[JackSpratts]

N, N, N…

Anger Over a Plan to Title a Record With an Epithet
Sewell Chan

A new turn in the strange political career of a troublesome word — the racial epithet known as the N-word — finds a state legislator denouncing a rapper who plans to use it as the title for his new CD.

The legislator, Assemblyman Hakeem S. Jeffries, Democrat of Brooklyn, issued a blistering statement today aimed at the rapper Nas, who has said he would use the epithet as the title for his upcoming album. Mr. Jeffries called for the Universal Music Group, which distributes the artist’s music, to halt the plan.

This comes after the City Council approved a resolution in February calling for a symbolic moratorium on the use of the word.

“It is time for Nas and other hip-hop artists to clean-up their act and stop flooding the airwaves with the N-word,” Mr. Jeffries said, citing support from the Abolish the ‘N’ Word Coalition. “There are thousands of words in the English language. Nas and Universal can find another title for his upcoming album.”

“We must remove this offensive word from our lexicon,” the Rev. Clinton M. Miller, the pastor of Brown Memorial Baptist Church, said in a statement released by Mr. Jeffries’s office. “If Universal condones this action by Nas, they are in effect profiting from a racial slur that has been used to dehumanize people of color for centuries. It is a hurtful term and blatantly disrespects our ancestors and the civil rights movement that they fought and we continue to battle.”

Mr. Jeffries noted that the state pension fund invests money in Universal, one of the largest music companies, and he called for State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli to “review the appropriateness of continuing the state’s multibillion dollar investment in the entertainment industry” if Universal does not budge.

Two spokespeople for Universal did not respond to an e-mail message requesting comment. There has been some lingering uncertainty about the music company’s plans. Last week, Fox News quoted an associate of Antonio Reid, the chairman of the Def Jam Music Group, which represents Nas, as saying that Mr. Reid did not support using the epithet as the album’s name.

But today, MTV News quoted Mr. Reid himself saying that he fully supported Nas, a native of Queens whose real name is Nasir Jones.

We support everything our artists do, everything! We stand firmly behind and beside our artists with pride and with pleasure. Anything Nas wants to do, I completely stand beside him. Nas is prolific, he’s prophetic, he’s a genius, an amazing artist of respect. So, while I’m not sure exactly all that [the title] entails, I know it’s smart, so I stand behind him. That’s real.

Numerous civil rights activists have called for hip-hop artists to stop using the N-word, along with the words “bitch” and “ho.” Whether Nas intends to move forward with the loaded title could be an important test case for that effort.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20.../index.html?hp





Sure, He Can Direct Hit Movies, but Can He Do Commercials?
Claire Atkinson

IN the film world, Michael Mann is well known as a producer and director, with credits that include the new action movie “The Kingdom” as well as “Ali,” “The Aviator,” “The Insider” and “The Last of the Mohicans.”

In the advertising world, Mr. Mann is a director, most recently of two Nike spots that started in August. He has also done work for Mercedes and Rolex, projects that suggest how important the small screen is becoming to filmmakers.

“As the Internet becomes the medium, normal TV programming will be streamed with commercials,” Mr. Mann said in a telephone interview. “How are you going to arrest attention?”

Hollywood directors have been doing commercial work for decades — usually to bring in extra cash, turn a project around quickly and show the range of their talent. These days, however, there are new reasons people with boldface names make ads: to keep up in a multimedia world where the ability to master various platforms is at a premium and where consumers are as likely to see their work on YouTube or TiVo as at the multiplex.

•

Moviemakers are in demand among advertisers, who have a growing appetite for cinema-quality video that can run on television, online and in theaters. The advent of high-definition television means commercials must be expertly filmed, advertisers say, and the rise of DVRs means people need compelling reasons to watch ads rather than skip them.

“Hollywood and the advertising world have been connected for a long time. What’s different is that consumers are in a different place,” said Diego Scotti, vice president for global advertising at American Express. In the age of outtakes and extra footage on DVDs, consumers want to see not just a single video, but also all the behind-the-scenes material, even for commercials, he said.

Wes Anderson, director of the new movie “The Darjeeling Limited,” is behind some fast-paced spots now running for AT&T, while David Mamet made his first television commercials in April for Ford. Ben Affleck, the actor whose first project as a movie director, “Gone Baby Gone,” came out on Friday, has just signed a contract with a company in Santa Monica that produces commercials; he has also been looking at storyboards for AT&T.

American Express uses Hollywood personalities both behind the cameras and in front of them: Martin Scorsese, M. Night Shyamalan and Mr. Anderson have all appeared in its ads.

“We want the best creative minds in the world thinking about our brand,” Mr. Scotti said. “It’s about creating a piece that’s going to be both art and commerce.”

Phil Joanou, who directs films and television shows, says there is “zero stigma” about making commercials — if anything, there is an element of prestige. “In the filmmaking world, they’re very excited to see your commercial reel,” he says. Sometimes, he says, it is the first thing a studio chief asks for. (Demonstrating the lack of stigma, some directors, like Ridley Scott, started out in commercials and moved on to movies.)

Mr. Joanou, whose movies have included “Gridiron Gang” and “Heaven’s Prisoners,” says that advertising projects are a pleasant change of pace. “I can do comedy for Budweiser, action for Allstate Insurance,” he said. “I can show the breadth of my work, and that generates interest.”

With broadcasters scheduled to switch completely to digital television in 2009, networks are pressuring advertisers to ratchet up their commitments to filming in high definition. Mike Shaw, president for sales and marketing at ABC, said he was seeing results. “Spots are definitely looking better.”

David Lubars, the chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America, said not all movie directors are able to switch nimbly from three-hour epics to 30-second spots, but those who can are eager to pick up the work.

“Movies take months. It’s a big long slog,” he said. With commercials, “they’re getting in and out in three days, and it exists in a few weeks.”

From an agency’s perspective, moviemakers bring freshness to a campaign, Mr. Lubars said: “Working with Hollywood gives you new colors to paint with.” Paying for prominent creative talent is a trickier business. A director without big-screen credits typically earns a fixed fee, perhaps $3,000 a day or $30,000 for a project, said Wayne Best, executive creative director at the New York office of Taxi, an advertising agency. For bigger-name talent, however, the size of the fee may depend on how strongly the client wants the director, and it is a gamble whether the money ends up on screen or simply to pay for creative vision.

•

As advertisers do more with interactive ad campaigns that play well online, animation and special-effects companies are also getting more work. Stan Winston Studios, which handled special effects for movies like “Jurassic Park” and “Pearl Harbor,” has seen a big jump in commercial work.

J. Alan Scott, an effects supervisor at Winston, said his company handled 123 spots last year, up from 17 in 2002. He said he now spends most of his time on advertising projects.

This year, Winston has worked on spots for Circuit City, Sears, Applebee’s and Burger King, as well as on the 700 figurines in a Microsoft commercial for the video game Halo 3.

To put their signature on a spot, moviemakers sometimes borrow from their films. Mr. Anderson, for instance, used actors from his “Royal Tenenbaums” from 2001 in his recent AT&T ads, while Mr. Mann used the theme music from “The Last of the Mohicans” in a Nike spot, which features professional football players. Mr. Mann describes his spots for Nike as short films.

The decision to make commercials, Mr. Mann said, is “a function of something that comes along that’s a great idea.” He added, “A two-hour movie and a spot — I don’t make a distinction.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/bu...ia/22adco.html





Devoted Moviegoers Show Up Early
Alex Mindlin

Frequent moviegoers tend to arrive at the theater 16 percent earlier than the average moviegoer, according to a survey by Arbitron, the audience research firm.

The survey was commissioned in part by the Cinema Advertising Council, a trade group, and it focused on the receptivity of audiences to movie theater advertising — not trailers, but the commercials that are often shown beforehand, as well as branded cups and popcorn buckets and other forms of advertising.

The survey found that 36 percent of Americans over the age of 12 find in-theater ads “acceptable.” Those numbers compare favorably with Internet ads (20 percent) or ads embedded in video games (12 percent).

“The ads before the movies don’t interrupt the movies themselves,” said Bill Rose, a senior vice president at Arbitron. “Viewers can go out to the bathroom or get popcorn. Whereas Internet ads can be very much in your face, and video games ads are actually embedded in the content.”

The survey was based on 1,010 telephone interviews with people 12 and over. It defined frequent moviegoers as people who had gone to the movies at least four times in the last three months.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/bu...a/22drill.html





‘Darjeeling’ to Be Paired With a Short
Lia Miller

“The Darjeeling Limited,” Wes Anderson’s fifth feature film, opened to mixed reviews in about 200 theaters on Sept. 29, but for its wider release to almost 800 theaters, next Friday, moviegoers will first see a short film — one that got rave reviews — and, the hope is, “The Darjeeling Limited” will get a bump in ticket sales.

A year before filming “The Darjeeling Limited,” Mr. Anderson made a 13-minute movie called “Hotel Chevalier” featuring one of the characters from “The Darjeeling Limited.” The short, in contrast to the feature, received nearly universal praise when it was shown alongside the longer film at some festivals. After being made available free on iTunes, it quickly became an online hit and has been downloaded nearly 500,000 times.

Now Mr. Anderson and Fox Searchlight Pictures, the film’s distributor, are adding the popular short to the start of the feature as sort of preface to the main movie.

“The Darjeeling Limited” is about three brothers, played by Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman, traveling together in India on a spiritual quest. “Hotel Chevalier,” which Mr. Anderson wrote, takes place in a fancy hotel room in Paris and tells some of the “back story” of Mr. Schwartzman’s character, Jack.

The short also stars Natalie Portman, and though she does not appear in the feature, her character is important to it, Mr. Anderson said in an e-mail message. (And just as important for publicity, the short features Ms. Portman’s first nude scene.)

Mr. Anderson, who paid to make the short himself, said he was not sure how its distribution would be handled. “The Darjeeling Limited” has a distinct “opening of the story” sequence that made him “reluctant to attach the short to it.” But he knew that he wanted audiences to see both films, “So it was a puzzle for me to decide how I wanted to present them.”

After some discussion with executives at Fox Searchlight the decision was made to offer it on iTunes (and since Mr. Schwartzman’s character pointedly uses an iPod and docking station, there was some inherent synergy there).

Nancy Utley, a chief operating officer of Fox Searchlight, said that her company did not even know about the short until “The Darjeeling Limited” was completed. Even though Fox was aware of the critical acclaim, the company decided not to release it along with the feature. She said Fox decided to remain “flexible” on what to do.

“We thought it would be too challenging to moviegoers to be exposed to the short in theaters right at the beginning of the run,” she said. “We wanted to make sure ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ got established first as a movie.”

With the wider release looming and “Darjeeling Limited” doing small business at the box office (just over $2.5 million so far), it seemed the obvious choice to include the film’s more popular little sibling as a bonus. Fox Searchlight also is hoping the short is Oscar-worthy and plans to promote it as a contender in the best live-action short category.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/bu...arjeeling.html





Microsoft Blames Hollywood for Record Halo 3 Sales
Brian Briggs

Microsoft executives blamed higher ticket prices and a "lack of originality" for record sales of Halo 3.

"We thought we'd get some good sales, but nothing like this," said Microsoft executive Bob Frederickson. "But with escalating ticket prices and the crappy movies Hollywood has been putting out. People are just hungry for entertainment."

Frederickson added that the record sales for Halo 3 have also caused booming sales for Xbox console as well as other Xbox accessories. "Gee thanks, Ben Stiller, with all this business our guys haven't gotten much rest."

Frederickson showed some internal data that demonstrated how an actually funny movie from Ben Stiller would've impacted sales. "This data shows a quality comedy starring Ben Stiller and not just some movie trying to recapture the "Something About Mary" magic, would've dampened Halo 3 sales by 10%. A movie where Charlize Theron appears nude would've decreased sales by 35%," said Frederickson

Many in Hollywood contest the data. Including Karl Goldsmith of Paramount Pictures. He said, "I don't think you can tie the record game sales only to bad movies. I mean the music and television industry isn't producing anything so hot either. Look at Caveman! Is that keeping anybody away from their Xbox 360?"

Fans of Halo 3 agree. Chad Phillips from Rockford, Illinois said, "I'm not going to pay $12 for another derivative Ben Still movie. I'd rather pay $60 for another derivative first-person shooter."
Microsoft sees even more reason to be sanguine about the future for video game sales. Frederickson said, "There's no Star Wars or Lord of the Rings on the horizon to slow sales. What have they got, Alvin and the Chipmunks?"
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2007/10/m...ord-sales.html





Wii Video Game System Becomes New Tool for Hospital Rehab Unit
Amanda Cuda

There are a lot of things Barbara Everlith can't do since she suffered a stroke. Grasping objects with her left hand doesn't come as easily as it used to. She can't stand or walk as steadily as she once did.

But there's one thing that Everlith, who lives in Stratford, can do. She can play tennis. Sort of.

Everlith has learned how to play tennis on a Nintendo Wii video game system at Bridgeport Hospital's Ahlbin Centers Inpatient Rehabilitation Unit. The hospital is one of a handful to incorporate the gaming system into its physical therapy programs.

Unlike most other video games, the Wii requires players to stand up and move their bodies. For instance, those playing the tennis game must swing the controller as if wielding a real tennis racquet and hitting a real tennis ball.

Everlith has been at the hospital for six weeks and her physical therapist, Courtney Benedetto, said Everlith has already regained some function in her left hand. But other skills, such as walking and standing, still need work.

Benedetto said the game could help improve these skills.

"Just standing there and swinging the tennis racquet is going to be great for her," she said.

To help get Everlith used to the Wii, Benedetto played a couple of tennis games herself, showing Everlith how to swing and serve. The lesson over, it was Everlith's time to play. Benedetto helped Everlith out of her wheelchair and fastened a piece of fabric around her patient's waist. As Everlith stood, control fastened to her wrist, Benedetto grasped the fabric to keep Everlith from falling if her balance faltered.

It took Everlith a while to get the hang of the game, and Benedetto often guided her arm as she swung at the imaginary ball. Eventually, though, Everlith could swing on her own, and even won a game.

More important, she stayed on her feet the whole time, with little help from Benedetto.

"I've never seen her hold her balance steady for that long," Benedetto said.

"I've never stood for that long before," Everlith added.

The amount of physical activity required to play the gaming system has earned the Wii a sort of second life as a physical therapy tool. Facilities such as Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis and Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton, Canada, have integrated the Wii into therapy programs.

Ahlbin director Patrick Schmincke said he got the idea to bring the Wii into the hospital after receiving the gaming system as a Christmas gift. After playing it a few times, Schmincke said, he noticed that his arms were sore from the activity, and that he was sweating while using the game.

"I couldn't believe how much energy it took," he said.

Schmincke decided that the Wii might be a good addition to the therapy program, and could help break up the monotony of traditional rehabilitation. Benedetto agreed. "I think it's a great tool," she said. "(Rehab therapy) does get routine. This can bring in more energy and more fun."

The hospital acquired two of the gaming systems, paid for through its ladies' auxiliary. The only Wii game they have is Wii Sports, which comes with the system and includes tennis, as well as bowling, golf, baseball and boxing. Benedetto and Schmincke said they hope to purchase more games, as well as more controllers. The latter would allow patients to play against one another.

Schmincke said the games also are great for rehab patients who are interested in a specific sport. For example, a patient who is an avid golfer might be particularly taken by the golf game.
http://www.newstimes.com/ci_7246821





Nintendo Seizes 10,000 Hong Kong Pirate Devices

The Hong Kong High Court has intervened, at Nintendo's request, to help stop a global distribution operation involving game copying devices and modification chips that violate the copyrights and trademarks of Nintendo DS and Wii.

On Oct. 8th, the court ordered the raid of Supreme Factory Limited facilities, through which Nintendo representatives seized more than 10,000 game copying devices and mod chips over the course of three days. The devices seized are used to copy and play Nintendo DS games offered unlawfully over the Internet, and the mod chips allow the play of pirated Wii discs or illegal copies of downloaded Nintendo games.

Documents recovered during the search also shed light on the scope of the operation, revealing that Supreme Factory Limited has ties to a French company, Divineo SARL, and its principal, Max Louarn, who are also named in the legal action initiated by Nintendo. The Hong Kong High Court prohibited the companies from further distribution of the devices and from disposing a portion of their assets worldwide, and ordered those assets frozen pending outcome of the legal proceedings.

The High Court previously awarded Nintendo more than $5 million in damages in 2005 against Lik Sang, a company found responsible for the widespread distribution of game copying devices. In another case, a U.S. judge ordered Bung Enterprises to pay Nintendo $7 million in damages in connection with its involvement in manufacturing and distribution of such products. Nintendo says it and the companies that create, license, market and sell its products lost an estimated $762 million in sales due to counterfeits in 2006.

Jodi Daugherty, Nintendo of America's senior director for anti-piracy, says, "Piracy affects the entire video game industry, from large companies to independent developers. It can destroy years of hard work by a team of very talented software developers, who strive to create games consumers enjoy playing. Copying the developers' work and spreading the game files globally is blatant stealing."
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=15949





One Person’s Trash Is Another Person’s Lost Masterpiece
Carol Vogel

It’s hardly a place you would expect to find a $1 million painting.

But one March morning four years ago, Elizabeth Gibson was on her way to get coffee, as usual, when she spotted a large and colorful abstract canvas nestled between two big garbage bags in front of the Alexandria, an apartment building on the northwest corner of Broadway and 72nd Street in Manhattan.

“I had a real debate with myself,” said Ms. Gibson, a writer and self-professed Dumpster diver. “I almost left it there because it was so big, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘Why are you taking this back to your crammed apartment?’”

But, she said, she felt she simply had to have the 38-by-51-inch painting, because “it had a strange power.”

Art experts would agree with her. As it turns out, the painting was “Three People,” a 1970 canvas by the celebrated 20th-century Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo that was stolen 20 years ago and is the subject of an F.B.I. investigation.

Experts say the painting — a largely abstract depiction of a man, a woman and an androgynous figure in vibrant purples, oranges and yellows — is in miraculously good condition and worth about $1 million. On Nov. 20 it is to go on the block at Sotheby’s as one of the highlights of a Latin American art auction.

Ms. Gibson said she did not suspect that the painting had any commercial value when she found it. “I am not a modern-art aficionado,” she said. “It was so overpowering, yet it had a cheap frame.”

The painting had been missing for so long that the owners, a married couple whom Sotheby’s would not identify, had long since given up hope of ever seeing it again. The husband, a Houston collector and businessman, had purchased “Three People” at a Sotheby’s auction in 1977 as a birthday present for his wife. He paid $55,000 for it.

Ten years later, when the couple were in the midst of moving from a house to an apartment in Houston, they put the painting into storage at a local warehouse. It was there that it disappeared.

The couple reported the theft to the local and federal authorities, and an image was posted on the databases of the International Foundation for Art Research and the Art Loss Register. They also offered a $15,000 reward to anyone who could help them recover it. But no credible leads surfaced.

The couple later moved to South America, and the husband died. It is his widow who is putting the painting on the market.

How “Three People” got from a Houston warehouse 20 years ago to the streets of New York remains a mystery. The painting’s disappearance so troubled August Uribe, an expert at Sotheby’s, that he volunteered to appear on “Antiques Roadshow” in a “Missing Masterpieces” segment in May 2005.

Ms. Gibson had hung the painting in her living room, but remained curious about it. She had gone back to the Alexandria the day after taking it home and asked the doormen there if anyone could tell her who had put it on the street.

“No one remembered anything,” she said. “All they said was that 20 minutes after I took it, the garbage truck arrived. This was truly an appointment with destiny.”

It took three years for her to realize that she possessed a stolen painting.

A few months after she hung it in her apartment, she said, she called a friend who had worked at an auction house and described the painting to him. “He asked me if it had a signature,” she recalled. It did. In the upper right-hand corner the artist had signed it “Tamayo 0-70.”

But her friend did not seem very interested in her discovery, she said.

More time passed, and one day she removed the painting from the wall and examined the back. There she saw several stickers — one from the Perls Gallery in Manhattan, now closed; another from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, where it had been exhibited in 1974; and a third from the Richard Feigen Gallery in Manhattan.

She called the Feigen gallery and told someone there about all the information on the labels. Days later, she said, the gallery called back to say it had no record of the painting.

A year or so after that, she said, she told another friend about the painting. “He showed me a Sotheby’s catalog where a Tamayo had sold for $500,000,” she recalled. He also went to the library and came back with a pile of books on the artist. One — a 1974 monograph of his work by Emily Genauer — had her painting on the cover. “I was stunned,” Ms. Gibson said.

She made an appointment to do more research at the Frick Art Reference Library, at the Frick Collection on East 70th Street. A librarian there directed her to the nearby Mary-Anne Martin gallery, which specializes in Latin American art.

She walked three blocks to the gallery, where she says she was told by someone that it was a “famously stolen” painting. “I was in a state of shock,” she said.

Realizing that she might have something very valuable, Ms. Gibson built a false wall in her closet to conceal the painting, carefully wrapping it in old shower curtains. After Googling the artist’s name, she discovered an image of “Three People” at the “Antiques Roadshow” Web site in reference to the “Missing Masterpieces” segment.

Searching the Web in May, she discovered that the episode would be rebroadcast the next day in Baltimore. She traveled to Baltimore by bus and checked into a hotel to watch the segment.

“It was very nail-biting, but the moment I saw it, I knew it was my painting,” she said.

Upon returning to New York, she immediately called Sotheby’s and made an appointment to see Mr. Uribe. “Just call me a Mystery Woman,” she says she told his office, not wanting to reveal her story until she was face to face with Mr. Uribe. She asked a minister from her church, the First Church of Religious Science, to accompany her and introduced herself as Mrs. Green.

“I asked her to describe the painting,” Mr. Uribe recalled. “And when she said it had a sandy surface, I knew it was the painting.” (Tamayo frequently ground sand and marble into his paint.) She also told Mr. Uribe about the stickers on the back, which offered further confirmation that she had the real thing.

Mr. Uribe visited Ms. Gibson’s Upper West Side apartment, and she began dismantling the false wall. “I saw only a corner of the canvas, yet I knew it was the painting,” he said. “The colors and surface were unique to Tamayo.”

Ms. Gibson will receive the promised $15,000 reward from the seller, as well as a smaller finder’s fee from Sotheby’s, which the auction house declined to disclose.

Sotheby’s informed the F.B.I. that “Three People” had been found. James Wynne, the agent in charge of the case, said that because a criminal investigation was continuing, he could not discuss whether the agency had any clues to who stole the work years ago.

“Finding a $1 million painting in the garbage is very unusual,” Mr. Wynne said. “It’s a real New York story.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/ar...gn/23pain.html





As Apple Gains PC Market Share, Jobs Talks of a Decade of Upgrades
John Markoff

It may have dropped the word “computer” from its name, but Apple is certainly selling plenty of Macs.

Driven in part by what analysts call a halo effect from the iPod and the iPhone, the market share of the company’s personal computers is surging.

Two research firms that track the computer market said last week that Apple would move into third place in the United States behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell on Monday, when it reports product shipments in the fiscal fourth quarter as part of its earnings announcement.

“The Macintosh has a lot of momentum now,” said Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in a telephone interview last week. “It is outpacing the industry.”

On Friday, Apple will start selling the new Leopard version of its OS X operating system, which has a range of features that in some cases match those in Windows Vista and in others surpass them.

Mr. Jobs said that Leopard would anchor a schedule of product upgrades that could continue for as long as a decade.

“I’m quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future,” he said. “We’ve put out major releases on the average of one a year, and it’s given us the ability to polish and polish and improve and improve.”

That pace suggests that Apple will continue to move more quickly than Microsoft, which took almost seven years between the release of its Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems.

Vista has had mixed reviews, and corporate sales have been slow so far. Mr. Jobs declined to comment on Microsoft’s troubles with Vista, beyond noting that he thought Leopard was a better value. While there are multiple editions of Vista with different features at different prices, the top being the Ultimate edition, Apple has set a single price of $129 for Leopard.

With Leopard, Mr. Jobs joked, “everybody gets the Ultimate edition and it sells for 129 bucks, and if you go on Amazon and look at the Ultimate edition of Vista, it sells for 250 bucks.”

Microsoft has said that it will release an update, or service pack, for Vista in the first quarter of 2008. But it has also said that it intends to offer a service pack for Windows XP in the first half of the year. That, analysts said, could further delay adoption of Vista as computer users wait to see how XP will be improved.

Microsoft has also hinted that its next operating system, code-named Windows 7, would not arrive until 2010. At Apple’s current pace, it will have introduced two new versions of its operating system by then.

Apple has not been flawless in its execution. Early this year, it delayed the introduction of Leopard for four months. Mr. Jobs attributed this at the time to the company’s need to move programming development resources to an iPhone version of the OS X operating system.

Several analysts said they thought that Leopard would have only an indirect effect on Macintosh sales.

As for Vista, it has clearly not pushed up demand for new PCs as much as computer makers hoped. Last week, the research firm Gartner said PC shipments in the United States grew only 4.7 percent in the third quarter, below its projection of 6.7 percent.

That contrasted sharply with Apple’s projected results for the quarter. Gartner forecast that Apple would grow more than 37 percent based on expected shipments of 1.3 million computers, for an 8.1 percent share of the domestic market.

Apple has outpaced its rivals in the United States, particularly in the shift to portable computers. While this is the first year that laptops have made up more than 50 percent of computer sales in this country, Mr. Jobs said that two-thirds of Apple machines sold in the United States are now laptops.

Apple has also outperformed rivals in terms of market share by revenue, because its machines are generally more expensive.

According to Charles Wolf, who tracks the personal computer market in his industry newsletter Wolf Bytes, Apple’s share of home PC revenue in the United States has jumped in the last four quarters. In the second quarter, for example, the Macintosh captured a 15.8 percent share, almost double its share of the number of units sold.

He added that Apple had a significant opportunity now in terms of visitors to its stores. Apple is now reporting 100 million annual visitors, and Mr. Wolf estimated that 60 million to 70 million of them were Windows users drawn by the iPod or the iPhone, who could potentially shift to Macs.

Although Apple may be able to grow briskly by taking Windows customers from Microsoft, the two companies face a similar problem: the industry is maturing and there have been no obvious radical innovations to jump-start growth.

Indeed, many of the new features in the Leopard operating system version are incremental improvements. But Mr. Jobs said he was struck by the success of the multitouch interface that is at the heart of the iPhone version of the OS X. This allows a user to touch the screen at more than one point to zoom in on a portion of a photo, for example.

“People don’t understand that we’ve invented a new class of interface,” he said.

He contrasted it with stylus interfaces, like the approach Microsoft took with its tablet computer. That interface is not so different from what most computers have been using since the mid-1980s.

In contrast, Mr. Jobs said that multitouch drastically simplified the process of controlling a computer.

There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.

The Apple development team worried constantly that the approach might fail during the years they were creating the iPhone, he said.

“We all had that Garry Trudeau cartoon that poked fun at the Newton in the back of our minds,” he said, citing Doonesbury comic strips that mocked an Apple handwriting-recognition system in 1993. “This thing had to work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/te...y/22apple.html





Hack Attack : Install Leopard on Your PC in 3 Easy Steps!

Well its been only a day since the Mac OSX Leopard was released officially by Apple and the hackers have managed to create a patched DVD that everyone like you and me can use to install Leopard on PC’s without having to buy a Mac. Please note the tutorial that I am going to post is still experimental and things might not work the right way simply because it is still early days in hacking Leopard to work on PC’s. Well if you don’t mind your PC getting screwed then go ahead and try out this tutorial.

Make sure you backup all important data before you proceed. Here are the things that you will need before Install Leopard on your PC…
The Patched DVD Image
The zip file containing the patch
One pen drive or USB Flash Drive formatted as FAT32

Well once you have all these you can go ahead and Install Leopard..

Step 1. Getting things ready
Burn the DVD Image onto a Single Layer DVD-R using a software like Nero.
Format the USB Flash Drive and the drive label should be "Patcher" without the quotes. Please note it has to be "Patcher" only and nothing else for the patch to work when we apply it later.
Extract the Zip file and put its contents into the USB Flash Drive.
Now your USB Drive should contain a folder called "files", if it doesn’t then check to see where you have gone wrong.

Step 2. Installing Leopard
Now that you have the Patched DVD with you, you can now install Leopard. Pop in the DVD into the drive and boot into it by pressing F12 at the BIOS Prompt.
Boot into the DVD and the installer should now load. It take a while though, so be patient.
Select your Language and make sure you select Customize and you need to deselect all the packages that are displayed.
Leopard will now install. This can take a while, so go grab yourself a coffee.
It will ask you to Reboot, so go ahead and Reboot. Before rebooting make sure that USB Flash Drive is connected to the PC.

Step 3. Patching Leopard
Now that you have got Leopard installed, you need to patch it. Before we do that Boot into the Leopard DVD like the way you did before.
Wait for the Darwin Bootloader to load. Once it loads up press F8. You should now see a prompt. Type -s and hit enter. The DVD will now load in Verbose mode. Watch for any errors. It should load without a problem because you have already installed Leopard.
Once the setup is loaded select your Language. Once done you should now be seeing the Welcome Screen. Once there navigate to Utilities-Terminal.
Once the terminal loads up, you now need to browse to your USB Drive, so follow the steps below, typing it exactly as it appears below in the Terminal.

In the command line type the following as they appear here

cd ..
cd ..
cd Volumes
cd Patcher
cd files

Notice the space between cd and the 2 dots.
Now its the time to run the patcher to make sure Leopard will work on your PC. Type the following into the Terminal.

./9a581PostPatch.sh
The Patch should now run. You can answer Yes while removing the ACPUPowerManagement.kext
After the Script is done, you should now be able to Boot into Leopard after you restart.

Step 4. Congratulations! You’ve done the Impossible!

Well that was it. Please note this has not been extensively tested, so most of your Hardware like Sound, Network may not work. If something goes wrong for you or you want to help us, then please join the discussion over at OSX86Scene. If you noticed I haven’t posted the links to the Torrent that contains the DVD image and the zip. Well I haven’t posted them because I am sure the lawyers over at Apple are going to sue the hell out of me. If you wondering where you can find them, then head over to Demonoid and search for it.
http://dailyapps.net/2007/10/hack-at...-3-easy-steps/





Apple Profit Up 67%, Aided by Record Mac Sales
John Markoff

Apple’s earnings report today leapt ahead of analysts’ already optimistic expectations. The company posted record Macintosh sales numbers for its fiscal fourth quarter, showing that the company is climbing into the league of the dominant personal computer makers, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

The company reported quarterly profits of $904 million, or $1.01 a share, up from $542 million, or 62 cents, in the same quarter a year ago, an increase of 67 percent. Analysts had predicted profit of 85 cents a share.

Sales rose to $6.22 billion from $4.84 billion. Gross margin also surged, to 33.6 percent from 29.2 percent a year ago.

But it was the absolute number of Macintosh sales that caused the company’s stock to shoot up more than 6 percent in after-hours trading.

Apple said it sold 2.16 million Macintosh computers during the quarter. The market research firm Dataquest estimated last week that it had sold 1.3 million computers, and I.D.C. put the figure at 1.1 million. Dell sold 5 million computers and H.P. sold 4.3 million in the same period, according to the I.D.C. report.

Apple is in the midst of one of the strongest stretches of its three-decade history, with recently revamped iPods and a new version of its operating system scheduled to appear this Friday.

Although it has been on the market for just one quarter, the iPhone is set to be a major product for Apple. The company has said that it sold 270,000 phones during the first weekend of sales, and last month it said it had reached the one-million-sold mark.

The company’s stock shot up after a strong earnings report in July, but it then fell through the middle of August amid concerns that the iPhone might not maintain its early momentum.

On Sept. 14, the company cut the price of the iPhone by $200 and offered early purchasers a $100 rebate, indicating that concerns about slowing sales had been justified. Since then Apple’s stock has climbed steadily as expectations grew that it would outpace analysts’ projections for the quarter.

Apple has said previously that it expects to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. Some analysts believe the company will easily surpass that figure. Charles Wolf, an independent market analyst who publishes the Wolf Bytes newsletter, said he expects the company to hit 14 million phones in its first year and a half.

By contrast, Microsoft has said that it expects its phone-making partners to ship 20 million Windows Mobile phones next year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/te...apple-web.html





Piper Jaffray: AT&T Paying Apple $18 Per iPhone, Per Month
Tom Krazit

The exact details of AT&T's revenue-sharing agreement with Apple have not been disclosed, but one analyst thinks that over the two-year life of a user contract, the amount exceeds the actual price of the iPhone.

Silicon Alley Insider spotted a research note from Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster estimating that Apple is receiving $18 per month for each iPhone subscriber, under the revenue-sharing agreement between the two companies. Apple has confirmed that such an agreement exists, but has not shared the details about exactly how much cash it's getting from the revenue AT&T makes on iPhone customers using the carrier's data network. In July, Munster estimated Apple was receiving just $3 per iPhone subscriber and $11 per iPhone customers new to AT&T, but he's rethought the numbers after Apple's latest earnings release.

Munster takes the 1.4 million iPhones that Apple has sold since the device made its debut, and subtracts the 250,000 iPhones that Apple said it believes were bought to unlock from AT&T's network, to calculate that there were 1.15 million revenue-generating iPhones in play during Apple's fourth quarter. He then uses the $118 million that Apple recorded in iPhone-related revenue during the quarter to estimate out how much service revenue Apple took in from its share of AT&T's data charges by subtracting his estimate of hardware revenue generated by the sale of each iPhone, based on the average selling price.

It's a little tricky because the iPhones that were sold in June and July have obviously been generating revenue for longer than the ones sold in September, but he arrives at a figure of $18 per iPhone subscriber in monthly payments to Apple during the fourth quarter.

That would mean that over the life of a two-year contract, AT&T will pay Apple $432 per iPhone subscriber. Silicon Alley Insider adds the $400 in revenue per iPhone and uses iSuppli's cost estimates to calculate a $565 profit per iPhone over a two-year period. I'm a little wary of those iSuppli numbers myself (they don't really account for things like research and development costs), but the exact number isn't really the point: Apple has a huge incentive to make sure iPhones stay on AT&T's network, even if Munster's numbers aren't perfect.

I sent Munster an e-mail with a few questions, including whether it's fair to assume that the $18 a month figure will remain constant over the two-year contract, but I haven't heard back yet. A reader of Tuesday's iPhone blog made a fair point that Apple still gets revenue from the sale of an unlocked iPhone. But it's leaving quite a bit of money on the table if that phone doesn't run on AT&T's network.
http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9803657-37.html





Staples To Sell Dell PCs, Printers, LCDs
Edward F. Moltzen

Dell on Monday dropped the second shoe of its new, U.S. retail strategy, saying it will start shipping PCs through retailer Staples on Nov. 11.

The Round Rock, Texas-based Dell said it will offer a series of notebooks, desktops, inket printers, laster printers and LCDs through Staples. Earlier this year, Dell began selling some PCs through Walmart.

In a statement, Dell said its branded products will include Inspiron 1721 and 1521 notebooks, Inspiron 530 desktops, all-in-one inkjet printers and the Dell 1320c laser printer, in addition to 19-inch and 22-inch LCDs. Staples will resell Dell ink and toner, the company said.

Dell is in the midst of trying to transform its company from a market-share losing, direct PC maker with sales and profit under pressure, into a growth-oriented company with major retail, commercial reseller and direct sales reach. While Dell executives have said they intend to embrace solution providers and work to grow its $9 billion in annual, indirect sales, the company has yet to deliver a new channel program or rules of engagemen to solution providers. Dell executives say that would come by year's end.

Dell's entry into the U.S. office retail space follows rivals including Apple, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Gateway over the past two years. Staples already sells PCs from Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Toshiba, among others.

The retail segment has been among those at Dell that have underperformed the rest of the market during that time.
http://www.crn.com/it-channel/202600172





SanDisk Sues LG, 24 Others for Patent Infringement
Dan Nystedt

SanDisk is suing 25 companies, including South Korean giant LG Electronics for allegedly infringing patents used in removable flash storage products including MP3 players and USB flash drives.

The Milpitas, California, chip maker has also filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), asking to have defendants in the court cases barred from importing products into the U.S.

The company filed two lawsuits in the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Wisconsin, one alleging the infringement of five patents in the ITC complaint, and another one including two additional patents not involved in the ITC action.

The court and ITC complaints could affect the prices and availability of products made by companies targeted in the suit if SanDisk wins and the companies are barred from importing products into the U.S.

The suit also covers makers of CompactFlash cards, multimedia cards and other removable flash storage products used in digital cameras, mobile phones and other gadgets, and includes companies from around the world, such as Japan’s Buffalo, Acer affiliate Apacer Technology of Taiwan, and Kingston Technology of California.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/10...disk/index.php





Patent Filed for Revolutionary Technique to Quickly Recover Lost Passwords

ElcomSoft has discovered and filed for a US patent on a breakthrough technology that will decrease the time that it takes to perform password recovery by a factor of up to 25. ElcomSoft has harnessed the combined power of a PC's Central Processing Unit and its video card's Graphics Processing Unit. The resulting hardware/software powerhouse will allow cryptology professionals to build affordable PCs that will work like supercomputers when recovering lost passwords.

Using the "brute force" technique of recovering passwords, it was possible, though time-consuming, to recover passwords from popular applications. For example, the logon password for Windows Vista might be an eight-character string composed of uppercase and lowercase alphabetic characters. There would about 55 trillion (52 to the eighth power) possible passwords. Windows Vista uses NTLM hashing by default, so using a modern dual-core PC you could test up to 10,000,000 passwords per second, and perform a complete analysis in about two months. With ElcomSoft's new technology, the process would take only three to five days, depending upon the CPU and GPU.

Until recently, graphic cards' GPUs couldn't be used for applications such as password recovery. Older graphics chips could only perform floating-point calculations, and most cryptography algorithms require fixed-point mathematics. Today's chips can process fixed-point calculations. And with as much as 1.5 Gb of onboard video memory and up to 128 processing units, these powerful GPU chips are much more effective than CPUs in performing many of these calculations.

In February, 2007 NVIDIA, the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, launched CUDA, a C-Compiler and developer's kit that gives software developers access to the parallel processing power of the GPU through the standard language of C. NVIDIA GPUs (GeForce 8 and above) act as multiprocessors with multiple registers and shared memory and cache. ElcomSoft has harnessed their computing power, and will be incorporating this patent-pending technology into their entire family of enterprise password recovery applications. Since high-end PC mother boards can work with four separate video cards, the future is bright for even faster password recovery applications.

Preliminary tests using ElcomSoft Distributed Password Recovery product to recover Windows NTLM logon passwords show that the recovery speed has increased by a factor of twenty, simply by hooking up with a $150 video card's onboard GPU. ElcomSoft expects to find similar results as this new technology is incorporated into their password recovery products for Microsoft Office, PGP, and dozens of other popular applications.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=5567





What's at Stake in the Surveillance Debate in Congress
Jennifer Granick

Over the next few weeks and months, civil libertarians and consumer advocates will wage a battle against the telecommunications companies and the Bush administration to preserve some semblance of privacy rights in Americans' communications.

Congress will be considering several versions of bills that will, one way or another, expand government access to phone calls and e-mails. These legislative proposals are complex and in flux, but there are two main issues at the center of the debate that citizens can focus on. One is whether eavesdropping on millions of Americans simultaneously is acceptable. The second is whether communications companies should get a free pass for breaking the law by allowing illegal warrantless surveillance of all Americans' communications.

In the 1960s and '70s, several Supreme Court cases held that citizens can reasonably expect that the government will not eavesdrop on their personal communications without first demonstrating to a court the need for this privacy invasion. Congress passed the Wiretap Act of 1968 to regulate eavesdropping for law enforcement purposes, and added the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 to establish procedures for the president to follow when conducting surveillance for national-security purposes. FISA established a "secret court" -- the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC -- to review applications for national-security warrants. These could be obtained merely by showing that the target was an agent of a foreign power.

Targeted surveillance was the order of the day for two primary reasons. First, the Fourth Amendment prohibits "general warrants," those which do not specify the names of people to be observed, the inventory of things to be seized, or otherwise fail to narrow the discretion of the officer performing the search. Second -- and it turns out, more importantly -- it was prohibitively expensive to perform mass surveillance. Eavesdropping required paying someone to sit and listen to calls, because storage and voice-recognition technology were not available.

By 2001, things had changed. Digital networks, vast storage and powerful computer processing meant that it was now economically feasible to monitor entire networks -- including the phone network -- using computers, voice recognition and other modern technologies. The government began pushing to use these new technologies for wide-scale mass surveillance.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks also occurred in 2001. But while the attacks may have raised the American public's tolerance for privacy invasions, it was not the sole impetus for mass spying. The National Security Agency (NSA) was pressuring telcos to give it unfettered access to customer calling records seven months before the attacks. Regardless, Sept. 11 inspired Congress to modify FISA to give national security officers more leeway in hunting down terrorists. The USA Patriot Act modified FISA in several important ways, but none of them would have allowed the wholesale surveillance of American communications networks the NSA was pushing for behind the scenes.

Despite the missing legal authority, we now know that several telecommunications companies secretly cooperated in the mass diversion of phone calls and e-mails to the NSA. The New York Times revealed the existence of this warrantless surveillance program in December 2005. After this revelation, the Bush Administration admitted it was listening without warrants to known al-Qaida members who called, or were called by, people in the United States. However, the warrantless wiretapping went much further than that. A former AT&T engineer by the name of Mark Klein revealed that all internet traffic flowing through AT&T's backbone was regularly diverted to the NSA.

My employer, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T on behalf of all its customers who had been intercepted without a warrant, as well as those who had had their phone records disclosed in a separate but apparently related program. A few months later, other class actions against the telcos were filed nationwide. The attorneys general of several states also began investigations to see whether the communications providers had violated their legal obligations as public utilities. The federal government has intervened in the litigation to kill all of these cases, alleging that telco cooperation is an official secret and that the lawsuits must be dismissed. That issue is currently on appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, although at least one high-level administration official -- Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence -- has since confirmed the phone company-government collaboration.

Now the administration is bringing the battle for mass surveillance to Congress. Just before this summer's recess, Congress passed the Protect America Act (PAA), which gave the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence the power to authorize surveillance without a court order, so long as the target of that surveillance was reasonably believed to be overseas. This was a major expansion of executive power from what FISA had allowed. it also went well beyond what the Bush administration had said it needed: The president had claimed FISA needed some modest tweaking to allow for efficient eavesdropping on foreign-to-foreign communications that travel through the United States, while leaving the privacy of Americans intact.

The PAA is due to expire in February of 2008, so Congress is now considering new proposals to replace it. An admirable goal of well-balanced legislation would be to enable us to detect and fight terrorism, without losing judicial and legislative oversight of the surveillance process.

The Restore Act, which failed to pass the House last week, tried to strike this balance. It would have permitted warrantless surveillance of foreign-to-foreign communications and put surveillance review back in the hands of the FISC rather than administration officials. And it would not have immunized phone companies for their illegal behavior. However, it did allow for "blanket warrants" that would sanction mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans if the purported target was a foreign national.

The problem with such blanket warrants is practical, legal and technical.

On the technical side, the tactic produces far more false positives than we are capable of processing. Also, warrants for general surveillance are proven vehicles for abuse. Our Founding Fathers abhorred general warrants, which is why the Fourth Amendment specifically prohibits them, proscribing that "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

The potential for abuse is extreme in the case of telecommunications, because the government is capturing and has access to every one of our calls or e-mails as they flow through telco offices, even if it's not supposed to look at most of it.

The legislation that just cleared the Senate subcommittee and is currently under consideration makes a different mistake. It would allow the attorney general in a closed-door session to unilaterally absolve any telco accused of illegally intercepting communications.

Communications carriers play an essential role in keeping the government honest about whether it's eavesdropping on us. Any working law must provide incentives to these companies to reject requests for unlawful surveillance by imposing liability when they fail to do so, while protecting companies that comply in good faith with valid legal process, just as FISA and the Wiretap Act already do.

It's not clear why the Senate thinks encouraging secret collusion between a president and a major industry is a good idea. Telcos accused of violations will donate money to the campaigns of those officials most likely to absolve their bad behavior. The bill also abandons the substantial oversight role that either Congress or courts could play in ensuring that laws are followed and effective. My employer, EFF, also objects to telco immunity because it is intended to kill our pending class action lawsuit.

Rather than offering a rational reason for the amnesty provision, the Senate seems to be acting out of confusion. Feeling left out, Congress said it would not consider amnesty unless the White House disclosed documents that would allow lawmakers to determine what exactly was going on with secret, warrantless surveillance in this country. Now that the Senate has received some documents, it is ready to pay off the administration for this small, belated courtesy of inclusion, while forgetting to exercise the oversight function that caused the legislators to ask for the information in the first place.

Sen. Russ Feingold's office says that the documents show that the surveillance was illegal, a very good reason to refuse any amnesty. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who recently benefited from unusually large campaign contributions from the phone companies, supports amnesty.

As the legislative process plays out, the issues of when to authorize mass surveillance, how to minimize abuses and how to deter unlawful behavior will continue to be major parts of the debate. The American Revolution was fought in part against the abuses practiced by an unchecked executive power. Terrorism and new technologies are novel challenges, but the legal techniques developed over the past 200 years -- separation of powers, checks and balances, individualized suspicion and special warrants among them -- have and will continue to serve us well, if we let them.
http://www.wired.com/politics/online...cuitcourt_1023





Terror Watch List Swells to More Than 755,000
Mimi Hall

The government's terrorist watch list has swelled to more than 755,000 names, according to a new government report that has raised worries about the list's effectiveness.

The size of the list, typically used to check people entering the country through land border crossings, airports and sea ports, has been growing by 200,000 names a year since 2004. Some lawmakers, security experts and civil rights advocates warn that it will become useless if it includes too many people.

"It undermines the authority of the list," says Lisa Graves of the Center for National Security Studies. "There's just no rational, reasonable estimate that there's anywhere close to that many suspected terrorists."

The exact number of people on the list, compiled after 9/11 to help government agents keep terrorists out of the country, is unclear, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Some people may be on the list more than once because they are listed under multiple spellings.

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who plans a hearing on the report today, says "serious hurdles remain if (the list) is to be as effective as we need it to be. Some of the concerns stem from its rapid growth, which could call into question the quality of the list itself."

About 53,000 people on the list were questioned since 2004, according to the GAO, which says the Homeland Security Department doesn't keep records on how many were denied entry or allowed into the country after questioning. Most were apparently released and allowed to enter, the GAO says.

Leonard Boyle, director of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, which maintains the list, says in testimony to be given today that 269 foreigners were denied entry in fiscal 2006.

The GAO report also says:

•The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) could not specify how many people on its no-fly list, which is a small subset of the watch list, might have slipped through screening and been allowed on domestic flights.

•TSA data show "a number of individuals" on the no-fly list passed undetected through screening and boarded international flights bound for the United States. Several planes have been diverted once officials realized that people named on the watch lists were on board.

•Homeland Security has not done enough to use the list more broadly in the private sector, where workers applying for jobs in sensitive places such as chemical factories could do harm.

Boyle also urges that the list be used by for screening at businesses where workers could "carry out attacks on our critical infrastructure that could harm large numbers of persons or cause immense economic damage."

But the sheer size of the watch list raised the most alarms.

"They are quickly galloping towards the million mark — a mark of real distinction because the list is already cumbersome and is approaching absolutely useless," said Tim Sparapani of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, says "creating and maintaining a comprehensive terrorist watch list is an enormous endeavor fraught with technical and tactical challenges."

The report, she says, "underscores the need to make the watch lists more accurate, to improve screening procedures at airports and the ports of entry, and to provide individuals with the ability to seek redress if they believe they have been wrongfully targeted."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...atchlist_N.htm





All the Same?
Al Kamen

April 8, 2004: Then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told the Sept. 11 commission that "terrorism is terrorism is terrorism -- in other words, you can't fight al-Qaeda and hug Hezbollah or hug Hamas."

"We don't make a distinction between different kinds of terrorism. And we're, therefore, united with the countries of the world to fight all kinds of terrorism. Terrorism is never an appropriate or justified response just because of political difficulty."
Wednesday: Army Maj. Gen. Richard Sherlock, a senior member of the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a news briefing: "There are over 45 different organizations on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations, and you can't look at all of them the same way.

"If you look at all of these as nails, then all of the solutions you have all of a sudden suddenly start to appear like a hammer, and a hammer's not always the right answer."

Hmmmm. . . .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...502488_pf.html





Democrats Were Targets in Inquiries, Panel Is Told
Philip Shenon

Richard L. Thornburgh, attorney general in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, charged Tuesday that political reasons motivated the Justice Department to open corruption investigations against Democrats in Mr. Thornburgh’s home state, Pennsylvania.

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Thornburgh became the first former Republican attorney general to join with Democratic lawmakers to suggest that the Justice Department under Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales had singled out Democratic politicians for prosecution.

“The citizens of the United States must have confidence that the department is conducting itself in a fair and impartial manner without actual political influence or the appearance of political influence,” said Mr. Thornburgh, who is now in private practice. He is defending the former elected Democratic coroner of Allegheny County, Pa., against federal corruption charges. “Unfortunately that may no longer be the case.”

His unusually harsh criticism of fellow Republicans was directed specifically at the United States attorney in Pittsburgh, Mary Beth Buchanan, who was director of the Executive Office of United States Attorneys, based in Washington, in 2004 and 2005. That office has come under scrutiny for its role in the dismissal of United States attorneys last year, in some cases for what appear to have been partisan reasons.

“It has been and remains the practice of the United States Attorney’s Office to investigate and prosecute individuals who violate federal law without regard to their political affiliation,” Ms. Buchanan said in a written statement.

Mr. Gonzales, who stepped down last month, and his former Justice Department colleagues have repeatedly denied that politics played any role in the prosecution of corruption cases in the Bush administration. The department’s inspector general is now conducting an investigation of the reasons for the firings of the United States attorneys last year.

The House Judiciary Committee is investigating the Justice Department’s handling of the prosecution of several prominent Democrats around the country, most notably the prosecution and conviction of former Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama on federal corruption charges. A Republican lawyer there has given a sworn statement to the committee in which she said she overheard discussion of how the White House had put pressure on local prosecutors to pursue the case.

Mr. Thornburgh noted that Ms. Buchanan had conducted a series of high-profile corruption investigations against Pennsylvania Democrats in the months before the 2006 midterm elections, including the one against the former coroner, Cyril Wecht.

“During this same period, not one Republican officeholder was investigated and/or prosecuted by Ms. Buchanan’s office — not one,” Mr. Thornburgh said, noting that there had been accusations of corruption against two prominent Republican members of Congress from Pennsylvania in that same period. He said that Dr. Wecht, a nationally prominent forensic pathologist, “would qualify as an ideal target for a Republican U.S. attorney trying to curry favor with a department which demonstrated that if you play by its rules, you will advance.”

Dr. Wecht, who is scheduled to go on trial next year, has been charged with 84 criminal counts, including theft and mail fraud, much of it involving his use of a government fax machine and postage meter. Mr. Thornburgh described the prosecution as “bizarre.”

Mr. Thornburgh’s testimony drew harsh attacks from Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who accused him of trying to undermine the credibility of the Justice Department in an effort to help a client.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/wa...prosecute.html





FBI Forces False Confession Out of Man
Blackandy

Long story short: Man is staying in hotel in NYC during the 9/11/2001 attacks. Hotel empties after attacks and device is found in man's hotel room closet that allows communication with airline pilots. Man is Egyptian national, and FBI questions him. Man denies owning device.

FBI agent threatens that man's family will be tortured in Egypt.

Man confesses, ultimately spending a month in jail before airline pilot shows up at hotel asking for radio left in man's room back. Whoops! Lawsuits ensue.

From Steve Bergstein's Psychosounds blog, where I found this:
"Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States."

Good thing the FBI doesn't do this any more. Right?

We never would have known any of this as the US Court of Appeals in Manhattan redacted the description of the torture threats in its decision, but someone posted an unredacted decision on the web for a brief time. And a PDF of that is what's making the rounds now.

Here's the link to a story on the situation from the ABA Journal.

In it, the court claims it redacted the information about the torture threats to protect Higazy and his family. The story doesn't say what they're being protected from.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/25...false-con.html





Rumsfeld Hit with Torture Lawsuit While Visiting Paris
Jason Rhyne

Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's jaunt to France was interrupted today by an unscheduled itinerary item -- he was slapped with a criminal complaint charging him with torture.

Rumsfeld, in Paris for a discussion sponsored by the magazine Foreign Policy, was tracked down by representatives of a coalition of international human rights groups, who informed the architect of the US invasion of Iraq that they had submitted a torture suit against him in French court.

The filed documents allege that during his tenure, the former defense secretary "ordered and authorized" torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US military's detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The head of one of the groups responsible for bringing the charges, the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights, told RAW STORY today by phone that the suit was a long time coming.

"We've been working on cornering Rumsfeld and getting him indicted somewhere going on three years now," said the Center's president, Michael Ratner. "Four days ago, we got confidential information he was going to be in France."

Joined by activists, attorneys for the human rights groups caught up with Rumsfeld on his way to a breakfast meeting. "He was walking down the street with just one person," said Ratner.

"Around 20 campaigners gave Rumsfeld a rowdy welcome...yelling 'murderer,' waving a banner and trying to push into the building," reports AFP.

Ratner, who wasn't personally at the scene, says his sources told him that the former defense secretary made some pre-scheduled remarks at the meeting before ducking through a door leading to the US Embassy.

According to Ratner, France has a legal responsibility under international law to prosecute Rumsfeld for torture abuses.

"If a torturer comes into your territory," he said, "there's an obligation to either prosecute the person or return him to a place where he will be prosecuted."

The rights groups notably cite three memorandums signed by the defense secretary between October 2002 and April 2003 "legimitizing the use of torture" including the "hooding" of detainees, sleep deprivation and the use of dogs.

Although his group has been a part of previous attempts to bring charges against Rumsfeld, including two former tries in Germany, Ratner believes French court has the highest chance of success.

"There are Guantananamo detainees who were tortured that are living in France," he said. "It gives French courts another reason to prosecute."

Ratner says Europe is "getting very hot for Rumsfeld," and suggests a French court could at least issue its version of a subpoena.

"We hope that this case will move forward," he said, "especially as the US says it can continue to torture people."

Other groups involved in the complaint include the International Federation of Human Rights, the French League for Human Rights and Germany's European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.

More details about the lawsuit are available at the website of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

(with wire reports)
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Rumsfe...hile_1026.html





EBay One of Few Companies to Lobby CIA
Christopher S. Rugaber

Online auctioneer eBay Inc. spent almost $2 million lobbying various departments of the federal government in the past year, including an entity rarely named on federal disclosure forms: the Central Intelligence Agency.

According to a database maintained by the Senate's public records office, eBay is one of eight groups and companies to lobby the spy agency. The company listed the CIA on a form covering its lobbying activities for the first six months of 2007.

Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said that listing was an error. But, he said the company did meet with CIA officials in the second half of 2006 to discuss amendments to a 1994 law _ the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act _ that required Internet phone companies to ensure their equipment can accommodate wiretaps.

EBay owns the Internet phone company Skype.

In a 2006 disclosure form, the company said it lobbied the CIA and other agencies on "law enforcement access to Internet communications."

A spokesman for CIA did not respond to a request for comment.

Only eight entities lobbied the CIA in the first half of 2007, according to the Senate's public records office, including the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy and the U.S. Awami League.

The Alliance is an industry group focused on the regulation of ozone-depleting chemicals, while the Awami League is a political party in Bangladesh.

Lockheed Martin Corp. and Sybase Inc. were the only other public companies to lobby the intelligence agency this year, according to the Senate's database.

By comparison, more than 1,100 companies and trade associations lobbied the Defense Department in the same period, while over 300 lobbied the U.S. Trade Representative's office, the Senate's database showed.

According to a disclosure form posted online Aug. 14, eBay lobbied Congress and many federal agencies in the first six months of this year, including the White House, U.S. Trade Representative, FBI, Federal Communications Commission, Internal Revenue Service and the Departments of Commerce, Justice, Defense, State and Treasury.

The company lobbied on a wide range of issues, including patent reform, copyright enforcement, data security, identity theft prevention, legislation intended to protect children from online predators, immigration reform, sales taxes, the Internet tax exemption and spectrum auctions.

The company spent $985,000 lobbying in the first half of 2007, and $890,000 in the last six months of 2006.

Under a federal law enacted in 1995, lobbyists are required to disclose activities that could influence members of the executive and legislative branches. They must register with Congress within 45 days of being hired or engaging in lobbying.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102600820.html





Privacy Lost: These Phones Can Find You
Laura M. Holson

Two new questions arise, courtesy of the latest advancement in cellphone technology: Do you want your friends, family, or colleagues to know where you are at any given time? And do you want to know where they are?

Obvious benefits come to mind. Parents can take advantage of the Global Positioning System chips embedded in many cellphones to track the whereabouts of their phone-toting children.

And for teenagers and 20-somethings, who are fond of sharing their comings and goings on the Internet, youth-oriented services like Loopt and Buddy Beacon are a natural next step.

Sam Altman, the 22-year-old co-founder of Loopt, said he came up with the idea in early 2005 when he walked out of a lecture hall at Stanford.

“Two hundred students all pulled out their cellphones, called someone and said, ‘Where are you?’ ” he said. “People want to connect.”

But such services point to a new truth of modern life: If G.P.S. made it harder to get lost, new cellphone services are now making it harder to hide.

“There are massive changes going on in society, particularly among young people who feel comfortable sharing information in a digital society,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation based in San Francisco.

“We seem to be getting into a period where people are closely watching each other,” he said. “There are privacy risks we haven’t begun to grapple with.”

But the practical applications outweigh the worries for some converts.

Kyna Fong, a 24-year-old Stanford graduate student, uses Loopt, offered by Sprint Nextel. For $2.99 a month, she can see the location of friends who also have the service, represented by dots on a map on her phone, with labels identifying their names. They can also see where she is.

One night last summer she noticed on Loopt that friends she was meeting for dinner were 40 miles away, and would be late. Instead of waiting, Ms. Fong arranged her schedule to arrive when they did. “People don’t have to ask ‘Where are you?’” she said.

Ms. Fong can control whom she shares the service with, and if at any point she wants privacy, Ms. Fong can block access. Some people are not invited to join — like her mother.

“I don’t know if I’d want my mom knowing where I was all the time,” she said.

Some situations are not so clear-cut. What if a spouse wants some time alone and turns off the service? Why on earth, their better half may ask, are they doing that?

What if a boss asks an employee to use the service?

So far, the market for social-mapping is nascent — users number in the hundreds of thousands, industry experts estimate.

But almost 55 percent of all mobile phones sold today in the United States have the technology that makes such friend-and- family-tracking services possible, according to Current Analysis, which follows trends in technology.

So far, it is most popular, industry executives say, among the college set.

But others have found different uses. Mr. Altman said one customer bought it to keep track of a parent with Alzheimer’s. Helio, a mobile phone service provider that offers Buddy Beacon, said some small-business owners use it to track employees.

Consumers can turn off their service, making them invisible to people in their social-mapping network. Still, the G.P.S. service embedded in the phone means that your whereabouts are not a complete mystery.

“There is a Big Brother component,” said Charles S. Golvin, a wireless analyst at Forrester Research. “The thinking goes that if my friends can find me, the telephone company knows my location all the time, too.”

Phone companies say they are aware of the potential problems such services could cause.

If a friend-finding service is viewed as too intrusive, said Mark Collins, vice president for consumer data at AT&T’s wireless unit, “that is a negative for us.” Loopt and similar services say they do not keep electronic records of people’s whereabouts.

Mr. Altman of Loopt said that to protect better against unwelcome prying by, say, a former friend, Loopt users are sent text messages at random times, asking if they recognize a certain friend. If not, that person’s viewing ability is disabled.

Clay Harris, a 25-year-old freelance marketing executive in Memphis, says he uses Helio’s Buddy Beacon mostly to keep in touch with his friend Gregory Lotz. One night when Mr. Lotz was returning from a trip, Mr. Harris was happy to see his friend show up unannounced at a bar where he and some other friends had gathered.

“He had tried to reach me, but I didn’t hear my phone ring,” Mr. Harris said. “He just showed up and I thought, ‘Wow, this is great.’”

He would never think to block Mr. Lotz. But he would think twice before inviting a girlfriend into his social-mapping network. “Most definitely a girl would ask and wonder why I was blocking her,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/te.../23mobile.html





Technology, the Stealthy Tattletale
Christopher Maag

Initially, it seemed like an easy bank robbery. After stealing $7,000 from a PNC Bank in Evendale, Ohio, Kenneth Maples climbed into a white Ford pickup driven by his wife, Jewell, according to a police report. No dye pack exploded, no police sirens screamed in pursuit as the couple’s truck slipped into the anonymity of heavy traffic on Interstate 71 just after 10 a.m. on Sept. 14.

But the suspects never had a chance. A Global Positioning System tracking device had been tucked inside the stolen cash, according to the report, allowing a small army of local police officers and F.B.I. agents to follow the signal from on-ramps and overpasses as it moved south into downtown Cincinnati.

Police put up a roadblock, closing five lanes of traffic. As hundreds of vehicles stopped, police converged on the suspects’ truck, sitting just five cars behind the police line.

“It was incredibly precise,” said Mark Fisk, a Cincinnati resident who photographed the arrest from his delivery van, three cars behind the suspects.

A technological revolution is making it possible not just to track down escaping bank robbers but to find missing things and people far more quickly and precisely than ever.

The change is powered less by new technologies than the artful combination of existing ones, mainly the Internet, cellphones and G.P.S. satellites. In some cases, the new devices linked to these systems can even detect a theft before it happens.

“This stuff is coming down the pike very soon,” said Jim Van Cleave, vice president of Spectrum Management, which has developed tracking systems for commercial and covert uses since 1980. “The number of potential applications is mind-boggling.”

One new use is tracking teenage drivers. Brian Aladesuyi, 17, received a new Jeep in exchange for a promise: he would never drive it outside his hometown, Kennesaw, Ga. His father, Kayode Aladesuyi, chief executive of the security firm EarthSearch Communications, used EarthSearch’s Web site to map Kennesaw’s boundaries into the Jeep’s onboard computer, surrounding the entire city with an electronic fence.

But when his father took a business trip to Brazil, Brian decided to try his luck, Mr. Aladesuyi said. Brian drove to Marietta, a neighboring town. Seconds after Brian breached the invisible wall, his father received a text message on his mobile phone.

Mr. Aladesuyi sent a message commanding the computer to disable the Jeep’s engine as soon as Brian switched it off. When the Jeep would not restart, Brian had to call his father and confess he had broken their agreement.

“I don’t think Brian really understood I could do that from Brazil,” Mr. Aladesuyi said.

That tracking system became available this spring. The onboard computer costs $229, installation included, and the service costs $19.99 a month. Mr. Aladesuyi uses a similar EarthSearch system to disengage the engine of his own Mercedes E500 sedan, making it “virtually impossible” to steal, he said.

Like a host of other location technologies in the works, the money-tracking tools can trace their origin to an initially obscure rule, written into the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, which required that new cellphones be able to communicate their location to emergency responders whenever callers dial 911. Some companies planted chips in their phones that communicate directly with G.P.S. satellites. Others use cellular towers to triangulate the signal. With the location systems in place, a number of companies began working on other applications.

“There’s a lot of sexy stuff out there that’s just getting ready for prime time,” said David Mansfield, vice president of Raptor Analytics, a company in Longmont, Colo., that advises banks on security.

Banks began putting the technology to use about two years ago, Mr. Mansfield said. Harry Trombitas, the F.B.I. special agent who leads the bank robbery unit in southern Ohio, said that the G.P.S. devices allowed law enforcement officials to keep close track of missing money. “These things are pretty accurate,” he said. “They can get it down to within a few feet.”

Sometimes the technology allows property owners to detect a theft before it occurs. SC Integrity, a security firm in Bothell, Wash., uses G.P.S. technology and a database of shipping container thefts to safeguard trucking fleets.

If it finds a pattern of thieves stealing, say, cigarette shipments from a certain Texas truck stop, the company can load the coordinates into a G.P.S. module inside the trailer, creating an electric fence around the entire freeway off-ramp, said Denis duNann, the company’s chief executive.

If the truck exits anyway, trucking company dispatchers instantly receive an alert and phone the driver. If the driver lies about his location, dispatchers call the local police and alert them to a possible theft in progress.

“You can sit at your computer and watch him do a U-turn and get right back on the highway,” Mr. duNann said.

Many missing objects, of course, do not involve a crime. Project Lifesaver, a nonprofit group in Chesapeake, Va., fits Alzheimer’s patients and autistic children with radio frequency beacons disguised as bracelets, which help emergency responders find them if they are lost.

Next spring the group will introduce new bracelets, created by Locator Systems, a British Columbia company, that combine radio signals with G.P.S. and cellular communications. That should allow caregivers to establish a zone where patients can safely wander, said Jim McIntosh, the company’s chief executive. If patients wander off, emergency crews could receive more specific information.

But most of the work is aimed at recovering stolen property, potentially saving billions.

OnStar, the G.P.S.-based navigation system offered by General Motors, will start a “stolen vehicle slowdown” service next spring to help avoid dangerous high-speed chases. If an equipped vehicle is stolen, police can ask OnStar to send a wireless message to the onboard computer, cutting the engine’s power.

The driver, said Chet Huber, OnStar’s president, will have time to pull off the road safely. After that, the thief is on his own.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/27/te...7tracking.html





Corvil Unveils Its Latest Network Monitoring Appliance
Sean Gallagher

The company's CorvilNet 4.0 correlates monitoring data with remote appliances.

Corvil has rolled out the latest version of its CorvilNet monitoring and bandwidth provisioning analysis appliance, and the London Stock Exchange has selected the product to monitor quality of service on its IP-based electronic trading network.

CorvilNet 4.0, announced Oct. 22, passively monitors traffic across networks in segments below 1 microsecond in length and correlates monitoring data with remote appliances to give a complete picture of latency, jitter, packet loss and other phenomena that affect network and application performance.

The London Stock Exchange has been using CorvilNet to achieve low latency in TradElect, the exchange's new electronic trading system, since June 18. "To achieve our latency and performance targets for TradElect, we needed network visibility at submillisecond granularity," said Robin Paine, the exchange's chief technology officer. "We use this microvisibility to provision the network for low latency."

"This is a product focused on how to deliver high application service quality on top of IP networks in a real-time world," Corvil CEO Donal Byrne said in an interview with eWEEK. "In high-end environments, like the e-trading and financial services space, [network managers] are trying to take milliseconds of latency off networks. If you can drop a millisecond off, you're a hero."

Based in Dublin, Ireland, Corvil was founded in 2000 by a group of researchers at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. "The company was founded on the promise of some mathematical and algorithmic work done [at DIAS] focused on the question of how do we program networks to deliver a precise level of quality of service for specific applications," Byrne said. "At that time, the telecom folks involved had decided IP wasn't ready to provide these services."

But now, with the emergence of Web conferencing, VOIP (voice over IP), virtualized desktops, Web-based applications such as those based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and other Web 2.0 technologies, as well as much higher IP network capacity, Corvil has begun to gain traction, Byrne said. The startup counts Cisco Systems among its investors. Byrne said Corvil's customer base is "more than 10 but less than 100."

The latest version of CorvilNet adds support for 10 Gigabit networks, as well as the end-to-end analysis functionality that the company calls Passive Network Quality Monitoring, or PNQM. "For every packet [that the appliance records], we compute a signature and a time stamp," said Byrne. "When it exits on the other side of the WAN, we time-stamp it, and we can correlate the data across the whole network. That way, we get a very accurate view of the performance of the network. You can determine, if there's a service-quality violation, did it occur in your network or the service provider's cloud."

IDC analyst Tracy Corbo said the level of understanding that products such as CorvilNet provide about IP networks is essential for running mission-critical applications. "I don't understand why everyone isn't doing this [sort of] root- cause analysis," Corbo said. "The traffic on networks has become increasingly complicated, and it's become difficult to prioritize traffic without really understanding the network."

Using a set of algorithms originally developed at DIAS, the appliance can analyze and isolate "microbursts" of network traffic—small spikes in network utilization triggered by application responses that can cause problems in the transition from LANs to WANs, especially for applications such as hosted Citrix sessions, Web 2.0 applications and other software that send bursts of data in response.

CorvilNet analyzes data and generates recommendations to network managers on how to better provision their networks—as well as sets of CLI (command-line interface) commands that can be uploaded into routers and switches for application performance management.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2204410,00.asp





When US-Made 'Censorware' Ends Up in Iron Fists

Despite Burma's record of repression, it's probably legal for American companies to sell Internet filters there, export lawyers say. But is it ethical?
Ben Arnoldy

During Burma's short-lived uprising late last month, young dissidents risked their lives to smuggle news of their peaceful protest to the outside world. They may have been up against Internet censorship software designed in America, if a connection found to exist in 2005 still holds.

Moreover, if a US firm wanted to sell Internet filters to Burma (Myanmar) today, despite several layers of economic sanctions against the government there, it would probably be legal to do so, say export lawyers.

Absence of federal regulation has allowed so-called censorware of at least four California companies to end up in the hands of foreign governments shown to block citizens' access to political, religious, and other websites.

Events in Burma provide new fodder for a censorware debate that had focused, until now, on China. Some experts note that repressive regimes might never have allowed Internet access at all if not for the filters, which tech-savvy citizens can overcome. But critics say US companies are breaking American values by abetting such censorship.

"Where the best and the brightest of Silicon Valley had been wiring the world, they are now, in these cases, doing the opposite," says Ronald Deibert, an investigator for the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a collaboration of Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge universities and the University of Toronto.

ONI researchers are conducting tests that have so far found censorship in 24 of 40 countries. Testing involves local users in each country trying to access various websites. Certain patterns and failure messages emerge, indicating which filtering system a country uses.

The software companies involved sell this technology primarily to private companies in the US and abroad. Companies use these tools to keep employees from accessing pornography sites and websites infected with viruses.

Repressive governments also turn to these American systems, not only to filter out porn and viruses, but also to block political, religious, and other websites.

ONI testing in 2005 indicated that Burma censored the Internet using software made by Fortinet, a Sunnyvale, Calif., company. The firm, says ONI, responded by saying it doesn't sell software directly to end-users. ONI challenges Fortinet's claim, pointing to a 2004 article, reachable online, by the official New Light of Myanmar newspaper. The story covers a ceremony bringing together Burma's prime minister and Benjamin Teh, described as "an official representative of Fortinet."

"Given Mr. Teh's participation, it seems unlikely that Fortinet did not know of the sale of its software to Burma," notes the ONI report.

Fortinet did not respond to two e-mail and at least five phone messages to three company officials over the course of last week.

Other ONI research revealed that Iranian Internet service providers (ISPs) have used filtering software of two other California firms: Websense Inc. and Secure Computing Corp.

A Websense spokeswoman denies the firm has sold software to Iran, which would be illegal. A published study by Nart Villeneuve at the University of Toronto found that from 2004 to 2005 the Iranian ISP ParsOnline used Websense's product. By 2006, the ISP had dropped Websense, he said in an e-mail.

The company's website advertises Websense's ability to categorize, and therefore filter, websites in categories such as "advocacy groups" and "religion" – specifying, among others, Christian Science. However, the Websense spokeswoman said, in an e-mail, its contracts forbid customers from using the technology to censor Internet content without permission from both the affected consumers and Websense's "express prior written approval."

Secure Computing has said publicly in the past that the Iranians may have obtained an illegal copy of its software. A company executive, Atri Chatterjee, says the software, called SmartFilter, would still function without frequent database updates from Secure Computing, though at a degraded capacity. Such updates could also be obtained illicitly, he says.

ONI also found in 2005 that Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates, countries with Internet censorship, use SmartFilter. The company wouldn't confirm or deny.

"We are a US organization that adheres to US rules. We only do business with organizations and countries we are approved to do business with," says Mr. Chatterjee.

That position is echoed by Blue Coat Systems Inc., whose sales materials have boasted that Internet access across Saudi Arabia is "monitored and controlled" by its technology.

US export rules focus mainly on national-security criteria, says Clif Burns, a partner at Powell Goldstein LLP in Washington and editor of exportlawblog.com. "It may well be the case that something doesn't have a [security] impact on the US but is otherwise improper or not good citizenship to export," says Mr. Burns.

The only cases where censorware cannot be sold, he says, involve certain forms of encryption or countries under broad US trade sanctions. In the case of Burma, sanctions probably don't outlaw a sale, he says, because the sanctions mostly prohibit imports from Burma, not exports of US goods to it.

Moves are afoot in Washington to take a harder line against censorware exports. High-profile congressional hearings last year examined the roles of Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco in helping China censor the Internet. Rep. Christopher Smith (R) of New Jersey has introduced the Global Online Freedom Act, a bill that would, among other things, study the feasibility of restricting censorware exports.

There is some debate over whether such filtering software merits real concern. In Burma, the regime ultimately decided to shut off the country's Internet access after it appeared unable to selectively filter out antigovernment communication.

As of on Sept. 28, the main Burmese ISP completely severed its connection to the outside world, and only occasionally reconnected starting last week, says Steve Gibbard, a researcher at the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit research institute focused on Internet security and stability. The shutdown did not appear to be the work of a software filter, but "a matter of unplugging a cable or flipping a power switch," says Mr. Gibbard.

The filtering software, in fact, may have given the Burmese regime enough of a false sense of security to allow Internet access in the first place, some suggest.

"Without [Internet filtering tools], there wouldn't have been access to begin with because [citizens] wouldn't have been trusted with it," says Bill Woodcock, also with the Packet Clearing House. Nor does pressure for censorship always come from the top, he adds. "In much of the world, the Internet is seen as this horrible sewer that is bringing things in that the government [feels popular pressure] to stop."

Internet-censorship tools can be defeated with the use of proxy servers. But many people living under repressive government are not going to hear about, or dare to try, methods to get around Internet fire walls, say experts.

"Some people say [censorware] is ineffective because dissidents can get around it," says Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and anticensorship activist. "I say political control doesn't have to be 100 percent to be effective. Controlling the ability of the vast majority of the population to see outside information is still very effective for the goals of the totalitarian regime."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1010/p01s01-ussc.html





China Accused of Rerouting Search Traffic to Baidu
Victoria Ho

Reports have surfaced that China is redirecting traffic from foreign search engines operated by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to homegrown Baidu.com.

According to various reports online, some online users in China attempting to access Google.com, Microsoft's Live.com and Yahoo.com search sites have been redirected to China-based Baidu.com.

Blog site TechCrunch reported that Chinese traffic to Google's blog search engine was being rerouted to Baidu. TechCrunch later published another article saying a similar situation was observed with the other two search giants.

Vivian Wong, a manager at CB Richard Ellis in Shanghai, said visits to the three search engines showed Baidu's home page instead.

Beijing-based David Feng wrote in his blog on Thursday that he was able to gain access to both Google and Yahoo, but not Microsoft's Live.com or Yahoo-owned search engine AltaVista.

However, Ori Elraviv, chief executive of Dragon Ports in Beijing, said he had no problems getting through to the sites. "I find such an occurrence really hard to believe. Blocking a service is one thing; diverting it to a competitor is a completely different story." Dragon Ports is a developer of mobile applications.

Google has, however, confirmed the traffic-rerouting episodes. In response to queries, Google sent similar statements to The Register and search engine blogger Danny Sullivan, noting: "While this is clearly unfortunate, we've seen this happen before and are confident that service will be restored to our users in the very near future."

China has been involved in previous allegations of Internet censorship, though the government has denied such claims.

Incidentally, Google sold its minority stake in Baidu last year, explaining that it was doing so to focus on building the Chinese version of its search engine, Google.cn.
http://www.news.com/China-accused-of...3-6214627.html





The Sound, Not of Music, but of Control
Howard W. French

A song often heard on the radio these days begins with a light and upbeat melody, and lyrics that are even bubblier.

“Don’t care about loneliness,” croons the lead singer. “I don’t think it really matters.”

Another much played song tries even harder to soothe. “Ah, little man, ah, succeed quickly,” it counsels. “Enjoy being poor but happy every day.”

Marxists once referred to religion as the opium of the people, but in today’s China it is the music promoted on state-monopolized radio that increasingly claims that role. China’s leader, Hu Jintao, has talked since he assumed power five years ago about “building a harmonious society,” an ambiguous phrase subject to countless interpretations.

But Chinese musicians, cultural critics and fans say that in entertainment, the government’s thrust seems clear: Harmonious means blandly homogeneous, with virtually all contemporary music on the radio consisting of gentle love songs and uplifting ballads.

In recent weeks, television networks have come under intense pressure from Beijing to purge their programming of crime and even mildly suggestive sexual references. Variety show producers are subject to new rules aimed at enforcing official notions of dignity. Art galleries and theatrical productions, meanwhile, have always been subject to review by censors.

Even without resorting to direct censorship, the state has formidable powers for controlling popular music and shaping tastes. They include state ownership of all broadcast media, the screening of lyrics for all commercial music and strict control of performance sites.

Many say one result has been the dumbing down and deadening of popular music culture. Fu Guoyong, an independent cultural critic in Hangzhou, likened today’s pop music culture to the politically enforced conformity of the Cultural Revolution, when only eight highly idealized Socialist “model operas” could be performed in China.

“Nowadays singers can sing many songs, but in the end, they’re all singing the same song, the core of which is, ‘Have fun,’” Mr. Fu said. “Culture has become an empty vessel.”

Nowhere is conformity enforced more vigorously than on broadcast radio, where pop music programs are saturated with the Chinese equivalent of the kind of easy listening often associated in other countries with elevators and dentists’ offices.

Rock ’n’ roll is mostly limited to special programs that are allowed brief windows of airtime during the graveyard shift, and even then there are few hints of angst, alienation or any but the very mildest expressions of teenage rebellion.

Rock enjoyed a wave of popularity in China the early 1990s, but the works of the country’s most famous performer, Cui Jian, disappeared from the airwaves around that time because, many fans believe, his lyrics began to flirt with political themes.

By this year, the rock groups felt so unwanted that when the Chinese Olympic Committee called on musicians to submit songs for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, virtually none stepped forward, according to Shen Lihui, a music company executive who was consulted by the committee.

Liu Sijia, the bass player and a vocalist for an underground Shanghai band called Three Yellow Chicken, said alternative music in China today is much like Western rock in the 1960s, with its frequent references to social issues like war, poverty, civil rights and generational conflict. But alternative rock is rarely heard on the radio.

“What prevails here is worse than garbage,” he said. “Because China emphasizes stability and harmony, the greatest utility of these pop songs is that they aren’t dangerous to the system. If people could hear underground music, it would make them feel the problems in their lives and want to change things.”

Chinese cultural officials and radio D.J.’s insist that the overwhelming prevalence of easy-listening pop merely reflects popular tastes. Many point to a commonly invoked generational shift in China, with today’s young people too caught up in the country’s economic boom to dwell on social problems or ponder life’s bigger questions.

“It’s whether you’re happy or not that counts, and not the substance,” said Zheng Yang, a veteran D.J. on Music Radio in Beijing. “Life is smooth, and so music is more about soothing things. Anyone can criticize or blame. What we need right now is guidance.”

Critics of the country’s cultural policies acknowledge that compared with past practices, direct censorship of popular music is relatively uncommon. But in comments that hinted at the political agenda behind the state’s management of popular music, Zhang Zhuyi, an official of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, said he doubted that a radio station dedicated to rock ’n’ roll would be allowed in China.

“New radio stations need approval, and regulators would consider whether the content fits with social trends and national policy,” Mr. Zhang said.

Asked what those were, he said, “It’s about how to orient the audience, and provide them with a kind of spiritual food.”

At a small performance spot in Shanghai, one of the few places where alternative music acts are able to perform, a group of college students dismissed mainstream Chinese pop.

“What’s on the radio are brainless mouthwash songs that all copy each other,” said Xu Jinlu, a 20-year-old junior. “What’s produced here is all about ‘You don’t love me’ or ‘I don’t love you.’ It’s lousy, and without layers.”

At that, her friend Yu Yun spoke up. “Once you hear the first rhythm,” she said, “you know the rest.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/wo...5shanghai.html





Growing Underground Is Making Noise in China
Ben Sisario

Down a short alley in the sprawling, tourist-mobbed 798 art district here — a complex of 1950s-era military factories converted into galleries and studios — is a tiny shop that serves as one of the centers of China’s small but thriving experimental music scene.

The store, Sugar Jar, is barely big enough to accommodate a half-dozen customers, and one wall displays all the essentials of the genre, from discs of abstract electronica and brutal noise-rock to anthologies with bold titles like “China: The Sonic Avant-Garde.” Playing samples from his stock, the proprietor, a lanky, soft-spoken man named Lao Yang, noted proudly that his store is one of the only spots in all of Beijing to buy much of this music.

Like Sugar Jar, avant-garde music occupies a minuscule niche in Chinese society, overshadowed by the larger and vastly more lucrative world of contemporary visual art. Only a few dozen musicians around the country make up this circle, but their work has begun to attract international attention, and over the last several years a steady stream of Western musicians, including Brian Eno and the New York guitarist Elliott Sharp, have visited and given their blessing.

“The feeling of the scene in Beijing is exciting and reminds me of New York in 1979,” said Mr. Sharp, who last performed here in April. “There’s a tangible sense of discovery and transgression.”

Though China may be in the beginnings of a new love affair with consumerism, rigid cultural controls are still in place, and discovery and transgression are values not widely held by the Communist government. Following President Hu Jintao’s call for moral purity in society, broadcasters have come under increasing pressure lately to keep potentially subversive material — which means anything but sugary, shallow pop — off the airwaves. At the end of the Communist Party Congress in October, the official Chinese Music Association denounced the “vulgar” pop music reaching the nation’s youth through the Internet.

Growing out of rock and electronic music, and operating outside the state-supported classical sphere, the experimental scene in China has existed for barely a decade. Its hub is Beijing, with the electronic performers Wang Fan, Sulumi, Yan Jun and FM3; Sun Wei, who creates sound collages under the name 718; and Dou Wei, one of China’s biggest rock stars, whose solo career includes numerous spacey, dreamlike albums that incorporate traditional instrumentation.

Shanghai has one of the most extreme noise groups, Torturing Nurse, which sometimes performs with a female member in a nurse’s uniform. Huanqing, from Sichuan Province, makes field recordings from the hinterlands of China and manipulates them with electronics.

Though Western styles have influenced them, the Chinese musicians have for the most part developed in isolation, and their work is flush with the excitement of creating a new kind of music with no previous national model.

“Chinese people don’t know the best music system,” said Mr. Yan, who is also an influential critic. “There are no rules. No teacher. I can use this, I can use that — that’s all interesting. In the West everything was created already. But here we don’t know that.”

In Beijing the subculture that surrounds this music is so small that most of the major participants often turn up at a weekly concert and gathering at 2Kolegas, a bar inside a drive-in movie complex on the east side of town. One recent night Mr. Yan led an audience-participation performance that involved strips of plastic sound triggers laid on the floor, to be danced on, stepped on or smacked.

It could have been a musical game of the kind that flourished in downtown New York lofts in the 1970s, except for the overhead ambient music with Chinese instrumentation that played through a sound system. Among those in the crowd were the members of FM3, who frequently employ Chinese sound elements, as well as Wu Na, who plays the zitherlike guqin.

Despite the new openness of Chinese society and its arts, the stultifying influence of the state is still felt in mass entertainment like the candied pop that fills the airwaves, and even in the often dull music coming out of the universities.

Kenneth Fields, a professor of electronic music at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, complained of a lack of creativity and free thought among students at his and other universities. The most exciting new music in China, he said, comes from the underground.

“Media is very centrally controlled at the top; at the bottom it seems to be a mirror of anarchy,” Professor Fields said. “There’s no innovation at the top, but on the bottom there’s a lot of informal freedoms.”

The experimental and underground rock musicians represent the most creative contingent of Chinese music, and the scene has had its first bona fide international hit: FM3’s Buddha Machine, a device slightly bigger than an iPod that plays nine electronic drones, has sold nearly 50,000 units around the world and already spawned remix albums.

Christiaan Virant, an American-born musician who is half of FM3, arrived at 2Kolegas in a spiffy black suit with a while silk scarf and a white Panama hat. (The other half is a Chinese man, Zhang Jian.) His new prosperity, he said, is “all 100 percent thanks to the Buddha Machine.”

But this music has received scant attention at home, from the marketplace or, for good or ill, from the government. The Buddha Machine is not widely available in China, because the low price demanded by the domestic market would make the cost of distributing it prohibitive, Mr. Virant said. (It is, of course, for sale at Sugar Jar.)

Like most pockets of avant-garde music, the Chinese musicians have no real commercial prospects. And while relatively few links exist to contemporary visual arts, that world and its moneyed clientele provide essential ancillary income.

Artists who might have minimal record sales — meaning hundreds of copies, or even fewer — can make money doing sound installations at galleries and, increasingly, through commissions from real estate developers looking to add a cool factor to their buildings by using sound art commissioned from underground musicians.

“There are huge amounts of rich people in China who lavish huge amounts of money on weird stuff,” Mr. Virant said.

The attention did not seem so lavish one recent afternoon at Sugar Jar. Over a few hours several curious gallerygoers wandered into the shop and looked around at the CDs for sale, though none bought anything. Mr. Lao said he operates the store without a proper retail license — that, he said, would necessitate stocking music for mainstream tastes, an intolerable concession — and until recently slept in the back.

He said he had no illusions that the music he sells will be accepted by a mass audience. He added that what he hopes for most is support from the government in the form of public festivals and other profile-raising events.

“Even though this music can’t be accepted by most of the people,” he said, “this is the real music of China.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/27/ar...ic/27expe.html





Bridgestone Shows Off Ultrathin, Full-Color E-Paper
Darren Murph

Just last year Bridgestone was feelin' pretty good about itself for unveiling the "world's thinnest" sheet of two-color e-paper. These days, the outfit is busy showing off a new version that measures in at just 0.29-millimeters thick and is capable of displaying 4,096 colors on an eight-inch display. In case that wasn't enough, the company is also touting what it calls the "world's largest full color e-paper that is A3 size, which is equivalent to a 21.4-inch screen." As you'd expect, the latter is expected to be used solely for advertising and could hit the market as early as next year, while the former technology is set to be commercially available in 2009
http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/22/b...color-e-paper/





From Sept.

Times Deselected
Jeff Jarvis

TimesSelect is dead. It was a cynical act doomed from the start. With it goes any hope of charging for content online. Content is now and forever free.

No one with sufficient experience ever thought that TimesSelect made good business sense. Oh, they talked a good game: It was another revenue stream to balance dependence on advertising, said the spin, . . . It was a tribute to the great value of the Times brand and its unique content ,. . . It was an opportunity to create added value worth added revenue. . . . It was a way to give print subscribers new benefits. Yada-yada-ka-ching.

Bull. TimesSelect represented the last gasp of the circulation mentality of news media, the belief that surely consumers would continue to pay for content even as the internet commodified news and — more important — even as the internet revealed that the real value in media is not owning and controlling content or distribution but enabling conversation.

I remember Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, giving a speech in which he ridiculed the revenue TimesSelect brought in. In his beloved PowerPoint, Rusbridger showed a picture of the new Times headquarters and said that the revenue from TimesSelect wouldn’t even pay the gas bill for the place.

The financial analyses of TimesSelect were always too simplistic — as if revenue were profit. The Times obituary for its service said that the service collected $49.95 per year or $7.95 per month from 227,000 paying customers at the end — 787,000 total customers, including print subscribers and, recently, academic readers given a free ride. The Times said it brought in $10 million revenue after two years, which sounds damned respectable. But no one ever mentioned the marketing cost to get that revenue. A magazine that costs $50 a year will spend almost that much acquiring subscribers. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. No one mentioned the extra editorial costs of creating more content to try to make the damned thing special enough to pay for. I never heard any calculation of the customer-service cost of maintaining that many customers, most of whom brought in no revenue. And then there was the question of how much revenue was lost in the Times archives, included in the deal. So though TimesSelect may have brought in revenue at a rate of $10 million at the end, it didn’t earn that much profit. I wonder whether it was profitable at all.

And TimesSelect cost the paper much more in the internet age: It took the Times columnists out of the conversation and reduced their influence in America and worldwide. Worse, it diluted the paper’s Googlejuice. Even as the Times acquired About.com, a grand demonstration of the economic power of search-engine optimization (where, full disclosure, I consulted for a year and a half), the company shut off some of its content from Google’s search and bloggers’ links. That was its greatest harm.

TimesSelect’s brilliant cynicism was that, when forced to find something to put behind a pay wall, they came up with content that was, indeed, uniquely valuable — the columnists and archives. But this was also content for which there was no significant ad revenue at the time (advertisers buy ads in food and travel but not opinion sections; there is essentially no endemic advertising for blather). Thus they made the good college try to prove whether or not a pay news service could work without harming the ad revenue of the business. Even so, TimesSelect hurt the larger brand and its position in the marketplace, in the conversation, and in Google. It was a short-sighted strategy.

I should add that this is apparently why the company just decided to make some of its archives free — great news for readers and for the paper, for it will bring in more traffic, more Googlejuice, and more revenue (and, besides, it’d be hard to charge for archives once they were perceived as free for most TimesSelect users). Oddly, the Times story says that archives from 1987 to present and from 1851 to 1922 will be free but there will be charges for reading articles from 1923 to 1986 (I smell a committee decision).

The bottom line is that the staff of the Times online did the best it could with TimesSelect, creating the richest service they could and probably garnering the largest paying clientèle possible — but still, it was a bad idea from the start. It turned out to be one expensive experiment, one bad investment.

But now everyone else in the content business can learn from the Times’ mistake. Rupert Murdoch has publicly toyed with the idea of taking down the pay wall around the Wall Street Journal online; I’d bet the odds of that just increased. If the Times and the Journal stop charging — and the Economist just took down its wall — then I’d have to imagine that the Financial Times will have to follow suit.

So much for the idea of charging for content — news content especially — online. Too much of it is commodified. There’s no end of free competition. The value is fleeting in time. The cost of charging is too high.

Whether or not content wants to be free, it is free.

Don’t let anyone tell you that this is bad for the content business. It’s only good sense. Having worked in the magazine business, I saw this even at the dawn of the internet: As I said above, a magazine has to pay up to $30-40 in marketing costs to acquire subscribers; it can pay up to $5-7 to print and distribute a copy of a glossy magazine; it has high editorial costs. Add that up, and a magazine can find itself in the hole $60 or more per subscriber in the first year of a subscription. And they get as little as $1 per issue in subscription revenue. Yet clearly, a magazine can make money because that subscriber’s value to advertisers is much greater.

It’s the relationship that is valuable. It’s the relationship that is profitable, not the control of the content or the distribution. That is the essential media moral of the internet story. It has taken 13 years of internet history for media companies to learn that, to give up the idea that they control something scarce they can charge consumers for, but they’ve finally learned it. That is the lesson of the death of TimesSelect.

: Here’s the Times’ announcement. Note that they sold American Express as a sponsor of the now-public opinion section. They are good at sales.

Here’s Staci Kramer’s report in PaidContent (hmmm, a name that has never been great but is now less-great than ever). She interviewed NYTimes.com GM Vivian Schiller:

The change is because of what’s happened in the internet in the past two years—particularly the power of search.” She added later: “Think about this recipe—millions and millions of new documents, all seo’d, double-digit advertising growth.” The Times expects “the scale and the power of the revenue that would come from that over time” to replace the subscriptions revenue and then some.
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2007/09/17/times-deselected/





Times Earnings Top Expectations
Richard Pérez-Peña

Bolstered by lower costs for newsprint and strong entertainment and fashion advertising, The New York Times Company today reported a small but increased third-quarter profit, defying a steep, industrywide decline and topping Wall Street’s expectations.

The company reported net income of $13.4 million, or 9 cents a share, for the quarter ended Sept. 30, up almost 7 percent from the quarter a year earlier. Analysts’ projections had averaged about 5 cents a share.

Operating profit improved more sharply, up 57 percent, to $28.1 million for the quarter. Factoring in the sale of the company’s television stations, income from continuing operations was up 70 percent.

The earnings come just days after it was reported that Morgan Stanley had sold its 7.2 percent stake in The Times Company, after a long and ultimately unsuccessful fight to change the ownership structure and bolster the falling share price. A two-tiered stock system allows the Sulzberger family to control the company, much like the systems in place at several other major newspaper companies.

Much of the strong performance came in September, and the company cautioned that October is not shaping up as well — though it looks better than the early part of the year. The company said the outlook beyond this month was unclear.

At the company’s New York Times Media Group — the flagship newspaper, the International Herald Tribune and their Web sites — revenues rose more than 5 percent for the quarter, putting them slightly into positive territory for the year to date. That third-quarter rise more than offset continued losses at the company’s New England Media Group, which includes The Boston Globe, and its Regional Media Group.

Leaving aside an accelerated depreciation charge for a printing plant that it is selling; the company cut operating costs by 1.5 percent for the quarter, partly because of a sharp drop in printing costs. The Times shrank its page size during the quarter, contributing to reduced use of newsprint and ink. The price of newsprint has also dropped this year.

The company’s About Group, which includes About.com, continued to grow rapidly, with revenues up 35 percent, bolstered by the acquisition earlier this year of ConsumerSearch.com. But the About Group’s expenses rose faster than revenues in the quarter because of several one-time expenses, leading to a slight drop in operating profit.

The Times Company has long had slimmer profit margins than most other large newspaper companies — less than 7 percent for the first nine months. But its finances, and particularly those of the flagship paper, have held up better over a very difficult year, as the industry as a whole suffers through significantly lower ad revenue and falling circulation.

The New York Times and NYTimes.com rely more than almost all other newspapers on national advertising, which has fared better than other forms, and less on classified ads, which have been hit hardest. The Times newspaper has also been able to raise its price without a significant loss in sales, the company said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/bu...cnd-times.html





New Commentary Editor Denies Neo-Nepotism
Patricia Cohen

To some within the neoconservative movement, the announcement of John Podhoretz as the next editor of Commentary magazine — the same job his father, Norman, held for 35 years — is the best of all possible choices. It is a model of what Adam Bellow (son of the Nobel-winning novelist Saul) called the “new nepotism,” combining the “privileges of birth with the iron rule of merit.”

But to others the decision reeks of the “old nepotism,” in which the only credential that matters is the identity of your father — in Mr. Bellow’s cosmology, less like the Roosevelts than like Tori Spelling getting an acting job because her father was Aaron Spelling.

“I think some people are pretty shocked,” said Jacob Heilbrunn, whose book “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons” is coming out in January. John Podhoretz, movie critic for The Weekly Standard magazine and a political columnist for The New York Post, “isn’t seen as a heavyweight intellectual,” said Mr. Heilbrunn, who has discussed the appointment with several neoconservatives. Rather, “he is seen as being a beneficiary of his parents’ fame in the George W. Bush mold.”

The complaints don’t mean that the newly named editor is without ardent fans. Many people still consider him to be “the standard bearer for neoconservatism,” Mr. Heilbrunn said, the perfect choice to carry on the magazine’s tradition and revive its readership.

“It’s great for John and great for the magazine,” said Andrew Ferguson, an editor at The Weekly Standard, which the younger Mr. Podhoretz founded with William Kristol (son of Irving). His style is a mix of “Mad magazine meets Foreign Affairs,” said Mr. Ferguson, who added he should develop that sensibility as editor. Commentary has such an air of sacred reverence around it, he said, that Mr. Podhoretz, may be “the only intellectual and conservative in America who is not intimidated by it and who could therefore change it.”

Mr. Podhoretz, 46, who is currently vacationing with his family, said that his father found out about the job offer just two weeks ago, only after he had already accepted the post. “I didn’t want him to be involved in any way, shape or form,” the younger Mr. Podhoretz said. He explained that Neal Kozodoy, who has edited the magazine ever since Norman Podhoretz retired in 1995, called during the spring and asked if he was interested in taking over. There was no search process. Mr. Kozodoy declined to comment.

As for charges of favoritism, Mr. Podhoretz said: “It’s silly for me to respond because I don’t accept the premise. I have a professional career that’s dated back 25 years. I’ve started two magazines, worked at three others. I am who I am. I have millions of words that you can read on Nexis.” He has also written three books.

Mr. Podhoretz’s supporters agree. “John happens to be in the family,” said Tamar Jacoby, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has written for Commentary, “but he is also more than qualified to carry the tradition forward. John is a serious person and takes ideas personally.”

Still, of the more than 30 people contacted for this article, several who have written for the magazine or have contributed money to the Commentary Fund said they were troubled by the family connection, the lack of an open search process and what they consider to be Mr. Podhoretz’s lack of intellectual credentials for such a highbrow journal, partly because he has written so much about popular culture. A former writer for Commentary said the appointment repudiated one of neoconservatism’s founding principles, a commitment to meritocracy. He, like other respondents, asked not to be identified because of longstanding ties either to the magazine or to the Podhoretz family.

The new appointment puts three generations of Podhoretzes at the magazine, with Norman holding the title of editor at large and his grandson Sam Munson as online editor. Of course, the ancestral streak is not exactly surprising. The Podhoretz, Kagan (Fred, Donald, Robert and Kimberly) and Kristol clans have dominated the movement for 40 years.

“There’s a family business aspect to the neoconservative enterprise,” said Mr. Bellow, whose book “In Praise of Nepotism” was published in 2003. Such kinship ties are part of “a very broad phenomenon across American society; it’s not really right to single out neoconservatives,” he said. “They just won’t shut up about it.”

Mr. Podhoretz is sensitive to suggestions of favoritism, Mr. Bellow said, citing a recent e-mail message Mr. Podhoretz sent to friends that noted “his father wouldn’t publish him in the magazine until he established himself in his own right.”

Mr. Bellow judged Mr. Podhoretz’s appointment to be an example of the beneficent kind of nepotism, arguing that the drive and ambition come from the bottom up.

“I think he’ll do a good job,” Mr. Bellow said. “The second generation tends to overcompensate for nepotistic advantages.”

Mr. Podhoretz said there wasn’t going to be a “popping up” of the magazine, with cover stories on “Gossip Girl.” His own interests in popular culture are very much part of Commentary’s traditional preoccupations with American life and the nation’s role in the world, he said. The magazine will also continue to defend Jewish interests at a time of growing anti-Semitism, he added.

Before the actual handoff in January of 2009, Mr. Podhoretz will have the title of editorial director. “My first order of business is to step up the Web site,” he said. Mr. Podhoretz will begin blogging on the Commentary site, commentarymagazine.com, ending his stint with National Review Online’s blog, The Corner.

Ultimately, what may be the biggest challenge facing Commentary has nothing to do with the genealogy or scholarship of its editor, but the threat of a dwindling readership, now about 34,000. Once a source of ideas and personnel for the Reagan and current Bush administrations, Commentary, said Mr. Heilbrunn and a number of conservatives, has become less of a must-read in recent years.

Intellectual journals shouldn’t be measured just in terms of numbers, Mr. Podhoretz said. “The question is what kind of readership do they attract,” he observed. The test, he said, is “whether things that are published have an influence on the common debate.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/arts/24comm.html





The Defender of a Lesser-Known Guarantee in Russia
C. J. Chivers

THE men who attacked Ivan Y. Pavlov waited beside his car outside his home.

They knocked him over from behind, stomped him and kicked him in the head. None of them spoke. They stole nothing. As Mr. Pavlov lay curled defensively on the street, they trotted away. Then they tried to run him over with their car.

Mr. Pavlov rolled clear, he said. The car sped off. “It was my good luck that there were four of them,” he said recently, recalling the attack in 2006 with a mix of drollness and lawyerly precision. “They were pushing each other out of the way to kick me and got in each other’s way.”

Mr. Pavlov was hospitalized for a week. The police later told him the attack appeared to be related to his work — a mission to pry open stores of government information that he says are essential to Russian public life and that by law should be in the public domain, but are kept from view by corruption and apathy.

The battle for personal and political freedom in Russia is often framed as a contest between the Kremlin and its critics over the rights of assembly, speech and suffrage, and for an independent judiciary, legislature and media.

Mr. Pavlov leads a quieter but still dangerous campaign: legal battles for what he calls, simply, “the right to know.”

As the director of the Institute for Information Freedom Development, a private organization he founded in 2004, he strives to teach government agencies that stores of information in their possession — manufacturing and sanitary standards, court records, licenses, fire codes, public tenders, administrative decrees, agency phone directories, registries of public and private organizations — should be made available for all to view.

HIS work is necessary, he and his supporters say, because much of the basic information of governance in Russia has never been made public, even after the Constitution codified the public’s right to nonsecret information in 1993.

It is a peculiar form of dysfunction. Information that was once sealed off from the public by Soviet policies of secrecy is now withheld by government insiders looking to profit from their positions. “There are people in every agency who want to sell their information, not give it away for free,” Mr. Pavlov said. “It is an element of ordinary corruption.”

The police said his near-fatal beating was an example of racket protection. At the time he was attacked, Mr. Pavlov was seeking to force a state agency to publish the standards used to regulate services and products manufactured in Russian factories.

By law, manufacturers and service providers must follow the standards or risk punishment for noncompliance. In practice, the archive of standards is sold piecemeal by private firms that Mr. Pavlov says are connected to the agency that creates them.

It was after Mr. Pavlov sued to require standards to be posted on a free government Web site that he was attacked. He returned to court upon being discharged from the hospital, and a judge eventually forced the government to post new standards on the Internet.

Gary Schwartz, a director of the Tides Foundation, a private philanthropic organization in San Francisco that has helped underwrite Mr. Pavlov’s institute, said his campaign “is critical for the way civil society will develop in Russia.”

Mr. Pavlov, for his part, speaks of the standards battle as a matter of iron principle. “This information was made by taxpayers’ money,” he said. “So you cannot sell it back. Like I told the court: you cannot sell me my shirt. I already own it.”

Mr. Pavlov, tall and lean, with a self-assured and intense bearing, took a roundabout route to his current line of work.

He graduated from an electro-technical university in St. Petersburg in 1992 and finished his law studies in 1997. From 1998 until 2004 he was a director at Bellona, an environmental organization that has fought with Russia about nuclear secrecy and pollution. In time he realized that secrecy itself was a more fundamental problem, one that was largely ignored.

“Nobody defended the basic right — the right to know, to have access to information,” he said. “People cannot have their freedom, and realize all their other rights, without this right.”

The standards case was a significant and symbolic victory, but small in scale. In addition to such officially sanctioned businesses, black-market sales of government information remain profligate. The scams extend into the most public of government offices. In 2006, the institute forced a Russian embassy in a foreign capital to stop selling its passport application forms for 50 euros, or almost $75. To release more public materials and combat such trade, Mr. Pavlov says he has more lawsuits in store, which will be filed in November.

His goals include the release of all official information at the federal statistics service, a database of Russian pollution sources in the air and water, the filings and registry of Russian corporations and organizations, all product certifications and a database of all decrees issued by ministers in the federal and regional governments.

“We will do everything to make this information available for the broad public,” Mr. Pavlov said.

His supporters say the litigation might eventually help the Russian government escape its ossified past and strengthen Russia’s public administration and business climate.

“A strong and consolidated authoritarian state does ultimately need the rule of law,” said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which collaborates with the institute Mr. Pavlov founded. “High oil prices cannot sustain the state. What he is doing is common-sense good government.”

MR. PAVLOV said that for his campaign to succeed he would need official support. He casts his work not as confrontational, but as a law-based effort to coach Russia to live up to its constitutional promise.

“We do not blindly work against the government,” he said. “We do not stage demonstrations that provoke confrontations between the power and the people.”

He makes clear, however, that his work can be frightening. One reaction after his beating was to buy and carry a four-shot pistol known as the “osa,” or wasp. (The pistol fires only rubber bullets and is designed to stun, not kill.)

He recently stopped carrying it — “I was wearing light clothing in summer, and the osa was heavy and hard to hide,” he said — but has applied for a grant from the Russian government to hire a bodyguard for himself and his staff of nine.

Whether or not Russia decides to protect the institute, Mr. Pavlov said, its work will go on.

“Unfortunately in Russia, there are many people who do not care about anything,” he said. “Our job is not to win all of the cases, or to force the government to publish all of the information, but to show people that they have rights.

“Civil rights are like a muscle,” he added. “If you don’t use them, they will atrophy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/27/wo.../27pavlov.html





FEMA Meets the Press, Which Happens to Be . . . FEMA
Al Kamen

FEMA has truly learned the lessons of Katrina. Even its handling of the media has improved dramatically. For example, as the California wildfires raged Tuesday, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, had a 1 p.m. news briefing.

Reporters were given only 15 minutes' notice of the briefing, making it unlikely many could show up at FEMA's Southwest D.C. offices.

They were given an 800 number to call in, though it was a "listen only" line, the notice said -- no questions. Parts of the briefing were carried live on Fox News (see the Fox News video of the news conference carried on the Think Progress Web site), MSNBC and other outlets.

Johnson stood behind a lectern and began with an overview before saying he would take a few questions. The first questions were about the "commodities" being shipped to Southern California and how officials are dealing with people who refuse to evacuate. He responded eloquently.

He was apparently quite familiar with the reporters -- in one case, he appears to say "Mike" and points to a reporter -- and was asked an oddly in-house question about "what it means to have an emergency declaration as opposed to a major disaster declaration" signed by the president. He once again explained smoothly.

FEMA press secretary Aaron Walker interrupted at one point to caution he'd allow just "two more questions." Later, he called for a "last question."

"Are you happy with FEMA's response so far?" a reporter asked. Another asked about "lessons learned from Katrina."

"I'm very happy with FEMA's response so far," Johnson said, hailing "a very smoothly, very efficiently performing team."

"And so I think what you're really seeing here is the benefit of experience, the benefit of good leadership and the benefit of good partnership," Johnson said, "none of which were present in Katrina." (Wasn't Michael Chertoff DHS chief then?) Very smooth, very professional. But something didn't seem right. The reporters were lobbing too many softballs. No one asked about trailers with formaldehyde for those made homeless by the fires. And the media seemed to be giving Johnson all day to wax on and on about FEMA's greatness.

Of course, that could be because the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters. We're told the questions were asked by Cindy Taylor, FEMA's deputy director of external affairs, and by "Mike" Widomski, the deputy director of public affairs. Director of External Affairs John "Pat" Philbin asked a question, and another came, we understand, from someone who sounds like press aide Ali Kirin.

Asked about this, Widomski said: "We had been getting mobbed with phone calls from reporters, and this was thrown together at the last minute."

But the staff did not make up the questions, he said, and Johnson did not know what was going to be asked. "We pulled questions from those we had been getting from reporters earlier in the day." Despite the very short notice, "we were expecting the press to come," he said, but they didn't. So the staff played reporters for what on TV looked just like the real thing.

"If the worst thing that happens to me in this disaster is that we had staff in the chairs to ask questions that reporters had been asking all day, Widomski said, "trust me, I'll be happy."

Heck of a job, Harvey.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...502488_pf.html





Court Strikes Down Age Verification For Adult Sites
Howard Bashman

Majority on partially divided three-judge Sixth Circuit panel strikes down as facially unconstitutional the recordkeeping requirements federal criminal law places on producers of images of "actual sexually explicit conduct" to verify the ages of those depicted in the images: Describing the federal statute at issue, the majority opinion explains, "The plain text, the purpose, and the legislative history of the statute make clear that Congress was concerned with all child pornography and considered recordkeeping important in battling all of it, without respect to the creator's motivation." The majority proceeds to hold the statute facially overbroad and then strikes down the law as unconstitutional.

You can access today's ruling at this link. Even the dissenting judge agrees that the statute is overbroad, but he believes that judicial narrowing of the statute can save it from being unconstitutional.

This decision is a significant First Amendment ruling that directly implicates the controversial subjects of legal adult pornography and illegal child pornography. I expect that the ruling will receive plenty of attention.
http://howappealing.law.com/102307.html#029204





FEMA Sorry for Fake News Briefing
Spencer S. Hsu

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's No. 2 official apologized Friday for leading a staged news conference Tuesday in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters listened on a telephone conference line and were barred from asking questions.

"We are reviewing our press procedures and will make the changes necessary to ensure that all of our communications are straight forward and transparent," Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson Jr., FEMA's deputy administrator, said in a four-paragraph statement.

"We can and must do better, and apologize for this error in judgment," Johnson said, a view repeated Friday by press officers at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, who criticized the event.

FEMA announced the news conference at its headquarters here about 15 minutes before it was to begin Tuesday afternoon, making it unlikely that reporters could attend. Instead, FEMA set up a telephone conference line so reporters could listen.

In the briefing, parts of which were televised live by cable news channels, Johnson stood behind a lectern, called on questioners who did not disclose that they were FEMA employees, and gave replies emphasizing that his agency's response to this week's California wildfires was far better than its response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

"It was absolutely a bad decision. I regret it happened. Certainly ... I should have stopped it," said John "Pat" Philbin, FEMA's director of external affairs. "I hope readers understand we're working very hard to establish credibility and integrity, and I would hope this does not undermine it."

White House press secretary Dana Perino said Friday that "it is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House. We certainly don't condone it. We didn't know about it beforehand. ... They, I'm sure, will not do it again."

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke called the staged briefing "totally unacceptable," adding, "While it is an isolated incident, that does not make it any more tolerable." He said reprimands are "very probable." FEMA is part of DHS.

"Trying to manipulate the press and the public will only tarnish their (FEMA's) current success," House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said.

Philbin's last scheduled day at FEMA was Thursday. He has been named as the new head of public affairs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, ODNI spokeswoman Vanee Vines said.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...1,272790.story





Out From Behind a Camera at a Khmer Torture House



Seth Mydans

He had a job to do, and he did it supremely well, under threat of death, within earshot of screams of torture: methodically photographing Khmer Rouge prisoners and producing a haunting collection of mug shots that has become the visual symbol of Cambodia’s mass killings.

“I’m just a photographer; I don’t know anything,” he said he told the newly arrived prisoners as he removed their blindfolds and adjusted the angles of their heads. But he knew, as they did not, that every one of them would be killed.

“I had my job, and I had to take care of my job,” he said in a recent interview. “Each of us had our own responsibilities. I wasn’t allowed to speak with prisoners.”

That was three decades ago, when the photographer, Nhem En, now 47, was on the staff of Tuol Sleng prison, the most notorious torture house of the Khmer Rouge regime, which caused the deaths of 1.7 million people from 1975 to 1979.

This week he was called to be a witness at a coming trial of Khmer Rouge leaders, including his commandant at the prison, Kaing Geuk Eav, known as Duch, who has been arrested and charged with crimes against humanity.

The trial is still months away, but prosecutors are interviewing witnesses, reviewing tens of thousands of pages of documents and making arrests.

As a lower-ranking cadre at the time, Mr. Nhem En is not in jeopardy of arrest. But he is in a position to offer some of the most personal testimony at the trial about the man he worked under for three years.

In the interview, Mr. Nhem En spoke with pride of living up to the exacting standards of a boss who was a master of negative reinforcement.

“It was really hard, my job,” he said. “I had to clean, develop and dry the pictures on my own and take them to Duch by my own hand. I couldn’t make a mistake. If one of the pictures was lost I would be killed.”

But he said: “Duch liked me because I’m clean and I’m organized. He gave me a Rolex watch.”

Fleeing with other Khmer Rouge cadres when the government was ousted by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, Mr. Nhem En said he traded that watch for 20 tins of milled rice.

Since then he has adapted and prospered and is now a deputy mayor of the former Khmer Rouge stronghold Anlong Veng. He has switched from an opposition party to the party of Prime Minister Hun Sen, and today he wears a wristwatch that bears twin portraits of the prime minister and his wife, Bun Rany.

Last month an international tribunal arrested and charged a second Khmer Rouge figure, who is now being held with Duch in a detention center. He is Nuon Chea, 82, the movement’s chief ideologue and a right-hand man to the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, who died in 1998.

Three more leaders were expected to be arrested in the coming weeks: the urbane former Khmer Rouge head of state, Khieu Samphan, along with the former foreign minister, Ieng Sary, and his wife and fellow central committee member, Ieng Thirith.

All will benefit from the caprice of Mr. Nuon Chea, who complained that the squat toilet in his cell was hurting his ailing knees and was given a sit-down toilet.

Similar toilets are being installed in the other cells, said a tribunal spokesman, Reach Sambath, “So they will all enjoy high-standard toilets when they come.”

It is not clear whether any of the cases will be combined. But even if the defendants do not see one another, their testimony, harmonious or discordant, will put on display the relationships of some of the people who once ran the country’s killing machine.

In a 1999 interview, Duch implicated his fellow prisoner, Mr. Nuon Chea, in the killings, citing among other things a directive that said, “Kill them all.”

Mr. Nhem En’s career in the Khmer Rouge began in 1970 at age 9 when he was recruited as a village boy to be a drummer in a touring revolutionary band. When he was 16, he said, he was sent to China for a seven-month course in photography.

He became the chief of six photographers at Tuol Sleng, where at least 14,000 people were tortured to death or sent to killing fields. Only a half dozen inmates were known to have survived.

He was a craftsman, and some of his portraits, carefully posed and lighted, have found their way into art galleries in the United States.

Hundreds of them hang in rows on the walls of Tuol Sleng, which is now a museum, their fixed stares tempting a visitor to search for meaning here on the cusp of death. In fact, they are staring at Mr. Nhem En.

The job was a daily grind, he said: up at 6:30 a.m., a quick communal meal of bread or rice and something sweet, and at his post by 7 a.m. to wait for prisoners to arrive. His telephone would ring to announce them: sometimes one, sometimes a group, sometimes truckloads of them, he said.

“They came in blindfolded, and I had to untie the cloth,” he said.

“I was alone in the room, so I am the one they saw. They would say, ‘Why was I brought here? What am I accused of? What did I do wrong?’”

But Mr. Nhem En ignored them.

“‘Look straight ahead. Don’t lean your head to the left or the right.’ That’s all I said,” he recalled. “I had to say that so the picture would turn out well. Then they were taken to the interrogation center. The duty of the photographer was just to take the picture.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/wo...a/27cambo.html





NY Court: Police Can Pose As Children
Larry Neumeister

Law enforcement officers investigating sexual predators can pose as children to catch their prey, a federal appeals court ruled Monday, saying the First Amendment provides no refuge for such criminals.

The ruling came in the case of Frank Gagliardi, who was convicted of attempting to entice a child to engage in prohibited sexual activity. His lawyers argued the law used to convict him required an actual child victim.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said requiring police to use an actual child as a decoy would significantly impede legitimate law enforcement and that the law itself was clear that an actual child was not required.

The panel also rejected his argument that the law "impermissibly suppresses fantasy speech with adults who happen to be posing as minors." The court said it had already concluded in previous cases that speech is not protected by the First Amendment when it is the "very vehicle of the crime itself."

The panel noted that its findings were in line with similar decisions by six other appeals panels across the country.

Gagliardi was 62 in July 2005 when he began chatting with an adult government informant who posed as a 13-year-old, "Lorie," after meeting Gagliardi in an Internet chat room called "I Love Older Men," authorities said.

FBI agents arrested him in October 2005 as he waited in his car, believing he was there to meet two 13-year-old girls with whom he had had sexually explicit online conversations. The girls were actually agents posing. Authorities said condoms and Viagra were found in his car.

After his conviction by a jury, he was sentenced to a mandatory minimum of five years in prison.

His lawyer did not immediately return a telephone message for comment.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





A Roman Icon, Red for a Day



Elisabetta Povoledo

One day a vandal, the next an artist. That is the story of the baseball-capped culprit who dumped a bottle of dye into Rome’s famed Trevi Fountain on Friday, turning the waters blood red for a day.

As soon as it was clear that the 18th-century Baroque fountain had not been seriously damaged, intellectuals and art critics began reconsidering the gesture as something nearing genius.

“Once the indignation had died down, we rediscovered the Fountain of Trevi thanks to that liquid,” said Roberto D’Agostino, an Italian blogger. “It’s a resurrection of Andy Warhol, the act of highlighting an object of mass consumption.”

A box found near the fountain held leaflets claiming responsibility, signed “Ftm Futurist Action 2007,” a reference to futurism, the early 20th-century art movement that advocated a violent break with the past. The fliers said that the act was, in part, a protest of the expenses of the Rome Film Fest , which runs until Saturday, and that the color referred to the event’s red carpet.

It is a lackluster festival, agreed a media critic, Gianluca Nicoletti, “with no depth, no color.”

“The real splash was the one made at a fountain,” he said today.

Describing the dyeing as a “dramatic representation of the decline of the country,” Mr. Nicoletti noted that photographs of the reddened fountain made the global rounds. “It was a marvelous event” that put Rome in the spotlight, he said, “at practically zero cost.”

Initial reactions were of outrage and concern, and underlined how exposed Italy’s precious monuments are to random acts of violence. Over the years, vandals have damaged dozens of statues throughout the country, including Michelangelo’s Pietà in the Vatican, and scrawled graffiti on thousands of walls. A 1993 car bombing aimed at the famed Uffizi gallery in Florence that killed five was attributed to the Mafia.

Anita Ekberg, who took a nighttime swim in the fountain for Fellini’s 1960 classic, “La Dolce Vita,” fumed in newspapers that the act had been “an offense to Rome’s culture.”

Photographs taken by tourists as well as a videotape captured a man, wearing a baseball cap pulled low, flinging the dye into the fountain from a plastic container and then hurrying off. Media reports have identified him as Graziano Cecchini, a 54-year old unemployed painter. In a telephone interview this afternoon, he was asked whether he was indeed the man in the photographs. “Who knows?” he answered. “If it had been me, wink wink, I’d say that this had been a media-savvy operation in the face of a very gray society,” said Mr. Cecchini, who was clearly enjoying his 15 minutes of fame.

He said he had taken refuge in an undisclosed location with a photographer, Oliviero Toscani, who often works for the Benetton clothing brand and has been himself a controversial figure.

“We see the same thing,” he said, citing a comment by Mr. Toscani about the fountain’s new color published in today’s Corriere della Sera: “Rome that’s still menstruating, Rome that has not entered menopause yet, can still have children, is still fertile.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/wo...e/24italy.html





Noted

Did I Uncover Your Credit Card Details on the Web Today!?

Today I accidentally uncovered a huge list of people’s names, addresses and credit card details online. No kidding.

I found more than that: login details to people’s web hosting accounts and e-commerce site memberships as well. It was really freaky to think it was all just staring at me, thanks to a flukey Google search. Nothing more complicated than that. (And no, don’t email me for the search details!)

For whatever reason, a hacker has broken into a number of sites and stored the resulting DB dumps into text files that Google came along and indexed, all because this guy’s site’s directories were set to display their contents when no default file is present.

I have emailed Victoria Police with all the details. But after thinking about it some more, I have a simple observation and a suggestion…

First the observation that if a hacker is dumb enough to have your private login or credit card details online and indexable by Google, then they’re likely to be in a text file and unencrypted. If your credit card is listed, it’s probably had the spaces removed, since that’s how it will be stored (by idiots who don’t use a salted hash).

Search Google for Your “Privates”

So here’s the suggestion: search Google for your credit card number. If something shows up go check it out. See if you also fluke a list of hacked card details with your own details there too. If you find nothing it doesn’t mean you haven’t been hacked… it just means you’re not listed online.

Now, if you have a strange and obscure password you always use (that is most likely your and yours alone), try searching for that too. Again, if it shows up in Google’s SERPs, check out the page and see what’s there.

I must say I was pretty freaked out to have discovered these credit card details online. I mean, you’d think a hacker would be smart enough to keep his stuff away from public web access and Google indexing, but perhaps not.

Crappy Coding of E-Commerce Sites

All this raises an issue that I have been long worried about… the coding and security standards of e-commerce sites out there.

How do you and I know that a given site is secure or not. Suuuuuuuure… it has HTTPS working right and the little key comes up on your browser when you get to the page asking for your credit card details. So what?!

The real worry is whether a hacker can get into the database and suck out all the customer and purchasing records. And if a programmer doesn’t know what a salted hash is (basic basic stuff), he should be shot. If a programmer doesn’t know how to code his querystrings so that SQL can’t be injected in, then he should also be shot.

This is why you SHOULD think about the e-commerce platform chosen by your chosen vendor of whatever it is you’re about to buy online. See, there are known weaknesses with various different shopping cart software platforms out there. And if someone builds one from scratch… well, you’d better hope they know what they’re doing.

If It’s Always The Same Password, One Hack Is Enough

If you’re like me, you use the same username everywhere. It’s a branding thing. I’m “alicam” (or “blogologist”) almost everywhere, unless I can’t get these, or unless I don’t want to be “me”.

If you’re NOT like me, you also use the same password everywhere. (I confess… I used to, until a few years ago when I woke up!)

Here’s the danger of using the same password everywhere: a hacker only needs to compromise any one single website to which you are subscribed as a member to get your username and password (assuming he can get past the hash or whatever obfuscation is in place). Once he’s got these, he can try these again all over the place, looking for what other sites and services you belong to. Along the way he can gather more and more information about you, in readiness for “becoming you”… called Identity Theft.

So don’t use the same password every time. Here’s a trick that may work for you: add part or all of the domain name into your password, along with the bit you usually use. So, if your password was always “fr3dd0″, make it fr3dd0-yahoo, fr3dd0-google, fr3dd0-wordpress, etc. Sure, a person could work out what you’re doing, but not a machine. And often enough the attacks are done by machine, with a person taking over once there is some success breaking in.

In my case, I had a password generator make up 16-character long unique strings (with alpha-numeric and special characters), which I use uniquely for each of the services I use. I’m not taking chances. (How I memorize them all is my secret!)

Important Tips for Your Online Security

So, to conclude, here are some simple tips to keep you safe online:

• Buy online from large, reputable suppliers only.
Ideally, choose vendors in the same “jurisdiction” as you, and vendors who also sell to you offline.

• Don’t buy from ugly sites.
If the site looks really ugly and clunky on the front end, it might be coded that way on the back end too. Just walk away!

• Use Paypal where you can
It’s an eBay company and gives you a safety net for online transactions. They spend millions getting it right.

• Update your passwords.
You should use really good passwords, and unique ones, for your important online services like banks, hosting suppliers, government, etc. Don’t double up on them.

• Buy from countries you trust.
If sounds snobbish, but if you get in trouble with a vendor who doesn’t deliver, and he’s from a country that can’t protect you in law, you’re up the creek without a strudel.

• Know about phishing.
You think you know what it means, but are you up-to-date on the latest tricks and techniques? Some of them are darned convincing. So use filters and software to help you too.

This is a quick brain-dump of my suggestions. There are more, so leave a comment for the benefit of others if you have some goodies

Do The Right Thing!

Finally, do the right thing. If you find stuff that shouldn’t be there, tell the authorities. If you’re a Google Search Guru with all your advanced operator trickery, then it’s even more possible that you’ll come across stuff like I did… but I sure hope not.
http://www.alistercameron.com/2007/0...-card-details/





OiNK Admin Released From Custody
Ernesto

After a turbulent day the admin of the raided OiNK.cd was released from custody. At this point it is still unclear what the legal consequences will be, but it is good to see that OiNK is back home.

The OiNK admin contacted TorrentFreak by email which confirms his release. As for the OiNK users, it is highly doubtful that the IFPI or BPI will go after them all, or even one of them. They do know how to scare people with messages like: “A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s users”, but there is no evidence that they actually will.

More interesting perhaps, how did they gain access to the OiNK domain, and why are they allowed to spread this propaganda? They are not a law-enforcement agency.

NFOrce, the ISP of OiNK, said today in an interview that they were not aware of any illegal activities surrounding the site. They thought OiNK was hosting a streaming video site or a weblog. Yeah, right.

The BBC did a small report on the arrest with a lot of false information, releasing nonsense statements such as: “illegally downloading music onto his website” and “paying subscriptions to enter the website.” The video of the arrest is shown below, see for yourself.
http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-r...ustody-071023/





Squeak

The OiNK Fallout: Should Its Ex-Users Be Watching Their Backs?

Once the OiNK news broke, Jess got a request from his pal Mark Pytlik: "hey, if you havent already, you guys seriously need to talk to an internet copyright lawyer and figure out how much danger oink's userbase is actually in right now. there are a ton of people bricking themselves out there and no sites or blogs seem to have much in the way of reliable information as far as that stuff goes." Informed speculation? On the Internet? That's such an anomalous occurrence that I had to track down a couple of legal types, and asked them how much OiNK's now-former-users should be worrying about the possibility of their being prosecuted.

First, I chatted with an American intellectual property litigator who asked to remain anonymous, and asked him basically the same question posed by Pytlik:
They should be very, very scared. There are at least two reasons why this is not just your average, everyday, run-of-the-mill file sharing copyright infringement: this involves music that has not yet been commercially released, and money changed hands.

Because the music has not yet been commercially released, as a practical matter, the fair use defense effectively disappears. The leading case involved The Nation beating Harper & Row to press by publishing merely "between 300 and 400 words" of President's Ford's memoirs; the Supreme Court held that "The Nation effectively arrogated to itself the right of first publication, an important marketable subsidiary right." Harper & Row Pubs., Inc. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539, 548-49 (1985). "First publication is inherently different from other [exclusive copyright] rights in that only one person can be the first publisher;... the commercial value of the right lies primarily in exclusivity. Because the potential damage to the author from judicially enforced 'sharing' of the first publication right ... is substantial, the balance of equities in evaluating such a claim of fair use inevitably shifts." Id. at 553.

That fact also makes it criminal infringement, because it is "the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution." 17 U.S.C. § 506(a)(1)(C). (A "'work being prepared for commercial distribution' means ... a musical work ... or a sound recording, if, at the time of unauthorized distribution (i) the copyright owner has a reasonable expectation of commercial distribution; and (ii) the copies or phonorecords of the work have not been commercially distributed." 17 U.S.C. § 506(a)(3)(A).) Of course, it's also criminal because "the infringement was committed ... for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain." 17 U.S.C. § 506(a)(1)(A).

Prison terms for this stuff run up to 3-5 years for first offenses, 10 years for repeats. 18 U.S.C. § 2319(a), (c).

Yipes! As a follow-up, I asked two questions: Whether or not it was likely for prosecution to occur in the US, and whether or not the idea that any money that changed hands was donated--as opposed to the fees being a membership requirement--made a difference as far as "commercial distribution" goes:
The legal issue of what constitutes infringement in the US stays the same--there still has to be an infringing act in the US, or importation into the US. There are probably differences among the protections that US, UK, Netherlands, and EU law afford to subscriber information, but unfortunately, I don't know the other countries' law, so I don't know whether those differences are material.

As far as money goes, remember that "commercial advantage or private financial gain" can include the benefits of barter and the like. So the fact that, in your [description of OiNK's ratio rules], "they had to assist in infringement in order to keep infringing" might be enough.

Ah, those ratio requirements--they'll always get you.

Later, I had a quick IM exchange on the subject with MCBarrister, a Washington-based attorney with a background in IP and Internet law:

mauraidolator: So basically I am curious as to whether or not you think it's likely that authorities in the US will try to go after American users of OiNK; there's a threatening message on the front page of the site right now, and the freaking-out has commenced, as you might imagine.

MCBarrister: I think it depends on how quickly the RIAA gets its hands on any of the server logs. That's partly facetious, but I don't see the U.S. Department of Justice using its resources right now for criminal investigations of copyright infringement. The overseas raids were criminal matters--I don't expect the same here. Plus, there's an interesting issue of whether the UK and Dutch authorities would share the information with a private party. There are long-running debates over data treatment and security between the US and EU.
But if RIAA does get the logs and data, then there will be hell to pay for anyone who used credit cards [to donate]; those who maintained membership via upload will be a little harder to trace because you'd have to follow the IP addresses, and ISPs are not always willing to hand over their customers without court orders

mauraidolator: i'm pretty sure that the donations were done via PayPal.

MCBarrister: Hrmmm. PayPal is owned by eBay, which has pretty liberal policies about helping IP rights owners. I think it would still take a court order, but PayPal / eBay would be more likely to hand over personally identifying information that universities have proven more unwilling to give.

mauraidolator: What is interesting to me is the rough estimates of where the users came from -- I've read that the US-based membership of the site was as high as 50%, even though the site was located in the UK.

MCBarrister: It's not that surprising, depending on the content. I graduated from college before there was a graphical Internet, so I never really participated in these activities--but I have a rough sense that lots of US-based university students were playing since they have access to the best net connections around. My cable modem would choke on the kind of uploading necessary to support what I would want back down, assuming I had anything that was of value to the network in my vinyl rips.

mauraidolator: same here

MCBarrister: My bottom line--there should be some level of fear, but the action is going to be from the RIAA (again), not the feds, unless a new US Attorney General (once confirmed) has a real passion for prosecuting IP violations.

mauraidolator: Has there been any word on his attitude towards IP violations yet?

MCBarrister: I haven't noticed--the mainstream coverage has focused on his willingness to back the administration's claims of independence from the rule of law when it affects them personally, and a short time searching on Google turns up nothing more relevant.

So, there you have it. And if the new US Attorney General is excited by the idea of going after illegal downloaders? Well, look on the bright side, ex-OiNKers: There could always be another terrorist attack! That would certainly tie him up for a while.
http://idolator.com/tunes/the-law/th...cks-314216.php





The Pirate Bay To Bring Back OiNK
Ernesto

The Pirate Bay is currently working on an OiNK replacement in an attempt to bring the hundreds of thousands of music albums back online that disappeared during the raid. The replacement will be released within a week and on the BOiNK.cd domain.

BOiNK will be a little different from OiNK. For instance, the tracker will be public and it will start out with a lot less torrents than OiNK had when it was raided. The success of BOiNK will mainly depend on the former OiNK community, who will be asked to upload their old OiNK torrents.

The most important thing about BOiNK is perhaps the message it sends out to the IFPI and the BPI: It shows that that if you stop one tracker, others will pop up days after. It is a hydra. Call it a slap in the face if you want.

BOiNK will probably be ready in a few days. People from the Pirate Bay, Mininova, TorrentFreak and even the recently arrested (and released) OiNK admin are currently at The Oil of the 21st Century conference where they are - among other things - discussing filesharing, culture and copyright related issues.

BOiNK is a Pirate Bay only project, OiNK and other BitTorrent sites are not involved.

In the meantime, please stay away from scam sites that pretend to be related to OiNK. All they will do is take your money and run away. As soon as there’s an approved donation campaign (if there will be any) we will report it here. http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...k-oink-071026/

OiNK Domains Now Point To The Pirate Bay DNS

It has been a controversial week with all the dramatic news surrounding OiNK. The tracker was effectively shut down in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement. However, it now seems that the domain has been reclaimed by The Pirate Bay.

Earlier this week we posted an article about the hijack of the OiNK domain by the police. To make things even worse, they did not just hijack it, but also replaced it by a page insinuating guilt on the part of the site owner, without allowing him a fair trial.

Quite a few people asked the question: “Why Are The IFPI and BPI Allowed To Hijack OiNK” No answer has been given to this question yet, but it seems to be less relevant now.

It now seems that the OiNK.cd domain no longer points to the IFPI and BPI propaganda messages, instead it now shows a waffles site, which is hosted in The Pirate Bay servers.

Yesterday The Pirate Bay announced that it will launch an OiNK replacement named BOiNK. However, this has nothing to do with OiNK.cd and OiNK.me.uk. These domains will be used for something totally different and there are no plans to relaunch OiNK.

Both OiNK.cd and OiNK.me.uk (the old domain) now use The Pirate Bay’s nameservers. At this point it is still unsure what the plans are for the OiNK domain. It is not likely that the tracker will return in its original form, right now it is “the number 1 site in the world for waffle recipes,” an inside joke.

There will be an official announcement of what will happen to the OiNK domains soon, stay tuned!
http://torrentfreak.com/oink-domains...ay-dns-071027/
















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

October 20th, October 13th, October 6th, September 29th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. Questions or comments? Call (617) 939-2340, country code U.S.. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black