[JackSpratts]

Ken - By Request Only - The Complete Story
Ryan Zeinert

If you're not familiar with the legend of 'Ken' by now, you're about to be. The album cover widely considered to be the 'Worst Of All-Time' has been an endless source of humor to hipsters like myself, cementing its place in Internet Infamy by being featured in every 'Wost Album Cover' list and book on the planet.

When the CDP compiled our own list of the Worst Album Covers Of All-Time, By Request Only came in at #2. It was one of our most popular posts ever, and did nothing but spread the Internet Phenomenon that was Ken.

Who was this guy? What was on the record? Was it even a real record? These were the questions that filled message board threads for years, as outsider music collectors and Internet historians debated the merits of this one and only photograph. Mere sleeves of this record were said to be going for big money on eBay. Surely, it was too good to be true. Just a little too nostalgic, just a little too funny, perhaps. People wanted their hands on this album, but nobody even knew if it actually existed.

Until now.

Snopes, the Internet's premiere Urban Legend website, has finally cracked the mystery of By Request Only, actually tracking down Ken himself for the straight dope. Besides Snopes, I'm confident that the CDP is currently the only place on the Internet where you can see the entire story of Ken from beginning to end.

First off, this album is real. The first big clue came when the album, vinyl and all, went up on eBay and sold for $150. This gave the world their first look at the back cover of the album, along with the actual record itself.

Finally being able to see the back cover of By Request Only opened the floodgates of information. We got a track listing, an idea of the musical genre it entailed (Christian), a personal message from Ken himself, a last name (Snyder) and full contact information! Things were going well for us Internet investigators.

The next step, of course, was to break the fourth wall and actually track this guy down. Did Ken know that he was an Internet Celebrity? Was he aware that By Request Only was making big bucks on eBay and considered the worst album cover of all-time?

After some more digging, a Ken Snyder who matched the description and location of the album recording was linked to a church in Sheldon, Iowa, along with an updated photograph and contact information!

Surely, this was the same man. Now, not only did we know that the album was real, we also knew that Ken was still alive and well, spreading his message of faith throughout the Bible Belt. This was a very good thing.

Eventually, someone had the balls to make the phone call, and contact was made. Here's the Snopes entry on said conversation:

"Talked with Ken, he said he was somewhat aware of the notoriety, but was surprised to hear about the eBay auction and wanted a link. He hadn't received any calls about it, hopefully I didn't start anything, he's a really nice guy."

Contact with Ken! The Internet truly is an amazing thing.

After this conversation with Ken, he was happy to know that people were still interested in his music, and actually put up the LAST 4 COPIES OF BY REQUEST ONLY THAT HE HAD. In the eBay auctions, he actually put 'Worst Album Cover' in the title, so it's clear that the man has a very good sense of humor about this. In fact, shortly after finding out this news, Ken's daughter posted on the Snopes board and offered this information:

"Hey, I'm Ken's daughter. Just thought you would like to know my dad has loved reading these sites about him. That record is from 1976. He used to travel and sing all over the U.S., and that was one of his records he sold. He only has about 4 left now, decided 'why not try selling them if people are actually interested in buying them?' He called me up immediately after he got a call saying that one of you had told him his record sold on eBay. He knew the album cover was under "Worst Album Cover" but didn't realize he was the talk of people online. Crazyness!"

So, that pretty much brings everyone up to speed. The album is real, Ken is real (with a great sense of humor), and he's selling off the last 4 copies of By Request Only known to exist. He's even going to sign them! I love it when mysteries like this end with happy endings, although I am a bit sad that the Internet has halted yet another great Urban Legend.

Ken - By Request Only. Solved.

You should also know that I'm getting myself a copy, and I don't care the price. I'm currently the highest bidder on one of the auctions that ends tomorrow. I'll tell you how I did when it's over.

From September
http://communistdanceparty.blogspot....ete-story.html





After 38 Years, ‘Soul Train’ Gets New Owner
Brian Stelter

People who think of “Soul Train” as an artifact from 1970s television may be surprised to learn that the 38-year-old song-and-dance show was never canceled. Although no new episodes are produced, it lives on in reruns that showcase the taste-making music, hairstyles and fashions of decades past.

Now a production company, MadVision Entertainment, has bought the “Soul Train” franchise from its founder, Don Cornelius, and plans to breathe new life into it. The plan is to open up the show’s archives for older consumers as well as to create a new version of the program for younger ones.

“The series has never been shown on DVD, and it’s not been utilized on video-on-demand or mobile or Internet platforms,” Peter Griffith, a co-founder of MadVision, said. “There are many opportunities that we are exploring.”

MadVision, which was founded in 2006 by three urban media veterans, is best known for the Showtime stand-up comedy series “White Boyz in the Hood.” One of the founders of MadVision, Kenard Gibbs, is the group publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines. Another founder, Anthony Maddox, worked as a producer at NBC and ran Sean Combs’s Bad Boy Films. Mr. Griffith, the third partner, founded a hip-hop Web portal and worked with Vibe to extend the magazine’s brand.

The deal for “Soul Train,” reached in mid-May, is the first acquisition for MadVision, which is based in Los Angeles. Neither the company nor Mr. Cornelius would comment on the sale price.

Mr. Cornelius, a former disc jockey, was not just the creator of “Soul Train,” but also the writer, producer and host. He produced the pilot for “Soul Train” in 1970.

Three years later, calling the show an “almost instant success,” a reviewer for The New York Times said that “Soul Train” was to “American Bandstand” as “Champagne is to seltzer water.” Later, the director Spike Lee called it an “urban music time capsule.”

“We had a show that kids gravitated to,” Mr. Cornelius said.

In the 1970s and 1980s, “Soul Train” helped glamorize black music, featuring performances by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson and other hit makers. But the real stars were the young dancers who would strut their stuff, laying the groundwork for countless dance programs , including current ones like Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance?” and MTV’s “America’s Best Dance Crew.”

But the “Soul Train” brand has not entered the Internet age. Its Web site has barely been updated since 2006, when Mr. Cornelius stopped producing new episodes. “The Best of Soul Train” is now shown on weekends in syndication.

For MadVision, the rights issues will be complicated. The company will have to compensate artists, producers and labels for rebroadcasts of the songs played on the show.

As for 2008 version of “Soul Train,” Mr. Griffith said the company is in talks with potential producers about what the show might look like.

Mr. Cornelius, now 71, didn’t mince words about his decision to sell.

“Thirty-five years is a long time,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/bu...ia/17soul.html





Audiophile Deathmatch: Monster Cables vs. a Coat Hanger

Whether or not Monster Cables are worth it is a war that has raged since home theatre immemorial. A poster at Audioholics was put in a room with five fellow audiophiles, and a Martin Logan SL-3 speaker set at 75Db at 1000KHz playing a mix of "smooth, trio, easy listening jazz" that no one had heard before. In one corner, Monster 1000 speaker cables. In the other, four coat hangers twisted and soldered into a speaker cable.

Seven songs were played while the group was blindfolded and the cables swapped back and forth. Not only "after 5 tests, none could determine which was the Monster 1000 cable or the coat hanger wire," but no one knew a coat hanger was used in the first place.

Further, when music was played through the coat hanger wire, we were asked if what we heard sounded good to us. All agreed that what was heard sounded excellent, however, when A-B tests occured, it was impossible to determine which sounded best the majority of the time and which wire was in use.

It's possible these guys weren't super-hardcore audiophiles that might not be able to tell the difference, but it largely goes with what we've found in our own tests of Monster Cable: The lower end can perform just as well, though we don't really recommend re-wiring your home theatre after a firesale on wire hangers.
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2008/03/au..._hanger-2.html





Demand for Data Puts Engineers in Spotlight
Steve Lohr

In Silicon Valley, the stars have long been charismatic marketing visionaries and cool-nerd software wizards. By contrast, mechanical engineers who design and run computer data centers were traditionally regarded as little more than blue-collar workers in the high-tech world.

For years, they toiled in relative obscurity in the engine rooms of the digital economy, amid the racks of servers and storage devices that power everything from online videos to corporate e-mail systems. Their mission was to keep the computing power plants humming, while scant thought was given to rising costs and energy consumption.

Today, data center experts are no longer taken for granted. The torrid growth in data centers to keep pace with the demands of Internet-era computing, their immense need for electricity and their inefficient use of that energy pose environmental, energy and economic challenges, experts say.

That means people with the skills to design, build and run a data center that does not endanger the power grid are suddenly in demand. Their status is growing, as are their salaries — climbing more than 20 percent in the last two years into six figures for experienced engineers.

“The data center energy problem is growing fast, and it has an economic importance that far outweighs the electricity use,” said Jonathan G. Koomey, a consulting professor of environmental engineering at Stanford. “So that explains why these data center people, who haven’t gotten a lot of glory in their careers, are in the spotlight now.”

At one time, “we were seen as sheet metal jockeys,” said Chandrakant Patel, a mechanical engineer at Hewlett-Packard Labs who has worked in Silicon Valley for 25 years. “But now we have a chance to change the world for the better, using engineering and basic science.”

There is no letup in the demand for data center computing. Digital Realty Trust, a data center landlord with more than 70 facilities, says that customer demand for new space is running 50 percent ahead of its capacity to build and equip data centers for the next two years. “We’re building the railroads of the future, and we can’t keep up,” said Chris J. Crosby, a senior vice president at Digital Realty.

For every new center, new data center administrators need to be hired. “It takes us eight months to find a guy to run a data center,” said Mr. Crosby.

Indeed, some data managers with only a degree from a two-year college can command a $100,000 salary. Trade and professional conferences for data center experts, unheard of years ago, are now commonplace. Five-figure signing bonuses, retention bonuses and generous stock grants have become ingredients in the compensation packages of data center experts today.

Paul Marcoux knows the feeling of being wanted. Cisco Systems, giant Silicon Valley maker of equipment used in data centers, recently held a nationwide search for a vice president for “green engineering.” It needed someone who could manage the traditional information technology functions as well as increasingly important mechanical and electrical systems.

Last November, Cisco found Mr. Marcoux, an electrical engineer with an M.B.A. working at American Power Conversion, a manufacturer of power supplies and air-conditioners for data centers. Mr. Marcoux, 57, worked on the design and construction of about 100 data centers in his 30-year career.

“To really make progress, we have to bridge the analog and the digital worlds,” said Mr. Marcoux.

At Cisco, Mr. Marcoux is applying his experience to improving the company’s data centers and its products, so that its computers increasingly can communicate with the coolers and power generators. “Our products need to talk to the power supplies and air-conditioners instead of being standalone boxes,” he explained.

Cisco is just one of the many companies — and the Energy Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — working on the challenge of making data centers operate more like seamless machines, using sensors and software, for example, so the computers can direct air-conditioners and fans where and what level of cooling is needed.

Mr. Patel is overseeing H.P.’s programs in energy-efficient data centers and technology. The research includes advanced projects like trying to replace copper wiring in server computers with laser beams. But like other experts in the field, Mr. Patel says that data centers can be made 30 percent to 50 percent more efficient by applying current technology.

The pace of the data center buildup is the result of the surging use of server computers, which in the United States rose to 11.8 million in 2007, from 2.6 million a decade earlier, according to IDC, a research firm. Worldwide, the 10-year pattern is similar, with the server population increasing more than fourfold to 30.3 million by 2007.

“For years and years, the attitude was just buy it, install it and don’t worry about it,” said Vernon Turner, an analyst for IDC. “That led to all sorts of inefficiencies. Now, we’re paying for that behavior.”

The problem is that most computers in data centers run at 15 percent or less of capacity on average, loafing the rest of the time, though consuming electricity all the while. (In the old days, when they housed a few large computers, data centers were far more efficient. Mainframe computers run at 80 percent of capacity or more.)

The computers also generate a lot of heat, so much so that half of the energy consumed by a typical data center is for enormous air-conditioners, fans and other industrial equipment used mainly to cool the high-tech facilities.

The nation’s data centers doubled their energy consumption in the five years to 2006, exceeding the electricity used by the country’s color televisions, according to the latest government estimates.

The availability of electricity, not just its cost, presents a threat to the continued expansion of data center computing that can hamper companies across the economy, as they increasingly rely on information technology.

Based on current trends, by 2011 data center energy consumption will nearly double again, requiring the equivalent of 25 power plants. The world’s data centers, according to recent study from McKinsey & Company, could well surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020.

Because the task ahead, analysts say, is not just building new data centers, but also overhauling the old ones, the managers who know how to cut energy consumption are at a premium. Most of the 6,600 data centers in America, analysts say, will be replaced or retrofitted with new equipment over the next several years.

They apparently have little choice. Analysts point to surveys that show 30 percent of American corporations are deferring new technology initiatives because of data center limitations.

Mechanical and electrical engineers with experience in data center design, air-flow modeling and power systems management are in demand. “If you have those skills, there are jobs waiting,” says Phil Calabrese, a mechanical engineer and director of I.B.M.’s real estate engineering and construction unit.

No company has longer experience in the care and feeding of data centers than I.B.M., and analysts say improving data center efficiency will involve applying some mainframe-style management disciplines.

To exploit the opportunity, I.B.M., which built its business on mainframes and still sells them, last fall introduced a green data center services unit. The new group signed $300 million in contracts in the fourth quarter of last year, and the business is growing rapidly this year, the company says.

Now that costs and energy consumption are priorities, the data center gurus are getting a hearing and new respect.

“After 25 years, we’re finally elevating mechanical engineering and adding a lot of electrical engineering, computer science and applied physics,” said Mr. Patel of Hewlett-Packard. “I wish I were 20 years younger.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/te...gy/17data.html





The Web Time Forgot
Alex Wright

On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”

Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”

Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”

Today, Otlet and his work have been largely forgotten, even in his native Belgium. Although Otlet enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, his legacy fell victim to a series of historical misfortunes — not least of which involved the Nazis marching into Belgium and destroying much of his life’s work.

But in recent years, a small group of researchers has begun to resurrect Otlet’s reputation, republishing some of his writing and raising money to establish the museum and archive in Mons.

As the Mundaneum museum prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary on Thursday, the curators are planning to release part of the original collection onto the present-day Web. That event will not only be a kind of posthumous vindication for Otlet, but it will also provide an opportunity to re-evaluate his place in Web history. Was the Mundaneum (mun-da-NAY-um) just a historical curiosity — a technological road not taken — or can his vision shed useful light on the Web as we know it?

Although Otlet spent his entire working life in the age before computers, he possessed remarkable foresight into the possibilities of electronic media. Paradoxically, his vision of a paperless future stemmed from a lifelong fascination with printed books.
Otlet, born in 1868, did not set foot in a schoolroom until age 12. His mother died when he was 3; his father was a successful entrepreneur who made a fortune selling trams all over the world. The senior Otlet kept his son out of school, out of a conviction that classrooms stifled children’s natural abilities. Left at home with his tutors and with few friends, the young Otlet lived the life of a solitary bookworm.

When he finally entered secondary school, he made straight for the library. “I could lock myself into the library and peruse the catalog, which for me was a miracle,” he later wrote. Soon after entering school, Otlet took on the role of school librarian.

In the years that followed, Otlet never really left the library. Though his father pushed him into law school, he soon left the bar to return to his first love, books. In 1895, he met a kindred spirit in the future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, who joined him in planning to create a master bibliography of all the world’s published knowledge.

Even in 1895, such a project marked an act of colossal intellectual hubris. The two men set out to collect data on every book ever published, along with a vast collection of magazine and journal articles, photographs, posters and all kinds of ephemera — like pamphlets — that libraries typically ignored. Using 3 by 5 index cards (then the state of the art in storage technology), they went on to create a vast paper database with more than 12 million individual entries.

Otlet and LaFontaine eventually persuaded the Belgian government to support their project, proposing to build a “city of knowledge” that would bolster the government’s bid to become host of the League of Nations. The government granted them space in a government building, where Otlet expanded the operation. He hired more staff, and established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph — a kind of analog search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian finance.

As the Mundaneum evolved, it began to choke on the sheer volume of paper. Otlet started sketching ideas for new technologies to manage the information overload. At one point he posited a kind of paper-based computer, rigged with wheels and spokes that would move documents around on the surface of a desk. Eventually, however, Otlet realized the ultimate answer involved scrapping paper altogether.

Since there was no such thing as electronic data storage in the 1920s, Otlet had to invent it. He started writing at length about the possibility of electronic media storage, culminating in a 1934 book, “Monde,” where he laid out his vision of a “mechanical, collective brain” that would house all the world’s information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network.

Tragically, just as Otlet’s vision began to crystallize, the Mundaneum fell on hard times. In 1934, the Belgian government lost interest in the project after losing its bid for the League of Nations headquarters. Otlet moved it to a smaller space, and after financial struggles had to close it to the public.

A handful of staff members kept working on the project, but the dream ended when the Nazis marched through Belgium in 1939. The Germans cleared out the original Mundaneum site to make way for an exhibit of Third Reich art, destroying thousands of boxes filled with index cards. Otlet died in 1944, a broken and soon-to-be-forgotten man.

After Otlet’s death, what survived of the original Mundaneum was left to languish in an old anatomy building of the Free University in the Parc Leopold until 1968, when a young graduate student named W. Boyd Rayward picked up the paper trail. Having read some of Otlet’s work, he traveled to the abandoned office in Brussels, where he discovered a mausoleumlike room full of books and mounds of paper covered in cobwebs.

Mr. Rayward has since helped lead a resurgence of interest in Otlet’s work, a movement that eventually fueled enough interest to prompt development of the Mundaneum museum in Mons.

Today, the new Mundaneum reveals tantalizing glimpses of a Web that might have been. Long rows of catalog drawers hold millions of Otlet’s index cards, pointing the way into a back-room archive brimming with books, posters, photos, newspaper clippings and all kinds of other artifacts. A team of full-time archivists have managed to catalog less than 10 percent of the collection.

The archive’s sheer sprawl reveals both the possibilities and the limits of Otlet’s original vision. Otlet envisioned a team of professional catalogers analyzing every piece of incoming information, a philosophy that runs counter to the bottom-up ethos of the Web.

“I think Otlet would have felt lost with the Internet,” said his biographer, Françoise Levie. Even with a small army of professional librarians, the original Mundaneum could never have accommodated the sheer volume of information produced on the Web today.

“I don’t think it could have scaled up,” Mr. Rayward said. “It couldn’t even scale up to meet the demands of the paper-based world he was living in.”

Those limitations notwithstanding, Otlet’s version of hypertext held a few important advantages over today’s Web. For one thing, he saw a smarter kind of hyperlink. Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.

Otlet also saw the possibilities of social networks, of letting users “participate, applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus.” While he very likely would have been flummoxed by the anything-goes environment of Facebook or MySpace, Otlet saw some of the more productive aspects of social networking — the ability to trade messages, participate in discussions and work together to collect and organize documents.

Some scholars believe Otlet also foresaw something like the Semantic Web, the emerging framework for subject-centric computing that has been gaining traction among computer scientists like Mr. Berners-Lee. Like the Semantic Web, the Mundaneum aspired not just to draw static links between documents, but also to map out conceptual relationships between facts and ideas. “The Semantic Web is rather Otlet-ish,” said Michael Buckland, a professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Critics of the Semantic Web say it relies too heavily on expert programmers to create ontologies (formalized descriptions of concepts and relationships) that will let computers exchange data with one another more easily. The Semantic Web “may be useful, but it is bound to fail,” Dr. Buckland said, adding, “It doesn’t scale because nobody will provide enough labor to build it.”

The same criticism could have been leveled against the Mundaneum. Just as Otlet’s vision required a group of trained catalogers to classify the world’s knowledge, so the Semantic Web hinges on an elite class of programmers to formulate descriptions for a potentially vast range of information. For those who advocate such labor-intensive data schemes, the fate of the Mundaneum may offer a cautionary tale.

The curators of today’s Mundaneum hope the museum avoids its predecessor’s fate. Although the museum has consistently managed to secure financing, it struggles to attract visitors.

“The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum,” said the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. “People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It’s like, would you rather go see the latest ‘Star Wars’ movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?”

Striving to broaden its appeal, the museum stages regular exhibits of posters, photographs and contemporary art. And while only a trickle of tourists make their way to the little museum in Mons, the town may yet find its way onto the technological history map. Later this year, a new corporate citizen plans to open a data center on the edge of town: Google.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html





U.S. School District to Begin Microchipping Students
David Gutierrez

A Rhode Island school district has announced a pilot program to monitor student movements by means of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips implanted in their schoolbags.

The Middletown School District, in partnership with MAP Information Technology Corp., has launched a pilot program to implant RFID chips into the schoolbags of 80 children at the Aquidneck School. Each chip would be programmed with a student identification number, and would be read by an external device installed in one of two school buses. The buses would also be fitted with global positioning system (GPS) devices.

Parents or school officials could log onto a school web site to see whether and when specific children had entered or exited which bus, and to look up the bus's current location as provided by the GPS device.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has criticized the plan as an invasion of children's privacy and a potential risk to their safety.

"There's absolutely no need to be tagging children," said Stephen Brown, executive director of the ACLU's Rhode Island chapter. According to Brown, the school district should already know where its students are.

"[This program is] a solution in search of a problem," Brown said.

The school district says that its current plan is no different than other programs already in place for parents to monitor their children's school experience. For example, parents can already check on their children's attendance records and what they have for lunch, said district Superintendent Rosemary Kraeger.

Brown disputed this argument. The school is perfectly entitled to track its buses, he said, but "it's a quantitative leap to monitor children themselves." He raised the question of whether unauthorized individuals could use easily available RFID readers to find out students' private information and monitor their movements.

Because the pilot program is being provided to the school district at no cost, it did not require approval from the Rhode Island ethics commission.
http://www.naturalnews.com/023445.html





Critics Study Possible Limits to Habeas Corpus Ruling

Affirming Right to Challenge Detention Is Considered by Some a Taking of Federal Power
Michael Abramowitz

The White House and allies in Congress have begun exploring how to limit the scope of this week's Supreme Court ruling that says suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their detentions in federal court.

Administration lawyers were digesting the ramifications of a decision they condemned as an unjustified judicial usurpation of federal and congressional prerogatives in waging war. They said the court provided little guidance for the standards judges should use in evaluating the claims of detainees seeking release, and suggested that they might press Congress to spell out new rules.

"We're looking at all options," said a senior administration official who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. "One of those options is to look and see if there is any way to legislatively contain the scope of the decision. The court's language is quite ambiguous. We need to make sure that we are anticipating the questions it raises, and that is what we are going to do in the next few days."

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a key figure in detention policy on Capitol Hill, said he is concerned that detainees will shop for sympathetic judges while challenging issues including their treatment, food and lodging.

"I am hoping that there is some legislative enactments that we can pass that would protect our national security requirements," Graham said.

Some Democrats counseled patience. "There is no need for quick-fix legislation," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). "No one is being released from custody. We need to study the opinion and consider next steps with great care."

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said it "seems unlikely that anything will be resolved in the next seven months. It'll be something that the next administration will have to deal with."

Over the past six years, the administration has been riven with debate over what to do with suspected terrorists seized overseas, and it has been slapped down three times by the Supreme Court over its efforts to create a legal framework outside the regular criminal justice system.

Several lawyers inside and outside the government said the latest rebuff from the high court may well represent the tipping point in the debate over the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which many around the world regard as a symbol for U.S. lawlessness. President Bush has repeatedly stated he wants to close down the facility, but administration officials have been unable to determine how to do so.

Charles "Cully" D. Stimson, who oversaw detainee affairs for the Pentagon until early 2007, said that the Bush administration has several options on Guantanamo -- but that almost all of them end in the facility's closure. He said Bush could run out the clock and leave such decisions to the next president, or he could take the "bold move" of immediately ordering Guantanamo's safe and secure closure.

"The legal rationale underlying the establishment of Guantanamo has been eviscerated by this decision," said Stimson, now at the Heritage Foundation. "The question is not if Guantanamo will close; it's when."

Stimson said the administration could "reluctantly embrace" the Supreme Court's decision and pull together the evidence to justify holding the detainees, then present it in hearings before judges in Washington. He said he believes most of the people held at Guantanamo would be considered enemy combatants, while a "small percentage" would have to be released. Currently, 270 detainees are held at Guantanamo.

Defense officials have not spoken publicly about Guantanamo since the Supreme Court decision, but officials said privately they are preparing for the possibility that the detention facility could close in the near future. Defense officials do not expect to take any newly captured terrorism suspects to the facility and have taken only six new detainees to Guantanamo since early 2007.

U.S. District Court officials said yesterday that they are still seeking to set up meetings with attorneys representing both the government and the detainees to work out legal and logistical issues. The District Court's judges will then discuss how to proceed with the habeas corpus reviews.

This week, lawyers representing several detainees filed motions to set scheduling conferences, and one asked a judge to force the government to treat his client as a prisoner of war entitled to the rights of the Geneva Conventions.

Staff writers Josh White, Joby Warrick and Del Quentin Wilber and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...nav=rss_nation





Opposition to Proposed Surveillance Law Mounts
Faisal Enayat Khan

As the vote on Sweden’s controversial surveillance proposal nears, the voices of political party youth wings and bloggers are rising up in a chorus of opposition.

Gustaf Stenlund, spokesperson for the youth wing of the Moderate party believes a few Moderate parliamentarians will chose their conscience over party policy and vote against the proposal.

And Stenlund is not the only youth wing member of the centre-right coalition parties who is breaking ranks with his senior colleagues.

Centre Party youth wing chair Magnus Andersson is also frustrated over the support his party is giving the measure.

“The legislation and the Centre Party’s support for it goes against the ideals we stand for,” he told The Local.

If passed, the measure would enable Sweden's National Defence Radio Establishment (Försvarets Radioanstalt - FRA) to monitor all outgoing and incoming communications crossing Sweden’s borders.

Both the Centre and the Liberal Party’s youth wings have issued statements condemning the legislation and urging their colleagues in the Riksdag to break ranks and vote down the proposal.

Although frustrated, Andersson is still hopeful that public pressure will help centre-right politicians vote no next week.

“I still have faith in my colleagues,” he said.

Frederick Federley, a Centre Party member of the Riksdag whose vote is considered crucial for both the yes and no camps, said on Wednesday that he has been overwhelmed by the number of emails and telephone calls he has received from members of the public giving him support.

Federley has been open about his mixed feelings towards the vote, exemplifying the challenges facing undecided members of parliament as they wrestle with the competing priorities of party politics and public pressure.

Even Allan Widman, defence spokesperson for the Liberal Party and a strong supporter of the proposed surveillance law, can understand people’s anxiety.

“I have received perhaps a thousand emails from people concerned about the proposal. It is a very serious matter,” he said.

“I think it is a very difficult position for every parliamentarian.”

Despite the worries expressed by those who have written to him, Widman, who also sits on the Riksdag’s Committee on Defence, said it was “very unlikely” that he would change his position.

“I am going to vote yes,” he said.

Stenlund from the young Moderates blames the media for not doing enough to highlight the privacy and national security issues at stake with the proposed measure.

“It makes more sensational headlines when just few days are left for the proposal to become law,” he said.

In fact, it was a select group of bloggers who played a pivotal role in drawing attention to the bill following its approval by the Riksdag’s defence committee last week.

Within days, a group of opponents had set up a website, www.stoppafralagen.nu, to galvanize the efforts of those who were against the measure.

According to its administrators, the site has had at least 100,000 hits a day since its launch on June 6th.

Mikael Nilsson, one of the main organizers of the opposition movement, said that individuals from all walks of life simply don’t want a society which resembles that of China and North Korea.

“We are overwhelmed by the response we’ve received from the members of the public. They are all worried,” he said.

The group plans to hold a demonstration outside of the Riksdag on the day of the vote in the hopes of convincing wavering politicians to vote against the measure.
http://www.thelocal.se/12426/20080613/





Sweden Fails to Pass Sweeping Surveillance Bill

The bill would have allowed sweeping surveillance of telephone data

Sweden's center-right government has failed in its attempt to introduce a wide-ranging surveillance law which would have allowed all cross-border Internet and telephone traffic to be monitored.

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who wanted to permit wide-ranging monitoring of cross-border Internet data and to tap international telephone calls to discover "dangers from abroad" more quickly, failed to get the backing of its own four-party coalition on Wednesday, June 18.

The draft law will not now be debated in parliament on Wednesday as originally planned.

The plans would have allowed the military National Defense Radio Establishment (FRA) to monitor Swedes' Internet usage as well as content from e-mails, phone calls and text messages. The legislation would have required all telecom operators in Sweden to bring their systems into line with FRA's surveillance system.

Sweden's conservative government cited the changing nature of security threats, terrorism, international crime and the specter of cyber warfare to push through the law which would have handed intelligence agencies far-ranging powers to snoop on citizens' personal data.

The law has been deeply controversial in Sweden with critics slamming it as an attack on civil liberties in a country that prides itself on its liberal attitudes.

The Swedish journalists' union said the bill constituted the "final nail in the coffin of democracy."
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,...421627,00.html





'Yes' to Surveillance Law
AFP

Swedish lawmakers voted late on Wednesday in favour of a controversial bill allowing all emails and phone calls to be monitored in the name of national security.

The vote, one of the most divisive in Sweden in recent years, had initially been scheduled for early Wednesday but was postponed after more than one-third of MPs voted to send the bill back to parliament's defence committee "for further preparation."

After the committee required that the centre-right government safeguard individual rights further in an annex to the law to be voted on in the autumn, the bill narrowly passed with 143 votes in favour, 138 opposed and one parliamentarian abstaining.

Critics have slammed the proposal as an attack on civil liberties that would create a "big brother" state, while supporters say it is necessary to protect the country from foreign threats.

The new law, set to take effect on January 1st, 2009, will enable the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) -- a civilian agency despite its name -- to tap all cross-border Internet and telephone communication.

But although the government said only cross-border communications would be monitored, all communications risk getting caught in the net since some internet servers are located abroad and FRA would need to check all emails to determine whether they have crossed the border.

Under the current law, FRA is only allowed to monitor military radio communications.

The Defence Ministry, which hammered out the proposal, insists the new legislation is necessary in today's changed world, where communications are increasingly transmitted through fibre-optic cables.

The government holds a slim seven-seat majority in parliament, and with the left-wing opposition vehemently opposed to the proposal, just four "no" votes within the coalition could have sunk it.

A number of the coalition members had voiced deep concern about the bill before Wednesday's revision was made, while opponents in parliament, along with hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the building, faced a nervy wait for the result.

"This law is rotten to the core. (It) is about violating integrity. Regardless of what words they use, it will do exactly that," one of the demonstrators, 32-year-old Magdalena Berg from Gothenburg, told Swedish public radio.

Critics of the new law, including human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and even the former head of the Swedish intelligence agency Säpo, had before Wednesday's revision argued that it did not go far enough in safeguarding individual rights.

Unlike police, FRA will, for instance, not be required to seek a court order to begin surveillance.

The government on Wednesday insisted it had addressed these concerns with the last-minute revisions to the law that among other things added further independent and parliamentary controls to FRA's work.

Former Säpo chief Anders Eriksson, who currently heads up the Swedish Commission on Security and Integrity Protection, was not impressed.

"I think the law needs to be re-written. It is not enough to create a few checks and balances ... It is the law itself there is something wrong with," he told Swedish radio before the vote.
http://www.thelocal.se/12534.html





New Airport Scanners See Through Clothes

Security scanners which can see through passengers' clothing and reveal details of their body underneath are being installed in 10 US airports, the US Transportation Security Administration says.

A random selection of travellers getting ready to board airplanes in Washington, New York's Kennedy, Los Angeles and other key hubs will be shut in the glass booths while a three-dimensional image is made of their body beneath their clothes.

The booths close around the passenger and emit "millimetre waves" that go through cloth to identify metal, plastics, ceramics, chemical materials and explosives, according to the TSA.

While it allows the security screeners - looking at the images in a separate room - to clearly see the passenger's sexual organs as well as other details of their bodies, the passenger's face is blurred, TSA said in a statement on its website.

The scan only takes seconds and is to replace the physical pat-downs of people that is currently widespread in airports.

TSA began introducing the body scanners in airports in April, first in the Phoenix, Arizona terminal.

The installation is picking up this month, with machines in place or planned for airports in Washington (Reagan National and Baltimore-Washington International), Dallas, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Miami and Detroit.

But the new machines have provoked worries among passengers and rights activists.

"People have no idea how graphic the images are," Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union, told AFP.

The ACLU said in a statement that passengers expecting privacy underneath their clothing "should not be required to display highly personal details of their bodies such as evidence of mastectomies, colostomy appliances, penile implants, catheter tubes and the size of their breasts or genitals as a pre-requisite to boarding a plane."

Besides masking their faces, the TSA says on its website, the images made "will not be printed stored or transmitted".

"Once the transportation security officer has viewed the image and resolved anomalies, the image is erased from the screen permanently. The officer is unable to print, export, store or transmit the image."

Lara Uselding, a TSA spokeswoman, added that passengers are not obliged to accept the new machines.

"The passengers can choose between the body imaging and the pat-down," she told AFP.

TSA foresees 30 of the machines installed across the country by the end of 2008. In Europe, Amsterdam's Schipol airport is already using the scanners.
http://news.theage.com.au/world/new-...0611-2oqm.html





News you can use

How to train death squads and quash revolutions from San Salvador to you

JULIAN ASSANGE (investigative editor)
Monday June 15, 2008

Wikileaks has obtained a sensitive US military counter-insurgency manual. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as "What we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places". Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies and guerilla movements world wide, history making.

The document, which has been verified, is official US Special Forces doctrine. It directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor unions & political parties. It directly advocates warrantless searches, detainment without charge and the suspension of habeas corpus. It directly advocates bribery, employing terrorists, false flag operations and concealing human rights abuses from journalists. And it directly advocates the extensive use of "psychological operations" (propaganda) to make these and other "population & resource control" measures more palatable.

The document has been particularly informed by the long United States involvement in the El Salvador. However it is worth noting what the US Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert E. White had to say in FOIA documents obtained from the US State Department about the situation, as early as 1980:
The major, immediate threat to the existence of this government is the right-wing violence. In the city of San Salvador, the hired thugs of the extreme right, some of them well-trained Cuban and Nicaraguan terrorists, kill moderate left leaders and blow up government buildings. In the countryside, elements of the security forces torture and kill the campesinos, shoot up their houses and burn their crops. At least two hundred refugees from the countryside arrive daily in the capital city. This campaign of terror is radicalizing the rural areas just as surely as Somoza's National Guard did in Nicaragua. Unfortunately, the command structure of the army and the security forces either tolerates or encourages this activity. These senior officers believe or pretend to believe that they are eliminating the guerillas.

Selected extracts follow. Note that the manual is 219 pages long and contains substantial material throughout. These extracts should merely be considered representative. Emphasis has been added for further selectivity. The full manual can be found at US Special Forces counter-insurgency manual FM 31-20-3.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/How_to_tra... vador_to_you





CONFIRMED: U.S. Hid Detainees From The Red Cross
Warren P. Strobel

The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday.

"We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques," Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who's since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture. Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting that were made public Tuesday. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility -- Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan -- were using sleep deprivation to "break" detainees well before then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved that technique. "True, but officially it is not happening," she is quoted as having said.

A third person at the meeting, Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, disclosed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the ICRC, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world.

Read the whole story here.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/0..._n_107702.html





General Accuses WH of War Crimes
Dan Froomkin

The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.

In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." He called the abuse "systemic and illegal." And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.

Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation.

The new report, he writes, "tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual's lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.

"The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full-scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted --both on America's institutions and our nation's founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.

"In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. . . .

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Pamela Hess of the Associated Press has more on the report, which resulted from "the most extensive medical study of former U.S. detainees published so far" and "found evidence of torture and other abuse that resulted in serious injuries and mental disorders."

The War Council

So if war crimes were committed, who's responsible?

In today's installment of a major McClatchy Newspapers series on the U.S. detention system, Tom Lasseter writes: "The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

"It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.

"The Supreme Court now has struck down many of their legal interpretations. It ruled last Thursday that preventing detainees from challenging their detention in federal courts was unconstitutional.

"The quintet of lawyers, who called themselves the 'War Council,' drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military's code of justice, the federal court system and America's international treaties in order to prevent anyone -- from soldiers on the ground to the president -- from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes. . . .

"The international conventions that the United States helped draft, and to which it's a party, were abandoned in secret meetings among the five men in one another's offices. No one in the War Council has publicly described the group's activities in any detail, and only some of their opinions and memorandums have been made public. . . .

"Only one of the five War Council lawyers remains in office: David Addington, the brilliant but abrasive longtime legal adviser and now chief of staff to Cheney. His primary motive, according to several former administration and defense officials, was to push for an expansion of presidential power that Congress or the courts couldn't check."

The other members were Alberto Gonzales, first the White House counsel and then the attorney general; William J. Haynes II, the former Pentagon general counsel; former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo; and Timothy E. Flanigan, a former deputy to Gonzales.

For more on Addington's central role, see my Sept. 5, 2007 column; for more on the relationship between the administration's legal memos and torture, see my April 2 column.

The Senate Investigation

The Senate Armed Services Committee made news with a hearing yesterday -- part of its continuing investigation into the administration's interrogation policies.

Joby Warrick writes in The Washington Post: "A senior CIA lawyer advised Pentagon officials about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a meeting in late 2002, defending waterboarding and other methods as permissible despite U.S. and international laws banning torture, according to documents released yesterday by congressional investigators.

"Torture 'is basically subject to perception,' CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. 'If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong.' . . .

"Fredman, whose agency had been granted broad latitude by Justice Department lawyers to conduct harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, listed key considerations for setting a similar program at the Cuban prison. He discussed the pros and cons of videotaping, talked about how to avoid interference by the International Committee of the Red Cross and offered a strong defense of waterboarding." . . .

"Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, asked: 'How on Earth did we get to the point where a United States government lawyer would say that . . . torture is subject to perception?'."

Levin also introduced evidence that proposed methods faced opposition at the time from experts in military and international law. Warrick writes: "Among them was Mark Fallon, deputy commander of the Defense Department's Criminal Investigation Task Force. He warned in an October 2002 e-mail to Pentagon colleagues that the techniques under discussion would 'shock the conscience of any legal body' that might review how the interrogations were conducted.

"'This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of,' Fallon wrote. He added: 'Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.'"

The star witness yesterday was Haynes -- the former Pentagon general counsel, "War Council" member and Addington protege.

Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane write in the New York Times that Haynes "sparred at length with senators seeking to pin on him some responsibility for the harsh tactics and the worldwide outrage they provoked.

"Documents released Tuesday show that some of Mr. Haynes's aides in July 2002 sought out information about aggressive interrogations.

"Mr. Haynes fended off attacks by Democrats and some Republicans, noting that the Defense Department has 10,000 lawyers and saying he had no time to conduct legal research himself on which methods were permitted.

"Moreover, Mr. Haynes said, 'as the lawyer, I was not the decision maker. I was the adviser.'

"Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said he thought Mr. Haynes's advice had led American soldiers drastically astray. 'You degraded the integrity of the United States military,' Mr. Reed said."

Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Post: "If ever there was a case that cried out for enhanced interrogation techniques, it was yesterday's Senate appearance by the Pentagon's former top lawyer.

"William 'Jim' Haynes II, the man who blessed the use of dogs, hoods and nudity to pry information out of recalcitrant detainees, proved to be a model of evasion himself as he resisted all attempts at inquiry by the Armed Services Committee. . .

"It was the most public case of memory loss since Alberto Gonzales, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, forgot everything he ever knew about anything. And, like Gonzales, Haynes (who, denied a federal judgeship by the Senate, left the Pentagon in February for a job with Chevron) had good reason to plead temporary senility.

"A committee investigation found that, contrary to his earlier testimony, Haynes had showed strong interest in potentially abusive questioning methods as early as July 2002. Later, ignoring the strong objections of the uniformed military, Haynes sent a memo to Donald Rumsfeld recommending the approval of stress positions, nudity, dogs and light deprivation. . . .

"Haynes mixed his forgetfulness with a dash of insolence. He suggested to [Claire] McCaskill [(D-Mo.)] that 'it's important that you understand how the Defense Department works.' He cut off [Jack] Reed [(D-R.I.)] with a 'Let me finish, Senator!' and disclosed that he had been too busy to give more attention to the Geneva Conventions: 'I mean, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of decisions made every day. This was one.'"

Mark Benjamin of Salon offers up a timeline based on the Senate investigation. He writes that "as more and more documents from inside the Bush government come to light, it is increasingly clear that the administration sought from early on to implement interrogation techniques whose basis was torture.

Phil Carter analyzes the new evidence on washingtonpost.com

Adam Zagorin writes for Time: "Despite years of investigation into alleged abuse and death of prisoners in U.S. custody since 9/11, the only Americans held accountable have been the low-ranking 'bad apples' convicted for the worst atrocities at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. No official blame has been assigned to higher-ups for abuses at Guantanamo or in Afghanistan, much less for crimes allegedly committed by U.S. personnel in various secret CIA prisons around the world."

Tim Rutten writes in his Los Angeles Times opinion column: "Apart from understanding how and why the Bush/Cheney administration tricked the American people into going to war in Iraq, no question is more urgent than how the White House forced the adoption of torture as state policy of the United States."

Rutten writes that, along with earlier revelations, "the current Senate investigation has established definitively that the drive to make torture an instrument of U.S. policy originated at the highest levels of the Bush administration -- mainly in the circle that included Cheney, Rumsfeld and Addington. This group had come to Washington determined to implement its theory of 'the unitary executive,' which holds that presidential powers of all sorts have been dangerously diminished since the Vietnam War. The fact that these guys seem to have defined executive branch power as the ability to hold people in secret and torture them pushes the creepy quotient into areas that probably require psychoanalytic credentials."

Rutten, however, has nothing but scorn for the "handful of European rights activists and people on the lacy left fringe of American politics" who are calling for criminal indictments or war-crime trials.

The White House Line

White House spokesman Tony Fratto repeated the official administration position yesterday: "I'm telling you that abuse of detainees has never been, is not, and will never be the policy of this government. The policy of this government has been to take these detainees and to interrogate them and get the information that we can get to help protect this country, which we have been very successful at doing, and we've been very successful at getting the information that has saved lives and prevented attacks on this country and on our allies. . . .

"[W]e do not abuse and we treat detainees humanely and comporting with the law."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061801546.html





Constitutional Expert: FISA Bill 'is an Evisceration of the Fourth Amendment'
Nick Langewis and David Edwards

"Never appease political bullies, President Bush admonished at the Israeli Knesset," MSNBC's Keith Olbermann opened. "Oddly, House Democrats chose to ignore him on the subject of dealing with him."

Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley sees a "very frightening bill" in a proposed "compromise," currently in the House, that would update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to effectively grant immunity from civil lawsuits to telecommunications companies that agreed to spy on their customers as part of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, starting shortly before the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. If the White House asked a phone company to spy with its assurance that it was legal, the measure says, that's enough to dismiss a case.

Congressional Democrats, Turley went on, knew about surveillance and torture programs, but were politically unable to oppose them at the same time they were touting themselves to the public as defenders of civil liberties. The bill, he said, is part of a campaign of collusion between Congress and the Bush administration, immunizing not only the telecommunications companies, but the administration and any members of Congress, on either side of the aisle, that may have been involved.

"The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation," Senator Russ Feingold said today. "The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the President’s illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home. Allowing courts to review the question of immunity is meaningless when the same legislation essentially requires the court to grant immunity. And under this bill, the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power. Instead of cutting bad deals on both FISA and funding for the war in Iraq, Democrats should be standing up to the flawed and dangerous policies of this administration."

"The Democrats never really were engaged in this," said Turley. "In fact, they repeatedly tried to cave in to the White House, only to be stopped by civil libertarians and bloggers."

"I think they're simply waiting to see if the public's interest will wane," he went on, referring to repeated attempts to float said legislation past the public. "This bill has quite literally no public value for citizens or civil liberties. It is reverse engineering, though the type of thing the Bush Administration's famous for, and now the Democrats are doing--that is, to change the law to conform to past conduct."

"It's what any criminal would love to do," Turley continued. "You rob a bank, go to the legislature, and change the law to say that robbing banks is lawful."

"People need to be very, very much aware of this bill," he charged. "What you're seeing in this bill is an evisceration of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. It is something that allows the President and the government to go into law-abiding homes, on their word alone--their suspicion alone--and to engage in warrantless surveillance.

"That's what the framers who drafted the Fourth Amendment wanted to prevent."

The House could vote on the bill as soon as Friday. A full copy of the bill, in PDF format, is available at this link.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Turley...n_of_0619.html





Senate Housing Bill Requires eBay, Amazon, Google, and All Credit Card Companies to Report Transactions to the Government

Broad, invasive provision touches nearly every aspect of American commerce.
Adam Brandon

Washington, DC - Hidden deep in Senator Christopher Dodd's 630-page Senate housing legislation is a sweeping provision that affects the privacy and operation of nearly all of America’s small businesses. The provision, which was added by the bill's managers without debate this week, would require the nation's payment systems to track, aggregate, and report information on nearly every electronic transaction to the federal government.

FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey commented: "This is a provision with astonishing reach, and it was slipped into the bill just this week. Not only does it affect nearly every credit card transaction in America, such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express, but the bill specifically targets payment systems like eBay's PayPal, Amazon, and Google Checkout that are used by many small online businesses. The privacy implications for America's small businesses are breathtaking."

"Privacy groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology and small business organizations like the NFIB sharply criticized this idea when it first appeared earlier this year. What is the federal government's purpose with this kind of detailed data? How will this database be secured, and who will have access? Many small proprietors use their Social Security number as their tax ID. How will their privacy be protected? What compliance costs will this impose on businesses? Why is Sen. Chris Dodd putting this provision in a housing bailout bill? The bill also includes the creation of a new national fingerprint registry for mortgage brokers.

"At a time when concerns about both identity theft and government spying are paramount, Congress wants to create a new honey pot of private data that includes Social Security numbers. This bill reduces privacy across America's payment processing systems and treats every American small business or eBay power seller like a criminal on parole by requiring an unprecedented level of reporting to the federal government. This outrageous idea is another reason to delay the housing bailout legislation so that Senators and the public at large have time to examine its full implications."

From the Senate Bill Summary:

Payment Card and Third Party Network Information Reporting. The proposal requires information reporting on payment card and third party network transactions. Payment settlement entities, including merchant acquiring banks and third party settlement organizations, or third party payment facilitators acting on their behalf, will be required to report the annual gross amount of reportable transactions to the IRS and to the participating payee. Reportable transactions include any payment card transaction and any third party network transaction. Participating payees include persons who accept a payment card as payment and third party networks who accept payment from a third party settlement organization in settlement of transactions. A payment card means any card issued pursuant to an agreement or arrangement which provides for standards and mechanisms for settling the transactions. Use of an account number or other indicia associated with a payment card will be treated in the same manner as a payment card. A de minimis exception for transactions of $10,000 or less and 200 transactions or less applies to payments by third party settlement organizations. The proposal applies to returns for calendar years beginning after December 31, 2010. Back-up withholding provisions apply to amounts paid after December 31, 2011. This proposal is estimated to raise $9.802 billion over ten years.
http://freedomworks.org/newsroom/pre...?press_id=2571





Spyware Bill Cloaks a Mini-UCITA
Ed Foster

The holy grail for the software industry's political muscle has long been what in UCITA was called "electronic self help" - the right of software publishers to remotely disable their software on the mere suspicion that it hasn't been paid for. UCITA was ultimately stopped, but last Wednesday the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on a bill that nominally is supposed to fight spyware but seems intended to make remote disabling legal.

As I suggested last week, S. 1625 -- the Counter Spy Act -- takes an anti-spyware approach that's very similar to the way the failed Can-Spam Act of 2003 attacked spam. Its list of prohibited behaviors - like taking over computers with zombies and collecting information for identity theft -- are all already clearly illegal under existing laws. Its various loopholes would allow some bad actors to claim they're actually following the law. And actual victims would have virtually no recourse but to beg the FTC to take action.

But one aspect of the Counter Spy Act is far more troubling than anything that was in Can-Spam. It's the "Limits on Liability" provision, more specifically Section 6(a). That says the whole laundry list of prohibited acts in the bill:

"do not apply to any monitoring of, or interaction with, a subscriber's Internet or other network connection or service, or a protected computer, by or at the direction of a telecommunications carrier, cable operator, computer hardware or software provider, financial institution or provider of information services or interactive computer service..."

These institutions have immunity under the Counter Spy Act when what they're doing is done for purposes network security, diagnostics, technical support and other mostly innocuous-sounding activities. In fact, with the first nine of these liability exemptions it seems rather odd that they would need to be mentioned at all in the context of the clearly nefarious behaviors prohibited by the bill. But the tenth and final exemption is granted for when the otherwise prohibited acts are done for:

"(10) detection or prevention of the unauthorized use of software fraudulent or other illegal activities."

Besides the fact that the clause needs a comma or two, what does preventing "the unauthorized use of software" have to do with spyware? Is the Counter Spy Act fighting for privacy or against piracy? To understand the real purpose of 6(a)(10), we need only look at the written testimony of Vincent Weafer, a vice president of Symantec who was representing the Business Software Alliance (BSA) before the committee. The BSA, by the way, was by far the primary lobbyist - some might even say the primary authors -- of UCITA and its electronic self help concept.

Weaver praised Section 6(a) as "a provision allowing legitimate security and anti-piracy activities." Along with the obviously legitimate activities that are provided exemption, he went on to say that "Section 6(a) also covers the detection and prevention of the unauthorized use of software. This is essential to our industry's ability to protect our products against theft. Software piracy results in almost 50 billion dollars in losses to the software industry each year, including more than 8 billion dollars in the US alone. Given these massive losses, it is absolutely critical that companies that engage in otherwise lawful conduct to detect or prevent piracy or other unlawful acts are not unwittingly subject to liability under anti-spyware laws."

OK, but which software providers (not to mention telecommunication carriers, financial institutions, etc.) get to conduct these anti-piracy activities? After all, the spyware purveyors themselves often claim to be authorized software providers who got the user to click OK to their EULA. The troubling questions raised by 6(a)(10) were pointed out to the Senate committee in the written testimony of Art Butler, an attorney representing Americans for Fair Electronic Commerce Transactions (AFFECT). The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. By the way, AFFECT is the organization that stopped UCITA from being passed in any more states after it was rushed into law in Virginia and Maryland. And it's an organization that I've been a member of since its inception, so there's no question whose side I'm on.

Subsection 6(a)(10) would allow a software vendor to surreptitiously download code onto a user's computer and freely violate their privacy, Butler wrote. "It would allow the provider to set itself up as an ad hoc police force to conduct warrantless searches and to act as judge and jury to conduct unilateral seizures. Private entities do not and should not have the right to conduct law enforcement activities. More troubling is the fact that the language of Subsection 6(a)(10) would effectively allow a software provider to unilaterally decide to remotely shut down the user's computer or Internet or other network connection or service. But whether the use of a particular software is 'unauthorized,' 'fraudulent,' or 'illegal' is often subject to legitimate dispute and merits some judicial consideration before a provider is allowed to unilaterally employ a drastic remedy like remote disablement."

AFFECT has a very modest proposal for tweaking 6(a)(10), but on that I personally feel they don't go nearly far enough. Even if 6(a)(10) were removed entirely, the net effect of the Counter Spy Act would still be to make the spyware problem worse. The basic approach of prohibiting a list of specific acts is a fatally flawed way of defining a moving target like spyware. Inevitably, it will let bad guys do bad things that weren't included on the list.

In its hearing last Wednesday the committee clearly struggled with the basic issue of how to define spyware, so perhaps there is hope they'll realize they need a completely different approach. They've been given some good advice in that regard. In his testimony, spyware expert Ben Edelman argued for a radical simplification of S.1625 that would focus on increasing the penalties such as a treble fine in FTC actions. And the FTC itself in its testimony before the Senate committee and in comments last year about similar bills in the House has made it clear it doesn't want new definitions of spyware but the ability to bring civil actions against those it goes after under existing laws.

So who is it that actually wants spyware laws to take this laundry list approach, and why? The only thing I can figure is it's the software industry and perhaps the major ISPs who know they can't have their exemptions if there aren't specific prohibited acts to exempt them from.

Of course, the BSA side also questions the motives behind opposing arguments. Weafer in his testimony warned the Commerce committee that "certain interest groups" would seek to weaken or delete Section 6(a). "The purpose of weakening this provision is not to protect against spyware, but to make it harder for legitimate companies to fight piracy, or other fraudulent or illegal activities," he wrote. "The laudable anti-spyware goals of this Act should not be subverted for this purpose."

Well, I agree with him that the laudable goals of the Counter Spy Act should not be subverted, but I would say the BSA is the certain interest group that is trying to do so for its long-held purpose of legalizing electronic self help. And if you agree with me, you should consider writing your U.S. Senators and telling them that you'd like to see S. 1625 dumped. Congress needs to find ways to help fight spyware, but handing a host of commercial entities unfettered powers over our computers isn't one of them.
http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/.../16/1219/71034





Bid to Have Businessman Jailed

The Solicitor-General has taken the unprecedented step of asking the High Court to lock up an Auckland businessman indefinitely for refusing to obey court orders.

David Collins says the contempt committed by Vince Siemer is the most serious he has ever encountered and he has no choice but to seek such a severe penalty.

The Siemers came from the United States nine years ago and has made New Zealand home. But now Vince Siemer is fighting for his freedom because the Solicitor-General wants him jailed indefinitely.

"What he is doing to me is not fair. It's not fair to me, it's not fair to the taxpayer," says Siemer.

Siemer claims the Solicitor-General has spent $100,000 taking him to court over a contempt issue that stems from his long-running battle with Vector chairman Michael Stiassny.

Siemer claims that Stiassny wrongly put one of his companies into liquidation, so he launched a website campaign which accuses Stiassny of suspect business practices.

"No one's proved that the information is defamatory or incorrect," says Siemer.

Stiassny obtained an injunction three years ago to stop Siemer's criticism.

But when he refused to take down the websites, the High Court jailed him for six weeks last year for contempt. And because the websites continue, the Solicitor-General now wants him sent to prison indefinitely.

"Of course indefinite is always excessive, except in this case. He has the keys to that jail cell in his own pocket, he can say 'OK I stop' and they'd let him go," says Bill Hodge of Auckland University Law School.

The Solicitor-General was reluctantly called as a witness to justify his action and says he agonised over taking such a rare step.

"Society falls apart if we don't obey court orders and the court order is cease publishing this material on this website," says Hodge.

Siemer describes himself as a law abiding citizen and says he just wants the chance to argue his case against Stiassny.

"No one in the courtroom has ever accused me of breaking the law. What they have accused me of is breaking or breaching the injunction which says that I can't speak truthfully about what Michael Stiassny is doing," says Siemer.

And Jane Siemer, the defendant's wife, says her faith in New Zealand's legal system is being sorely tested.

"The courts just have no idea of the strains put on my family and to just not allow us to really speak up and have a fair trial - it's unjust to all Kiwis," she says.
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/1318360/1849593





At Social Site, Only the Businesslike Need Apply
Brad Stone

For a Web site, it could hardly look less exciting. Its pages are heavy with text, much of it a flat blue, and there are few photos and absolutely no videos.

But LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, is dull by design. Unlike Facebook and MySpace, the site is aimed at career-minded, white-collar workers, people who join more for the networking than the social.

Now, in the midst of Silicon Valley’s recession-proof enthusiasm for community-oriented Web sites, the most boring of the social networks is finally grabbing the spotlight.

On Wednesday, LinkedIn will announce that it has raised $53 million in capital, primarily from Bain Capital Ventures, a Boston-based private equity firm. The new financing round values the company at $1 billion. That heady valuation is more than the $580 million that the News Corporation paid for MySpace in 2005, but less than the $15 billion value assigned to Facebook last year when Microsoft bought a minority stake.

LinkedIn’s investment round delays a rumored initial public offering, which would have finally tested the public market’s interest in social networking.

“What we didn’t want is to have the distraction of being public and to be worried by quarterly performance,” said Dan Nye, the buttoned-down chief executive of LinkedIn, who would not be caught dead in the Birkenstocks and rumpled T-shirts favored by MySpace and Facebook employees.

LinkedIn, which says it is already profitable, will use the investment to make acquisitions and expand its overseas operations.

“We want to create a broad and critical business tool that is used by tens of millions of business professionals every day to make them better at what they do,” Mr. Nye said.

The average age of a LinkedIn user is 41, the point in life where people are less likely to build their digital identities around dates, parties and photos of revelry.

LinkedIn gives professionals, even the most hopeless wallflower, a painless way to follow the advice of every career counselor: build a network. Users maintain online résumés, establish links with colleagues and business acquaintances and then expand their networks to the contacts of their contacts. The service also helps them search for experts who can help them solve daily business problems.

The four-year-old site is decidedly antisocial: only last fall, after what executives describe as a year of intense debate, did the company ask members to add photos to their profiles.

That business-only-please strategy appears to be paying off. The number of people using LinkedIn, based in Mountain View, Calif., tripled in May over the previous year, according to Nielsen Online. At 23 million members, LinkedIn remains far smaller than Facebook and MySpace, each with 115 million members, but it is growing considerably faster.

LinkedIn also has a more diversified approach to making money than its entertainment-oriented rivals, which are struggling to bring in ad dollars and keep up with inflated expectations for increased revenue.

LinkedIn will get only a quarter of its projected $100 million in revenue this year from ads. (It places ads from companies like Microsoft and Southwest Airlines on profile pages.) Other moneymakers include premium subscriptions, which let users directly contact any user on the site instead of requiring an introduction from another member.

A third source of revenue is recruitment tools that companies can use to find people who may not even be actively looking for new jobs. Companies pay to search for candidates with specific skills, and each day, they get new prospects as people who fit their criteria join LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is set to undergo a radical shift in strategy to find other sources of revenue. Instead of catering primarily to individual white-collar workers, the site will soon introduce new services aimed at companies. It is a risky move that could alienate members who prefer to use the networking site to network — without their bosses peering over their shoulders.

One new product, Company Groups, automatically gathers all the employees from a company who use LinkedIn into a single, private Web forum. Employees can pose questions to each other, and share and discuss news articles about their industry.

Soon, LinkedIn plans to add additional features, like a group calendar, and let independent developers contribute their own programs that will allow employees to collaborate on projects.

The idea is to let firms exploit their employees’ social connections, institutional memories and special skills — knowledge that large, geographically dispersed companies often have a difficult time obtaining.

For example, in a test of the feature by AKQA, a digital ad agency in San Francisco, an employee based in Amsterdam recently asked her 350 colleagues on LinkedIn if the firm had done any previous work for television production companies. Executives in San Francisco, New York and London promptly responded to the query.

“This is a collected, protected space for employees to talk to each other and reference outside information,” said Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder and chairman.

Becoming even more corporate is something of a gamble for LinkedIn. Many companies might resist the idea of confidential corporate information circulating on LinkedIn’s servers — and perhaps being exposed to former employees who are included in the group because they have not updated their LinkedIn résumés. (LinkedIn says every member of a company group can remove people whom they identify as former workers or interlopers.)

Diffusing the purpose of the site might also repel some users.

“It will be extraordinarily challenging to simultaneously serve as a corporate tool and yet promote the ‘brand of me’ in an emerging free-agent nation,” said Keith Rabois, a former LinkedIn executive who is now vice president at Slide, a maker of applications for social networks.

Jeffrey Glass, a partner at Bain Capital, says his firm invested in LinkedIn primarily because it is now becoming popular enough to introduce these kinds of products to companies and other organizations, like universities.

“This is a powerful tool because inside the corporation, there are massive bodies of knowledge and relationships between individuals that the corporation has been unable to take advantage of until now,” he said.

The new services could help LinkedIn fend off some new competition. Microsoft, long covetous of rapidly growing social-networking properties, is internally testing a service called TownSquare that allows employees of a company to follow one another’s activities on the corporate network.

Executives at Facebook, meanwhile, have recently said that they see networking tools for professionals as a primary avenue of growth. The site recently added networking to the list of options that new users select when they are asked to specify what they intend to do on the site.

Mr. Hoffman was an early investor in Facebook and says he does not want to disparage the competition. But he said that most members of Facebook who are older than 30 use it for entertainment, like playing Scrabulous, a version of Scrabble — not for doing their jobs.

“Scrabulous is not work, and it does not enable you to be an effective professional,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/te...8linkedin.html





Study Shatters Myths on Personal Net Use at Work
Anick Jesdanun

It's no secret that people sneak in some personal e-mail and Web surfing when they're supposed to be working.

A new study attempts to shatter perceptions that these Web surfers are just slackers trying to avoid work. In fact, it turns out everyone does it, from senior managers to entry-level employees _ and researchers figure that means management attempts to clamp down on Internet use may be missing the mark.

Many legitimate reasons may be at play, speculates R. Kelly Garrett, one of the study's authors and a communications professor at Ohio State University. For instance, people may use the Web at work to help balance job and life responsibilities; with the personal matters taken care of from work, they can focus on the task at hand.

"It's appropriate to just avoid the knee-jerk response that all personal Internet use is detrimental," Garrett said.

Installing filters to block access to Web sites and e-mail services could backfire by reducing job satisfaction and thus productivity, researchers wrote.

The study on "cyberslacking," based on statistical analyses of responses in a phone survey of 1,024 people during the summer of 2006, was published in the June issue of the CyberPsychology and Behavior journal.

James N. Danziger, a professor at the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations at the University of California, Irvine, was Garrett's co-author.

The study didn't attempt to go much beyond trying to gauge the types of employees who use the Internet for personal reasons. Garrett said more research is needed to determine motives and measure effects on productivity. Those studies, researchers say, would then help companies figure out how best to control and accommodate personal use.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061801570.html





Court: Bosses Wrong to Read Text Messages

Ruling states that police had expectation of privacy
Maura Dolan

An employer has no right to read an employee's text messages without the worker's knowledge and consent, and federal law bars service providers from turning over the contents of the messages to the employer who pays for the service, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled Wednesday.

The court's unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel stemmed from a lawsuit by Ontario, Calif., police Sgt. Jeff Quon and three others against the city's service provider, the city and its police department for violating his constitutional right to be free of unreasonable searches.

Although the city had informed employees that it might monitor e-mails, the informal policy was that text messages sent over city-owned pagers would not be monitored for content, the court said. If an employee exceeded the city's limit on text messages, the employee had to pay the "overage" charges.

In August 2002, Quon and another officer exceeded the 25,000-character limit for texting. The police chief ordered a subordinate to obtain transcripts of the officers' text messages to determine whether the pagers were being used purely for work purposes.
The provider, Arch Wireless, sent the department transcripts of the messages. The city determined that many of Quon's messages were personal, and several were sexually explicit.

The court found that Arch Wireless violated the federal Stored Communications Act, which prohibits providers from divulging the contents of any communication which is maintained on the service.

Quon and the other plaintiffs had a reasonable expectation that their messages stored on the service provider's network were private, the court found.

"The extent to which the Fourth Amendment provides protection for the contents of electronic communications in the Internet Age is an open question," Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote for the panel. "The recently minted standard of electronic communications via e-mails, text messages and other means opens a new frontier in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that has been little explored."

The court declined to adopt a "monolithic view" of privacy involving text messages, saying a person's expectation of privacy may depend on various factors. If Quon had permitted the department to review the messages, he would have no claim, the court said.

Instead, the Ontario Police Department "surreptitiously reviewed messages that all parties reasonably believed were free from third-party review," the court said.

The audit of the messages, intended to determine whether a 25,000-character limit on texting was adequate for work purposes, was not reasonable, the court found.

"There were a host of simple ways to verify the efficacy of the 25,000 character limit (if that, indeed, was the intended purpose) without intruding . . . on Fourth Amendment rights," Wardlaw wrote.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_9632574





Belarus Parliament Backs New Press Law
Andrei Makhovsky

Parliament in Belarus, an ex-Soviet state accused in the West of crushing human rights, gave initial approval on Tuesday to a media law banning foreign funding and possibly tightening control over the Internet.

Many opposition publications have been closed down, leaving the Internet as the main source of information on the country's small, and often divided, liberal and nationalist opposition.

Parliament, where opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko hold no seats, backed the bill on first reading after speakers said the text posed no threat to freedom of speech.

"There are no repressive provisions in this law which could significantly worsen the situation with the media," Yuri Kulakovsky, head of a parliamentary commission, said in presenting the bill to the chamber. "The current law governing the press dates from 1995 and is very out of date."

Independent journalists in the country of 10 million said they feared the new legislation could be used to clamp down on opposition websites.

"This law creates a legal basis to regulate in future the activities of Internet sites, one of the main sources of independent information in Belarus," said Andrei Bastunets of the Belarussian Association of Journalists.

Official media in Belarus, particularly state television, report at length on Lukashenko's activities and lionise his initiatives. Opposition figures are given little opportunity to appear except in election campaigns as required by law.

Lukashenko, first elected in 1994, promotes policies of generous subsidies and state control of the economy and is broadly popular in the country of 10 million wedged between Russia and three European Union members.

Western countries say Lukashenko has cracked down on independent journalists, rigged his re-election and crushed freedom of expression by dispersing demonstrations.

The president is barred entry to the United States and the European Union, which make resumed dialogue contingent on extending fundamental rights.

The new law does not specifically require Internet sites to be registered, but allows their regulation to be overseen by government decisions.

"This law does not regulate the activities of Internet media. For now, there is no requirement for them to register and that means nothing will change in the way they operate," said Natalya Petkevich, presidential chief of staff.

"The law sets down only that at some point Internet media may be registered and that the govenment is to prepare conditions for registration." (Writing by Ron Popeski; Editing by Elizabeth Piper)
http://www.reuters.com/article/media...29085320080617





Dacre Promises New Look at Rules on Hacking by Journalists
Owen Gibson

The editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, has promised to re-examine the rules that prevent journalists hacking into computers to obtain personal information, to clarify and possibly tighten them, after becoming chairman of the body responsible for the editors' code that governs newspapers and magazines.

In his report on the activities of the committee that reviews and revises the self-regulatory code overseen by the Press Complaints Commission, he said the industry had faced a challenging year.

"The threat of custodial sentences under the Data Protection Act was particularly worrying because of the effect it would have had on press freedom by inhibiting investigative reporting," he said. "Such sentences would also have meant that Britain would have been one of the only countries in the civilised world to jail journalists trying to do their job."

Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, has campaigned for jail sentences for journalists breaking data protection laws after he compiled two reports showing that newspapers - including the Daily Mail - habitually bought personal details from private investigators.

Following editors' lobbying, ministers tabled an amendment shelving the proposed jail terms but leaving the legislation on the statute book.

Dacre took over in April as chair of the editors' code of practice committee. In his report, he called on the industry to show the Justice Department it was treating the issue of data "extremely seriously". He said the committee had amended the code in 2007 to make clear that the rules on subterfuge banned writers hacking into computers to obtain confidential information, unless it was in the public interest.

The issue came into the spotlight after Clive Goodman, the News of the World royal editor, and a private investigator were jailed under existing laws after hacking into voicemails meant for royal family members. A report from Thomas also suggested that "blagging" - obtaining personal information by underhand means - was commonplace among private investigators employed by newspapers.

Dacre said that in addition to educating staff, the industry must demonstrate publicly "the various mechanisms it has introduced collectively and individually to ensure compliance". He said that the editors' code should also be re-examined to see if the rules needed to be "tightened still further" and promised to report back on the matter.

Following criticism of newspaper coverage of the suicides in Bridgend, Dacre said editors faced "hugely difficult challenges in balancing the public's right to know against the due sensitivity needed in handling individual cases". He said the code had apparently performed well and that many of the complaints had been directed at foreign news groups and broadcasters. But the issue would be examined by the committee in the light of a current PCC review.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008...ishing.privacy





In a Changing World of News, an Elegy for Copy Editors
Lawrence Downes

I went to the Newseum, a shiny new building in Washington that news companies and foundations have erected as a shrine to their industry. Since it’s my industry, too, I thought a museum, where sacred relics and texts have been placed safely in the equivalent of a big glass jar, might make me hopeful about the future.

“Where’s the section on copy editing?” I asked the guy at the entrance.

He wasn’t sure. “Try Internet, TV and Radio, on the third floor.”

“For copy editing? Newspaper copy editing?”

He checked with a colleague. “News History, on five,” she said.

Ouch. Copy editors are my favorite people in the news business, and many I know are still alive and doing what they do. As it happened, I couldn’t find anything about them on the fifth or any other floor. A call later confirmed that the museum has essentially nothing about how newspapers are made today, and thus nothing about the lowly yet exalted copy editor.

I was one for a long time, and I know that obscurity and unpopularity are part of the job. Copy editors work late hours and can get testy. They never sign their work.

As for what they do, here’s the short version: After news happens in the chaos and clutter of the real world, it travels through a reporter’s mind, a photographer’s eye, a notebook and camera lens, into computer files, then through multiple layers of editing. Copy editors handle the final transition to an ink-on-paper object. On the news-factory floor, they do the refining and packaging. They trim words, fix grammar, punctuation and style, write headlines and captions.

But they also do a lot more. Copy editors are the last set of eyes before yours. They are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted prose. They are surgeons, removing growths of error and irrelevance; they are minimalist chefs, straining fat. Their goal is to make sure that the day’s work of a newspaper staff becomes an object of lasting beauty and excellence once it hits the presses.

Yeah. Presses. It has probably already struck you how irrelevant many of these skills may seem in the endlessly shifting, eternal glow of the Web.

The copy editor’s job, to the extent possible under deadline, is to slow down, think things through, do the math and ask the irritating question. His or her main creative outlet, writing clever headlines, is problematic online, because allusive wordplay doesn’t necessarily generate Google hits. And Google makes everyone an expert, so the aging copy editor’s trivia-packed brain and synonym collection seem not to count for as much anymore.

The job hasn’t disappeared yet, but it is swiftly evolving, away from an emphasis on style and consistency, from making a physical object perfect the first time. The path to excellence is now through speed, agility and creativity in using multiple expressive outlets for information in all its shapes and sounds.

As newspapers lose money and readers, they have been shedding great swaths of expensive expertise. They have been forced to shrink or eliminate the multiply redundant levels of editing that distinguish their kind of journalism from what you find on TV, radio and much of the Web. Copy editors are being bought out or forced out; they are dying and not being replaced.

Webby doesn’t necessarily mean sloppy, of course, and online news operations will shine with all the brilliance that the journalists who create them can bring. But in that world of the perpetual present tense — post it now, fix it later, update constantly — old-time, persnickety editing may be a luxury in which only a few large news operations will indulge. It will be an artisanal product, like monastery honey and wooden yachts.

It would be nice, at least, to thank the copy editors on the way out. But after visiting the Newseum, I know what I have suspected for a few years: if newspaper copy editors vanish from the earth, no one is going to notice.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/opinion/16mon4.html





The Secret to Success in Publishing: Bash Bush, With Nods to a Classic
Joanne Kaufman

The manuscript — unsolicited and addressed simply to “Editor in Chief, Little, Brown” — arrived at its destination in a clear envelope, “which was very clever,” said Geoff Shandler, the Little, Brown editor in chief who received the package. “Without opening it, I could see some of the cover image they had designed.”

Such was Mr. Shandler’s introduction to “Goodnight Bush,” an unauthorized parody of the 1947 children’s bedtime classic “Goodnight Moon,” written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd.

For generations, weary parents have intoned: “Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon. Goodnight light, and the red balloon.” And who can forget the bowl of mush and the quiet old lady who endlessly whispers “hush”?

The cover of “Goodnight Bush” looks almost exactly like “Goodnight Moon — green and orange, with an image of a window and fireplace — and uses a similar rhyme scheme. But there the thematic similarities end.

The authors, Erich Origen and Gan Golan, set their story in “a situation room.” There is no bunny snuggling into bed, but rather George W. Bush, grinning and wearing a “Mission Accomplished” flight suit. Instead of three little bears sitting on chairs, there are “war profiteers giving three cheers.”

Subsequent pages tell of “A grand old party to war in a rush/And a quiet Dick Cheney whispering hush.” The vice president is illustrated seated in a rocking chair — with a shotgun in his lap and bunny slippers on his feet.

“I thought it was brilliant,” said Mr. Shandler, whose company also published the parody “Yiddish With Dick and Jane.” That book, from 2004, prompted the owner of the rights to the classic “Dick and Jane” primers to sue in 2005, alleging copyright and trademark infringement.

The publisher of “Goodnight Bush” is counting on the fair use doctrine, which allows limited amounts of copyrighted material to be used without permission. “Parody as fair use is a developing area of the law,” said Pamela Golinski, an entertainment lawyer in New York, “and as a result, whether a given parody merits the shield of the fair use doctrine is a complex question.”

A spokeswoman for HarperCollins, publisher of “Goodnight Moon,” said the company would have no comment on “Goodnight Bush.”

While the authors’ considerations were largely political, the publisher worried more about sales potential. At 48 pages, “Goodnight Bush” is the sort of short read that publishers fear will be quickly digested in stores and thus will not make it to the cash register.

“But this had so many brilliant gags,” Mr. Shandler said. “You could spend so much time looking page by page.”

For example, the mouse that flits about the pages of “Goodnight Moon” has been replaced by a tiny scurrying Osama bin Laden. At the beginning of the book, a pristine Constitution hangs on a wall; by book’s end, it is full of crayoned redactions.

An afterword to “Goodnight Bush” notes that the first lady, Laura Bush, placed “Goodnight Moon” first on her list of children’s books and that the president’s brother, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, called it one of his childhood favorites.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/bu...goodnight.html





'Degenerate' Art Stolen by Nazis on Show in Rostock

An art exhibition has opened in Rostock showing hundreds of works stolen by the Nazis and condemned as ‘‘degenerate’’, which have not been seen since the 1950s.

The works, by artists as celebrated as Paul Klee, Ernst Barlach, Lyonel Feininger and Ersnt Ludwig Kirchner are all included in the show, called, “Modern Masterworks - from the survivors of art confiscated by the National Socialists in 1937”.

It has been hailed as a sensation as it is the first time they have been displayed together since 1957, and due to the insight the collection gives into the mindset of those who wanted to ban ‘‘degenerate’’ art.

Thousands of ‘degenerate’ artworks were burned by the Nazis when they cleared the museums and galleries of art which did not fit with their philosophy.

But art historian Andreas Hüneke, who has analyzed a list of more than 20,000 works, said most of the burned art was by unknown artists. “One has to understand that the really big names were not burned with them,” he told Die Welt newspaper.

Bernhard Böhmer, a collector who worked with some of the most important art dealers of the Third Reich, spent years dealing with the ‘‘degenerate’’ art taken by the regime from museums. Those he could not sell, he kept – 1,000 of them.

After the war around 400 were returned to the museums they hailed from, but those which had come from West German museums, remained in Rostock.

The exhibition has sparked a debate about what to do with the rest. In the meantime they are finally available for people to see at the Kulturhistorisches Museum in Rostock – until September 7.
http://www.thelocal.de/12499/20080615/





Mutilation Art Show Gets Warning
Kylie Davis

A Sydney exhibition featuring urine-soaked clothes and video of self-mutilation disgusted visiting police today.

In the wake of the controversy over Bill Henson's photographs of naked girls recently, police were heard telling organisers on the opening day of the modern Arts Festival Biennale on Cockatoo Island today that the exhibits required a much stronger warning at the entrance.

Biennale organisers said the visit from officers from Balmain Police was routine "to discuss arrangements for the opening night party" on the island tomorrow evening.

The officers, who visited the installation of controversial Sydney artist Mike Parr, were heard expressing astonishment and disgust.

The works by Parr, hosted in the dilapidated and derelict sailors' quarters, feature video pieces of self-mutilation and installations of urine-soaked clothes.

A warning appears at the entrance of the exhibit, which is a collection of Parr's work from 1972 to the present, stating that viewers need to be over 18 and that the exhibits are graphic, including dead birds.

Police were heard telling organisers the warning sign was not explicit enough.

One black and white video shows Parr holding his finger over a candle until the pain becomes unbearable.

A second involves stitching his face with a needle and thread while a third has him vomiting a toxic blue dye.

"The police were here to discuss tomorrow's party arrangements," an organiser said.

"They did not have a problem with the art, they had worked in homicide and had seen much worse."

Parr's work, according to the program, seeks to denounce the brutality of the world we live in.

The exhibition goes from June 18 - September 7. It is free at venues across Sydney. See Saturday's Herald for a sepcial report. For details of events go to bos2008
http://www.aol.com.au/news/story/Mut...881/index.html





Milestones

Man Who Helped Create ‘Daisy Ad’ Dies
Margalit Fox



Tony Schwartz, a self-taught, sought-after and highly reclusive media consultant who helped create what is generally considered to be the most famous political ad to appear on television, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.

His death was announced by his daughter, Kayla Schwartz-Burridge.

“Media consultant” is barely adequate to describe Mr. Schwartz’s portfolio. In a career of more than half a century, he was variously an art director; advertising executive; urban folklorist who captured the cacophony of New York streets on phonograph records; radio host; Broadway sound designer; college professor, media theorist and author who wrote books about the persuasive power of sound and image; and maker of commercials for products, candidates and causes. What was more, Mr. Schwartz, who had suffered from agoraphobia since the age of 13, accomplished most of these things entirely within his Manhattan home.

Of the thousands of television and radio advertisements on which Mr. Schwartz worked, none is as well known, or as controversial, as one that was broadcast exactly once: the so-called “daisy ad,” made for Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaign in 1964.
Produced by the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach in collaboration with Mr. Schwartz, the minute-long spot was broadcast on Sept. 7, 1964, during NBC’s “Monday Night at the Movies.” It showed a little girl in a meadow (in reality a Manhattan park), counting aloud as she plucks the petals from a daisy. Her voice dissolves into a man’s voice counting downward, followed by the image of an atomic blast. President Johnson’s voice is heard on the soundtrack:

“These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.” (The president’s speech deliberately invoked a line from “September 1, 1939,” a poem by W. H. Auden written at the outbreak of World War II.)

Though the name of Johnson’s opponent, Senator Barry M. Goldwater, was never mentioned, Goldwater’s campaign objected strenuously to the ad. So did many members of the public, Republicans and Democrats alike. The spot was pulled from the air after a single commercial showing, but it had done its work: with its dire implications about Goldwater and nuclear responsibility, the daisy ad was generally credited with contributing to Johnson’s victory at the polls in November. It was also credited with heralding the start of ferociously negative political advertising in the United States.

In interviews and on his Web site, www.tonyschwartz.org, Mr. Schwartz said he had created the daisy ad in its entirety, an account that was publicly disputed over the years by members of the Doyle Dane Bernbach team. (The daisy ad was modeled directly on a radio commercial for nuclear disarmament that Mr. Schwartz had made for the United Nations in the early 1960s.) What is generally acknowledged is that Mr. Schwartz was at least responsible for the overall audio concept of the daisy ad — the child counting up, the man counting down, the explosion — and for producing the soundtrack.

Over the years, Mr. Schwartz helped develop advertising campaigns for hundreds of political candidates, most Democrats, among them Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. (All of them, no matter how eminent, made the trek to Mr. Schwartz’s home to be filmed.) He was also known for creating some of television’s earliest, and most evocative, anti-smoking commercials, a cause on which he worked for much of his career.

The subject of frequent articles in the news media, Mr. Schwartz was described often as an impassioned visionary and occasionally as a skilled trafficker in truisms with a talent for self-promotion. His work was likened frequently — sometimes approvingly, sometimes not — to that of the media scholar Marshall McLuhan, a mentor and close friend. (He was sometimes confused with the Tony Schwartz who was a co-author of memoirs by Michael D. Eisner and Donald Trump.) But detractors and admirers alike praised Mr. Schwartz for being one of the first people to put the neglected medium of sound to effective use in television advertising. He was widely credited, for instance, with being the first person to use real children’s voices in the soundtracks of television commercials, something he began doing in the late 1950s. Advertisers had long considered young children too intractable to deliver their lines on cue; their dialogue had traditionally been recorded by adult actresses attempting to sound like children.

Anthony Schwartz was born in Manhattan on Aug. 19, 1923. He was reared in New York City and Crompond, N.Y., near Peekskill. As a youth, Tony was an ardent ham-radio operator and also interested in visual art. At 16, he went blind for about six months as a result of an unspecified episode of “an emotional type,” as he told People magazine years later. His blindness strengthened his already deep connection to the auditory world.

Mr. Schwartz earned an undergraduate degree in graphic design from the Pratt Institute, followed by service during World War II as a civilian artist for the Navy. Afterward, he worked as an art director at several ad agencies and later ran his own agency, the Wexton Company, which later became Solow/Wexton.

Around this time, Mr. Schwartz also bought his first wire recorder. Slinging it heavily over his shoulder, he began to harvest the intoxicating sounds of the city: foghorns and folk singers; street vendors hawking their wares; a shoemaker plying his trade; a Central Park zookeeper waxing poetic on the care and feeding of lions; hundreds of taxi drivers; and a slew of ordinary New Yorkers, just talking.

Mr. Schwartz also built an important archive of folk music, recording young artists like Harry Belafonte and the Weavers performing in his home. Through his extensive correspondence with other, far-flung audiophiles, he augmented his collection with their recordings of music from around the globe.

During the 1950s and afterward, Mr. Schwartz produced more than dozen record albums, most for the Folkways label. Among them were “Sounds of My City”; “1, 2, 3 and a Zing, Zing, Zing,” featuring the songs and games of New York children; and “A Dog’s Life,” which captured the sounds in the first year in the life of a real dog. (Many of these albums are available as CD’s from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, www.folkways.si.edu.)

Because of his agoraphobia, Mr. Schwartz confined his fieldwork to his immediate neighborhood, on Manhattan’s West Side. One result was “New York 19” — the number denoted the district’s old postal zone — which documented the “music” Mr. Schwartz encountered on his walks there, from street performers to the lilting cadences of immigrant speech to a pneumatic drill singing its achingly familiar aria.

For 31 years, from 1945 to 1976, Mr. Schwartz was the producer and host of “Around New York,” a radio program broadcast on WNYC. He was also a sound designer for several Broadway plays, among them “Two for the Seesaw” (1958) and “The Miracle Worker” (1959).

Mr. Schwartz was a shrewd observer of communication in its many forms, in particular the persuasive marriage of word and image known as advertising. The aim of advertising, Mr. Schwartz often said, should not be to introduce viewers to new ideas, but rather to bring out ones that were already present, lurking subconsciously in the mind.

“The best political commercials are Rorschach patterns,” he wrote in his book “The Responsive Chord” (Anchor Press, 1973). “They do not tell the viewer anything. They surface his feelings and provide a context for him to express these feelings.”

Mr. Schwartz also wrote “Media, the Second God,” published by Random House in 1981. He taught media studies at several universities, including Fordham, Columbia, New York University and Harvard, using a variety of technologies — among them two-way telephones and live satellite transmissions — to conduct his classes from the security of his home. As he often said late in life, he had delivered lectures to every continent but Antarctica, all without leaving the house.

Besides his daughter Michaela Schwartz-Burridge, who is known as Kayla, Mr. Schwartz is survived by his wife, the former Reenah Lurie, whom he married in 1959; a son, Anton; a brother, Lasker, known as Larry; and one grandchild.

Among Mr. Schwartz’s most famous television ads is one he wrote and produced for the American Cancer Society; it was first broadcast in 1963, a year before the Surgeon General’s warning on the dangers of smoking was released. The ad showed two children dressing up in adult clothes. The announcer’s voice said, simply: “Children love to imitate their parents. Children learn by imitating their parents. Do you smoke cigarettes?”

He later produced an evocative television ad in which Patrick Reynolds, a grandson of the tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds, named the members of his family who had died of cancer, emphysema and heart disease.

Mr. Schwartz’s commercial clients included Coca-Cola (for which he created the well-known TV ad featuring a sumptuously sweating bottle with the sound of pouring liquid as the only audio element); American Express; Chrysler; Kodak; and Paine Webber, among many others.

In 2007, Mr. Schwartz’s entire body of work from 1947 to 1999, including his field recordings and the thousands of radio and television commercials he made, was acquired by the Library of Congress.

To the end of his career, Mr. Schwartz was asked often about the daisy ad. To the end of his career, he defended it.

“For many years, it’s been referred to as the beginning of negative commercials,” Mr. Schwartz said in an interview with MSNBC in 2000. “There was nothing negative about it. Frankly, I think it was the most positive commercial ever made.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/bu...-schwartz.html





Cyd Charisse, 86, Silken Dancer of Movies, Dies
Robert Berkvist

Cyd Charisse, the leggy beauty whose balletic grace made her a memorable partner for Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in classic MGM musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Band Wagon” and “Brigadoon,” died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was believed to be 86.

Her death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was apparently caused by a heart attack, said her agent, Scott Stander.

Ms. Charisse came of age in a sparkling era of Hollywood musicals, and though she had some dramatic film roles, it was in musicals that she achieved her lasting renown. That fame later helped power a successful song-and-dance partnership with her husband, Tony Martin, in nightclubs and on television.

In his 1959 memoir, “Steps in Time,” Astaire called Ms. Charisse “beautiful dynamite.” She was a striking presence on film: slender and graceful with jet black hair. She stood 5 feet 6, but in high heels and full-length stockings — a familiar costume for her — she seemed even taller.

She made her film debut in 1943 under the name Lily Norwood in “Something to Shout About,” with Don Ameche and Janet Blair, and then spent almost a decade performing in small roles and sometimes anonymously before she got her big break. That came with “Singin’ in the Rain,” released in 1952.

Written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, the film established her as one of Hollywood’s most glamorous and seductive talents.

Set during the dawn of talking pictures, “Singin’ in the Rain” starred Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds and Jean Hagen. Ms. Charisse appeared in only one of the movie’s many indelible dance sequences, but one was enough. During the “Broadway Melody Ballet,” opposite Kelly, she was both sultry vamp and diaphanous dream girl.

A year later, “The Band Wagon” brought Ms. Charisse her first leading role. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, with a book by Comden and Green and songs by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, the film starred Astaire, Ms. Charisse, Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray.

Astaire played a fading Hollywood song-and-dance man hoping to make a comeback on Broadway and who finds himself cast in a show opposite a snooty ballerina (Ms. Charisse). The couple do not see eye-to-eye until they take a nighttime carriage ride through a moonlit Central Park and wind up embracing languorously to the strains of ”Dancing in the Dark.” One of the most famous sequences from the film, if not in the history of dance on film, is “The Girl Hunt Ballet,” in which Ms. Charisse plays the vamp to Astaire’s private-eye stage character.

In “Brigadoon” (1954), also directed by Minnelli and adapted from the 1947 Broadway show by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Kelly and Van Johnson played American tourists who stumble on a mysterious Scottish village that materializes only once every 100 years. Kelly falls hard for a beautiful villager, Fiona (Ms. Charisse). They danced to “The Heather on the Hill.”

Cyd Charisse was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Tex. Though some sources say she was born on March 8, 1921, her agent said the year was 1922. She began taking dance lessons as a little girl. Her many name changes began, so the story goes, when her brother had trouble pronouncing “sister” and settled for “Sid.”

While still a teenager, she was sent to California for professional dance training and quickly became a member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a touring troupe, adopting the name Felia Sidorova. She was on a European tour when she met Nico Charisse, a handsome young dancer and dance instructor. They married in Paris when she was 18. In 1942, they had a son, Nicky.

By the early 1940s, Ms. Charisse had been spotted by studio scouts and her first film roles — as Lily Norwood — followed. (She also appeared anonymously in 1943 as a ballerina in “Mission to Moscow.”) In 1946, MGM, by then the king of Hollywood musicals, signed her to a contract and gave her minor roles in several films, including “The Harvey Girls,” “Till the Clouds Roll By” and “Ziegfeld Follies,” in which she danced a brief opening sequence with Astaire. When she was chosen to appear in “Ziegfeld Follies,” the producer Arthur Freed preferred the name Charisse to Norwood and changed the spelling of Sid to Cyd.

The next year, Ms. Charisse played a ballerina once again in “The Unfinished Dance,” which featured the child star Margaret O’Brien as a dance student.

Ms. Charisse was reunited with Kelly in the 1955 Comden and Green musical “It’s Always Fair Weather,” and was teamed with Fred Astaire in “Silk Stockings” (1957). In the latter, an update of the Greta Garbo vehicle “Ninotchka,” she played an icy Soviet functionary who is sent to Paris where she meets and is romanced by a Hollywood producer (Astaire). Needless to say, she melts for Fred as they sing and dance to Cole Porter songs like “All of You” and “Fated to Be Mated.” It was the twilight of the Hollywood musical.

Ms. Charisse’s marriage to Nico Charisse ended in divorce in 1947. She married Mr. Martin in 1948. He survives her, along with their son, Tony Jr., and her son, Nicky, by her first marriage.

In November 2006, Ms. Charisse was one of the recipients of the National Medal of Arts presented by President Bush in a White House ceremony.

Looking back on her work with Kelly and Astaire during a 2002 interview in The New York Times, Ms. Charisse said that her husband, Mr. Martin, always knew whom she had been dancing with. “If I was black and blue,” she said, “it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn’t have a scratch.”

In a 1992 interview with The Times, she remembered dancing with Astaire to Michael Kidd’s demanding choreography in “Silk Stockings” and said admiringly, “Fred moved like glass.”

As it turned out, “Silk Stockings” was her last major musical. She appeared in a few more movies, chiefly in dramatic roles in films like “Party Girl” (1958) and “Two Weeks in Another Town” (1962). She and Mr. Martin took their nightclub act to Las Vegas and other cities. Her last film was an Italian drama, “Private Screenings” (1989).

Ms. Charisse made her belated Broadway debut in 1992 in “Grand Hotel,” when she replaced Liliane Montevecchi in the leading role of a famous but aging ballerina in 1920s Berlin. “I think that in all my dancing I play a role,” she told The Times that year. “To me, that’s what dancing is about. It’s not just steps.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/ar...8charisse.html





Stan Winston, 62, Special-Effects Artist, Dies
William Grimes

Stan Winston, the Oscar-winning special-effects artist who created the animatronic dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park,” the slimy 14-foot alien queen in “Aliens” and the liquid-metal assassin in “Terminator 2,” died Sunday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 62.

The cause was multiple myeloma, said a spokesman for Stan Winston Studio.

Although he created some of the most famous special effects in movie history, Mr. Winston insisted that he cared less about technical wizardry than he did about storytelling. “It’s not about technology,” he once said. “It’s about writers writing wonderful stories with fantastic characters and me being able to create a visual image that’s beyond what you would expect.”

Courtesy of Mr. Winston, the unexpected leapt from the screen in dozens of films. He created the extraterrestrial assassin who hunts Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Predator,” the hands of “Edward Scissorhands” and the Penguin (from the neck up) in “Batman Returns.”

Mr. Winston won four Oscars for his film work and in 2001 he became the first special-effects artist to receive a star in the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard.

Stan Winston was born in Arlington, Va., and as a child was fascinated with puppets, monster movies and special effects. Disneyland’s animatronic Abraham Lincoln only deepened his obsessions. He earned a degree in art at the University of Virginia then set out for Hollywood.

After seeing “Planet of the Apes,” he entered a Disney apprenticeship program and became a makeup artist in 1972. His work on the television movie “Gargoyles” won him an Emmy Award, as did his makeup effects for “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” in which the title character ages from 19 to 110.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Winston entered into a collaboration with James Cameron, the director of the “Terminator” films and “Aliens.” His creepy exoskeleton effect for the villain in the first “Terminator” film inspired a host of imitations.

His second collaboration with Mr. Cameron, on “Aliens,” earned him his first Academy Award, in 1986. He would receive three more: two for “Terminator 2: Judgment Day (special effects and makeup) and one for “Jurassic Park.”

In 1988, Mr. Winston directed his own film, “Pumpkinhead,” in which a rural father summons an ancient demon to wreak vengeance on the city slickers who accidentally kill his son. He teamed up with Mr. Cameron for “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and created a protean villain resembling quicksilver that was able to transform itself into almost anything.

Mr. Winston returned to dinosaurs in “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” and “Jurassic Park III.” And again with Mr. Spielberg, he contributed special effect to “A.I.,” notably Teddy, a walking, talking animatronic teddy bear.

In 2001, Mr. Winston produced five films for the HBO series “Creature Features,” a tribute to the cheaply made horror films of the 1950s. At the same time he started Stan Winston Creatures, a toy company whose first line was based on characters in the Creature Features series.

More recently, he contributed to “Iron Man,” released earlier this year, and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. He also worked on the unreleased films “Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins,” “G.I. Joe,” “Shutter Island” and Mr. Cameron’s “Avatar.”

He is survived by his wife, Karen; a son, Matt, of Encino, Calif.; a daughter, Debbie Litoff, of Woodland Hills, Calif.; and four grandchildren.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/movies/17winston.html





Spielberg Said to Be Seeking Deal
Heather Timmons

Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks SKG film studio may soon get a lift from Bollywood.

The production company, which has been tussling with its parent, Paramount Pictures, is in discussions with Reliance Entertainment, part of one of the largest conglomerates in India, about a cash infusion of a half billion dollars or more that could allow DreamWorks to split from Paramount.

Any deal is still in the discussion stages, people briefed on the negotiations said on Wednesday. It may be several weeks before an agreement is signed, one such person said. What is being discussed would bring Mr. Spielberg and his business partner, David Geffen, $500 million to $600 million in cash, in return for an undisclosed stake in their company.

A spokesman for Reliance ADA, Reliance Entertainment’s parent, declined to comment on the talks, which were first reported on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal.

Reliance ADA also owns one of the largest telecommunications businesses in India, which is making to acquire the MTN Group of South Africa in a deal that could be valued at more than $40 billion. The group is controlled by Anil Ambani, the younger brother of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, who controls a rival group. As Mukesh’s company, called Reliance Industries, expands in India, Anil has increasingly looked at foreign growth.

Reliance Entertainment is a new venture with ambitious plans. The group owns an Indian film exhibition and production company, Adlabs Films, and the largest FM radio network in India. Reliance Entertainment in May announced that it would finance films by production companies run by some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, including George Clooney and Tom Hanks.

In February, the billionaire financier George Soros bought a 3 percent stake in Reliance Entertainment for $100 million. Reliance Entertainment executives said this year that they planned to create a $10 billion company that will be one of the world’s largest entertainment concerns. In addition to Hollywood, Reliance Entertainment is planning to expand in television, online gambling and social networking.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/bu...mworks.html?hp





EA to PC Gamers: “Install 3 Times? Buy Another Copy”
Jud Hudson

This really grinds my gears…As reported here in the past, Mass Effect for PC contains a new type of SecuROM which will be present in all future EA/Maxis games.

What does it do? Not only does it install itself to your computer without a word of notification as well as disable your firewall, dvd drives and cd/dvd burning software. It limits you to installing your game on your PC up to 3 times.

This can be triggered via using up your 3 activations and each time you change a piece of hardware, reformat your computer or install/upgrade a new operating system, it takes up one of the activations.

This is proven to be true by a guy over at the Mass Effect forums. He registered and started to play the game (Activation #1). Well, when he tried to play the game he had strange artifacts on his screen. Thinking it was an OS-related issue, he reinstalled XP and reinstalled the game (Activation #2). Finding out that it didn’t help the problem, he soon figured out it was his graphics card struggling. Well, he bought a brand new card and that solved the problem (this triggers Activation #3). Game ran fine for a short period of time (2 days) and he played thru it and completed the game. Well, a week after that, he decided he wanted to run thru the game again. This is where he stumbles upon this error:

“The game can not start. For security reasons, only a limited number of machines can ever be licensed by a single purchase. This limit has been reached. Please purchase another registration code, reinstall, and then try again.”

There is no doubt that EA will try to include this new version of SecuROM on Spore and possibly The Sims 3….and if it is, we are going to encounter some very serious problems. Heck, I can’t even count the times I had to reinstall the games, upgrade my hardware and reformat…

You know, come to think of it…EA is doing this to prevent piracy of their games, but it’s only hurting us legal customers. Look at this:

If you are a Pirate:

• BAD: You do have the same bugs that those with legal copies have, plus new ones depending on how the cracked copy was programmed.
• GOOD: Unlimited Activations!
• GOOD: No SecuROM to deal with
• GOOD & BAD: It’s free, but illegal

If you are a Legal Customer:

• BAD: Limited to 3 Activations
• BAD: Your computer is plaqued with SecuROM
• BAD: Game contains errors and bugs
• GOOD & BAD: You support Maxis by purchasing the game, but you are also supporting EA, and if you support them, you support SecuROM

Honestly…what looks better to you?
http://www.simprograms.com/?p=692





Radiohead Blasted By Veteran Rockers KISS For Giving Their Music Away For Free

Bassist Gene Simmons says the British rockers – who gave fans the choice to download last year's album 'In Rainbows' for free or pay a sum of their choosing - says their decision is contributing to the demise of the record industry and insists his band would never follow suit.

Gene - who starred in reality TV show 'School of Rock' - said: "The record industry is dead. It's six feet underground and unfortunately the fans have done this. They've decided to download and file share. There is no record industry around so we're going to wait until everybody settles down and becomes civilised. As soon as the record industry pops its head up we'll record new material."

Meanwhile, Radiohead were left with a row of empty seats at a recent French concert after a ticket giveaway backfired. The eco-friendly group announced 50 passes were available for their show at Paris' Bercy Arena but fans could only get by cycling to their record label's offices in the French city.

However, Parisians were not prepared to get on their bikes so 35 tickets went unclaimed. A source said: "Radiohead are using their current world tour to highlight their commitment to green issues. They advise all concertgoers to use public transport and are doing all they can to make their carbon footprint as small as possible. Unfortunately the French didn't appear to share their noble intentions and roundly ignored the free ticket tactic."
http://www.aol.com.au/celebrity/stor...011/index.html





Pearl Jam Offers Streaming 'Bootlegs'
Greg Sandoval

Pearl Jam, a band with a reputation for delivering great live performances, is offering to sell "bootleg" recordings of the group's concert shows.

Fans can go to Pearljam.com and purchase streaming downloads or burn-to-order CDs of each of the band's performances during its 2008 concert tour, which launched last week in Florida. Internap is overseeing the audio streaming.

Pearl Jam is taking liberties with the term bootleg. Typically bootlegs are pirated material that are given away or sold at bargain-basement prices.

That's not the case here. Each concert performance will sell for $9.99 (MP3) and $14.99 (FLAC) and be made available two weeks after the performance. But fans may give Eddie Vedder and the group a pass on this one.

Why?

Because at least Pearl Jam is offering the music free of digital rights management. This means fans can burn the songs to disc or transfer them to their digital music players. Another reason is that Pearl Jam is a longtime advocate for fans.

Pearl Jam once canceled a concert tour to protest the high price of concert tickets. The group sued Ticketmaster and requested that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate the company. Nothing came of the lawsuit.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9969571-7.html





Kid Rock Boycotts iTunes, Champions P2P
Eliot Van Buskirk

The digital music revolution has been compromised, according to Kid Rock, because digital music stores and record labels still manage to hoard the lion's share of music revenue.

He advises fans to download his music for free from P2P services, although he himself doesn't have to. "I don't steal things," he told the BBC. "I'm rich." As for everyone else, he says, "Download it illegally, I don't care. I want you to hear my music so I can play live."

Rock's tirade was apparently precipitated by a request from his record label, Warner Music Group's Atlantic Records, that he publicly denounce file sharing. His response: "Wait a second, you've been stealing from the artists for years. Now you want me to stand up for you?" Ouch.

It seems there's no one way that artists are responding to the opportunities and challenges presented by the internet. It's official now: They're all over the map when it comes to downloads, DRM, file sharing and the rest of it, no longer offering the same rationales for completely different conclusions.

"ITunes takes the money, the record company takes the money, and they don't give it to the artists," added the country rock rapper. Instead, he says, the internet offers a "great opportunity for everyone to be treated fairly, for the consumer to get a fair price, for the artist to be paid fairly, for the record companies to make some money."

This makes a lot of sense, and it's the sort of thing that the digital music optimists among us have been saying for years. However, Rock expands on the idea, positing that anyone who needs something should just take it: "I don't mind people stealing my music, that's fine. But I think they should steal everything. You know how much money the oil companies have? If you need some gas, just go fill your tank (up) and drive off, they're not going to miss it."

Kid Rock's iTunes boycott is already in full effect. As of right now, none of his Warner-era albums are available on iTunes, and only his rarely heard debut -- 1990's Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast on Zomba Recordings -- is available (clicking the link spawns iTunes).

Meanwhile, Metallica has been busy apologizing for its management company's testosterone-fueled deletion of early reviews of their upcoming album -- more on that soon.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/06/...ck-boycot.html





Pretty pirates

Cosmo Girls Get Wise





Despite Leaks Online and File Sharing, Lil Wayne’s New CD Is a Hit
Robert Levine

In a year when album sales have fallen by another 11 percent after years of declines, the ailing record labels received good news Wednesday: “Tha Carter III” (Cash Money/Universal Mo- town), the new album by the rapper Lil Wayne, looks to be a rare blockbuster hit.

The album sold 423,000 copies on June 10, its day of release, according to Billboard, and industry executives predict that first-week sales will near one million. (Nielsen SoundScan will release final numbers Wednesday.) And although Lil Wayne is a household name only to hip-hop fans, his first-week sales are the best so far in 2008, surpassing those of Mariah Carey and Usher, better-known R&B artists whose new albums each sold about 450,000 copies in the first week.

The last album to come close to a million in its first week was Kanye West’s “Graduation,” which sold 957,000 copies in 2007. The last time an album broke the million barrier was in 2005, when “The Massacre” by 50 Cent sold 1.1 million copies in its first week.

As CD sales drop and popular tastes splinter, big debuts for hit albums are less common. Hip-hop has been hit especially hard, with sales declining about 25 percent this year compared with the same period in 2007.

Lil Wayne, whose real name is Dwayne Carter Jr., has not put out an official album since 2005, but he has kept the attention of fans by releasing mixtapes and rapping on dozens of songs by stars like Usher and Chris Brown. He has built a reputation as one of the most prolific performers in hip-hop, an heir to M.C.’s like Jay-Z, who raps with Lil Wayne on the new album’s “Mr. Carter.” (Jay-Z’s real name is Shawn Carter.) Last fall the hip-hop magazine Vibe listed 77 songs Lil Wayne appeared on in 2007 — a year in which he did not release an official album.

“He stayed connected and nurtured his audience,” said Sylvia Rhone, president of Universal Motown Records. “He was always working. And I think the rabid following he’s cultivated is reflected in those sales numbers.”

Too many guest appearances can create fatigue among fans. But the opposite seems to have happened with Lil Wayne, as the scores of songs that reached listeners on mixtapes and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks fueled anticipation for an official release. Although “Tha Carter III” was leaked online several weeks ago, many fans seem to have decided to buy the CD.

Even in this era of mixtapes and MP3s, however, it took an old-fashioned summer radio hit to market Lil Wayne beyond his dedicated fan base of young men. “Lollipop,” one of the album’s singles, is No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, where it has spent several weeks, in part because it also appeals to women.

“I don’t think Middle America got interested in him because his mixtapes were so great, but they forced serious rap fans to care about everything he was doing,” said Sean Fennessey, the music editor at Vibe. “Then he landed on a pop hit with ‘Lollipop,’ which was something he had never been able to do before. And between that and the serious rap fans, it became an event.”

In April, before his album was leaked, Lil Wayne was the most pirated artist on file-sharing networks, going by BigChampagne, a company that tracks peer-to-peer online activity. Fans who downloaded Lil Wayne songs took an average of 10 of his tracks; fans of other pop artists only took an average of two per act.

“That speaks to the quantity of his output, which is plentiful, as well as the depth of his audience’s engagement,” said Eric Garland, BigChampagne’s chief executive. “If you’re a fan, you’re most likely a serious fan. And while people who like an individual song are not going to open their wallets for you, people who like 10 songs will. I think the mixtape phenomenon is great for feeding the machine, which is what the music industry is about in the 21st century.” This business model contrasts with that of major labels, which usually discourage unofficial releases.

Universal Motown also promoted “Tha Carter III” with television advertising and partnerships with MySpace, Yahoo and America Online, and iTunes briefly offered a new song weekly. In addition to the album’s success, “Lollipop” is now the best-selling ring tone of 2008, according to Nielsen RingScan, each of which earns Universal Motown more than a full song. But fans are buying the song for their phones as well: Ms. Rhone says “Lollipop” has sold a half-million copies as a download on cellular networks.

“It shows you that there’s still a vital market, both physically and digitally,” Ms. Rhone said of “Tha Carter III.” “There’s only a few of these that come around a year, but it speaks well of us and our industry.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/ar...c/18wayne.html





Surviving the Hits
Suzanne Vega

A couple of weekends ago I began what I call my “bread-and-butter” touring season. I had two shows, one in Long Island and one in Saratoga, N.Y. I had a raging head cold, but made it through and came home to check on a few days worth of e-mails.

At first I couldn’t tell what was going on. As I went to access my account, I kept seeing my own face flashing at me on my computer, in between photos of a fire at the Universal Studios and some other news item. But not a current version of my face — one from before 1990.

I wondered if my AOL shoebox of photos had burst open and was somehow leaking online in a public way. Then I read the text, which said something like, “Her first hit, ‘Luka,’ brought the subject of child abuse to the Top 40. But what was her other one? Hint: It’s catchy!”

I looked at the screen for a few minutes as it changed from my face to the fire at Universal to the other photo every few seconds. My husband, Paul, came up behind me.

“Click on it!” he said. I did, and read what followed: “This New Yorker’s poignant tale of an abused child brought a dose of social awareness to the upper reaches of the pop charts. Vega made her second and final chart visit thanks to an initially unauthorized remix of a three-year-old song about her favorite Manhattan greasy-spoon eatery, a place soon to be even better known from being featured in ‘Seinfeld’ episodes.”

“They shouldn’t say things like that about you,” said Paul.

“What?” I said. “I thought it was kind of nice.” I had missed the headline, which read: “Two-Hit Wonders!”

Oh, that.

It’s a list I have shown up on fairly often recently, so I had almost gotten used to it. Of course, he’s right, and it’s demeaning — it makes me look as though somehow I managed to squeak out those two songs and then shuffle back to being a receptionist, which isn’t true.

The way I prefer to see it is that I have had a 20-plus-year career, with a big back catalog of songs that a lot of people know, and want to hear, and yes, two of those songs were big Top 40 hits. What’s to complain about? They are like the cherries on top of the sundae. Why would I not want that? They have been my passport out of a life in an office, to a life on the road where I can go to Korea and the guy who stamps the passport says, “Are you Vega, Suzanne? Everybody knows you here.” And his eyes change with emotion when he reads my name.

So I refuse to be embarrassed by those hits. It doesn’t take away from the rest of the songs. But I have often wondered, “Why those two? Why not the others?” There were other songs just as sparkly and and shiny and major key and radio friendly like “Book of Dreams” or “No Cheap Thrill” or “Frank & Ava” and so forth. But nothing has had the longevity of those two. So far, anyway.

Why is that? I have heard both songs described as “flukes,” but I really don’t think that is the case. A lot of hard work went into their production, especially in the arrangements. Let’s look at “Luka,” for example. I had been listening to Lou Reed’s “Berlin” album — on that record he plays acoustic guitar, and a fair amount of the album is about abuse of all kinds including domestic abuse.

“Luka” was not a popular song when I would perform it back then. I would watch people from the stage. You could see their faces change as they thought about the lyrics; a frown would appear, then a general look of unhappiness, followed by a scowl directed at the floor and, at the conclusion, a smattering of reluctant applause. Then a request for something else, usually “Gypsy” or something in a major key with a chorus.

It was my manager at the time, Ron Fierstein, who plucked ”Luka” out. “Is that song about what I think it’s about?” he asked one day in the back of Folk City. My memory of that conversation goes something like this:

“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think it’s about?”

“Unless I am mistaken it seems to be from the point of view of a child who is abused.”

“That’s right. A 9-year-old boy named Luka.”

“Where did you get the name from?”

“A 9-year-old boy who lives in my building. Who is not abused, by the way. I like the name Luka, it’s universal. It could be a girl or boy and it could be any nationality.”

“Well, I think that song could be a hit.” he said. Here I hooted at him.

“What are you talking about? Nobody wants to hear about child abuse. Nobody asks for that song. They want ‘Gypsy’ or ‘The Queen and the Soldier.’”

“It’s a song about a social issue. Songs about social issues are important. We don’t have enough of them now. This generation needs to have more.” This was in 1985.

“I didn’t write it to be be about a social issue — I wrote it as a little portrait. I hate songs about social issues. Everybody knows they don’t work.”

“Well, it is still a song about a social issue. It’s the issue of child abuse, you said it yourself. And how can you say they don’t work? We stopped the Vietnam War with the music we made in the 70’s!” he began to shout, his cheeks flushing pink.

We had a half-hour argument after that about whether songs with a social message worked or not — me taking the more cynical view that if they really worked then Bob Dylan and Joan Baez would have been able to end all wars. Was there a better anti-war song than “Masters of War”? And yet we had been at war since. Ron shouted that music was part of the dialogue of American culture, along with the marches and the protests that helped to shape the decisions of a nation.

To say I was skeptical is to completely understate it, but I agreed to start on the pre-production for “Luka.” We even decided not to put it on the first album, which I was working on at the time, but to delay it for the second one.

One of the things that happened right away is that the producer Steve Addabbo ran into a keyboard player named Peter Wood in the street. Steve played him the song and he had some ideas immediately about how it should be arranged.

My ideas are usually simple, melodically. What Mr. Wood did was to create a space for the guitar solo and changed the melody line of the fourth verse. This, I have come to realize after years of singing the song, is the emotional climax of the song, because it goes up there — “You don’t ask WHY!” — and is at the top of my range and the top of the melody.

Verse 1

My name is Luka
I live on the second floor
I live upstairs from you
Yes I think you’ve seen me before

If you hear something late at night
Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was


Verse 2

I think it’s because I’m clumsy
I try not to talk too loud
Maybe it’s because I’m crazy
I try not to act too proud

They only hit until you cry
And after that you don’t ask why
You just don’t argue anymore
You just don’t argue anymore
You just don’t argue anymore


Guitar solo

Verse 3

Yes I think I’m okay
I walked into the door again
Well, if you ask that’s what I’ll say
And it’s not your business anyway
I guess I’d like to be alone
With nothing broken, nothing thrown

Just don’t ask me how I am [X3]


Verse 1 repeated

My name is Luka
I live on the second floor
I live upstairs from you
Yes I think you’ve seen me before

If you hear something late at night
Some kind of trouble some kind of fight
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was


Verse 4

They only hit until you cry
And after that you don’t ask why
You just don’t argue any more
You just don’t argue any more
You just don’t argue any more.

So, when you hear the song, it’s not just one melodic idea presented the same way three times — that fourth verse tells a story, makes an arc the same way a good narrative does, and when the song concludes you feel as though you have been somewhere emotionally. This is the purpose of an arranger — to take what’s there musically and arrange the music like a puzzle — to tease out the emotions of the song and present it to the public in a way that they are “hit” emotionally. More on that later.

We did a lot of other work as well. We kept it in a major key. I had written it that way deliberately, because the stereotype of a sad little boy on a doorstep suffering in a minor key made me furious. It seemed to me that most children who are abused regularly are sad and scared in the beginning but also eventually accept it as a fact of life, as something you might even expect. There is a matter-of-factness that develops. So I chose a major key, which we kept.

Weirdly, when the song was done, that casual major-key quality sounded cheerful, upbeat and even triumphant, which wasn’t my intention. Some of it was Jon Gordon’s ringing guitar solo, somewhat influenced by U2’s the Edge. We were huge U2 fans at the time and they came to our show in Dublin in 1986. Some of it was the pop synth sound and part that Anton Sanko played me at his audition to be in the band. Those first four notes ascending sounded almost architectural in how he approached the song, and I was deeply impressed.

It took at least a year before the song was arranged, produced and burnished to the sheen that it came out with. I redid my vocal over and over again with Steve Addabbo at the controls. “Why do I have to do it again? I need to go finish my other lyrics. I don’t want to do it again.” (At that point, Lenny Kaye was helping me to finish some lyrics, especially to “Ironbound,” which I was really having trouble with.)

I was thinking of asking Lucy Kaplansky to do the background vocals — I liked staying in touch with the folk scene I had been steeped in during the early ‘80s — but I had already asked her to sing on “Left of Center” the year before. So I asked Shawn Colvin, who sounded great. My management liked her so much they ended up signing her and handled her career for years.

I was hugely distracted by trying to finish the other songs by the deadline to feel any nervousness about “Luka.” I felt that I was hanging from a cliff by my nails — a feeling I have had many times in my career. How funny that journalists sometimes write about my “relaxed recording schedule”! If your idea of relaxing is hanging by your nails from a cliff, I guess that’s correct.

I sat in on the mixes with Shelley Yackus, a top-notch engineer of that era — it was a big deal that we got him and he contributed a lot to the overall sound of the record. I encouraged him to bring out the sound of the drums. Everyone always tiptoed around the acoustic guitars and wanted the drums to sound (seem) accidental so they didn’t overshadow the guitar, but this time the guitar sound was nice and fat, so there was no reason to be so polite.

We had barely finished the album when it was scheduled for release six or seven weeks later, as I remember it. We were on the road when it came out and things changed overnight. Literally. One night we were playing the usual half-filled theaters and clubs. The next day, and every day after that, each venue was full. This continued for the rest of the year and included two shows at Carnegie Hall and one at Radio City. “Luka” had been delivered to radio and accepted almost immediately.

Why? Why the huge response? Some of it was the topic — so many people wrote me of their experiences. This has continued right up until this past weekend, when a teenaged girl told me she had been a victim of child abuse and that she really identified with the character. This was astonishing to me — that so many people from so many cultures from all over the world, including here in America, identified with the character. I had believed it was about a small personal issue, but Ron had been correct: it was about a huge social one.

A lot of it was the sound of the song, the chemistry of it, since many people had no idea what the song was about. It sounded good on the radio, sounded good before and after certain songs, all the different qualities of the production gelled in a certain way that people remembered and wanted to hear again. There was a magic about certain things — I have been told that “Luka” means “wounded” in Indonesian, for example, which I certainly didn’t know when I wrote the song.

Along with acclaim, success and hard work also came criticisms, parodies and complaints. “I don’t want to hear about child abuse when I am drinking coffee in the morning,” one guy wrote in. The worst letters were from child abuse agencies. “How dare you suggest that the child is responsible for his own abuse!” began a typical one. I threw those letters away, eventually, along with a bag of parodies, which tended to start, “My name is Loofah, I live on the bathroom floor…” Ha ha. Very funny. Next, please.

“Hit” is a good name for it — a feeling of intense communication with a huge amount of people at the same time. As with a baseball and a bat, a cracking, quick connection. As with drugs, a sudden alteration of reality. You could get used to it.

That particular intensity lasted about eight months, I’d say until Tracy Chapman appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. “Tom’s Diner” was a hit too, after that, but proved to be a very different experience than “Luka.” It has gone on to have its own weird history of which I am very proud. More on that later. As for being a two-hit wonder — well, I think it’s better than being a one-hit wonder, thank you very much.
http://measureformeasure.blogs.nytim...its/index.html





A Redesign at Skype
Brad Stone

Skype, eBay’s Internet phone division, has always been something of a problem child for the e-commerce giant.

The service is growing like a weed, with 309 million registered users. It earned $126 million in the first quarter of the year, exceeding what eBay and PayPal earned at similar age.

Yet considering eBay paid $2.6 billion for Skype in 2005 and last year took a massive write-down on the acquisition, investors and industry observers still view Skype through the thick, dreary lens of disappointment.

Now eBay hopes to give them a new pair of glasses. Tuesday night the company will make available a test of a new version of the program, called Skype 4.0, which it says is the most dramatic redesign of the calling service in its short five-year history.

Josh Silverman, Skype’s president, says it was time to evolve Skype’s user interface. The service started out by offering free audio calls but has gradually added other kinds of communication, like video calls, file-sharing, and text chats. The main purpose of the upgrade, he said, is to bring all those modes together and make it easier to switch between them in a single conversation.

“If I were to sum it all up, that is what 4.0 is about: the next leap forward in integrated communications,” he said.

Skype 4.0’s biggest change is making it easy to initiate a video conferencing call. Although Skype says that 28 percent of the calls on its service include live video, adding a face-to-face component to a call has typically been a difficult task that involves hunting around for a small camera icon after an audio link between Skype users has already been established. Skype 4.0, thankfully, puts large “call” and “video call” buttons next to every user’s name.

The new Skype also includes records of current and past conversations next to each name in a person’s Skype directory, so the program no longer spawns new windows on a person’s computer every time a new call comes in. It also makes it easier to drill down and see records of previous communications.

Naturally, eBay hopes the new Skype will funnel more users to the pay portions of the service (calls between Skype users remain free.) eBay says that future iterations of the Skype 4.0 beta will make it easier to use PayPal to send money over the service and to access Skype Prime, a directory of experts and 1-900-style companies that pay Skype commissions to set up shop on the service.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...sign-at-skype/





Why Firefox Matters
Brian Caulfield

If you use the Web for a living you're probably enjoying your shiny new toy already: the official release of Firefox 3. The team at Mozilla, the group behind the free Firefox Web browser, is gunning to set a record for most downloads in a 24-hour period.

Mozilla's definitely on track with its bigger goal: taking a big bite out of Microsoft's browser monopoly. Firefox grabbed 18.41% of the market in May, up from just 11% during the year-ago period, according to Web tracker NetApplications. Microsoft, by contrast, has fallen to 73.75% from 84% over the same period.

Of course, it's easy to dismiss the importance of the Web browser. The software is free, and Microsoft crushed its only serious commercial competition, Netscape, almost a decade ago. As recently as 2005, Microsoft owned 95% of the market.

But don't be fooled. Firefox has become one of the most important pieces of software around today as consumers shift from using their PCs to run applications living on their hard drives to a communications device able to connect with applications living on distant servers. As Saul Hansell at The New York Times pointed out, the browser is poised to unlock a slate of new applications in the years to come.

And, thanks to Google, Mozilla has plenty of money. Google funnels tens of millions dollars to Mozilla in exchange getting for a valuable spot on the default home page of the browser preferred by the most avid Web surfers and developers.

As long as Google keeps the money flowing, Firefox's small team of developers moves quickly. Firefox was the first to introduce new features, like tabbed browsing, that have now become ubiquitous.

The latest release, Firefox 3, continues the pattern. The new browser has plenty of these soon-to-be-ubiquitous features, such as the ability to bookmark a page with a single click and the "Smart Location Bar" that uses the browser's URL field to help users rifle through their bookmarks and browsing history. Then there's the big stuff, like a continued emphasis rendering a Web page in a hurry. (Check out this handy field guide here.)

Whether Microsoft co-opts Firefox's best ideas, or the Web browser continues gobbling up market share, we'll all be using Mozilla's best ideas to access those new applications soon.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...17firefox.html





Firefox 3 Launch a Success: 8 Million Downloads in 24 Hours
Ryan Paul

Mozilla's Firefox 3 release event yesterday was an epic success. The servers logged over 8 million downloads during the 24-hour download day, and Mozilla has declared victory after exceeding its initial goal of 5 million downloads.

I was at the official launch party at Mozilla headquarters yesterday in Mountain View, where some revelers stayed all night to party and watch the download counter. During the event, Mozilla chairwoman Mitchell Baker's speech was broadcast live from Seoul, Korea over the Internet to all of Mozilla's offices. She reflected on the success of Firefox 3 and illuminated some of Mozilla's long-term goals.

"Today reflects so many great things about Mozilla," she said. The download day is the collaborative achievement of "millions of people on a global basis doing things that everyone thought was impossible." Mozilla is all about "keeping and building an Internet that is open and participatory, where individuals have control."

During the interview, she answered several questions from members of the Firefox community who were participating via an IRC channel. When she was asked what percentage of browser market share Mozilla aims to achieve, she said that Mozilla wants only enough to be able to achieve the organization's primary goal, which is building an open web. "We want enough market share to be able to move the Internet toward our goals. There is no exact number," she said. "It is not our goal to be a single source that unilaterally determines where the web goes. Mozilla is about having fun and building a better Internet."

A big part of Firefox's success is its spirited grassroots marketing efforts. I discussed this with Mozilla evangelist Asa Dotzler, whose team was instrumental in organizing download day. Mozilla's strategy of inclusiveness and participatory advancement isn't confined to just software development. The same principles extend to Mozilla's publicity projects. The grassroots marketing campaigns give users who lack programming expertise a way to become active participants and contributors. Through the SpreadFirefox portal, those users can become an important part of the Firefox project. Grassroots marketing is also a major win, said Dotzler, because word of mouth is one of the strongest vehicles for directly promoting Firefox adoption.

I also asked Dotzler some questions about the process through which Mozilla's download day statistics will enter the Guinness World Records. The server logs and download information will be given to an independent review board from Oregon State University Open Source Labs, which will then conduct a thorough audit, weed out duplicate and incomplete downloads, and determine an exact number.

The first 24 hours are over, but the downloads continue to pour in. At press time, the official counter shows that the current rate is approximately 5,500 downloads per minute, and the total number of downloads is roughly 8.8 million. It's further confirmation that the Firefox web browser is rapidly becoming mainstream; it has long since ceased being a niche product confined to early adopters and enthusiasts. Firefox has had a profound impact on the web and will likely continue to play a central role in shaping the future of the Internet.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-24-hours.html





Opera Software Targets 48 Pct Growth In 2008

Norwegian browser maker Opera Software said it is targeting revenue growth of around 50 percent in 2008 and even more in 2009 on increasing demand.

Opera Software, a tiny rival to industry leader Microsoft, said revenues should grow on a par with 2007, when they increased 48 percent to 315.5 million crowns ($61.21 million).

In 2009 Opera aims to grow "48 percent or more," it said on Thursday in presentation material for a capital markets day in Oslo.

It also said it targets an EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) margin of 12 percent in 2008 and more than 20 percent in 2009.

Opera, which makes browsers for cellphones and other mobile gadgets as well as for desktop computers, has seen its software included on more and more phones. It earns money from licensing its software to mobile phone and other equipment manufacturers.

The market for the group's software is in rapid growth, Chief Financial Erik Harrell told analysts and reporters at the investor event, adding that a newly appointed strategy team will consider acquisition opportunities.

"The market opportunities are huge and Opera is well-positioned to take advantage of them," the company said.

Opera said it would continue to invest heavily in its core markets in Europe, the United States, Japan and Korea.

(Reporting by Aasa Christine Stoltz and Ole Petter Skonnord; Editing by David Cowell)
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssS...50787020080619





Opera 9.5 Gives Firefox 3 a Run for its Money
Mayank Sharma

Two of the most popular Linux browsers were unveiled this month after years of development -- the open source Firefox 3 and the proprietary Opera 9.5. Opera's launch a week before Firefox was like any other launch, unlike Firefox's much publicized world record attempt. But Opera 9.5 is no less revolutionary than Firefox, matching its open source rival feature for feature, from security-related enhancements to improved multilingual text rendering.

The first thing you notice when you launch Opera 9.5 is that it occupies less desktop real estate than Firefox 3, with less toolbar space and smaller borders, giving you more room to view pages. Opera's nifty features are tucked away in its power panel. Unlike Firefox's panel, which displays only bookmarks and history, Opera's lets you access the built-in file transfer manager, the notes app, widgets (the Web browser equivalent of desktop applets), and other features. You can also see any bookmarked site as a panel as well, or download more Web panels for a variety of tasks, such as browsing news sites or playing games.

If you like to start your browser with multiple tabs, one for your email, a couple for tech and other news, a couple of comics, and so on, you'll love Opera's default start page, called "speed dial." It displays nine customizable buttons that, with a click, will take you to your favorite bookmarked sites. Opera also has a lot of tabbing features and control options, including the Ctrl-Tab cycling control and restoring tabs. You can preview pages open in a tab as well or resize pages within tabs, which lets you see multiple pages in one window.

Another nifty time-saving feature is the wand, which stores autocomplete information, including passwords. Like with the new Firefox, the wand in Opera doesn't interfere with browsing, saving username and passwords in the background while a site continues to load. The wand is better than the "remember password" option in Firefox, because it doesn't autofill the fields and allows you to enter details manually if you want to use different credentials. But if you want to use the stored username and password, just click the wand button, next to the address bar, and it not only fills in the information but also logs you in automatically, saving you another click.

Opera 9.5 also protects you from online fraud and scams with a built-in fraud protection feature. Opera monitors sites you're visiting and checks them against phishing information from Netcraft and PhishTank, and malware protection from Haute Secure. An option in the panel also lets you view details about the site and its security certificate, if it has one. Firefox 3 has similar phishing and malware protection.

Also similar between the two browsers is their ability to replace desktop apps with online counterparts. Both Opera 9.5 and Firefox 3 let you configure a Web-based email account and use it to answer all mailto: protocol requests. Opera 9.5 goes a step further and in fact packs in a complete email client that can also synchronize with a POP or IMAP-based server. This allows you to compose and send messages from within the browser. The email client is well integrated into the browser, and can be launched in a tab from the panel.

In addition to the email client, Opera has lots of features built in that are available only as add-ons for Firefox. For instance, in its note-taking app, you can create multiple notes from scratch, or copy a selected piece of text into a note, arrange notes in folders, and, if the mail client is configured, email them as well. Then there's the download manager, which can not only pause and resume downloads, but is also a full-fledged BitTorrent client. And Opera also bundles an IRC client.

One Firefox 3 feature I miss in Opera 9.5 is the ability to copy multiple text ranges. But it can search a selected word in a dictionary, or translate it to other languages using Yahoo!'s Babel Fish online service. Firefox 3 lets you tag bookmarks; Opera 9.5 doesn't, but it has a quick find feature that remembers the content of every page you visit. So if you forget to bookmark a difficult-to-remember site -- say zedropratodretua.co.za -- you can still find it in your history if you remember bits of its content.

At the bottom of its window Opera 9.5 displays three buttons. The Fit to Width button zooms out a page to help you avoid horizontal scrolling, which is pretty cool if your resolution is lower than 1280x1024. The resizing worked on several sites I tried it on, but not on Gmail. Another button is actually a pull-down menu that lets you select preset zoom levels defined in percentages from 20% to 1,000%. This is good for instantly doubling or tripling the font size, as compared to Firefox, where you have to press the "zoom in" button several times for the same result. But Firefox 3 can remember zoom settings for a particular site, whereas Opera cannot.

The final button on the bottom toolbar helps you disable and re-enable all images on the page. If you want to block other content, an option in the right-click context menu helps you block certain elements like online advertisements.

Opera 9.5 has lots of import and export options. It can import bookmarks from Firefox, Konqueror, and Internet Explorer, and email from older Opera versions and dedicated clients such as Thunderbird, Eudora, or any generic mbox file. You can also use Opera's free Opera Link Web service to sync bookmarks and speed dials between your Opera browsers at work, home, and on your mobile phones. Opera's Knowledge Base has details on these and more features and how to use them, as well as on online help options and premium support for $29.

For Web developers, Opera 9.5 also includes an alpha release of the company's Dragonfly tool, which helps developers debug JavaScript, inspect CSS and the DOM, and view any errors in their apps while they are running over Opera. It both sounds and looks similar to the popular Firebug tool for Firefox.

Testing under the hood

In addition to the user-facing additions, Opera 9.5 also has a new browser engine under the hood. Opera claims to have "made the fastest browser in the world even faster with superior support for Web standards." While Opera 9.5 did render internationalized scripts better than Firefox 3, I put this claim to test with a couple of online benchmarks. I ran all the tests on a machine with an Intel Core 2 Duo 4400 2.0GHz processor with 1GB RAM over Ubuntu 8.04, and on Windows XP (SP2) to check cross-platform support.

First up was the CSS benchmark, and Opera 9.5 on Linux was indeed the fastest of the lot. The test measures the time it takes the browser to render a locally stored page consisting of almost 2,500 positioned DIV tags. The plotted numbers in the CSS test graph are the average of five test runs. Opera 9.5 also passes the ACID 2 test, but, like its peers, fails the ACID 3 benchmark -- but it scored the maximum marks on the ACID 3 test among the tested browsers, as shown in the ACID 3 test graph.

In terms of rendering JavaScript, Firefox 3 had the edge over Opera 9.5 in the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, which has an error range between +/-0.8% to +/-11.3% depending on the type of test. In the JavScript Engine speed test, Opera 9.5 scores over its peers when it comes to error handling, DOM, and AJAX. Similarly in the W3C DOM vs. InnerHTML test, designed to find out which method of generating large amounts of content is fastest in the browser, Opera 9.5 fares better than Firefox 3, though Safari on Windows won that test with the quickest time.

Conclusion

Opera 9.5 is full to the brim with features and improvements and highly customizable. By rolling in apps such as the mail client and IRC chat application, and integrating them into a user's browsing experience, Opera 9.5 is a worthy challenger to Firefox 3. It surely has enough power and features to make it my favorite browser. If only it were free software and open source!
http://www.linux.com/feature/139212





Firefox 3 Vulnerability Found
Nancy Gohring

Five hours after Mozilla officially released Firefox 3.0, researchers found a vulnerability in the new browser.

Tipping Point has verified the bug and reported it to Mozilla, Tipping Point said on Wednesday.

Since Mozilla is still working on a fix, the researchers won't share details about the problem. Tipping Point ranked the severity of the vulnerability as high, but said that users would have to click on a link in an e-mail or visit a malicious Web page before being affected. The issue affects users of Firefox 3.0 as well as Firefox 2.0.

Once the problem is fixed, Tipping Point will publish an advisory on its Web site, it said.

Tipping Point found out about the vulnerability through its Zero Day Initiative, which lets researchers earn cash by submitting new vulnerabilities to the company. Once Tipping Point validates the issue, it pays the researcher for the information and notifies the relevant software vendor of the technical details.

Mozilla did not respond to a request for comment.

Mozilla launched its newest browser on Tuesday along with a marketing stunt that went a bit wrong. The company announced that it wanted to set a Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period. However, the volume of downloads crippled Mozilla's site, and so customers in the U.S. couldn't begin downloading the software until two hours later than expected. Still, Mozilla said it logged more than 8 million downloads within 24 hours. There is currently no record for number of software downloads in a day, but Mozilla must now wait for review of the stunt by Guinness officials.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...ity.html?t51hb





Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?
Mike Pesca

Right now, you're probably happy that you have the vast resources of the entire Internet at your fingertips. It's a feeling of power, isn't it? All that information, all that content, right there for you whenever you want it?

You probably shouldn't be feeling so good about it, says writer Nicholas Carr, who has just written an article for The Atlantic Monthly with the provocative title, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Carr says that while the Internet allows us to get lots of information very quickly, it also encourages us not to look at it very thoughtfully.

In fact, Carr argues, when we give in to the natural impulses to click and skim, rather than to read and think, the Internet may actually doing us a disservice: It shortens our attention spans and even inhibits our ability to read longer books and articles.

In fact, if Carr is correct, you may never even make it to the end of this article.

Carr says it's not just about people scanning and jumping around very quickly. He says that the Internet is actually beginning to change the way we think. "It makes it harder even when we're offline to read books, as skimming takes over and displaces our modes of reading," he says.

It's not just Google Carr is talking about, but rather the structure and nature of the whole Internet. But he says that Google is very much the dominant player, and it both governs and symbolizes the way information is structured. "The way we gather information is by jumping around," he says, "and that's governed not only by Google but by the whole economic structure of the Internet."

Just as the arrival of Gutenberg's printing press helped to make reading universal, in the process ushering in enormous social revolutions, Carr says the Internet is producing a revolution of its own that is once again changing how we structure everything. While much of the revolution is positive, Carr says, he thinks that we should be aware that there might be some casualties, including prolonged reading and time for contemplation.

Carr tries to find time for more of what he calls deep reading, but he says that many of his friends are also facing difficulties in fighting Internet-influenced attention deficit disorder. In the article, he quotes one friend of his who told him: "I can't read War and Peace anymore. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...14&ft=1&f=1013


















Until next week,

- js.



















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