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Old 09-11-06, 10:55 AM   #2
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What the Democrats' Win Means for Tech
Declan McCullagh

It was the narrowest of Republican margins in the U.S. Senate that doomed a crucial vote on Net neutrality earlier this year.

By an 11-11 tie, a GOP-dominated committee failed in June to approve rules requiring that all Internet traffic be treated the same no matter what its "source" or "destination" might be. A similar measure also failed in the House of Representatives.

But now that this week's elections have switched control of the House back to the Democrats--and they appear to have seized the Senate as well--the outlook for technology-related legislation has changed dramatically overnight.

On a wealth of topics--Net neutrality, digital copyright, merger approval, data retention, Internet censorship--a Capitol Hill controlled by Democrats should yield a shift in priorities on technology-related legislation.

Network neutrality is one of the clearest examples of a partisan rift. In the Senate, all the Republican committee members but one voted against extensive broadband regulations. These regulations are backed by Internet companies such as Google and eBay, but are opposed by telecommunications and hardware providers.

"Clearly, we're going to have to address the question of network neutrality," Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, told reporters on Wednesday. Dingell, who has served in the House for more than 50 of his 80 years, is set to be the next chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which writes telecommunications laws.

Dingell didn't elaborate. But he's previously gone on the record as a staunch supporter of extensive regulations that would prohibit network operators from charging content providers extra for premium placement or faster delivery, dubbing it "private taxation of the Internet." (Network operators say they may need to do this to recoup their vast investments in new broadband infrastructure.)

Net neutrality
Adam Green, a spokesman for the liberal advocacy group Moveon.org, predicted that the election results would be a boon to the enactment of extensive Net neutrality regulations. "Internet freedom should not be a partisan issue. But Republicans have consistently been standing in the way, and there is zero doubt that the increased Democratic control of Congress will be fantastic news," said Green, whose group lobbies on the topic.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat set to be the next House Majority Leader, has also been a strong supporter of more Net neutrality regulations. Pelosi said in June that "without Net Neutrality, the current experience that Internet users enjoy today is in jeopardy."

The issue of electronic surveillance represents another partisan divide. House Democrats cast 62 votes against the 2001 Patriot Act, but only three Republicans opposed it. Similarly, not one Democrat opposed a more recent amendment requiring the executive branch to disclose its data-mining technologies, while 165 Republicans did.

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU's Washington office, said she hoped the new Congress would investigate the National Security Agency's domestic spying program. "The illegal spying program should be a primary focus of congressional efforts to investigate this administration's abuse of power," Fredrickson said. "The president himself has admitted to authorizing this warrantless spying in direct contravention of the dictates of FISA," or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Longtime Washington observers acknowledge that neither party is that principled when it comes to the topic of electronic surveillance. Rather, positions on privacy can become partisan methods of attacking the party that holds the White House. (Republicans, now stalwart defenders of the Patriot Act, were advocates of protecting privacy during President Clinton's time in office. Republican Sen. Conrad Burns said the White House "has no respect for privacy," and House Majority Leader Dick Armey used words like "Orwellian" to describe administration proposals.)

The ACLU is pinning some of its hopes on Rep. John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who is set to be the next chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers has suggested imposing greater controls on government surveillance and is in a key position to lead a high-profile investigation.

"Several of the new committee chairs have already expressed their intention to conduct a thorough inquiry into the unlawful actions of this administration," Fredrickson said.

Digital copyright
Digital copyright is another topic that likely will be heavily influenced by the congressional shakeup--though more because of new committee chairmen than the shift in party alignments.

Hollywood tends to be solidly Democratic: Employees of companies like Viacom, Walt Disney and Vivendi Universal consistently write checks to Democratic politicians over Republicans, by a 2-to-1 margin. (And Sen. Bob Dole, a Republican, famously bashed Hollywood during the 1996 presidential campaign.)

But in practice, Republican politicians have been nearly as enthusiastic about helping Hollywood. It was Sen. Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, who endorsed the so-called broadcast flag for television in January. It was a New Jersey Republican, Rep. Mike Ferguson, who introduced the legislation for digital radio two months later, and another from North Carolina, Rep. Howard Coble, who co-sponsored a plan in mid-2002 to let copyright holders disable PCs used for illicit file trading. And Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican, once called for remotely destroying pirates' computers.

The Motion Picture Association of America said on Wednesday that it encountered bipartisan opposition in the House--from Republican Joe Barton and Democrat Rick Boucher--when trying to enact a broadcast flag bill before. Such a law is designed to curb digital TV piracy by making certain receivers illegal to sell.

Because of Barton and Boucher's opposition, "we have bipartisan challenges on that, and we hope to have a bipartisan solution," said John Feehery, MPAA's executive vice president for external affairs. "We'll have to see how it all shakes out with the (new) chairmen."

Key chairmen
One question worrying Washington insiders is who will be the next chairman of key subcommittees, such as one dealing with writing copyright laws.

"We're going through a process right now of just deciding what those priorities are going to be for the next year," Feehery said. "We've been working hard on the analog hole and broadcast flag--the bottom line is (that) we want to limit the impact of piracy on our industry."

If Boucher gets the nod as chairman, a broadcast flag becomes far less likely and changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "anti-circumvention" sections become politically feasible. "He would be a big boost to our efforts to allow innovation to develop," said Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that has opposed content providers on many digital copyright bills.

If Rep. Howard Berman, however, gets the job, the recording industry and motion picture industry will have a staunch ally as subcommittee chairman. Berman, a Hollywood Democrat, has sponsored legislation in the past that would let copyright holders legally hack into peer-to-peer networks. (Berman currently is the subcommittee's top Democrat, but there's speculation that he'd take a different chairmanship.)

Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, said that his group's strategy to oppose to the broadcast flag won't change much. "Our strategy is (to) work with both parties," Shapiro said. "Technology is the field that's growing the national economy. It's not a partisan issue."

Shapiro is worried about what might happen in a so-called lame-duck Congress, which will reconvene briefly this fall under Republican control. Tennesseean Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who is retiring, could "try to hurt us badly," Shapiro said. "He indicated he's going to try, with the broadcast flag and audio flag, possibly attached to a spending bill. We're very concerned about that and we're going to be very vigilant."

On other topics:

AT&T and BellSouth: Rep. Dingell on Wednesday reiterated concerns about rushing into approval of a proposed $80 billion merger of AT&T and BellSouth. The merger won unconditional approval from the U.S. Department of Justice but has stalled in another layer of review by the Federal Communications Commission.

"I think it would be in (the FCC's) interest, I think it would be in the interest of the committee, and I think it would be in the broad public interest" if the FCC delayed its decision until the new Congress is seated, Dingell said. That would let the Democrats hold hearings into its advisability.

House leadership: High-tech companies have reason to be optimistic about the Democrats passing laws in an industry-friendly direction under Rep. Pelosi's leadership, said Josh Ackil. Ackil is the vice president of government affairs for the Washington-based Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Apple Computer, Microsoft, Dell, Cisco and Intel.

That's in part because the San Francisco representative emerged last November with a Democratic "innovation agenda" lauded by high-tech companies. The move signaled that "she understands the importance of a strong technology and innovation economy, and the effect that innovation economy has on every other industry," said Ackil, a former staffer to onetime House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt. "She gets it."

Data retention: The Bush administration, led by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, has been pushing Congress relentlessly for new laws requiring Internet companies to keep records on what their customers do. Because Democrats have generally been more critical of this move, the proposal could run into more opposition next year.

The Markey factor: Rep. Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Democratic firebrand, has antagonized tech companies for a decade--but with a Republican majority in place since 1995, he's had little luck enacting legislation. Now that may change, especially because Markey is in line to take over the chairmanship of a key Internet and telecommunications subcommittee.

In the past, Markey has complained about privacy concerns in Intel chips and tried to force Web sites to delete information about visitors. He attacked AOL after it disclosed user search histories and said that Hewlett-Packard's boardroom scandal means more privacy laws are necessary.
http://news.com.com/What+the+Democra...3-6133833.html





The Big Chill

Verizon's decision last month to shut off a Montreal ISP for hosting edgy gay chatboards points to a colder, grayer internet ahead
Bill Andriette

The chilling of free expression-- sexual and otherwise-- on the internet is like global warming: almost everyone agrees it's happening, but the process is too big, too abstract, too long-term to readily notice. Only through the distorting window of dramatic events-- the collapse of an Alpine glacier or a Hurricane Katrina--do we see something's amiss.

When it comes to freedom on the net, lately a lot's been storming and crashing

• On November 3rd, US telecom giant Verizon says it will disconnect a Montreal-based internet service provider (ISP) Epifora whose clients host sexually edgy chat sites. Civil-liberties experts say it's an unprecedented assertion of corporate control over legal expression.

View our poll archive

The US government (see box) has also lately been turning down the thermometer on internet speech.

• Based on SM stories she had written and posted to her web site, Karen Fletcher was indicted in September for obscenity by US federal prosecutors on charges that carry up to 30 years in prison.

• US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urged Congress in September to pass legislation requiring that ISPs log all users' internet activity

• In August, the US Senate ratified the International Convention on Cybercrimes-- which requires signatories to investigate and arrest people for suspected crimes-- including crimes of expression-- that may not be even be illegal in the place where they were committed.

The internet was supposed to "route around censorship" and herald a global shift to "open societies." As repression hots up, is that dream heading into deep freeze?

Unplugged in Montreal

Certainly a chill has descended on a small Montreal ISP, Epifora, whose home page promises "respect for client privacy" and tolerance of "controversial speech." The company's clients host a number of websites and chatboards-- such as Boychat.org and Freespirits.org-- with a pederastic slant. On October 4th Epifora was notified by MCI-Canada that their connection to the internet backbone would be cut off in 30 days for violating the "acceptable use policy" of Verizon-- the giant US telecom that swallowed MCI in 2005. Epifora had paid for a high-speed link to the internet's "backbone" through MCI-Canada for five years, without incident. Neither Verizon, nor MCI-Canada, nor any law-enforcement agency had ever served Epifora with a "take-down notice"-- the established procedure in Canada to get an ISP to remove, pending a court hearing, a client's possibly offending material. So what was the alleged violation?

"I don't have any specifics for you," Verizon spokesman Peter Lucht tells The Guide. Nor did Verizon or MCI-Canada answer Epifora's queries. But Verizon, which maybe takes lessons in customer service at Guantanamo Bay, said their determination was final and unappealable.

In their particular corner of cyberspace, the chatboards on the Epifora network have proven vital. Some have been online for more than a decade, and have gained a loyal following, as they are among the few places on the net where people can talk relatively safely and anonymously about how to live with their feelings for youths.

"Every time I find a message from a newbie saying 'Thank God I found this place,' it's further validation for what I'd been doing for ten years," says a former Boychat webmaster. For many users, he says, the chatboards are key to participants' feelings of personal integrity. "We're a decent, civilized community of reasonable people," he goes on. "Ultimately our record is the chatboard itself and its archives."

Within a few days of news of the impending cut-off, Freespirits.org raised $30,000 in pledges for a legal defense fund-- and not because its users' are especially numerous or wealthy; its demographics are slanted to tech-savvy young people just coming out. "Boychat changed my life," says one participant, who notes that he met the man who has been his lover of five years on the board.

Right side of the law

Do consciousness-raising and mutual support cross red lines? Verizon's concise "Acceptable Use Policy" boils down to "don't do anything illegal," and Epifora insists it hasn't. For the five years MCI-Canada provided Epifora's backbone link, the company evidently agreed.

That Epifora's clients were not breaking the rules appears to be the view of one particularly informed group of people-- Canadian law enforcement.

With its transgressive content, Epifora had faced scrutiny before. After a July, 2001 report in Canada's National Post, MCI-Canada approached the Ontario Provincial Police for an opinion, and inspector Bob Matthews, of the OPP's "Project P" declared the material on Epifora's servers in compliance with the Criminal Code.

That says a lot, as Canadian law sets a higher bar than the US and most other countries, making no distinction between, say, photographs of minors having sex, textual descriptions thereof, or even speech "advocating" such acts.

There's no reason to think anything had changed: Epifora is a brick-and-mortar business, and authorities would've known where to knock. And if Verizon had reason to believe any of the sites on Epifora's network violated the law, Verizon could have served the ISP with a take-down notice.

"Boychat goes back 11 years, and there's a record of decisions by the moderators and the logs," says the former webmaster. "If we ever had to prove we were keeping an eye on our resource and self-policing, we can."

Breaking the backbone

Verizon's cutoff of Epifora didn't come out of the blue; it was the result of a campaign started in September by a Portland, Oregon-based outfit called Perverted Justice (PJ). Funded by NBC, the group runs private internet sex sting-ops as fodder for the TV network's eponymous "reality" cop show. Staffers and volunteers pose as underage teens on the net, steer conversation into sex-chat, and then lure men to meeting places, where police are waiting to bust them on-camera. Some critics condemn the show as an unholy marriage of cops and media. Certainly it turns destroying people's lives into entertainment. With the public's limitless appetite for kiddie sexposé, it's brought NBC stellar ratings and loads of money.

In mid-September, PJ launched a campaign to shut down Epifora, contending that its clients' chatboards contained speech promoting "rape," "stalking" and illegal porn. With Epifora evidently unfazed by controversial content, PJ targeted backbone provider Verizon, labelling it a "corporate sex offender."

Verizon's prompt cave-in to the pressure might seem expectable. But according to free-speech advocates, it opens a new chapter in constricting online speech.

"I'm not aware of cases where backbone providers have exercised this degree of censorship," says Lee Tien, staff attorney in San Francisco with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I think this is very, very dangerous to speech on the internet, and why you need some kind of legal framework to govern [backbone access]."

The companies and organizations that run the net's major "trunk lines" usually present themselves-- and in turn are treated-- as "common carriers." Certainly, no one holds the phone company responsible if, say, Arnie rings up Moe to plan a bank heist. In the internet era, common-carrier status has become especially vital, even while it has grown legally murkier. Interlocking networks open to each others' traffic is what define the internet-- literally, a network of networks. With data on the net travelling at near light-speed, distance matters little compared to bandwidth. If you're a photon, the quickest path across Manhattan at rush hour might be by way of Singapore. A single e-mail or request for a web page gets broken into a powder of data packets, each travelling the most efficient path they can find, to be reassembled at the recipient-end on-the-fly. A network doesn't know whether a bit passing over its cables is a love letter or diagram on bomb-making.

Indeed, companies such as Verizon have been quick to assert their role as serving all comers without prejudice. Otherwise, every time a teen gets busted downloading bootleg Kurt Cobain, or a broker trades insider stock tips, or a hacker spews viruses, telecom executives could face charges as co-conspirators. Indeed, telecoms have resisted filtering content, arguing that the mere attempt would wrongly imply they control what passes over their wires.

Driving around jams

But why should one company's decision to censor an ISP matter? Kin to the US interstate system, today's internet is a bastard child of a 1960s-era US military project to create a communications mesh that could survive nuclear war. Even if Washington and Chicago were offline, the thinking went, data can always find a route that bypassed them.

But the highway metaphor shows the limits of the net as well as its robustness. From a bird's-eye view, the interstate system is interlocking web allowing infinite routings and destinations. But if you are stuck in traffic on Route 95 at the end of Labor Day weekend, the highway itself becomes an insurmountable obstacle.

"If there's only one bridge between two points then you can't route around it, because it's been architected that way," notes the EFF's Tien. "If that area of Montreal is only serviced by that provider, then you can't route around it."

And in fact, on a local level-- and even a global one from some standpoints-- internet infrastructure can be surprisingly centralized when judged by its narrowest expanses-- in a sense, its weakest links. Countless Nigerian ex-oil ministers have no trouble finding your inbox with their urgent inquiries about Swiss bank accounts that they need you to unlock. But in fact few cables link Africa to the internet beyond.

"If I can't do something with this ISP maybe I can with that one-- there can be some competition among providers at the ISP level," notes Tien. "But when it comes to a backbone provider, there may not be any alternative, so their power becomes determinative of what can or cannot be said. Perverted Justice, or whatever organizations that may be involved, has discovered the sensitivity of that bottleneck."

One solution is to build more redundancy in the network. "'Routing around censorship' always assumed there would be alternative ways to get around a blockage," Tien notes. "When it's actually somebody who controls a large amount of fiber, then you have the problem that you'll never be able to route around them."

Polluting neutrality

Sensing their indispensability and feeling they've missed the internet boom-train that's riding over their rails, US telecoms right now are angling to parlay their control over the net's physical wiring into power over its content. That's the ongoing battle in Washington over "network neutrality"-- with Congress, palms greased with telecom cash, a hair's breadth away, under pending legislation, to give the likes of Verizon the keys to the content caboose.

Network neutrality is so central to the internet that users notice the principle as frequently as fish wonder about water.

Right now if you want Google.com, your ISP-- whoever it is-- will take you there, with the help of whatever big telecom ultimately links them to the backbone. But if they had the legal green light, that telecom could take you-- instead of to Google-- to whatever search engine paid them the fattest kickbacks.

It's a replay-- on a grander and more sinister scale-- of what Microsoft pulled off against Netscape in the 90s when it tried-- and for a time succeeded-- in parlaying its domination in operating systems into control over web browsing.

"Usually the network-neutrality debate is couched in business terms," notes the EFF's Ren Bucholz. "But the elephant in the living room is that if you can discriminate based on price, why can't you discriminate based on anything else?"

Gloves come off

Verizon's cut-off of Epifora is an early warning that global telecoms are prepared to use their choke-hold on the net's infrastructure to filter out chunky political expression. What will be the limits of such censorship? If chatting about the Boy Beautiful besmirches Verizon's corporate name, what does the firm gain by allowing access to sites celebrating barebacking or ball torture? The list of Americans registered as "sexual predators" for blow-jobs at highway rest stops is a few mouse-clicks away. Isn't Verizon a "corporate sponsor of perversion and disease" for selling such people internet access in the first place?

How far would Verizon go to eliminate edgy gay content-- and edgy gays-- from use of its networks? "We're not speculating about what the company might do," Verizon spokesman Lucht tells The Guide.

Epifora has a warchest big enough to start a legal battle, but probably not to carry it through to completion without outside help, with the controversial content in question possibly discouraging the usual cyber-freedom angels.

The case raises important questions. Can internet companies allege violations of "acceptable use" without saying what they are? Can they about-face and declare that legal content they willingly carried yesterday is forbidden today? Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees everyone "freedom of the press and other media of communication." Does that mean anything when a tiny handful of backbone providers refuse access? Is it for a US company to decide that speech legal in Canada can be forced off the internet?

The Epifora case could establish important new legal principles. More likely, it will be one more step in the transition of the internet from messy democratic forum into a frigid private shopping mall, ringed with surveillance cameras, with many doors marked "no entry," free expression be damned.
http://www.guidemag.com/magcontent/i...96211CDCD52F41





Craigslist Sex Ad Scammer Seeks to Silence Critics

Baseless Copyright Claims Used to Shut Down Debate Over Privacy Controversy
Press Release

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit today against the man behind "craigslist-perverts.org" -- a website that publicized responses to fake personal advertisements posted on Craigslist.org -- on behalf of an online journalist who criticized the controversial outing campaign and received legal threats in return.

Michael Crook posted the fake ads earlier this year, claiming to be a young woman seeking a casual sexual encounter. Crook then displayed many of the replies on his craigslist-perverts.org website, including information such as the responders' names, photographs, phone numbers, and where they worked. Jeff Diehl, the editor of Internet magazine 10 Zen Monkeys, published an article in September critical of Crook's behavior and used an image of Crook being interviewed by Fox News to highlight how controversial a figure he was.

Instead of responding to the criticism with words, Crook sent a legal notice to the magazine's online service provider, claiming to be the copyright holder of the image and demanding that it be removed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Such actions violate the DMCA's requirements that only the copyright holder or someone authorized by her can send such notices.

"This is yet another case of someone intentionally misusing copyright law to try to shut down legitimate debate on an issue of public interest," said EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz. "Crook certainly doesn't own the copyright to the news footage -- Fox News does. Furthermore, a still shot of that footage, used as part of a commentary on the controversy surrounding him, is clearly a fair use. It's hypocritical for such an outspoken figure like Crook to attack other speakers just because they disagree with him."

Because of Crook's misuse of the DMCA, Diehl was forced to switch web-hosting companies in order to continue publish the photo. But even then, Crook sent another bogus DMCA notice to the new hosting company, and Diehl had to remove the photo for a second time. In the lawsuit filed today, EFF asks that Diehl be compensated for the financial and personal expenses associated with responding to the meritless claims and switching web hosts -- as well as for the infringement to his free speech rights protected by the First Amendment.

This lawsuit is part of EFF's ongoing work to protect online free speech in the face of bogus copyright claims. Last week, EFF filed an objection to a subpoena from Landmark Education, a group that claimed copyright infringement in a video uploaded to the Internet Archive.

"The Internet is home to passionate debate on countless important issues. It is too bad that some people find the robust exercise of free speech so frightening that they use intimidation to try to silence it," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "EFF is grateful that people like Jeffrey Diehl and the Internet Archive are fighting back."
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_11.php#004976





Police Say Man Met Teen on MySpace
John Pirro

A 46-year-old Bethel Connecticut man charged with attempted sexual assault after police found him in a parked car with a 15-year-old girl last week met the teen on MySpace.com, police said.

Bethel Police Chief Jeffrey Finch said Monday that Harry Denney, of Rockwell Drive, met the underage girl on the popular social networking Web site about a year
ago.

He wouldn't say if Denney and the teen had contact prior to the meeting that resulted in Denney's arrest in the high school parking lot Friday.

Officers who were patrolling the lot during a football game between Bethel and New Milford found the pair in a "suspicious vehicle" parked in a rear corner of the lot. Finch wouldn't say what attracted attention to the car.

In addition to the sexual assault count, Denney was charged with risk of injury to a minor and loitering on school grounds. He was released on $10,000 bond for an appearance Nov. 14 in Danbury Superior Court.

The arrest was the second made by Bethel police this year involving an older man and under-aged girls who met on MySpace.

In June, police charged a 25-year-old Newtown man with attempted sexual assault and attempted risk of injury after he had conversations they said were of a "sexual nature" with two 13-year-old Bethel girls he met through the Web site.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal on Monday called the latest incident "powerful evidence" of the need for MySpace.com to implement stricter safeguards to protect younger users.

Blumenthal is among attorneys general from 30 states who have called for raising the minimum age for a MySpace profile from 14 to 16, or for a separate site to be set up for 14- and 15-year-old users.

Blumenthal also said that MySpace.com should take steps to prevent older man from passing themselves off as 18-year-old boys in order to meet younger girls.

Company officials have "made encouraging statements that they understand our points, but we have yet to reach agreement with them," Blumenthal said.

"They claim there is no technical way to do a reliable age verification. WE say there is, though parental consent, by Social Security number or driver's license," the attorney general said.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1021367





A Son’s Revenge: ‘Friendbombing’
John Schwartz

I HAVE many new friends. Too many.

My troubles began when I signed up for a page on Facebook.com, the Web site that’s phenomenally popular with millions of college and high school students.

I did it, frankly, to keep up with my own children. My daughter, Elizabeth, off at college and a 10-hour drive away, details her days on her LiveJournal.com and Facebook pages. Anyone can read the LiveJournal page, but Facebook requires that you have your own account, and be part of the same network (like University of Michigan students) or share “friend” status, to read others’ pages.

But a child doesn’t need to be out of town to be a little distant. Sam, my 16-year-old son, has a Facebook page, and when he occasionally left it up on his computer screen, I noticed it was a pretty freewheeling place, with coarse language, flirtation and jokes about high-school drinking. I mean, I hope they were jokes. We’re talking about that. In any case, it all made me want to keep an eye on things.

Now, I wouldn’t read my kid’s locked diary. But if Sammy is going to put his daily thoughts out there for the world to see, I’m going to check in every once in a while — and let him know that I’m doing it, too.

Facebook recently started offering accounts to corporations, and I signed up, and immediately “friended” Sam and Elizabeth, as well as several colleagues at work. My colleagues and I have not written on each others’ “walls” — a way for members to leave messages that can be read by anyone in the network — because we are, you know, grown-ups. We are neither hip nor cool, nor are we happening. And I was happily able to check in on my kids.

But things took a turn on Monday, when “new friend” requests started rolling in from students at my son’s high school. It was mystifying. I dug around and found that Sam had formed a group, Friend My Father.

He wrote, “My dad got a Facebook, lets make it worth his while.” He told them how to find me online, and then wrote, simply, “Go!”

Sam invited more than 100 teenagers to join the Friend My Father group. That night, more than a dozen did so, with “new friend” requests popping up every hour or so. Many of them wanted to say Hi. I replied. One asked questions like “waddup mr shcwartz? how it goes” and “r u a journalist or a writer? is there a difference?”

I had, to coin a phrase, been friendbombed. It reminded me of what computer security experts call a “distributed denial of service attack,” in which multiple computers send so many messages or information requests that data can’t get into or out of the targeted machine. As I sat at home Monday night trying to get work done, I occasionally moaned and announced to my wife, in resigned monotone: “Andrei has asked to be my friend. Sida has asked to be my friend. Alison has asked to be my friend.” My wife, who ridiculed me for cybersnooping on our boy, laughed at what she seemed to think was some kind of poetic justice, and said that Sam had cleverly exacted his revenge.

I explained to Sam that I didn’t quite know what to do with all of my new friends. “Yes!” he said with a smile. “I embarrassed my dad!”

The friend requests continue. I’ve known at least some of these kids for a long time, and like them. It’s nice to know that they like me enough to sign in and say, “Hey.”

But Facebook’s use of the word “friend” is a little troubling in a world where true friendship is hard to find and even harder to sustain. The idea of getting friends wholesale seems to be part of that element of the Internet that can render life virtual and a little pallid. In many ways, the Internet strengthens relationships by allowing easy communication over a distance. But without a human touch, it’s hard to keep the conversation going beyond niceties. Facebook seems to be saying: “Sure, we might be seeing less of our real friends face to face. But we’ll make it up with volume.”

I have visions of becoming like Charlie Rosenbury, a college student in Missouri who ended up with tens of thousands of friends by writing an automated program that put his request out far and wide. He became a Facebook celebrity and an object of ridicule.

But mainly what I wonder, as the new requests pop up one after another, is what parents will think if they discover that I am part of their teenagers’ network of friends. I worry that two terrifying words will come to mind: Mark Foley.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/we...5schwartz.html





MySpace Aims for a Global Audience, and Finds Some Stiff Competition
Robert Levine

A couple of months ago, Robert Basic, a 40-year-old technology consultant in Frankfurt, signed up for MySpace, the online social networking site, mostly out of curiosity.

In September, MySpace opened public test pages for Germany and France, the company’s first versions in languages other than English. That month, the site had 2.5 million unique users in Germany and about half that in France, respectable numbers for a new venture.

But Mr. Basic was only briefly among them. “I’m not a typical user,” he said. He became frustrated by unwanted messages and he did not care for the flashy pages.

“People here think the design is bad,” he said, “and that is important for Germans.”

MySpace, which was purchased by the News Corporation in July, is aggressively trying to move into overseas markets, and is expected to announce today that it is expanding into Japan in a possible joint venture.

With a presence already in Britain, Australia, Ireland, Germany and France, the company plans to add 11 other countries in the coming year, said Chris DeWolfe, the chief executive. Over the summer, Mr. DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, the company’s co-founders, went to China with Wendi Deng, the wife of Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, and met with possible partners.

But as Mr. Basic’s experience shows, turning MySpace into a global power could be far more complicated than marketing a movie overseas. While the company has 100 million registered users, most are in the United States. People outside the United States already have different habits about socializing online.

And many do so by using cellphones rather than computers.

“In the U.S., teen and 20-something culture is more about I.M.,” instant messaging, said Danah Boyd, a fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, who studies popular culture and technology. In other countries, “the primary way of talking to your friends is SMS,” text messages on mobile phones.

Subject as it is to the whims of young people, the social networking business can be hard to predict. For example, Orkut.com, a social networking site started by Google, now consists mostly of Brazilians. After the site went online, Portuguese speakers attracted more Portuguese speakers, to the point where those who did not understand the language felt alienated.

“MySpace seems to be doing pretty well so far,” said Nate Elliot, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research, of the site’s international expansion. “But you have very little control over where these things take off.”

In Germany, MySpace must compete with Studivz.net, a site aimed at students that works much like the American site Facebook. In France, the company will compete with Skyblogs, which in August, the last month for which data is available, attracted 5.9 million unique visitors as opposed to the 1.1 million MySpace had in France, according to comScore.

Europe also has dozens of sites aimed at relatively small groups of people, which would not really compete with MySpace but could potentially limit its appeal in some markets if European consumers prefer a local experience.

Facebox, which is based in Brussels, for example, operates pages in different languages separately, on the logic that people prefer to join a more intimate network.

Something that will help MySpace compete, Ms. Boyd said, is the site’s emphasis on music. In the United States, the way bands of all sizes and music fans embraced the site helped it beat local competitors such as Friendster. In countries with established sites, “what MySpace is offering is music,” she said. And to compete effectively, it will have to attract local bands.

Mr. DeWolfe agrees. “It’s important to have something that reflects the local culture,” he said. Many MySpace hallmarks will remain, like secret shows from bands with pages on the site. But they will feature local artists, selected by local employees.

“They know what’s cool,” Mr. DeWolfe said. “The idea behind internationalization is localization.” Already, according to Jamie Kantrowitz, senior vice president for marketing and content for MySpace in Europe, the site has offered users a chance to hear albums by French rock bands before they were available in stores.

Since MySpace has never spent much money on advertising or content, it need not push its competitors aside to make a profit. “Our goal is to be No. 1 in every market,” Mr. DeWolfe said, “but we’re not so arrogant as to think we will be No. 1 in every market.”

As in the United States, the international versions of the site will make most of their revenue from selling ads. But some of the impetus for expansion may come partly from the site’s parent company.

“News Corporation is global,” said Allen Weiner, research director at Gartner Inc. “If they’re going to use the strategy they’re using in the U.S. — which is that MySpace is a portal but also a platform for content delivery — then each and every market is important.” So there’s a lot riding on this.”
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/...ey/myspace.php





Large appetite

Hannibal
Weblurb

This machine eats the competition for breakfast. (fava beans and chianti sold seperatly)

$549.00

Free shipping on the Hannibal.

Uncomparable video display capabilities
- Native 1080i output
- Can display in 1080i, 720P, 480i, 480P, or standard definition
- Connect any TV. DVI, VGA, Component, S-video, composite

Completely Digital Audio
- 7.1 Digital Audio
- Dolby Digital, DTS, THX hardware decoding
- Digital SPDIF output to connect to home stereo components
- Stereo left and right (red and white) for non digital audio
- Replace your stereo, connect speakers directly

Built in Bit Torrent downloads
- Unlimited Downloads with the click of your remote
- Unlimited Free Movie and Music downloads
- We dont endorse pirating of movies or music

More options than you will know what to do with
- Rip DVD's to hard drive
- Burn home videos to DVD
- 802.11G wireless out of the box as well as wired ethernet
- 11 in 1 memory card reader for importing pics and vids straight to media center
- Surf the web with your remote
- Check your email
- Live updating local weather
- Sony universal remote included
- Play any media format, AVI, MPG1,2,4, MP3 and a hundred others
- Do everything with a push of a button on your remote

All with zero setup. You take it out of the box, plug it in, answer 3 questions about how you will hook it up. Watch movies and enjoy. Its that simple. Dont you wish everything in life could be this simple.
http://tvease.net/product_info.php?products_id=46





Microsoft to Offer Shows on Xbox Live
Elizabeth M. Gillespie

Microsoft Corp. has teamed up with a handful of Hollywood studios to sell TV shows and rent movies that can be downloaded through the software maker's Xbox Live online video-game service and beamed straight onto television sets.

The company announced Monday that beginning Nov. 22, Xbox Live users with the latest console will be able to choose from shows including "South Park," which airs on MTV's Comedy Central, and CBS Corp.'s "CSI," and movies including Warner Bros.' "V for Vendetta" and Paramount Pictures' "Mission Impossible III."

In addition to CBS, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures and MTV Networks, Microsoft has signed agreements with Turner Broadcasting System Inc. and Ultimate Fighting Championship, a privately held Las Vegas company that primarily broadcasts pay-per-view fights.

Financial terms of the partnerships were not disclosed.

Ross Honey, senior director of Microsoft's media, content and partner strategy group, estimated that 750 hours of programming would be available as soon as the service launches and roughly 1,000 hours by the end of the year.

The programming - most of it in standard-definition format and some in high-definition - will be available through the Xbox 360 console to any user of Xbox Live's free or paid online service, which allows gamers with broadband connections to send text or voice messages to each other, and watch movie trailers and other product demonstrations.

Microsoft hasn't said how much the downloads will cost, only that prices for programs broadcast in standard definition will be "competitive" with those offered by competitors, including Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes store, Movielink, CinemaNow and Amazon.com's Unbox.

TV shows through those services generally go for $1.99 per episode, while movie rentals generally cost about $3.99. Microsoft will sell TV shows for purchase only, and the only option for movies will be a rental that expires 24 hours after you start watching it.

High-definition content will cost more than standard-definition programming, Honey said, because it requires a lot more bandwidth to broadcast in the higher-quality format.

A key advantage Microsoft is hoping will play in its favor is that consumers will be able to watch the content on their TV sets rather than on computers or portable digital devices, the standards for most of the competing services.

"Being able to watch on your TV, yeah, that's a pretty big deal," said David Cole, president of DFC Intelligence, a market research firm based in San Diego.

IPods and other devices can be plugged into TV sets with optional cables, though the picture quality usually suffers a bit. A handful of gadgets that act as a bridge between computers and TVs also are available but haven't gained much consumer traction.

Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, recently showed off a compact set-top box, dubbed iTV, that will allow consumers to wirelessly send movies purchased online - as well as other digital content stored on a computer - to a television set. He said it will be available early next year.

Much like the Media Center edition of Windows XP, which Microsoft touts as an all-in-one PC and home entertainment center, the new Xbox service aims to bolster Microsoft's presence in the living room. Nevertheless, industry analysts aren't predicting it will drive hordes of people to buy the Xbox console.

"This is already a game system - so it's really going to sell to a presold audience," Cole said. "People aren't going to be buying it for these features, I don't think."

Some analysts said the initial variety of Xbox TV and movie programming struck them as a bit thin.

"The size of the launch library did feel a bit too small to be able to make a huge immediate impact," said Jason Anderson, director of research at San Francisco-based International Development Group. "But what it does is send out a signal flare to the rest of the industry that there's a commitment from Microsoft to be able to sell multiple types of content through the Xbox."

Analysts are not predicting that the new service will steal much business away from Sony Corp.'s market-leading PlayStation franchise, but the consensus seems to be that it will help Microsoft remain competitive.

The Xbox service will launch less than a week after Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game console hits store shelves in the United States.

Sony has not said whether it will sell TV shows and movies through PS3, though company officials last month said the forthcoming online PlayStation Store is being set up so users could potentially download movies through the PS3.

It would be easy for Sony to sell TV and movie downloads, given its ready access to shows and films produced by its Sony Pictures division.

"Sony has a wealth of entertainment content available to us at our fingertips, whether it's movies, television or music. It's just a matter of us tapping into that content, and we will be making an announcement about that at some point," said Dave Karraker, spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment America.

The PS3, due out in U.S. stores on Nov. 17, will be able to play games and DVDs at "1080p," which is the highest-definition resolution currently available. Microsoft has developed a high-definition DVD drive that can be added to the Xbox 360. It will hit store shelves in the U.S., Europe and Japan in the coming weeks.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-07-02-33-26





Adobe Gives Mozilla Some Computer Code
AP

Adobe Systems Inc. is contributing some of the computer code behind its widely used Flash player to the Mozilla Foundation so that it can be improved upon and blended into an upcoming version of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser.

The donation, to be announced Tuesday at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, represents the largest contribution of code to Mozilla since the Mountain View-based foundation's 2003 inception. The code covers the scripting language in Adobe's Flash software, which millions of people use to view online media and other dynamic applications delivered over the Internet.

San Jose-based Adobe, best known for its Photoshop and Acrobat programs, picked up the Flash software as part of its $3.4 billion acquisition of Macromedia Inc. last year.

With the Mozilla contribution, Adobe becomes the latest major software company to throw its support behind open-source software - a concept founded on the belief that a global community of independent programmers can improve computer code by freely sharing their work.

Both Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. have announced expanded support of open-source software during the last two weeks.

Mozilla has set up an open-source project called "Tamarin" to manage the future contributions to the scripting language code from Adobe. The project will be jointly managed by developers from Adobe and Mozilla.

"By working with the open-source community we are accelerating the adoption of a standard language for creating and delivering richer, more interactive experiences that work consistently across PCs and mobile devices," said Kevin Lynch, Adobe's chief software architect.

The improvements eventually will be incorporated into the Firefox browser, probably in an upgrade scheduled for the first half of 2008, said Frank Hecker, the Mozilla Foundation's executive director. Mozilla is counting on the improvements to make many Web applications run more smoothly and quickly in Firefox.

The Flash player will continue to work on Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer browser.

In just a few years of existence, Firefox has emerged as the most popular alternative to Internet Explorer, which commands an 86 percent share of the market, according to WebSideStory. Two years ago, Explorer held a 93 percent share. Firefox's share stands at about 11 percent.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-07-05-28-37





Asia ‘Pirates’ Out of Necessity, Not Choice

The content industries, specifically those in the US, accuse Asia of being the polestar of all piracy. Is this really the case? Or do otherwise law-abiding Asians have no other choice, no other legal alternatives?

Asia is associated with piracy. This association isn’t off the mark. People here use P2P networks to download copyrighted music (among other things), and having bootleg software on one’s computer is a completely normal thing. The idea of paying $100 for an original copy of Windows is considered wild. People are laughed at when they ask a computer salesman for original copies of Windows XP, Microsoft Office or Norton Antivirus. The general consensus is, when you can get it so easily for free, why bother? Well, many of us do bother.

Why is piracy widespread in Asia?
This question has two simple answers. Firstly, there aren’t viable legal competitors. Piracy can only be overcome if the customer feels he/she is getting something better by buying content, instead of downloading it for free. There are moral issues involved as well, and each person has a different breaking point. For some it might be being able to purchase songs from the iTunes Store, for others it might be getting a better deal, like an all-you-can-download monthly subscription service.

Secondly, Asia comprises mostly of ‘third world’ countries, most of whose citizens can’t afford the exuberant rates companies like Sony ($700 for a 512MB mp3 player) charge for their products. Multi-nationals are slowly understanding this and are starting to sell their products at a cheaper rate in Asia. The XBOX 360 is one of these. Also, many countries charge extraordinary import taxes on goods. This makes an imported good purchased in the grey market almost 1/3 the price of one bought legally. For example, iPods bought in the US and sold in India are considerably cheaper than those sold by authorised dealers here. Wired News published a mostly accurate piece on the booming grey market of iPods in India.

Pirates will be pirates
Pirates will be pirates. But people who want to purchase digital content legally will only be pirates if they have no other choice. Accusing an entire continent of being law-breakers is outrageous. Everyone’s favourite example these days is the iTunes Store. If Apple would expand into more countries, I am sure we would see a noticeable drop in the amount of music shared over P2P networks. Companies like Apple need to start trusting Asia. They can only gain from this. Piracy will continue with or without them. Their presence might actually reduce it. Apple Asia’s marketing director said that they “cannot comment on the specifics but it is true that iTunes is not available in Asia” and that the continent’s attitude towards copyrighted material is “relaxed.”

In April we reported on how a leading Indian newspaper, the Hindustan Times was openly promoting BitTorrent and the downloading of copyrighted files. Do they have another good legal alternative to recommend to their tech-savvy readers? No, they do not.

Asia now has the money. We’re just not being recognised as a potential market. Don’t turn away from us. We don’t want to be forced to pirate. “Do you want more frickin’ pirates?” asked Joey Alarilla, writing for CNET Asia. My answer is no, we do not.
http://torrentfreak.com/asia-pirates...ty-not-choice/





Wikipedia "Hoax" Not Actually a Hoax
Nate Anderson

A long-standing article on the little-known "NPA theory" of personality was recently deleted from Wikipedia after editors realized that the piece had been authored by the creator of the theory, a doctor named Anthony Benis. Critics are already pointing to the case as an example of Wikipedia's problems, arguing that allowing a "hoax" article to persist for so long only shows how open Wikipedia is to "vandalism." But a closer look reveals a more complicated story.

NPA theory suggests that human personality is a combination of three traits: narcissism, perfectionism, and aggression. Each one of these traits is coded for by specific genes, and the process of personality formation therefore follows the long-established rules of genetics. It's a theory developed by Benis but not given much credence by the scientific community at large. Even Benis, when contacted by Ars Technica, acknowledges that his idea is not "conventional wisdom." Still, it's one that he believes in and wants to disseminate.

Back in May, Benis says that he was approached by a Wikipedia user who had seen Benis' website and asked him to do an entry on NPA theory. Benis tells Ars that he agreed to do so and that he and his associates "tried our best to produce the finest possible article." This article was posted to Wikipedia, where it remained undisturbed for many months.

In late October, though, a user brought attention to the fact that the article had been written and edited almost exclusively by user "ABenis," and questions were raised about whether this was appropriate. Wikipedia has strict rules against vanity articles, and it didn't help that an article was created about Benis himself that some argued was his own work. Benis says that a Wikipedia editor actually authored the entry, but acknowledges that it "took the appearance of a vanity entry." After a lengthy discussion, both articles were eventually deleted—but on the grounds that they were not "notable" enough to merit inclusion in Wikipedia.

After the deletion decision was made, Benis took his article on NPA theory and put it up on its own website (it is also still available on Wikipedia France).

The entire affair seems hardly worthy of mention, except that it provides an illustration of how quickly stories like this one can be sensationalized. One of the bloggers who first described the incident eventually admitted that the writeup was "sensationalist", and he awarded user ABenis a purple barnstar "for blogging carelessly."

But the case also raises a pair of interesting questions. The first concerns the Wikipedian concept of "notability." The proposed guidelines for academic notability no doubt keep thousands of academics from beginning brief vanity articles on themselves or writing up descriptions of their own pet projects, but Wikipedia is already stuffed with trivial topics—in fact, that's part of its charm. Where else can you learn about the 1980 computer game The Prisoner, read up on sixteen-year old Indy rapper Grand, or find hundreds of words of plot summary for Robin Hood: Men in Tights?

The other question is whether interested parties ought to be contributing material to the site. On the one hand, people like Benis are in the best position to know about their own line of work. On the other, obvious conflicts of interest arise, and users would be rightfully skeptical of the information's accuracy. But where does the line get drawn? People already contribute information to Wikipedia for topics they care about. Knowing when they are too involved in an industry/field of study/fan club to be objective can be almost impossible work.
Wikipedia in the news

Wikipedia continues to make headlines, but most of those seem to concern the site's accuracy, massive size, or safety from viruses. That's right—the BBC is reporting that the German Wikipedia was vandalized to include a link to a virus, though such events are simply inevitable outcomes of the Encyclopedia's decision to let all users post material. Showing that the moderating system does a good job of catching this type of thing, Wikipedia users quickly removed the offending link.

Wikipedia continues to grow, but that growth may be slowing. In October, Wikipedia added 49,220 articles to its database, the fewest of any month in the last year. For the project as a whole (including other languages), last month was the lowest one since April.

The site has become a staple resource for students, often to the chagrin of teachers, but a (totally unscientific) look at three sample articles shows that Wikipedia can hold up quite well to scrutiny. The Chronicle of Higher Education asked three college professors to critique articles chosen from their fields of study.

The article on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World earned a B-, with Dr. Peter Firchow noting that "it's clearly lacking an editorial hand to smooth out the inconsistencies." "African-American Civil-Rights Movement" was given a C by Dr. Doug McAdam, who notes that he "would not direct a student to this site," but does say that "it isn't bad in a lowest-common-denominator encyclopedia sense." Finally, "Flow Cytometry" was examined by Dr. J. Paul Robinson, who gave the article an A. Robinson appreciated the main entry, but noted that the subsections were less accurate. "I went in and actually made some corrections to these," he said, telling himself, "I can't leave these and let the record stand like this."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061106-8161.html





Attackers Dig Into Zero-Day Flaw
Greg Sandoval

An "extremely critical" vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft's XML Core Services, according to several security companies.

The vulnerability, which affects only systems running Internet Explorer, is caused by an unspecified error in the XMLHTTP 4.0 ActiveX Control and could be used to seize control of an affected system, according to an advisory from Secunia, a security company based in Denmark.

IBM-owned ISS X-Force detailed on its site the kind of damage that could be caused by the vulnerability.

"This could lead to loss of confidential information, disruption of business, or further compromise," according to the security company.

For the vulnerability to be exploited, a user would have to visit a malicious Web site, Secunia said.

Microsoft acknowledged that the bug is already being exploited, in a note posted to the company's site.

"We are aware of limited attacks that are attempting to use the reported vulnerability," Microsoft said.

Some of the software that may be affected includes Windows 2000, Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003.

People running Windows Server 2003 and 2003 Service Pack 1 in the default configuration with the Enhanced Security Configuration turned on aren't affected, Microsoft said.

Microsoft will determine, based on "customer needs," whether to release a patch during the company's monthly release process or an "out-of-cycle security update," the company said.

Microsoft's next patch release day is November 14.
http://news.com.com/Attackers+dig+in...3-6133028.html





Torrents of Users Turn P2P Leaders Towards Licences, Sales
Kate Bulkley

Kate Bulkley: BitTorrent is considered by most content owners, including broadcasters and studios, as a scourge because it encourages the illegal sharing of content. How do you respond to that?

Ashwin Navin: BitTorrent grew because people were using it to publish unlicensed TV shows and music and, big surprise, people like to download TV shows and movies and music, so now we've got 80 million people out there that have the software. The idea now is to convert this user base into paying customers. BitTorrent was never specifically designed for the purpose of stealing content, but it was designed to deliver content efficiently, and if we can be a distributor of content using our tools we can be more efficient than all of our competitors. Hopefully that will mean more margin for the publishers and better quality for the consumer.

KB: That sounds good, but a lot of people would say peer-to-peer networks and content protection are oxymorons.

AN: Five years from now we will be laughing about that because every service online uses some kind of peer-to-peer delivery. As file sizes get richer and bigger, P2P is fundamentally the only way to deliver content on the internet without breaking the internet itself. BitTorrent doesn't get in the way of content protection. It is actually a separate layer.

KB: This all sounds very rational and grown-up and is the future that you are trying to invent for BitTorrent, but when BitTorrent was founded in 2001 by Bram Cohen it was a very different story - it was more of a Napster, I mean the original Napster.

AN: Actually, from the day Bram founded BitTorrent it was a web-publishing tool and very controllable and distinct from other layers of service and technology that would be required to make it viable. Bram Cohen committed the grave crime of giving away this powerful tool for free! Anyone would consider that a crime because he never benefited from its use. Now that we have got this large number of users on BitTorrrent, we think there is huge commercial value in becoming a distributor of content.

To be clear, file sharing is one application of P2P. Napster, Grokster and Kazaa basically made a directory available to the public in exchange for everyone else's directory. BitTorrent doesn't work that way at all. BitTorrent uses P2P as a means to an end, so it is invisible to the user.

KB: You joined BitTorrrent in 2004, three years after Bram founded the company. You came into the company to create a business model, correct?

AN: Well, let's just say that before I joined, Bram had a phenomenally successful T-shirt company. (The only way BitTorrent was getting money was through donations and selling T-shirts.) It took a certain amount of convincing to actually point him in the direction of a commercial entity.

KB: The judicial system in the US has taken a dim view of peer-to-peer: Grokster is out of business. Why is BitTorrent still around?

AN: If your technology looks like it was designed for illegal purposes, you'll be held liable for it. It's kind of like the pornography standard. I can't define it but I know it when I see it, and that is basically what the court handed down. From the beginning of BitTorrent, Bram vociferously discouraged the use of BitTorrent for piracy and warned users there is no anonymity.

KB: So now the plan is to license content and sell it, but what about monetising the traffic you have? You already have some advertising. How is that going?

AN: BitTorrent does have a lot of traffic and we make some money from advertising, but that's not where we think we'll be wildly profitable.

KB: So the wildly profitable part means you need to license content, and so far you've signed a licensing deal with one studio, Warner Bros. But you haven't actually started offering any paid-for content yet. Why's that?

AN: What we want to show the world is that BitTorrent is the most efficient way to deliver content and there are attractive legal purposes for it. The second phase beyond that is to take the core component of the BitTorrent delivery system and make it available for a fee for anyone who has a website and wants to deliver content efficiently.

KB: And why is the Warner Bros deal the only one you've signed so far? Are you still proving the technology?

AN: We haven't announced any other deals but we've been quite successful working with all the other studios.

KB: Apple has licensed TV shows such as Lost and Desperate Housewives on the iPod. There's lots of other content on other sites, more each day. Why wait, or is it a case of you not being able to get the deals you need?

AN: The idea is to get a comprehensive catalogue. We also want to offer high-quality, fast downloads so it is a good experience to discover not only major content, but also independently created, high-quality content.

KB: So you are still working on the technology. Clearly a big part of that is the copyright protection software. How do you convince the Warner Bros of the world that you can protect their shows?

AN: There will never be a digital rights management (DRM) system that works (universally). It's sort of like expecting a $75 door lock to protect all your valuables. Fundamentally, you've got to get to a speed bump that works for 90 per cent of the users. Ten per cent of the users may have the interest and time to break something that is available for sale for $1, but most people aren't going to bother with that. At our launch, we are using Windows DRM, which is the accepted standard today. We're always looking for a standard that is independently created, cross-platform, and the studios are as well, especially when they see that Apple and Microsoft are starting to exert their control and lock in users.

KB: So what's the solution to having Apple or Microsoft dictate terms?

AN: I think the next phase is about DRM-free. It will be like the watermarked approach, so that content is labelled as mine and the process of putting it up on a P2P network is not attractive because I paid for it and so others should probably pay for it, too. Do I want something with my name on it all over the web? No. So that can be a pretty effective form of copy protection.

KB: What is your view on the pricing for these kinds of offers? I mean, your 80 million users are getting this stuff for free now.

AN: One of the things that seems to be proven is that consumers need a consistent pricing framework. The pricing needs to be commensurate with the value proposition of getting a digital download and so we are learning from others. We are shaping that up.

KB: What about user-generated content (UGC)? Will you encourage it and try to become YouTube 2?

AN: We care about the users who have created the content, not necessarily the people who have posted content that they haven't created or which they don't own.

Right now we have a submission tool that allows people to submit content on an invite-only basis.

KB: So, controlled UGC. Sounds like you don't see it as the future, which is interesting, given that Google just spent $1.6 billion to buy YouTube.

AN: People use BitTorrent to post UGC to their own sites and then our webcrawler picks it up. So instead of allowing people to post to their own sites, we are going to allow them to post to our site as well and therefore we hope to have a better connection with the artists and the file sharers. One thing about BitTorrent is we are all users as well.

KB: And all under the age of 25, no doubt?

AN: Well, I think the average age of BitTorrent staff is 29. But we in a sense don't need to do endless focus groups because we are the focus group!
http://www.smh.com.au/news/wireless-...e#contentSwap2





Google Warns Against Changes to Australian Copyright Law

Internet search-engine giant Google has warned that proposed changes to Australia's copyright laws could drive the country back to "the pre-Internet era".

The warning came in a submission to Australia's senate on legislation Google said could open the way for copyright owners to take legal action against search engines for caching and archiving.

"Given the vast size of the Internet, it is impossible for a search engine to contact personally each owner of a web page to determine whether the owner desires its web page to be searched, indexed or cached," Google said Tuesday.

"If such advanced permission was required, the internet would promplty grind to a halt," Google's senior counsel and head of public policy Andrew McLaughlin told the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee.

Such requirements would "condemn the Australian public to the pre-internet era and will place them at a serious competitive disadvantage with those in other countries who have such access," McLaughlin said.

The Australian government says the new laws are designed to keep up with the fast pace of technological change, but McLaughlin said they failed to take into account the reality of how information was processed and provided online.

"Google believes that the bill fails significantly to bring Australia's Copyright Act fully into the digital age," it said.

Google has been locked in copyright disputes with several content providers globally, including Agence France-Presse, who have complained the Internet giant had used their material without permission or compensation.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061107...t_061107104851





Piracy Stats Don't Add Up
Simon Hayes

PIRACY statistics are labelled "self-serving hyperbole" in a draft government report.

'They're entitled to say they're not convinced, but not necessarily entitled to say it's unverified,' Jim Macnamara, BSAA chairman

A confidential briefing for the Attorney-General's Department, prepared by the zian Institute of Criminology, lashes the music and software sectors.

The draft of the institute's intellectual property crime report, sighted by The Australian shows that copyright owners "failed to explain" how they reached financial loss statistics used in lobbying activities and court cases.

Figures for 2005 from the global Business Software Association showing $361 million a year of lost sales in Australia are "unverified and epistemologically unreliable", the report says.

BSAA chairman Jim Macnamara said the figure was an extrapolation, but other studies had supported it.

"They're entitled to say they're not convinced, but not necessarily entitled to say it's unverified," he said.

The study, which says some of the statistics used by copyright owners are "absurd", will be redrafted after senior researchers disagreed with its conclusions.

Painting a picture of an industry seething with competitive jealousies, the report describes how "well-connected Canberra-based lobbyists" fight for government attention and police time on piracy.

Researcher Alex Malik, working for the AIC under a commission from the Attorney-General's Department and IP Australia, was particularly critical of the use of statistics in court.

"Of greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law," the draft reads.

Mr Malik declined to speak to The Australian, citing a confidentiality agreement.

Institute principal criminologist Russell Smith said the report was an early draft that was being edited by the agency.

"We wouldn't use language like that because it's not accurate, it's hyperbolic and overblown," he said.

"It was a very early draft written by a consultant, and we would want a chance to revise it.

"We have an extensive quality control system in the institute, so that drafts are read by most senior staff.

"The report hasn't been finalised. It's still being edited and revised."

Copyright owners have lobbied for several years to have a study done, hoping their figures will result in more law enforcement action on piracy.

The report, intended as a confidential government briefing, casts doubt on the methodology of some industry piracy studies.

It says the manager of the recording industry's anti-piracy arm, Music Industry Piracy Investigations, did not know how piracy estimates were calculated, as that work was done by the International Federation of Phonographic Industries in London.

Copyright owners often use street-value estimates to calculate losses, but this assumes that every person who bought pirated goods would otherwise have paid for a legitimate item, the report notes.

MIPI manager Sabiene Heindl defended the figures, which she said were based on local survey, research and seizure statistics, but compiled in Britain.

"The reason I wasn't personally aware of how they are prepared is because they are compiled by the IFPI," she said.

"They have a group that has been doing this for some time."

Ms Heindl said the report was not intended to be made public.

"We haven't had an opportunity to see the report," she said.

"My understanding is it wasn't to be a public document and that any submissions were to be considered confidential."

The most recent locally commissioned study was in the late 1990s, Mr Macnamara said.

Many copyright holders claimed links between piracy and organised crime, but AIC researcher had found nothing to support that view.

"Either there is no evidence of any links between piracy and organised crime or it is simply beyond the capacity of rights holders to identify these links," he wrote, adding that he was concerned about the way piracy figures were being used.

"It is inappropriate for courts and policy makers to accept at face value currently unsubstantiated statistics.

"Either these statistics must be withdrawn or the purveyors of these statistics must supply valid and transparent substantiation."

Some industry groups were reluctant to work with researchers, because of concern about data leaking to competitors.

Much of that has to do with a fight over access to resources.

"There is a perception among some rights holders that they are in competition with each other over limited federal government resources," the report says.

"They fear that if they reveal the nature of their relationships with government, such as the placement of well-connected Canberra lobbyists, they will jepordise their advantage."
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...nbv%5E,00.html





New DVDs: Formidable 50: A DVD Collection Drawn From the Janus Vaults
Dave Kehr

In 1909 P. F. Collier & Son published a 50-volume set of the world’s great literature as chosen by Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard. For the ambitious, go-getting Americans of the time, always eager to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, the collection became an immediate success, and Mr. Eliot’s “five-foot shelf” found a place in countless American homes as it was published and republished over much of the 20th century.

Almost 100 years later, the Criterion Collection has issued a parallel compilation, “Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films.” Though it requires significantly less shelf space (about three and a half inches), this collection is just as useful as Mr. Eliot’s for cinematically curious Americans. Packaged in a brown fabric binder, the set includes an album of 50 DVDs drawn from the holdings of Janus Films, the distinguished distribution company founded in 1956, as well as a 240-page book of notes, credits and stills on all 50 titles.

Janus Films does not have quite the clout of Harvard, but it says a lot about the central role Janus has played in American film culture that the selections made by a modestly staffed for-profit distribution house have come to assume almost as much canonical authority as Mr. Eliot’s choices. Jean Renoir (“The Rules of the Game”) may have replaced Jean Racine, and Ingmar Bergman (“The Seventh Seal”) may have stepped in for Martin Luther, but it’s hard to argue with the artistic significance and historical importance of the great majority of the movies in this volume, an amazing number of which continue to figure on critics’ polls of the best films of all time.

There isn’t enough space here to catalog every title in “Essential Art House” (a complete list, along with a discount price on the set, can be found at the Criterion Collection Store, at store01.prostores.com/servlet/criterionco/Detail?no=31). Suffice it to say that if you attended a repertory theater in the 1960s or ’70s, took a film course in college or have seen more than one movie by Woody Allen, you have been exposed to at least some of the films in this collection: films like Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Avventura,” François Truffaut’s “400 Blows,” Fritz Lang’s “M,” Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” and Luis Buñuel’s “Viridiana,” along with dozens of others that constitute the backbone of the art house tradition.

These are movies to be returned to again and again — justification enough for owning Janus’s three-and-a-half-inch shelf, even with its breathtaking suggested retail price of $850. (In fairness, that breaks down to $17 a title, about half of what Criterion’s releases generally go for — though the discs in this collection don’t include the commentaries and other supplementary materials that give the Criterion discs their extra value.)

Janus Films was formed in Boston by Bryant Haliday and Cyrus Harvey. They were friends from Harvard who had acquired the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and the 55th Street Playhouse in Manhattan but were having trouble filling their schedules with the small number of films available from early specialized distributors like Walter Reade and Richard Davis.

Janus’s first acquisition was Pierre Braunberger’s documentary “Bullfight,” followed by two early films by an unknown Italian director named Federico Fellini, “The White Sheik” and “I Vitelloni.” All of them lost money (though “The White Sheik” is still part of the Janus library and is in the current set). Janus’s first hit came in 1958 in the unlikely form of “The Seventh Seal,” with its indelible image of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) engaged in a chess game with Death (Bengt Ekerot).

Other Bergman films followed — “Wild Strawberries” and “The Virgin Spring” are also part of the set — and then critical successes like Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible, Part II,” “The 400 Blows” and “L’Avventura.” But actual profits remained elusive.

For help, Mr. Haliday and Mr. Harvey turned to an old Harvard friend, William Becker, who in turn contacted an acquaintance of his own: Saul J. Turell, a documentary filmmaker who had been working in acquisitions for Walter Reade. “I asked Saul if he wanted to join me in taking over Janus Films,” said Mr. Becker, speaking from Los Angeles, where he was searching for new acquisitions at the American Film Market. “And he said yes, and that’s how it all happened.”

Janus might have remained just another independent distribution company, but its new owners had a eureka moment. The landscape was littered with important European films that had never been distributed in the United States or had had their original licensing deals expire. With new public television outlets and revival theaters springing up around the country, these films seemed unlikely to lose their value over the years. At a time when rights to a foreign film in the United States could be had for less than $50,000, Mr. Becker and Mr. Turell (who died in 1986) set about systematically acquiring the most prestigious films available, including some Hollywood classics.

“We made a deal with RKO for a few little films like ‘Citizen Kane,’ ‘King Kong’ and ‘Top Hat,’ ” Mr. Becker recalled. “The principal buyer was me, but we all put our heads together.”

Armed with its formidable library, Janus no longer had to depend on theatrical bookings to do business: the 16-millimeter, nontheatrical business — aimed at colleges and local film societies — exploded as the 60s gave way to the 70s. In the 1980s, when the nontheatrical business collapsed in the face of competition from home video, Janus was ready again. In 1983 it formed a partnership with a start-up laser disc company, the Criterion Collection, and pioneered the use of supplementary materials and filmmakers’ commentaries. By the time Jonathan Turell and Peter Becker, sons of the founders, joined Janus in 1993, DVDs were about to take off, and Criterion, thanks to its experience in laser discs, was already ahead of the game.

Peter Becker, who became the president of Criterion in 1997 and helped to introduce the DVD line a year later, credits his forebears with the company’s success. “The whole Criterion idea is a direct outgrowth of the philosophy that Janus developed” over its history, he said from his New York office. “Janus had the insight that, much like the Penguin Classics or the Modern Library, there is a place for a curated collection of classic films — that cinema art is there to be collected like any other art.”

“The reason we created this 50-disc set was as much for ourselves as anything else,” Mr. Becker said. “We felt that we needed to create an appropriate and substantial milestone for this legacy. There aren’t a lot of small, independent companies, especially in the media business, that get to be 50 years old at all.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/mo...7dvd.html?8dpc





A Vanishing Act for ‘Lost,’ as It Takes a 13-Week Break
Edward Wyatt

After little more than a month of thrills and twists that have some fans feeling that the show is at its best ever, “Lost” is disappearing into the wilderness.

After tonight’s episode, only the sixth of the still-young fall television season, ABC will take “Lost” off the air for 13 weeks. The show will return on Feb. 7 for a run of 16 or 17 new episodes that will carry viewers into late May.

But the midyear split season is a scheduling gambit that could have enormous consequences not only for ABC, but also for the entire genre of serialized television drama, testing whether audiences are loyal enough to expensive, complex shows to weather long midseason interruptions.

Lengthy delays between seasons is a characteristic common to HBO and other premium channels, which have put popular series like “The Sopranos” on extended breaks to accommodate the plotting, script writing, filming and production schedules required to produce such cinematic shows.

But it is highly unusual for broadcast television, which still mostly adheres to a September-to-May season, to remove a show entirely from the schedule for three months in midyear.

“We would love to have 35 weeks of uninterrupted episodes,” said Jeffrey D. Bader, an executive vice president at ABC Entertainment who is responsible for planning and scheduling the network’s prime-time programming. “But the ‘Lost’ air schedule is dependent on the production schedule. And like all one-hour dramas, only a certain number of episodes can be delivered for the fall.”

This season’s split schedule is partly the result of backlash from fans who complained loudly last season about the frequent interspersing of new episodes with repeats. At its annual meeting with advertisers in New York last spring, Stephen McPherson, the president of ABC Entertainment, promised to address those complaints.

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, executive producers of “Lost,” said they believed this season’s scheduling would help fans follow the show better.

“Last season we would try to build a narrative arc over three or four weeks, and then it would just die with three or four repeats,” Mr. Cuse said. “We didn’t want to be in a situation this year where the audience would tune in and be confused whether an original episode was on or not.”

But the schedule could still cause confusion and dismay among “Lost” fans who do not spend most of their waking hours scouring recorded episodes and online fan sites for clues about the mysteries of the island where the show is set. If they tune in next Wednesday night at the usual time, they will be greeted with the first episode of “Day Break,” a new drama starring Taye Diggs, that has its own supernatural mysteries.

Part of the problem is that, as television dramas have become more like movies, the time required to produce a single episode has lengthened. Whereas dramas like “Marcus Welby, M.D.” might have required five days to shoot enough scenes to fill an hour of broadcast television, shows like “Lost” and the Fox hit “24” require eight days of filming, not including weekends.

Barry Jossen, the executive vice president for production at Touchstone Television, the studio that produces “Lost,” explained that, compared with shows like “Marcus Welby,” each episode of newer dramas has more scenes, more characters in each scene and more camera angles on each character.

Add in the time required to produce special effects, like the black-cloud monster that last week attacked the “Lost” character Mr. Eko, and the hours spent editing together all those scenes and camera angles, and it can take two weeks or more to create a one-hour show.

One solution might seem to be to start production earlier. But that is difficult with serialized shows, which have a season-long story line, meaning the whole season must be plotted in advance. Therefore more time must be spent writing and plotting in the summer, before actors begin stepping in front of the cameras.

Fox solves the problem by not putting “24” on the air until January, then running the show for 24 weeks straight, without interruption or repeat.

Mr. Bader said that ABC considered that, but other factors worked against it.

“We knew this would be a risky fall for us,” he said. “Monday Night Football” moved from ABC to ESPN this year, leaving a hole in the network’s prime-time schedule. The network also moved “Grey’s Anatomy” from Sunday nights to Thursday and, uncertain what the results of that move would be, decided that it could not afford to keep another signature franchise, “Lost,” off the fall schedule, he said.

Creating an extended, continuous season would require a different approach. “We could say, O.K., ‘Lost’ will be on for 30 weeks without interruption,” Mr. Bader said. “But to produce that many shows, we wouldn’t be able to do a season next year,” and viewers would have to wait until the 2008-9 season for the next installments.

Instead, ABC hopes to keep “Lost” fans enticed over the next three months with what it is calling “ ‘Lost’ Nuggets”: 30-second promotional clips of scenes from episodes not yet broadcast that will hint at what will become of the island castaways when the show returns.

The “Nuggets” will be shown each week during “Day Break,” although ABC is not saying at what time, meaning “Lost” fans will have to watch the new show or fast-forward through their digitally recorded files to unearth the clues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/ar...on/08lost.html





Film: Where Horror Meets Art House
Dave Kehr

Makers of horror movies tend to fall into two main categories: gloomy types with dark- ringed eyes and nicotine-stained fingers, and big, jolly men (and men they mostly are; it's not a genre that attracts many women) who seem almost unnaturally well adjusted, as if they had worked out most of their obsessions and antisocial instincts through the fantasies they put on film.

Guillermo del Toro falls under the second category. A large, round man with long, reddish-brown hair, wire- rimmed glasses and a scraggly beard, del Toro, who was born in Guadalajara 42 years ago, comes across as a Mexican Santa Claus, full of cheer and infectious good humor. And yet the horror films he has made are some of the most unsettling and darkly poetic of the last two decades. "Within fantasy," del Toro said on a recent visit to New York, "you can explore anything."

His directing debut, released in 1993, was the internationally successful "Cronos," a modern vampire tale in which a Mexico City antiquarian (the Argentine actor Federico Luppi) discovers an ancient mechanism hidden by an alchemist in the base of a statue.

Del Toro's newest feature, "Pan's Labyrinth," shot in Spain and set for wide release this month and next month takes place in 1939, when the Spanish Civil War is coming to its horrendous conclusion. A little girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), accompanies her mother and her new stepfather, a fascist officer, Captain Vidal (Sergi López), to a remote area in northern Spain where fascist troops have been assigned to clean up what is left of the Republican resistance.

In an unconscious gesture of self- protection, Ofelia transforms the brutality she is forced to witness into a fairy story of her own imagining, in which another authority figure, no less than the Great God Pan (played by the mime Doug Jones) lures her into the secret world that lies beneath the labyrinth in the ruined garden behind the abandoned mill that serves as military headquarters. Ofelia's experiences below ground begin as an escape from reality, but reality creeps into the fantasy too. Pan, in his cruelty and insistence on unthinking obedience, becomes Captain Vidal's supernatural double, driving the girl into ever more terrifying tests of courage and resolve.

Underground refuges are a motif that runs through del Toro's films, along with giants, statues, keys, daggers, clocks and clockwork, and insects. His first American film, the 1997 "Mimic," imagined giant cockroaches living in the New York subways.

Alfonso Cuarón, a Mexican filmmaker ("Y Tu Mamá También" and the forthcoming "Children of Men") who is one of del Toro's oldest friends and a producer of "Pan's Labyrinth," said: "Guillermo was always the lonely child. There's a lot of him in the lonely little girls and boys he always portrays in his films. His stories are always about innocence, and he has an innocence that is very contagious, and helps you reconnect with your own. But at the same time it's a kind of innocence that is almost perverse."

After attending the University of Guadalajara, del Toro learned makeup and special effects under the American master Dick Smith. He established his own special-effects company, Necropia, and worked on films in several capacities, including boom operator, production assistant and assistant director, as well as makeup.

"My belief is that in order to be able to command, you need to learn to be able to obey," he said. "Otherwise as a director you are just a little dictator, living in a separate reality."

Cuarón and del Toro met in 1987, when both were working on a Mexican television series, "La Hora Marcada."

"We did a couple of other shows together,"' Cuarón continued, "and one day he said, 'You know, there's a story that's my most personal story and something I really love. I'd like to film it but - you know what? - you're going to be able to do it a lot more justice.' He told me the story, and I thought it was absolutely beautiful. It was called 'About Ogres,' but it was actually 'Pan's Labyrinth.'"

Del Toro is rare among contemporary filmmakers for his insistence on the primacy of the visual. "Ideally," he said, "images create their own narratives. My ideal film is a film with no dialogue."

"I get an idea of the theme first," he said. "And then the images immediately start to percolate. What I do then is open my diaries - right now I have three books, a sum of three hundred and some pages - and I check for ideas I like."

Del Toro's notebooks - as densely lettered and carefully illustrated as a Leonardo codex - are objects of beauty, and he insists on personally creating the many prop books with his own hand.

Both del Toro and Cuarón have been able to lead dual careers, alternating big-budget entertainments ("Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" for Cuarón, and "Blade II" and "Hellboy" for del Toro) with modestly budgeted, more personal films destined for art houses rather than multiplexes.

"Some people say, 'Why do you do a Hollywood movie and then do a Spanish movie?' It's because what I learn on 'Blade II' I put to use on 'Pan's Labyrinth,' where I use a mixing of makeup and prosthetic effect with computer graphics."

"You know," Cuarón reflected, "when you are a kid, you learn that you have to eat all of your cereal, because you know at the bottom of the cereal is a little plastic toy. And you eat all the cereal to get to the plastic toy. Guillermo and I used to say that the studio film is the cereal and that the plastic toy is the small movie.

"But we also have a secret that we swore not to tell anybody, which is that we love the cereal as much as the toy."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/07/news/kehr.php





Man Held Without Bail in Murder of Actress
Thomas J. Lueck and Colin Moynihan

A 19-year-old construction worker who confessed to the police that he struck an actress in her Greenwich Village office and then left her hanging from a shower rod in her bathroom was ordered held without bail this morning pending a hearing next Tuesday.

Diego Pillco, the construction worker, appeared in State Supreme Court in Manhattan and was charged with second-degree murder in the death last week of Adrienne Shelly, which was initially believed to be a suicide.

Assistant District Attorney Marit Delozier said that Mr. Pillco made written and videotaped statements to the police that he had argued with Ms. Shelly after she complained about construction noise coming from an apartment below her office, at 15 Abingdon Square, in Greenwich Village.

"He admitted he fought with the victim," the prosecutor said at the brief hearing. "He tied a sheet around her neck and dragged her to the bathroom."

"This is an exceptionally egregious case."

After they argued, Mr. Pillco struck Ms. Shelly, leaving her unconscious, and then tried to cover up his crime by making it look like a suicide, Ms. Delozier said.

"This woman did not die from a strike to her head," Ms. Delozier told the court. "The medical examiner has made it clear, crystal clear, that the victim died from compression to the neck."

Mr. Pillco, a slightly-built man who was dressed in a gray and blue sweatshirt and jeans, said nothing during the hearing. His lawyer, Thomas Klein, asked that he be put under suicide watch.

Mr. Pillco, of Prospect Avenue in Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn, is a native of Ecuador who arrived in the city in July, police said. He had been working in a third-floor apartment directly beneath the one Ms. Shelly used as her office.

Ms. Shelly, 40, lived not far away on Varick Street with her husband, Andy Ostroy, and her daughter, Sophie. She used the Abingdon Square apartment as the base of a career that included leading or featured roles in two dozen Off Broadway plays as well as movies and television shows.

Ms. Delozier said that Ms. Shelly's husband dropped her off at the apartment that morning and did not speak to her all day. At 5:30 p.m., he went to meet her, and found her hanging from the shower rod.

Even though the death initially looked like a suicide, family members and friends were skeptical. Her show business career was thriving, they said, and she was a devoted mother to her 3-year-old daughter. They insisted that she would not have taken her own life.

"We have felt adamantly that what happened was not the result of suicide," Rachel Sheedy, Ms. Shelly's agent, said on Monday when she was informed of Mr. Pillco's arrest. "It is a great relief knowing that the police have taken us seriously."

Detectives from the Sixth Precinct in Greenwich Village found few signs of trauma or struggle, and initially the death looked like a suicide. But the investigation soon showed signs of foul play.

"It appeared to be a suicide -- he staged it as a suicide," one investigator said. But he said investigators "never just accepted it for what it was staged to be."

They were particularly troubled by an unexplained footprint found in the bathroom. They examined the shoes of everyone who had entered the apartment, including police officers and emergency workers, but found no match for the print.

They canvassed the building, and found that renovation work was under way in some apartments. The detectives matched the footprint from Ms. Shelly's bathroom to one they found at one of the work sites, and then used the match to track down Mr. Pillco, the authorities said.

Ms. Shelly first gained recognition for her film roles in Hal Hartley's dark comedies "The Unbelievable Truth" and "Trust." She was featured last year in the movie "Factotum," starring Matt Dillon, and she had recently finished directing "Waitress," which is under consideration for inclusion in the Sundance Film Festival.

Ms. Shelly, born Adrienne Levine, was a Queens native who started performing as a child in arts camps on Long Island and upstate. She dropped out of Boston University after her junior year and moved to Manhattan.

Mr. Pillco was picked up Sunday night and taken to the Sixth Precinct station house, where he made his admissions early on Monday, investigators said. Neighbors at Mr. Pillco's apartment building said he was hard-working and respectful. He lived in a basement apartment with his cousin and held a variety of odd jobs, they said.

"He sent money home to his mother and father," said Frank Lingo, a neighbor. "He minded his business. He never bothered me or anyone else near here. He seemed like a good kid. I've never seen him hang out."

Chris Pannhorse, another neighbor, said: "He was always respectful to me and my wife. He's a good kid. Because that is what he is to me, just a kid."

The arrest came after a memorial service for Ms. Shelly on Sunday that drew hundreds of mourners.

According to The New York Post, Mr. Ostroy spoke at the service, repeating his insistence that his wife would not have committed suicide.

"There's no way on this planet that she would have left that child," he said. "Nobody is ever going to tell me that woman walked away from Sophie."

Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Kate Hammer, Daryl Khan, William K. Rashbaum, Emily Vasquez and Maria Newman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/ny...rtner=homepage





Gates says Russia is Progressing on Software Piracy

MOSCOW (AP) - Microsoft Corp. chairman and co-founder Bill Gates said Tuesday that Russia has made progress tackling software piracy, a problem that has threatened the country's bid to join the World Trade Organization.

Knockoffs of the latest computer programs can be had from stalls and markets around Moscow for just a few dollars, and pirated films, music and software in Russia cost U.S. companies nearly $1.8 billion in 2005, according to the International Intellectual Property Association. Despite Microsoft being one of the main victims of the pirates, Gates praised Russia's efforts to rein them in.

``A lot has been done in the past two years,'' he said in televised comments.

At a Microsoft-organized business forum later in the day, Gates also promised that handwriting-recognizing tablet PCs would be ubiquitous in five to 10 years, revolutionizing the way people learn, and eventually cost less than a set of textbooks.

``We'll spend billions to make that a reality,'' he said.

As well as making a sales pitch for Microsoft's Office 2007 and Vista -- the first update of Microsoft's operating system since 2001 -- Gates touched on the subject of education in his speech, promising that a part of Microsoft's $7 billion annual investments into research and development would be spent on advancing software for tablet PCs.

Gates said the company was also making it a priority to develop software that would unify users' disparate gadgetry.

``We want to get these devices to work together, to make them more user-centric,'' he said, and noted that eventually ``the ease of moving between devices will be very, very high -- because software is taking care of that responsibility.''

In a selection of questions submitted in advance on the Internet, Gates was asked if he would change anything about the way he had built Microsoft. With a few exceptions, he said he was satisfied.

``I'd be afraid to turn back time and risk that it wouldn't come out so good ... so, no complaints,'' he said.

Should Microsoft have pursued Internet search engines more aggressively given Google Inc.'s stellar rise?

``Yeah, that would have been nice,'' Gates said. ``But we'll be fine.''

Gates' Moscow visit was part of an international tour that saw him speak in Munich on Monday and takes him to Riyadh and Brussels on Wednesday and Thursday.

At the Microsoft Business Forum, Gates said that Russia's strong tradition in educating scientists and mathematicians meant that the country would have a key role to play in the global high-tech sector.

The popularity of computer science and mathematics among students in the U.S. is declining, Gates said. ``Its ironic, but ... this scarcity will create opportunities (for Russia).''

Half of university students in Russia study science and technology, according to industry data, contributing to one of the biggest technology talent pools anywhere in the world.

Gates used a meeting earlier in the day with Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to stress the importance of the Internet as an educational tool and pledge support for the government's efforts to bring the countries' schools online.

``Russia is a highly educated country, but the level of literacy includes computer literacy,'' he was quoted as saying by the RIA-Novosti news agency. ``We are ready to help cooperate with the government in the field of education so that all the potential of modern technology can be realized.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/15951993.htm





Bill Gates Says West Not Supplying Enough IT Talent
James Kilner

A shortage of information technology graduates from Western universities is leading companies to call on developing countries to meet research demand, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Tuesday.

After the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia's internationally renowned education system became a cheap talent pool for the West. Now dozens of Russian language Web sites offer computer programming jobs in the United States, alongside visa support and language training.

"Worldwide, a lot of the developed countries are not graduating as many IT students as they were in the past, which is kind of ironic as it does mean it does increase the opportunities," Gates said.

Russia loses around 700,000 people each year -- about 0.5 percent of its total population -- to emigration, disease and alcoholism.

Many Western firms have also outsourced data management, software development and other high tech operations to lower cost operators in Asia, where education standards are high in some countries but wages are still comparatively low.

"There is a shortage of IT skills on a worldwide basis. Anybody who can get those skills here now will have a lot of opportunity," Gates said.

Gates spoke for about 30 minutes at the 2006 Microsoft Business Forum in Moscow in a speech in which he emphasized the need to retain the pace of research in the IT sector.

He said roll-up and stuff-in-your-pocket screens would be available in the next few years and students would study from portable computer tablets that act as interactive tutors.

"The curriculum will be redesigned in such a way around that device," he said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Gates attended a seminar on innovation and information technology for regional officials from across Russia alongside First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, a man touted as a possible successor to President Vladimir Putin, whose second and final term in office expires in 2008.

(Additional reporting by Dmitry Solovyov)
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...lso_on_reuters





Google Positioning for Move Into U.S. Radio
Sue Zeidler

Web search leader Google Inc. is hiring scores of radio sales people and is spending heavily in a bid to expand its position in the $20 billion radio industry.

Google spokesman Michael Mayzel said this week that the company will begin a public test of Google Audio Ads by the end of the year. Advertisers will be able to go online and sign up for targeted radio ads using the same AdWords system they use to buy Web search ads.

Google is generally testing its ability to move into offline media, this week saying it would help customers buy advertisements in 50 U.S. newspapers.

It made a clear move into radio in January when it agreed to pay more than $1 billion, depending on performance, for dMarc Broadcasting Inc., which connects advertisers to radio stations through an automated advertising system.

It's all part of what Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has said is an investment in radio advertising that could grow over time to include up to 1,000 Google employees -- not just in ad sales, but also in engineering and operations.

The fast-growing Silicon Valley Internet company had 9,378 employees in September.

"Google is hiring salespeople in most major markets and they're hiring sales people to sell radio. They're paying about 50 percent more than a typical radio sales person might make," said Bill Figenshu, chief operating officer of Softwave Media Exchange Inc, a unit of SWMX Inc.

Figenshu said three people he had spoken with believed Google was in talks to buy about $1 billion in radio advertising inventory from Clear Channel Communications Inc. Softwave Media Exchange sells radio ads online and competes with Google's dMarc.

Google declined to elaborate on its plans.

Google's move into radio comes at a time when Clear Channel, the biggest radio station operator, is weighing a possible sale of the company.

Clear Channel, which controls an estimated 20 percent of local radio industry revenues, declined to comment on recent reports that Google could take a stake in the radio company, perhaps as part of a buyout led by private equity firms.

Clear Channel's stock closed up 9 cents to $34.54 a share on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, while Google's stock fell 0.92 percent, or $4.38, to $472.57 a share on Nasdaq. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts.

In a recent research report, RBC Capital Markets analyst David Bank said he was perplexed by Google's hirings, since they are being made before it has significant radio advertising inventory to sell.

"While there are other possibilities, we believe there's a reasonable chance Google Audio is establishing critical mass in anticipation of a major acquisition of prime inventory. Our sense from recent discussions with industry players has been most radio operators are reluctant to offer prime inventory to Google Audio," he said.

Bank said Clear Channel's size and potential sale make it a likely source of inventory for Google, either through Google taking a modest investment in a leveraged buyout or by taking a stake in the company's current incarnation.

Two private equity consortia are looking into making bids for Clear Channel, sources familiar with the matter said late last month. Analysts estimated an offer could approach $40 per share, valuing the company at just under $20 billion.

Other industry sources said Google had been approaching all the radio operators in recent weeks.

"They've been going around to all the radio groups, trying to do deals. It seems like a good time to be doing this because business is so slow, There's a lot of inventory," said one industry executive.

(Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in San Francisco)
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...chnologyNews-3





For Start-Ups, Web Success on the Cheap
Miguel Helft

When Seth J. Sternberg and two colleagues started Meebo, a Web-based instant-messaging service, they didn’t go looking for venture capitalists. Using their credit cards, they financed the company themselves to the tune of $2,000 apiece. It was enough to cover their biggest expense — leasing a few computer servers at $120 a month each.

Within a month of its introduction in September 2005, Meebo was getting as many as 50,000 log-ins a day, and it needed more servers. It decided to take a modest $100,000 from three angel investors, wealthy individuals who typically contribute small amounts but do not get involved in management decisions.

“We had a bunch of V.C.’s talking to us about potentially putting more money in,” Mr. Sternberg said. “We said no. A lot of things happen when you raise a V.C. round, and they really slow you down.”

Eventually, Meebo did raise money from venture investors — about $3.5 million from Sequoia Capital. But that was after the company was well on its way to showing that its service was a hit; Meebo had about 200,000 daily log-ins.

In the last couple of years, hundreds of other Internet start-up companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere have followed a similar trajectory. Unlike most companies formed during the first Internet boom, which were built on costly technology and marketing budgets, many of the current crop of Internet start-ups have gone from zero to 60 on a shoestring.

Some have gone without venture capital altogether or have raised far smaller sums than venture investors would have liked. Many were sold for millions before venture capitalists could even get in. That has been a challenge for venture capitalists, who have raised record amounts in recent years and need places to put that money to work.

“V.C.’s hate it; they want you to take big money,” said Jay Adelson, who is the chief executive of two start-ups, Digg and Revision3. Digg took some venture money, but far less than backers offered, and Revision3 has been running on about $850,000 raised from a group of angel investors.

Several venture firms are seeking to adapt. Just last week, Charles River Ventures announced it would offer loans of $250,000 to entrepreneurs as a way to gain access to promising start-ups. Other firms are also giving out small loans, albeit not as a part of any formal program.

For its part, Mohr Davidow Ventures has increased the number of “seed” investments — small sums given to embryonic companies — to about 10 a year from 5. And Union Square Ventures, which was formed in 2003, has made nearly half of its investments at $1 million or less, a departure from its initial plan to make first-round bets of $1 million to $3 million, according to its Web site.

“I think there is in the V.C. community a sense that the rules have changed or are changing,” said John Battelle, a journalist and entrepreneur, who is a host of a technology conference in San Francisco this week that will include a panel on the subject. “How does the V.C. who is set up for a model that requires millions, if not tens of millions, revamp for a different scale?”

And as large firms try to go small, they are encountering a new crop of competitors who are happy to bankroll start-ups on the cheap and are fueling the current Internet boom. They include a large pool of angel investors and a number of small venture funds whose specialty is to invest tens of thousands of dollars, or hundreds of thousands at most.

There is even a group called Y Combinator, whose rule of thumb for investing in start-ups is $6,000 per employee. One of its investments, Reddit, was acquired last week by Wired Digital, which is owned by Condé Nast Publications, for an undisclosed sum.

“I came to the conclusion that $500,000 was the new $5 million,” said Michael Maples Jr., an entrepreneur who created a $15 million venture fund aimed at investing in companies that required little capital. Mr. Maples sees himself not so much as a competitor to venture capitalists, but as someone who is filling the gap between angels, who may invest $250,000 or so in a start-up, and venture investors, whose typical early-stage bet is closer to $5 million.

Several forces are allowing companies to operate cheaply compared with the first Internet boom. They include the declining costs of hardware and bandwidth, the wide availability of open-source software, and the ability to generate revenue through online ads.

“It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur,” Joe Kraus, a veteran of the dot-com boom, wrote in a widely noted blog posting last year. Mr. Kraus said it took $3 million to get his first start-up, Excite.com, from idea to product, much of it spent on servers and software, which have since become much cheaper or even free. His new start-up, JotSpot, was started on just $100,000.

With the notable exception of YouTube, many recent acquisitions involved Internet start-ups that simply could not effectively use large amounts from venture capitalists or produce large returns, said Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and blogger.

“The problem is that as a V.C., these companies don’t soak up enough capital,” Mr. Kedrosky said.

To succeed, a firm with a $250 million fund needs a handful of investments from $10 million to $15 million that can return payouts of $150 million or more, Mr. Kedrosky said. But even a twentyfold return on a $1 million investment will not do much for the success of a large fund, Mr. Kedrosky said.

For smaller funds, the economics are far different. For starters, those who manage them do not earn huge management fees. Instead, they are almost always among the largest investors in the fund, so they will earn a return if the investments pay off.

“I think large venture funds in this economic model have a challenge,” said Josh Kopelman, managing director of First Round Capital. Since starting First Round in 2004, Mr. Kopelman has made about 30 investments that range from $250,000 to $500,000. Mr. Kopelman, who made a fortune as a serial entrepreneur, is the largest investor in First Round’s $50 million fund.

Y Combinator is aiming at even smaller firms, and its approach is decidedly unorthodox. It chooses companies for financing in two batches of 8 to 12; one batch is selected in the winter from companies based in Silicon Valley, the other in the summer from those in Cambridge, Mass.

“When you change the amount of money, a lot of things change,” said Paul Graham, one of four partners in Y Combinator, who made millions when his company, Viaweb, was sold to Yahoo in 1998. “We have to mass-produce things. We can be more risky. We are like mice, and V.C.’s are more like elephants. They can only make a few deals, so each one has a whole amount of weight and worry attached to it.”

As for the target investment of $6,000 for each employee, an explanation on Y Combinator’s Web site makes it clear that Mr. Graham and his colleagues are not looking for computer science entrepreneurs who want to be pampered: “C.S. grad students at M.I.T. currently get $2,000/month to live on, so this represents three months’ living expenses. Though in fact most groups make it last longer.”

Established venture capitalists, however, say the new crop of capital-efficient start-ups represents an opportunity, not a problem.

“Companies have bootstrapped themselves in earlier eras,” said Gary Morgenthaler, a general partner at Morgenthaler Ventures. “There is no shortage of companies that need venture capital and company-building skills.”

Jon Feiber, a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, said it was “incredibly good and healthy” that many Internet start-ups were able to do more with less.

“A small percentage of those companies will lend themselves to the model of a larger fund,” Mr. Feiber said. “If your goal is to generate something of huge value and scale, it is going to take more than $300,000 or $400,000.”

JotSpot, the company that Mr. Kraus started on $100,000, may fit that mold. The company eventually took in $4.5 million from a pair of venture capital firms, and last week it was acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum.

“I think it could be a great time to be a venture capitalist,” Mr. Kraus said in an interview. “Like in any competitive market, fear and hope are the two competing forces.” And for venture capitalists, the success of scrappy start-ups may simply be heightening the fear. “I think there is a lot of fear that people won’t get into the best deals,” Mr. Kraus said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/09/te...09venture.html





The Information Factories

The desktop is dead. Welcome to the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you'll ever use. George Gilder on the dawning of the petabyte age.

THE DRIVE UP INTERSTATE 84, through the verdant amphitheatrical sweep of the Columbia River Gorge to the quaint Oregon town of The Dalles, seems a trek into an alluring American past. You pass ancient basalt bluffs riven by luminous waterfalls, glimpsed through a filigree of Douglas firs. You see signs leading to museums of native Americana full of feathery and leathery tribal relics. There are farms and fisheries, vineyards arrayed on hillsides, eagles and ospreys riding the winds. On the horizon, just a half hour's drive away, stands the radiant, snowcapped peak of Mount Hood, site of 11 glaciers, source of half a dozen rivers, and home of four-season skiing. "I could live here," I say to myself with a backward glance down the highway toward urban Portland, a sylvan dream of the billboarded corridor that connects Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

Then, as the road comes to an end, the gray ruin of an abandoned aluminum plant rises from a barren hillside. Its gothic gantries and cavernous smelters stand empty and forlorn, a poignant warning of the evanescence of industrial power.

But industry has returned to The Dalles, albeit industry with a decidedly postindustrial flavor. For it's here that Google has chosen to build its new 30‑acre campus, the base for a server farm of unprecedented proportion.

Although the evergreen mazes, mountain majesties, and always-on skiing surely play a role, two amenities in particular make this the perfect site for a next-gen data center. One is a fiber-optic hub linked to Harbour Pointe, Washington, the coastal landing base of PC-1, a fiber-optic artery built to handle 640 Gbps that connects Asia to the US. A glassy extension cord snakes through all the town's major buildings, tapping into the greater Internet though NoaNet, a node of the experimental Internet2. The other attraction is The Dalles Dam and its 1.8‑gigawatt power station. The half-mile-long dam is a crucial source of cheap electrical power – once essential to aluminum smelting, now a strategic resource in the next phase in the digital revolution. Indeed, Google and other Silicon Valley titans are looking to the Columbia River to supply ceaseless cycles of electricity at about a fifth of what they would cost in the San Francisco Bay Area. Why? To feed the ravenous appetite of a new breed of computer.

Moore's law has a corollary that bears the name of Gordon Bell, the legendary engineer behind Digital Equipment's VAX line of advanced computers and now a principal researcher at Microsoft. According to Bell's law, every decade a new class of computer emerges from a hundredfold drop in the price of processing power. As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born?

How will we feed it?

How will it be tamed?

And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?

One characteristic of this new machine is clear. It arises from a world measured in the prefix giga, but its operating environment is the petascale. We're all petaphiles now, plugged into a world of petabytes, petaops, petaflops. Mouthing the prefix peta (signifying numbers of the magnitude 10 to the 15th power, a million billion) and the Latin verb petere (to search), we are doubly petacentric in our peregrinations through the hypertrophic network cloud.

Just last century – you remember it well, across the chasm of the crash – the PC was king. The mainframe was deposed and deceased. The desktop was the data center. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were nonprofit googoos babbling about searching their 150-gigabyte index of the Internet. When I wanted to electrify crowds with my uncanny sense of futurity, I would talk terascale (10 to the 12th power), describing a Web with an unimaginably enormous total of 15 terabytes of content.

Yawn. Today Google rules a total database of hundreds of petabytes, swelled every 24 hours by terabytes of Gmails, MySpace pages, and dancing-doggy videos – a relentless march of daily deltas, each larger than the whole Web of a decade ago. To make sense of it all, Page and Brin – with Microsoft, Yahoo, and Barry "QVC" Diller's Ask.com hot on their heels – are frantically taking the computer-on-a-chip and multiplying it, in massively parallel arrays, into a computer-on-a-planet.

The data centers these companies are building began as exercises in making the planet's ever-growing data pile searchable. Now, turbocharged with billions in Madison Avenue mad money for targeted advertisements, they're morphing into general-purpose computing platforms, vastly more powerful than any built before. All those PCs are still there, but they have less and less to do, as Google and the others take on more and more of the duties once delegated to the CPU. Optical networks, which move data over vast distances without degradation, allow computing to migrate to wherever power is cheapest. Thus, the new computing architecture scales across Earth's surface. Ironically, this emerging architecture is interlinked by the very technology that was supposed to be Big Computing's downfall: the Internet.

In the PC era, the winners were companies that dominated the microcosm of the silicon chip. The new age of petacomputing will be ruled by the masters of the remote data center – those who optimally manage processing power, electricity, bandwidth, storage, and location. They will leverage the Net to provide not only search, but also the panoply of applications formerly housed on the desktop. For the moment, at least, the dawning era favors scale in hardware rather than software applications, and centralized operations management rather than operating systems at the network's edge. The burden of playing catch-up in this new game may be what prompted Bill Gates to hand over technical leadership at Microsoft to Craig Mundie, a supercomputer expert, and Ray Ozzie, who made his name in network-based enterprise software with Lotus and Groove Networks.

Having clambered well up the petascale slope, Google has a privileged view of the future it is building – a perspective it's understandably reticent to share. Proud of their front end of public search and advertising algorithms, the G-men hide their hardware coup behind an aw-shucks, bought-it-at-Fry's facade. They resist the notion that their advantage springs chiefly from mastering the intricate dynamics of a newly recentralized computing architecture. This modesty may be disingenuous, of course, but amid the perpetual onrush of technological innovation, it may well be the soul of wisdom. After all, the advantage might turn out to be short-lived.

BACK IN 1993, in a midnight email to me from his office at Sun Microsystems, CTO Eric Schmidt envisioned the future: "When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network." His then-employer publicized this notion in a compact phrase: The network is the computer. But Sun's hardware honchos failed to absorb Schmidt's CEO-in-the-making punch line. In which direction would the profits from that transformation flow? "Not to the companies making the fastest processors or best operating systems," he prophesied, "but to the companies with the best networks and the best search and sort algorithms."

Schmidt wasn't just talking. He left Sun and, after a stint as CEO of Novell, joined Google, where he found himself engulfed by the future he had predicted. While competitors like Excite, Inktomi, and Yahoo were building out their networks with SPARCstations and IBM mainframes, Google designed and manufactured its own servers from commodity components made by Intel and Seagate. In a 2005 technical article, operations chief Urs Hölzle explained why. The price of high-end processors "goes up nonlinearly with performance," he observed. Connecting innumerable cheap processors in parallel offered at least a theoretical chance for a scalable system, in which bang for the buck didn't erode as the system grew.

Today, Schmidt's insight has been vindicated, and he's often seen on Google's Mountain View, California, campus wearing his comp-sci PhD's goofy dimpled grin. The smile has grown toothier since he announced the plant in The Dalles, a manifestation of what he trumpets as "some of the best computer science ever performed." When it's finished, the project will spread tens of thousands of servers across a few giant structures. By building its own infrastructure rather than relying on commercial data centers, Schmidt told analysts in May, Google gets "tremendous competitive advantage."

The facility in The Dalles is only the latest and most advanced of about two dozen Google data centers, which stretch from Silicon Valley to Dublin. All told, it's a staggering collection of hardware, whose constituent servers number 450,000, according to the lowest estimate.

The extended Googleplex comprises an estimated 200 petabytes of hard disk storage – enough to copy the Net's entire sprawling cornucopia dozens of times – and four petabytes of RAM. To handle the current load of 100 million queries a day, its collective input-output bandwidth must be in the neighborhood of 3 petabits per second.

Of course, these numbers are educated guesses. One of the unstated rules of the new arms race is that all information is strategic. Even the once-voluble Chairman Eric now hides behind PR walls. I had to battle hoards of polite but steadfast flacks to reach him, but he finally replied to my queries with a cordial email. Cloud computing, he confirmed, has indeed succeeded the old high-performance staples: mainframes and client-server, both of which require local-area networks. This is very much last year's news. "In this architecture, the data is mostly resident on servers 'somewhere on the Internet' and the application runs on both the 'cloud servers' and the user's browser. When you use Google Gmail, Maps, Yahoo's services, many of eBay's services, you are using this architecture." He added: "The consequence of this 'architectural shift' is the return of massive data centers."

This change is as momentous as the industrial-age shift from craft production to mass manufacture, from individual workers in separate shops turning out finished products step by step to massive factories that break up production into thousands of parts and perform them simultaneously. No single computer could update millions of auctions in real time, as eBay does, and no one machine could track thousands of stock portfolios made up of offerings on all the world's exchanges, as Yahoo does. And those are, at most, terascale tasks. Page and Brin understood that with clever software, scores of thousands of cheap computers working in parallel could perform petascale tasks – like searching everything Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.com, and anyone else could shovel onto the Net. Google appears to have attained one of the holy grails of computer science: a scalable massively parallel architecture that can readily accommodate diverse software.

Google's core activity remains Web search. Having built a petascale search machine, though, the question naturally arose: What else could it do? Google's answer: just about anything. Thus the company's expanding portfolio of Web services: delivering ads (AdSense, AdWords), maps (Google Maps), videos (Google Video), scheduling (Google Calendar), transactions (Google Checkout), email (Gmail), and productivity software (Writely). The other heavyweights have followed suit.

Google's success stems from more than foresight, ingenuity, and chutzpah. In every era, the winning companies are those that waste what is abundant – as signalled by precipitously declining prices – in order to save what is scarce. Google has been profligate with the surfeits of data storage and backbone bandwidth. Conversely, it has been parsimonious with that most precious of resources, users' patience.

The recent explosion of hard disk storage capacity makes Moore's law look like a cockroach race. In 1991, a 100-megabyte drive cost $500, and a 50-megahertz Intel 486 processor cost about the same. In 2006, $500 buys a 750-gigabyte drive or a 3-gigahertz processor. Over 15 years, that's an advance of 7,500 times for the hard drive and 60 times for the processor. By this crude metric, the cost-effectiveness of hard drives grew 125 times faster than that of processors.

But the miraculous advance of disk storage concealed a problem: The larger and denser the individual disks, the longer it takes to scan them for information. "The little arm reading the disks can't move fast enough to handle the onrush of seeks," explains Josh Coates, a 32-year-old storage entrepreneur who founded Berkeley Data Systems. "The whole world stops."

The solution is to deploy huge amounts of random access memory. By the byte, RAM is some 100 times more costly than disk storage. Engineers normally conserve it obsessively, using all kinds of tricks to fool processors into treating disk drives as though they were RAM. But Google understands that the most precious resource is not money but time. Search users, it turns out, are sorely impatient. Research shows that they're satisfied with results delivered within a twentieth of a second. RAM can be accessed some 10,000 times faster than disks. So, measured by access time, RAM is 100 times cheaper than disk storage.

But it's not enough to reach users quickly. Google needs to reach them wherever they are. This requires access to the Net backbone, the long-haul fiber-optic lines that encircle the globe. In the last decade, the speed of backbone traffic has accelerated from 45 Mbps to roughly a terabit per second. That's a rise of more than 20,000 times. Google interconnects its hundreds of thousands of processors with gigabit Ethernet lines. The expense of placing gigantic data centers near major fiber-optic nodes is well worth the expense.

Wasting what is abundant to conserve what is scarce, the G-men have become the supreme entrepreneurs of the new millennium. However, past performance does not guarantee future returns. As large as the current Google database is, even bigger shocks are coming. An avalanche of digital video measured in exabytes (10 to the 18th power, or 1,000 petabytes) is hurtling down from the mountainsides of panicked Big Media and bubbling up from the YouTubian depths. The massively parallel, prodigally wasteful petascale computer has its work cut out for it.

THE FASTEST-GROWING search engine – besides Google – isn't Microsoft or Yahoo or AOL. It's Ask.com, which has seen its total searches grow 20 percent this year. Like Google, Ask.com has built a petascale computer out of commodity CPUs, hard disks, and RAM chips. And while Google doesn't permit outsiders to ogle the hardware inside its data centers, Ask.com is eager for the attention.

The East Coast branch of Ask.com's machine occupies a 500,000-square-foot concrete structure at the end of a long and winding suburban road. The driveway runs a gauntlet of pylons bearing heavy gray power lines and festooned with smaller yellow fiber-optic cables. The windowless facility crouches behind a 10-foot-high chain-link fence in a drab tan camouflage that suggests military-level security. The building holds the central nervous system of not only Ask.com, which occupies more than half the space, but also other well-known information technology companies. Corporate logos are conspicuously absent.

The facility is run by telco giant Verizon. It was designed not for supercomputing but for communications, steering photons through glass threads and mostly copper switches toward their telephonic destinations. MCI, a Verizon acquisition, built it to accommodate UUNet, the premier high-end Internet service provider.

Arriving at a diminutive brown door discreetly designated MAIN ENTRANCE, I pass inside to be vetted by earnest security guards. Metal gates clank behind me as I step into a sirocco of lukewarm air blowing up from the floor. A sudden roar of machinery – fans, air conditioners, and power supplies all whirring together in a tangle of white noise – assaults my ears. The few workers attending to the endless rows of cabinets protect their eardrums with hulking orange muffs.

These cabinets once held as many as eight UUNet routers apiece. Now each 10-foot frame houses 42 black Dell PowerEdge servers, interconnected by a Rastafarian tangle of wires – tens of thousands of computers in total. Hovering above the cabinets like a midday emanation over Death Valley, a shimmering haze of heat signifies an awesome consumption of power.

If it's necessary to waste memory and bandwidth to dominate the petascale era, gorging on energy is an inescapable cost of doing business. Ask.com operations VP Dayne Sampson estimates that the five leading search companies together have some 2 million servers, each shedding 300 watts of heat annually, a total of 600 megawatts. These are linked to hard drives that dissipate perhaps another gigawatt. Fifty percent again as much power is required to cool this searing heat, for a total of 2.4 gigawatts. With a third of the incoming power already lost to the grid's inefficiencies, and half of what's left lost to power supplies, transformers, and converters, the total of electricity consumed by major search engines in 2006 approaches 5 gigawatts.

That's an impressive quantity of electricity. Five gigawatts is almost enough to power the Las Vegas metropolitan area – with all its hotels, casinos, restaurants, and convention centers – on the hottest day of the year. So the annual operation of the world's petascale search machines constitutes a Vegas-sized power sump. In the next year or so, it could add a dog-day Atlantic City. Air-conditioning will be the prime cost and conundrum of the petascale era. As energy analysts Peter Huber and Mark Mills projected in 1999, the planetary machine is on track to be consuming half of all the world's output of electricity by the end of this decade.

Google's Hölzle noticed the high electric bills after taking his post in 1999. At 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, power dominated his calculus of costs. "A power company could give away PCs and make a substantial profit selling power," he says. (At The Dalles, the huge protuberances on top are not giant disk drives, climbing to the rooftop for a smoke while the RAM below does the work, but an array of eight hulking cooling towers.)

The struggle to find an adequate supply of electricity explains the curious emptiness that afflicts some 30 percent of Ask.com's square footage. Why is the second-fastest-growing search engine one-third empty? "We ran out of power before we ran out of space," says search operations manager James Snow, a ponytailed refugee from an IBM acquisition. Not only does the Verizon facility lack a cheap power source, it struggles to get any further power at all; designed for the more modest needs of Internet switching, the building has already maxed out the local grid. Consequently, Ask.com's Sampson has followed Google's trail to the Columbia River, where he's scoping out properties. Perhaps by moving farther up the river into the Washington headwaters he can get even cheaper power than Google will get in The Dalles.

Microsoft and Yahoo are a few steps ahead of him, building me-too data centers in Quincy and Wenatchee, Washington, respectively. There they can take advantage of rock-bottom electricity prices as well as dark fiber laid by the Bonneville Power Administration. Patterning itself on Ronald Reagan's cold war strategy against the Soviet Union, Microsoft is headed toward spending two dollars on data centers and online services for every dollar spent by Google. As Microsoft Live operations chief Debra Chrapaty tells me, her company "added a Google" last year in search capability.

Microsoft's power consumption has risen 10 times in the last three years as it has come to serve Hotmail's 260 million users, MSN Messenger's 240 million, and Live's 320 million. Chrapaty projects a further tenfold rise in the next five years as the company's nine data centers, most scattered around the US, are joined with others around the globe. With a great sucking sound audible in Redmond as the Windows desktop disappears into the cloud, Microsoft has no choice but to damn the expense and forge ahead.

The catch-up crew at Ask.com may be wise to hold out for alternatives beyond the remote corners of the Pacific Northwest. After all, hydropower is a limited and localized resource, while nuclear power promises centuries of nearly limitless energy that can be produced almost anywhere. China is moving forward with plans to build as many as 30 new nuclear plants; perhaps the next wave of data centers will be sited in Shenzhen.

UNTIL HUMANKIND devises an inexhaustible font of electricity that can be situated wherever it's most convenient, the best hope for cooling overheated data centers is to make computers themselves more efficient. The dire state of data center economics (as well as customer demand for portable computers with a reasonable battery life) has driven chipmakers to throw all their weight behind efforts to design low-power chips. AMD's Opteron CPU, debuted in 2003, consumed significantly less power than its predecessors, reversing the trend toward higher speed and greater power consumption that had held since the microprocessor was invented. The Opteron upgrade this past summer brought an additional 30 percent reduction in power usage. Intel, introducing its competing Core architecture, recently acknowledged that the market now values energy efficiency over clock speed. But with the Internet's expansion and the migration of desktop applications online, these improvements won't be enough to avert a meltdown.

An even more daunting roadblock stands ahead: Further dramatic gains in efficiency may be physically impossible without radical breakthroughs in chip design. Microsoft's Craig Mundie bluntly describes the predicament. "We have now run into a brick wall," he says. "What brought all of us faster computing was raising the CPU's clock rate, which increased power consumption. Raising the clock rate without consuming more power was only possible because we could lower the voltage. We can't do that anymore because we're down into electron volts. If you can't lower the voltage, you can't raise the clock rate without using a lot more power."

If CPUs won't run much cooler, maybe the rest of the computer can be redesigned to keep power consumption to a minimum. That's the goal of Andy Bechtolsheim, who's plotting the compact, low-power future of the data center from his workbench at Sun. Bechtolsheim has fundamentally reconceived the way computers are put together, coupling CPUs directly to drives, angling drives for maximum air flow, and connecting fans directly to motherboards. He aims to bring data center computing capacity to the back office – without oversize air-conditioning trolls on the roof.

Some industry vets believe that Bechtolsheim doesn't count much in the era of cloud computing. He counted, though, back in 1998 when he supplied the first outside money for Brin and Page. Prior to that, he had made successive fortunes as Sun's founder and employee number one, as a major early investor in Microsoft, and as progenitor of Granite Systems, an inventor of gigabit Ethernet switches ultimately snapped up by Cisco. Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and Sun give him sort of a royal flush, making him perhaps the supreme investor-entrepreneur in Silicon Valley history.

Speaking at double data rate in a German accent, Bechtolsheim acknowledges that the move from search to more ambitious services plays to Google's advantage. "To deliver video, maps, and all the rest on the fly, optimized for a specific customer's needs, to get the maximum benefit for the advertiser – that requires tremendous hardware, storage, and memory. It takes hundreds of computers free to each end user. The next tier down doesn't have the economics to build this stuff."

I ask, "So is the game over?" Bechtolsheim's reply: "Only if no one changes the game."

Earlier this year, Sun presented new products that can dispense the entire Internet from a few bread boxes – using, curiously enough, industry-standard AMD Opteron processors, cheap hard disks, and industry-standard RAM. The Sun Fire X4600 is a modular hybrid data server and storage facility. Stacking 655 of these machines together, the Tokyo Institute of Technology created a 38-teraflop machine that has been recognized as one of the world's fastest supercomputers. And with 1-terabyte drives, available next year, Bechtolsheim will be able to pack the Net into three cabinets, consuming 200 kilowatts and occupying perhaps a tenth of a row at Ask.com. Replicating Google's 200 petabytes of hard drive capacity would take less than one data center row and consume less than 10 megawatts, about the typical annual usage of a US household.

Leaning back in his chair in a Sun conference room, Bechtolsheim observes, "The last few years have been disappointing for people who want to accelerate progress in technology. But now the world is moving faster again."

FOR THE MOMENT, at least, the power of massive parallelism has far outstripped the promise of alternative computing architectures. But reliance on massively parallel computing may come to define the limits of what can be accomplished by a computer-on-a-planet. Two decades ago, Carver Mead, the former head of computer science at Caltech and key contributor to several generations of chip technology, pointed out that a collection of chips arrayed in parallel can't do everything a computer might be called upon to do. "Parallel architectures," he noted, "are inherently special-purpose."

Hölzle admits as much. Since he arrived at Google, he says, the company has been through six or seven iterations of its search software and perhaps as many versions of the hardware backend. "It's impossible to decouple the two," he explains. "The search programs have to fit with the hardware systems, and the hardware systems have to work with the software."

All previous parallel architectures, from Danny Hillis' Thinking Machines to Seymour Cray's behemoth supercomputers to Jim Clark's Silicon Graphics workstations, have fallen before this problem. Their software and hardware became too specialized to keep up with the pace of innovation in computing. Scalability is also an issue: As the number of processors grows, the balance of activity between communications and processing skews toward communications. The pins that connect chips to boards become bottlenecks. With all the processors attempting to access memory at once, the gridlock becomes intractable. The problem has an acronym – NUMA, for nonuniform memory access – and it has never been solved.

Google apparently has responded by replicating everything everywhere. The system is intensively redundant; if one server fails, the other half million don't know or care. But this creates new challenges. The software must break up every problem into ever more parallel processes. In the end, each ingenious solution becomes the new problem of a specialized, even sclerotic, device. The petascale machine faces the peril of becoming a kludge.

Could that happen to Google and its followers?

Google's magical ability to distribute a search query among untold numbers of processors and integrate the results for delivery to a specific user demands the utmost central control. This triumph of centralization is a strange, belated vindication of Grosch's law, the claim by IBM's Herbert Grosch in 1953 that computer power rises by the square of the price. That is, the more costly the computer, the better its price-performance ratio. Low-cost computers could not compete. In the end, a few huge machines would serve all the world's computing needs. Such thinking supposedly prompted Grosch's colleague Thomas Watson to predict a total global computing market of five mainframes.

The advent of personal computers dealt Grosch's law a decisive defeat. Suddenly, inexpensive commodity desktop PCs were thousands of times more cost-effective than mainframes.

In this way, the success of the highly centralized computer-on-a-planet runs counter to the current that has swept the computer industry for decades. The advantages of the new architecture may last only until the centripetal forces pulling intelligence to the core of the network give way, once again, to the silicon centrifuge dispelling it to the edges. Google has pioneered the miracle play of wringing supercomputer performance from commodity CPUs, and this strategy is likely to succeed as long as microchip progress remains in the doldrums. But semiconductor and optical technologies are on the verge of a new leap forward.

The next wave of innovation will compress today's parallel solutions in an evolutionary convergence of electronics and optics: 3-D and even holographic memory cells; lasers inscribed on the tops of chips, replacing copper pins with streams of photons; and all-optical networks in which thousands of colors of light travel along a single fiber. As these advances find their way into an increasing variety of devices, the petascale computer will shrink from a dinosaur to a teleputer – the successor to today's handhelds – in your ear or in your signal path. It will access a variety of searchers and servers, enabling participation in metaverses beyond the ken of even Ray Kurzweil's prophetic imagination. Moreover, it will link to trillions of sensors around the globe, giving it a constant knowledge of the physical state of the world, from traffic conditions to the workings of your own biomachine.

Such advances promise to transform the calculus of storage, bandwidth, and power that gives centralization its current advantage. As the redoubtable Bell Labs engineer turned giga-investor Andy Kessler tells me, "It's sure to happen. It always has. Because all the creativity, customer whims, long tails, and money are at the network's edge. That's where chipmakers find the volumes that feed their Moore's law margins. That's where you can find elastically ascending revenues and relentlessly declining costs."
Amid the beckoning fantasies of futurism, the purpose of whatever comes next – like that of today's petapede – will be to serve the ultimate, and still the only general-purpose, petascale computer: the human brain. The brain demonstrates the superiority of the edge over the core: It's not agglomerated in a few air-conditioned nodes, but dispersed far and wide and interconnected via myriad sensory and media channels. The test of the new global ganglia of computers and cables, worldwide webs of glass and light and air, is how readily they take advantage of unexpected contributions from free human minds, in all their creativity and diversity. Search and you shall find.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.10/cloudware.html





Easy for you to say

A Neuroscientific Look at Speaking in Tongues
Benedict Carey

The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who “speak in tongues” reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.

The images, appearing in the current issue of the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, pinpoint the most active areas of the brain. The images are the first of their kind taken during this spoken religious practice, which has roots in the Old and New Testaments and in charismatic churches established in the United States around the turn of the 19th century. The women in the study were healthy, active churchgoers.

“The amazing thing was how the images supported people’s interpretation of what was happening,” said Dr. Andrew B. Newberg, leader of the study team, which included Donna Morgan, Nancy Wintering and Mark Waldman. “The way they describe it, and what they believe, is that God is talking through them,” he said.

Dr. Newberg is also a co-author of “Why We Believe What We Believe.”

In the study, the researchers used imaging techniques to track changes in blood flow in each woman’s brain in two conditions, once as she sang a gospel song and again while speaking in tongues. By comparing the patterns created by these two emotional, devotional activities, the researchers could pinpoint blood-flow peaks and valleys unique to speaking in tongues.

Ms. Morgan, a co-author of the study, was also a research subject. She is a born-again Christian who says she considers the ability to speak in tongues a gift. “You’re aware of your surroundings,” she said. “You’re not really out of control. But you have no control over what’s happening. You’re just flowing. You’re in a realm of peace and comfort, and it’s a fantastic feeling.”

Contrary to what may be a common perception, studies suggest that people who speak in tongues rarely suffer from mental problems. A recent study of nearly 1,000 evangelical Christians in England found that those who engaged in the practice were more emotionally stable than those who did not. Researchers have identified at least two forms of the practice, one ecstatic and frenzied, the other subdued and nearly silent.

The new findings contrasted sharply with images taken of other spiritually inspired mental states like meditation, which is often a highly focused mental exercise, activating the frontal lobes.

The scans also showed a dip in the activity of a region called the left caudate. “The findings from the frontal lobes are very clear, and make sense, but the caudate is usually active when you have positive affect, pleasure, positive emotions,” said Dr. James A. Coan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “So it’s not so clear what that finding says” about speaking in tongues.

The caudate area is also involved in motor and emotional control, Dr. Newberg said, so it may be that practitioners, while mindful of their circumstances, nonetheless cede some control over their bodies and emotions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/he...ebc&ei=5087%0A





Dell Customer Gets Windows Refund

Thanks to Dell, one UK Linux user has succeeded in the perennial quest to buy and use a laptop without paying for an unused bundled OS.
Don Marti

Dell today gave freelance programmer and sysadmin Dave Mitchell, of Sheffield, UK, a refund of 47 pounds ($89) for the unused copy of Microsoft Windows XP Home SP2 bundled with his new Dell Inspiron 640m laptop, Mitchell says. Dell also refunded the tax, for a total of £55.23 ($105).

With few laptops available without the so-called "Microsoft tax", Windows refund requests have long been a slow movement among Linux community organizers. A few Linux users have reported success, but most laptop vendors have refused to honor the refund clause in Microsoft's End User License Agreement (EULA) unless the user returns the entire laptop. A Dell spokesperson was not aware of any policy change.

The online version of the Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition EULA states, "You agree to be bound by the terms of this EULA by installing, copying, or otherwise using the software. If you do not agree, do not install, copy, or use the software; you may return it to your place of purchase for a full refund, if applicable."

The language in the version that Mitchell received was slightly different. It read, "If you do not agree to the terms of this EULA, you may not use or copy the software, and should promptly contact manufacturer for instructions on return of the unused product(s) for a refund in accordance with manufacturer's return policies."

Mitchell ordered his Dell laptop on Oct. 21, and it arrived on Oct. 27. He sent a postal letter requesting a refund to Dell's Bracknell, UK office on Nov. 1, received a phone call two days later, and his refund today, he says.

Dell has not yet requested that Mitchell return his Microsoft hologram sticker or any other materials bundled with the system. The laptop did not come with a Windows CD.

Mitchell was careful to document that he did not run the Microsoft product or accept the EULA. "I booted the laptop, then photographed every step of the boot process up to and including clicking on the XP 'no I don't accept' button. I also scrolled through each page of the EULA, taking a photo of each page," he wrote in an e-mail interview.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...l-windows.html





The MacArthur Foundation's Digital Drive

The nonprofit institution has launched a five-year initiative to study online culture and media literacy, and its impact on modern youth
Aili McConnon

The world is in the middle of a seismic societal shift. Young people actively produce much more content—digital and otherwise—than previous generations, who were more passive in their consumption of commercially-generated media. One in 100 adults online create a blog or personal Web page or share artwork, photos, stories, or videos. Yet more than half of online teens regularly create such content, according to recent research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

For this reason, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently launched a $50 million, five-year initiative to investigate how and why young people—who have been bathed in bits and bytes since birth—use the Web, computer games, cell phones, and other gadgets to learn, play, and communicate.

"It's clear that for many, the richest environment for learning is no longer inside the classroom but…online and after school," said MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton at the launch of the Digital Media & Learning Initiative at the end of October (the press conference was, appropriately, also streamed in real time in the Second Life virtual world). "That's our opening hypothesis. We believe there's a new interdisciplinary cross-sector in the making, and MacArthur wants to build and support this field of digital media and learning."

Knowledge Hub

To nourish this nascent field, the MacArthur Foundation will give $10 million in grants to individuals and organizations to work on projects that stimulate research in digital media or explore new approaches to educational innovation.

The remaining $40 million will be put towards fulfilling the broader aim of connecting researchers, educators, youth, and practitioners in different disciplines (and across sectors). A digital knowledge hub is already in the works, so that teachers from around the world can compare, contrast, and share research, tools, and findings through open-source software and online forums.

Founded in 1978, The MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent, grant-making institution. It's probably best known for its "genius grants," five year unrestricted fellowships with $500,000 stipends awarded to those who "show exceptional merit and promise of continued creative work." With assets of $5 billion, the organization makes grants of some $200 million annually.

The foundation typically dips its toe in uncharted waters gently, testing projects by giving short-term grants to develop preliminary research and prototypes. Based on the results of this seed innovation, they then allocate longer, more substantial grants. In 2005, they made several short-term (eight month to a year) grants that laid the groundwork for this new initiative, and some of those projects are among the first recipients of the Digital Media & Learning grants. Most of them will be three years in length. Here are some of them:

The participation gap. In 2005, Henry Jenkins, the director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received $500,000 for research that was published to coincide with the launch of the new initiative. His paper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, examines what Jenkins calls the "participation gap."

While educators used to worry about the "digital divide"—whether all students had equal access to computers and technology—they should now consider the "participation gap", or whether students who can only use computers in the school library have enough time to develop the same media literacy and skills as peers who spend hours designing, communicating, editing, networking, and learning on their home computers.

Based on the results of his research, Jenkins' Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT will receive a further $1,800,000 to develop a media-literacy curriculum in conjunction with the Center for Urban School Improvement in Chicago. Curriculum products will include a library of day-in-the-life videos of people who have excelled in digital media and a Remixing Melville project, in collaboration with the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Students will use video, sound, and other multimedia tools and techniques to re-imagine Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick in the context of their own lives—an innovative way to introduce classic literature.

Kid-driven lessons.Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California spent time with thousands of children in a large-scale ethnographic project. Both schools were given awards to expand upon their research: over $2 million to the School of Information Management & Systems at UC Berkeley and $1,346,000 to the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC.

Led by Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist of technology use, along with information professor Peter Lyman, researchers observe children's interactions with digital media to get a sense of how they're really using the technology. The findings of this program will be shared with all the other MacArthur recipients to inform their research and to spawn innovative educational curricula and projects.

Global Kids, a non-profit youth organization, received $170,000 in 2005 to organize an essay competition and develop several online discussion forums where kids explained how they use digital media. They also developed an island within the teen spin-off of the immersive world Second Life. Created by Linden Lab, the same company that created the adult version, the Teen Second Life is inhabited by approximately 45,000 young people between the ages of 13 and 17.

Teens build educational areas and experiences to teach one another about world issues such as child sex-trafficking or the genocide in Darfur. Global Kids has received just over a million dollars to continue with this work.

Games and learning.The Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory at The University of Wisconsin-Madison received $3 million to develop a media-literacy curriculum involving computer games. Using a software application, students can design games, learn aesthetic and systems design, and figure out how to problem solve with their peers. Several other grants were made to research the power of games as educational tools. Commercial outfits such as Gamelab, a game-development company based in New York, are also collaborating.

Evaluating the results. Digital-media education is such a new and rapidly changing field that one grant ($450,000) went to Blueprint Research & Design, a strategy consultancy, to develop the metrics to evaluate the Foundation's success in developing this new field. Given the many disciplines and sectors they hope to involve, finding a common language is one of the first aims. And to keep tabs on the unfolding projects, MacArthur has created a site to host ongoing discussion.

"Ultimately, we want to understand the benefits of digital media, and accelerate research and development in this area. But we also want to be cautious, and look at potential harms," says Connie Yowell, director of education at the MacArthur Foundation. "At this stage, we need to keep asking questions to know where to go next. For instance: Are kids daydreaming in the same way? Are they physically active in the same way? How are their identities shaped by this digital media?" This forward-thinking initiative hopes to find some answers.
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate...v.g3a.rss1107y





Turkey May Relax Free Speech Limits
Dan Bilefsky

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has signaled that he is prepared to amend a law limiting free speech, in an apparent 11th-hour attempt to prevent a crisis with the European Union.

The surprise move Sunday by Erdogan came just three days before the European Commission is expected to publish a report criticizing Turkey for sluggishness on reforms necessary if it wants to join the 25-member bloc.

"The move looks desperate," said Ilker Domac, a Turkish economist. "It shows how badly things are going with Turkey's EU membership prospects."

Talks with the EU have reached an impasse that could result in the suspension of the country's EU membership talks, some Turks fear. Such a move would hobble a key European and American ally in an unstable region and would risk slowing the pace of its political and economic reforms.

The commission, the EU executive branch, has been particularly concerned by Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which makes insulting Turkishness a crime. The law attracted global criticism earlier this year when the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, who was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, was put on trial for telling a Swiss newspaper that more than a million Armenians were massacred by Ottoman Turks during World War I. The case was later dismissed.

In an apparent attempt to gain favor with the European Union before the commission's report is released Wednesday, Erdogan signaled that his party, Justice and Development, might be willing to amend the law.

"We are studying several options for how we can handle Article 301 in harmony with the spirit of the reforms," he said without elaborating.

Turkish analysts said this would likely entail narrowing the legal definition of what constitutes an insult to Turkishness and amending the law to make it compatible with the European Court of Human Rights.

Erdogan, who faces strong pressure from nationalists not to change the law, all but ruled out doing so last week. But Turkish officials said he had tempered his resistance after furious lobbying by human rights groups, trade unions and the business community, which fear that a break in EU membership talks would undermine Turkey's stability.

EU officials cautiously welcomed the move, but warned that Turkey's membership bid still faced enormous obstacles, in particular a simmering dispute over Cyprus that shows little sign of resolution.

"This is a positive signal, but there are other big hurdles that still need to be overcome," said Joost Lagendijk, the chairman of the Turkey delegation in the European Parliament and a member of the Green group.

Turkey has said it will not open its ports to ships from Cyprus, an EU member, until the European Union lifts trade restrictions against Turkish Cypriots in northern Cyprus, which is recognized internationally by Ankara alone. The Cyprus impasse has proved so intractable that last week Finland, which holds the Union's rotating presidency, canceled talks because the parties refused to be in the same room.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/06/news/turkey.php





IBM Touts Smart Surveillance System

IBM Corp. hopes to capitalize on the enormous growth in video surveillance by selling technology from its research labs that performs real-time analysis on footage captured by security cameras in stores and sensitive locales.

Several companies already offer systems that can alert security guards if something unusual appears to be going on - such as someone entering an off-limits room or a jewelry store employee leaving a key in a display case.

But IBM contends that it is the first to add advanced search functions that make use of computers' improving ability to recognize video content. For example, the IBM system would let a user search for all instances of a green car passing by a store on a certain day.

The so-called S3 - Smart Surveillance System - also can incorporate data gathered from audio or chemical sensors. And IBM said S3 includes important privacy enhancements, such as the ability to automatically obscure faces of customers or passers-by.

Joseph LaRocca, vice president for loss prevention at the National Retail Federation, said that while he had not seen IBM's technology, the entry of such a large company into the market figured to help lower the prices and improve the capabilities of video analytics products.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-06-23-04-50





Appeals Court Will Hear EFF/AT&T Spying Case
Andy Patrizio

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is the next stop on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) case against AT&T over alleged collaboration with the National Security Agency's (NSA's) domestic surveillance program.

The court decided on Tuesday decided it would hear an appeal of a district court's decision allowing the EFF's case to go forward against the government and AT&T. The ruling is only an agreement to hear the case, not on the merits of the appeal.

The EFF first sued AT&T in January, claiming the company, then called SBC before it acquired AT&T and took the name, violated the law in providing customer information to the government.

The government claimed that "state secret privilege" prevented the federal judiciary from determining whether the spying program is legal or not. In July, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker disagreed and ruled that the case could go forward.

Judge Walker has set a case management conference for November 17th to consider how EFF's lawsuit and other suits against telecommunications companies can go forward. The hearing will start at 10:30am at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

The case involves allegations that AT&T, then SBC, provided caller information to the NSA as part of its domestic surveillance program monitoring that monitored international phone calls to suspected terrorists in foreign countries.

Thus far there has been no discovery or revelations, as all the court cases have involved arguments back and forth on the legitimacy of the EFF's claims and AT&T's counterclaims.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...le.php/3642521





Lawyers Face Right to Blog

Online journals that contain legal discussions and background information are challenging traditional practices on attorney advertising
Ameet Sachdev

Evan Brown, a 32-year-old Chicago lawyer, publishes a blog about legal developments involving the Internet. Other than a cute picture of his 1-year-old son sitting on his shoulders on the Web site, the online forum is a scholarly discussion for tech geeks like him.

Yet, Brown acknowledges the blog, www.internetcases.com, has had some unintended business benefits. He has met about a dozen clients through his blog who have sought his advice on intellectual-property matters.

"I think of that as a natural and healthy side effect of the blog," said Brown, an associate at Hinshaw & Culbertson. "It's certainly not the reason I started it."

That impact of Brown's blog puts him at the leading edge of a debate about how attorneys communicate--and advertise.

The marketing potential, whether explicit or not, of law-related blogs--or "blawgs" as some attorneys have come to call their online journals--is raising some tricky ethical questions for the profession, which regulates lawyer advertising.

Those issues have come to the forefront in recent months, after ethics monitors in Kentucky found lawyer-written blogs to be advertising and subjected them to increased scrutiny. Regulators in New York have made bloggers nervous by proposing new advertising rules that also include electronic communications.

Blogging has added a 21st Century twist to the broader ongoing debate within the profession about advertising by lawyers. In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court gave lawyers the 1st Amendment right to advertise. States came up with guidelines to protect consumers from deceptive legal ads, paving the way for late-night TV ads and billboards featuring bankruptcy attorneys.

But, even with the state protections, Warren Burger, former chief justice of the United States, once denounced "the outrageous breach of professional conduct we see in the huckster advertising of some attorneys."

Most large corporate firms eschew advertising. In its place, they employ marketing departments to generate news about the firms with the hopes of generating publicity. It's not advertising but it can achieve a similar purpose: promoting the firm's name and activities.

Law bloggers see their forums as a public service, not huckster advertising.

"If I blog and I talk about the law, why should that be treated any differently from a lawyer who goes to a senior center and gives a free talk about elder care?" said Marty Schwimmer, a lawyer in Westchester, N.Y., who writes a blog about trademark and copyright law.

The Kentucky Attorney's Advertising Commission sees a distinction, as Lexington attorney Ben Cowgill, an expert in lawyer professional conduct, discovered last year.

The state has rules that broadly define advertising to include virtually any communication to the public by a lawyer that contains any information about the lawyer or the lawyer's practice. The rules also require that ads must be submitted for commission approval, along with a $50 filing fee.

When Cowgill considered starting a scholarly blog on legal ethics, he thought it might be viewed as advertising. But if he followed the rules to the letter, he would have to give the state $50 every time he posted a new entry on his blog. "That would be cost-prohibitive," Cowgill said.

He went ahead with his blog anyway and on the day he started it, he sent a copy to the advertising commission stating that it was not an advertisement for legal services. "I told them that this was no different in concept than authoring a handbook on a particular field of law."

But the commission did not agree, concluding that the blog was no different than a law firm Web site, which comes under its guidelines. Cowgill described his run-in with the commission on his blog, which circulated like a virus to other lawyers-turned-bloggers.

Some argued that Kentucky had no right restricting lawyer speech this way and suggested that the $50 fee was unconstitutional if it was enforced every time a blog was updated.

After some negotiations, the commission reached a compromise with Cowgill that has become the working policy of the commission on blogs. Kentucky bloggers don't have to pay $50 every time they post a new entry, but if the blog contains a link to biographical information about the lawyer, that page has to be submitted to the state with a one-time fee. Regulators also can demand to review a blog if they find that it is not a legitimate exercise in journalism.

The more-generous policy has encouraged other Kentucky lawyers to launch blogs, Cowgill said.

There are between 2,000 and 3,000 law blogs nationwide, said Kevin O'Keefe, president of LexBlog, a company that creates blogs for lawyers to use as a marketing tool.

Despite the proliferation of lawyer-written blogs, Kentucky is one of the few states to mull the ethical issues. In Illinois, the Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission, which enforces professional-conduct rules, including lawyer advertising regulations that are set by the state Supreme Court, said it has not received any complaints about blogs. And the topic has not generated much discussion at the state bar association, said Bob Creamer, a retired attorney in Evanston who sits on the group's committee on professional conduct.

Elsewhere, there's been some action. Some state regulators in different states say that current rules preventing misleading solicitations and protecting attorney-client privilege also apply to the blogs. The medium, in essence, should not matter.

But some states are updating their antiquated guidelines regulating lawyer advertising to take into account the rise of electronic communications. New York, for example, wants to ban Internet pop-up ads.

The state's office of court administration also has proposed some requirements that may pose a burden to lawyer bloggers. One amendment would require attorneys to provide copies of all ads. The definition of advertisements would include Web sites, e-mails, blogs and speeches.

Another proposed amendment would require law firms and attorneys to disclose in every e-mail or blog a listing of all office locations and jurisdictions in which the attorney and firm members are licensed.

The amendments have been criticized as too broad. Even the Federal Trade Commission has objected to some of the rules. The filing requirement, the FTC said, "will likely raise the cost of doing business for attorneys and thus likely raise prices for consumers."

There were so many public comments to the proposals that the state extended the deadline by two months, to Nov. 15.

"There has been an outcry against the excess," said Schwimmer. "I am optimistic they will do something more reasonable."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...,7074178.story





Humiliated Frat Boys Sue 'Borat'
AP

Two fraternity boys want to make lawsuit against ''Borat'' over their drunken appearance in the hit movie.

The legal action filed Thursday on their behalf claims they were duped into appearing in the spoof documentary ''Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,'' in which they made racist and sexist comments on camera.

The young men ''engaged in behavior that they otherwise would not have engaged in,'' the lawsuit says.

''Borat'' follows the adventures of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's Kazakh journalist character in a blend of fiction and improvised comic encounters as he travels across the United States and mocks Americans.

The plaintiffs were not named in the lawsuit ''to protect themselves from any additional and unnecessary embarrassment.'' They were identified in the movie as fraternity members from a South Carolina university, and appeared drunk as they made insulting comments about women and minorities to Cohen's character.

The lawsuit claims that in October 2005, a production crew took the students to a bar to drink and ''loosen up'' before participating in what they were told would be a documentary to be shown outside of the United States.

''They were induced to agree to participate and were told the name of the fraternity and the name of their school wouldn't be used,'' said the plaintiffs' attorney, Olivier Taillieu. ''They were put into an RV and were made to believe they were picking up Borat the hitchhiker.''

After a bout of heavy drinking, the plaintiffs signed a release form they were told ''had something to do with reliability issues with being in the RV,'' Taillieu said.

The film ''made plaintiffs the object of ridicule, humiliation, mental anguish and emotional and physical distress, loss of reputation, goodwill and standing in the community,'' the lawsuit said.

It names 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp., and three production companies as defendants.

Studio spokesman Gregg Brilliant said the lawsuit ''has no merit.''

The plaintiffs were seeking an injunction to stop the studio from displaying their image and likeness, along with unspecified monetary damages.

''Borat'' debuted as the top movie last weekend with $26.5 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...t-Lawsuit.html





More and More Pot Users Getting Their Marijuana Delivered to Their Door
AP

In a city where you can get just about anything delivered to your door - groceries, dry cleaning, Chinese food - pot smokers are increasingly ordering takeout marijuana from drug rings that operate with remarkable corporate-style attention to customer satisfaction.

An untold number of otherwise law-abiding professionals in New York are having their pot delivered to their homes instead of visiting drug dens or hanging out on street corners.

Among the legions of home delivery customers is Chris, a 37-year-old salesman in Manhattan. He dials a pager number and gets a return call from a cheery dispatcher who takes his order for potent strains of marijuana.

Within a couple of hours, a well-groomed delivery man - sometimes a moonlighting actor or chef - arrives at the doorstep of his Manhattan apartment carrying weed neatly packaged in small plastic containers.

"These are very nice, discreet people," said Chris, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition only his first name be used. "There's an unspoken trust. It's better than going to some street corner and getting ripped off or killed."

The phenomenon isn't new. It has long been the case around the country that those with enough money and the right connections could get cocaine or other drugs discreetly delivered to their homes and places of business.

But experts say home delivery has been growing in popularity, thanks to a shrewder, corporate style of dealing designed to put customers at ease and avoid the messy turf wars associated with other drugs.

"It's certainly been the trend in the past 10 years in urban areas that are becoming gentrified," said Ric Curtis, an anthropology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who specializes in the drug culture.

The corporate model - and its profit potential - were demonstrated late last year when the Drug Enforcement Administration announced that it had taken down a highly sophisticated organization dubbed the Cartoon Network. DEA agents arrested 12 people after using wiretaps and surveillance and making undercover buys.

Authorities estimated that since 1999, the ring made a fortune by delivering more than a ton of marijuana, some of it grown hydroponically - without soil - in the basement of a Cape Cod-style home on 10 acres in Vermont, where an informant reported the smell of the crop was overpowering.

The dealers, working out of a roving call center, processed 600 orders a day - from doctors, lawyers, Wall Street traders - even on Christmas, investigators said. Authorities refused to give names, but in one conversation overheard last October, a courier boasted about the ring's upscale clientele, according to court papers.

"We know comedians. We know celebrities," the courier said. "So you might meet a rapper, a singer. We go to a lot of people."

One former customer named Lucia, a 30-year-old employee at an entertainment cable network, recalled blatant deals done at the company's Manhattan headquarters. Executives and employees alike would pool their orders as if they were buying lunch together, then await the arrival of a courier, Lucia said.

The cost was $60 for one plastic case holding two grams of marijuana - a steep markup, but worth it because of convenience and quality, she said.

"It was kind, kind bud," she said. "Yummy stuff."

The emphasis on customer service and satisfaction was evident at one stash house, where agents found more than 30 pounds of marijuana in plain view, already packaged for holiday delivery, court papers said. The packages featured the drug ring's cartoon character logo and the greeting, "Happy Holidays From Your Friends at Cartoon!"

The operation's alleged mastermind, John Nebel, "should have been the CEO of a Fortune 500 company," said his attorney, Steve Zissou.

Instead, Nebel, who is awaiting trial, could get a minimum of 10 years in federal prison if convicted. Prosecutors also are demanding the forfeiture of $22 million in cash, homes, cars, motorcycles and a boat owned by him and his cohorts.

At Lucia's workplace, employees were "bummed" by the news of Nebel's bust, Lucia said. But worries that the office might get raided evaporated, and other dealers stepped in, though "their product does not hold up to Cartoon," she said.

Investigators seized customers' names and addresses from the drug operation's computer logs. But those people face little risk of prosecution, authorities said.

Authorities conceded the home delivery trade will probably survive because of the high demand for marijuana and the low penalties for dealing it.

Under state law, most marijuana offenses "are not treated as very significant crimes," said Bridget G. Brennen, the city's special narcotic prosecutor. "That is why you see the marijuana delivery services proliferating. Their exposure is slight."
http://www.katu.com/news/national/4575976.html





Robot Identifies Human Flesh As Bacon
Lore Sjöberg

Let the robot holocaust commence: robots think we taste like bacon.

Researchers at NEC System technologies and Mie University have designed the cute little guy to the right: a metal man gastronomist, "an electromechanical sommelier", capable of identifying wines, cheeses, meats and hors d'oeuvres. Upon being given a sample, he will speak up in a childlike voice and identify what he has just been fed. The idea is that wineries can tell if a wine is authentic without even opening the bottle, amongst other more obscure uses...like "tell me what this strange grayish lump at the back of my freezer is/was."

But when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot's omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.

Absolutely horrifying. Like cows, once robots taste blood, their hunger for human flesh can never be satiated.
http://blog.wired.com/tableofmalcont...identifie.html


















Until next week,

- js.



















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November 4th, October 28th, October 21st, October 14th, October 7th

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


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