 computers, with 90 of them moving around on the ride vehicles and communicating with one another via a secured wireless network. With a click of a mouse, developers could jump to any spot inside in the vehicles for a virtual dip into how the experience might look to someone on the ride.

“We don’t want anybody to be able to see multiple versions of Woody at the same time, and seconds make a difference,” said Mark Mine, the technical concept designer. “Every part of the ride has to be magical.

“It is much easier and less expensive to do this before the concrete has been poured,” he added. “As rides become more complicated, your ability to tweak in the field gets harder and much more expensive.”

Across the street, in a cold, unmarked garage, Ms. Allen helped to conduct “play tests” on rudimentary versions of the ride. More than 400 people of all ages — all had signed strict nondisclosure agreements — sat on a plywood vehicle set up in front of a projection screen and played various versions of the games. Disney workers studied their reactions and interviewed them afterward.

“We were looking to see if some effects were too scary,” Ms. Allen said, “or if there wasn’t enough laughing happening during certain sequences.”

Among the discoveries: People wanted to be able to compare scores after they were finished playing, while some children had a hard time reaching the cannonlike firing controller, christened by Disney as a “spring action shooter.” Engineers added a computer screen to vehicles to display scores and installed the controls on movable lap bars.

“We were trying to find out things we didn’t even know to ask about,” said Sue Bryan, a senior show producer.

The ride’s psychological components started to take shape during this phase. Disney decided that riders were happier when they got a bigger visual payoff. (One of Little Bo Peep’s balloons now pops with greater force when hit with a virtual dart and a blast of air shoots into a rider’s face.) A game involving shooting at a paper target was dropped. (“It was hard to make paper interesting,” Ms. Bryan said.) And developers decided that the last game before the exit needed to be the easiest, so riders would feel that they were coming out as winners, even if they weren’t very good.

After Disney closed the Pixar deal, in January 2006, Toy Story Mania became more elaborate. Mr. Iger wanted Pixar — and particularly one of its co-founders, John Lasseter, who had worked as a skipper on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland after college — to contribute to creative advances in the parks. Disney had incorporated Pixar movies into its theme parks before, but Pixar’s involvement in those efforts was modest, Mr. Vaughn said.

“The minute Pixar became 100 percent part of the family, it could go whole hog and dive in,” he said.

One of Mr. Lasseter’s major concerns about Toy Story Mania centered on the animation, various developers said. Disney had hired an outside contractor to handle it, but Mr. Lasseter insisted that Pixar staff members who were involved in creating the films should also work on the ride.

The Disney team had also decided to leave out Buzz Lightyear, the modern spaceman toy in the films, because he was already showcased in an older ride called Astro Blasters. But Pixar felt that the character was essential to the “Toy Story” franchise. Buzz will now be a host of a game, and he shares top billing on the ride’s marquee.

Creating what Mr. Coltrin had called “a little piece of magic” was another area of special attention for Mr. Lasseter and his lieutenants. To entertain people as they waited in line, the developers decided to place one of Disney’s signature animatronic figures outside. It would draw attention like a carnival barker, but also be sophisticated enough to interact one on one with guests, adding another element of customization.

Only one “Toy Story” figure was considered for the role: Mr. Potato Head.

WORK on Mr. Potato Head started last year in a heavily guarded Disney research plant a few miles from the company’s headquarters in Burbank, Calif. Developers had to make a five-foot-tall plastic potato sing, dance and seemingly hold conversations with people at random. The robot also had to be able to remove his ear and put it back on.

“It’s all in the math,” said Jimmy A. Thomas, the lead mechanical designer.

When Walt Disney introduced animatronics in the 1960s, coining the word in the process, his creations moved in simple ways through the use of pneumatic valves and hydraulic pumps. The children in the It’s a Small World attraction wowed patrons simply by blinking their eyes and bowing.

Modern visitors expect much more. Mr. Potato Head — with help from a dozen video cameras, several computers, an unseen ride operator and a $1 million budget — will be able to make his mouth form words, a first for Disney animatronics.

The comedian Don Rickles, whose gravelly voice brought the character to life in the films, was hired to record 750 words and four songs. The hidden ride operator, armed with a computer and cameras that scan the crowd, will then choose phrases based on the actions and appearance of people standing in front of it. (“Hey, you in the red baseball hat.”)

The goal was to make the character so perfect that it looked as if it had just stepped out of the movies. Pixar executives tightly monitored every detail and helped direct Mr. Rickles. At a recent taping, the Pixar team put him through his paces.

“Let’s put a little more chuckle in that line,” said Roger Gould, Pixar’s creative director, sitting in a recording studio as 10 other executives and engineers took notes and adjusted instruments.

Mr. Rickles complied, repeating a line that would play if the ride stopped unexpectedly. “Folks, we’re having a little delay here,” he said. “For your safety, please stay seated inside the game tram.”

Among Disneyphiles, at least, the wait for Toy Story Mania to open is unbearable. Blogs like Blue Sky Disney and Mice Age, which are not affiliated with the company, have been chronicling minute details of the construction. (“The first ride vehicles have just arrived in California from their production facility in Osaka, Japan!”)

Al Lutz, the publisher of Mice Age and a critic of what he calls California Adventure’s “cheap strip-mall stucco” aesthetic, says fans are keen to see the ride’s over-the-top details. Disney is, after all, a company that studied how the sun struck the earth differently in various locations to determine the color of paint to use on the fairy-tale castle at the center of each resort.

“Young people are going to be fighting to be first in line,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/bu...ia/10ride.html





AT&T’s Broadband Harvest Strategy
Saul Hansell

UPDATED: Details from AT&T are at the end of the post.

AT&T is raising the price for its broadband data services by $5 a month, as first reported by The Chicago Tribune. It now offers DSL data service at $15, $20 and $25 a month, depending on the speed.

Craig E. Moffett, a telecommunications analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., wrote in a note to clients that this move shows that the price war between cable and phone companies that had been anticipated is not going to occur. The telcos have priced DSL service far lower than cable operators. But instead of cable companies lowering prices to close the gap, the phone companies, he wrote, are raising their prices. He said that prices for some phone company services, like call forwarding and caller ID, are being increased by as much as 300 percent.

Indeed, he says that prices are going up at phone companies, cable companies and satellite TV providers for all manner of services and options. He called this a “harvest” strategy — the companies are trying to acquire customers with low prices and then reap profits several years later with fee increases.

Quote:
The uniform direction of these price increases makes one issue clear, at least to us: the TelCos, cable operators and DBS providers will compete aggressively for voice, video and data customers -– but likely not on price. Across the board, the approach taken by each provider reflects an understanding of the benefits of pricing up the base rather than pricing down service to gain flow share as growth slows.
With Time Warner Cable testing caps on bandwidth for its broadband service, I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ll hear about data prices going up.

UPDATE: An AT&T spokesman e-mailed some details of the changes:

Quote:
The price change ($5) is in our 13-state traditional region (California, Nev., Texas, Okla., Missouri, Ark., Kansas, Ohio, Ill., Ind., Wis., Mich,. CT). The change will not occur in the 9 Southeast states.

The current pricing:
– Basic (768 Kbps): $14.99 (will change to $19.95)
– Express (1.5 Mbps) : $19.99 (will change to $25)
– Pro (3 Mbps) services.: $24.99 (will change to $30)

There is no price change for our 6 Mbps and 10 Mbps (this is only available to U-verse customers) services. Also, there is no price change for the $10 DSL service (768 Kbps) that we offer to customers who have never had DSL from AT&T before. Also, there is no change for customer who sign up for our 768 Kbps stand-alone DSL offer ($19.95).

The new pricing will be in effect for new customers signing up for service beginning Feb. 16. For month-to-month customers (those who are not on a contract), the change will begin to take affect in March. Customers who just signed up for month-to-month won’t see a change at this time.
He added this explanation for the reason behind the change:

Quote:
Consumer broadband usage is exploding, driven by trends like video and music downloading, photo sharing, and online gaming. We invest billions of dollars each year to stay ahead of these trends and deliver a quality broadband experience. We remain committed to offering the best broadband pricing in the marketplace. We are making a $5 price adjustment for some levels of service to better reflect the value of our broadband service and market conditions. Even with this adjustment, our pricing still beats cable’s standard pricing across the majority of our markets.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...vest-strategy/





Comcast Tweaks Terms of Service in Wake of Throttling Uproar
Eric Bangeman

Months after third parties were able to demonstrate that Comcast was throttling some BitTorrent (and Lotus Notes) traffic, the cable giant has quietly changed its terms of service. Comcast updated the ToS on January 25—the first update in two years, according to company spokesperson Charlie Douglas—to more explicitly spell out its policies on traffic management.

According to Section III of the revised ToS, Comcast "uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards." The company points out that it is not alone in the practice, saying that "all major" ISPs engage in some form of traffic shaping. Comcast does it to keep its subscribers from suffering the heartaches of "spam, viruses, security attacks, network congestion, and other risks and degradations of service" and to "deliver the best possible Internet experience to all of its customers."

The revised language exactly mirrors that of the FCC's 2005 Internet Policy Statement, which allows ISPs to engage in "reasonable network management." At the same time, subscribers are entitled to run lawful applications and services, access their choice of lawful content, and hook up any hardware as long as it doesn't harm the network.

Not long after Comcast's traffic management practices came to light, the company was hit with a class-action lawsuit by a disgruntled subscriber. Online video provider Vuze complained to the FCC, and the Commission officially opened its investigation of the cable company in mid-January.

Since the investigation began, the FCC has been bombarded with comments from angry users. "If you so much as open a BitTorrent client on a computer on the Comcast network, your entire connection drops to almost a crawl," says one comment. Another user: "I have experienced this throttling of bandwidth in sharing open-source software, e.g. Knoppix and Open Office. Also I see considerable differences in speed ftp sessions vs. html. They are obviously limiting speed in ftp as well."

Comcast has denied throttling BitTorrent traffic, saying that the ISP just "delays" or "postpones" it on occasion. One analogy used by a Comcast executive was that of trying to make a phone call and getting a busy signal for a time, until the call actually goes through. A more accurate explanation of Comcast's use of TCP reset packets, to build on the phone analogy, would be talking on the phone with someone and then both of you hearing the other's voice saying "hang up." That's the effect of the forged reset packets: convincing the BitTorrent clients that the other(s) have stopped responding.

Douglas told Ars that the change in the ToS was made to better clarify the company's policies. "We updated the terms of service as part of our normal course of business," he said.

Comcast's decision to affirm its traffic management practices in the newly revised ToS is a welcome baby step towards greater transparency. Subscribers (disclosure: Comcast is my ISP) would love to see even more transparency from the company, which remains cagey when it comes to its nebulous usage caps as well as what type of traffic is liable to be "delayed."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ng-uproar.html





Pay Per Gig
Steven Levy

If you are an Internet-crazy movie lover in Beaumont, Tex., life may soon take a miserable turn for you.

Time Warner Cable, which also sells broadband via its Road Runner service, has chosen your city for a pricing experiment. If you have plans to sign up and watch lots of high-definition flicks using, say, the new iTunes digital rental program announced last month, start saving now, because Time Warner is going to tally up those gigabytes. You know that feeling that mobile phone users get when they exceed their allotted minutes and get a heart-stopping tariff for overage charges? Some Beaumont cinephiles could get the same infarction from their Road Runner bills.

The experiment doesn't necessarily mean the rest of us will soon see a dramatic change in the way we pay for our broadband Internet; cable giant Comcast says it's also evaluating the concept, but other broadband providers aren't indicating they'll adopt the scheme. (They all have their own ideas, though, about getting returns on their broadband investments.) But Time Warner's move illuminates some of the troubling issues facing the United States in the Internet era, where, in terms of penetration, we are in 24th place -- behind Estonia -- in the international broadband competition.

The news broke about Time Warner's plan from a leaked internal memo that company spokesman Alex Dudley confirms as genuine. The Beaumont trial will be a test of "consumption-based billing." The reason for the change, he says, is that some users are unfairly piling up gigabytes of goodies on their digital plates. "As few as 5 percent of our customers use 50 percent of the network," he says, adding that these bandwidth hogs are commonly denizens of seamy peer-to-peer file-sharing networks; one of these gluttons downloaded the equivalent of 1,500 high-definition movies in a month.

It sounds reasonable for Time Warner to ask big-time freeloaders to pay their way. But talking to Dudley, I get the impression that it won't just be flagrant over-indulgers who wind up paying more. Indeed, he acknowledges that TW hopes such a plan will get all its customers thinking about how much media they consume on the Net. TW envisions offering plans capped at 5, 10, 20 and 40 gigabytes. Five gigs gets you barely two movies and a couple of TV shows, not counting the normal Web surfing, music streaming and e-mail. Clearly it won't just be inductees to the LimeWire Hall of Fame who are hit with excess charges.

Those penalties could be rough. Bell Canada, which meters service in some plans, charges customers who go over the limit $7.50 per additional gigabyte. (The Canadian dollar is worth about as much as the U.S. version these days.) That would jack up the $2.99 iTunes rental fee for "The Magnificent Seven" by 10 bucks. A high-def movie, typically 4 gigs, could cost you $30 more. (Bell Canada offers an Unlimited Usage Insurance Plan for $25 a month.)

You would think that consumer activists would be lining up against this idea, but some are holding their fire, largely because the experiment will measure how many bits a customer uses but doesn't care where those bits come from. This is in contrast to behavior that violates the principle of "net neutrality," which asserts that providers shouldn't be able tilt the digital playing field to favor their favorite Internet services (i.e. their partners or those who pay them). The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Digital populists are more concerned with pressuring the FCC to enforce its principles that ban companies from selectively blocking Internet content. In the wake of one possible violation -- Comcast slowing traffic involving certain peer-to-peer transmissions -- several groups have petitioned the agency to adopt and enforce more specific regulations. Metering isn't seen as part of that problem.

There is, however, a net neutrality angle to the Time Warner Cable experiment. As its name implies, this operation's main interest is cable television. An increasingly important component of that business is distributing video on demand. TW's competitors in that arena are Internet companies that intend to do the same thing. The TW plan tilts the field in its own favor. Let's say I want to watch the indie film "Waitress." I may have the choice to order it on my cable box or rent it from iTunes. Each might cost me $3. But if I'm metered, renting it from iTunes might mean that I exceed my monthly limit, perhaps incurring a penalty that's more than renting the movie.

A more profound problem with the metering scheme, however, doesn't involve corporate competition but international competition. In the United States, where the Internet was born, we pay higher prices (seven times what they pay in South Korea) for slower speeds. (Japan's users surf 13 times faster.) Though President Bush promised affordable broadband for all by 2007, tens of millions are still stuck with dial-up.

Fast, cheap, abundant broadband is a fantastic economic accelerator, enabling breakout businesses and kick-starting new industries. Unless we move quickly, these will spring from foreign soil. Instead of testing systems that discourage people from vigorously using our overpriced, underpowered systems, government and industry should be working overtime to figure out how to get faster service for less money and make sure that all users, no matter where they live, have affordable access to the high-speed Net. Maybe then we'll get out of 24th place.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012903205.html





Peer-to-Peer Lending Online Takes Off

Major players begin entering market, or so-called 'P2P' scene
Jim Wyss

When Walter Kond needed $25,000 to buy a shipment of home-theater seats for his company to resell, he didn't go to the bank. He went online. Kond posted a loan request on Prosper.com and a few days later, more than 300 absolute strangers had pooled together the cash for a three-year loan at 13 percent interest.

Welcome to the world of peer-to-peer lending - where anyone with Web access can be a banker and small business owners like Kond are finding a new way to raise cash.

The industry is still in its infancy, but has been catching fire as major players enter the market. The UK's Zopa - considered the grand-daddy of the niche - launched its U.S. operations in December, California-based Lending Club debuted on social networking giant Facebook in May, and billionaire Richard Branson re-launched Circle Lending as Virgin Money USA in October.

"There is so little innovation in traditional consumer finance that anytime something new like this comes along, it's a rarity and something to watch," said George Hofheimer, chief research officer at Filene Research Institute in Wisconsin, which studies the lending sector. "This has a high probability of being what academics refer to as a 'disruptive innovation."'

Each of the services offers its own twist on peer-to-peer lending, but in Prosper, Kond says he found an intuitive, pain-free way to finance the imports for his online store Miacom.

Walking through the Miacom warehouse - stacked with everything from shredders to mahogany security doors - Kond said he first heard about Prosper during an eBay convention a few years ago. Last June, seeking a short-term loan to buy a shipping container of home-theater chairs he had spotted in Asia, Kond posted a seven-day ad on Prosper outlining what he wanted to do with the money and offering a 14.5 percent annual return.

"For the first three or four days there was nothing, but then we started getting corporate bidders and people who (make loans) for a living," Kond said. Prosper's lenders offered amounts from $50 to $1,000 and bid the interest rate down to 13 percent. "The next thing you know we have 25 grand and the container was on its way," Kond said.

While 13 percent is higher than Kond might get at his local bank, there are no penalties for paying off the Prosper loan early - and the process was far more pleasant, he said. In business since 1994, Kond said when he goes to banks, he still feels on the defensive: "I feel like they are looking for holes in my character or credit report (to find excuses) to not lend me money."

At Prosper, on the other hand, bidders were actually competing to give him cash.

If making unsecured loans to absolute strangers sounds risky, Prosper claims it's not.

Since launching in 2006, the company has facilitated $110 million in loans from 550,000 users and has an overall default rate of 1.37 percent.

The default rate on its highest rated, AA-loans is 0.27 percent - in line with brick and mortar banks.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8162235





John Mellencamp Asks McCain Camp to Stop Using His Music
PoliJAM

Representatives of John Mellencamp have contacted the McCain campaign to ask them to stop playing Mellencamp’s music at McCain campaign rallies. John Mellencamp is a Democrat who had been supporting John Edwards’ presidential race until Edwards dropped out of the race last week. Mellencamp songs such as “Our Country” and “Pink Houses” have been commonly heard at McCain rallies. But Mellencamp hopes that is coming to an end.
http://polijamblog.com/?p=274





Lilly's $1 Billion E-Mailstrom

A secret memo meant for a colleague lands in a Times reporter's in-box.
Katherine Eban

When the New York Times broke the story last week that Eli Lilly & Co. was in confidential settlement talks with the government, angry calls flew behind the scenes as the drug giant's executives accused federal officials of leaking the information.

As the company's lawyers began turning over rocks closer to home, however, they discovered what could be called A Nightmare on Email Street, a pharmaceutical consultant told Portfolio.com. One of its outside lawyers at Philadelphia-based Pepper Hamilton had mistakenly emailed confidential information on the talks to Times reporter Alex Berenson instead of Bradford Berenson, her co-counsel at Sidley Austin.

With the negotiations over alleged marketing improprieties reaching a mind-boggling sum of $1 billion, Eli Lilly had every reason to want to keep the talks under wraps. It was paying the two fancy law firms a small fortune to negotiate deftly and quietly.
If and when it did settle the allegations that it had improperly marketed its most profitable drug, Zyprexa, for schizophrenia, it would certainly want to announce the news on terms carefully negotiated with the government.

"We usually try to brace for that [kind of] story," a Lilly staffer said.

So when the Times' Berenson began calling around for comment, and seemed to possess remarkably detailed inside information about the negotiations, Lilly executives were certain the source of the leak was the government.

As it turned out, one of Eli Lilly's lawyers at Pepper Hamilton in Philadelphia wanted to email Sidley Austin's Berenson, about the negotiations. But apparently, the name that popped up from her email correspondents was the wrong Berenson.

Alex Berenson logged on to find an internal "very comprehensive document" about the negotiations, the consultant said, and on January 30, Berenson's article, "Lilly in Settlement Talks With U.S." appeared on the Times' website. A similar article followed the next day on the front page of the New York Times.

Those who knew the real story must have had a chuckle—or shed some tears—over Lilly's statement to the Times that it had "no intention of sharing those discussions [with the government] with the news media and it would be speculative and irresponsible for anyone to do so."

When reached for comment, Alex Berenson told Portfolio.com, "I can't say anything. I just can't."

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Philadelphia, which is spearheading the Zyprexa investigation, declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for Eli Lilly.

However, the Lilly spokeswoman called back to add that the drugmaker would continue to retain Pepper Hamilton. Phone calls to Sidley Austin and Pepper Hamilton were not returned.

And sadly, no confidential emails with further scoops were received in error.
http://www.portfolio.com/news-market...New-York-Times





FBI's Sought Approval for Custom Spyware in FISA Court
Kevin Poulsen

The FBI sought approval to use its CIPAV spyware program from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in terrorism or foreign spying cases, THREAT LEVEL has learned.

Officials processing a Freedom of Information Act request from Wired.com have turned up some 3,000 pages of FBI documents about the CIPAV, according to an FBI FOIA official. They date back to at least 2005. Some 60 - 75 percent of them are internal e-mails. Others are technical documents and legal filings.

Among the legal filings are affidavits submitted by the FBI in other criminal cases, and affidavits submitted to the secretive FISC, a court based in the Justice Department's headquarters that approves surveillance orders and covert entries in cases involving national security, including terrorism probes. The court was created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

FISC hearings are closed and the decisions secret.

As first reported by Wired.com, the software, called a "computer and internet protocol address verifier," is designed to infiltrate a suspect's computer and collect various information, including the IP address, Ethernet MAC addresses, a list of open TCP and UDP ports, running programs, operating system type and serial number, default browser, the registered user of the operating system and the last visited URL, among other things.

That information is sent covertly to an FBI computer in Quantico, Virginia. The CIPAV then monitors and reports on all the target's internet use, logging every IP address to which the machine connects.

The FBI's use of the technology surfaced in July when Wired discovered an affidavit in an investigation into a series of high school bomb hoaxes in which the bureau traced the culprit using the program.

An FBI spokeswoman then invited Wired to submit a list of questions about the technology, but hasn't gotten back to us.

While the FBI FOIA official did not remark on the quantity or details of the CIPAV affidavits, it's likely the surveillance requests were granted Through the end of 2004, the court approved 18,761 warrants, and rejected only five. It approved 2,072, in 2005, and 2,181 in 2006, rejecting none. Five were withdrawn before a ruling.

In a rare published opinion in 2002, the court accused the FBI and Justice Department of supplying "erroneous information" in more than 75 affidavits.

It's unclear when Wired.com will see the FOIAed documents, and the FISC affidavits will almost certainly be withheld in their entirety.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...ive-surve.html





FBI Wants Palm Prints, Eye Scans, Tattoo Mapping
Kelli Arena and Carol Cratty

The FBI is gearing up to create a massive computer database of people's physical characteristics, all part of an effort the bureau says to better identify criminals and terrorists.

But it's an issue that raises major privacy concerns -- what one civil liberties expert says should concern all Americans.

The bureau is expected to announce in coming days the awarding of a $1 billion, 10-year contract to help create the database that will compile an array of biometric information -- from palm prints to eye scans.

Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI's Biometric Services section chief, said adding to the database is "important to protect the borders to keep the terrorists out, protect our citizens, our neighbors, our children so they can have good jobs, and have a safe country to live in."

But it's unnerving to privacy experts.

"It's the beginning of the surveillance society where you can be tracked anywhere, any time and all your movements, and eventually all your activities will be tracked and noted and correlated," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Project.

The FBI already has 55 million sets of fingerprints on file. In coming years, the bureau wants to compare palm prints, scars and tattoos, iris eye patterns, and facial shapes. The idea is to combine various pieces of biometric information to positively identify a potential suspect.

A lot will depend on how quickly technology is perfected, according to Thomas Bush, the FBI official in charge of the Clarksburg, West Virginia, facility where the FBI houses its current fingerprint database. Watch what the FBI hopes to gain »

"Fingerprints will still be the big player," Bush, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, told CNN.

But he added, "Whatever the biometric that comes down the road, we need to be able to plug that in and play."

First up, he said, are palm prints. The FBI has already begun collecting images and hopes to soon use these as an additional means of making identifications. Countries that are already using such images find 20 percent of their positive matches come from latent palm prints left at crime scenes, the FBI's Bush said.

The FBI has also started collecting mug shots and pictures of scars and tattoos. These images are being stored for now as the technology is fine-tuned. All of the FBI's biometric data is stored on computers 30-feet underground in the Clarksburg facility.

In addition, the FBI could soon start comparing people's eyes -- specifically the iris, or the colored part of an eye -- as part of its new biometrics program called Next Generation Identification.

Nearby, at West Virginia University's Center for Identification Technology Research, researchers are already testing some of these technologies that will ultimately be used by the FBI.

"The best increase in accuracy will come from fusing different biometrics together," said Bojan Cukic, the co-director of the center.

But while law enforcement officials are excited about the possibilities of these new technologies, privacy advocates are upset the FBI will be collecting so much personal information.

"People who don't think mistakes are going to be made I don't think fly enough," said Steinhardt.

He said thousands of mistakes have been made with the use of the so-called no-fly lists at airports -- and that giving law enforcement widespread data collection techniques should cause major privacy alarms.

"There are real consequences to people," Steinhardt said. Watch concerns over more data collection »

You don't have to be a criminal or a terrorist to be checked against the database. More than 55 percent of the checks the FBI runs involve criminal background checks for people applying for sensitive jobs in government or jobs working with vulnerable people such as children and the elderly, according to the FBI.

The FBI says it hasn't been saving the fingerprints for those checks, but that may change. The FBI plans a so-called "rap-back" service in which an employer could ask the FBI to keep the prints for an employee on file and let the employer know if the person ever has a brush with the law. The FBI says it will first have to clear hurdles with state privacy laws, and people would have to sign waivers allowing their information to be kept.

Critics say people are being forced to give up too much personal information. But Lawrence Hornak, the co-director of the research center at West Virginia University, said it could actually enhance people's privacy.

"It allows you to project your identity as being you," said Hornak. "And it allows people to avoid identity theft, things of that nature." Watch Hornak describe why he thinks it's a "privacy enhancer" »

There remains the question of how reliable these new biometric technologies will be. A 2006 German study looking at facial recognition in a crowded train station found successful matches could be made 60 percent of the time during the day. But when lighting conditions worsened at night, the results shrank to a success rate of 10 to 20 percent.

As work on these technologies continues, researchers are quick to admit what's proven to be the most accurate so far. "Iris technology is perceived today, together with fingerprints, to be the most accurate," said Cukic.

But in the future all kinds of methods may be employed. Some researchers are looking at the way people walk as a possible additional means of identification.

The FBI says it will protect all this personal data and only collect information on criminals and those seeking sensitive jobs.

The ACLU's Steinhardt doesn't believe it will stop there.

"This had started out being a program to track or identify criminals," he said. "Now we're talking about large swaths of the population -- workers, volunteers in youth programs. Eventually, it's going to be everybody."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/04/f...ics/index.html





DHS Official Moots Real ID Rules for Buying Cold Medicine
Dan Goodin

A senior US Department of Homeland Security official has floated the idea of requiring citizens to produce federally compliant identification before purchasing some over-the-counter medicines.

"If you have a good ID ... you make it much harder for the meth labs to function in this country," DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker told an audience last month (http://www.heritage.org/Press/Events/ev011608a.cfm) at the Heritage Foundation. Cold medicines like Sudafed have long been used in the production of methamphetamine. Over the past year or so, pharmacies have been required to track buyers of drugs that contain pseudoephedrine.

His comment came five days after the agency released final rules (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01...hanges_issued/) implementing the REAL ID Act of 2005 that made no mention of such requirements. It mandates the establishment uniform standards and procedures that must be met before state-issued licenses can be accepted as identification for official purposes.

Beyond boarding airplanes and entering federal buildings or nuclear facilities, there are no other official purposes spelled out in the regulations. And that's just what concerns people at the Center for Democracy and Technology. They say Baker's statement underscores "mission creep," in which the scope and purpose of the REAL ID Act gradually expands over time.

"Baker's suggested mission creep pushes the REAL ID program farther down the slippery slope toward a true national ID card," CDT blogger Greg Burnett wrote here (http://blog.cdt.org/2008/02/04/real-...ission-creep/). He says requiring people to produce a federally approved ID to buy cold medicine is a good example of the "significant ramifications" attached to the act.

So far, 17 states have formally opposed REAL ID, which takes effect on May 11. Residents of those states will be subject to additional searches and other inconveniences when flying and may be barred from entering federal buildings and nuclear plants.

Baker's statement belying the official DHS position on REAL ID isn't the first time the agency has made confusing remarks about the legal requirements surrounding identification. According to travel writer Edward Hasbrouck, DHS officials continue to plant the misunderstanding that residents from states which don't comply with REAL ID requirements won't get on planes. They will, Hasbrouck asserts here (http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001382.html). In fact, he says, airlines are prevented by law from requiring any kind of ID.

Nonetheless, the DHS website continues to claim (http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtrav...rial_1044.shtm) a photo ID is needed to pass through security checkpoints. Hasbrouck has his suspicions about the motives for such statements.

"The most obvious explanation is that they want to use the implied (but legally and factually empty) threat of denial of air travel to intimidate states into 'voluntarily' complying with the Real-ID Act and its rules," he writes.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02...cold_medicine/





TrueCrypt 5.0 Released, Now Encrypts Entire Drive
A funny little man

The popular open source privacy tool, TrueCrypt, has just received a major update. The most exciting new feature provides the ability to encrypt an entire drive, prompting the user for a password during boot up; this makes TrueCrypt the perfect tool for non-technical laptop users (the kind who are likely to lose all of that sensitive customer data). The Linux version receives a GUI and independence from the kernel internals, and a Mac version is at last available too.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/06/1333216





F.C.C. Approves Sale of Nationwide Spectrum to AT&T
Grant Gross

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has approved the purchase by AT&T of 12MHz of wireless spectrum that covers 60 percent of the U.S.

AT&T bought the spectrum from Aloha Spectrum Holdings. The spectrum, in the highly coveted 700MHz band, covers 196 million of the 303 million U.S. residents and includes 72 of the top 100 media markets in the country. Aloha acquired the spectrum in earlier FCC auctions and from other auction winners. This portion of the 700MHz spectrum is not part of the FCC auction now in progress.

The FCC, in an order issued Monday, approved the sale despite concerns expressed by the commission's two Democratic members. AT&T announced in October that it intended to buy the spectrum for US$2.5 billion. The company said then it planned to use the spectrum for broadcast video or for two-way communications such as voice, data or multicast content.

The 700MHz spectrum band carries wireless signals three to four times farther than some higher spectrum bands, making it optimal for long-range broadband networks.

Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said he voted to approve the deal because of a lack of public opposition, but he had concerns about the FCC's review of the deal.

The agency's review "lacks both substance and analysis in its review of whether, on balance, the transaction serves the public's interest," Adelstein said in a statement. "We are required to do more than simply conclude that a transaction benefits the public and will not have an adverse effect on competition. I would have preferred to see a more thorough assessment weighing the potential public interest harms and benefits of this transaction and its impact on the mobile telephony market."

Commissioner Michael Copps voted against the deal. The deal could have a large impact on a mobile voice and data market "that has seen round after round of consolidation in recent years," he said in a statement.

Copps also raised concerns about the FCC's review of the deal. The review "contains only an extremely abbreviated analysis of the competitive effects of this change in ownership," he said.

AT&T, in a statement, said it was pleased with the FCC's decision. The deal will help AT&T meet growing customer demand for wireless services, the company said.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/...-to-ATT_1.html





Public Broadcasters Prepare to Fight Federal Budget Cuts
Elizabeth Jensen

It’s a familiar dance: for eight straight years, the Bush administration has proposed deep cuts in federal funds for public broadcasting, and seven times so far, Congress has restored them. But the magnitude of the proposed cuts put forth this week — Patricia Harrison, president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, called them “draconian” — still sent public broadcasters scrambling.

Matt Martin, general manager of KALW-FM in San Francisco, went on the air Monday night to tell listeners about the effects of the proposed budget, which would cut in half the $400 million allocated in advance by Congress for fiscal year 2009 and cut $220 million from the $420 million already planned for 2010.

In addition, President Bush proposed eliminating advance funds for 2011, along with any additional funds in 2009 for stations to convert to digital transmission, which is federally mandated. They are the deepest cuts yet proposed by the administration.

KALW relies on federal funds for just under 10 percent of its $1.6 million annual budget, but that is money “that can make or break a lot of things we do,” Mr. Martin said. He added that he was particularly concerned about relying on contributions to make up any potential shortfall, given the state of the economy.

Critics of public funds for public broadcasting have long held that educational and other public-interest programming is increasingly available elsewhere, including on cable.

“The administration’s proposal is consistent with the evolving role of public broadcasting in a market that has benefited from tremendous growth and diversity of programming,” Sean Kevelighan, press secretary at the White House Office of Management and Budget, said in an e-mail message. He also said that government funds make up only 15 percent of public broadcasting revenue.

The administration’s budget also called for cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts, but not nearly of the magnitude of those faced by public broadcasting. There the administration proposed a cut of $16.3 million — to $128.4 million from $144.7 million.

Robert L. Lynch, president and chief executive of Americans for the Arts, an advocacy group, called the cuts “senseless” and asked Congress to restore the National Endowment for the Arts to its 1992 financing level of $176 million.

“After three years of minimal, but incremental, funding growth, we are sorry to see an attempt at this progress erased,” Mr. Lynch said in a statement.

The administration also refused, for the eighth consecutive year, to finance arts education programs.

By contrast, the White House requested $716.4 million for the Smithsonian Institution for fiscal year 2009, up from $682.6 million for fiscal 2008.

This was a positive turn for the Smithsonian, which has been struggling over the last year to improve its administration and oversight amid recent scandals.

The appropriation provided for an additional $15 million in a “legacy fund” requested by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, that would become available once the Smithsonian raised $30 million. The fund would be used for renovations and repairs at the institution’s various museums.

The proposed cuts for public broadcasting come just as local public television station executives are set to descend on Washington next week for a day of lobbying. They will be asking not just for the cut funds to be reinstated but also for an increase, which they eventually got last year, said John Lawson, president and chief executive of the Association of Public Television Stations.

“I’m confident we will be successful,” he said in an interview, noting that this year for the first time, stations will be tying their pleas to “the delivery of quantifiable services to local communities,” in the form of early childhood education, health information and a “recommitment to local programming, which is increasingly missing from the media marketplace.”

But others are not so sure. Ken Stern, chief executive of National Public Radio, said in an interview that even though public broadcasters had been successful in fighting off past proposed cuts, this year could be different. “I worry that this gets lost in a whole lot of other issues,” he said, acknowledging that it was also “an incredibly tight budget year.”

He added that “one of the shames” is that by focusing on restoring the budget, instead of adding new funds, attention is drawn away from how public broadcasting could do even more to serve its constituencies at a time of media upheaval.

“That’s the conversation we should be having, and not just fighting off these paint-by-numbers cuts that the administration is proposing,” he said.

Mr. Martin, at KALW in San Francisco, said he was careful not to advocate what action listeners should take when he told them about the cuts. But public broadcasters are hopeful that Congress will see the same groundswell of support for their services as they did during past budget fights. The last time around, some two million citizens contacted Congress, Mr. Stern said.

In a statement, Ms. Harrison of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which administers the federal money, noted that the proposed cuts “would work to degrade a 40-year partnership the American people overwhelmingly support and their elected representatives in Congress have repeatedly voted to strengthen.”

Robin Pogrebin contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/arts/06cuts.html





Pirated by iTunes, Artist Turns to BitTorrent
enigmax

The Flashbulb, aka Benn Jordan, became so outraged when he discovered that iTunes was effectively pirating his music, that he uploaded copies of his latest album to BitTorrent. TorrentFreak caught up with Benn to learn more about the decision to stop distributors and ‘coked-up label reps’ from getting all the cash.

An established, but outraged musician has decided to shun conventional distribution methods by following other recent initiatives (such as Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ promotion) by making his latest album available for free download. It’s available on BitTorrent on sites like The Pirate Bay, with so-called ‘OiNK replacement’ site, What.cd, providing the album on ‘free leech’ to encourage more downloads.

TorrentFreak caught up with Benn Jordan who told us he’s not just disillusioned, he’s ‘outraged’ that iTunes is selling his work without permission and seemingly keeping all the money.

TF: Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your musical journey.

Benn: I’m Benn and I’m 29 years old. I started playing classical guitar when I was about 5, and since then, all I’ve wanted to do with my life was make music. Now 20-some odd years later, I feel lucky to tell you that I make music for a living. I’ve been releasing albums for about 14 years on various indy labels, and in the last 5 years I’ve also been composing for television, film, and ads. Music has allowed me to travel the world, meet thousands of wonderful people, and express myself through my work. It seems impossible to me that I’m on this planet for any other reason than writing music.

My label, on the other hand, doesn’t have a complex or radical plan. Our goal is to simply compensate our artists as much as possible, and that includes utilizing the “digital revolution” to our advantage, instead of punishing our artists by punishing their fans.

TF: Tell us a little about your dealings with labels and ‘the industry’ and why you became disillusioned.

Benn: Luckily, my record contracts were always negotiated well. Once things started moving with small labels I was approached by some larger ones, but there was always some seedy stipulation that prevented me from ever signing.

Still, with a 50/50 contract, I’d be selling 2,000 albums and would get $250 for it somehow. Many people that i’d meet at my shows would say that they bought my music on iTunes, yet I’ve never signed any sort of agreement allowing iTunes to host my music, and I’ve certainly never seen a dime of money for my albums hosted there.
So I started investigating the numbers from the label, which led me to some shocking revelations about how little the artist and label was getting in comparison to the retailers. When I got around to asking about iTunes, the owner of Sublight Records pleaded with me to “leave it be”. Everyone else made an extraordinary effort to ignore my calls and emails.

When I finally got a hold of the digital distributor (I must note that “digital distributor” is the most pathetic job title I’ve ever heard), I was told that once the files are in the iTunes system, it literally couldn’t be removed or taken down for a year. So, either Apple has created a self-aware doomsday machine that cannot be stopped or reasoned with, or everyone involved is just enjoying the gravy train of ripping off artists like myself and using Apple’s backbone of attorneys as an intimidation factor.

Even after having a lawyer working for me on this matter, this is the one and only response we’ve EVER been able to get from Apple:

Dear Benn,
I understand that you are writing to the iTunes Store because you are upset about finding your own album “The Flashlight” and some of your other album as well on the iTunes Store, and that you feel that you are owned
royalties for this music that his being purchased. I am sorry that you have to found this upsetting. My name is Wendy, and I would be happy to link you to right people to talk to about this issue

So, who’s the pirate I should go after? A kid who downloads my album because it isn’t available in non-DRM format and costs $30 on Amazon? Or a huge multi-billion dollar corporation that has been selling thousands of dollars worth of my music and not even acknowledging it?

I’m not disillusioned, I’m outraged, and anyone who ever spent a dime on buying music through these distribution methods should be outraged too. Here we are pleading with people to not steal music, and then we hand them dog shit when they go out of their way to buy it.

TF: You were a member of OiNK. Could you tell us a bit about your time there and how you used the site?

Benn: OiNK was an amazing network. As an avid-collector of ultra-rare old jazz records, I’ll tell you right now that it was the most complete and diverse library of music the world has ever seen. I filled some requests by uploading some of my rarer albums there. Eventually I started being harassed by someone on the network who was sending screen grabs of my seed lists to record labels. Upon complaining, a moderator simply removed my ability to communicate with anyone on the network or post comments on torrents. I can understand the paranoia and strictness.

I guess I just sort of laughed it off and stopped using it. When Oink went down, the only thing that surprised me was that the servers weren’t hidden in some weird country.

TF: Could you tell us more about the support you’re getting from one of the so-called ‘OiNK replacement’ sites, ‘What.cd’ ?

Benn: It was really a fresh breath of air for What.cd to promote the idea of artists having involvement with their own torrents. Not only does it benefit the artist to no end, but I can’t imagine that any court in the world would be able to pin someone on copyright infringement for a torrent the copyright holder created.

TF: Aside from uploading your own albums, at times you took an anti-piracy stance at OiNK, why the big change of heart?

Benn: I don’t think my stance has changed all that much. It’d be a great PR move to say that I’m pro-piracy, but I’d be lying. I keep seeing these internet news stories saying things like “The Flashbulb Promotes Piracy”. It is totally out of control. How could I be promoting piracy if I’m uploading my own material with a “buy it if you like it” message in the torrent?

What I’m promoting is the artist’s freedom to choose what can and can’t be done with his/her music, and more importantly, the listener’s freedom to do what he/she wants with their own computer, MP3 player, or internet connection.

After a journey through miles and miles of bullshit in this industry, you learn one thing: If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself. Whether you’re downloading my music to check it out, to accompany the CD, or even pirating it…I want you to have a version/rip of it that I’ve listened to and approved of.

TF: You say you’re not pro-piracy yet you downloaded stuff from OiNK and also What.cd. One position seems to conflict the other. How do you explain this?

Benn: In my case I think that visible list of downloads strengthens my point. Most of those downloads are actually albums I already own (much easier to download than to record an entire vinyl album), albums I previewed but didn’t like, or albums I simply cannot find available in a suitable DRM-free format (including CD). Some of the software, like the TomTom DVD on my list, is actually impossible to technically “pirate” because you can’t buy a US TomTom GPS unit without the software. The thing is, when a tracker gets busted, the companies count these towards their losses.

So, my new album currently has 6381 downloads at the time of this interview on what.cd alone. Using that deceitful equation, my losses are over $100,000. If I wanted to, I could subtract those losses from my profit and completely get out of paying any income taxes. It makes sense from an evil, corporate, criminal-minded standpoint, right?

Beyond that, iTunes and other services simply are not acceptable to me. No company will have any control over a product that I legally own after I buy it, period.

Oink was the biggest music library in the world. People didn’t use it because they were criminals, people used it because it was literally better than any service you could pay for. It was the stubborn behavior of the record labels, artists, and government that wouldn’t allow that music library to have a cash register at the front door.

The thing RIAA is scared of is that their billion dollar backbone can no longer shelter people from exploring music themselves. Their business plan had evolved into telling the world what they will want to listen to and buy, and now they’ll have to actually compete with talented artists again. As the people regain control of the market, music will be judged by it’s content again and will be subjected to it’s own Darwinism. It is a very interesting time for the music industry…and since my entire life is devoted to making music, bring it on. I hope that this situation with my new record proves to other labels and artists that giving people exactly what they want is the smartest way to conduct any business.

TF: How do you feel about people being heavily punished for sharing music?

Benn: Obviously, the last thing I would want is anyone to be fined or imprisoned for listening to my music. Another feature of uploading my own torrent is that it creates a little legal nesting area on a network otherwise deemed illegal by most governments and RIAA. When someone else uploads a torrent of my music, it is without my approval…on the other end of things, and more importantly, when someone raids an admin’s apartment…no police officer is asking me if I want to press charges.

TF: What happens when people donate?

Benn: If you decide that you like the album, you’ll have the option of donating directly to the artist. If you decide that you’d like a CD, you’ll be able to order it directly from my label. I’ve even hired my mother to run our shipping department since she’s the most obsessive-compulsive-perfectionist office worker that I’ve ever laid eyes on.

Finally, every detail of my album’s content, release, and business is done exactly the way I want it to be done. I hope other artists realize how liberating and profitable it is compared to the distribution system we’ve all become so accustomed to.

TF: Radiohead did really quite well after they offered ‘In Rainbows’ online for free. You’re a few days into this experiment - how is it going for you?

Benn: My donations have a way to go before they match the numbers from CD pre-orders, but I’m still crossing my fingers. In a week or so I plan to release a detailed statistical report. For some reason I really like making pie charts.

TF: I’ve listened to the album - Soundtrack To A Vacant Life - and I really enjoyed it. Could you tell us some more about it?

Benn: It was 2 years in the making, and is conceptually me attempting to write the soundtrack to my own life. Of course this means that it is much more cinematic than electronic, and the songs all connect chronologically. Those who have heard my previous albums can expect this one to be a lot more melodic, tame, and instrumental. Suggested listening is with a decent pair of headphones from start to finish.

TF: I have some, I’ll try that later. Thanks for your time.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirated-by-i...orrent-080206/





The Pirate Bay Interrogations
Ernesto

During the two year investigation into The Pirate Bay, several people connected to the site were questioned. The Swedish police allegedly used some of the harshest (Jack Bauer like) interrogation tactics to get them to talk, with surprising results.

When The Pirate Bay was raided back in 2006, three men were brought in for questioning, and the interrogations continued in the months that followed. The police’s goal was obviously to let the people behind the site confess to something they didn’t do. This led to a series of the most hilarious interrogation transcripts I’ve ever read.

Not surprisingly, “the confessions” of the Pirate Bay three didn’t help the police much. Earlier this week, the Swedish prosecutor Håkan Roswall charged four individuals involved with The Pirate Bay for “assisting copyright infringement”. Actually, this is a surprisingly mild accusation if you consider that he called the Pirate Bay “terrorists” only a few months ago. The response of Brokep’s lawyer sums it up quite nicely: “My client will plead not guilty, but i’m not sure if what he’s being charged with, is a crime at all,” he said.

Below you can read some of the transcripts of the interrogations of Brokep, Anakata and TiAMO, translated from a Swedish article published by IDG.se. (thanks Jens and Billy)
Brokep

I: Interrogator
B: Brokep (Peter Sunde)

I: You are under suspicion of assisting copyright infringement between 2005-07-01 - 2006-05-31 by running and maintaining The Pirate Bay, and thereby assisting in other peoples’ copyright infringement. Another accusation is conspiracy to commit copyright infringement during the same period of time. This has been done through The Pirate Bay where a large amount of so called torrents of copyrighted files or content are made available. It’s customary to ask the person being interrogated if he admits or denies committing a crime?

B: I deny.

I: You deny.

B: Definitely!

I: Yes. And this thing with The Pirate Bay. I don’t know your position on anything about what you have been accused of, but I say you are one of the people who run this site, The Pirate Bay. What do you say about that?

B: I have no comment.

I: Why not?

B: I don’t want to make a statement about it.

I: What do you want to make a statement about?

B: I’ll probably not make statements about very much.

I: Okay. Then what are we doing here?

B: Well it was you who wanted to (not recognizable, laugh) interrogate me.

I: Yes, because you have the opportunity to explain you ideological position.

B: But I think…

I: ..the purpose of The Pirate Bay etc.

B: Oh, well I don’t think my ideology has anything to do with an interrogation. My ideology and my views on things are… Well it’s my political opinion and I can keep that to myself.

I: I’m not asking about your political opinion, I’m asking about your stance on….

B: But I think copyright is a political issue. So if you ask me about my opinion on a copyright policy issue, I will answer that I don’t wish to make a statement on my policy and my political views.

[…]
Anakata

I: Interrogator
A: Anakata (Gottfrid Svartholm)

I: Well! What do you know about this site, The Pirate Bay?

A: Well it is a site.

I: Yes…what is it?

A: Yes bits and trackers and related services.

I: What is your part in this site?

A: No comment!

I: No. Anakata - Who is that?

A: No comment!

I: No. Do you know how long this has been going on, The Pirate Bay?

A: Like a couple of years!

I: Were you involved in starting it?

A: No comment?

I: No, I will ask a lot of questions!

A: Okay, you will have to annoy me then!

I: Do you have any idea how many users per day The Pirate Bay gets?

A: No comment!

I: Do you have any idea who maintains the homepage?

A: No comment!

I: How can one translate the word tracker? (Note: same in Swedish)

A: It is not possible to translate.

[…]

I: Okay! Is there anything else that you want to say, that we might find valuable to know?

A: No! Yes… there… you can tell Roswall that he is a damn clown, he can … can stop abusing the judicial system!!!

I: You have said this before!

A: Yes. It is the third or fourth time i have said it!

I: Okay!

A: I said it in the media earlier!

I: Well! Then I will end the interrogation at 12.25.

[…]

In a later interrogation Anakata was questioned about an interview with IDG.

I: Okay. During last year, or maybe it was this year, there was an interview in the Hot chair at IDG where you talked openly about The Pirate Bay’s operation. Have you got any comments on..(interrupted)

A: No! No comment.

I: Is it correct that you where in this..(interrupted)

A: No comment!

I: …interview. Okay.

I: We have been talking about this nickname Anakata, and we still claim that is you.

A: No comment!

I: You don’t want to comment on that either. Okay, then lets move on and make this effective instead!
[…]
TiAMO

I: Interrogator
T: TiAMO (Fredrik Neij)

I: This has been a police investigation for a long time. The prosecutor’s case is one of copyright infringement, assisting in copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. What is your position on this?

T: That he is wrong. That if we are guilty, then Google is guilty too.

I: You mean you can compare Google to The Pirate Bay?

T: Almost.

I: What the difference between them?

T: Well… One difference is that you can upload torrents on The Pirate Bay, but it’s really the same thing because if you have a site with copyrighted material, you can add the link to be indexed on Google. It’s the same level as both sites are handling user-generated material. We don’t have any views on what the content is, we just provide a search engine.

I: But these torrents.. Uhm.. I don’t know what it is in plural (ED: The word “torrent” sounds weird in plural in Swedish)

T: Files of meta data..

I: Yes, I know but what… torrents. If we talk about torrents as more than one, they actually end up on The Pirate Bay’s servers. That’s different to Google?

T: But in the same way it’s… we have a torrent file that is a reference to the material. Someone who only uses a meta link and doesn’t host the file but the file is still available on the filesharing network. Should that be less illegal or more legal? Just because you store the binary data for the hash file locally on a server?

I: But that’s more than Google provides. They only provide a link in that case. While a user or a specific computer in another network provides with the actual… meta data. That has nothing to do with…

T: But then you had to decide whether meta data in itself is illegal or not.

I: But surely it’s not!

T: No.

I: I don’t believe so either, but the summary I mentioned, assisting to commit a crime, that is supplying or owning certain things that can be used for a crime. In this case, it’s providing a tracker, providing a collection of torrent files, you have… It’s about a search engine and so on. That’s more than Google does?

T: Yes

I: And furthermore there was a change of legislation July 1 2005, which means the copyright law has been made tougher than before. I don’t know if you are familiar with the mp3 trial that many refer to in this context, that it is not permitted to link to copyrighted material?

T: Yes.

I: That sentence may be obsolete now, it’s not relevant anymore since the legislation has changed. That’s the foundation of the crime we investigate today. So this thing with Google, it isn’t quite the same thing.

T: I still don’t believe the way we have interpreted it, and we have consulted law people on this. They say that torrent files are not illegal and providing them is not illegal. Since we haven’t actively encouraged the users to upload copyrighted movies and not (not recognizable). We haven’t said anything. We have created an empty site where the only condition was that you cannot upload something where content doesn’t match the description, or if it blatantly is criminal in Sweden.

I: But at the same time, you ridicule Microsoft etcetera on another page of The Pirate Bay?

T: That’s because they try to apply US laws to Sweden.

I: Yes, but what they are really doing is making you aware that there is copyright infringing content on the site.

T: Yes.

I: It comes as no surprise to you that such content is available there?

T: No..

I: So you are not unaware that there is copyright infringing content, but still you chose to remain passive and not remove it?

T: There are links to copyrighted content!

I: Yes exactly, there are links to copyrighted content!

T: Yes.

I: And you are aware of this?

T: We have always had the policy not to interfere with the content on the site.

I: Ok.

T: Since the site was created by Piratbyrån, who stand for free speech and freedom to share without some bully trying to interfere, the policy (not recognizable)

I: That’s what we have left here (not recognizable). You say yourself that Piratbyrån is not a part of it anymore and that the ideological thing has faded during later years?

T: Yes, but I believe Gottfrid for example is ideologically in line with Piratbyrån. Peter as well.

I: And you aren’t?

T: I agree with much of what they say, but it’s not like I would go out on a cold rainy autumn day and protest with a sign against something (not recognizable)
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...ations-080207/





The Pirate Bay and Filesharers Backed by Swedish Politicians
Ernesto

Two weeks ago we reported on Greens EFA launching the pro-filesharing campaign “I Wouldn’t Steal“. With new editorials in Swedish newspapers coinciding with The Pirate Bay’s charges, it seems the Green Party is looking to push the issue forward, thereby supporting The Pirate Bay.

In recent years, the Swedish Green Party, which holds 19 seats in parliament, has taken a clear stance on filesharing. Following the raid on The Pirate Bay in 2006, the party board released a memo entitled “Free the files!” in which they suggested to fully legalize non-commercial filesharing.

When asked about the purpose of the memo in 2006, party spokesperson Peter Eriksson said: “Our aim is to make laws in line with the new technologies. The other option is to pretend that you can go on like you always have, although it’s practically impossible. Reality has changed.”

One of the driving forces behind the recent “I Wouldn’t Steal” campaign from the European Green parties was the Swedish politician Carl Schlyter, and his initiative seems to have spurred others in the party to join the debate. Earlier this week, an editorial was published in two local Swedish newspapers. It was titled “Filesharing is not theft” and was written by Akko Karlsson, member of the Swedish Green Party’s executive board.

In the editorial, Akko argued that filesharing can’t be compared to theft, as theft is when someone takes away the possibility for another person to use something, whereas filesharing only creates a new copy without erasing the original.

“For me, this is a generation issue,” said Akko Karlsson when TorrentFreak asked her why she decided to write the editorial. “You should always endorse the new technologies’ possibilities.”

In her editorial, Akko criticizes the entertainment industry’s failing to enter the information age with working business models:

“You could argue that filesharing hinders some people from earning as much money as they would have if filesharing was not possible. But now it is possible, the technology is there, and then the industry needs to find new ways of handling it. They’ve had the chance to work on new ways for 10 years but haven’t come up with much else than silly trailers that say filesharing is theft. […] When new technology emerges, it’s not necessarily it that must be adapted to the old ways. Sometimes, the industry itself must adapt.”

Akko further told TorrentFreak that she’s convinced that filesharing, copyright and integrity will be important issues for Green Party in the 2009 elections for the European Parliament and the 2010 elections in Sweden.

“Because there is also the democratic aspect of this,” she says, “There are so many people under repressive regimes for whom filesharing and the Internet is the link to the rest of the world that inspires, gives hope and makes it endurable to fight for human rights and democracy. The state’s control system is expanding. We used to heavily criticize the intrusions of privacy and control systems in place behind the Iron Curtain, but now we are building this ourselves.”

In Swedish old media, there’s currently a heated argument against filesharing, with novelists like Liza Marklund and Jan Guillou using every inch of their weekly columns in Swedish newspapers to lobby for tougher measures. With the trial against The Pirate Bay coming up, the debate has sunk even deeper in the trenches. In this climate, for politicians to step up to the plate with sound arguments why filesharing should be legalized seems like a bold move.

But Akko Karlsson is not alone.

On January 31, an editorial was published in Gothenburg’s daily newspaper. It was written by Green Party’s Lage Rahm, member of Parliament, party spokesperson on IT issues and substitute member on The Committee on Industry and Trade. On the subject of the ongoing case against The Pirate Bay, he called for reason when it comes to impose tougher measures on filesharing:

“Not only is the struggle [to end illegal filesharing] doomed to fail, it also creates a risk that filesharing on the Internet becomes anonymized and encrypted. An increased availability of untraceable networks will make it harder to fight organized crime.”

As an example, Lage Rahm put forward the bust of a pedophile ring with more than 700 suspects in 33 countries last year. This was done by tracking chatrooms, downloaded photos and e-mail.

“Most people realize that the police and copyright interest groups are fighting against windmills. […] Convicting sentences against The Pirate Bay would have merely marginal effects on the scope of illegal filesharing. More severe is that the hunt will lead to an increased interest for absolute anonymity among Sweden’s approximately 1 million filesharers. Their activity will move to untraceable darknets.”

He focused on the dangers of Internet communities going underground and concluded:

“New technologies mean we as legislators are faced with an entirely new reality. Tougher measures against filesharing means risking the police’s possibilities of fighting child pornography and organized crime. It is worrying that the Minister of Justice doesn’t seem to realize this. For The Green Party, this is one of the main arguments of legalizing non-commercial downloading. […] The Minister of Justice should leave to the industry to clear up the mess they have made for themselves. Judicial resources should be diverted to fight severe online criminality instead of hunting filesharing sixteen-year-olds.”

So, what does this all mean for the European filesharer? Well, one thing is sure, political parties that actually have power are taking a pro-filesharing stance. A sign that things are moving forward, slowly, but in the right direction.
http://torrentfreak.com/tpb-and-file...icians-080209/





Rant of the week

A Reg Shill-Reporter?
Rick Brasche

Let's cut the crap, okay?

The issue isn't about technology or capability. It's about what the company sells, what it tells you you're going to get for your money, versus what you actually get.

This is very simple. If you sell me "unlimited" use then it is "unlimited". If you put a download cap (not just bandwidth throttling) then you are "limiting". very very simple.

telling me you sell "blazing fast" internet connections and demonstrating to me how fast i can download stuff, then put a cork on downloads that come from a source you decide is too popular, is "bait and switch".

Crying about not having enough to "serve all our customers" is not the customers' problem. If you failed to modify your infrastructure and oversold capability (which Comcast et al was already doing over 6 years ago when cable modems first rolled out-which is why I never went back to them) is *your* problem. If an airline sells me a seat on an airplane, then oversells the seats, giving me a f*cking bus ticket isn't going to be allowed.

What happened here is providers sold what they thought was a cash cow for them-selling to rubes who would never utilize bandwidth or even come close to getting their money's worth. Comcast and others just sat on their @sses and laughed at all those "nerds" who bought the "high speed hype".

Then, people started using the pipe. It wasn't just nerd bragging rights now. Even Aunt Bea and Grandma needed a phat pipe because the Internet got too bloated. Advertisements on her favorite gardening site and email provider are even full video now. Web 2.0 dorks and out of work dot-commers flooded the net with eye candy and bloated sites to try to get recognition. A fast connection became mandatory. And the cable companies were caught with their pants down.

We wouldn't accept crap like this from cellular companies would we? Cell speeds and coverage are much better than even 4 years ago, no matter how sucky their customer service and billing systems are. Every provider has wireless data service many times faster than the fastest dialup connection. Even as far behind Japan as we are, even AT&T is getting faster, and they actually put a little of their profits into infrastructure expansion and improvement.

Not the cable guys tho. Not in tune with how fast they sold the stuff. They got people canvassing my neighborhood at least once a week. One hub, a thousand apartments, and Comcast failing to mention you're sharing that "high speed' with every damned one of them. They also forgot to mention back in the day that you were all on the same network-when I used them I could browse the C drives on every neighbor's PC who was in the same neighborhood hub.

Maybe instead of paying shills and lawyers, maybe they ought to either upgrade neighborhood hubs to a better technology, or if that isn't possible, actually be *honest* about what you do and don't get. Advertise the average speed measured in a given neighborhood. tell new cusomers that your speed goes down as soon as that condo/housing development goes online next month. Tell them that for anything but websurfing and MMORPG's, it's going to get even slower so that the websurfing and email can get thru. Stop using "unlimited" in ads.

Because most of the world aren't weasely lawyers and Clinton apologists who buy into convoluted arguments about 'what the definition of the word "is" is". Most understand the language, and the language of lies is what's causing Comcast the problems. Less money on weaseling out, more on doing things right.

And keep your f**king cable guys and their ads off my porch. I told each and every one of them I ain't paying $50 a month for channels spewing mostly ads, propaganda and sh*tty "reality TV". Then getting gypped for more to get the few channels I could stand, and still, no decent pr0n. Oh yeah, add on more cost to be able to pay for their "socialist internet" (everyone is equal, some are more equal than others) and I'd pay close to $90 a month (until the next rate increase!) to get less than I do now with DSL and a Netflix account (that costs me less than $50 total now). Plus I remain blissfully unaware of "hawt social trends" like which wanker won "dancing with the stars", or what new beer/car commercial is so awesome. I ain't paying for some corporate @rsehats to cram a sewer pipe into my living room. They'd better pay *me*.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12...ysis/comments/ (Dec. 13th,’07)






Finland's Roadside Toilets: Now Accessible Only by SMS
Darren Murph

While those in London can use SMS to actually find a lavatory, folks passing through Western Finland will be required to bust out their handset in order to relieve themselves in select public restrooms. In an attempt to curb vandalism, the Finnish Road Administration has implemented a system along Highway 1 which requires restroom visitors to text "Open" (in Finnish, of course) in order to let themselves in. The idea is that folks will be less likely to lose their mind and graffiti up the place knowing that their mobile number is (at least temporarily) on file, but it remains to be seen if uprooters will simply take their defacing ways elsewhere or actually excrete in peace.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/05/f...e-only-by-sms/


















Until next week,

- js.



















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