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Old 27-02-08, 11:31 AM   #2
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Spammers Crack Gmail Captcha

Fresh fruit for rotting vegetables
John Leyden

Spammers, fresh from the success of cracking the Windows Live captcha used by Hotmail, have broken the equivalent system at Gmail.

Internet security firm Websense reports that miscreants have created bots which are capable of signing up and creating random Gmail accounts for spamming purposes, defeating Captcha-based defences in the process. It reckons the same group of spammers are behind both attacks.

Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) challenge-response systems, which are used to prevent accounts being created until a user correctly identifies letters in an image, are designed to ensure requests are made by a human rather than an automated program. The technique has been used to defeat automatic sign-ups to email accounts by services including Yahoo! Mail and Gmail for years, and hackers are increasingly successful in defeating the approach. For example, the HotLan Trojan has created more than 500,000 spam email accounts with Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail since its arrival back in July 2007.

Websense reckons the latest Gmail Captcha hack is the most sophisticated it has seen to date. Unlike Live Mail Captcha breaking, which involved just one zombie host doing the entire job, the Gmail breaking process involves two compromised hosts. Each of the two compromised hosts applies a slightly different technique to analysing Captcha, as explained in a posting by Websense.

Even using the two techniques, only one in every five Captcha-breaking requests are successful. It's a fairly low percentage, but one that's still more than workable in the case of automated attacks.

It sounds like a lot of effort, but gaining a working Gmail account has a number of advantages for spammers. As well as gaining access to Google's services in general, spammers gain a address whose domain is highly unlikely to be blacklisted, helping them defeat one aspect of anti-spam defences. Gmail also has the benefit of being free to use.

A wide range of Captcha-breaking services are hosted on a domain located in the US, Websense reports. The page includes a support page and payment advice along with an internal test page.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02...captcha_crack/





Teenage Hacker Is Blind, Brash and in the Crosshairs of the FBI
Kevin Poulsen

At 4 in the morning of May 1, 2005, deputies from the El Paso County Sheriff's Office converged on the suburban Colorado Springs home of Richard Gasper, a TSA screener at the local Colorado Springs Municipal Airport. They were expecting to find a desperate, suicidal gunman holding Gasper and his daughter hostage.

"I will shoot," the gravely voice had warned, in a phone call to police minutes earlier. "I'm not afraid. I will shoot, and then I will kill myself, because I don't care."

"I will shoot." Listen to the Colorado Springs hostage hoax.

But instead of a gunman, it was Gasper himself who stepped into the glare of police floodlights. Deputies ordered Gasper's hands up and held him for 90 minutes while searching the house. They found no armed intruder, no hostages bound in duct tape. Just Gasper's 18-year-old daughter and his baffled parents.

A federal Joint Terrorism Task Force would later conclude that Gasper had been the victim of a new type of nasty hoax, called "swatting," that was spreading across the United States. Pranksters were phoning police with fake murders and hostage crises, spoofing their caller IDs so the calls appear to be coming from inside the target's home. The result: police SWAT teams rolling to the scene, sometimes bursting into homes, guns drawn.

Now the FBI thinks it has identified the culprit in the Colorado swatting as a 17-year-old East Boston phone phreak known as "Li'l Hacker." Because he's underage, Wired.com is not reporting Li'l Hacker's last name. His first name is Matthew, and he poses a unique challenge to the federal justice system, because he is blind from birth.

If he's guilty, the attack is at once the least sophisticated and most malicious of a string of capers linked to Matt, who stumbled into the lingering remains of the decades-old subculture of phone phreaking when he was 14, and quickly rose to become one of the most skilled active phreakers alive.

"Who's the best out there?" says Jeff Daniels, a veteran phone hacker and an admitted mentor to Matt. "The little blind kid is one of the best. And that's a fact."

Innocent at first, Matt's worst instincts surfaced after he fell in with a gang of telephone ruffians -- men as old as 40 -- who eventually fingered the teenager when they were swept up in an FBI crackdown on swatters late last year. The government says the gang launched swatting attacks in over 60 cities, leaving hundreds of victims and chalking up over $250,000 in losses.

Interviews by Wired.com with Matt and his associates, and a review of court documents, FBI reports and audio recordings, paints a picture of a young man with an uncanny talent for quick telephone con jobs. Able to commit vast amounts of information to memory instantly, Matt has mastered the intricacies of telephone switching systems, while developing an innate understanding of human psychology and organization culture -- knowledge that he uses to manipulate his patsies and torment his foes.

The holes he's exploiting are in large part the same ones a previous generation of phreaks relied on. He's running variations of the same old scams. Daniels notices this as well. "He is nasty as the day is long because he knows a few tricks from the old days," he says.

It's as though the phone companies -- which enjoy notoriously close relations with the feds -- are so adept at getting their hackers arrested that they're little motivated to spend money securing their sprawling infrastructures. If malicious phone phreaks were the only threat to telecom customers, that might be a sound strategy. But as the pretexting scandals of 2006 showed, the same vulnerabilities make things easy for snoops and criminals of all stripes, and a report released this week tallying identity theft complaints ranks AT&T and Sprint customers as the second and third most victimized, respectively.

(Disclosure: The author is a one-time phone phreak.)

Matt appeared on the phone phreaking scene in late 2004, when a neighbor gave him the number of a telephone party line called the Boston Raven. Party lines are privately run telephone-conferencing facilities where people from around the country dial in and socialize, forming friendships, romances and, at times, bitter enemies.

While similar to online, text-based chat rooms, the party lines are actually an echo of a much older phenomenon that began in the early 1980s with home-brew phone conferences boasting anywhere from two to eight call-in lines. Today's computerized party lines offer virtually limitless capacity, and include features like multiple "rooms" for different groups to congregate.

Like those early conferences, modern party lines are also home to a small cohort of phone phreaks -- hackers who specialize in telephone systems. It's a subculture that immediately appealed to Matt.

"I've been interested in phones since I've been about 8," says Matt, who lives with his single mother, and older brother and younger sister in an East Boston apartment. "I talked to technicians when they came down here to do things on my phone."

Blind hackers were a part of the first generation of phone phreaks in the 1970s, and it's easy to see the draw. On the phone, Matt's handicap is irrelevant, and his gifts -- which include his ironclad memory, and vocal skills that can mimic a much older man, or masquerade as a woman -- make him an impresario. A party line denizen called "Lotus" remembers the first time he encountered Matt at a Boston conference. "He was sitting in the room beat-boxing. And I was like, who's playing the drums in here? And it was just Li'l Hacker."

Matt started asking questions about phone phreaking, learning a little. The party lines are a gladiator school of mischief, and Matt began challenging experienced phone hackers with the obscenity-laced bravado of a teenage boy feeling power for the first time.

"We're enemies at this time," says Daniels, a 36-year-old Alabama man who runs one of the party lines. "And he's telling me in this little 12-year-old sounding voice what he's going to do to me." He laughs. After Matt lost a phone war with Daniels, the elder phone phreak became Matt's closest friend and mentor, schooling him in the ins-and-outs of the phone system.

Perhaps grateful to have a worthy protégé to receive his knowledge, Daniels didn't give much thought to how Matt would use it. "I don't sit down and say, 'Hey Matt, I'm going to teach you how to infiltrate such-and-such,'" Daniels says. "The conversation starts with a discussion about how equipment operates."

Matt says he ordered phone company switch manuals off the internet and paid to have them translated into Braille. He became a regular caller to internal telephone company lines, where he'd masquerade as an employee to perform tricks like tracing telephone calls, getting free phone features, obtaining confidential customer information and disconnecting his rivals' phones.

It was, relatively speaking, mild stuff. The teen though, soon fell in with a bad crowd. The party lines were dominated by a gang of half-a-dozen miscreants who informally called themselves the "Wrecking Crew" and "The Cavalry." The group was led by a 40-year-old Cleveland ex-con named Stuart Rosoff, a.k.a. "Michael Knight," and Guadalupe Santana Martinez, Jr., a.k.a., "Wicked Wizard."

The gang specialized in serving up trouble to people who defied them on the party lines. Their most common tactic was swatting. Using a commercial caller ID spoofing service called SpoofCard, they'd call police departments around the country with false alarms, triggering tense confrontations between armed cops and the victims, at least two of whom have suffered injuries.

Matt's phone friends -- some of whom had being trying to get Rosoff and his associates arrested for years -- cautioned Matt to steer clear of the group. But the teen was cocky and arrogant, and was swept in by Rosoff's goading, even coming to believe he was invulnerable to prosecution. "They told him things like, 'You don't have to worry about this, you're a blind kid, you're a minor,'" says Lotus. "They would feed this kid this bullshit, and eventually he'd start to believe it."

That's when Danielle Gasper, then 18, met "Hacker Matt" on a party line in late April 2005.

Though Danielle doubted his claim that he was only 15, and blind (she thought he could be as old as 20), Hacker Matt seemed like a nice guy, she later told investigators. But as she spoke with him twice a day for about a week, he became less nice, and started pressing her for phone sex.

Their relationship soured for good when the family phone rang at 3 a.m. on May 1 of that year, a few hours before Richard Gasper was scheduled to start his shift as a screener at the Colorado Springs Municipal Airport. Hacker Matt asked for Danielle, who was asleep in the other room. "I want to have phone sex with her," the caller told Gasper.

Gasper called the man a pervert and hung up, perhaps thinking that ended the matter. But Hacker Matt was persistent. "What's the matter?" Gasper asked on the next call. "Can't you get sex from a real woman?" On the fourth call, the caller threatened to "knock the dimple off" Danielle's chin and to "blow up the fucking airport with (Gasper) in it."

Minutes after the Gaspers hung up on Hacker Matt for the fifth time, the phone rang at the Colorado Springs Police Department. A recording of the call was obtained by Wired.com.

"Now listen here," the caller growled. "I've got two people here held hostage, all right? Now you know what happens to people that are held hostage. It's not like on the movies or nothing, all right? You understand that?"

"OK," the female dispatcher replied calmly.

"One them here's name is Danielle, and her father."

Identifying himself as John Defanno, the caller claimed to be armed with a .22 caliber handgun, and said the hostages were duct-taped, and the father injured. "Defanno" warned dispatchers not to send armed police into the house. "I will shoot," he said. In an effective touch, he seemed to address someone in the room "Shut up!" he barked.

The Sheriffs Office responded quickly. They called Gasper's number, and Gasper told them about the phone calls and the bomb threat. But they didn't believe him. Shortly after 4 a.m., deputy sheriffs showed up at his house, ostensibly to take a report. When Gasper stepped outside to meet them, he was taken into custody while police stormed the house. His daughter and his parents were inside, but, of course, there was no gunman.

The next day, Gasper's phone was mysteriously forwarded to the FBI's office in Washington DC.

In the aftermath of the swatting, Karl Mai, a deputy sheriff detailed to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in Colorado Springs, started looking for Hacker Matt. Adam Panagia, the head of AT&T's fraud division, passed on a tip from an informant that Li'l Hacker had been heard bragging about the Gasper swatting. But the investigation petered out after two months.

In two phone interviews with Wired.com, Matt was evasive and taciturn. He spouted angrily about the crimes committed by other party liners, particularly Rosoff and Martinez, but declined to answer questions about his own activities. He denies making any swatting calls.

But Daniels says Matt, particularly in his younger days, was capable of unleashing hell on his perceived enemies. "You don't have a clue," says Daniels. "He was a raving lunatic ... He could decide he doesn't like you, and he could make your life a living hell, and there's nothing you could do about it."

"I give that guy props, but in some respects he's not smart enough for his own IQ," says Jered Morgan, a phone phreak known as Lucky225.

Unlike Rosoff and the others, though, Matt seemed to develop some restraint as he grew more skilled. Instead of sending police out to people's houses, or phoning Child Protective Services with false abuse reports, Matt spent more of his time calling internal phone company numbers and flexing his growing access to phone company systems.

According to the government, between August and October 2006 Matt logged more than 50 pretext phone calls to Verizon's provisioning center in Irving, Texas. He also told party liners that he could eavesdrop on calls on Verizon's network with the help of a credulous employee.

Verizon admits to suffering some breaches, but emphasizes that it was purely indirect. "No one has literally accessed a Verizon computer, but there has been social engineering taking place," says Verizon spokesman William Kula.

To hack AT&T, Matt boldly adopted the identity of a real phone company security agent named William Jones. In a series of undated recordings obtained by Wired.com, Matt is heard repeatedly phoning AT&T's internal help desk to get workers to disconnect the phone of Kenneth McComas, a party line rival who lives in Ohio.

"We're looking at a fraud account," he said in one call, affecting a confident baritone. "We're just gonna have to take that out of there." While the worker processed the order, Matt kept him engaged in jocular small talk thick with camaraderie.

His enthusiasm sometimes chaffed other hackers. At one point, Matt allegedly hacked into a Verizon recorded-announcement system that tells callers when a number has been disconnected or changed. Other hackers were exploiting the system for more subtle pranks, until Matt stomped over the recordings with his own voice. "If you called any number that was not in service, you would hear him say some weird shit," says Teli Brown, a former phone hacker known as "Gray Area." "It was funny, but it ruined it."

By then, Matt's reputation had taken on a life of its own, and tales of some of his hacks -- perhaps apocryphal -- are now legends. According to Daniels, he hacked his school's PBX so that every phone would ring at once. Another time, he took control of a hotel elevator, sending it up and down over and over again. One story has it that Matt phoned a telephone company frame room worker at home in the middle of the night, and persuaded him to get out of bed and return to work to disconnect someone's phone.

To Matt's family, the teen's interest in telephony seemed harmless. His 18-year-old brother would read him articles on hacking, according to Lotus. And while Matt was on the party lines, his mother, Amy Kahloul, could sometimes be heard in the background playfully imitating his frequent pose as an AT&T technician.

"I think that she has concerns," says a Boston phone phreak who was Matt's only real-life friend from the party lines. "She's like, 'Don't get yourself into trouble.' But I know that she also respects Matt's interest. She knows that it makes him happy, and she's proud of how much Matt's learned." (Kahloul could not be reached for comment, and the family's lawyer did not return repeated phone calls).

The Boston phone phreak, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of FBI attention, is the only party liner to meet Matt in person. In the summer of 2006, he showed up at Matt's home to intercede in a brewing confrontation between Matt and another Boston party liner.

The visitor chatted with Matt's family for a few minutes, before meeting Matt, a heavyset kid with a shaved head. The visit was a rare incursion into Matt's real life from the phone world, and Matt was shaking with nervousness. "I showed up unexpected, and he didn't know what was going on when I rang the bell," says the phone phreak. "But after a few minutes he calmed down."

On another day, the Boston phone phreak met up with Matt at an East Boston plaza while Matt's mother was shopping. Often brusque and abusive on the party lines, "in person, he's a very friendly guy," the phone phreak says. "Easy to get along with and have a conversation with." The friends hacked on a pay phone for an hour-and-a-half.

But the Boston phone phreak eventually distanced himself as Matt became more involved with Stuart Rosoff and the other swatters -- a relationship characterized by posturing and mutual harassment.

"Stuart E. Rosoff is going get on his knees and suck my pole, dude," Matt taunted one day, in a recorded party line conversation. "He cut my phone off three times today ... But I got it back on, three times."

"You won't get it back on any more," Rosoff responded, incorrectly.

Matt's roughhousing with the swatters alarmed his party line friends, who'd become protective of the sharp-tongued teen. When Rosoff began harassing Matt's mother, another phone phreak sent $800 to help the family move. Their new location didn't stay a secret for long, though. "He moved, literally, right around the block," says Lotus. "He had his phone all rigged so it was showing different locations, and they still tracked him down. They started to harass him again and sucked him back in."

But time was running out for the swatters. They'd gotten away with their harassment in large part because each individual swatting call was considered a minor, local offense -- a misdemeanor in some jurisdictions. No law enforcement agency had ever stitched them all together.

Then, on Oct. 1, 2006, Martinez staged a swatting attack against Stephanie Proulx, a female party line participant in Fort Worth, Texas. When police arrived, expecting to find a shooting in progress, a detective on the scene realized he'd already been to the apartment on an earlier false emergency call. He interviewed Proulx, who told him all about Rosoff, Martinez and other members of the gang. Martinez had even swatted her father in Cleburne, Texas. The detective called in the FBI.

Special agent Allyn Lynd, from the FBI's nine-person Dallas cyber-crime squad, began an investigation. A West Point graduate and a veteran of the Global Hell defacement gang prosecutions of the late 1990s, Lynd phoned up corporate security officers at Verizon and AT&T, who had been tracking the party liners for years.

Verizon sent Lynd their file on Li'l Hacker, complete with call logs showing Matt phoning a variety of internal Verizon offices, including RCMAC, an office responsible for entering commands directly into telephone switches. AT&T security agent Gary Beaulieu had a hotter tip: He told Lynd about Rosoff, who at that very moment was serving time for telephone harassment in a county jail in Cleveland.

Lynd booked a flight to Ohio. Before he left he ran a check through the FBI's computers for incidents similar to the Proulx case. He found the 2005 Colorado Springs case linked to "Hacker Matt," and contacted Karl Mai to see if he had any questions for Rosoff. Mai had a request, according to a task force report on the case. "Any information developed as to the real identity of Hacker Matt would be helpful."

On Nov. 21, 2006, Lynd and a partner interviewed Rosoff in jail. The details of the conversation are hard to come by, but court records indicate that on that day, Lynd obtained a new confidential informant. The informant provided ample details about the swatting incidents, naming Martinez, a New York man named Chad Ward, and Jason Trowbridge, a bill collector who'd used his access to a consumer database to get information on the gang's targets. The anonymous informant, Lynd admitted in an affidavit, "has been accused by members of the party lines as being engaged in telephone harassment."

The informant also gave Lynd something the FBI had been looking for since 2005: the real name of Little Hacker.

Two weeks later, the FBI held the first of several meetings with Matt in the East Boston apartment, while his worried mother looked on. The teenager proved to be a fount of information on Rosoff's and Martinez's actions, but he became evasive when the feds asked him about his own hacking. "They asked, hey, are you able to drop in on lines?" Matt recalls. "And I told them, I'd rather not talk about things like that."

Lynd began grooming Matt as a confidential informant, a path that would make it easy to let the teen emerge relatively unscathed from the looming swatting prosecutions. But the phone companies Matt so effortlessly manipulated were less forgiving of the blind teenager. AT&T investigator Gary Beaulieu began monitoring the phone numbers Matt called.

When Beaulieu saw Matt dial into a party line just a few days after the hacker made a deal with the FBI, the phone cop called in to listen. He heard another phone phreak describe a new way to forward somebody's phone without their knowledge using a particular AT&T facility. Matt's phone was soon seen calling the AT&T number.

Beaulieu passed the information onto Lynd, and Matt was in hot water again. Prosecutor Linda Groves called Matt's attorney, and warned that if Matt continued to hack the phone companies, he'd lose his status as a protected informant.

Matt agreed to record some phone calls with Rosoff's crew for the FBI, and in January he turned over four cassette tapes filled with calls. But he didn't stop hacking. By February, the FBI had formally revoked his status as a confidential informant, and began planning for his indictment. Lynd told Mai that Matt couldn't stop hacking for more than 72 hours.

Daniels agrees, but says his protégé can't help himself. His entire world is on the telephone.

"Instead of looking at him as some malicious kid who's out to do no good, maybe you should look at him as a 17-year-old blind kid with an addiction," says Daniels. "Maybe the adults should think about that."

The federal government has gone after juveniles in only a handful of computer crime cases. In the first one, in 1997, a hacker named "Jester" phoned into an unprotected Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) dialup and crashed a subscriber loop carrier system, killing phone service for Rutland, Massachusetts for six hours. He was sentenced to two years probation and 250 hours of community service.

In 2000, a 16-year-old Miami youth became the first juvenile to go to jail on federal computer crime charges, when he was sentenced to six months for hacking NASA. In 2005, a Boston phone hacker, who made a bomb threat against a Florida school, was sentenced to 11 months detention. In the most recent case, a teenage bot herder called "SoBe" pleaded guilty in February, and faces 12 to 18 months in jail.

Complicating matters in Matt's case is that there's no federal law against pretext phone calls. So in court filings in related cases, the feds have invented a novel legal theory just for the blind hacker. Matt, they argue, violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by persuading phone company workers to access their computers on his behalf. He hacked by proxy, using his voice instead of a computer.

Prosecutors may not be eager to test that theory in court, though, and going after minors can be complicated. Former Dallas cyber-crime prosecutor Matthew Yarbrough, who worked with Lynd on the Global Hell prosecutions, says it's usually not worth the trouble. "Those 20 guys in Global Hell, I only ended up prosecuting three or four of them because most of them were minors," says Yarbrough. "I remember looking back and thinking this was just too much a pain to do this."

When the swatter indictments came in last June, Matt was spared. FBI agents in 11 cities swept in on the swatters and their associates, arresting five of them: Rosoff, Martinez, Ward, Trowbridge, and Trowbridge's girlfriend, Angela Robberson. All five have since pleaded guilty, and are scheduled for sentencing in March. All but Robberson are in custody. All of the swatters named Matt as a co-conspirator in their plea agreements, claiming he'd used his access to the phone companies to get information on swatting victims.

Rosoff agreed to cooperate against his associates. In exchange, Dallas assistant U.S. attorney Linda Groves, who declined to comment on the case to Wired.com, persuaded a Michigan prosecutor not to go after Rosoff for one of the nastier phone attacks -- a false report Rosoff allegedly made against a female party line user in which he claimed that she was abusing her child. Groves also promised to recommend a sentence below federal guidelines if Rosoff's cooperation was found to constitute "substantial assistance" to the government.

Matt was re-interviewed, but not charged. But the indictments didn't end the FBI's investigation. In the wake of the arrests, party liners in California, New York and Omaha, Nebraska. contacted Lynd to complain that they were being harassed by unindicted members of the conspiracy, who were pressuring them to stop providing information to the FBI, according to an October 2007, affidavit by Lynd.

The phone companies were also still on the case. Referring to Matt by his initials, because of his underage status, Lynd wrote, "I was contacted multiple times by employees of both AT&T and Verizon and was told that the illegal activity was continuing and was now being orchestrated by M.W. and other unindicted co-conspirators."

Then the FBI agent caught a remarkable break. In October, Lynd was tipped off that somebody was still using Chad Ward's SpoofCard account. He checked in with the company that runs the caller ID spoofing service, and learned that SpoofCard offers a special option: With the press of a touch-tone button, users can have SpoofCard record their spoofed calls. The recordings stay on SpoofCard's servers for retrieval.

Ward and the other swatters had used that option. Over the next two weeks, Lynd obtained recordings from 17 SpoofCard accounts in three search warrants. One warrant alone, targeting nine accounts, produced recordings of 98 calls, including two swatting attacks, countless harassing phone calls, a false report to Child Protective Services and a series of extortion threats. Court records don't indicate who was on the recordings.

With the recordings in hand, the FBI is preparing for another round of indictments. For his part, Matt denies trying to hush up any witnesses. "There's a lot of gossip about it, the investigation," Matt says. "A lot of gossip about when people are getting out of jail -- a lot of he-said, she-said. Nobody has to worry about me doing anything to anybody out there."

Matt's friends say he's the one who's worried. But he's also not stopping. Several phone phreaks and party liners told Wired.com that Matt is still on the party lines daily, openly bragging about his ongoing social engineering successes against the phone companies. He's also popping up on private, unpublished conference bridges, where phone hackers run their exploits live on three-way. If recent history is a guide, AT&T's security agents are also on the line, listening in.

Matt will turn 18 on April 7, and many expect him to be picked up by the FBI before the candles have gone out on his birthday cake. In truth, though, turning 18 doesn't affect Matt's federal exposure for actions committed as a minor.

But if Matt celebrates his birthday by disconnecting a party liner's phone, or wheedling someone's Social Security number out of a Verizon representative, or forwarding someone's line to the FBI's number in Washington … Then all bets are off. Nobody interviewed for this story believes that Li'l Hacker will stop. And he's not fooling anyone by using the pay phone down the street.

"One of the reasons he's so effective ... is because that's all he does," says Daniels, the veteran phone phreak. "All he knows is what he knows. He's completely consumed with telephone party lines all the day, all the time. It's depressing, but at the same time he has become quite a force."

"He doesn't understand what it took a long time for me to learn," Daniels adds. "Everything you think is another world is really the same old world."
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/ne...2/blind_hacker





FCC Hearing: Comcast Uses Hacker Techniques
Ernesto

Today is an important day for network neutrality, as the FCC’s Broadband Network management hearing has been discussing Comcast’s attempt to slow down BitTorrent traffic. One of the panelists said Comcast uses “hacker techniques” to manage their network.

When we first reported that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds, we never expected that it would lead to a FCC hearing, but it did. Let’s hope it’s for the better.

The second half of today’s hearing started with a number of network and technological experts telling us about the Internet, its history, and its makeup. Of main contention was the line between acceptable, and unacceptable traffic management.

Wise things were said, and the panelists made some good points about the unfairness of the traffic management tools that Comcast uses. There was emphasis on the TCP reset, which means that a few seconds after you connect to someone in a BitTorrent swarm, a peer reset message (RST flag) is sent by Comcast and the upload immediately stops.

Richard Bennett (co-inventor of the twisted-pair system for ethernet, and its protocol, 1BASE5) targeted those opposed to any sort of traffic management in his opening statement saying, “if we can’t control network management, we’ll have to shut down the internet”. David Clark, of the MIT computer science lab, opened by saying that ISPs can either see enemies, or they can see partners, and suggesting that right now, they see the former. He, like almost all the panelists, called the current usage of Sandvine technology ‘troubling’, and said that the user should pick the Quality of Service (QoS) level, not an ISP.

Daniel Weitzner, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Decentralized Information Group summed up bad traffic management with: “Maybe it’s a bit like the old adage about pornography ‘I know it when I see it’. In this case I know what Comcast is doing is in the camp of unreasonable. These are techniques that hackers would use to deny service to any application on the web, very similar in that regard. It might be interesting to hold a panel of security experts to talk about those kind of mechanisms, I’m certainly not one. But, forging data on the internet is probably outside of the realm of reasonable, and any standards body would deem it to be.”

However, one of the most succinct criticisms of Comcast’s actions came from Prof. David Reed, of MIT’s Media Lab, who suggested that any ISP that didn’t follow the standard solutions evolved over the last 30 years should not advertise themselves as an Internet provider, but instead as a company “offering selective access to portions of the net only”, a description many of Comcast’s customers will probably agree with.

The FCC questioner continued the panel discussion, and pointed out that one of the problems might be that there is no actual data on how busy the network was, something that, from his point of view, would be helpful in determining whether the TCP resets are a unreasonable form of network management or not.

One of the panelists (sorry, they all sound the same) immediately replied to this by pointing out that congestion was not important. He compared the TCP reset to a conversation between two people where a third party - who pretends to be one of the persons engaged in the conversation - says “Stop, this conversation is over”. He added: “I find it uncomfortable that someone in the middle is creating a message to you that appears to come from me, I have a lot of trouble with that.”

At the beginning of the hearing FCC chairman Kevin Martin said that they were willing to step in if needed. Let’s hope they will. Feel free to file a comment if you want to let the FCC know what you think of Comcast’s haxxor skills. A video of the hearing will be available within two days.

Stay tuned.
http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-uses...niques-080225/





F.C.C. to Act on Delaying of Broadband Traffic
Stephen LaBaton

The head of the Federal Communications Commission and other senior officials said on Monday that they were considering taking steps to discourage cable and telephone companies from discriminating against content providers as the broadband companies go about managing heavy Internet traffic that they say is clogging their networks.

The agency is considering new rules and enforcement decisions that would force the cable and telephone companies to more clearly disclose to consumers the circumstances in which they might delay some traffic. Comcast recently disclosed that the heavy use of video sharing applications has forced them to slow down some broadband traffic. Consumer groups have replied that such packet discrimination is both unnecessary and potentially threatens to undermine the freewheeling nature of the Internet.

“They must be conducted in an open and transparent way,” said Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, at a hearing on network neutrality and network management here Monday. “While networks may have reasonable practices, they obviously cannot operate without taking some reasonable steps but that does not mean they can arbitrarily block access to certain services.”

Michael J. Copps, a Democratic commissioner, said that until recently, the cable companies had been decided “in a black box that the American public could not peek into.” He expressed alarm that any cable companies might be degrading or slowing down network traffic.

“The time has come for a specific enforceable principle of nondiscrimination at the F.C.C.,” Mr. Copps said. “Our job is to figure out where you draw the line between unreasonable discrimination and reasonable network management.”

The hearing comes as the commission has been called to resolve a growing number of disputes between broadband providers and file-sharing companies over consumers using peer-to-peer protocol to upload larger video files. Cable companies say that the growing use by consumers of the Internet to get large video files is beginning to clog their networks.

But consumer groups say that efforts to manage the traffic may result in the cable companies favoring one content provider or file-sharing company over another. Comcast has recently acknowledged that it has delayed Internet traffic of BitTorrent, a file sharing service that makes it easier for consumers to upload video files.

The Commission has been considering complaints made by Vuze, BitTorent and several consumer groups that Comcast has violated a policy statement issued by the commission in 2005 that permits Internet service providers to engage in “reasonable network management.” The term has become a focal point in the revived debate over what is called network neutrality.

At the hearing, Gilles BianRosa, chief executive of Vuze, attacked Comcast’s decision to slow down Internet traffic. The company is a leading provider of high quality video to computer users, and has had more than 20 million downloads of its application.

He said the problem is that “the network operator is our competitor.”

“We compete with Comcast with delivery of content over the Internet,” Mr. BianRosa said. "What we have here is a horse race and in this contest, Comcast owns the race track, in fact, the only track in town. They also own a horse. We are being told they are only slowing down our horse by a few seconds.”

He said that Vuze has been waging a “cat and mouse” game with Comcast in an effort to find ways around Comcast’s decision to slow down broadband to heavy users of his service.

“We agree that network operators should be able to employ reasonable measures to manage their networks. We are against network management with no boundaries. It threatens the openness and freedom of the Internet.”

The hearing is being held all day Monday in the Ames courtroom at Harvard Law School, near the congressional district of Representative Edward J. Markey, a Democrat who as the head of a House telecommunications subcommittee recently introduced legislation intended to prevent cable and telephone companies from discriminating in the way they control broadband traffic. (The school is also the alma mater of Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the commission.)

The legislation faces significant political obstacles and is unlikely to be adopted this year. But the debate over it has set off a fierce lobbying war.

In his written testimony, David L. Cohen, an executive vice president of Comcast, told the commissioners that the growing popularity of peer-to-peer applications was straining the network.

“Independent research has shown that it takes as few as 15 active BitTorrent users uploading content in a particular geographic area to create congestion sufficient to degrade the experience of the hundreds of other users in that area,” Mr. Cohen said. “Bandwidth-intensive activities not only degrade other less-intense uses, but also significantly interfere with thousands of Internet companies’ businesses.”

“Far from managing our network in a discriminatory way to benefit our own offerings — other than managing our network to make our high-speed Internet service faster and better — our limited network management practices ensure that everyone else’s applications and services, even those that may compete with our services and use P2P protocols, work,” Mr. Cohen said.

But Mr. Markey expressed concerns about Comcast’s practice, warning of “the transformation of BitTorrent into bit trickle.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/te...25cnd-fcc.html





Network Neutrality: How the FCC Sees it (Part 1 of 2)
Andy Oram

The mere announcement of an FCC hearing on "broadband network management practices" was a notch in the gun of network neutrality advocates. The achievement was reinforced by the line-up at Harvard University's law school today. The Comcasts and Verizons were outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the left wing of the network neutrality movement, which included such leading lights as Yochai Benkler, David P. Reed, and the honorary host of the event, Representative Edward Markey, who heads the House's Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.

Yet to a large extent, the panelists and speakers were like petitioners who are denied access to the king and can only bring their complaints to the gardeners who decorate the paths outside his gate. I believe that the FCC commissioners see distinct limits to what they can accomplish, and that their compromise will come out much closer to the current practices of the Comcasts and Verizons than to the more idealistic calls for an Internet that we should have had seven or eight years ago.

I feel a natural pull toward network neutrality, which I knew for many years in slightly different versions and different terms (common carriage, the layered protocol stack, the end-to-end principle, the stupid network) before the current buzzword emerged. But I soon realized that the subject was a thornbush from which it is hard to untangle a solution, and wrote a major analysis two years ago that I really think still stands as an accurate representation of the issues.

But where do industries, the public, and the government stand today? That's what I'll explain in this article. I'll drill down tomorrow in another article about some interesting details at the hearing.

Format of the event

Today's hearing was the first event in a stated policy by the FCC to get "outside the Beltway" and go before citizenry around the country. If bringing the FCC to us contributes less of a carbon footprint than bringing us to the FCC, I'm all for it, but I personally didn't get much more of thrill than when I saw a live webcast of the Senate's network neutrality hearings two years ago.

Still, I appreciate the commissioners' willingness to appear before an audience of hundreds, and I thank them along with the Harvard Law School and Markey's office for organizing this event. With my praise echoing in your ears, I have to note three missteps I think the organizers made.

The first was to hold the hearing in Harvard Law School's Ames auditorium instead of the FleetCenter sports arena, which would have been more suited to the size of the crowd as well as the emotional mood of the attendees.

The second misstep was to change the date at the last moment, which made it hard for people such as me (who arranged my schedule around the event) to attend the whole thing.

The third was the format. As I mentioned at the start, the line-up was slanted toward network neutrality advocates. It made me suspect that this public hearing was a sop to these idealists, and a counter-balance to the actual policy that the FCC will adopt.

But the line-up at any hearing is always a stunted representation of the range of creative ideas on a topic, just as presidential campaigns are. Benkler, for instance, has tremendous vision and gave a stunningly eloquent presentation of his view of the Internet's future, but he still represents just one branch of a very bushy movement that I'll categorize a bit later.

The Free Press (who also had a panelist) set up a studio in the Law School to take testimony from any and all comers. The results will no doubt be a YouTube of network neutrality. I'm sure there is much in the recordings that is insightful, heartfelt, and stimulating, but the gems will be hard to pick out and organize coherently. Isn't it time to use available technology to organize public input in some rational way that's more diverse and representative than hand-picked panelists but more useful than a barrel of impetuous commentary?

The stakes

Broadband network management practices--the subject of today's hearings--have an impact far beyond the number of bits in the network mask used to route IP packets. Issues on which the hearings focused today included:

• The "four freedoms" of telecommunications, inspired by Richard M. Stallman's four software freedoms and enunciated by none other than Michael Powell, the chair who redirected the FCC along its current free-market path. Powell's freedoms are the right (within the limits of the law) to access any content of your choice, to use any applications of your choice, to attach any devices of your choice, and to understand the parameters of the network service you receive.
• The future of innovation in Internet applications, services, and protocols.
• The attainment of bandwidth that is ten or a hundred times the current standards, an increase we need for today's Internet applications and that are being achieved in several other developed nations.
• Open content, which can promote democracy and provide alternatives to an ever more concentrated mainstream media. In this regard, it is not irrelevant that the FCC has permitted far greater cross-ownership in the media than before, and that the NAACP organized a protest about the decreasing racial diversity of mainstream media at today's hearing. (On the other hand, Verizon is a corporate sponsor of the NAACP. You make your alliances where you have to.)

Three stances

Within the parameters suggested by Powell's four freedoms (not to mention the 1996 Telecom Act), three different points of view have emerged in the network neutrality debate.

The large Internet providers, limited in the money they are willing or able to spend to increase bandwidth, want leeway to control traffic toward two ends: to balance out current bandwidth, and to generate extra revenue that they claim they will spend to add bandwidth.

Balancing out current bandwidth is the less noxious goal, and one companies would probably try to apply lightly in order to keep all customers as happy as possible. Comcast's infamous restrictions on peer-to-peer traffic, which many critics claim to be a monopolistic blow against video downloads that compete with Comcast's cable offerings, are probably an outlier case.

But such traffic shaping still has the unintended consequence of introducing distortions into the choices made by those who offer or consume network services. As law professor Timothy Wu pointed out on one of today's panels, investors would be reluctant to fund innovative Internet companies if their services could be choked off unexpectedly.

Generating extra revenue is even more alarming, because here the vendors are playing favorites. There is also no guarantee that they would actually use the money they skim off the top to fund higher bandwidth. (Why would they?)

On the other side of the debate, observers have actually gone beyond network neutrality. It is now seen as a stop-gap at best, and more often a distraction from the real goal of increased competition.

Some advocates want to nationalize the physical network or build out new networks with government funding; some want to leave the network in its current hands but strip the incumbent companies of all their higher-level services so they have no incentive to discriminate. And yet others want to amend interconnection rules and beef up enforcement of rules against discrimination so that new competitors arise naturally.

As I said before, this competitive, high-speed Internet is what we should have had seven or eight years ago, and I'll explore that in tomorrow's article.

But what we'll end up getting is the third stance, which FCC commissioner Michael J. Copps described in his opening comments: a formal endorsement of non-discrimination as a policy that Internet providers must follow, leading to continual FCC review of current practices by telecom and cable companies in order to build up, over time, a collection of case law that can ensure fair access without altering the basic ownership of the physical network.

Benkler argued strenuously against this continual fussing and fixing, but after years of actions in favor of the incumbent operators, the FCC can't do much more.

This is the essential message I took away today about the current state of Internet policy and the relative positions of the major players. To some extent, the rest is all rhetoric, but I'll go into that tomorrow.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/20...w-the-fcc.html





House Bill Would Create Voluntary Seal of Approval for Internet Service Providers

ISPs Unlikely to Sign Up, Says XMission Founder
Jeff Robinson

Utah Internet Service Providers could receive a seal of approval from the state Department of Commerce if they meet certain conditions, under a bill approved today by the House Government Operations Committee. The question is, would any providers be interested in signing up? The sponsor, Republican Representative Michael Morley from Spanish Fork, says the bill allows ISPs to show the public where they stand on pornography.

"Basically, it's a voluntary program for ISPs who are willing to say that they will not host pornography," he said. "It allows consumers to look at those kinds of products, when they're looking for an ISP, to support those who are making a statement that they're not willing to support pornography."

But that's not all providers would have to do to receive the seal of approval. They would also have to agree to turn over the records of users who have used their services for illegal activity to law enforcement. The bill would also fine participating ISPs $10,000 for violating the terms of the seal, although receiving the seal is voluntary to begin with.

XMission founder Pete Ashdown says he wouldn't sign up for this seal of approval.

"It would mandate that I hand over information about my customers without a court order to law enforcement, just on mere suspicion, and I still believe in the Fourth Amendment in this country," he said.

Ashdown also says in order to earn the seal of approval, he'd have to log more information about his customers, although the bill doesn't provide any means for him to do so. The XMission founder believes legislation likes this makes Utahns look ignorant about technology. XMission is a KCPW underwriter.
http://www.kcpw.org/article/5422





Net Filter at Test Phase
Fran Foo

THE federal Government's plan to have internet service providers filter pornography and other internet content deemed inappropriate for children is going full-steam ahead.

Trials are to be conducted soon in a closed environment in Tasmania.

Today is the deadline for expressions of interest to Enex TestLab, the Melbourne company evaluating internet service provider content filters on behalf of the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

ISP-based filters will block inappropriate web pages at service provider level and automatically relay a clean feed to households.

To be exempted, users will have to individually contact their ISPs.

The trial will evaluate ISP-level internet content filters in a controlled environment while filtering content inappropriate for children, Enex said.

"We invite vendors of all types (hardware appliances, software - proprietary or open-source) of ISP-based internet content filters to participate.

"Vendors will be involved in the installation and configuration of their filters to ensure their correct deployment," Enex said in a newspaper advertisement.

The testing is slated for completion by July and will be followed by live field trials.

Enex was selected more than six months after ACMA closed a tender for an organisation to test ISP-based content filters.

"The contract has been let. It will be completed by June 30, as we originally planned," Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said at a Senate Estimates hearing last week.

"We have indicated that there will be a field test to follow."

The tender was awarded to Enex on January 16, ACMA spokesman Donald Robertson said.

The tender closed in July and evaluation was conducted late last year, but ACMA decided not to let the tender until after the federal election caretaker period, Mr Robertson said.

Privacy advocates have long argued that ISP-based filters are too onerous and web users should be free to choose what they want to access online.

They also say several measures, including PC-based filters, would be more effective in protecting children online.

The internet sector has consistently voiced concern about the Government's ISP filters.

Internet Industry Association chief executive Peter Coroneos has said any clean feed policy would have to be balanced against the likely financial and performance costs, and ACMA's first annual report to Senator Conroy confirmed his fears.

On the performance impact of filters, ACMA said: "In the case of personal computers the cost of upgrading processing power may be modest (although significant in terms of household income).

"However, for ISPs the cost of upgrading or augmenting the expensive hardware that they typically deploy may be substantial, particularly for small providers."

The report, released last week, also conceded that Web 2.0 technology poses the greatest threat to the younger generation.

"The risks to Australian youth are primarily those associated with Web 2.0 services - potential contact by sexual predators, cyber-bullying by peers and misuse of personal information," ACMA said.

The rise in popularity of social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace, coupled with a dive in the use of email, has made it difficult to filter content.

"Filters are currently unable to sift the content of communication between users using instant messaging or chat services," ACMA said.

The agency concluded that education was the most effective way of addressing risks associated with illegal contact online.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





How Dangerous Is the Internet for Children?
David Pogue

A few years ago, a parenting magazine asked me to write an article about the dangers that children face when they go online. As it turns out, I was the wrong author for the article they had in mind.

The editor was deeply disappointed by my initial draft. Its chief message was this: “Sure, there are dangers. But they’re hugely overhyped by the media. The tales of pedophiles luring children out of their homes are like plane crashes: they happen extremely rarely, but when they do, they make headlines everywhere. The Internet is just another facet of socialization for the new generation; as always, common sense and a level head are the best safeguards.”

My editor, however, was looking for something more sensational. He asked, for example, if I could dig up an opening anecdote about, say, an eight-year-old getting killed by a chat-room stalker. But after days of research—and yes, I actually looked at the Google results past the first page—I could not find a single example of a preteen getting abducted and murdered by an Internet predator.

So the editor sent me the contact information for several parents of young children with Internet horror stories, and suggested that I interview them. One woman, for example, told me that she became hysterical when her eight-year-old stumbled onto a pornographic photo. She told me that she literally dove for the computer, crashing over a chair, yanking out the power cord and then rushing her daughter outside.

You know what? I think that far more damage was done to that child by her mother’s reaction than by the dirty picture.

See, almost the same thing happened at our house. When my son was 7 years old, he was Googling “The Incredibles” on the computer that we keep in the kitchen. At some point, he pulled up a doctored picture of the Incredibles family, showing them naked.

“What…on… earth?” he said in surprise.

I walked over, saw what was going on, and closed the window. “Yeah, I know,” I told him. “Some people like pictures of naked people. The Internet is full of all kinds of things.” And life went on.

My thinking was this: a seven-year-old is so far from puberty, naked pictures don’t yet have any of the baggage that we adults associate with them. Sex has no meaning yet; the concept produces no emotional charge one way or another.

Today, not only is my son utterly unscarred by the event, I’m quite sure he has no memory of it whatsoever.

Now, I realize that not everybody shares my nonchalance. And again, it’s not hard to find scattered anecdotes about terrible things that happen online.

But if you live in terror of what the Internet will do to your children, I encourage you to watch this excellent hour long PBS “Frontline” documentary. (I learned about it in a recent column by Times media critic Virginia Heffernan).

It’s free, and it’s online in its entirety. The show surveys the current kids-online situation—thoroughly, open-mindedly and frankly.

Turns out I had it relatively easy writing about the dangers to children under age 12; this documentary focuses on teenagers, 90 percent of whom are online every single day. They are absolutely immersed in chat, Facebook, MySpace and the rest of the Web; it’s part of their ordinary social fabric to an extent that previous generations can’t even imagine.

The show carefully examines each danger of the Net. And as presented by the show, the sexual-predator thing is way, way overblown, just as I had suspected. Several interesting interview transcripts accompany the show online; the one with producer Rachel Dretzin goes like this:

“One of the biggest surprises in making this film was the discovery that the threat of online predators is misunderstood and overblown. The data shows that giving out personal information over the Internet makes absolutely no difference when it comes to a child's vulnerability to predation.” (That one blew my mind, because every single Internet-safety Web site and pamphlet hammers repeatedly on this point: never, ever give out your personal information online.)

“Also, the vast majority of kids who do end up having contact with a stranger they meet over the Internet are seeking out that contact,” Ms. Dretzin goes on. “Most importantly, all the kids we met, without exception, told us the same thing: They would never dream of meeting someone in person they'd met online.”

Several teenagers interviewed in the story make it clear that only an idiot would be lured unwittingly into a relationship with an online sicko: “If someone asks me where I live, I’ll delete the ‘friend.’ I mean, why do you want to know where I live at?” says one girl.

Fearmongers often cite the statistic, from a 2005 study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center, that 1 in 7 children have received sexual propositions while online. But David Finkelhor, author of that report, notes that many of these propositions don’t come from Internet predators at all. “Considerable numbers of them are undoubtedly coming from other kids, or just people who are acting weird online,” he says.

“Most of the sexual solicitations, they’re not that big a deal,” says another interview subject, Danah Boyd of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “Most of it is the 19-year-old saying to the 17-year old, ‘Hey, baby.’ Is that really the image that we come to when we think about sexual solicitations? No. We have found kids who engage in risky behavior online. The fact is, they’ve engaged in a lot more risky behavior offline.”

As my own children approach middle school, my own fears align with the documentary’s findings in another way: that cyber-bullying is a far more realistic threat. Kids online experiment with different personas, and can be a lot nastier in the anonymous atmosphere of the Internet than they would ever be in person (just like grown-ups). And their mockery can be far more painful when it’s public, permanent and written than if they were just muttered in passing in the hallway.

In any case, watch the show. You’ll learn that some fears are overplayed, others are underplayed, and above all, that the Internet plays a huge part in adolescence now. Pining for simpler times is a waste of time; like it or not, this particular genie is out of the bottle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/te...gue-email.html





My Wired Youth
Virginia Heffernan

Last month, a PBS documentary called “Growing Up Online” revealed that kids today create false Internet identities, contend with cyberbullies and visit Web sites that promote anorexia. To my surprise, I felt defensive: the scare phrase “growing up online” recalled nothing so much as my own shady adolescence 25 years ago, when, because of a quirk of early communications technology, a small group of New Hampshire girls, including me, came of age on a primitive computer network — the Internet before the Internet.

The way things worked out, Internet addiction nearly laid me to waste. At 11, I pretended I was 18 and tried to pass off Raquel Welch’s measurements as my own, having copied them from TV Guide. For years, I dated, studied, endured heartbreak and hazing and crossed and double-crossed everyone in a mysterious online netherworld called Xcaliber. By the time I turned 13, I was confident I knew every single person online. Xcaliber taught me to type, talk to adults, experiment with fantastic personas and new idioms, spot lechers by their online styles and avoid ideologues who post in all caps.

Xcaliber was early social-networking technology developed at Dartmouth College. In the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, its vaguely Arthurian theme appealed to both hackers and preadolescents. But Xcaliber was actually intended as a convenience for the several academic and scientific institutions who shared Dartmouth’s mainframe computer — one of those big, heaving rhinos in a cage of bulletproof plexiglass. Every day a few hundred people dialed that mainframe for an alien signal — the then-unfamiliar squeal and crash of information transmission — and fit their receivers into acoustic couplers, like people in kayaks.

Having thereby turned “dumb terminals” into extremely slow personal computers, real mathematicians probably worked on impossible theorems using machine code. The rest of us did nothing but admire the many figures in pi and practice programming in Basic, the computer language invented by two local professors.

But on a fateful day in 1979, my friend Megan and I met some sysprogs: Dartmouth’s student system programmers, surprisingly cute hippie guys who developed the complex time-sharing system. One of them slipped us a password to Conference XYZ, a live-chat option on the network.

I remember that day by the keystrokes: joi xyz. Between the years 1979 and 1984, I typed that string thousands of times. The joi was short for “join” — commands could only be three letters long — and xyz was the name of the so-called “conference.” Conference XYZ amplified Xcaliber’s fantasy element: each convocation had levels and a self-anointed master who could banish chatters he disliked. Participants often communicated in an odd Led Zeppelin idiom or referred to damsels and steeds.

I assumed the ludicrous screen name Athena (my favorite sysprog called himself Apollo), while Megan’s handle was cooler: the doors. We then consorted — first with the sysprogs and each other, then with Dartmouth students, then with twisted weirdos, merchant marines and college students up and down the East Coast. We evolved a whole cutesy shtick that, in this text-only interface, chiefly meant giving up mixed cases. In the name of enhancing adorableness, we stuck to little letters and as few spaces as English semantics could bear. Our classic squinched-up opener was “hi-howre you?”

At 13, Megan and I introduced our friends to the conference, and as early adapters she and I felt obliged to play the pros and make the whole thing look ungeeky. When someone on the network asked me what I was up to, I replied — without fail — “music, sports and parties,” which was true, strictly speaking, though the parties were still make-your-own-sundae sleepovers, no boys allowed.

The result was attention, sweet nothings and mostly intimate or cerebral conversations — often about loneliness, the central preoccupation of people who stay up late and are drawn to anonymous forms of communication. Things rarely got more intense than “I’d really love to kiss you,” and when the conversations turned openly sexy, I’d beat it, a reaction echoed by the kids featured in “Growing Up Online,” who brag (as we used to) that they can always spot the creeps in their midst.

Which brings me to what nonplayers don’t get about online social-networking: it’s much less a walk on life’s wild side than it is a game like backgammon or — that ’70s favorite — Stratego. Successfully “playing the computer,” as we used to call it, requires a set of skills: social intuition, inventive self-presentation, speedy and clever writing, discretion, intricate etiquette, self-protection. Eventually you get a little finesse: you stop saying you’re 18, and you snub people who ask for measurements. You pride yourself on being able to find cool people, avoid jerks and not make dumb mistakes like disclosing too much, opening spam, talking to impostors and replying to all instead of to sender.

The best part of Conference XYZ was talking about adult stuff — etymology and lacrosse and Ronald Reagan — instead of being dismissed as too young. The worst part was the head games: the people who pretended they weren’t who they were and tried to make you say, “I’d love to kiss you,” so they could make fun of you. Your prowess as a player lay largely in how infrequently you were fooled, but everyone got fooled sometimes.

In 1983, I weathered jokes from my friends (“desperado!”) for going on a date with someone I met online. He was a freshman at Dartmouth, and I was 14, as he well knew, since we’d been talking frankly for months online. We met at a bonfire, wrapped in ski jackets and surrounded by my friends, who whispered to me that he seemed great. He kissed me that night, and we started dating, a little bit, no computers involved. Conference XYZ pretty much folded in 1986, but by then I was over it, like an easy game — tic-tac-toe or a search-a-word. Anyway, I’d been kissed, at last, which had never happened when I sat alone in front of a screen. Real life was apparently going to hold more excitement even than Xcaliber.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/ma...-medium-t.html





Network of TVs Talks to Cellphones and Trades Clips for Advertising
Claire Atkinson

A LITTLE-KNOWN private company, Akoo International, is setting up a network of digital screens that can send and receive messages from cellphones. The company aims to transform mobile devices into universal remote controls that can select on-demand content from big-screen TVs in airports, bars and restaurants.

With Akoo’s network, named m-Venue, cellphone users can send a text-message request for a music video, sports clip or fashion show to be delivered to their phone or played on a nearby Akoo television screen, which would act much like a high-tech jukebox.
In return, companies can deliver digital coupons and promotions to the cellphones. For instance, a customer at a John Barleycorn restaurant in Chicago, part of the m-Venue network, might select a text message code displayed on a big screen — say, one that would deliver Gwen Stefani’s new music video.

The customer would then receive a text message to the effect of, “Thanks! Gwen Stefani will play shortly. Show this text to your server and get any appetizer for $1.”

Ads on cellphones and digital signs that can be activated by consumers are part of the rapidly expanding business of mobile marketing.

The Carmel Group, a research firm in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., predicts that revenue in the United States from digital signs will grow to $2.6 billion by the end of 2010 from $1.5 billion in 2007.

While a handful of companies are using digital signs for one-way communication, like sending coupons to cellphones, Akoo (pronounced AH-koo) says its technology is different because it allows consumers to control content on digital advertising screens to see something they choose. “This is the only digital out-of-home billboard network that’s fully interactive with mobile phones,” said Andy Stankiewicz, vice president for marketing at Akoo.

The content for the system, he said, is being supplied through deals with the Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Fashion TV, which have collectively made more than two million clips available to m-Venue.

Advertisers are being lured to Akoo’s network by its potential customers, who tend to be young and hard to reach. Cellphone users can register online for the service and choose to receive offers. The system also interests marketers given its proximity to the cash register, where 70 percent of purchase decisions are said to be made.

“We can tie back a mobile phone user to the customer’s purchase history,” said Niko Drakoulis, the chief executive of Akoo, based in Chicago. This works partly by identifying a person’s location when they use the system.

Akoo, which was founded in 2001, has done some early trials with McDonald’s. At one Chicago store, Akoo said, a 14-day trial with the digital screens helped increase business 17 percent.

Ad agencies have shown both interest in and trepidation about cellphone-activated digital signs. The creative agency Leo Burnett and its nontraditional sister shop, Arc Worldwide, both part of the Publicis Groupe, have signed an alliance with Akoo. The digital agency Avenue A/Razorfish, which is owned by Microsoft, is also discussing trials.

Texas State University became the first college to become part of Akoo’s network after Akoo made a deal with the food provider Chartwells, which manages food services for 200 American universities and is part of the Compass Group.

Akoo’s other public partners are mainly in the Chicago area, including the restaurant chain Bob Chinn’s Crabhouse; the Cubby Bear, a Chicago sports bar with live music; and Ala Carte Entertainment, the owner of several bars and restaurants in the area. Mr. Stankiewicz declined to say how many display screens were in the network.

Other ad agencies, while not familiar with Akoo, say they see interesting possibilities for the marriage of mobile and digital signs. “I can’t see how marketers in today’s environment couldn’t look at something like this and say it completely makes sense,” says Ross Dobson, managing partner for digital, direct and analytics at the ad agency Mullen in Wenham, Mass., a part of the Interpublic Group of Companies. “I hope they’d embrace this before they embrace other disruptive advertising on mobile devices.”
Mr. Dobson said some clients had shied away from marketing with digital signs because of the potential for lawsuits that could result from the distraction posed by moving images.

Bill Reynolds, vice president and head of media for the Interpublic Group agency Erwin-Penland, said, “These installations initially attract consumer attention, but much of it is for the novelty effect. Many of these will wear out pretty quickly, so it will be a challenge to keep them fresh and engaging.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/bu...a/25adcol.html





Library of Congress Sells Itself Out to Microsoft for a Mere $3 Mil
Carl Malamud

Paul Jones of iBiblio tipped me off to some recent M&A activity by Microsoft, this time involving the Library of Congress.

This deal involves the donation of "technology, services and funding" (e.g., mostly not money) with a purported value of $3m from Microsoft to the Library of Congress. The Library, in turn, agrees to put kiosks running Vista in the library and to use Microsoft Silverlight to "help power the library's new Web site, www.myloc.gov."

The official blogger of the library, Matt Raymond, says "this is really a quantum leap for the library." Perhaps it is, but it sure smells like a whole lot of proprietary.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/20...ongress-1.html





Publisher Purges Thousands of Unlicensed Fonts
Nick Heath

Publishing giant Faber & Faber is wiping away the chance of costly lawsuits by using software to purge unlicensed fonts.

The London publishing house, which has printed classic authors from T.S. Eliot to W.H. Auden, found hundreds of thousands of unlicensed fonts on their machines using software from Monotype Imaging.

The haul could have cost hundreds of thousands if left unaddressed--a recent Business Software Alliance enquiry valued 11,000 unlicensed typefaces at another London publishing house as being worth 80,000 pounds ($156,000).

Faber said it was shocked at the number of unlicensed fonts it uncovered on 21 Apple Macs by Montotype's Fontwise software, nearly three times the initial estimate.

The company has now cleansed nearly all unlicensed fonts from 19 of the computers and has purchased the remaining licenses.

Work is continuing to flush unauthorized fonts off the remaining two computers.

Roy Smith, information systems manager at Faber, said rogue fonts had built up over time as demand grew for a wide range of fonts within the design department.

He said: "Alarm bells started ringing when we saw other publishers punished for breaching copyright. We were totally shocked to see a six-figure number of fonts across the 21 machines. But we now have the tools and the knowledge required to maintain legality indefinitely.

"We know how important our own intellectual property is for our business, so ethically there really isn't any other option. It wasn't the case that staff didn't care about font licensing. The problem was a general lack of awareness of the copyright laws surrounding fonts and the concept of fonts as intellectual property."

Fontwise gives a snapshot of which font is in which directory or drive across the company.

It also allows Faber to stop unlicensed fonts from creeping back onto systems by tracking any new additions and giving designers the option of buying the license if necessary.

Faber has also introduced policies restricting designers from freely downloading new fonts.

Technical problems in Faber's systems have dropped following the purge of rogue fonts.
http://www.news.com/2100-1030_3-6231704.html





List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots
EFF

Introduction

This is a list in progress of color laser printer models that do or do not print yellow tracking dots on their output.

We are in the process of trying to interpret the information conveyed by these dots as part of our Machine Identification Code Technology Project.

Limitations of this information

A "no" simply means that we couldn't see yellow dots; it does not prove that there is no forensic watermarking present. (For example, the HP Color LaserJET 8500 series does not include any yellow tracking dots that we can see, but it may still include some kind of forensic marking, since the majority of other Color LaserJET models do. Other forensic marking techniques have been invented, and we do not yet know how to determine whether these techniques are used by a particular printer.)

A "yes" simply means that we (or another source, as noted) saw yellow dots that appeared anomalous to us. Until we decipher the marking schemes or receive other confirmation, this does not constitute proof that any particular kind of information is represented by these dots. In a very few cases, for example, they might be the result of a dithering technique, rather than a forensic mark, or they could be the result of a poorly calibrated printer. In most cases, we are confident that the arrangement of dots is intentional and is intended to track users.

Sources of information

We have employed three sources of information. We looked at printer output under a blue light and/or a computer microscope; we consulted press reports about printers (e.g. at Druckerchannel); we relied on printer manuals and other manufacturer statements. We welcome additional statements by manufacturers, resellers, or technicians.

Thanks to our friends at software firms and symphonies, public schools and physics labs, semiconductor fabs and ice cream parlors, in about a dozen countries around the world.

Table of printers

Manufacturer Model Dots? Comments

Brother
HL-2700CN yes volunteer test
HL-4200CN yes EFF test
Canon
CLC 1000 yes EFF test
CLC 2400 yes EFF test
CLC 3002 yes EFF test
CLC 4000 yes EFF test
CLC 5000+ yes EFF test
CLC-iR 3200-C1 yes EFF test
Color imageRUNNER C2570 yes EFF test
Color imageRUNNER C3100CN yes EFF test
Color imageRUNNER C3200 yes EFF test
Color imageRUNNER C3200N yes EFF test
Color imageRUNNER C3220 yes EFF test
Color Laser Copier 1150 yes EFF test
Imageclass MF8170C yes EFF test
LBP 2410 unclear faint dots; could be artifacts
Dell
3000CN yes EFF test
3100CN yes EFF test
5100CN yes EFF test
Epson
AcuLaser C900 yes EFF test
AcuLaser C1100 yes EFF test
AcuLaser C1500 yes EFF test
AcuLaser C1900 yes EFF test
AcuLaser C3000 yes EFF test
AcuLaser C4000 yes EFF test
Fuji: see Xerox
Hewlett-Packard
Color LaserJET 1550L yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 2250LN no (??) EFF test
Color LaserJET 2500 yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 2500N yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 2550 yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 2550L yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 2550N yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 2600N yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 2680 yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 2840 yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 3500 yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 3550 yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 3600DN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 3700 yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 3700DN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 3700N yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 4500 no EFF test
Color LaserJET 4500DN no EFF test
Color LaserJET 4500N no EFF test
Color LaserJET 4550 no EFF test
Color LaserJET 4550N no EFF test
Color LaserJET 4600 yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 4600DN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 4600HDN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 4600N yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 4650 yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 4650DN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 4650DTN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 4700DTN yes volunteer test
Color LaserJET 5M no EFF test
Color LaserJET 5100CN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 5500 yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 5500ATN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 5500DN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 5500HDN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 5550 yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 5550DN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 5550DTN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 8500 no EFF test
Color LaserJET 8500DN no EFF test
Color LaserJET 8550 no EFF test
Color LaserJET 8550DN no EFF test
Color LaserJET 8550GN no EFF test
Color LaserJET 9500 yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 9500HDN yes EFF test
Color LaserJET 9500MFP yes EFF test
IBM
Infoprint Color 1454 unclear dithering?
Infoprint Color 1464 PS3 yes dithering?
Konica
(Konica/Minolta)
Bizhub C350 yes EFF test
Colorforce 1501 yes EFF test
Colorforce 8050 yes EFF test
DialtaColor CF 2001 unclear dithering?
DialtaColor CF 2002 unclear dithering?
Ikon CPP500E yes EFF test
Magicolor 2 Desklaser no EFF test
Magicolor 2200 DL yes EFF test
Magicolor 2210 yes EFF test
Magicolor 2300 DL yes EFF test
Magicolor 2300 W yes EFF test
Magicolor 2350 yes EFF test
Magicolor 2350 EN yes EFF test
Magicolor 2400 W yes EFF test
Magicolor 2430 DL yes EFF test
Magicolor 2450 yes EFF test
Magicolor 3100 yes EFF test
Magicolor 3300 yes EFF test
Magicolor 5450 yes EFF test
Magicolor 7300 yes EFF test
Kyocera
FS-C5016N yes EFF test
FS-C5030N yes EFF test
FS-C8008 yes EFF test
Mita KM-C2230 yes EFF test
Lanier
LD238C yes EFF test
LP125CX/LP126CN yes EFF test
Lexmark
C510 yes EFF test
C720 unclear retest
C752 yes EFF test
C752N yes EFF test
C760 yes EFF test
C910 yes EFF test
C912 yes EFF test
Minolta: see Konica

OkiDATA
(Oki)
C5100 no EFF test
C5150 no EFF test
C5150N no EFF test
C5200 no EFF test
C5300 no EFF test
C7200 no EFF test
C7350 no EFF test
C7400 no EFF test
C7400N no EFF test
C9200 no EFF test
C9300 no EFF test
C9400 no EFF test
MIP C5540 no EFF test
OkiLAN 8100E no EFF test
Panasonic
Workio KXCL-500 yes EFF test
Ricoh
(see also Savin)
Aficio 1224C yes EFF test
Aficio 1232C yes EFF test
Aficio CL 2000 yes press report
Aficio CL 3000 yes EFF test
Aficio CL 3000E yes EFF test
Aficio CL 6010 yes EFF test
Aficio CL 7000 yes EFF test
AP 206 yes EFF test
Infotec/Danka ISC 2838 yes EFF test
Samsung
CLP-500 no EFF test
CLP-510 no EFF test
CLP-550 no EFF test
CLP-550N no EFF test
Savin
C3210 yes EFF test
CLP35 yes EFF test
Tektronix: see Xerox

Toshiba
eStudio 210c yes mfr. statement
eStudio 211c yes mfr. statement
eStudio 310c yes mfr. statement
eStudio 311c yes mfr. statement
eStudio 2100c yes mfr. statement
eStudio 3100c yes mfr. statement
eStudio 3511 yes EFF test
FC15 yes mfr. statement
FC15i yes mfr. statement
FC22 yes mfr. statement
FC22i yes mfr. statement
FC25P yes mfr. statement
FC25Pi yes mfr. statement
FC70 yes mfr. statement
Xerox
(Tektronix)
DocuColor 12 yes EFF test
DocuColor 40 yes EFF test
DocuColor 1521 yes EFF test
DocuColor 1632 yes EFF test
DocuColor 2000 yes mfr. statement
DocuColor 2045 yes EFF test
DocuColor 2240 yes EFF test
DocuColor 3535 yes EFF test
DocuColor 6060 yes EFF test/mfr. statement
Phaser 560 no EFF test
Phaser 740 no EFF test
Phaser 750 (Z750V) no EFF test
Phaser 750P no EFF test
Phaser 790 yes EFF test
Phaser 850DP no EFF test
Phaser 860DP no EFF test
Phaser 1235 no EFF test
Phaser 6100 no EFF test
Phaser 6200 no EFF test
Phaser 6200DP no EFF test
Phaser 6250DP no EFF test
Phaser 6350DP no EFF test
Phaser 7300DN no EFF test
Phaser 7300DT no EFF test
Phaser 7700 no EFF test
Phaser 7750DN no EFF test
Phaser 8200DP no EFF test
Phaser 8200DX no EFF test
Phaser 8400 no dithering?
Phaser 8400B unclear dithering?
Phaser 8400DP unclear dithering?
Phaser 8400DX unclear dithering?
Phaser 8400N unclear dithering?
Phaser 8440DP unclear dithering?
Phaser 8550 no EFF test
Phaser 8550DP no EFF test
WorkCentre M24 yes EFF test
WorkCentre Pro (all models) yes mfr. Statement

http://www.eff.org/pages/list-printe...-tracking-dots





Secret Service Inspector Admits Destroying Documents
Rebecca Carr

A senior U.S. Secret Service inspector admitted today that she destroyed original evidence sought in a long-standing lawsuit alleging that the service routinely discriminates against African American agents.

The team of assistant U.S. attorneys representing the service told U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson today that they did not know that the inspector had placed the documents in a “burn bag” for destruction just two days before she was scheduled to testify in the case.

Inspector Carrie Hunnicutt testified that she questioned more than 150 senior service officials under an order from Robinson about their search for all paper documents related to the promotion of black agents in a civil lawsuit filed in federal court eight years ago.

Nearly 60 African Americans allege in sworn statements that they were leapfrogged by white agents who scored lower on promotional exams and forced to endure the use of the word “nigger” on the job. They are seeking certification for a class-action lawsuit, but so far have not made it past the discovery stage.

Hunnicutt testified that she destroyed surveys from 50 high ranking officials; a statistical report; fax sheets and documents that showed who was contacted during the service’s search for paper documents in the case.

Hunnicutt said she placed the documents in a “burn bag” on Jan. 30, 2008, just two days before she was scheduled to testify about the the service’s efforts to comply with Robinson’s Dec. 21st court order to hunt for documents.

Today’s hearing was the 7th hearing held by Robinson to determine whether to sanction the service again for failing to produce credible testimony and evidence in the lawsuit. Robinson has already sanctioned the service three times. Legal experts say that is a highly unusual number especially against a government agency.

Robinson told the lawyers that she was “shocked” that a Secret Service agent would destroy documents. The Secret Service’s own counsel has ordered the agency’s employees to retain all documents relevant to the case.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Marina Utgoff Braswell told Robinson that she and the rest of the legal team did not learn about the extent of the destruction until Hunnicutt testified today.

“We are all learning for the first time what happened here,” Braswell said. Hunnicutt’s supervisor told the government lawyers on Tuesday that there were some “scraps of paper” that were destroyed but he did not elude to the destruction of the original surveys.

Braswell said her hands were tied to find out more information about the destroyed documents in advance of the hearing because of a court order forbidding Hunnicutt from talking to anyone about the case.

“We have certainly not been dilatory,” Braswell said.

The team of lawyers from Hogan & Hartson and Relman & Dane representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit for free said the burning of the documents is an “outrageous act” and in defiance of the service’s own order to preserve all documents in the case.

“I am shocked and disappointed in the U.S. Secret Service and their inability to retain and produce evidence relevant to our claims,” said E. Desmond Hogan, a lawyer with Hogan & Hartson in Washington. “This is representative of a pattern of behavior in this case. It shows how they disrespect and mistreat the plaintiffs in the case.”

Under questioning by assistant U.S. attorney Michelle Johnson, Hunnicutt said she destroyed the documents because she wanted the most accurate ones to be sent to court.

Hunnicutt said she noticed that some of the surveys, about 50, were misnumbered in January. So she “transferred” the correct information to the newly numbered surveys.

But during the cross-examination, Hogan argued that by destroying the original documents, the court would have no way to independently verify her work as accurate.

Robinson had to intervene several times during the questioning to instruct Hunnicutt to answer Hogan’s question. Nearly every single objection was overruled by Robinson in favor of the plaintiffs.
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/conte...tor_admit.html





Disturbing New Photos From Abu Ghraib

As an expert witness in the defense of an Abu Ghraib guard who was court-martialed, psychologist Philip Zimbardo had access to many of the images of abuse that were taken by the guards themselves. For a presentation at the TED conference in Monterey, California, Zimbardo assembled some of these pictures into a short video. Wired.com obtained the video from Zimbardo's talk, and is publishing some of the stills from that video here. Many of the images are explicit and gruesome, depicting nudity, degradation, simulated sex acts and guards posing with decaying corpses. Viewer discretion is advised.
http://www.wired.com/science/discove...=1&slideView=1





Head of Guantanamo Trials Resigns
Steven Edwards

The Pentagon official overseeing the planned military trials of Canadian Omar Khadr and other terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba resigned Monday - just days after a published report alleged he'd insisted there be no acquittals.

As General Counsel at the U.S. defence department, William J. Haynes was a leading architect of the military commission system U.S. President George. W. Bush ordered established in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

But his alleged backroom insistence the commission produce only convictions provoked a rush of commentary - much of charging it proved the trials will be a sham.

"I am sorry to see Jim leave the Pentagon," U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates said in Washington. "I have valued his legal advice and enjoyed working with him. Jim held this important post longer than anyone in history and he did so during one of America's most trying periods."

Haynes' alleged comments appeared in an interview Nation magazine conducted with Col. Morris Davis, who resigned last October as the commission's chief prosecutor, citing political interference.

"I said to (Haynes) that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis was quoted as saying about an August 2005 meeting the two men had.

"At which point, his eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? . . . We've got to have convictions.'"

The Pentagon has disputed Davis's recollection of the conversation, and denied there is any connection between the Nation article and Haynes' resignation, which takes effect next month.

"Mr. Haynes discussed his interest in returning to the private sector with the Secretary of Defence some months ago," said spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith. "Mr. Haynes was recently presented with an excellent opportunity and he and his family decided to take (it)."

Haynes' departure makes little difference for Khadr's prospects before the commission, his U.S. military lawyer, Navy Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, told Canwest News Service.

"Whether or not Mr. Haynes is managing the commission, it is still the process he helped to create," Kuebler said.

"Consistent with his comments, it is designed to produce convictions of the presumptively guilty."

Kuebler spoke from Ottawa where, earlier in the day, he had joined opposition MPs in calling on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to intervene on behalf of Khadr.

"The Guantanamo Bay military commission process does not provide a fair trial. It is a political process," he said.

A military judge will rule soon on Kuebler's recent bid to have the charges against Khadr - who was 15 when U.S. forces seized him on an Afghan battlefield - dropped on grounds the commission isn't designed to try child soldiers.

"All (other) children taken to Guantanamo were ultimately released to be reintegrated back into the societies of their home countries - including a 14-year-old Afghani boy who was responsible for the death of a U.S. serviceman," Kuebler said.

Kuebler argued the United States has held onto Khadr on suspicion he has "intelligence value." Khadr's father, Ahmed Said Khadr, had been an al-Qaida operative close to Osama bin Laden before being killed in a U.S. air raid.

But Pentagon spokesman J.D. Gordon said the litany of charges against Khadr warrant his detention and eventual trial as an adult. He is accused in a grenade attack that left a U.S. serviceman dead.

"Omar Khadr is charged with murder, attempted murder, conspiracy and spying, all in violation of the Military Commissions Act," he said.

"Canadian law and U.S. law both provide that a person of Khadr's age alleged to have committed such offences can be tried as an adult . . . If Khadr is found guilty, however, age may be relevant at sentencing."

Barring a successful motion to dismiss, Khadr is scheduled to go on trial in May.
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/...8687fa&k=13379





U.S. Designates Afghan Journalist Enemy Combatant

Military board says it has `credible information' to further detain media aide as danger to troops
Olivia Ward

An Afghan journalist working for CTV has been designated an "unlawful enemy combatant" by the U.S. military, after being held for four months without charge.

Jawed Ahmad, also known as Jojo Yazemi, went before an enemy combatant review board, which determined there was "credible information" to detain him further as a danger to foreign troops and the Afghan government, a U.S. spokesperson said yesterday. He is being held at Bagram, north of Kabul.

Maj. Chris Belcher, spokesperson for the U.S.-led coalition, told the Associated Press Ahmad was allowed to make a statement to the review board, and "was in no way targeted because of his work as a journalist."

It was unclear if he was represented by a lawyer.

CTV News president Robert Hurst said his company "continues to be deeply concerned about Ahmad's well-being. We are continuing to work all diplomatic channels available to find out additional information and get Jojo his due process."

Ahmad, who is in his early 20s, had also worked as a freelance fixer for the Star.

"It is distressing to hear allegations such as these without being shown a single piece of supporting evidence," said Star Europe bureau chief Mitch Potter, for whom Ahmad did freelance translation and field work in Kandahar in 2006.

Earlier this week, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement asking U.S. authorities to disclose evidence and specify charges against Ahmad, after holding him since Oct. 26.

"We urge military officials to either charge (Ahmad) with a recognizable criminal offence, or if they have no intention of doing so, to release him immediately," said CPJ executive director Joe Simon.

Ahmad's brother, Siddique Ahmad, told reporters the military accused Jawed of having contact with local Taliban fighters. Journalists' organizations note that Afghan journalists often have contact with the Taliban, in order to get information for stories they are assigned.

Ahmad was detained in Kandahar, the southern area where Canadian troops are based – and one of the most Taliban-infiltrated areas. Potter described him as a "diminutive man who probably weighs 120 lbs. and could find it difficult to withstand a lot of pressure."

Human rights groups have protested reports of ill-treatment of prisoners at the Bagram base.

Ahmad is one of the latest local journalists to be detained by the U.S. in Afghanistan or Iraq. AP's Iraqi photographer Bilal Hussein has been held without charge in Iraq for 22 months.
http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/307722





Air Force Blocks Access to Many Blogs
Noah Shachtman

The Air Force is tightening restrictions on which blogs its troops can read, cutting off access to just about any independent site with the word "blog" in its web address. It's the latest move in a larger struggle within the military over the value -- and hazards -- of the sites. At least one senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so "utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream."

Until recently, each major command of the Air Force had some control over what sites their troops could visit, the Air Force Times reports. Then the Air Force Network Operations Center, under the service's new "Cyber Command," took over.

Quote:
AFNOC has imposed bans on all sites with "blog" in their URLs, thus cutting off any sites hosted by Blogspot. Other blogs, and sites in general, are blocked based on content reviews performed at the base, command and AFNOC level ...

The idea isn't to keep airmen in the dark -- they can still access news sources that are "primary, official-use sources," said Maj. Henry Schott, A5 for Air Force Network Operations. "Basically ... if it's a place like The New York Times, an established, reputable media outlet, then it's fairly cut and dry that that's a good source, an authorized source," he said ...

AFNOC blocks sites by using Blue Coat software, which categorizes sites based on their content and allows users to block sub-categories as they choose.

"Often, we block first and then review exceptions," said Tech. Sgt. Christopher DeWitt, a Cyber Command spokesman.

As a result, airmen posting online have cited instances of seemingly innocuous sites -- such as educational databases and some work-related sites -- getting wrapped up in broad proxy filters.
"A couple of years back, I fought this issue concerning the Counterterrorism Blog," one Air Force officer tells Danger Room. "An AF [Air Force] professional education course website recommended it as a great source for daily worldwide CT [counterterrorism] news. However it had been banned, because it called itself a blog. And as we all know, all blogs are bad!"

He's joking, of course. But blogs and social networking sites have faced all sorts of restrictions on military networks, for all sorts of reasons. MySpace and YouTube are officially banned, for eating up too much bandwidth. Stringent regulations, read literally, require Army officers to review each and every item one of his soldiers puts online, in case they leak secrets. And in televised commercials, screensavers and fliers, troops are told that blogging is a major security risk -- even though official sites have proven to leak many, many more secrets. Now there's the Air Force's argument, that blogs aren't legitimate media outlets -- and therefore, shouldn't be read at work.

But this view isn't universally held in the military. Many believe blogs to be a valuable source of information -- and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, at home and abroad. Gen. David Petraeus, who heads the U.S. effort in Iraq, has commended military bloggers. Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, who replaced Petraeus as the head of the Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth, recently wrote (in a blog post, no less) that soldiers should be encouraged to "get onto blogs and [s]end their YouTube videos to their friends and family."

Within the Air Force, there's also a strong contingent that wants to see open access to the sites -- and is mortified by the AFNOC's restrictions. "When I hear stuff this utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream.... Piles of torn out hair are accumulating around my desk as we speak," one senior Air Force official writes in an e-mail. "I'm certain that by blocking blogs for official use, our airmen will never, ever be able to read them on their own home computers, so we have indeed saved them from a contaminating influence. Sorry, didn't mean to drip sarcasm on your rug."

One of the blogs banned is In From the Cold, which examines military, intelligence and political affairs from a largely right-of-center perspective. It's written by "Nathan Hale," the pseudonym for a former journalist and Air Force intelligence officer, who spent more than two decades in the service. He tells Danger Room, "If knowledge and information are power -- and no one disputes that -- then why not trust your people and empower them to explore all sides of issues affecting the service, air power and national security?"

Quote:
Obviously, DoD [Department of Defense] can decide what internet content should be filtered -- they spent billions on the IT architecture and billions more to maintain it. But if it's a matter of "ensuring worker productivity" and deterring "wasteful surfing of the internet," does it really make sense to block relatively small blogs (that just happen to focus on military and security issues), while allowing everyone to access ESPN or FoxSports? Wonder how much work time will be lost on filling out "March Madness" brackets, versus reading a military or intelligence blog?

In short, there doesn't seem to be any consistency in the current DoD policy. And that's no surprise. A few months ago, a senior Pentagon P.A. [public affairs] official told me that his service had no plans to engage the blogosphere, because their studies showed that "people don't rely on blogs for news and information." And he said it with a straight face.
The Air Force recently launched an $81 million marketing campaign to convince lawmakers and average citizens of its relevance in today's fights. By making it harder for troops to blog, an Air Force officer says, the service had undermined "some of their most credible advocates."

"The Air Force isn't getting the planes that they want because they are incapable of communicating their usefulness and applicability in this new war. Because Air Force officers talk more like corporate bureaucrats than cocky war fighters, no one is inspired or convinced of their pressing (and quite legitimate) need to modernize the force," he adds. "Air Force bloggers spoke the lingo of someone heavily invested in the fight, because they operate outside the survival-minded careerist world of public affairs, with many of them penning blog posts from theater."

Perhaps, says retired Air Force Col. Tom Ehrhard, who's now a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. But there are legitimate security reasons why blogs need to be restricted. Adversaries may be using blogs to take advantage of airmen, he notes.

Quote:
It is increasingly clear that active exploitation could take advantage of airmen and civilians who want to inform and correct the often outrageous, false assertions on these blogs. In doing so, it is easy for well-meaning insiders to violate operational security (OPSEC) tenets, either directly or tangentially. We are in a different world today when it comes to sensitive military information, and foreign intelligence operatives surely understand this and will exploit it. As a former member of Strategic Air Command, where OPSEC was (rightly) an obsession, this has been obvious to me for some time in reading aerospace-oriented blogs. This policy strikes me as a timely reminder to Air Force professionals that they should be on guard when blogging, because someone is watching.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/0...rce-banni.html





EFF Being Stymied in Effort to Explore Justice Department/Google Coziness
Paul McNamara

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to know all there is to know about contacts between Google and a Justice Department official involved in a highly charged 2006 government-snooping dispute that ensnared the search giant. That DoJ official, Jane Horvath, was subsequently hired by Google last year as senior privacy counsel.

The government has for six months refused Freedom of Information Act requests from EFF to see correspondence between Horvath and Google for the period the former was employed as the DoJ's first chief privacy and civil liberties officer (insert laugh track here), according to a suit filed yesterday by the EFF.

From the EFF press release:

Quote:
Jane C. Horvath was named the DOJ's first Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer in February of 2006. At that time, Google was fighting a massive DOJ subpoena asking for the text of every query entered into the search engine over a one-week period. The DOJ request -- part of a court battle over the constitutionality of a law regulating adult materials on the Internet -- ignited a national debate about Internet privacy.

The DOJ later scaled back its request, and a judge eventually allowed access to only 5,000 random Google search queries. In a subsequent news article, Horvath was publicly critical of the DOJ's initial subpoena, saying she had privacy concerns about the massive request for information. Horvath's new job as Google's Senior Privacy Counsel was announced in August of 2007.

"Google has an unprecedented ability to collect and retain very personal information about millions of Americans, and the DOJ and other law enforcement agencies have developed a huge appetite for that information," said EFF Senior Counsel David Sobel. "We want to know what discussions DOJ's top privacy lawyer had with Google before leaving her government position to join the company."
While Horvath's career path represented a sequence of events guaranteed to raise eyebrows, it's also not clear from the release what exactly the EFF is suspecting it might find in the Horvath/Google correspondence, so I asked for clarification from Sobel.

"It's a request that we very well might have made under any circumstances -- the DOJ's chief privacy official's contacts with the world's largest private repository of info about online activity," he writes. "The fact that she ended up working for Google made it all the more intriguing to know what kinds of contacts there were. We're not after anything in particular, just a window into the relationship between these two powerful entities vis-ŕ-vis privacy issues."

What requires no explanation is why the Justice Department has refused to comply with the EFF's request for what is clearly public information: the Bush Administration's fetish for secrecy and bedrock conviction that it operates above the law.

The Justice Department told Associated Press that it had no comment on the matter.

I've asked Google for a response. Don't expect anything meaningful.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/25435





Worker Snooping on Customer Data Common
Ryan J. Foley

A landlord snooped on tenants to find out information about their finances. A woman repeatedly accessed her ex-boyfriend's account after a difficult breakup. Another obtained her child's father's address so she could serve him court papers.

All worked for Wisconsin's largest utility, where employees routinely accessed confidential information about acquaintances, local celebrities and others from its massive customer database.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press in an employment case involving Milwaukee-based WE Energies shine a light on a common practice in the utilities, telecommunications and accounting industries, privacy experts say.

Vast computer databases give curious employees the ability to look up sensitive information on people with the click of a mouse. The WE Energies database includes credit and banking information, payment histories, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and energy usage. In some cases, it even includes income and medical information.

Experts say some companies do little to stop such abuses even though they could lead to identity theft, stalking and other privacy invasions. And companies that uncover violations can keep them quiet because in many cases it is not illegal to snoop, only to use the data for crimes.

"The vast majority of companies are doing very little to stop this widespread practice of snooping," said Larry Ponemon, a privacy expert who founded The Ponemon Institute, a Traverse City, Mich.-based think tank.

Jim Owen, spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, a lobbying association that represents utilities, disputed suggestions the problem was common in the industry.

"I am not aware of any other situation that has arisen in the utility sector," he said.

Companies generally avoid talking about snooping or any measures they've taken to prevent it.

Scott Reigstad, a spokesman for Madison, Wis.-based Alliant Energy, which has one million electric and 420,000 natural gas customers in Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, said his company has safeguards in place to stop misuse but does not discuss them publicly.

"We haven't had any issues that we're aware of," he said.

Jay Foley, executive director of the Identity Theft Resources Center, said state regulators and lawmakers must step in if companies are not guarding their customer information responsibly.

"Something needs to be done at the state level to make sure this is illegal," he said.

He said more companies have to start using software that can track each customer account that employees access.

WE Energies says it has taken numerous steps to stop the problem but even so detecting misuse can be difficult. That's because it is hard to discern the legitimate access of customer information from employees looking for curiosity.

"People were looking at an incredible number of accounts," Joan Shafer, WE Energies' vice president of customer service, said during a sworn deposition last year. "Politicians, community leaders, board members, officers, family, friends. All over the place."

Her testimony came in a legal case involving an employee who was fired in 2006 for repeatedly accessing information about her ex-boyfriend and another friend. An arbitrator in November upheld the woman's firing. The AP reviewed testimony and documents made public as part of the case.

The misuse came to light in 2004 when an employee helped leak information to the media during a heated race for Milwaukee mayor that a candidate, acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, was often behind in paying his heating bills. Pratt lost to the current mayor, Tom Barrett.

Pratt said he's convinced the disclosure cost him votes and unfairly damaged his reputation. Pratt said he recently met with top company executives and was satisfied it has stopped the problem as much as possible. He said he has dropped earlier plans to explore a lawsuit.

"They caught this and they are making corrections to it, which they should. But it never should have happened in the first place. Not just to me, but to anyone. They gave their employees too much latitude to access files."

After the incident involving Pratt, the company fired the employee who leaked the information and vowed to crack down after finding others engaged in similar practices. But problems continued.

In all, the utility fired or disciplined at least 17 employees for breaking the policy between 2005 and 2007, according to testimony and company records. Another employee gained access to Pratt's account for no business purpose and was suspended in 2005 but kept her job.

Others looked up information on their bosses at WE Energies and local conservative radio host Mark Belling, who said he had never been told of the breach.

Ponemon said employees with access to vast amounts of customer information often see nothing wrong with looking up an individual out of curiosity, or in some cases, more sinister motives.

Governmental agencies have also struggled with the problem.

The IRS took 219 disciplinary actions, including firings and suspensions, against employees who browsed through confidential taxpayer information last year, according to the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Information. That was more than double the number the previous year.

Last month, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety said it disciplined two employees who accessed information on 400 residents from its driver's license database. The agency did not say what the discipline was because it continues to investigate. It said the employees were looking for their own entertainment, not any criminal motives.

WE Energies serves 1.1 million electric customers in Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula and 1 million natural gas customers in Wisconsin.

Shafer said in an interview that the utility took steps to eliminate the practice and only one employee has been disciplined for violations in the last year.

After the 2004 incident, the company started checking who accessed high-profile customer accounts and requiring annual training on its policies.

Still, Shafer acknowledged in her deposition last year that it would be "difficult, if not impossible" to discover many instances of misuse.

Utility regulators in Michigan and Wisconsin said they had not been notified of the company's problems. They say they do not have any rules covering such misuse.

The head of the Wisconsin Citizens' Utility Board, which lobbies on behalf of utility customers, said he was "shocked and dismayed" to learn about the practice.

"The testimony is incredibly candid. I'm very surprised that utility employees were misusing this information," said executive director Charlie Higley. "We hope WE Energies has taken steps to ensure that information is treated privately."
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...97DEAD8V019TG0





German Court Limits Cyber Spying
BBC

Germany's highest court has restricted the right of the security services to spy on the computers of suspected criminals and terrorists.

Under the technique, software sent in an email enables the authorities to spy on a suspect's computer hard drive.

The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe said cyber spying violated individuals' right to privacy and could be used only in exceptional cases.

Civil liberties activists have warned of an unacceptable invasion of privacy.

National precedent

The case - which began last year - was brought after the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia allowed officials to begin using the technique.

Court President Hans-Juergen Papier said that using such software contravened rights enshrined in Germany's constitution, adding that the decision would serve as a precedent across the country.

The ruling emphasised that cyber spying by the authorities would have to receive the permission of a judge.

The German government has described cyber spying as a vital tool in fighting terrorism.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble welcomed the possibility of using the strategy and said it would be considered as part of plans to change the law.

"The court's decision must be carefully analysed and will be accounted for as the legislation is modified," he said.

Terror plots

Judicial approval is already required in Germany for a suspect's telephone to be tapped, and the interior ministry had been expecting the court to make a similar requirement for spying on computers.

During the case, Germany's independent privacy commissioner Peter Schaar argued that the measure would be a "further alarming step towards ever more sweeping surveillance".

Germany has uncovered a number of alleged terrorist plots in recent years.

In September 2007, the authorities arrested three men whom they claimed were planning bomb attacks around the country and belonged to militant Islamist group al-Qaeda.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...pe/7266543.stm





The Most Spied Upon People in Europe

Germany's highest court has ruled that spying on personal computers violates privacy, but governments across Europe are under pressure to help their security services fight terrorism and organised crime.

Here, BBC reporters give a snapshot of the extent of surveillance across Europe.

Paul Kirby on Germany

Dominic Casciani on the UK

Emma Jane Kirby on France

David Willey on Italy

Malcolm Brabant on Greece

Julian Isherwood on Denmark

GERMANY - PAUL KIRBY

Germans have an historic fear of state intrusion, dating back to the Stasi secret police in the East and the Nazi-era Gestapo. But the threat of terrorism has forced the German government to take stricter measures.

During the 1970s, the West German authorities tightened legislation after a series of attacks by the left-wing Red Army Faction. The German government went further following revelations about Mohammed Atta, the head of the Hamburg cell involved in the 9/11 attacks on New York.

The most controversial changes have come since 2006, when police found explosives in a pair of suitcases left on two passenger trains in Koblenz and Dortmund in western Germany.

The bombs did not go off and, after surveillance camera video was posted on the internet, arrests were made.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said the use of video surveillance was clearly important and rail operator Deutsche Bahn stepped up its use of closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras.

When a laptop was found apparently containing plans, sketches and maps, the authorities then considered how to monitor suspects' computers so that plots could be prevented at an earlier stage.

The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) already had the ability to monitor suspects' emails and the websites and chat rooms they visited.

They could also tap phones with the consent of a judge.

Now they wanted to send emails that would infect a recipient's computer with spy software and relay information to police computers.

The threat was compounded by the discovery of 12 vats of hydrogen peroxide in September 2007 and an alleged plot to bomb US civil and military targets.

Three hundred police had been involved in a nine-month surveillance operation but had not been able to access the suspects' computers.

The Constitutional Court has now decided that the practice of cyber spying violates the right to privacy but would be acceptable in exceptional cases, under the auspices of a judge.

Faced with warnings from Germany's privacy commissioner of ever more sweeping surveillance - and protesters' T-shirts bearing the slogan "Stasi 2.0" - the government will have to tread carefully.

The police believe they will need to use spy software in perhaps 10 cases a year.

UNITED KINGDOM - DOMINIC CASCIANI

There is a big-budget sci-fi thriller running on BBC TV at the moment called The Last Enemy.

The hero is advising ministers on plans for a crime-fighting database to link all databases. And, unwittingly, he becomes a victim of the computer's all-seeing eyes.

So is it silly drama or the shape of things to come?

Privacy campaigners say the UK has some of the world's leading surveillance systems - and they argue there is now a real failure of sufficient oversight.

Take the millions of CCTV cameras, for example. They were rolled out to deter city centre crime.

But thanks to the internet and new software that can read number plates, text and, in certain circumstances, isolate specific human behaviour, their importance is increasing ten-fold.

The question in the UK is what would happen if you took camera data and married it to other sources, such as information on the location of mobile phones, swipe cards for urban transport and static databases about you, your family and life history. That would be a pretty effective surveillance system, say critics.

Ministers say this is completely fanciful - for a start there are no plans for a supercomputer to gather this information.

Secondly they argue two important laws govern the use of personal information and how the security services can use surveillance technology.

But the reality is they are now struggling politically to make reassurances stick.

The two main opposition parties oppose plans for full biometric identity cards on grounds of cost, oversight and, increasingly, fears of incompetence. The cards are almost certain to become a big issue at the next general election.

A string of controversies have buffeted ministers including the loss of a laptop containing information on armed services personnel and the disappearance of CDs holding family records. There has also been a row over the bugging of an MP.

While none of these rows seamlessly fit together, the jigsaw pieces are enough to make some people nervous.

So while the police-led DNA database - the largest in the world - has clear crime-fighting successes under its belt, no political party will back the calls of one highly respected judge to place everyone on it.

The Roman satirist Juvenal famously asked "Who watches the watchmen?" and that question is very much alive in British politics today.

FRANCE - EMMA JANE KIRBY

When you remember that the word "Liberty" is one of just three words enshrined in the French Republic's motto, you can guess that on the whole, the French are not big fans of surveillance equipment.

Too bad then that last year, the French Interior Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, announced that the number of CCTV cameras in France would triple by 2009 in a bid to crack down on street crime and to fight terrorism.

Official estimates suggest there are already about 340,000 authorised surveillance cameras in France and this new move would see the number of cameras on Paris's public transport network hit 6,500 in the next two years - compared with a projected 9,000 on the London Underground in the same period.

Plans to deploy 4ft-long spy drones across French skies in an attempt to tackle the country's growing problem of gang violence were also unveiled.

The drones, with day-night vision, will be used to track suspects and should begin full operational testing this year. The plan has annoyed many local officials who doubt spy cameras are the answer - they would rather see neighbourhood police officers brought back.

Surveillance cameras are not just kept for the streets. Last year a company which manufactures GPS systems for cars launched Kiditel, a child-tracking device.

The games console-sized device slips into a child's pocket and allows parents to keep track of their child's movements via satellite images sent to their computers.

Many parents welcomed a product they believed would help their children keep safe, but psychologists like Jean Claude Guillemard were not so welcoming:

"The children who have this device will think of their parents as Big Brother" he said. "I think that scares me. I think it's dangerous for their mental health."

Similarly a French childminder caused a row last year when she became the first nanny to install an internet webcam in her creche so that parents could still look in on their children - and see that she was taking good care of them - even though they were at work.

The parents loved it, but local authorities and the National Federation of Maternal Assistants denounced the idea as undermining the relationship of trust between the parents and the child minder.

The eye in the sky may be keeping an ever closer watch on France - but the French are determined to keep their liberty.

ITALY - DAVID WILLEY

Italians are among the most spied upon people in the world. That's the conclusion of the authoritative German scientific think-tank, the Max Planck Institute, which reports that Italy leads the world with 76 intercepts per 100,000 people each year.

Although the Italian constitution guarantees privacy of information, and a national data protection authority was set up in 2003 with a communications ombudsman at its head, wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping are widely used not only by the secret services, but also by the judiciary, particularly in the fight against organised crime.

Prosecutors routinely order wiretaps as a result of police investigations, and the cost to the Italian state has become a heavy burden on the taxpayer.

Wiretaps are carried out with the help of the now privatised Italian Telecom, which has been frequently criticised in the media for working hand in glove with the secret services.

A former director of security at Telecom, Giuliano Tavaroli, who had close links with the secret services, was sent to prison together with his friend Marco Mancini, a former anti-terrorism chief, as a result of a wiretapping scandal.

Several recent high profile political scandals have revealed the extent to which the private conversations of politicians and public figures are being taped.

Although the bugging of MPs' phones is forbidden without the specific permission of parliament, prosecutors and judges routinely leak to journalists details of compromising conversations.

The former governor of the Bank of Italy, Antonio Fazio, was forced to resign as a result of a scandal which came to light in this way.

The outgoing government of Romano Prodi announced last year that it was going to introduce a law making it an offence punishable by up to three years imprisonment for journalists to publish information obtained through judicially authorised wiretapping leaks. But no such law was ever passed.

GREECE - MALCOLM BRABANT

In the run-up to the 2004 Athens Olympics, I met a man who was furious about the appearance of 350 cameras in the capital as part of a $1.5bn security programme to protect athletes and spectators.

"If I choose to have an affair with a woman who is not my wife, that is my fundamental human right, and I should be protected from being caught on camera," he said.

The man was walking in the suburb of Nikaia, where the local left-wing mayor, who disapproved of surveillance, had ordered workmen to daub black paint over the lenses.

That cameo encapsulates the desire of most Greeks to resist state attempts to spy on them and helps explain why Greece leads the European Union and the rest of the world in privacy protection for its citizens.

The other important contributory factor is the strength and moral independence of the nation's Data Protection Authority, which is resolute in its determination to uphold the following principles enshrined in the Greek constitution:

• Every person's home is a sanctuary

• The private and family life of the individual is inviolable

• Secrecy of letters and all other forms of free correspondence or communication shall be absolutely inviolable

The authority has real teeth. In December 2006 it fined mobile phone company Vodafone 76m euros for bugging more than 100 top Greek officials, including Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, around the time of the Olympics.

Vodafone's network planning manager in Greece, Costas Tsalikides, was found hanged not long after he informed his superiors he had discovered that spying software had been secretly installed in the company's system.

Mr Tsalikides family has always suspected he was murdered.

Since January 18, 2008, the case has been officially closed. Vodafone Greece will appeal against the fine and says it has co-operated fully with all relevant authorities since the beginning of the case.

The Data Protection Authority has also frustrated the efforts of the Conservative government to extract some value from the Olympic security system.

When a left-wing group called Revolutionary Struggle fired a rocket into the office of the US ambassador in Athens, there was no video record because the security cameras were switched off.

The authority refused to allow the cameras to be used for anything other than traffic control.

In November 2007, a state prosecutor told the police that they would be allowed to use footage from the surveillance system to prosecute demonstrators who turned violent.

The new rules were first applied during the annual 17 November march to commemorate the dozens of students killed in 1973 when tanks of the right wing colonels' junta crushed an uprising at Athens Polytechnic.

"So many years after the dictatorship, Greece is very sensitive in the area of freedoms," said Panos Garganos, who was marching for the 33rd year in succession.

The use of the cameras to monitor the demonstration led to the resignation of the head of the Data Protection Authority.

Despite the fact that Greece has such strong constitutional protection against state-sponsored spying, some of my contacts refuse to have sensitive conversations on either land lines or mobile phones, because they assume that someone is listening.

DENMARK - JULIAN ISHERWOOD

In keeping with other European countries, Denmark has introduced anti-terrorist legislation that has provided the country's domestic security service PET with a raft of monitoring tools with which to carry out its counter-terrorism activities.

With the discovery over the past five years of terrorist cells, and particularly groups using Denmark as preparatory ground for activities elsewhere in Europe, Danish parliamentarians have been relatively unanimous in adopting counter-terrorism measures, with the broad support of the general public.

These have included the availability to the domestic security service of quite extensive monitoring measures, particularly in the areas of communication interception, data retention and the ability to monitor and geographically locate mobile and other telephone conversations.

Internet Service Providers are now by law required to keep all communication for at least one year. Access to all these monitoring activities however, although simplified in the latest counter-terrorism legislation, is not automatic and still requires a court order.

While previous legislation required the security service to substantiate and obtain a court order for each telephone number it wished to monitor, the new law provides for application for a court order to monitor a person's full communication activities - telephones and cyber-communication - but only in connection with cases falling under counter-terrorism legislation.

CCTV monitoring, while extensive in other parts of Europe, is not widespread in Denmark, although there are currently plans, and a public demand, to introduce monitoring in some crime-prone urban areas following several murders and disturbances in defined areas at night.

However, safeguards against general CCTV monitoring are strict, preventing the installation of CCTV cameras in public areas that would allow the identification of individuals or groups.

A Copenhagen kindergarten that recently suggested it would like to install CCTV monitoring around its premises gave up the idea following a public outcry.

Similarly, workplace monitoring is under strict control, preventing camera surveillance of employees, although the installation of CCTV in public areas of shops in particular is permitted.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...pe/7265212.stm





Command and control - and more control

Unprepared to Fight Worldwide Cyber Crime
Patrick J. Dempsey

Although the Internet may be considered the greatest achievement of the past 50 years, the technology behind it has created a sanctuary for various types of computer criminals. The unfortunate and ugly truth is that the Web is providing a brand new “world” where international cyber criminals can thrive, and the world’s numerous criminal justice systems just aren’t ready to address these crimes in their entirety.

Cyber criminals don’t necessarily need to leave the comfort of their homes to commit their crimes. Today, for example, bank robberies can be committed in Southeast Asia via a computer that’s being controlled by an individual in Russia. Identity theft is achieved through a complex network of individuals residing in North America, Europe, and Africa, all effectively working together on the Internet to profit from shared information. And organized crime has ties to spam campaigns, identity theft, denial-of-service attacks, and organized hacking rings.

The fact is that Internet crimes are almost always international crimes. When you read about a bank system being hacked in order to steal 100,000 accounts, more than likely this crime was committed by perpetrators overseas, and there will almost definitely be a connection to organized crime. This part of the story is rarely conveyed to the everyday reader, but it is critical to understand this fact if we are going to fix the problem.

In the world of cyber crime, law enforcement officials in most countries have recognized that they must move much faster than the average investigator due to the fact that computer evidence can “disappear” rather quickly. These same cyber investigators realize they must be willing and ready to cooperate with law enforcement officials in other countries if they actually plan to capture the Internet criminals.

Laws, treaties, and conventions, such as the Convention on Cybercrime, have attempted to address the international cooperation issue. Although the Convention on Cybercrime is an outstanding step in the right direction, is not a “law” that applies to all countries. Regardless of whether the country is a member of this Convention, the punishments levied are based on the local laws of the land.

But the problem with investigating international cyber crimes and capturing criminals on the Internet is not necessarily due to lack of cooperation among international law enforcement bodies. The issue has much more to do with the fact that the legal systems throughout the world vary greatly and take a very long time to change. These two facts make it extremely difficult for law enforcement to cooperate, investigate, capture, and ultimately prosecute the cyber criminals today.

If we accept the fact that the greatest hurdle in arresting international cyber criminals is that various legal systems just aren’t prepared to address the speed at which these crimes occur or the various nuances that are unique to computer crimes, then the question is: What can we do to fix the problem?

It’s obvious that the Internet requires some type of governance. But it is just as obvious that trying to establish this governance through the numerous legal systems might not be practical. The other possibility for governing the Internet, and, more specifically, the criminal activity that occurs on the Internet, would be to change the structure of the Internet. Although I don’t support ideas like the “national firewalls” put in place by some countries, this type of solution does afford some level of control over Internet traffic flowing through said country.

However, knowing all the possibilities with disguising or “spoofing” one’s information on the Web, I’m not sure that there is a way to truly “protect our borders” when it comes to the Internet. The solution might be to establish two Internets -- the current Internet and a new, more secure Internet where users would be required to register prior to gaining access. Once again, though, we’re confronted with the issue of what would be the governing body that would manage the user registrations? Would it be an organization similar to the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) or InterNIC that would manage user registrations on the “new” Internet, or do we need to establish an entirely new entity to manage a more secure Internet?

The fight against international cyber crime is going to take a concerted effort from large and small corporations, law enforcement in all countries, as well as the governments and legislative bodies of those same countries. Most importantly, the average end user will have to join the fight to bring about change on the Internet, or create a “new” Internet using the lessons we’ve learned.
http://www.internetevolution.com/aut...doc_id=147027&





Soon U.S. Citizens Must Ask for Government Permission to Fly or Travel
David Gutierrez

The Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is moving forward to institute a rule that would require all passengers to go through a government review process before boarding any airplane that takes off or lands anywhere with in the United States.

The U.S. government already requires international passengers to participate in the Advanced Passenger Information System, providing their full name, gender, date of birth, nationality, country of residence, and travel document type and number to the TSA before boarding. Under the proposed Secure Flight Program, this procedure would also be required on domestic flights.

Currently, individual airlines are responsible for checking the passenger manifests against the "no fly" and "enhanced screening" lists provided by the TSA. The new programs are part of a concerted effort to centralize this process, so that the TSA itself will check all supplied information against these lists, and then instruct the airline or airport staff as to how to proceed.

The Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) has criticized the new Secure Flight rules for their secrecy and lack of accountability. The association has expressed concern that there is no clear appeals process for passengers denied boarding or continually forced to undergo enhanced security screening.

"On the surface, the new Secure Flight program no longer relies on commercial databases and appears to have reduced the number of names on the 'No Fly' list," said ACTE Executive Director Susan Gurley. "It also seems that the responsibility for checking data is no longer abrogated to the airlines. While this is a step in the right direction, it prompts the industry to ask what was the origin of this new data, how is it stored, who has access to it, and how can it be corrected."
http://www.naturalnews.com/022737.html





TSA Lab's New Concept in Airport Security: Tunnel of Truth

Futuristic vision of airport security would see passengers stand on a conveyor belt moving under an archway as different sensors scan them for weapons, bombs, and other prohibited items; no need to take the shoes off; by the time they step out of the tunnel, they have been thoroughly checked out

A smart mathemtics Ph.D. student may want to consider writing his or her dissertation on the direct correlation between, on the one hand, the importance of being on time for a pressing business meeting in another city and, on the other hand, the length of lines and slowness of the security screening process at the airport of origin. We may call it the Irritability Corollary. National Defense reports that Transportation Security Laboratory director Susan Hallowell would like to see the day when airline passengers no longer have to take their shoes off after standing in a long line at airport security checkpoints. Instead, she would like to combine the line and an array of sensors into what she calls a “tunnel of truth.”

The concept -- with the somewhat Orwellian name -- would have passengers stand on a conveyor belt moving under an archway as various sensors scan them for weapons, bombs or other prohibited items. By the time they step out of the tunnel, they have been thoroughly checked out, she said at a homeland security science and technology conference sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association.

“You’re in line anyway … why not enclose that in a little glass thing and do your analysis there?” she asked.


The lab has given a grant to Penn State University to study the concept.
http://hsdailywire.com/single.php?id=5622





Greenpeace Activists Blatantly -- and Easily -- Breach Heathrow Security

Greenpeace activists, protesting plans to build a third runaway at Heathrow, manage to breach tight airport security and clamber atop a Boeing 777 on the tarmac; security authorities worry about airport security

The British security authorities are investigating how, exactly, did Greenpeace activists manage to climb on top of a British Airways Boeing 777 at Heathrow. The demonstrators walked through a set of double doors at Terminal 1 and succeeded in making their way across the tarmac without being challenged or stopped. The Telegraph's David Millward writes that the demonstrators did not cause disruption to other flights, but security experts are worried about the ability of the demonstrators to make their way through several layers of supposedly tight airport security and reach the plane. The Greenpeace activists' stunt is but the latest in a series of protests by climate change campaigners, who last summer staged a camp at Heathrow. Their ability to get onto the tarmac and then climb onto a plane without police or security staff intervening raises serious question about the ability of Heathrow security personnel and systems to protect aircraft and passengers at the busy airport.

The protest is tied to a soon-to-be-made government decision about whether to press ahead with the third runway at the airport. Heathrow is running out of space, so observers believe the government will endorse the plans despite opposition from environmentalists, London mayor Ken Livingstone, and local authorities across the capital. The aviation industry disagrees and Flying Matters, representing a coalition of companies and trade unions condemned the protest. "This action is misjudged and misdirected: aviation is responsible for two per cent of global carbon emissions and is growing at a slower global rate than power generation and industry," a spokesman said. "If they are serious about climate change they should engage in a proper debate about solutions that will make a real difference."
http://hsdailywire.com/single.php?id=5623





Laptop Sold on eBay Hid Confidential Home Office Disc
Thair Shaikh

The Home Office has launched an investigation into how an optical disc holding confidential information was discovered hidden beneath the keyboard of a laptop bought on the online auction site eBay.

The disc was found by technicians when the computer was taken into a small IT repair company for service.

The laptop had been bought on eBay and taken to Leapfrog Computer repairs in Westhoughton, near Bolton, Greater Manchester, on Tuesday morning.

An engineer took the notebook apart and found a disc marked "Home Office Confidential" hidden beneath the keyboard. Lee Bevan, the managing director of LeapFrog Computers, said: "This seemed like just another IT repair ... the customer said he had bought it on eBay and seemed quite innocent. It was just an ordinary laptop and it was only when we opened up the keyboard that we found the disc - it had the words Home Office and Confidential written on it.

"The disc appeared to be hidden deliberately underneath the keyboard. We put the disc in the drive to see what it was, but it was encrypted.

"As soon as I saw it belonged to the Home Office I placed it in the company safe and called the police. Luckily, it has ended up in the right hands. The police were here most of the day examining the laptop and the disc."

A Home Office spokesman last night said that both the disc and the laptop were encrypted, suggesting that the computer also belonged to the department, although police have not confirmed this. He would not comment on how the laptop may have gone missing, nor on the type of information held on the disc.

The spokesman said: "We understand that encrypted IT equipment has been handed to Greater Manchester police. Both the laptop and the disc were encrypted, thus safeguarding any information that might be stored on them. Investigations are now under way. It would be inappropriate to comment further while they are ongoing."

A spokeswoman for Greater Manchester police said: "A laptop has been recovered. Inquiries are continuing."

The missing laptop and disc will be a further embarrassment to the government which has had to deal with a number of departments losing confidential information.

The personal details of 25 million child benefit claimants were lost when two compact discs containing the bank details and addresses of 9.5 million parents and the names, dates of birth and national insurance numbers of all 15.5 million children vanished after a junior employee of HM Revenue and Customs put them in the post, unrecorded and unregistered.

That was followed by the loss of thousands of learner drivers' details by a DVLA contractor, and at least 168,000 patients were affected by NHS trusts' loss of data.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology.../politics.ebay





Philharmonic Stirs Emotions in North Korea
Daniel J. Wakin



As the New York Philharmonic played the opening notes of “Arirang,” a beloved Korean folk song, a murmur rippled through the audience. Many in the audience perched forward in their seats.

The piccolo played a long, plaintive melody. Cymbals crashed, harp runs flew up, the violins soared. And tears began forming in the eyes of the staid audience, row upon row of men in dark suits, women in colorful high-waisted dresses called hanbok and all of them wearing pins with the likeness of Kim Il-sung, the nation’s founder.

And right there, the Philharmonic had them. The full-throated performance of a piece deeply resonant for both North and South Koreans ended the historic concert in this isolated nation on Tuesday in triumph.

On Wednesday, North Korea’s main state-controlled daily newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, gave a brief account of the concert, with a picture of the orchestra, on an inside page. Of Lorin Maazel, the Philharmonic’s music director, it said, “His performance was very sophisticated and sensitive.”

The audience applauded for more than five minutes, and orchestra members, some of them crying, waved. People in the seats cheered and waved back, reluctant to let the visitors leave.

“Was that an emotional experience!” said Jon Deak, a bass player, backstage moments after the concert had ended. “It’s an incredible joy and sadness and connection like I’ve never seen. They really opened their hearts to us.”

The “Arirang” rendition also proved moving for the orchestra’s eight members of Korean origin. “It brought tears to my eyes,” said Michelle Kim, a violinist whose parents moved from the North to Seoul, South Korea, during the Korean War.

The piece was part of a program carefully constructed to showcase the orchestra and its tradition. A State Department official who accompanied Zarin Mehta, the orchestra’s president, on a planning trip to Pyongyang, the North’s capital, last year suggested that “Arirang” be played, Mr. Mehta said.

The emotional setting took a turn away from the political theme that had dominated the visit, which began on Monday and ends on Wednesday, when the orchestra flies to Seoul.

It was the first time an American cultural organization had appeared here, and the largest contingent of United States citizens to appear since the Korean War. The trip has been suffused with political importance since North Korea’s invitation came to light last year. It was seen by some as an opening for warmer relations with the United States, which North Korea has long reviled.

The concert brought a “whole new dimension from what we expected,” Mr. Maazel told reporters afterward. “We just went out and did our thing, and we began to feel this warmth coming back.”

He suggested that there would be a bigger impact. “I think it’s going to do a great deal,” he said. “I was told 200 million people were watching. That’s important for the people who want relations to improve.” The concert was broadcast live in many nations, including in North Korea.

“If it does come to be seen in retrospect as a historical moment,” he added, “we will all be very proud.”

Still, there was little indication that the good will generated by the visit would affect a critical issue: North Korea’s nuclear program, and efforts to determine the extent of it. At a banquet following the concert, Song Sok-hwan, the vice-minister of culture, said: “All the members of the New York Philharmonic opened the hearts of the Korean people.” He called the concert “an important occasion to open a chapter of mutual understanding between the two countries.”

It did not appear that the country’s leader, Kim Jong-il, was present at the concert. High-ranking officials did attend, including the vice president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, the vice culture minister and the chairman of the Pyongyang People’s Committee, akin to mayor.

In Washington, on Tuesday, the White House played down the significance of the concert, while criticizing the North for failing to meet its commitments to disarm. Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, said the performance neither hurt nor helped American diplomatic efforts.

“At the end of the day, we consider this concert to be a concert,” Ms. Perino said, “and it’s not a diplomatic coup.”

At the outset, the sound of the American national anthem at the East Pyongyang Grand Theater was striking. The North Korean anthem came first, and the audience stood for both. The flags of both countries flanked the stage, which was separated from the audience by a bank of flowers. The players moved on to the prelude to Act III of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony.

Then Mr. Maazel introduced the next work, “American in Paris” by Gershwin. “Someday a composer may write a work titled ‘Americans in Pyongyang,’ ” he said. In Korean, he added, “Enjoy!” The audience, mostly stone-faced until then, grew slightly more animated.

For an encore, Mr. Maazel introduced the overture to “Candide” by Leonard Bernstein, which the orchestra played conductorless, in homage to Bernstein, a former Philharmonic music director.

The concert evoked other orchestra missions to repressive states, like the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1956, followed soon after by a Philharmonic visit, and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s trip to China in 1973.

At a news conference earlier in the day, Mr. Maazel drew a distinction between Tuesday night’s concert and the Philharmonic’s visit to the Soviet Union.

“It showed Soviet citizens that they could have relations with foreign organizations and these organizations could come in the country freely,” he said. “But what the Soviets didn’t realize was this was a two-edged sword, because by doing so they allowed people from outside the country to interact with their own people, and to have an influence. It was so long lasting that eventually the people in power found themselves out of power” in a country that was a “global threat.”

“The Korean Peninsula is a very small area geographically,” Mr. Maazel said, “and has an entirely different role to play in the course of human events.” Drawing a parallel, he added, “would do a disservice to the people who live here and are trying to do their art and make a better world for themselves and all of us.”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/wo...mphony.html?hp





Station Says ‘60 Minutes’ Blackout Was Just Technical
Bill Carter

A television station in Huntsville, Ala., offered viewers nothing but a black screen for 12 minutes Sunday night — at the exact time that the CBS News program “60 Minutes” was broadcasting a report about potential political skulduggery involving the former Bush administration official Karl Rove in the conviction of a former Democratic governor of the state.

The interruption raised suspicions among some viewers, especially Democratic backers of Don Siegelman, the former governor, that partisan political interests might be behind the blackout.

Even some CBS executives wondered initially about the reasons for the disruption, though the general manager of the station, WHNT-TV, denied any ulterior motives, and immediately offered the report in its entirety on the station’s newscasts Sunday and Monday nights, as well as on its Web site.

“We know what our license means to us,” said Stan Pylant, the chief executive at the station. “There were no political motives in this.”

Mr. Pylant blamed a signal receiver. “The receiver failed to pick up the video from CBS,” he said. The station had no problems picking up CBS for the half-hour before “60 Minutes” started. The network’s Sunday evening news was on. But Mr. Pylant said that as he watched at home he saw the signal break off just as “60 Minutes” started.

“I really hoped the Siegelman report would be the third one they aired,” he said. It was not. It was first. WHNT had promoted the report all week because of the obvious interest in Huntsville.

The report quoted political figures from both parties questioning the bribery conviction of Mr. Siegelman and specifically included a charge from a “Republican operative” in the state who said Mr. Rove had urged her to try to get compromising pictures of Mr. Siegelman.

The station is part of a group formerly owned by The New York Times Company, purchased last year by an investment company, Oak Hill Capital Partners. That firm is managed by Robert M. Bass, one of a group of wealthy brothers who have all been major contributors to George W. Bush.

The investment company does not manage the stations, however. That is done by a separate company, Local TV L.L.C. That company’s chief executive, Bobby Lawrence, has also been a substantial contributor to Republican political candidates, including Mr. Bush.

Mr. Pylant said no one in either company had said or done anything “to sabotage our signal.” He pointed out that Oak Hill owns and Local TV manages three other CBS stations — though not in Alabama — and nothing had gone wrong with “60 Minutes” at any of those stations.

“This was just a G.M.’s worst nightmare,” he said. “But we’re replaying it. We have had a crawl up telling people where they can see it.” He added, “Believe me, I can get higher ratings than by going to a black screen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/bu...ia/26tele.html





Veteran CBS News Anchor Dan Rather Speaks Out on BBC Newsnight Tonight

The veteran CBS News anchor and reporter Dan Rather has for the first time attacked the climate of patriotism in the United States, saying it's stopping journalists asking tough questions. In an exclusive interview with BBC TWO's Newsnight tonight (Thursday 16 May), he admits he has held back from taking the Bush administration to task over the so-called war on terror.

Rather says: "It is an obscene comparison - you know I am not sure I like it - but you know there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tyres around people's necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tyre of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions, and to continue to bore in on the tough questions so often. And again, I am humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism."

Rather admits self-censorship: "What we are talking about here - whether one wants to recognise it or not, or call it by its proper name or not - is a form of self-censorship. It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself. It carries through with a certain knowledge that the country as a whole - and for all the right reasons - felt and continues to feel this surge of patriotism within themselves. And one finds oneself saying: 'I know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it'."

He tells Newsnight: "I worry that patriotism run amok will trample the very values that the country seeks to defend... In a constitutional republic, based on the principles of democracy such as ours, you simply cannot sustain warfare without the people at large understanding why we fight, how we fight, and have a sense of accountability to the very top."

He declares himself a patriot, but for him the essence of being American is being able to bring the government to account: "It's unpatriotic not to stand up, look them in the eye, and ask the questions they don't want to hear - they being those who have the responsibility, the ultimate responsibility in a society such as ours, of sending our sons and daughters, our husbands, wives, our blood, to face death, to take death. Now, in my position my view is not to ask the tough questions in this kind of environment is the height of lack of patriotism."

Rather is also stinging about the lack of access and information the Bush administration is giving news journalists over the war: "There has never been an American war, small or large, in which access has been so limited as this one.

"Limiting access, limiting information to cover the backsides of those who are in charge of the war, is extremely dangerous and cannot and should not be accepted. And I am sorry to say that up to and including the moment of this interview, that overwhelmingly it has been accepted by the American people. And the current administration revels in that, they relish that, and they take refuge in that.

"What's being done practically in real terms is in direct variance with the Pentagon's stated policy. The Pentagon stated policy is maximum access and maximum information consistent with national security."

Rather is dismissive about the new trend in American television - "militainment" - mass market reality shows about life in the military. The Pentagon has given unprecedented access to RJ Cutler to make Military Diaries for VH1, which airs later this month. It features service men and women talking personally about the music they listen to away from home, and includes exclusive footage of Operation Anaconda.

Rather says: "The belief runs so strong in both the political and military leadership of the current war effort that those who control the images will control public opinion. They realise what an entertainment-oriented society ours has become. Therefore one way of looking at it is quite natural, they would say to themselves: 'Hey, we've had the Hollywoodisation of the news, we have had the Hollywoodisation of almost everything else in society, why not the Hollywoodisation of the war?'

"And I want to say quietly but as forcefully as I can that I hope this doesn't go any further, it has gone too far already. I am appalled by it, I do think it is an outrage, this is a personal opinion."

RJ Cutler - the maker of the Oscar-nominated documentary, The War Room, on the 1992 Clinton campaign - responds: "I always think what we do is more real than conventional news coverage. I think that journalism has extraordinary merits and its place, but that the work of documentary filmmakers is really to get to the core of something both more dramatic and more human."

Other "militainment" TV shows include the upcoming Profiles From the Frontline by Jerry Bruckheimer for ABC and the CBS drama documentary JAG about life in the US Navy (which recently featured a military tribunal). CBS has already aired - and pulled - the reality TV show American Fighter Pilot.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pre...n_rather.shtml





Late-Night TV Satires Become Online Hits
Edward Wyatt

The worst-kept secret in Hollywood on Oscar night was whom Jimmy Kimmel was sleeping with.

Nevertheless, a satiric video in which Mr. Kimmel, the host of the ABC late-night talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” talks enthusiastically — jokingly, we are led to believe — about his sexual relationship with Ben Affleck, has been a huge hit online since it was first shown on Sunday during Mr. Kimmel’s post-Oscar broadcast.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the four-minute video had been viewed more than two million times on YouTube. It has also been prominently displayed on the broadcast network’s home page, ABC.com.

The “relationship” has not been a secret since at least Feb. 15, when The New York Post reported that Mr. Kimmel was preparing a star-studded video, reminiscent of “We Are the World,” as a reply to a similar video presented on his show last month by the comedian Sarah Silverman.

Ms. Silverman, who is Mr. Kimmel’s longtime girlfriend, unveiled her video, in which she confesses that she has been sleeping with Matt Damon, on Mr. Kimmel’s fifth-anniversary show on Jan. 31. Iterations of that video have been viewed more than eight million times on YouTube.

The Matt Damon angle originated from a joke that was introduced more than three years ago by Mr. Kimmel as a throwaway line. One night, discouraged by what he described as a sub-par show with guests who “weren’t what you would call A-list celebrities,” he signed off by telling the audience that he was sorry that he had run out of time and that Matt Damon would have to come back on another night.

After Ms. Silverman revealed that she was hooking up with Mr. Damon — everywhere, it seemed, and all the time — Mr. Kimmel vowed to take his revenge. “You take something I love from me,” he vowed, “I’m gonna take something you love from you.” Most of the lyrics of Mr. Kimmel’s and Ms. Silverman’s songs are too graphic to be repeated here. One vulgar word describing the coital relations between, on the one bed, Ms. Silverman and Mr. Damon, and on the other, Mr. Kimmel and Mr. Affleck, was repeatedly bleeped out for the broadcast of each video.

Several scenes from the videos also required pixelation.

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Mr. Kimmel said that the most difficult part of the project was arranging the schedules of the stars featured in his video — they included, in addition to Mr. Affleck, Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford, Cameron Diaz, Don Cheadle, Robin Williams, Josh Groban and Huey Lewis.

“Every once in a while Hollywood rallies itself for a worthy cause,” Mr. Kimmel said. “We saw that with the ‘We Are the World’ video, with ‘USA for Africa’ and after 9/11. This is just the next natural step in that progression.”

(A number of the stars had ABC ties, which probably eased some of the logistics. Those included Christina Applegate, star of “Samantha Who?”; Rebecca Romijn, of “Ugly Betty”; and Dominic Monaghan of “Lost”; in addition to Mr. Ford, who is the longtime partner of Calista Flockhart, star of “Brothers & Sisters.”)

The gaggle of celebrities was wrangled by Jill Leiderman, an executive producer of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” who also performed the not-insignificant task of explaining the premise of the enterprise to the various stars — who, while certainly regular viewers of Mr. Kimmel’s show, might have been at a Hollywood premiere or volunteering at a soup kitchen on the night Ms. Silverman’s video was first broadcast.

The music was written by Mr. Kimmel’s music director and bandleader, Cleto Escobedo III, Mr. Kimmel said. Also contributing to the song lyrics and the dramatic content were his brother, Jonathan Kimmel, who is a writer for “South Park,” as well as the writing staff of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Ms. Silverman has said, and Mr. Kimmel confirmed, that her song and video were written before the beginning of the writers’ strike because it was planned for broadcast on his show on Nov. 13, his 40th birthday. But planning for that broadcast was interrupted by the strike, so the video was instead shown on his fifth-anniversary show in January.

Mr. Kimmel said his video was recorded last Wednesday and Thursday. Members of the Writers Guild of America voted on Feb. 12 to end the strike.

While the video was edited for presentation on a television show that is shown after midnight in most markets, it — and its not-too-disguised premise — is now prominently featured on ABC’s Internet home page. An unsuspecting visitor to the site will be introduced to the video’s not-too-subtle premise automatically, because the site begins showing video clips without prompting once the home page is loaded.

The video also includes pictures of Ms. Silverman with vulgar insults scrawled across them — again, words that cannot be reprinted here and, presumably, would not appear on most Web sites affiliated with ABC’s corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company.

Karen Hobson, a spokeswoman for ABC’s digital division, said that any material previously vetted through the network’s standards and practices department is automatically approved for use on the Web site. She said the Web site did not differentiate, however, between content approved for viewing on television after midnight and that intended to be shown in prime time, because the average age of users of the ABC Web site is over 30. Other networks have wrestled with the same issues. Ms. Hobson noted that NBC.com last year posted an unedited version of a vulgar parody music video featuring Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg that, in edited form, appeared on “Saturday Night Live.”

Regarding ABC’s ties to Disney she said: “We’re not talking about Disney.com. This is a different brand.”
http://nytimes.com/2008/02/27/arts/t...kimm.html?8dpc





Suitors Are Set to Say to Leno, Long Live King
Bill Carter

The Jay Leno chase is on.

Four years ago, NBC made the comedian the lame-duck host of “The Tonight Show,” announcing with fanfare that he would be succeeded by Conan O’Brien in 2009.

Today, Mr. Leno is still the champion of late-night ratings, with no apparent desire to do anything else but continue on top. “What I do,” he has said on several occasions to colleagues, “is tell jokes at 11:30 at night.”

And so, nearly two years before he can officially be courted, suitors including two networks, ABC and Fox, and at least one television studio, Sony Pictures Television, are beginning to circle, doing everything they legally can to make sure Mr. Leno knows that they will make it possible for him to continue doing just that.

Senior executives at ABC and Fox said that their networks had discreetly gotten the message to Mr. Leno that they were waiting eagerly for the time when they would be able to make official overtures. NBC Universal, meanwhile, has repeatedly expressed its intention to retain Mr. Leno with a still-undisclosed plan for a new program.

Sony Pictures Television has made an approach through intermediaries to let Mr. Leno and his representatives know that as soon as he is allowed to discuss his next move, the studio will make him a rich offer for a syndicated late-night show that would make him the highest-paid host in late-night television, put his name on a new theater on the Sony lot and give him a financial interest in Sony music artists who appear on his show.

Executives who have heard the details of the plan said the move was Sony’s effort to stake a flag in the ground, knowing how intense the pursuit of Mr. Leno was likely to be in coming months.

In a series of interviews here, executives on several sides of the courtship of Mr. Leno outlined possible plans for his future. They all asked to speak anonymously because they are not allowed to negotiate with Mr. Leno until November 2009, when a negotiating window will open up in Mr. Leno’s deal with NBC.

Executives who know the details of his contract said Mr. Leno would remain attached to NBC through the end of 2009 even though he probably would not be on the air for the last six months of the contract. Mr. Leno’s contract is estimated to pay him about $25 million a year — which is less than David Letterman’s, which pays him more than $30 million. “Jay will of course honor his contract obligations to NBC,” said Kenneth Ziffren, Mr. Leno’s lawyer. (Mr. Leno works without a formal deal with an agent or manager.) “Jay isn’t talking to anyone about anything and won’t be until it’s contractually proper,” Mr. Ziffren said.

In 2004, when they established a plan for the network’s late-night future, NBC executives most likely did not expect to find themselves facing the prospect of losing another incumbent late-night star to a competitor. That happened in the early 1990s when Mr. Letterman defected to CBS after Mr. Leno won the battle to succeed Johnny Carson.

Instead, the announcement of the five-year transition from Mr. Leno to Mr. O’Brien in 2009 cut off efforts by other networks to steal away Mr. O’Brien, whose “Late Night” appears on NBC after “Tonight,” and secured five more years with both Mr. Leno and Mr. O’Brien in the NBC fold.

But if the expectations at NBC had been that Mr. Leno, as he approached 60, would be showing signs of slackening in popularity, he has defied them, winning in the ratings virtually every night, even during the recent three-month writers’ strike. Mr. Leno’s ratings dominance even without writers was noted throughout the television business, and only heightened the already intense curiosity surrounding his next move.

Mr. Letterman is signed at CBS through 2010.

The terms of Mr. Leno’s contract, as well as the tentative plan for how and when Mr. O’Brien will step in to replace him on “Tonight,” have set up a sequence of events that will have both comedians off the air in 2009 for extended periods of time.

Executives close to the planning said the expectation now was that Mr. O’Brien would leave “Late Night” next January, allowing him five months to reshape his show for the transition from New York to Los Angeles and the earlier time period of “Tonight.”

NBC has begun construction on a new studio for “Tonight,” as well as offices for Mr. O’Brien’s staff, on its Universal lot here. Several executives predicted that NBC would use the months Mr. O’Brien will be off the air to introduce his successor, widely expected to be Jimmy Fallon, the former “Saturday Night Live” cast member. Mr. Fallon is the favorite of Lorne Michaels, the “Saturday Night Live” producer who had success in choosing the unknown Mr. O’Brien in 1993 to succeed Mr. Letterman and who will again be involved in the selection of the new host of “Late Night.” Moving into the show next February would mean Mr. Fallon could benefit from the lead-ins from Mr. Leno’s last months on “Tonight.”

But the terms of NBC’s contract also mean Mr. Leno could not return to the air anywhere else until January 2010. That would give Mr. O’Brien an extended period on “Tonight” without facing competition from Mr. Leno.

“The Tonight Show” earns an estimated $100 million a year. Mr. Leno, who turns 58 in April, has kept his intentions for his post-“Tonight” career to himself, declining any comment about what he might choose to do after his contract expires. His friends and associates have speculated that he could be looking for some way to make NBC regret asking him to make way for Mr. O’Brien — though Mr. Leno publicly has been nothing but supportive of Mr. O’Brien.

As a guest last month on another late-night show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on ABC, Mr. Leno declared his intention to go through with the move.

That comment countered what had become rampant speculation that NBC might reconsider at the last minute and ask Mr. Leno to stay on at “Tonight.” But NBC executives, including the chief executive of NBC Universal, Jeff Zucker, have reaffirmed their commitment to Mr. O’Brien. And if they did change their minds, they would owe Mr. O’Brien a penalty payment: an estimated $45 million.

One of Mr. Leno’s potential suitors said, “I expect money will play a secondary role to revenge and Jay will look to prove to everybody that NBC was wrong.”

Several of those trying to guess Mr. Leno’s next move suggested that motivation would be one of many reasons why ABC enjoys the best chance to land him. That network could abandon its “Nightline” news program at 11:35 p.m. to give Mr. Leno a show that could go directly against “Tonight.” Fox, in contrast, would offer him an 11 p.m. slot.

Executives at Fox, though, say that network’s pitch to Mr. Leno will use its recent prime-time dominance as a selling point. Executives at ABC, meanwhile, say the network will stress its lineup of prime-time hits as well as the lead-in power of the late local news on its stations.

“Another performer would find getting a jump at 11 an advantage,” one Fox executive said. “But probably not Jay, who will want to be head to head against NBC.”

If Mr. Leno prefers a face-to-face network battle with NBC, that could make it difficult for Sony Pictures Television or any other syndicator to win out over network offers, executives say. But those who have heard the details of Sony’s plan say that by 2010, when Mr. Leno would finally return to the studio, networks will be further diminished as viewers get their programming from a wider array of sources.

Sony also has the backing of its chief executive, Howard Stringer, who, when he held a similar position at CBS, was in the middle of the last late-night roundelay, wooing Mr. Leno with a vintage motorcycle, which led to NBC’s decision to commit to him over Mr. Letterman — which in turn led to Mr. Stringer’s landing Mr. Letterman for CBS.

The president of Sony Television, Steve Mosko, declined to comment. But executives who have heard some of the details of Sony’s plans said the studio intended to throw a kitchen sink of proposals at Mr. Leno.

“When he walks on the lot, there’ll be a Yellow Brick Road to the Jay Leno Theater, which will sit at the centerpiece of the Sony lot,” said an executive who has seen the plans.

Sony is expected to promise Mr. Leno $40 million a year or more — the top salary in late night. The studio would also give him ownership, not just of his own show, but also of a second hourlong late-night show designed to follow Mr. Leno’s — a construction that Mr. Letterman already enjoys at CBS, with his “Late Show” and “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson.” (Mr. Leno does not own “Tonight.”)

The terms are not likely to drive off the competition for Mr. Leno’s services. Referring to the executives with ultimate control over ABC and Fox, one NBC executive said, “Bob Iger and Peter Chernin are camped out at Leno’s garage.”

No matter how elaborate their charm offensive may be, Mr. Leno cannot sign with anyone else until very late next year, and cannot be on the air anywhere until January 2010. That is not a lot of time to prepare a new show.

But perhaps not for Mr. Leno. “He could hire an executive producer and staff up,” said one executive who has worked with him. “He’d probably be ready to go after a weekend.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/ar...on/27leno.html





Oscars Draw Record Low TV Ratings
Steve Gorman

Films about psychopaths, greedy oilmen and corrupt lawyers failed to click with moviegoers, and they proved a turnoff to U.S. television viewers as this year's Oscars show hit record low ratings.

The 80th anniversary edition of the Academy Awards, dominated by European stars and films that played poorly at the box office, averaged 32 million viewers, entering the record books on Monday as the least watched Oscar telecast ever.

The national viewer tally reported by Nielsen Media Research for ABC's live, three-hour-plus telecast on Sunday was down about 1 million viewers from the previous record low, set in 2003 when the Oscars were presented just after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had begun.

The 2003 program was hosted by Steve Martin and featured the musical "Chicago" as best picture.

Sunday's broadcast, with comedian Jon Stewart making his second appearance as Oscar host, now ranks as the smallest U.S. TV audience for the Oscars since 1974, when actual viewer totals first became available.

The household rating, 18.7, also marks the lowest level by that measure going back to the first televised Oscars in 1953.

By contrast, the most watched Oscar broadcast on record was the 1998 show, when the box-office blockbuster "Titanic" sailed off with a record-tying 11 awards, including the prize for best picture. Some 55 million Americans tuned in that year.

Even that figure pales in comparison to the audience that tunes in annually to the National Football League championship Super Bowl game, which this year drew 97.5 million viewers.

"American Idol," the most popular U.S. series, averages 30 million viewers a week with its Tuesday night broadcast. It debuted this season with 33.5 million.

Low Ratings, No Surprise

The weak ratings for Sunday's Oscar broadcast came as no surprise given that many movies showcased this year -- "There Will Be Blood," "Michael Clayton," "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," -- generated little enthusiasm among moviegoers despite critical raves.

The night's big winner, the grim, violent crime drama "No Country For Old Men," which claimed four awards including best picture and best drama, grossed a modest $64 million at the North American box office.

Only one movie among the five nominated for best picture, breakout comedy "Juno," crossed the $100 million box office market domestically. That film managed just one win for best original screenplay.

The Oscar ratings likely also suffered from the fact that all four acting awards this year went to European performers whose names are fairly obscure for American audiences and who appeared in movies that relatively few moviegoers saw.

The Oscars generally have drawn a bigger U.S. television audience in years when the big crowd pleasers at the multiplex, like "Titanic" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," figured prominently in the awards race.

Oscar producers already were bracing for low ratings due to an overall viewership slump in network TV this broadcast season, exacerbated by a glut of reruns and reality shows triggered by the recently settled Hollywood writers strike.

Still, the Academy Awards show ranks as the year's highest-rated entertainment special and a cash cow for Walt Disney Co.'s ABC, which raked in an average of $1.8 million for each 30-second spot, up 7 percent from a year ago.

(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Stuart Grudgings)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...022600933.html





New Line’s 40 Years of Reaching Brows High and Low
A. O. Scott

Four years ago, on the night before the Academy Awards, I found myself at the Beverly Hills home of Bob Shaye, the founder and co-chairman of New Line Cinema.

The annual New Line party chez Shaye was a popular stop on the pre-Oscars festivity circuit, and to an outsider the scene seemed to fit every stereotype of Hollywood power and the aspiration to it. There was the blue-chip contemporary art on the walls (“Is that a real Francis Bacon?” I heard someone ask); the panoramic views of the Los Angeles basin and the San Fernando Valley; the Wolfgang Puck-catered dinner; the endless parade of agents, executives, movie stars and aspirants to influence and fame.

Wasn’t that Richard Parsons of Time Warner? Is she Paris Hilton? Is that the guy who used to be on that TV show? And that must be his agent. It was like something from “The Player,” speaking of New Line releases.

This impression, however, was a bit misleading. Yes, it’s true that in February 2004, New Line Cinema was on top of the world, and Mr. Shaye and his colleagues, including his co-chairman, Michael Lynne, were riding high. The night after the party, to no one’s particular surprise, “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” swept every category in which it was nominated, collecting 11 Oscars, among them best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay. But New Line was hardly a typical blockbuster factory, the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy was not a typical franchise, and Bob Shaye was far from a standard studio boss.

And that is why New Line — which ceased to operate as a full-fledged studio on Thursday, when Time Warner announced that it would be folded into Warner Brothers and Mr. Shaye and Mr. Lynne would depart — will be missed. New Line was not a specialty division or a genre label. It went highbrow and low, sometimes playing for the niches and sometimes for the mass audience. It was an oddity and an anomaly.

Last year, in commemoration of its 40th anniversary, New Line put together a DVD sampler of some of its more memorable productions. It was handsomely bound and presented, but the impression was less of a catalog of masterpieces than a collection of betting slips, a compendium of gambles, hunches and long shots. “The Lord of the Rings” was the most successful of these. (Others included “Elf,” “Blow” and the “Austin Powers” trilogy.)

No other studio was willing to sink several hundred million dollars into the simultaneous production of three movies directed by an obscure New Zealander named Peter Jackson. And when New Line did just that, there were a lot of smirks and raised eyebrows in Hollywood.

As perhaps there are now, since schadenfreude is as essential to the health of the Hollywood body politic as Diet Coke. The triumph of the “Rings” was followed by a long losing streak, exacerbated by messy litigation over the spoils and the future of the Tolkien franchise. Mr. Shaye decided to dabble in directing, turning out a ghastly kiddie- magic movie called “The Last Mimzy.” It began to seem as if New Line’s days were numbered.

It’s not for me to argue the merits of the decision to snuff out New Line’s independence. The dissolution of one corporate entity by another is rarely an occasion for sentiment, except perhaps among stockholders. But New Line Cinema was a link between the smooth, conglomerated present and a gamier, more entrepreneurial past. Mr. Shaye may live like Hollywood royalty, but his roots are in New York retail and in the nervy, disreputable world of grindhouses and exploitation pictures.

He was the man who made the 1930s drug-scare propaganda movie “Reefer Madness” into a staple of the late-’60s campus counterculture. He picked up, on the cheap, North American rights to Bruce Lee movies, and he helped turn John Waters’s “Pink Flamingos” into a cult classic. And let’s not forget Freddy Krueger of the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series, or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Not a bad art collection, after all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/movies/01line.html





Facebook Film Ad Pulled Over Violence
Jemima Kiss

A controversial online marketing campaign for the Universal Pictures thriller Untraceable has been pulled from Facebook and the video community Seesmic after concerns about the violence of its content.

The interactive marketing company Picture Production Company set up a promotional page on Facebook called "Kill With Me" ahead of the film's UK launch this Friday.

Launched five days ago, the Kill With Me page has been gradually revealing more and more of a visceral torture scene from the Untraceable movie to Facebook members.

The Kill With Me Facebook profile included the following text: "This guy is going to die. You want to see his stinking flesh burn and bleed and blacken? Until he's some twisted dead thing? This is what you want. And I've filmed it especially for you. The more fans I get, the more I'll show ..."

PPC's head of interactive, Dan Light, admitted the company had expected the campaign to be pulled from the social networking site, so had "other things in place".

According to Facebook policy, groups must clearly label and apply age filters to content that is for over-18s so that younger users cannot access it. Facebook does not allow content that is "hateful, threatening, or obscene".

PPC's stunt on Seesmic, the video messaging community, caused more alarm when an actor planted on the service briefly disappeared, and was then filmed by a video camera being bound, gagged and seemingly executed.

The interactive marketing company had told Seesmic's management in advance that it would be using the service, but a moderator based at the video community site's HQ in San Francisco attempted to call the police over the stunt.

Light said that both the clip and the fake murder were very violent, but said the agency wanted to push the boundaries of what is acceptable in an online community with the Untraceable marketing campaign.

"There's that interesting question of whether people are desensitised to things on screen," he added. "They will watch these things, but won't say they watched them."

Users of social networking sites are often very protective of the spaces they create, which they see as intimate and personal areas for communication with their network.

The BBC recently clarified its internal policy on using photographs from social networking sites for news stories, and an earlier promotional stunt by the LonelyGirl15 project on YouTube angered some users who felt they had been misled.

"If we posted a trailer every hour we would be misusing it and would expect a backlash," said Light.

"But my view is that if you are entertaining or stimulating the user then you go some way towards earning the right for their attention."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008...k.digitalmedia





MySpace Picks Harvard Scholars to Lead Task Force on Internet Safety
AP

Leading Internet scholars at Harvard Law School will head a task force exploring the safety of users at MySpace and other popular online hangouts amid growing fears that youngsters have become targets of sexual predators.

The creation of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force is part of an agreement that MySpace, a unit of News Corp., reached with all attorneys general except Texas' in January.

Initial participants include leading Internet companies such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and MySpace rival Facebook, along with Internet access providers and nonprofit groups.

The group will have a broad mandate to explore technical ways to keep children safe - not only from sexual predators but also from online bullies and adult content. Procedures for verifying users' ages are expected to be among the task force's discussion.
Although MySpace was in charge of creating the group, naming its members and choosing Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to run it, the task force will be independent of MySpace effective Thursday, said John Palfrey, Berkman's executive director.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8393034





Sirius Posts Narrower Loss As Subscribers Surge
FMQB

In light of a surge in subscriber numbers as well as lower costs, Sirius Satellite Radio narrowed its fourth-quarter loss in 2007. The satcaster is reporting a loss of $166.2 million, or 11 cents per share, compared with a loss of $245.6 million, or 17 cents per share, from the year before. Sirius also reported that it finished the quarter with 8.3 million subscribers, which is 2.3 million more than a year ago. Company revenue increased 29 percent to $249.8 million.

However, the matter of whether Sirius will be allowed to merge with XM still looms. Lingering uncertainty over the deal is likely to overshadow the better-than-expected fourth-quarter results, says Reuters, as the company's stock fell 2 percent in premarket trading.

"Unfortunately, we have not received our approval from the DOJ or the FCC," Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin said on a conference call, according to Reuters. "We are optimistic that we will hear favorable information from them in the near future." Karmazin added that Sirius will refrain from forecasting 2008 results until regulators approve the pending deal.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=597784





XM Satellite Radio Narrows Loss in 4Q
AP

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. said Thursday that it narrowed its fourth-quarter loss thanks to a 20 percent jump in revenue and a favorable comparison to last year, when the company took a significant write-down.

The Washington-based company reported a loss of $239 million, or 78 cents per share, compared with a loss of $263 million, or 90 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter.

The latest quarter included charges of 25 cents per share related to a legal settlement and costs associated with XM's pending acquisition by smaller rival Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.

Excluding those charges, results beat the average analyst estimate of a 63 cent-per-share loss, according to Thomson Financial.

Fourth-quarter results in 2006 were weighed down by a one-time charge of $57.6 million to reflect the declining value of XM's stake in Canadian Satellite Radio.

In morning trading, its shares dropped 7 cents to $12.37.

XM and Sirius announced plans to merge more than a year ago, and had hoped to have the $5 billion deal completed by the end of 2007. Shareholders have approved the merger, but regulators at the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission have not finished their reviews.

Opponents of the deal say it will create a monopoly in satellite radio service, but the companies argue they will still face brisk competition from other forms of audio entertainment, including free commercial radio.

XM's quarterly revenue jumped 20 percent to $307.7 million from $257.1 million, topping an analyst forecast of $303.8 million.

The company remains the largest satellite radio service, and it finished the year with 9.03 million subscribers. But subscriber growth slowed in 2007 compared to 2006, and Sirius continued to narrow the gap.

XM added 1.4 million net subscribers in 2007, compared with 1.7 million in 2006. Meanwhile, Sirius added 2.3 million subscribers in 2007, finishing the year with 8.3 million.

For the year, XM reported a loss of $682.3 million, or $2.22 a share. That's a 7 percent improvement over 2006, when XM lost $731.7 million, or $2.70 a share.

Annual revenue in 2007 was $1.14 billion, a 22 percent improvement over 2006 revenue of $933 million.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...DJvbwD8V3CR3O0





Sony Leery of the Eee PC?
Erica Ogg

As a computer, the Eee PC from Asus is intended to be the opposite of intimidating--it's made for children after all. But its potential as a market force is apparently giving chills to its larger industry peers.

Here at Sony's annual Open House event, the senior vice president of Sony's IT product division said the tiny $299 notebook could potentially shift the entire notebook industry.

"If (the Eee PC from) Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble. That's just a race to the bottom," said Mike Abary.

He means that if mainstream PC buyers start to find their needs met by a lightweight, simply featured, inexpensive portable, it's likely to impel all of the major players in the industry to pile on by lowering their prices. And that's in an industry with already low margins for retailers and manufacturers.

If the Eee PC just catches on with Linux developers, enthusiasts, and the tech-savvy early adopter crowd, that's fine by him. "But if mainstream buyers buy it, then, whoa," Abary said.

So should Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and their ilk be frightened of Asus? So far, the version of the Eee PC in the U.S. only comes with Linux, but that will soon change. Japan got its Windows XP version last month, and the U.S. should be getting one in the next few weeks.

And even with just the open-source version available stateside, the numbers say it's striking a nerve: the company reported moving 350,000 units of the Eee in the first quarter it was available last fall.

Sony's not the only one taking notice. Acer is reportedly readying an Eee competitor, and the yet-to-be-officially-announced HP Compaq 2133 was developed with the Eee firmly in mind.

As for Sony, though it did start offering lower-priced notebooks last year in the $800 range, don't expect the company to go any lower just yet. Abary says so far the company is just "keeping an eye" on the Eee's activity.

Sony has always positioned itself as a premium brand, and will continue to do so, as was evident in the rest of its PC offerings on show here.

The company has been at the forefront of the uber-personalization trend that's taken over the notebook industry. By charging more, the company has more leeway with the options it can offer customers. It began doing colored laptops three years ago and is now branching out into personalized patterns, and--as suspected--textures.

People who buy their Vaio at the SonyStyle store online have as many as 36 different choices for personalizing their laptop. The Graphic Splash line has three different patterns and multiple color combinations, as well as a choice of font on the keyboard. "That's what consumers really, really want," Abary told a gathering of reporters earlier in the day.

Sony also said that Vaio as a brand sells particularly well with women, which could also explain Sony's increased emphasis on personalization. Though 80 percent of notebooks sold industrywide are owned by men, Abary estimated, Vaios' percentage ownership by men is in the low 70s, indicating a higher-than-average ownership rate by women.

But it's not all about appearances. Sony is also pushing its lineup of home theater PCs, which are not primary PCs, but still start at $1,699.

Though Sony had earlier indicated that its TP home theater PC (that white round one), didn't sell particularly well last year, it still decided to bring it back for Round 2. It's still round, but now it's got some high-definition guts. Sony beefed it up with a Blu-ray Disc player, Intel Penryn processors, and two Cable Card tuners. It's also now available in black for $1,699 to $3,000.

Though it was released in the fall, the all-in-one PC from Sony, the LT, is part of the same strategy. Again, though it's a PC like Gateway's One or Dell's XPS One, Sony positions the product as a TV with PC capability instead of the other way around. Doing so is likely to lure more high-end customers, with the LT's Bravia-like bezel echoing Sony's line of LCD TVs.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9879798-7.html





The Future Was Then

The times have caught up with that erstwhile icon of modernity, the Sharper Image
David Segal

For all of its flaws as a business, nobody can accuse the Sharper Image of over-promising. The name explains precisely what it can do for you. Spend money here, it says, and we will improve the way you are perceived. You want an actual enhancement? Try the Greater Substance store, if one opens up. Until then, drop some money in this gleaming gadgetorium and bask in the regard of your awestruck friends.

Until last week, this seemed like a surprisingly durable premise. Then the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and announced it would close 90 of its roughly 180 stores "as soon as possible." Two days ago, it added to the air of doom by announcing that its shares, which were recently trading for a mere 45 cents, would be delisted from the Nasdaq.

But where will I kill time while my wife shops, you hear a few million husbands murmuring to themselves. Fair question. The company is likely to remain alive in some kind of dramatically altered shape, analysts say. (A few messages left at the company's headquarters in San Francisco were not returned.) But you don't need to stick the Grill/Fork Thermometer -- which "measures the internal temperature of chicken, beef, pork and fish" -- into the Sharper Image to grasp the obvious: The place, as we've known it, is done.

What are we losing? A world of luminescent safety leashes, hideaway gyms, telescoping ladders -- an entire chain dedicated to the idea of streamlining your life by .002 percent. The Sharper Image is a place that sells a lighted nose-hair trimmer, which is to say it targets men who already own a regular nose hair trimmer in the hopes they'll think it's worth $40 to get a better look up their nostrils. Bought a fine bottle of wine? Why throw it in a bucket of ice when for $99.95 you can treat yourself to a "professional wine chiller" with 33 built-in settings, and chill that Chablis to its optimum temperature.

This was a Sharper Image forte: taking the guesswork out of realms in which you never knew you were guessing. The ideal product is a contraption that stands this close to the realm of the purely inane. Which is to say that although the product mix now includes hair dryers and "miracle food storage" containers, it's basically a store for men. Especially men in desperate need of a gift, especially a gift for a man -- arguably the most desperate creature in all of giftdom. The store is filled with objects that say, "I had no idea what to get you, but I spent some real money."

Here's a NeatReceipts Scanalizer 3.0. Enjoy.

Of course, if you don't have your heart set on a Scanalizer, odds are good you won't actually use it. For countless Sharper Image products, there is the sad and inevitable migration that starts in the office, moves to a closet, then to the attic and finally, a year or two later, to the front lawn for a yard sale, where the $50 desktop power shredder is priced to move at $15. It waits next to an old adding machine and a red plaid thermos until a neighbor picks it up from a table ("Does this thing work?") and the journey starts all over again, at a different address, with a fresh set of batteries.

Given that the product mix hasn't changed much since the store debuted in 1977, why is the Sharper Image hurting now? Certainly, this is a lousy time to be in the luxury gizmo business. As market researcher Jack Plunkett put it in a phone interview: "If you're suffering economically, how important is it to run out and buy a $3,000 vibrating chair?"

The company also made a bunch of strategic missteps. It relied too heavily on blockbuster products, like the Razor scooter. It sold a ton of Ionic Breeze air purifiers, which Consumer Reports panned so viciously in 2002 that a class action lawsuit was filed against Sharper Image for refunds. (A judge's rejection of a settlement to that lawsuit -- she didn't like the $19 store coupon proposed for each Ionic owner -- seemed to precipitate the Chapter 11 filing.)

It doesn't help that so much of the stuff at Sharper Image is now sold all over the place, in Best Buys, through hundreds of online stores. Maybe there was a time when customers would spend $1,000 for a Panasonic camcorder that can be acquired through B&H Photo for $785. (Yes, that's a real, present-day example.) But not anymore.

The Sharper Image also has a well-funded rival in Brookstone, which was acquired three years ago by an Asian company that specializes in high-end massage chairs. Exactly how Brookstone is faring isn't clear, because Osim, its new owner, is privately held. But those massage chairs are a high-margin item.

"So in addition to other problems, the Sharper Image's biggest competitor is attacking one of their core categories," says Scott Tilghman of Soleil Securities-Hudson Square Research. "That hurt."

But even if the Sharper Image had sidestepped all of these bear traps, it was headed for trouble. Once, a visit to the store seemed like a trip to the future's very own showroom, or a museum exhibit called "What Is Next." Brushed aluminum was the surface of choice, back when only very cool stuff had a brushed aluminum surface. Staffers dressed in head-to-toe black and looked like they could serve drinks on the space station.

Well, they looked like that in 1984. Today, they could be baristas.

It's not just that the idea of the future as curated by the Sharper Image now seems hopelessly dated. (Although ask any 22-year-old about the store and get ready for an eye roll.) It's that the number of curators of the future has exploded. If you want to stoke your gadget lust, you head to Gizmodo or Engadget, two of roughly 74 million gadget blogs. Or you head to the Apple Store, or Circuit City.

Even for the chain that brought us the Equalizer Foot Pro Massager, it's hard to keep your image sharp in that much company.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...022603143.html





MediaDefender Parent Company Facing Liquidation
enigmax

After suffering humiliation at the hands of a hacker in 2007, the future of anti-piracy company MediaDefender is in serious doubt. Its parent company, ARTISTdirect, has called in a team of specialists to “assist in the exploration of strategic alternatives.” That’ll be alternatives to liquidation, then.

In early 2005, online music business ARTISTdirect saw its stock being traded at just a cent. Then in mid 2005, it paid MediaDefender founders, Randy Saaf and Octavio Herrera, $43m for their anti-piracy company and the stock rocketed to beyond $3.00. Smiles all round - but not for long.

In September 2007, disaster struck. MediaDefender had gathered many enemies due to their anti-p2p activities. One of them decided to teach the company a lesson by hacking into their systems and leaking their internal emails and closest secrets to the Internet. The effect on the company and its operations was dramatic.

Within days, seemingly everyone knew about the MediaDefender leak and inevitably, news started filtering through to MediaDefender’s customer base. With the company’s secrets out in the open, and its operations virtually shut down, people started asking if it was possible for the business to continue and if it did, how effective could it be? MediaDefender’s customers weren’t happy, and the company was forced to issue $600,000 in credits to them by way of compensation for a total lack of results in the 3 months following the leak. But this was just the beginning.

In a SEC filing, the financial damage started to become clear. As a result of the hacking, by November 2007 MediaDefender had lost a massive $825,000 - and growing. Before the email leak, stock was around the $2.25 mark. Three months later in December 2007, things were starting to look bleak as stock plummeted to $0.63.

With the stock sitting today at $0.51, ARTISTdirect needed to take some drastic action - and they have, calling in Los Angeles based financial services company, Salem Partners LLC, to try and sort out the mess. Salem Partners are to explore “strategic alternatives” for the business (which is currently $30m+ in debt), such as restructuring, merger or sale. For this service they will be rewarded well: Salem are on a $50,000 a month retainer for the first 4 months with numerous six and seven-figure bonuses woven in to the rates, dependent on the deals they manage to do.

They could decide to sell MediaDefender off as a separate entity, so it’s possible that Randy and Octavio would like to buy their old business back. One thing is certain - it won’t fetch anything near the $43m they sold it for. The pair currently pick up $350k a year each at MediaDefender so they’re not quite at rock-bottom yet, but would they even want it back after last year’s disaster? Time will tell.

Potential buyers will probably choose to wait a little. According to a source, ARTISTDirect’s current FORM 10-QSB financial statement is not online, but it should have been posted to SEC by Feb 14th 2007. Looks like the worst of the financial pain hasn’t even been reported yet.
http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefende...dation-080226/





Cisco kids

US, Canadian Agencies Seize Counterfeit Gear
Grant Gross

U.S. and Canadian law enforcement authorities have seized more than US$78 million worth of counterfeit Cisco Systems networking equipment in an ongoing investigation into imports from China, the U.S. Department of Justice and other agencies announced Friday.

The coordinated operation, begun in 2005, has resulted in more than 400 seizures of Cisco hardware and labels, the DOJ said in a news release. The operation targets the illegal importation and sale of counterfeit network hardware such as routers, switches and network cards. One of the operation's goals is to protect the public from network infrastructure failures associated with the counterfeits, the DOJ said.

"Counterfeit network hardware entering the marketplace raises significant public safety concerns and must be stopped," Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher of the DOJ's Criminal Division, said in a statement. "It is critically important that network administrators in both private sector and government perform due diligence in order to prevent counterfeit hardware from being installed on their networks."

The agencies that worked together on the operation included the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cyber Division, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

The FBI named its portion of this ongoing initiative Operation Cisco Raider, an investigation involving nine FBI field offices and help from several other agencies. Over the last two years, the FBI's operation has resulted in 36 search warrants that identified about 3,500 counterfeit network components with a retail value of more than $3.5 million, the DOJ said. The FBI's work has led to 10 convictions and $1.7 million in restitution.

ICE and CBP have opened 28 investigations in 17 field offices since 2005. ICE has conducted 115 seizures of counterfeit Cisco products, with an estimated retail value of $20.4 million. ICE's investigation have lead to six indictments and four felony convictions. CBP has made 373 seizures of counterfeit Cisco hardware since 2005, and 40 seizures of Cisco labels for counterfeit products.

ICE and CBP seized more than 74,000 counterfeit Cisco networking products and labels with a retail value of more than $73 million.

On Friday in Toronto, the RCMP charged two people and a company with distributing large quantities of counterfeit network components to companies in the U.S. through the Internet. The RCMP seized approximately 1,600 pieces of counterfeit network hardware with an estimated value of $2 million.

Other recent cases:

-- On Feb. 14, Todd Richard, 33, was sentenced to 36 months in prison and ordered to pay $208,440 in restitution to Cisco by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. From late 2003 to early 2007, Richard imported shipments of counterfeit Cisco computer components from China, and separate shipments of counterfeit Cisco labels. He then affixed the fake labels to the fake components and sold the products on eBay, the DOJ said.

Richard sold more $1 million worth of counterfeit Cisco products, the DOJ said.

--On Jan. 4, a grand jury in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas indicted Michael Edman, 36, and his brother Robert Edman, 28, for trafficking in counterfeit Cisco products. The indictment alleges that the Edmans purchased and imported the counterfeit computer network hardware from an individual in China, then selling the products to retailers across the U.S. The Edmans shipped some of the counterfeit hardware directly to the U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force, Federal Aviation Administration, FBI, defense contractors, universities and financial institutions, according to the indictment. These organizations had purchased the product from a computer retailer serving as a middleman, which in turn purchased the products from the Edmans.
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008...eit-cisco-gear





City Raids ‘Counterfeit Triangle,’ Shutting 32 Storefronts
Sewell Chan

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg showed off a sign saying “Closed” as he stood amid piles of seized counterfeit goods inside Chinatown’s New Land shopping center after a news conference on Tuesday. (Photo: Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press)

City investigators raided dozens of storefronts on a triangular block in Chinatown this morning in what officials described as a major seizing of counterfeit goods — including fake Rolex, Coach, Prada and Gucci products — with an estimated street value of more than $1 million. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, who announced the raids, also said that the city had obtained a temporary restraining order to shut the storefronts.

In a strongly worded news release, the officials called the block, which is bounded by Canal Street, Walker Street and Centre Street, Counterfeit Triangle. The owner of the property, which has 32 separate storefronts, will be required “to replace the counterfeit vendors with legitimate businesses and pay a substantial fine to the city before the buildings can be reopened” under the terms of a court order obtained by the city against the owner.

“Each corner of this triangle flouted the law and lowered the quality of life in the area,” said Shari C. Hyman, director of the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement, which addresses quality-of-life issues like adult businesses, night clubs, counterfeiting bazaars and illegal conversions of apartment buildings into hotels. “Using nuisance abatement laws, we will make sure this activity is gone for good.”

The owner of the property was identified as the Vincent Terranova estate; its trustees were identified as Robert Becht, Edward T. Borg, George Terranova and Carl Terranova. The stores will be padlocked, and in addition to the stores selling counterfeit goods, an illegal massage parlor was closed today and illegal signs were removed, officials said. The order includes a $1,000-a-day fine dating to early January, when the violations were first reported.

In a statement, Terranova Properties, the managing agent for the property owner, said: “We have been working together with New York City and will continue to cooperate to the utmost degree with the New York City Police Department and the mayor’s office to remedy this situation on Canal Street.” The employee who read the statement, Leah Terranova, declined to answer further questions.

As part of the investigation, 42 undercover purchases were made in various storefronts. The investigation uncovered counterfeits of such brands as Coach, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbanna, Dior, Prada, Rolex, Fendi, Burberry, Calvin Klein, Dora the Explorer and Oakley. The building addresses in the “Counterfeit Triangle” that were raided today are 224–230 Canal Street; 232 Canal Street; 234–238 Canal Street; 106 Baxter Street; 112–116 Walker Street; 118 Walker Street; 120-124 Walker Street; and 152-156 Centre Street.

Several industry representatives applauded the raids.

“A tremendous thanks to Mayor Bloomberg and the Office of Special Enforcement for recognizing the pervasive crime of trademark counterfeiting and stepping up to the plate,” said Brian W. Brokate, a lawyer for Rolex. “Rolex applauds all of their efforts, particularly today’s raid and lawsuit.”

Julie Summersgill, a spokeswoman for NBC Universal, said in a statement: “This investigation should be a real wake up call to those selling counterfeit or pirated products that their illegal activity will not be ignored. Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelly and Special Enforcement Director Hyman have made a major commitment to shut down bootleggers. Counterfeiting and piracy has cost the New York City economy billions of dollars and thousands of good jobs, and we applaud the city for this bold action to curb the sale of illegal goods on the streets of New York.”

Christine Hauser contributed reporting.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20.../index.html?hp





Online Scrabble Craze Leaves Game Sellers at Loss for Words
Heather Timmons

The latest bane of office productivity is Scrabulous, a virtual knockoff of the Scrabble board game, with over 700,000 players a day and nearly three million registered users.

Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers, and many have several games going at once.

Everyone seems to love the online game — everyone, that is, except the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which markets it everywhere else.

In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla who run a software development company. Both Hasbro and Mattel said they were hoping for a solution that would not force them to shut down the game.

Jayant Agarwalla, 21, said they did not create Scrabulous to make money, even though they now collect about $25,000 a month from online advertising. They just wanted to play Scrabble on their computers, and their favorite (unauthorized) site had started charging, he said.

“Our family has been playing the game for 50 years now,” he said, and received a set when the game first came out in India. His mother encouraged him and his 26-year-old brother, Rajat, to play as a learning tool, often with a dictionary by the board.

Scrabulous, which most users play on the Facebook social-networking site, has a board that looks just like Scrabble, and the same number of letter tiles with the same point values. Players can send invitations to others on Facebook or search for strangers to play with by posting messages.

There is no time limit for moves or games. Scrabulous keeps track of player statistics, and it does not allow fake words. It cannot, however, prevent players from cheating. One method is an unaffiliated online “helper” program, which generates a list of possible words based on the letters a user has.

Two game companies, RealNetworks of Seattle and Electronic Arts of Redwood City, Calif., say they have signed deals with Hasbro to create online versions of the company’s games. Both say their versions of Scrabble will be out shortly. But Scrabulous has already brought Scrabble a newfound virtual popularity that none of the game companies could have anticipated.

The threat of legal action has not gained the companies many admirers. Many Scrabulous fans, some of whom say they bought the board game for the first time after playing the online version on Facebook, call their approach heavy-handed and out of touch.

“The big thing that Hasbro is missing is that this is targeting a young audience that in general is not into board games,” said Venkat Koduru, the 15-year-old founder of the Facebook group “Save Scrabulous.”

Mr. Koduru had three Scrabulous games going as of Wednesday. He has gathered names of more than 1,000 people who have pledged to never buy a Scrabble board if Hasbro and Mattel shut down the online game.

Other groups devoted to saving the game have recently been created on Facebook, including “Please God, I Have So Little: Don’t Take Scrabulous Too.” Tens of thousands of fans have joined in, threatening to boycott Hasbro and Mattel products.

Iain Morgan, 34, a music producer in London who goes by the name Iain Easy, is playing 25 games of Scrabulous at the same time. The funny thing is, he said, he was never a fan of the original board game.

Mr. Morgan, who is the host of a Facebook group called “Help, I’m a Scrabulous Addict,” attributes the game’s popularity to “all these people who are bored at work in their office,” and added that the game keeps him in regular contact with his mother.

The legal questions concerning Scrabulous are complicated by the interests of the companies that own the rights to Scrabble.

Harold Zeitz, senior vice president for games at RealNetworks, said Friday that he was working closely with the Agarwalla brothers to bring the official Scrabble game to Facebook users.

Hasbro, meanwhile, said in a statement that Electronic Arts was planning to release an online version of Scrabble this spring. And Mattel, which signed a deal with RealNetworks last July, says that settling with the Agarwallas would set a bad precedent.

Neither Hasbro nor Mattel would disclose the number of Scrabble board games they have sold since Scrabulous started becoming popular last year. Hasbro estimates it sells one million to two million Scrabble boards a year in North America.

To some online marketing experts, Scrabulous represents a turning point for the board game industry, which has struggled for years to recreate itself as new generations turned alternatives like the Xbox and the GameBoy.

“If you’re Hasbro or Mattel, it isn’t in your interest to shut this down,” said Matt Mason, a consultant to the entertainment industry and author of “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism.”

The board game industry will be forced to adapt, Mr. Mason predicts, just as the music industry has adjusted to unauthorized downloads of songs. “If something’s already out there and proven, the companies should go with it,” he said.

For their part, Mattel and Hasbro are trying to protect their franchise as consumers turn increasingly to the Internet for entertainment. They say they consider Scrabble a crown jewel and are working on marketing campaigns for the game’s 60th anniversary this year. The plans include adding anniversary labels to Scrabble packaging and introducing a folding edition of the deluxe Scrabble board.

Scrabble began as Lexico in 1931, the creation of an out-of-work architect, Alfred Mosher Butts. He determined the frequency of each letter in the game and its value by reviewing the front page of The New York Times. His patent was denied, and it was 17 years before he found a manufacturer, which renamed the game Scrabble.

It took many more years before Scrabble became popular, thanks in part to a Macy’s chairman who was a fan, according to the game’s official history.

The Scrabble brand in North America was passed from manufacturer to manufacturer. It landed with Hasbro in 1989. The British game maker J. W. Spear & Sons owned the rights outside North America until the company was bought by Mattel in 1994.

The board game has had a core group of close-knit, intense fans for decades. They attend tournaments, refer to amateurs as “living room players,” and memorize lists of two-letter words.

Until Scrabulous landed on Facebook, no one could have mistaken the game, which had only a few thousand users, for a fast-growing phenomenon.

The Agarwallas introduced their first Scrabble knockoff Web site, bingobinge.com, in August 2005, and renamed it Scrabulous.com a year later. In May 2007, one of the site’s users suggested they adapt the game as a Facebook application, and it took off.

After 25 years with the National Scrabble Association, John D. Williams Jr., the executive director, said he had seen numerous copyright infringements of Scrabble, but the Scrabulous program on Facebook was the most “widespread and intense.”

Dozens of other Web sites offer unauthorized versions of Scrabble, but most force users to play in real time or require clunky downloads to play.

“People believe it to be in the public domain, like chess,” Mr. Williams said. “The idea that Scrabble belongs to a corporation is something that people don’t or are unwilling to accept.”

The Agarwalla brothers are avid players themselves — Jayant had 14 Scrabulous games going as of Saturday, and Rajat was playing 19.

Jayant, who is responsible for the game’s player interface and customer support, said, “People rarely find time to sit down anymore with their family and friends, to invite people over, to prepare the tea and biscuits.”

Even though it is easy to cheat at Scrabulous, he says he thinks few players actually do. “You may be doing it for personal glory, but it really takes the fun out of the game,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/bu...02game.html?hp





Copyright this

Intellectual Property’s Social Value May Trump Copyright Law.
Dallas Weaver

Jon Healey correctly points out that the debate over intellectual-property theft is complex because we are often dealing with "non-real properties." These properties cost nearly nothing to produce, and an infinite number of people can use the same property at the same time. And yet, we still want to treat them as if they were "real" property.

Significantly, some of these non-real properties have major effects on human welfare. Take, for example, the formula for "oral rehydration therapy," a mixture of salt, sugar and water. Although it could potentially be copyrighted, it has saved more lives in the Third World than almost anything else. The world is lucky that this formula is in the public domain, not copyrighted and subject to use charges that people who need it couldn't afford.

The present system treats these copyrighted works as a funny kind of real property with no carrying costs, taxes or significant fees. Without carrying costs, copyrights remain in force almost forever - even though, over time, the demand for the copyrighted material can fall to almost nothing. As the demand decreases, the value may remain, but it becomes effectively unavailable to, as the Constitution puts it, "promote the progress of science and useful arts." Witness all the copyrighted books, scientific journals, audio works and visual works that are out of print or otherwise unavailable because copyright law prevents the new, low-cost methods of distribution from being utilized.

In the scientific field, this has devastating effects on the advancement of human knowledge - which is just the opposite of the intent of copyright law.

As a member of a scientific journal's editorial board - and as a senior citizen - I see reams of manuscripts that just reinvent the wheel. Because the whole scientific enterprise has become so complex that non-electronic research is effectively impossible, many young scientists don't know and can't find out what has already been done from older, copyrighted, paper-based literature. This results in a huge waste of resources. The same can be said for copyrights in creative areas such as music and writing, in which older works with limited distribution could be built upon to "promote the progress of science and useful arts."

A solution to determining which works are in the "Mickey Mouse" category of copyrights and which are in the more socially valuable "oral rehydration therapy" class of work is not feasible for a government bureaucracy. However, if all copyrights were taxed at a fixed (but significant) amount per year to maintain the copyright (all registered through the copyright office and searchable), there would be a significant carrying cost and most of the copyrighted material would revert to "public domain" and become available to "promote the progress of science and useful arts." The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. As intellectual property and copyrights become an even more significant part of our economy, and as copyright holders (not necessarily the creators) make claims of "stealing" as though it is real property, it should be taxed. Relative to copyrights' significance in our economy, the amount of revenue from this source should be in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

With a proper tax system, publishers like the L.A. Times or scientific journals may maintain a copyright for only a year or so before letting the content revert to public domain and letting Google and everyone else utilize the material for its small, but socially significant, remaining value. The human enterprise could continue to build on itself in these creative, sustainable and non-resource-consuming ways, with copyrights only applying to a small subset of this enterprise.

It should also be noted that some of the most valuable and significant intellectual property and creative works can't be copyrighted. For example, Mickey Mouse is copyrighted, but E=MC2 could not have been. Which was truly the more significant creative work?
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...,1675278.story





End Software Patents Project Comes Out Swinging
Bruce Byfield

Four months after being announced, the End Software Patents project (ESP) is launching a new Web site with arguments for economists, computer scientists, lawyers, and lay people about why they should support the project. Prominent on the site is the publication of a report on the state of patents in the United States during 2006-07, and a scholarship contest that will award $10,000 for "for the best paper on the effects of the patentability of software and business methods under US law."

The project is being launched with initial funding of a quarter million dollars, supplied primarily by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Under the directorship of Ben Klemens, a long-time advocate of software patent abolition best-known for the book Math You Can't Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software, the project is being supported by the FSF, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).

One of ESP's goals is to enlist support from academics, software developers, legal experts, and business executives. Its initial supporters show that the project is already well on its way to building such a coalition.

"Software patents give the megacorporations a sort of dominion over the whole software field," says Richard Stallman, FSF president and founder, explaining his organization's support of ESP. "For all other software developers, and for the users of software, they are dangerous. We have to eliminate them." The FSF is committed to continuing to raise funds for ESP indefinitely until it achieves its goal of abolishing software patents.

At the SFLC, Chairman Eben Moglen expressed similar views, describing the present American software patent system as "a significant long-term nuisance and occasional long-term threat." Moglen notes that, as a nonprofit organization, the SFLC is limited in the political advocacy that it can undertake. However, he anticipates doing "what we can to provide intellectual material for legal activity that we are permitted [and] we will, if possible, assist our clients in the passing of legislation that is helpful in eliminating software patents." Moglen also expects the SFLC to assist in educating the legal community about the issues surrounding the campaign.

Another supporter of ESP is Brad Feld, founder and chair of Mobius Venture Capital. An opponent of software patents since he studied in the late 1980s under Eric von Hippel, the famous innovation expert at at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Feld describes software patents as "a gigantic waste of time and money," arguing that "you'll find very few sophisticated investors who invest in companies because of their software patent portfolios," except outright patent trolls.

Nor, contrary to what many believe, are patents an incentive for investment, according to Feld. He dismisses the idea of "spending money and time in an early stage company" to obtain patents, because "going through the patent process means waiting three or four years, when really what's more important is how you play out in the market. The actual cost of either asserting or defending a patent far outweighs the benefits."

To promote ESP, Feld plans to continue blogging on the subject of patents, as he has done for several years. He is also due to sit on an advisory board at the University of California at Berkeley with technology legal expert Pamela Richardson, and committed to funding a full-time researcher on software patents at the University of Colorado Law School.

Web site resources

As well as serving as a focus for the campaign, the ESP Web site is designed to educate people on the subject of American software patents. Several pages summarize the arguments against software patents for a variety of audiences. For those familiar with the subject, these pages have little new. They explain the vulnerability of everyone to patent infringement cases, and make several well-known arguments, such as that software patents stifle innovation, and that the idea of patenting mathematics or source code is fundamentally absurd. Instead, the site suggests, copyright would be a more suitable form of protection, and certainly a less wasteful one in terms of time and money. However, for those new to the subject, together these pages quickly make an academic case for the subject.

Perhaps the most original of these pages is the one aimed at lawyers, which describes the potentially important cases involving software patents today. Another page lists major cases and settlements.

Another major source of information on the site is the PDF report on the state of software patents over 2006-2007. Entitled "The current state of software and business method patents: 2008 edition," the report is obviously intended to be the first in an ongoing series.

Much of the report's 11 pages is devoted to summarizing the history of American patent law, as it moved from considering software unpatentable in the 1980s to allowing software patents in the mid-1990s, and created the increasingly untenable situation of the present. For those who need to be brought up to speed on the subject, the summary is an ideal resource.

The rest of the report is a miscellany of related information on current trends. For instance, the report estimates that, at an average of $4 million to litigate a mid-sized patent, some $11.4 billion is wasted per year on software patent litigation in the United States. The report also notes that, despite the general academic trend to accept software patents, three recent studies found no evidence that patents had any effect on innovation, while a fourth suggested that patents stifled innovation.

The report further suggests that, based on the tentative changes contained in The Patent Reform Act of 2008 (S.1145), a bill currently before Congress, reform is unlikely to improve the current situation. Although proposed changes such as a change from granting patents to the first to file to the first to invent, and a set scale for assessing damages, are welcome, the fact that US patent law does not treat software as a unique category makes extensive change almost impossible, according to the report.

The site offers ways to put this information to practical use. However, although one page is entitled "What can I do?" the main call to action is a call for papers prominently displayed at the top of the menu.

As well as the first prize of $10,000, the contest is also offering prizes of $4,000 and $1,000. "Papers may be from law, economics, management, computer science, or any other field." according to the contest page, and "may be empirical or qualitative." Despite the obvious perspective of ESP, the contest instructions include a warning that "bias and quality of scholarship tend to work against each other. Papers that let the facts and the data speak for themselves will fare better than papers that work from a foregone conclusion."

This comment echoes the general style of the site. For all the site's obvious bias, the general tone is one of reasoned academic discourse, with statements carefully supported by evidence and some attention paid to answering opposing arguments.

ESP's initial strategies

As the site suggest, one of ESP's primary concerns is education about patent issues. But the project also intends to assist corporations contesting patents, either in court or in the US Patent and Trademark Office -- although only "to the extent that the patent is a test case for questioning patents at large," Klemens says.

One area that ESP will not get involved in is attempts to reform existing software patent law. "There are on the order of 100,000 software patents out there today," says Klemens, and "we just don't have the bandwidth to re-examine all those patents." Besides, some patent reform is already happening, because of such cases as KSR v. Teleflex, which should make the filing of obvious patents harder. Advocacy groups for reform, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Patent Busting Project, are already underway. And, ultimately, ESP's goal is abolition, not reform.

For now, at least, ESP seems to reject politics as its main battleground. Speaking of the bill now before Congress, Klemens says, "The Patent Reform Act could have made Senator [Patrick] Leahy a hero in computer geek circles. Instead, it isn't doing much that we in computing would be significantly concerned with."

By contrast, the courts seem a venue far more likely to get results. "The Patent Office has recently rejected a spate of patents," Klemens says, "and those rejections have gone to the Federal Circuit, which is taking some of them as a chance to seriously reconsider the scope of what is patentable."

Klemens is especially interested in In re Bilski, a case that centers on the question of what is patentable. In the last few months, Klemens has been looking for such a test case, and he believes that "the Federal Circuit simply handed us an agenda" by hearing this case.

Klemens is currently working on an intervention in the case. "I have been working like crazy on an amicus curiae brief for the ESP. We've been making an effort to coordinate with other organizations to make sure that all the bases are covered in one brief or another, have been searching for companies that would like to sign on to our briefs, and otherwise making sure that our team has a strong showing in this case."

But Klemens is too experienced to imagine that obtaining ESP's goals will be so simple. "Even if we win Bilski -- and we can only guess the odds of that -- the fight is not yet over. There are people who lobby Congress and the courts for monopolies on their products all the time, so we need to be vigilant that any gains we're making now are not simply reversed."

In other words, ESP is probably in for a prolonged fight. For now, though, it has made a promising start.
http://www.linux.com/feature/128110





Milestones

Buddy Miles, Hendrix Drummer, Dies
Jon Pareles

Buddy Miles, the drummer in Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys and a hitmaker under his own name with the song “Them Changes,” died on at his home in Austin, Tex. He was 60.

Mr. Miles suffered from congestive heat failure, his publicist, Duane Lee, said, according to Reuters. Mr. Lee said he did not know the official cause of death.

Mr. Miles played with a brisk, assertive, deeply funky attack that made him an apt partner for Hendrix. With his luxuriant Afro and his American-flag shirts, he was a prime mover in the psychedelic blues-rock of the late 1960’s, not only with Hendrix but also as a founder, drummer and occasional lead singer for the Electric Flag. During the 1980’s, he was widely heard as the lead voice of the California Raisins in television commercials

George Allen Miles Jr., whose aunt nicknamed him after the big-band drummer Buddy Rich, was born in Omaha and began playing drums as a child. He was 12 years old when he joined his father’s jazz group, the Bebops. As a teenager he also worked with soul and rhythm-and-blues acts, among them the Ink Spots, the Delfonics and Wilson Pickett. By 1967, he had moved to Chicago, where he was a founding member of the Electric Flag.

That band included a horn section and played blues, soul and rock; it made its debut at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and released its first album in 1968. But the Electric Flag was short-lived. Mr. Miles formed the Buddy Miles Express, and its first album, “Electric Church,” was produced by Hendrix, whom he had met when both were sidemen on the rhythm-and-blues circuit. Mr. Miles appeared on two songs on the Hendrix album “Electric Ladyland.” When Hendrix disbanded the Jimi Hendrix Experience and replaced his trio’s British musicians with African-Americans, Mr. Miles joined him in the Band of Gypsys along with Billy Cox on bass.

On the last night of the 1960s, a New Year’s Eve show, they recorded “Band of Gypsys,” an album that included “Them Changes.” Mr. Miles also worked in the studio with Hendrix, and appears on “Cry of Love,” released after Hendrix died in 1970.

He re-recorded “Them Changes” with his own band, and it became a hit and a blues-rock staple; Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood performed it on Monday at Madison Square Garden. Through the 1970s, Mr. Miles made albums with his own bands. He also made a live album with Carlos Santana in 1972, and sang on the 1987 Santana album “Freedom.” During his career he appeared on more than 70 albums and worked with musicians including Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Barry White and George Clinton.

He was imprisoned on drug-related convictions during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, but when he emerged, advertising recharged his career. He sang the lead vocal for the California Raisins, whose Claymation commercials were so popular that they led to a string of albums by the fictional group. Two of them, “California Raisins” and “Meet the Raisins,” shipped a million copies. Mr. Miles also produced and performed commercials for Cadillac and Harley Davidson.

He and Mr. Cox recorded a live album, “The Band of Gypsys Return,” in 2004. Mr. Miles continued to perform even after suffering a stroke in 2005. Survivors include his partner, Sherrilae Chambers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/ar...cnd-miles.html





Music Exec: "Music 1.0 is Dead."
Nate Anderson

Five hundred top members of the music business gathered today in New York to hear that "music 1.0 is dead." Ted Cohen, a former EMI exec who used the phrase, opened the Digital Music Forum East by pleading with the industry to be wildly creative with new business models but not to "be desperate" during this transitional period. But what is music transitioning to? No one seemed quite sure, except to say that it won't look much like the music business of the last several decades.

Consider the statements that were made today without controversy:

• DRM on purchased music is dead
• A utility pricing model or flat-rate fee for music might be the way to go
• Ad-supported streaming music sites like iMeem are legitimate players
• Indie music accounts for upwards of 30 percent of music sales
• Napster isn't losing $70 million per quarter (and is breaking even)
• The music business is a bastion of creativity and experimentation

Only a few years ago, none of those statements would have been true, but perhaps none is more striking than the last. Panelists from every sector of the digital media marketplace were in agreement that the major labels, under the pressure of eroding profits, have been forced to become experimental in their business dealings and to do deals that would have been deemed too risky only months before.

Just within the last year, we've seen an array of experiments that include ad-supported streaming, "album cards" from labels like Sony BMG, and allowing Amazon to offer MP3s from all four majors. Some labels even allow user-generated content to make use of their music in return for a revenue share from sites like YouTube—unthinkable a few years ago to a business wedded to control over its music and marketing. YouTube's Glenn Otis Brown says that the labels now have less of a "standoff mentality" and are ready to deal.

That innovation has been paying off. Interscope now rakes in 40 percent of its total revenues from digital sales, while Sony BMG makes 30 percent (in the US), but this hasn't been nearly enough to offset the loss in revenue from plummeting CD sales. While the majors once held all the cards when it came to licensing music (and they used their power to negotiate revenue splits on the order of 85/15), they aren't quite so powerful any more. In fact, several audience members and panelists even questioned whether major music labels brought much to the table besides their back catalogs.

Who needs a label?

Ted Mico, the head of digital strategy at Interscope, defended the majors by saying that "anyone who has spent an hour or a day listening to demos understands the labels' place in the food chain"; that is, labels provide both filtering and then marketing of music. Without their help, promising artists would be lost in a sea of noise and would be almost impossible for music lovers to discover.

This attitude was deconstructed during the very next panel, where the CEO of social music recommendation site iLike pointed out that labels, in fact, don't actually need to spend their time listening to demos; customers have already done it for them. Social networking sites like MySpace show that it works. Do music labels still need expensive A&R staff when they can simply listen to works of any band with over 50,000 MySpace friends? The message, in other words, was "Music 2.0, welcome to Web 2.0."

The contrast between these two ways of looking at the world—one rooted in a more elitist and expensive model, the other open to the "wisdom of crowds" and its democratic ideals—underscored a broader theme that emerged from the first day of the conference: the music business is a complicated place. Internecine warfare was the order of the day, so much so that the disagreements from one panel of music luminaries drew an impassioned plea for the infighting to end.

David Del Beccaro, the president of Music Choice, laid out a clear case for change and for labels to focus more on building long-term partners than on short-term advances and profits, but he sees the music industry's fundamental transformation as taking ten to twenty years to complete. In a business changing this quickly, that could mean death.

Greg Scholl, boss of indie label The Orchard, pointed out that the music business is not just four companies, and that indie music's market share is now approaching one-third... and it's growing. Indies have also been more open, historically, to experiments such as selling music without DRM. If the major labels take more than a decade to turn the ship around, they risk running a ghost ship with little in its cargo hold but a valuable back catalog. The indies could instead become the place for fresh new music and even for established artists who want more control (we saw that last year with Paul McCartney, John Fogerty, and James Taylor, for instance).

But no one quite knows how it will all shake out at this point. As Sony BMG's Thomas Hesse put it, "the next big thing is a dozen things." That's a scary thought to labels that pursued only one thing—the sale of recorded music on pieces of plastic—for decades.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...0-is-dead.html





6 Music Industry Tricks That Must Die
Miles Hlivko

If the music industry really wants to save itself, it could start by doing away with all the bullshit. What bullshit, you ask? Here are six underhanded tricks that we could live without, and that our kids probably will.

#6. Auto-Tune

Worst Offenders:

Kid Rock, Cher, Uncle Kracker, T-Pain

How it Caught On:

Frequently mistaken for a vocoder and more commonly known as "That Fucking Weird Computer Voice Thing," Auto-Tune is actually a brilliant piece of software. All you have to do is tell it which notes you're trying to hit while you're singing. When you fuck up, Auto-Tune makes the necessary adjustments so that you can pretend to be a good singer and a weird sounding robot at the same time. Obviously this has made it invaluable in the world of music.

Singers used to spend days trying to get their songs recorded perfectly, and studios charge by the hour. Some would record late at night when their vocal chords were more relaxed. Some (Rod Stewart) even gargled crew-members' love gravy to get that smooth, even tone (allegedly, but the kid who told us about it in high school also had the best weed, so it has to be true, right?). Auto-Tune has made it possible for performers to lower their recording budgets, get some rest, and sidestep such unfortunate homeopathic remedies.

Why it Must be Stopped:

Unfortunately, Auto-Tune has become the HGH of the recording industry. While we doubt that Kid Rock will be facing a grand jury for his blatant abuse of the software in the steaming turd of a song "Only God Knows Why," we can only hope that any future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees who've received such a heaping dose of simulated talent will get an asterisk next to their names. Also, we hope that in the future, an asterisk will resemble a middle finger.

"That Fucking Weird Computer Voice Thing" has made it possible for every paparazzi sweetheart, pop culture freak of the week to record an album and assail our eardrums.

For too long, consumers had been duped into thinking that fame had some sort of direct correlation to talent. Auto-Tune provided yet another step down the road towards the inevitable day when Soldja Boi wins the Grammy in rap, R&B, adult contemporary and operatic solo.

Auto-Tune will be around as long as talented musicians and teenage girls who make men want to masturbate continue refusing to be the same person (allow us a moment to shake our fist at evolution). But rest assured that the current trend of making one's voice sound obviously computerized will not last much longer. Our guess is that, in time, That Fucking Weird Computer Thing will sound as dated as Jeopardy's Daily Double laser sound effect.

#5. Rehab

Worst Offenders:

Scott Weiland, Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse

How it Caught On:

In 2007, Paula Abdul appeared on a morning TV talk show, stoned out of her mind on what we imagine was a combination of oxycontin, absinthe, and Drano. This, of course, got people talking, videos YouTubed, and ratings boosted. In the music industry, there's no such thing as a drug scandal because we expect our musicians to be on drugs. We'd be a little disappointed if we found out they weren't. The downside is that publicists have figured out that checking your client into rehab is actually the cheapest way to drum up publicity, assuming the price of street drugs remains lower than whatever Nickelback's manager pays to get them into Rollingstone.

We are a nation of voyeurs, and there's nothing we like to watch more than celebrity sex tapes. But embarrassing celebrity drug freakouts come in a close second. And since sex tapes require that people actually want to watch you have sex (clearly not the case for two of our three worst offenders) chemical dependency is a much easier go-to. It should be noted that it's not as good an idea to combine drugs and sex tapes, as when a cracked out Tom Sizemore played power bottom to a hooker with an elephant trunk-sized slab of rubber strapped to her pelvis.

Why it Must be Stopped:

Repeat offenders have made going to rehab a joke. While regular-ass people rehabilitate in facilities that are just a step up from county jail, Britney Spears spends an extended weekend in Malibu, then Antigua, then Malibu again. These celebrities are giving real addicts a bad name. We'll start taking their problems seriously as soon as we see Scott Weiland barefoot, hauling ass down Sunset Boulevard, clutching a stolen DVD player.

On the other hand, being a regular person in rehab with a celebrity might not be so bad. If that celebrity is Lindsay Lohan, she'll probably have sex with you if you're a dude with a passably functioning penis. This is preferable to having sex with Lindsay Lohan in the bathroom at a club, because in rehab there will be medical help readily available when you come down with a mean case of Hepatitis F.

#4. Songs About How California is Phony

Worst Offenders:

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Madonna, System of a Down

How it Caught On:

Those who faithfully follow rock stars do so because they feel a genuine, personal connection through the music. "Here is someone who's just like me," they think, "only better looking, rich and more prone to wearing black leather pants."

When you're a struggling musician, your life isn't that far off from other people: you're unsure of yourself, you're hung over, you get dumped for guys with better jobs (when you're a struggling musician, this includes the guy at the mall who paints himself silver and pretends to be a statue for two hours). Thus the rock star is able to write lyrics that almost anyone can relate to. Your girlfriend dumped you? There's a song for that. You're broke? There's a song for that too. You're married and you just realized that you're gay? R. Kelly wrote twenty-two songs for that.

However, it can become difficult for a performer to relate to his fans when he reaches a certain level of success. Those songs of struggle and heartbreak don't come as easily when the swedish bikini team is wiping your ass with hundred dollar bills in the back of a stretch Hummer limo.

That screaming horde of fans still loves their rock star, though. So much so that they'd trade anything to live his life. With that last remaining connection, the rock star pretends to be down to earth one last time with a song (or in the case of the Chili Peppers, three straight albums) about how California ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Why it Must be Stopped:

Ever since the overrated, pretentious, and ponderous "Hotel California," rock bands have tried to duplicate the Eagles' success. They'll sing ironic lyrics about the glamorous life and it's ugly underbelly, completely missing the irony that they've become exactly the sort of asshole their girlfriend used to leave them for. This is inevitable. It is simply very difficult to examine your own existence while spackling a hotel room with evidence for your future paternity suit.

Many of these songs are passed off as some sort of public service. If too many people are exposed to these contrived and cliched cautionary tales though, they may never have their dreams crushed by Hollywood, leading to the greatest restaurant-staffing crisis California has ever seen.

Vince Neil complained that Hollywood "fat cats" were going to "take our money and flush it down the drain" in Motley Crue's "Fake." Five years later he was singing a cover of "If I Die Tomorrow," through a face full of collagen implants. Fake, indeed.

#3. Multiple Producers on One Album

Worst Offenders:

Velvet Revolver, Every rapper ever

How it Caught On:

Hip hop is rarely a one-man show. Generally, someone makes the beats, and someone else delivers the vocals. In old school hip hop, the bringer of beats was designated as the DJ, such as: DJ Jazzy Jeff, DJ for the Fresh Prince; Terminator X, DJ for Public Enemy; or SW1, DJ for In Living Color. These days, we call this person the Producer, because beat creation is no longer limited to turntables and samplers.

Not all producers are created equal though, and as a result of supply and demand, the best producers come with the highest price tags. Not to mention that Dr. Dre and Timbaland just don't have the time to make beats for every up-and-coming MC. In an attempt to spread the wealth, and launch as many careers as possible, record labels spread the talent around.

Why it Must be Stopped:

Ever bought a CD and wondered why the only good songs are the ones you already hear on the radio all the time? Check the credits. Chances are, the two that you like were produced by the same person, and the 13 you hate were produced by the performer's cousin. You can't help but feel betrayed, wondering if you've been the victim of some sort of prank a la whopperfreakout.com.

Too many fans have been swindled by this bait-and-switch tactic, and we've definitely caught on to the grift. Album sales continue to plummet while digital track sales are climbing. Consumers are sending the message that if you can only crank out one or two good songs, we're only going to buy one or two songs from you. When rappers start looking for someone to blame when they're popping Korbel instead of Cristal, they'll have to look no further than the reflection in the chrome wheels on their Chevy Cavaliers.

#2. Featuring ...

Worst Offenders:

T-Pain, Akon, Li'l Jon

How it Caught On:

So how is a new act supposed to get noticed in a music scene that's more crowded than Tokyo? Why, by piggy-backing on an established artist by being "featured" on one of his tracks.

Or, what if you're stuck being a producer, forever in the shadows? You can get yourself "featured" in a track by popping in with an occasional "uh huh" or "yayuh!" If not for this, the world may never have learned the names of producers like Li'l Jon, Timbaland, or Sean John (we're told that's what we're supposed to call him this week).

Why it Must be Stopped:

It has come to a point where songs feature so many artists that the consumer can't figure out whose album to buy. Faced with a stack of CDs that could possibly contain the song in question, often the consumer will opt instead to just steal the song on the internet. This could result in heavy fines, jail time, and the feds looking through all that embarrassing shit on your hard drive, all thanks to the Recording Industry Association of America. So whether you steal 'em or buy 'em, you end up broke. See? Evil.

Established, respected artists have found that lending their name to someone else's song can indeed damage their reputations. Redman's appearance in Christina Aguilera's "Dirty" stripped him of the credibility that even those deodorant commercials couldn't tarnish.

#1. Farewell Tours

Worst Offenders:

KISS, The Rolling Stones, Cher, The Who

How it Caught On:

These days, concert ticket sales are only slightly less abysmal than album sales. It's hardly surprising when you consider that many artists need computers to sound good, other artists to give them credibility, and a team of producers to write their music. If an act is good enough to garner interest from their fans after all of that, there's still the risk that your tickets will become worthless when the lead singer checks into rehab. What's the point of going through all that hassle when you only know two or three of their songs?

There are still some surviving acts that have a universal appeal, but those artists have reached such a level of success that their concert tickets cost an arm, a leg, and whichever reproductive organs you posses (for nosebleed seats). The only way for an artist to guarantee themselves a packed house this time around is to assure their fans that this will be the last time around.

Why it Must be Stopped:

As soon as a band sees the paycheck from their first farewell tour, they apparently rethink that whole retiring business. The Who did a farewell tour in 1983. KISS did theirs in 2000, and it lasted two years. The Rolling Stones' farewell tour started in 2005, lasted two years, and raked in $437,000,000. All three bands are planning tour dates for 2008, and many fans have already refinanced their homes to pay for the tickets (plus service charges).

Nothing rocks less than a farewell tour. When bands break up for real, it's because their pilot was still drunk from the night before and flew their plane into the side of a mountain. Or maybe the band members hate each other so much that they go their separate ways after an attempted murder/suicide and record unlistenable solo albums. Or how about just a near-fatal drug overdose where a band member finds Jesus and starts an Armageddon cult?

Literally anything rocks more than a farewell tour, where they might as well open things up with a little honesty:

"Are you ready to rock? Actually, we got burnt playing the markets in the last recession, so instead of rocking, why don't you give us all of your money for our 401k plans and kindly go home. And please leave quietly, all your shouting is scaring the bassist."
http://www.cracked.com/article_15965...-must-die.html





More Teenagers Ignoring CDs, Report Says

48% of teenagers bought no CDs at all in 2007, up from 38% in 2006. Music downloads continue to grow, though, with iTunes leading the way.
Michelle Quinn and Andrea Chang

Going to the mall to buy music may no longer be a rite of passage for adolescents.

For the first time last year, nearly half of all teenagers bought no compact discs, a dramatic increase from 2006, when 38% of teens shunned such purchases, according to a new report released Tuesday.

The illegal sharing of music online continued to soar in 2007, but there was one sign of hope that legal downloading was picking up steam. In the last year, Apple Inc.'s iTunes store, which sells only digital downloads, jumped ahead of Best Buy Co. to become the No. 2 U.S. music seller, trailing Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

That could be hopeful news for the music industry, which has been scrambling in recent years to replace its rapidly disappearing CD sales with music sold online. The number of CDs sold in the U.S. fell 19% in 2007 from the previous year while sales of digital songs jumped 45%, Nielsen SoundScan said.

The number of people buying music legally from online music stores jumped 21% to 29 million last year from 24 million in 2006, according to the study by NPD Group, a market research firm in Port Washington, N.Y.

NPD declined to release figures on individual retailers' sales or their market shares, so it is impossible to know how close iTunes sales are to Wal-Mart's. The NPD market ranking of music retailers is based on a study of the music habits of Americans 13 and older over the last week.

The report, which involved 5,000 people who answered questions online, highlighted a generational split. The increase in legal online sales was driven by people 36 to 50, the report said, giving the music industry an opportunity to target these customers by tapping into its older catalogs.

That's not to say iTunes is not popular with the younger set. Mallory Portillo, 24, an executive assistant in Santa Monica, said she hadn't bought a CD in five years, but typically spent more than $100 a month buying music online. She will turn to illegal music sharing sites only if she can't find new releases or more obscure music on iTunes, she said.

Buying online saves her the step of having to load a CD onto her laptop so that she can then transfer the files to her iPod.

Her most recent purchase came two days ago, when she spent $19.99 on iTunes for Michael Jackson's 25th anniversary edition of "Thriller."

"Hopefully it doesn't come back to haunt me one day that my 'Thriller' CD is on my computer and therefore not a collector's item," she said.

The increase in online spending didn't offset the revenue lost from the drop in CD sales and from illegal downloading. Last year, about 1 million consumers stopped buying CDs, according to NPD.

There are several ways for consumers to expand a digital music collection. They can buy music at online stores such as iTunes and Amazon.com's MP3 store. They also can convert their CD collection into a digital format.

What concerns the music industry is illegal Internet file-sharing on websites where people pick up a digital song or album that others have uploaded. They can also do what is known as peer-to-peer file sharing, when people download music while temporarily opening up their computers to others to pick up music. The music industry says people who obtain music free online are breaking the law.

Rachel Rottman, 14, says she hasn't bought a CD in a year. The Santa Monica High School freshman says she downloads five or six songs a day, using paid services such as iTunes and social networking site MySpace, where bands post songs for free download. Rachel said she had about 2,600 songs stored on her computer.

Before getting a computer in the seventh grade, she always bought CDs. But now it's too much trouble, she said.

"You have to go to the store and then you have to pay -- I don't know how much, $12, I'm guessing? -- then you have to put it on your computer," Rachel said. "When you download it, it's right there."

Hunter Conrad, an eighth-grader at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, says she downloads about 80% of her music from iTunes, "but when it's an artist I really like, I'll buy the original CD."

Out of her group of friends, she's "one of the few" who still buy CDs, she said. Most of her buddies download for the convenience, to save money and to get only the songs they like.

"Nobody really wants the other songs [on an album]," Hunter, 14, said. "They just want the hits."

In the last year, consumers paid for 42% of the music they obtained, the report said. That was down from 48% in 2006 and more than 50% in 2005.

"The trend is continuing but it will flatten because there are people who will always want the physical," said Ted Cohen, managing partner at TAG Strategic, a digital media advisory firm.

Over the last year, the music industry has pushed back. Some companies now permit online music stores to sell songs without copyright protections in hopes of making it easier for consumers to move digital music to different computers and devices, and thus remove the temptation to download it illegally.

Some music companies have thrown support behind Amazon's MP3 store, which competes with iTunes. The music industry has also sued fans to stop them from downloading and sharing music without paying for it.

The legal efforts may have had an effect. The report said that the portion of survey respondents who shared music on sites that facilitate illegal downloads was 19% in 2007, the same as 2006. But those who do it are doing it more. Some said they got more than 3,000 songs a year this way.

Two years ago, teenagers accounted for 15% of CD sales. In 2007, the figure was 10%. The digital music world has yet to completely capture the attentions of Isaac Kahn and his friend Charlie Williams, both 14. They buy music online but prefer to go to the Amoeba store on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and thumb through the CDs. "I like to look at CDs and see if there's anything else I might want to buy," Isaac said.

Charlie, who recently bought a device to transform his father's 300 records into digital files, said many teens download music illegally because they are on computers. But he doesn't have a computer. And besides, he said, "I'm a musician myself; I prefer to just buy it."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...,2979285.story

















Until next week,

- js.



















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