[JackSpratts]

If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What’s the Original?
Randy Kennedy

Since the late 1970s, when Richard Prince became known as a pioneer of appropriation art — photographing other photographs, usually from magazine ads, then enlarging and exhibiting them in galleries — the question has always hovered just outside the frames: What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?

Recently a successful commercial photographer from Chicago named Jim Krantz was in New York and paid a quick visit to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where Mr. Prince is having a well-regarded 30-year retrospective that continues through Jan. 9. But even before Mr. Krantz entered the museum’s spiral, he was stopped short by an image on a poster outside advertising the show, a rough-hewn close-up of a cowboy’s hat and outstretched arm.

Mr. Krantz knew it quite well. He had shot it in the late 1990s on a ranch in the small town of Albany, Tex., for a Marlboro advertisement. “Like anyone who knows his work,” Mr. Krantz said of his picture in a telephone interview, “it’s like seeing yourself in a mirror.” He did not investigate much further to see if any other photos hanging in the museum might be his own, but said of his visit that day, “When I left, I didn’t know if I should be proud, or if I looked like an idiot.”

When Mr. Prince started reshooting ads, first prosaic ones of fountain pens and furniture sets and then more traditionally striking ones like those for Marlboro, he said he was trying to get at something he could not get at by creating his own images. He once compared the effect to the funny way that “certain records sound better when someone on the radio station plays them, than when we’re home alone and play the same records ourselves.”

But he was not circumspect about what it meant or how it would be viewed. In a 1992 discussion at the Whitney Museum of American Art he said of rustling the Marlboro aesthetic: “No one was looking. This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.”

People might not have been looking at the time, when his art was not highly sought. But as his reputation and prices for his work rose steeply — one of the Marlboro pictures set an auction record for a photograph in 2005, selling for $1.2 million — they began to look, and Mr. Prince has spoken of receiving threats, some legal and some more physical in nature, from his unsuspecting lenders. He is said to have made a small payment in an out-of-court settlement with one photographer, Garry Gross, who took the original shot for one of Mr. Prince’s most notorious early borrowings, an image of a young unclothed Brooke Shields. (Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article, saying in an e-mail message only, “I never associated advertisements with having an author.”)

Mr. Krantz, who has shot ads for the United States Marine Corps and a long list of Fortune 500 companies including McDonald’s, Boeing and Federal Express, said he had no intention of seeking money from or suing Mr. Prince, whose borrowings seem to be protected by fair use exceptions to copyright law.

But with the exhibition now up at the Guggenheim — and the posters using his image on sale for $9.95 — he said he simply wanted viewers to know that “there are actually people behind these images, and I’m one of them.”

“I’m not a mean person, and I’m not a vindictive person,” he said. “I just want some recognition, and I want some understanding.”

Mr. Krantz, whose clients generally own the copyrights to his photos for them, said he had been aware for several years that his work had been lifted by Mr. Prince, along with that of several other photographers who have shot Marlboro ads. But he said he did not think much about it, and said he had never talked with other Marlboro photographers about the issue.

“If imitation is a form of flattery, then I will accept the compliment,” he said.

But on one occasion a woman active in the art world visited his studio in Chicago, and, seeing a print of one of his pictures, Mr. Krantz recalled, “she said, ‘Oh, Richard Prince has a photograph just like that!’” And in 2003 Mr. Prince’s version of an image that Mr. Krantz shot for Marlboro — showing a mounted cowboy approaching a calf stranded in the snow — sold for $332,300 at Christie’s. Although the shot was blown up to heroic proportions, “there’s not a pixel, there’s not a grain that’s different,” he said. And so Mr. Krantz, whose Marlboro ads now appear mostly in Europe and Asia, began to grow angry.

He said that while he is primarily an advertising photographer, when he was growing up in Omaha, he did attend workshops with Ansel Adams. He studied graphic design and got into commercial photography, starting out in Omaha taking shots of toasters and pens and heating pads because that was where the work was. But he has long exhibited his own art photographs, recent examples of which show stark images of an empty prison as if seen through defaced or broken glass.

Mr. Krantz said he considered his ad work distinctive, not simply the kind of anonymous commercial imagery that he feels Mr. Prince considers it to be. “People hire me to do big American brands to help elevate their images to these kinds of iconic images,” he said.

He has considered trying to correspond with Mr. Prince to complain more directly but said he felt it would probably do no good.

“At this point it’s been done, and it’s out there,” he said. “My whole issue with this, truly, is attribution and recognition. It’s an unusual thing to see an artist who doesn’t create his own work, and I don’t understand the frenzy around it.”

He added: “If I italicized ‘Moby-Dick,’ then would it be my book? I don’t know. But I don’t think so.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/ar...gn/06prin.html





Work With Me, Baby



Guy Trebay

FASHION is a stepchild, in photography no less than in other areas of the culture. The reach of the imagery it produces influences everything from trash television to presidential campaigns. Yet the slick work cranked out by the fashion machine is rarely taken seriously.

Museums relegate fashion picture shows to their basements. Art galleries disdain fashion photographs as work for hire. Auction houses have historically tended to accord fashion images second-class status, sneaking a few first-rate fashion pictures into sales of photography’s certified masters. It’s not hard to fathom why friction exists between practitioners of fine art and fashion photography. For every self-styled Cindy Sherman hoping to hit it big in the gallery world, there are scores of competent but doubtless overpaid journeymen (fees of $100,000 a day are not rare for top fashion photographers) toiling in advertising’s lucrative fields.

“For a long time in the quote unquote fine arts world, fashion was a dirty word,” said Joshua Holdeman, international director of the photography department at Christie’s. “We’re far enough away from the work now,” he added, referring to the early examples from the canon, “to realize it is a valuable cultural product that belongs in the pantheon of art history.”

Signs of this seem to be everywhere. Last January, a show of pictures by five important contemporary fashion photographers was mounted at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Designating 2009 as the Year of Fashion, the International Center of Photography in New York recently announced an ambitious roster of shows celebrating the fashion image, beginning with a survey of contemporary work, moving through a retrospective of fashion images by Edward Steichen and Richard Avedon, and closing with the third I.C.P. Triennial, whose theme will be the cultural ubiquitousness of fashion imagery.

And this week, fashion photography makes its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual trade fair that is to the art world what the Coachella festival in Southern California is to indie rock. In Fashion ’07, an assembly of 20 contemporary photographers brought together by Marion de Beaupre, a curator and author, opened Dec. 2 at the Surfcomber Hotel. Part survey and part marketing trial balloon, the show also tests the premise that the traditional borders between fine and commercial art are now permeable.

“As the market becomes so broad and there are so many people who have the means to collect,” fashion pictures have been upgraded both critically and in the marketplace, Mr. Holdeman said. “The imagery is easy to approach and accessible in price,” he added, although accessible in this case may be a relative term. Prices for images by photographers like Serge Lutens, Max Vadukul and Willy Vanderperre are modest by Art Basel Miami Beach standards (generally under $10,000). But the Irving Penn platinum print a farseeing collector might have picked up at auction 10 years ago for under $8,000 would now command $350,000, Mr. Holdeman said.

A paradoxical dimension of the current lively interest in the field is that the innovative spirit and visual daring of the late ’90s — when many photographers were mining their personal lives as well as the weirder byways of pop culture, including pornography, and were also eschewing technological wizardry in favor of raw emotional response — appears to have gone into retreat.

Some in the industry point to the economy and the conservative tenor of most mainstream fashion magazines to explain this development. Some claim that a backlash against images condemned (by Bill Clinton, among others) for glorifying “heroin chic” in the mid-90s resulted in self-chastening throughout the industry.

Many note that the marquee names of the moment were already the establishment a decade ago. Where is the generation that ought by now to have supplanted stars like Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Ellen von Unwerth, Mario Testino or Nick McKnight? Who knows?

“It’s obviously a complicated issue,” said Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W magazine, perhaps the most visually daring of mainstream American fashion publications. “There are many photographers working today who have a lot to say, who have points of view, who have a voice that’s intelligent and considered,” he added. “Unfortunately within the fashion world there aren’t enough opportunities to create that meaningful work.”

True, there was a period within the last decade, said Vince Aletti, a photography critic for The New Yorker and adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography, “when every time I went to look at a fashion magazine, I was psyched.” At the moment, he added, “there is not much to jump out of your seat about.”

There is little around quite as startling as the “Fight Club” pictorial that Steven Klein photographed for W, in which Brad Pitt posed covered with sweat and grime and so little else that the magazine’s caption writers were taxed. There is little that seems so controversial as Mr. Klein’s pictures of Justin Timberlake, which appeared just after 9/11, images whose borders were singed and whose pretty boy subject was shown with his nose caked in blood.

Even Mr. Klein’s pictures of a compulsive exhibitionist like Madonna, posed atop a table with her foot behind her head and her crotch thrust toward the viewer, seems to belong to another, more provocative time.

“The entirety of that Madonna sitting was very dark,” Mr. Aletti said. “And it couldn’t have been further from the classicism and clean lines of Beaton and Horst.”

Like the 20 photographers whose work is on view in Miami Beach, Mr. Klein sometimes gives the impression that he consults fashion history only rarely and cares little or nothing about clothes. This is illusion, of course, but one that Ms. de Beaupre, the curator of In Fashion ’07, said helped set terms for a new kind of photographic engagement with the business of selling garments.

With the notable exception of Steven Meisel, whose work mines an obsession with fashion’s back pages, most fashion photographers of recent years have made it clear that their concerns lie mainly in “material that has nothing to do with the history of fashion,” as Mr. Aletti said.

Enmeshed in both fashion’s past and the cultural present, Mr. Meisel exploits an unabashed affection for fashion’s surface obsession while simultaneously devising a sly form of cultural critique. “I don’t know whether a term like avant-garde works in this case,” Mr. Aletti said. “But, like a lot of people over the past few years, Meisel is really trying to do something creative and risky. He’s really pushing photography.”

Whether or not by intention, he is helping propel fashion photographs in the direction of art and in the process creating an alluring hybrid, one that sometimes supports an aesthetics of glamour and just as often parodies it. “Fashion photography now is not about fashion alone,” Ms. de Beaupre said. “The material is of interest now because there is this strong creative and personal language,” Ms. de Beaupre said, “that belongs very much to our times.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/fashion/06photo.html





At Wikipedia, Illustrators May Be Paid
Noam Cohen

The foundation that runs Wikipedia has finally agreed to pay contributors to the online encyclopedia a modest fee for their work. But it won’t pay the thousands of people who participate in creating the wiki pages — just artists who create “key illustrations” for the site.

The payments are made possible by a $20,000 donation from Philip Greenspun, who said he was moved to give the money because of his experience seeing technical books he had originally published online appear in print.

“In comparing the Web versions to the print versions, I noticed that the publishers’ main contribution to the quality of the books was in adding professionally drawn illustrations,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “It occurred to me that when the dust settled on the Wikipedia versus Britannica question, the likely conclusion would be ‘Wikipedia is more up to date; Britannica has better illustrations.’”

The woman running the project for Wikipedia, Brianna Laugher, says the plan is to create a list of articles that need illustrations and then solicit the work. The first list is expected to have 50 illustrations and be completed this month. Contributors will be able to sign up for an illustration and have two weeks to submit it; if it is accepted, the illustrator will be paid $40.

“The standard payment will be $40, and depending on how it is received it could change in the future,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “I really don’t know if we will be flooded by illustrators clamoring to join, or if the general response will be one of apathy.”

While the German chapter of Wikipedia has received a grant from the government to write on sustainable development, and individuals have compensated contributors writing in underrepresented languages, the foundation has never before paid contributors. Commercial influence at Wikipedia — for example, outside advertising, which is forbidden — is always a touchy question.

Ms. Laugher said, however, that there has been little concern at discussion sites. “I think there is a difference between paying people to get the whole going versus paying people to do the parts that volunteers apparently don’t find rewarding,” she wrote. “The illustration project is definitely the latter.”

Mr. Greenspun, who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hoped his grant might be the start of a larger fund at Wikipedia. He imagined payments of $5 — “I was thinking of illustrators in Romania and India” — but added, “I haven’t heard a peep from anyone since the check cleared!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/te...gy/03wiki.html





Simulations of Ailing Artists’ Eyes Yield New Insights on Style
Guy Gugliotta

For Claude Monet, 1912-22 was a watershed decade. He was perhaps the most successful artist of his time, and his genius had already assured him a place in history.

But as he aged, his painting noticeably lost subtlety. Brush strokes became bolder, and colors strikingly blue, orange or brown. His images lost detail and flowed into one another. His days as an avant-garde rebel had long passed, but some critics would later wonder whether the Impressionist was suddenly trying to become an abstract expressionist.

What has long been known about Monet’s later years is that he suffered from cataracts and that his eyesight worsened so much that he painted from memory. He acknowledged to an interviewer that he was “trusting solely to the labels on the tubes of paint and to the force of habit.”

Now, thanks to modern digital techniques, scientists and critics can have a better idea how cataracts changed what Monet saw. This year, an ophthalmologist at Stanford, Michael F. Marmor, described in The Archives of Ophthalmology creating computer simulations of Monet’s world as his lenses yellowed, blurring vision and turning patterns of color and light into muddy, unfocused, yellow-green inkblots.

Although it is impossible to know how Monet wanted his canvases to look, Dr. Marmor’s research suggests that understanding physical infirmity can help assess his work. Whatever Monet intended, his eyes provided little help. “He couldn’t judge what he was seeing or see what he was painting,” Dr. Marmor said. “It is a mystery how he worked.”

Monet was not alone. France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries embraced an astonishing number of important artists who battled serious physical shortcomings — sometimes for decades. Edgar Degas, known for his paintings of nudes and ballet dancers, suffered retinal disease, probably macular degeneration, for nearly half his life. When he died in 1917, his colleague Pierre Auguste Renoir said, “It is fortunate for him ... any conceivable death is better than living the way he was.”

Renoir suffered painful rheumatoid arthritis for more than 30 years, continuing to paint as assistants inserted brushes between his gnarled fingers.

Mary Cassatt, like Monet, had cataracts. Camille Pissarro had a malfunctioning tear duct. Seizures and other nervous disorders tortured and ultimately destroyed Vincent van Gogh.

Over the years, Dr. Marmor and other scientists have studied artists for insights into physical condition’s influences on style and perception. “It made it difficult for them to judge if their art was accomplishing what they intended,” Dr. Marmor said.

For some, disease ended careers. Cataract surgery was possible in the early 1900s, but it did not always work.

“I look forward with horror to utter darkness,” Cassatt wrote in 1919, fearing that an operation on her left eye would be “as great a failure as the last one.” It was, and she stopped painting.

Renoir had his first arthritis attack in 1888, and over time his fine motor skills were compromised. For the rest of his life, arthritis progressively deformed his hands and swelled his joints. “It is so painful to see him in the morning,” wrote Julie Manet, a niece of Edouard Manet. “He does not have the strength to turn a doorknob.”

A Renoir biographer, the art historian Barbara Ehrlich White, wrote in an e-mail message: “Because of his physical disabilities,” Renoir “had to change, to become less detailed and freer. He continued to paint until the day he died, but because of his handicap, his later work could not approach the brilliance of his earlier paintings.”

For artists with eye problems, it is perhaps surprising that infirmities did not change their styles more radically. A key, some experts said, might be that although artists’ perceptions might be influenced by physical limitations, they are also informed by what the artists know and what they want to do.

“Most of us are into quick snapshots,” said John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. “But the ability to translate visual memory into a different medium is another thing altogether. Monet had been painting for 50 years when he had cataracts. Of course he painted from memory. He painted from memory all his life.”

It is easy to see a stylistic contrast. On the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, a three-canvas set of Monet’s water lilies spreads across a gallery wall in dazzling homage to the artist at the height of his brilliance. Off to one side is a painting of the Japanese bridge at Giverny from the early ’20s, when Monet’s cataracts were at their worst. It is a disturbing mix of dark reds and browns, much darker than the water lilies, yet just as compelling, perhaps, in its brooding intensity.

Monet, terrified by Cassatt’s example, put off surgery, but finally had a successful operation on one eye in 1923. His last paintings before his death three years later harked to his earlier work. He also destroyed many cataract-period canvases, but it is unclear whether they surprised him. He had ruined paintings at other times in fits of pique.

Degas first noticed eye problems as a national guardsman in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, when he could not aim his rifle because of a blind spot in his right eye. By 1890, his left eye also began to deteriorate. Light dazzled him. He tried to use peripheral vision to compensate for his loss of central vision.

Dr. Marmor used computer simulations to gauge the problem. Retinal disease, unlike cataracts, does not cause major difficulties with color perception. But Degas had blurred vision, affecting his ability to perceive form and line.

An ophthalmologist in Toledo, Ohio, Dr. James G. Ravin, who has collaborated with Dr. Marmor in the past, suggested that Degas’s return to pastels and his interest in sculpture might have arisen from seeking an easier-to-control medium.

The simulations showed that the draftsmanship became less detailed and the shadowing coarsened as Degas’s sight deteriorated. Even so, Dr. Marmor said, his work would have looked smoother to him than it actually was.

An art historian and a Degas scholar who taught at Columbia, Theodore F. Reff, wrote in an e-mail interview that retinal disease was a factor in Degas’s late style. “Bitterness and growing isolation,” caused, in part, by the infirmity, may have led him “to paint and draw and sculpt more brusquely and summarily,” Mr. Reff said. But eye disease in no way compromised his art, he added. “What his draftsmanship lost in fullness of realistic description and refinement of execution, it gained in grandeur and expression.”

Pissarro, who in his last 15 years suffered chronic infection of the tear sac in his right eye, had difficulty painting outdoors, particularly in winter.

“But there is a certain element of ‘I’m not going to stop what I want to do,’” said a great-grandson of the artist, Joachim Pissarro, an art historian at Hunter College. “You don’t want to over-analyze the impact.”

Indeed, Pissarro’s late cityscapes of Rouen and Paris, regarded as masterpieces, were painted from indoors behind a window to protect his eyes.

The idea that disease and its consequences might lead an artist down fruitful paths has prompted great interest in van Gogh. His suicide at 37 followed seizures and nervous distress variously attributed to epilepsy, bipolarity, schizophrenia and substance abuse.

Dr. Marmor rejected speculation that van Gogh’s affinity for yellow in his paintings came from “yellow vision,” caused by taking digitalis to treat supposed epilepsy. “He could not have taken enough of it to have that effect,” Dr. Marmor said. “It’s too toxic. He loved yellow throughout his career.”

A biochemist at the University of Kansas, Wilfred N. Arnold, also dismissed theories that “madness” made for a better artist. Dr. Arnold has suggested that van Gogh suffered a congenital liver-centered metabolic disease, acute intermittent porphyria, that can provoke episodic derangement, depression, hallucinations, disability and abdominal distress. Between crises, van Gogh behaved normally and painted spectacularly, Dr. Arnold said, but when he had a crisis, he courted death.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/science/04impr.html





Morning TV Veers From News to Frills
Alessandra Stanley

In a world without men, the word metal is rarely heard, but there is a lot of talk about metallics.

Morning programs like “Today” on NBC and “The View” on ABC are the modern equivalents of the old Barbizon Hotel for Women, a frilly haven where men were not allowed above the first floor — or here, after the first hour — and viewers are treated to diet tips, ambush makeovers, cancer health scares, relationship counseling and, of course, shopping.

And the fourth hour of “Today,” which was introduced this fall, has blurred the distinction between consumer news and product promotion even further. Especially now, in the Christmas holiday marketing frenzy, it is sometimes hard to tell the NBC program from those on ShopNBC or QVC.

“This is the heiress bag, this is all about beautiful metallics,” a ShopNBC hostess purred on Friday as the camera closed in on the Lisanne heiress handbag, and a price box popped up ($138 or three “value pays” of $46). “Everything is hot, hot, hot when it comes to fashion right now.”

On “Today” the same morning, a model paraded down an outdoor runway in a shiny belted overcoat. “Metallics and metallic brocade is a very, very big trend this season — you’re going to see a lot of it,” the fashion expert Stacy London said as a price box popped up on screen (metallic coat: Jones New York, $269; shoes: Kenneth Cole Reaction, $69.99).

Natalie Morales, a “Today” correspondent, added, “Again for the holidays, a little metallics goes a long way.”

Product placement is hardly a new phenomenon, and the morning shows long ago mastered the quid pro quo of daily television: Actors give interviews timed to their latest projects; authors are recruited as experts just as their books hit the stores. Oprah, Ellen and the women of “The View” specialize in audience giveaways — anything from a Dodge Caravan to a $150 gift certificate toward a Barbour wax jacket.

But the fourth hour of “Today” has tipped the balance of the program: The more newsy first hour, with the hosts Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira, and Al Roker on the weather, is front-loaded with information and interviews with public officials and, of course, with husbands of missing wives like Drew Peterson, and people who survive freak accidents (lightning bolts or nail-gun injuries). That first hour seems increasingly at odds with the long, tranquilizing estrogen stretch that follows.

It used to be that hosts who are at least nominally part of the network’s news division maintained an air of neutrality during consumer segments; now they are in on the pitch. And sometimes they just make no sense.

The week the fourth hour was introduced on “Today,” the host Hoda Kotb spoke to the program’s nutrition expert, Joy Bauer, about frugal fast-food finds. While Ms. Bauer and Ms. Kotb emphasized the importance of buying generic and store brands, the camera panned a cornucopia of top-dollar items, including Thomas’s English muffins, Uncle Ben’s rice, Quaker Oats cereal, Lean Pockets, Campbell’s soup and Kraft cheese.

The blurring of job descrip tions adds to the confusion. Ann Curry used to be on the news desk, but now straddles all aspects of the show with boundless, exhausting good cheer — not even an assignment to the remotest continent on earth, Antarctica, last month dampened her spirits. Or her unctuous solicitude for guests: “Your fans, a lot of them want to know, you know, how you have time to do this?” she asked Brad Pitt, who was on Monday’s program to talk about a post-Katrina reconstruction project for New Orleans.

As the day wears on, the men become scarce, and quieter. Mr. Lauer leaves after the second hour, but Mr. Roker gamely tags along for recipe tests, laundry tips and makeup lessons like a husband dragged through a Labor Day white sale.

Even Tiki Barber, the former New York Giants running back who was recruited earlier this year to bring some macho glamour to the show, has had to get in touch with his feminine side. He was a fashion muse on a recent episode of “Project Runway” on Bravo, a cable network owned by NBC.

He warned the designers assigned to create an outfit he could wear on television that he had a small waist but large buttocks. “I’ll wear pink sometimes, I’ll wear pastels, as long as it accents the whole outfit,” Mr. Barber said.

The morning on-air chemistry has gotten less tense with the arrival of new faces, but also less interesting. On “The View” Whoopi Goldberg has taken over for Rosie O’Donnell, who left last spring and took much of the show’s unhinged energy with her. The discussions have turned more sedate and predictable. (It doesn’t help that Wal-Mart recently began showing a 20-minute infomercial — four women chatting roguishly over coffee mugs about the merits of the chain — that looks uncannily like an episode of “The View.”)

The only frisson of excitement is provided by the occasional veiled dig at Oprah Winfrey by Ms. Goldberg. Last week, in a discussion of Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama, Ms. Goldberg mumbled about the excesses that come with too much power, likening Ms. Winfrey to the country-bred media demagogue played by Andy Griffith in Elia Kazan’s “Face in the Crowd.”

Changes on “Today” have also smoothed out some of the more interesting quirks, making the new format seem even longer than four hours. Ms. Vieira, who replaced Katie Couric more than a year ago, is pleasant but bland, and not forceful enough to dim the ascendance of Ms. Curry, who was passed over for the top co-host job but seems determined to play the role anyway.

And Ms. Curry has proved that she can cover any subject, from Darfur to diaper rash, without critical distance. (She once led a segment on the power of female friendship by asserting that there is “a lot” of medical evidence that not having long-term friends is “as risky to your health as obesity, as smoking.”)

The fourth hour of “Today” feels less like an extension of the three-hour show than a cozy Tupperware party that never ends.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/ar...on/04watc.html





Governments Prepare for 'Cyber Cold War'

Security experts have warned that governments are regularly monitoring and attacking the critical national infrastructures of other nations

There has been a sea change over the past year in the amount of government-sanctioned cyber-espionage, according to some security experts. They warn that a "cyber cold war" is developing, in which governments are using technology not only for the immediate benefit of gaining intelligence from stolen data but also to probe critical national infrastructures for possible weak points that could be exploited in the event of conflict.

Countries are currently testing the water to gauge the threat and potential for damage posed by their cyber-assaults, according to the 2007 Virtual Criminology Report produced by security firm McAfee.

The use of networks of compromised computers, or botnets, for data theft and intelligence gathering has increased this year, according to Peter Sommer, an expert in information systems and innovation at the London School of Economics. "There are signs that intelligence agencies around the world are constantly probing other governments' networks, looking for strengths and weaknesses, and developing new ways to gather intelligence," said Sommer. "Government agencies are doubtless conducting research on how botnets can be turned into offensive weapons but, before launching a weapon, you need to be sure what the outcome will be — you don't want attacks to spill over to your own allies by mistake."

However, attacks are not limited to any particular countries, or by alliances between countries, according to cyberwarfare watchers. In the McAfee report, Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer for research organisation the Sans Internet Storm Center, said that most countries hack each other regardless of any supposed allegiances.

Alan Paller, director of research at security training organisation the Sans Institute, concurred. "All nations are doing it to each other. I don't know of any country not doing it," he said. "If it's not for normal espionage, it's for economic espionage. It's a very broad set of countries [involved]."

Paller said attacks against the US military this year — reportedly made by China, although the Chinese have denied responsibility — resulted in the loss of large amounts of data. The data had, in part, been stolen from the NIPRNet, a US military network which is open to the internet and used for the transmission of non-classified documents.

Quoting Major General William Lord, a director of information, services and integration for the US Air Force, Paller said: "China is stealing identities and stealing sensitive terabytes of information from the NIPRNet."

While the NIPRNet itself does not carry sensitive information, Paller argued that the ultimate aim of such attacks is to "own" the opponent's computer. Probing systems for weaknesses also gives intelligence gains, he said.

As in the Cold War, it is the countries with access to the most resources that are seen to be flexing their muscles. Paller said that, while he had no data on any US attacks on rivals, both China and Russia had launched attacks this year.

"The US Department of Commerce admitted that its computers had been penetrated and had information stolen by China this summer," said Paller, who added that it was difficult to say whether it had been the government or "hybrid groups" of government and other organisations within China that had been responsible for the attack.

Mikhel Tammet, director of the Estonian communication and information technology department, said he believes forces within the Russian government may have initiated and sponsored attacks against his country's critical national infrastructure earlier this year. "It was a political campaign induced by the Russians; a political campaign designed to destroy our security and destroy our society," said Tammet. "The attacks had hierarchy and co-ordination."

While the attacks on Estonia sought to knock out parts of the country's critical national infrastructure by brute force, with both government sites and internet-banking systems targeted, most attacks against other nations are conducted by stealth.

Social-engineering attacks, in which intelligence-gathering organisations target either an individual or group of individuals, can be highly successful.

Nato analysts, quoted in the McAfee report, said that some governments are leaving themselves open to attack. "Many government offices don't even know yet that they are leaking information," said one analyst, who...

...was not named. "Attackers are using Trojan horse software targeted at specific government offices. Because they are custom-written, these Trojans are not amenable to signature detection and they can slip past antiviral technologies, so this is a big problem. Hackers have dedicated quality-assurance capabilities that they run on all of their malware to make sure that their malware doesn't get detected."

Circuitous routes are sometimes used by hackers to acquire information. According to a source close to the situation, the chief information security officer of the US Department of Commerce learned this summer that his home computer was being used to send data to computers in China. He found his family had been the victim of a spear-phishing attack, in which his child had been encouraged by an email to unwittingly download malware onto the family's home computer. Once it was compromised, the attackers used the security officer's personal computer as a tunnel into the Department of Commerce's systems.

Spear-phishing attacks — where one specific individual is targeted with a malicious URL — are very hard for governments and companies to counter, according to the Sans Institute. Senior civil servants and business executives simply do not appreciate IT departments sending them spear-phishing emails for education purposes.

"One inoculation is to provide benign versions of spear-phishing attacks, but this is hard because senior executives don't like to be fooled by IT people," said Paller. Another possible solution is to establish monitoring and forensics systems that constantly search network traffic and systems for evidence of deep penetration and persistent presence.

Systems can also be targeted through web applications, which is an area of major concern for the Sans Institute. This year, hundreds of senior federal officials and business executives visited a political thinktank website that had been compromised, allowing their computers to become infected via a cross-site scripting attack. Keystroke loggers, placed on their computers by the unknown assailants, captured their usernames and passwords when they signed into their personal bank accounts, their stock trading accounts and their employers' computers, and sent the data to computers in different countries. Bank balances were depleted, stock accounts lost money, servers inside the organisations were compromised and sensitive data was copied and sent to outsiders. Back doors were placed on some of those computers and are still there, according to the Sans Institute.

A short-term workaround for the problem of having insecure web applications is to diligently patch security software, said Paller, who indicated that IT professionals must ensure that patches are applied on users' machines. "It's absolute 100 percent patching, rather than a patch-and-hope plan. Hope is not a strategy," said Paller. "If you let users turn off security updates because they're inconvenient, their machines become a back door for everything."

Web-application firewalls can also help, while testing and patching custom-built applications is essential. "One quarter of custom-built apps have critical or bad vulnerabilities in them," said Paller. A longer-term solution would be for all organisations to insist on secure coding practices, he added.

As technology becomes more ubiquitous, permeating every level of global society, it seems cyber-espionage and cyberwarfare are set to increase dramatically. Nation states have traditionally gathered information on friends and foes from every source possible — regardless of political or trade alliances — as well as monitoring their own populations. It seems technology is providing another means to do this. Attacks on government systems and network probing can only increase.

But is it accurate to call this escalation a "cyber cold war"? Not necessarily. The Cold War was, at base, a battle of ideologies, which is seemingly at odds with the practical, hard-nosed, free-market economics currently practised by businesses in all of the world's major powers, including China.

However, those powers all still have their own agendas, as well as access to nuclear weapons, so a Dr Strangelove situation cannot be ruled out.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1...9291200,00.htm





'There is No Longer Any Privacy'
David Calder

Not so long ago, the Information Commissioner warned that we were "sleep-walking our way into a surveillance society".

At the time, a lot of people assumed he was talking about CCTV cameras.

But it's now clear he was more concerned about the amount of data held on each and every one of us which, if all brought together, would give the government an incredibly detailed view of our lives.

It was brought home all too clearly when Alistair Darling stood up in the House of Commons last month and admitted the loss of those CDs by HM Revenue and Customs.

You may have thought we had some protection from the Data Protection Act.

But Dr David Murakami Wood, a surveillance specialist from Newcastle University, believes it was out of date even before it came into force.

"It's based on a 1970s conception of computing," he explained.

"It came long before the networking of computers. You could now argue that how we exist in databases is as important as how we exist in the real world."

He edited a report on the surveillance society for the Information Commissioner. It makes quite disturbing reading, especially when you think about the plans for a national ID card.

"The National Identity Register will hold up to 50 pieces of information," he said.

"Everything from your national insurance number to your health record to the number of penalty points on your driving licence will be stored there, even information about when you buy a mobile phone."

That mobile phone is also storing a surprising amount of information about you.

From the start of October, the mobile phone companies will have to retain data about who you were calling, when you made the call and where you were when you made it.

And that information won't just be available to the police.

'No privacy'

According to Geraint Bevan of No2ID, 650 other organisations will be able to see it as well, from the Gaming Commission to local authorities.

"This data will be logged for a year," he said, "and every minor official could be able to have access to your phone records. There's no privacy anymore."

Then there's data from CCTV systems.

There have been various estimates of how many of these there are in the UK.

But Camera Watch, the industry body set up to ensure that systems are compliant with data protection, believes it's largely educated guesswork.

The numbers range from about four million to 10 million - no-one actually knows.

On top of all this, there's the data collected on you by the private sector.

If you use a loyalty card in a shop, that information is stored to build up a picture of your preferences.

Even more is gathered when you shop online. Banks and insurance companies also gather data about you and not everyone is convinced that it's all strictly necessary.

The human rights lawyer, John Scott, is worried by the way it's monitoring our lives but acknowledges that "you can't turn back the tide of technology".

He said: "We should stop and think about where we'll be in five or 10 years time. We should be trying to stop the unthinking proliferation of surveillance systems before it's too late."

Dr Murakami Wood, however, thinks we've brought a lot of this on our own heads by "putting so much of our own personal data up on Facebook or MySpace".

He added: "It's made officials think we don't value privacy any more."

He believes it's time for the country to have a serious national debate about our surveillance society before it goes any further.

The Investigation is on Morning Extra on BBC Radio Scotland from 0850 GMT - 0930 GMT on Monday
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nd/7123887.stm





Press release

ACLU Urges Vote On Senate Judiciary FISA Bill and Rejection of Telecom Immunity
Caroline Fredrickson

"This past August, Congress rushed through wiretapping legislation that allowed the government to scoop up all of our international communications without any court review, or any finding of wrong-doing. In the next several weeks the Senate is going to make a choice between two bills – the Bush Administration’s bill to make this awful law permanent, or a more moderate version that at least attempts to rein in the President’s unfettered power.

"The Administration bill basically writes August’s mistake in stone. It does nothing to protect Americans’ communications and violates the Fourth Amendment requirement that courts supervise any spying on American soil.

"The current Administration bill is even worse than the 'Protect America Act,' though, in that it gives complete immunity to the telecoms which spied on us after 9/11. The Attorney General will be able to single-handedly kill any pending case – and then gag the judge from ever publicly discussing whether the company participated in the illegal program.

"The Senate must reject the Administration proposal and insist that:

"The bill sent to the president must not let the telecoms off the hook. We still don’t know what they did. We do know, however, that the companies won’t have any incentive to follow the law in the future if they get away without having to answer to their customers about why they violated the law.

"The bill sent to the president must not allow for massive untargeted dragnets that scoop up all of our international calls and emails. Smart – and constitutional – surveillance is actually targeted at bad guys.

"American communications must be protected by individualized court orders as the Constitution demands.

"In Saturday’s radio address and yesterday’s press conference, President Bush unveiled the fearmongering campaign he’s planning to unleash on Congress – not unlike last July when his push for power and the Protect America Act began. The president seems to be gearing up to launch the same campaign of fear and misinformation he so clearly won in August. This time, Congress must reject the administration’s bag of tricks and stand up for the Constitution."
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general...s20071204.html





Post Office Drawback Cited in Dark Forecast for Netflix
Joanne L. Kaufman

When Netflix’s seven million subscribers send their DVDs back to one of the rental service’s 47 distribution centers, the discs do not represent many happy returns for the Postal Service.

According to a recent audit by the service’s Office of Inspector General, the adhesive flap that seals the Netflix mailers often jams machinery and requires sorting by hand, adding $21 million a year to the service’s labor costs. The Office of Inspector General has recommended a 17-cent surcharge on every package that requires hand sorting (not just Netflix discs).

A research note issued by Citigroup on Tuesday said 70 percent of Netflix’s return mailers must be sorted by hand. Netflix “is not specifically mentioned” by the postal audit “but is implied,” according to Citigroup. A spokesman for the post office declined to comment.

A Citigroup analyst who wrote the report, Tony Wible, said that Blockbuster’s return mailing envelopes do not cause this problem and that the issue could make a big competitive difference for the companies.

If Netflix “has to bear the full brunt of this increase (without other cost offsets), monthly operating income per paying subscriber would fall 67 percent from $1.05 to 35 cents,” Mr. Wible’s report states.

In the report, Mr. Wible reiterated his sell rating on Netflix and his buy rating on Blockbuster. “Given the magnitude of this risk,” he wrote, Netflix is most likely to “work towards resolving this issue by redesigning its mailers.”

Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said that the company has gone through 40 to 50 iterations of the mailer since Netflix started shipping DVDs a decade ago and that it was open to further adjustments.

“If the specifications of the post office were to change, we would change the mailer as necessary,” he said. The company ships 1.6 million DVDs a day and offers nine monthly subscription plans, from $4.99 to $47.99.

Far from being a drag on the post office, Netflix is a help, Mr. Swasey said. “We save them about $100 million a year,” he said. “We pick up the returns from the post office. They are not delivered to Netflix, even though we’re paying for it” by buying first-class postage for the DVDs.

“Even if there is some validity of the cost of hand sorting to the post office, it is more than made up for in the costs we’re saving the post office every year,” Mr. Swasey said.

Blockbuster, which started mail rentals over three years ago, “looked carefully at the design of our envelopes,” said Karen Raskopf, a company spokeswoman, “and we worked with the post office to make sure they could go through the machines and that the DVDs would be safe.”

Mr. Wible said in an interview that Blockbuster was edging in on Netflix: “They’ve got their store content, delivery by mail and downloaded delivery.”

Blockbuster, which has 3.1 million online subscribers and 60 million customers over all, is “offering more convenient access to media than Netflix,” Mr. Wible said. “Netflix either has to spend more on marketing or lower pricing to increase growth,” he added. “So they have these rising costs — including postage increases.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/bu...ia/06flix.html





Blu-Ray Titles Outsells HD DVD During Black Friday Week

Just after the Black Friday week sales, HD DVD was proud to put out a press release about its surge in HD DVD player sales thanks to the cut player prices, however, the Blu-ray camp is once again back with the other side of the story. Apparently, the Tracking firm Nielsen VideoScan has unveiled that 72.6% of HD disc sales were on Blu-ray disc, showing Blu-ray had an even greater market share of HD movie sales than usual according to this Home Media Magazine report.

During the Black Friday week, some retailers including Wal-Mart and Best Buy, sold HD DVD players for under $100, which helped Toshiba sell 90,000 players throughout the weekend of the sales. The player prices have since come back up, starting at around $200 again (going by Amazon.com's current lowest pricing).

Going by this DailTech report, two possibilities for the unusual Blu-ray disc sale surge during the week includes the release of the Blu-ray only titles Live Free or Die Hard, Hairspray and Ratatouille and also that the Nielsen Video does not include Wal-Mart sales. For example, if the majority of the cheap HD DVD players were sold at Wal-Mart, chances are that most of the buyers would have bought their first set of HD DVD titles along with the player at the store.
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/Blu-ray...iday-week.html





HD DVD’s New Feature: Watching Movies Together But Not In the Same Place
Bob Caswell

Perhaps in an attempt to differentiate itself from Blu-ray, HD DVD tech wizards will launch the HD DVD version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with a new feature called “community screening.” The movie takes advantage of the fact that all HD DVD players are equipped with an Ethernet hookup (unlike Blu-ray, which has players that do not include network connectivity). “Community screening” is a way to watch a movie simultaneously with your friends while you’re each in the comfort of your own homes. Here’s how it works:

One of you sends out an invitation to join a viewing of the movie, which then syncs your movie watching experience with your friends that accept the invitation. While watching, you and your friends can exchange chats through the remote, a computer, or cellphone. The catch of this social movie experience is that only the host will be able to play, pause, or otherwise control the movie.

Here’s a quote directly from the release site:

“Gather your own army of fellow wizards for a live community screening party. Invite other owners of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix HD DVD to simultaneously watch from their own internet-accessed players and text with your remote, PC or cellphone. When you host an invitation-only viewing, you control the film by pausing and playing the feature on everyone’s machine. You can chat live with your friends as you watch.”

So is it a gimmick or a feature? It’s hard to say at this point. But the battle between HD DVD is a heated one for sure, and it has only escalated for the holiday season. The HD DVD Promotional Group announced last week that sales of HD DVD players increased significantly because of last week’s Black Friday sales (of which I participated because of Amazon’s amazing deal, which made HD DVD at least half the price of Blu-ray). Sales over that particular weekend were apparently enough for total HD DVD players sold to come close to 1 million (they were hovering around 750,000 previously).

But the battle is far from over. The Blu-ray Disc Association had good news of its own claiming that Blu-ray is outselling HD DVD discs in Europe at a ratio of over three to one. But in the U.S., Sony’s Playstation 3 is the main reason Blu-ray has seen any success. According to Adams Media Research, 94 percent of Blu-ray players purchased in the U.S. are simply a byproduct of gamers buying the Playstation 3 (which just had a recent price cut).

The dust may need to settle after the holidays before we know which next generation DVD has taken the lead…
http://www.techconsumer.com/2007/12/...he-same-place/





The State of HD DVD

Where Blu-ray is a freight train of unrivaled weight and marketing might, backed by 13 of the world's most well known electronics and computer makers, HD DVD is a Little Engine That Could, the product of a much smaller group of collaborators that has gotten over each obstacle by simply thinking it can. Judging from early buzz, HD DVD should have been beaten long ago. Today, though, it appears healthy and gaining in momentum thanks to lower prices, less confusion about disc standards, less in-fighting among the format's supporters and a high likelihood of cheap Chinese models arriving soon. This piece answers the following questions: How in hell has the HD DVD camp lasted this long? And how will the format's backers stay competitive in the next year in the face of cheaper and more plentiful Blu-ray players?

In my recent research into the two sides of the format war, I have tried hard to steer clear of marketing mumbo jumbo on both sides, and examine real issues. As I shared in The State of Blu-ray, there's growing disarray among Blu-ray's hardware makers and confusion about hardware versions and player capabilities. HD DVD has by contrast proven to be surprisingly elegant—at the moment best demonstrated by comparing both versions of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. There's far less confusion and potential backstabbing, but that is to be expected: There are only two household names leading the charge on the hardware side, Toshiba and Microsoft, and they are not engaged in any sort of infighting. Toshiba was one of the companies most involved with the original DVD patents, and creating HD DVD as a blue-laser extension of DVD made good business sense, though not to Sony and others who were left out of that revenue stream. Regardless of its strong roots, HD DVD is run by a smaller posse with less overall reach, so keeping things clear and tight amounts to a survival tactic.

HD DVD has three things going for it that Blu-ray doesn't:

1. Players at lower prices
There's no doubt that price is the deciding factor in an embarrassing number of consumer-electronics purchases, and HD DVD—Toshiba's players—have been priced lower than Blu-ray players from Sony, Samsung, Pioneer and others. At the beginning of November, Wal-Mart dropped the entry-level Toshiba to $99 and apparently sold around 90,000.
2. A finished spec with fully compatible players
Whereas Blu-ray bewilders me with future capability promises and current competing standards, the HD DVD spec is by contrast remarkably sound. Every player meets certain standards, and while there's no requirement for 1080p video like in Blu-ray, there is a consistent requirement of internet connectivity, dual-tuner playback and local storage, which disc makers are now using for fun—and useful—interactivity. It is also becoming typical for combo discs to be released with DVD on one side and HD DVD on the other, making them eminently more compatible. (Blu-ray can't do this.)
3. Coalition members who are not in direct competition
It's easy for the HD DVD camp to work together, since there are very few who have traditionally competed in the marketplace. Because of pricing and product positioning, Toshiba and Microsoft don't vie for the same customers at all. And as others begin to market HD DVD players of their own, they approach different customers in different ways. Of course, you could argue that competition among Blu-ray's supporters is a good thing, but it has not yet led to the holy grail of competition: discounted pricing.

Who is joining HD DVD?

Many people can name five hardware partners in the Blu-ray camp (Hint: if they start with P or S, they're in). Nobody knows who else is getting into HD DVD besides its main founders, Toshiba and Microsoft, but in fact, other HD DVD players are already starting to hit the market. Here are three key players:

• Onkyo DV-HD805 ($900): distingushing characteristics include a Silicon Optix HQV Reon VX processor for upscaling old-school DVD content, and internal support for Dolby True HD and DTS Master HD Audio for natively outputting full-resolution sound. It's certainly a tweaker's special, and only makes sense if your speakers cost much much more.
• Samsung BD-UP5000 Duo ($800): Since this upcoming device
famously has stated support for Blu-ray discs that Sony and Pioneer won't be able to play, it's easy to forget that it's also billed as a fully compliant HD DVD player. But the reviews say it's a winner in both arenas.
• Venturer SHD7000 player ($200): Who? Exactly. That's what they said about Apex Digital when it came out with the super cheap DVD player. Venturer is living up to its name as the first cheap Chinese player to infiltrate American retailers but signs say it will not be the last.

What about Microsoft?
Microsoft's role in HD DVD may seem a bit mysterious. Besides selling the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive, Microsoft helped write the HD DVD video spec, including VC-1 compression. It also licenses the HDi runtime engine, developed with Toshiba, that enables interactivity on Toshiba players and those of other licensees. HD DVD players don't have to have HDi, but at the moment, it's obviously the software with the most momentum. And software is the key to HD DVD's current successes.

Toshiba's HD-A1 and HD-XA1 players, rolled out first in the spring of 2006, were based on a 2.4GHz Pentium PC architecture, in other words, real hogs. The second generation players were moving on a 900MHz Celeron, and the third-generation HD-A3 has a 333MHz MIPS chip. The funny thing is, menus move quicker on the much more affordable third gen, because of Microsoft's improvements on the back end.

In a tear-down evaluation, industrial analyst iSuppli determined that the components of that first $599 Toshiba player actually cost the maker $674 before manufacturing, accessories and packaging. Though neither Microsoft nor Toshiba would acknowledge any losses, Kevin Collins, head of HD DVD promotion for Microsoft, said, "I don't know if they are losing money or breaking even," adding, "We work together to minimize cost." Jodi Sally, VP of marketing at Toshiba America Consumer Products, echoed: "All of this speculation that we're losing money is just speculation," she said. Working with Microsoft, "we've transitioned our lines three times to lower costs. I can't comment on profitability, but we have increased cost production and efficiency."

So whether you are using a Toshiba player or an Xbox 360, you are watching HD DVDs using a hardware/operating-system combo developed in large part by Microsoft. Given the fact that Microsoft isn't always known for stable and intuitive user experiences, it is even more amusing to see Blu-ray and HD DVD side by side.

Compare One Movie on Both Formats
When I compared Warner's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix discs, the Blu-ray edition in a PS3 and the HD DVD in an Xbox 360, the differences were startling. Never mind that the HD DVD has an entire online component that the Blu-ray can't yet implement, with features such as mobile downloads and user-organized live screenings. Never mind that you could watch the entire HD DVD with pop-up actor-commentary windows on screen—if Warner had implemented this in the Harry Potter Blu-ray, it would have been compatible with exactly one currently shipping Blu-ray player.

The surprising thing was, even when you compared the exact same experiences, the HD DVD behaved much better. Every so often an icon appears in the top left corner of the screen, indicating a behind-the-scenes featurette about that particular scene. On the HD DVD, you click it, watch what you want to, then click Enter again to return to the point you left off in the main movie. With the Blu-ray, the system had no way of returning you to the movie; it could only dump you in the featurette menu, where you were stuck watching more of those. Sure, these problems could be Warner's programmers, and not a format issue, but Warner is going for as similar an experience on both, and it clearly can't do everything on Blu-ray that it can on HD DVD. Just have a look at the back of each disc:

The difference is still less subtle when comparing the two editions of 300:

As I discussed previously, Blu-ray has specifications for picture-in-picture, but to date, only one Blu-ray player that has shipped, the Panasonic DMP-BD30, will be able to handle the discs when they start making their way to stores in early 2008. Except for some rumblings from Daewoo, nobody has promised an internet-connected Blu-ray player, while all HD DVD players can. (Samsung's hybrid BD-UP5000 Duo has Ethernet, but only for HD DVD.)

The Hollywood Factor
Studio support was once Blu-ray's ace in the hole—none of this technical crap matters when the movies you want to watch aren't available in a given format—but ever since Paramount and DreamWorks announced exclusive publishing on HD DVD, even Sony chairman Howard Stringer feels a bit shaken. (Fox, Disney, Sony and others are still Blu-ray stalwarts of course.) Some say there's dirty dealing afoot, specifically alleging that Microsoft and the HD DVD group paid $150 million or so to Paramount and DreamWorks to go exclusive. When Michael Bay made these bribery accusations again the other day, along with the accusation that Microsoft was using HD DVD to destabilize Blu-ray in favor of downloads, Jordi Ribas, GM of the HD DVD Group at Microsoft responded:
Microsoft provided no financial incentives to Paramount or DreamWorks. Michael Bay's additional comments about our commitment to HD DVD are similarly unfounded. We have major technology investments in HD DVD...and have more than 100 staff at Microsoft dedicated to the success of HD DVD.

The China Factor
People who are looking to Hollywood to determine the fate of the format war may well be looking in the wrong place. China is where HD DVD's secret to success lies, in a blue-laser format called CH-DVD.

The not-so-secret secret is that a CH-DVD player is an HD DVD player whose laser is set at a different modulation. While you could never play an HD DVD on a CH-DVD player, it is physically more or less the same product. Manufacturing can happen side by side, using the same components such as processors and optical pick-ups.

The funny thing is, HD DVD is known to be region-free—discs from one country can play in HD DVD players from another country. Many discs available on Blu-ray in the US are available on HD DVD elsewhere, making for a higher chance of piracy or at least quasi-legal trade. In our mind, CH-DVD can be an answer to that, an anti-piracy measure coming from a root technological difference. "I guess you could call it a region control," said Collins, "but the Chinese just want to have their own format." Whether this separate-but-equal policy helps the format burgeon, or whether rampant piracy itself is a sign of a healthy format, is for us all to find out.

The upshot of CH-DVD is that, if and when the time is right, China could flood the US market with cheap HD DVD players. Meanwhile, because of this deal, the likelihood of a similar Blu-ray flood gets slimmer. The Venturer is here; keep your eyes peeled at Wal-Mart, Target and other discount big boxes for the next models.

Does the China threat faze Toshiba? It's nice being the one in the spotlight, but Toshiba is well aware that it will soon share the stage with competitors. "There's always a business for a Tier 1 brand in HD DVD players the way there is with DVD players," says Sally. Increased competition will come at the higher end, with combo players from Samsung, LG and possibly Denon, and the premium Onkyo I mentioned above. All of this is good news to Toshiba. Sally adds, "Increasing household penetration of HD DVD players is good overall for the format and for the software [movie] sales."

Black Friday Stalemate
On Black Friday 2007, both the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps released numbers saying they were the overwhelming winner. HD DVD announced it had reached 750,000 in total home penetration (including the Xbox 360 drive). Blu-ray said that it had 2.4 million homes, presumably including PS3. Microsoft argues that all Xbox 360 HD DVD drive purchasers are using them to play HD DVD movies, while not all PS3 buyers are using the game system to play Blu-ray discs. While this is obviously true, there is only unreliable guess work to determine exactly how successful the PS3's Blu-ray drive actually is.

The point is, the format war is far from over, and it's wrong to write off HD DVD now just because it has fewer major japanese manufacturing giants 100% behind it. There's still some time before this whole thing shakes out, but because of the organization and proper planning of the HD DVD camp, Blu-ray no longer looks anything like the predestined victor that it once seemed.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/the-state...dvd-330684.php





DVD Movies With an iTunes Copy: Worth More?
Saul Hansell

Richard Greenfield, the Pali Research analyst, writes this morning that he hears that the long standoff between Apple and Hollywood over movie downloads may be heading for a resolution. As of right now, Disney, of which Steve Jobs is a director and large shareholder, sells movies through the iTunes Store, and the other major studios don’t. The issue has been that the studios want to charge more money for downloads than Mr. Jobs thinks they are worth. The studios also worry about offending Wal-Mart and Target, which are by far their largest distributors. (The report is here, but requires registration to see.)

Mr. Greenfield says that at least one studio, News Corporation’s Twentieth Century Fox, is working on a deal to start selling its new releases and back titles through iTunes starting early next year. He cites two reasons for the change: Apple has relented and has agreed to a higher wholesale price for movies. Mr. Greenfield estimates that the wholesale price for a digital movie will be about $15, compared to about $18 for a DVD, which has extra bonus features (and works easily on zillions of players). Mr. Greenfield doesn’t mention it, but another force may be Amazon.com, which is selling downloads from Fox and other studios. Remember that Amazon’s entry into the MP3 business put pressure on Apple to lower the price of its unprotected downloads.

More interestingly perhaps, the studios are hoping to create “premium” versions of DVDs that include a copy of the movie that can easily be put on an iPod (and presumably a laptop with iTunes or an Apple TV). Fox has tried this already, with a version of “Die Hard 4″ that includes a digital copy. Mr. Greenfield writes that this version costs $3 or $4 more than an ordinary DVD.

My question to Bits readers, a gadget-loving bunch, is whether you would in fact pay extra for a combination of a DVD and an iTunes-ready copy. If so, how much extra?
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...n-itunes-copy/





Apple Wants To Make DRM Extortion Explicit

For years, DRM critics have been arguing that the technology isn't so much about stopping piracy as it is about taking away traditional fair use privileges and then selling them back to you. I've agreed with this for a while, but I never thought I'd see a major DRM vendor admit it so candidly: Steve Jobs has apparently been pitching Hollywood studios on the idea of selling "premium" DVDs that include an iTunes-compatible version of the movie. For an extra $3 or $4, you can buy the privilege of playing your legally-purchased movie on the device of your choice—well, the Apple-manufacturered device of your choice, anyway. Only the DMCA makes this kind of extortion possible. Tools like HandBrake make it possible to convert a DVD to an iPod-compatible format without any help from Apple, but Handbrake is an illegal "circumvention device" under the DMCA. Compare that to the CD, which was developed long before the DMCA and comes without copy protection. The courts have held that "space-shifting" your CDs to a portable music device is a fair use. So you can legally import your CD collection to your iPod, or any other device, without paying a penny. But Steve Jobs apparently wants to charge you $4 for the privilege of doing the same with your DVDs.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20071204/140443.shtml





Nielsen To Offer Copyright Protection System For The Web

The software would first be used for policing the use of TV programs, clips of which are often posted on user-generated content sites, such as YouTube.
Antone Gonsalves

Nielsen, best-known for its rankings of TV programming, said Wednesday it is developing a system that would police Web sites for copyrighted material, and notify site owners and content providers when video has been posted without authorization.

Nielsen is developing the system with Digimarc, a provider of digital watermarking technology. The service, which the companies plan to start rolling out in the second quarter of next year, would tap into technology Nielson currently uses in the services it sells to advertisers and TV networks.

The system would first be used for policing the use of TV programs, clips of which are often posted on user-generated content sites, such as YouTube, which is owned by Google. Much of that content is uploaded without authorization or compensation to the content provider, which has led to tension between Internet companies and Hollywood studios. These tensions reached a peak in March when Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of massive copyright infringement.

The Nielsen/Digimarc system would be offered as a way to quickly discover unauthorized content on sites. To do that, the system would leverage Nielsen's existing watermark technology, which is used on more than 95% of TV programming distributed today. The watermarks are used by the meters installed in people's home to identify the programs they watch. Nielsen sells data from people's viewing habits to TV networks and advertisers.

Besides watermarking, Nielsen also tags over-the-air TV programs intercepted by 700 installations across the nation. For those programs without watermarks, Nielsen creates a digital signature based on unique patterns in the audio signal.

Nielsen's watermarks and digital signatures are stored in a database that would be used in the copyright-protection system. When a clip is posted on a Web site, the system would search for the watermark. If one doesn't exist, then the system would create a digital signature. In either case, the identifier would be compared to what's in the database to find a match. Once the program is identified, the Nielsen system could notify site operators and content providers when a clip is being shown without authorization.

While the system wouldn't automatically delete unauthorized material, Web site owners could configure their systems to take that step. "The purpose of this system is not to be a policeman on the Internet, but to provide a system where the content provider can have confidence and knowledge of where their programming is being distributed," Dave Harkness, senior VP of strategy and business development at Nielsen, told InformationWeek. "They also can develop a business relationship with the content distributor, which in this case is the Web site."

Nielsen is confident it can convince many TV producers to buy into the system, since the company already has relationships with most of these businesses. Convincing Web sites may be more difficult, since many already have some kind of copyright-protection system in place or are developing one. Google, for example, is developing a system for YouTube. In general, most sites take down unauthorized content as soon as the owners notify them.

Nielsen believes it can turn many sites into customers by offering a system that's ready to plug into their infrastructure, saving them the cost of building a copyright-protection system themselves, Harkness said. Besides generating revenue from the service, Nielson could also use it to track the use of video on the Web and sell the gathered data to advertisers.

If Nielsen launches its service it will have competitors, albeit smaller businesses. Those companies that provide services for policing the use of copyrighted content online include Audible Magic, Vobile, and BayTSP.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=204701360





Noncompete Agreements Are The DRM Of Human Capital

Over the weekend, venture capitalist Bijan Sabet kicked off an interesting discussion by saying that he doesn't believe in noncompete agreements and suggesting, anecdotally, why he thinks that they do more harm than good. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson responded by disagreeing and suggesting that noncompetes do more good than harm. This is a topic that I've become deeply familiar with recently, for some research I've been working on. My interest in the specifics of noncompetes was kicked off by a small part of David Levine and Michele Boldrin's book Against Intellectual Monopoly, where they discuss how the lack of noncompetes helped Silicon Valley grow. This lead me to a lot of research on the topic, some of which I thought it would be worth bringing up, as the discussion has become so heated -- with almost all of it focused on anecdotal points, rather than actual research. Some of this research was for a separate project I am working on, but with so much interest in the topic, I thought it would be worth a detailed post.

Much of this discussion kicked off with AnnaLee Saxenian's 1994 book Regional Advantage that tries to understand why Silicon Valley developed into the high tech hub it is today, while Boston's Route 128 failed to follow the same path -- even though both were considered at about the same level in the 1970s. Saxenian finds that the single biggest difference in the two regions was the ability of employees to move from firm to firm in Silicon Valley. That factor, ahead of many others, caused Silicon Valley to take off, while the lack of mobility in Boston caused its tech companies to stagnate and make them unable to compete against more nimble Silicon Valley firms. Saxenian claims that the difference in mobility was simply due to "cultural" differences between the east coast and the west coast. However, the impact was massive. The frequent job changes helped speed up the process of innovation, as ideas flowed more freely, allowing ideas to quickly change and grow and build upon other ideas leading to faster and better innovation. In contrast, employees in Boston stuck with their firms. The firms grew bigger, but slowly, and new ideas didn't flow nearly as easily. There was less direct competition from firm to firm, so firms were able to rest on their laurels rather than increasing their own pace of innovation.

Ronald Gilson found this to be interesting, and followed it up with his own research suggesting that that it had much less to do with cultural reasons and much more to do with the legal differences between the two places, specifically: California does not enforce noncompetes, while Massachusetts does. Gilson looks at a few of the other possible explanations for the difference and shows how they're all lacking, leaving the difference in noncompetes as being the key difference between the two regions in terms of the flow of information and ideas leading to new innovations. He also explains the history of non-enforcement in California, showing that it was mostly an accident of history more than anything done on purpose.

The problem with all of this research was that none of it really showed how much more mobile employees were in California than elsewhere, so that job fell to some researchers from the Federal Reserve and the National Bureau of Economic Research, who produced some data to back up the findings of Saxenian and Gilson in their report Job Hopping in Silicon Valley. Their data showed that, indeed, there was much greater mobility in Silicon Valley than elsewhere. Their research further backed up Gilson's suggestion that it was noncompetes that made the difference by showing that other high tech communities in California outside of Silicon Valley also showed greater job mobility -- suggesting it was a California-wide phenomenon.

Finally, to make the case even more compelling, some researchers from Harvard Business School put out some research earlier this year that not only compared the situation in Silicon Valley to Boston, but added a third natural experiment in Michigan. You see, Michigan used to not enforce noncompetes, but in 1985, Michigan inadvertently began allowing noncompetes to be enforced again. The research showed that immediately following the change, mobility of inventors in Michigan decreased noticeably, slowing the spread of certain ideas. Their research found that "The networks of small companies so crucial to Silicon Valley's growth would be less likely to develop in regions that enforce noncompetes."

Noncompetes Are The DRM Of Human Capital

In order to understand how this makes sense, just think of noncompetes as the "DRM" of human capital. Just as DRM tries to restrict the spread of content, a noncompete seeks to restrict the spread of a human's ideas for a particular industry within the labor arena. Both concepts are based on the faulty assumption that doing so "protects" the original creator or company -- but in both cases this is incorrect. What it actually does is set up an artificial barrier, limiting the overall potential of a market. It may not be easy to see that from the position of the content creator or company management (or investors). It's natural to want to "protect," but it's actually quite damaging.

We're already seeing this in the recording industry, of course. The desire to protect has actually limited the market size of other avenues for the music industry to make money. It's held back the ability to use music as a promotional good to build up the overall market for other tangible goods. In the same way, noncompetes limit the market size of the industry where those noncompetes are enforced. It holds back the ability of firms to innovate. Innovation is an ongoing process -- and the fuel of that process is the continual spread of ideas that allows multiple parties to build on those ideas, try different approaches and seek better solutions. While it may seem scary to a firm that supposedly "risks" losing some of its top employees to direct competitors, that's not necessarily the best way to look at this. What it does is force companies to keep on innovating and keep trying to come up with newer, better solutions to top those competitors. At the same time, that free flow of ideas means that the companies in the space have more fuel with which to attack the problem, rather than quarantining those ideas off in separate bins that can't be connected.

While it may seem easier to "protect" your ideas and your people, what you really end up doing is blocking off your own access to many of the ideas that you need to continue to innovate. You limit the vital mix of ideas to build not just decent products, but great products. Just as DRM has helped to destroy the record labels when competing against more nimble, more open technology -- noncompetes destroy businesses when competing against more nimble, more open technology clusters.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071204/005038.shtml





Spot the Difference

MPAA don't fuck with my shit.

(And yes, I did attempt to contact them by email and phone before resorting to the more obnoxious behaviour of contacting the ISP. No reply to my email, and the series of friendly receptionists I got bounced between had no idea who would be responsible but promised me someone would call back. No joy there, either.)
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/78590.html





FCC Commissioner Michael Copps vs. "Big Media"

FCC chairman Kevin Martin wants to relax rules on how many media outlets one company can own in one market. Democratic commissioner Copps wants to rally the public to stop media consolidation.
Louise Witt

Michael Copps doesn't want to be called a crusader. But as one of the two Democrats on the five-member Federal Communications Commission, he's not shy about sounding biblical. He says he's "blowing a loud trumpet" for a "call to battle" to stop the FCC from giving big media a generous Christmas present.

Copps is trying to defeat FCC chairman Kevin J. Martin's last-minute proposal to loosen media ownership rules, which will be voted on by Dec. 18. As it stands now, a company can't own both a daily newspaper and a broadcast outlet -- a radio or TV station -- in the same market without a waiver. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on Nov. 13, Martin wrote that media companies in the 20 largest markets should be allowed to own both in the same market to bolster journalism. "If we don't act to improve the health of the ... industry," he wrote, "we will see newspapers wither and die ... and have fewer outlets for the expression of independent thinking and diversity of viewpoints."

The public, however, won't have much time to express its own diverse viewpoints on Martin's proposed rules. He unveiled his plan in the Times four days after the FCC's sixth, and last, hearing of the year on media ownership. The public has only until Dec. 11 to comment on the new rules, with the FCC voting on them within the following week. The push for a quick decision prompted Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Trent Lott, R-Miss., to introduce bipartisan-sponsored legislation to halt the FCC's "fast march" toward easing media ownership rules. Why the rush? Last time the FCC proposed a relaxation of the rules in 2003, public outcry killed the plan. Copps thinks Martin wants to push them through now when voters -- and politicians -- are distracted by holiday hoopla and before the first presidential primaries and caucuses. Once everyone sobers up in January, Copps says, the issue will become a " hot potato." Copps, 67, was chief of staff to former Democratic Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina and was an assistant secretary of commerce in the Clinton administration. He was sworn in as an FCC commissioner in 2001. Salon recently spoke with him by phone:

In his Op-Ed in the Times, FCC chairman Kevin Martin wrote that the loosening of the ban on cross ownership of newspaper and TV stations was "relatively minor." You have characterized these new rules as the "camel's nose in the tent." What do you mean by that?

Number one, it's not the modest proposal that he would have us believe, because I find it is riven with loopholes. For example, he says that it is only going to affect the top 20 markets. That, by the way, is 42 or 43 percent of all of our households. But point in fact, there is a major loophole that would allow companies in smaller markets, just about any market, to apply for a similar exception on the basis of meeting a few loose criteria. So what you could wind up with is newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership in many, many more markets.

And number two, I said it was the camel's nose in the tent because I think that if they get away with this one proposal with newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership, they'll come back for changes in more of the rules, like allowing more duopolies or triopolies like the ones [FCC] chairman [Michael] Powell proposed back in 2003. You might remember that his scheme, which he actually succeeded in getting through the FCC, though it was later reversed by Congress and the courts, would have allowed in some of the larger markets a company to own up to three television stations, eight radio stations, a newspaper -- which is already a monopoly in most cities -- a cable system, and even an Internet provider. I just fail to understand how that kind of control over our media enhances democracy or works to the benefit of the American people.

What do you think could be the effect of these rules on the political system?

It's bad for the political system whether you're a liberal, a conservative or a moderate, when the number of voices and diversity is diminished in our country. That's bad for our civic dialogue, if a few companies have too much control. We've witnessed a tremendous amount of consolidation already. This consolidation involves not just owning the various channels of distribution, stations and the channels, but also vertical concentration, so they control the production and the content. If you have a lock on the content and a lock on the distribution, that's a recipe, and it always has been, for a monopoly or at least an oligopoly. That's what we have in our media.

Our Communications Act is premised on the idea that we should have more localism in our programming, that we should have more diversity of content, diversity of voices, and that includes diversity of ownership and competition. We're going in exactly the wrong way. And I might point out, I've been pretty adamant that we should not vote until we do something about minority ownership and localism.

Before we vote to loosen old rules, governing media ownership, we should take proposals that have been pending for so long on how we can increase minority ownership of our media properties. We live in a country that is one-third minority right now in the United States of America. People of color own 3.26 percent of all full-power commercial television stations, so is it any wonder then that their issues are not given the kind of coverage that they may like to have? Is it any wonder that they're so characterized that when you see a news story about an African-American it's often about crime? Or when you see a news story about a Latino, it's about jumping over a fence to get into the United States? What about the many million more stories that have to do with the contributions that these groups make to the country and what's going on in their communities? And what are their issues? And this applies to women when it comes to ownership too. Diversity of voices depends on ownership. If you don't have diversity of ownership, you're not going to have diversity of voices. So it's important to the future of our country. Our future is our diversity. That's our strength. That's our opportunity going forward. Why should we have a media that doesn't reflect that?

What do you mean by "localism"?

I mean that that in the face of consolidation too much of the programming comes from the networks or comes from afar. The owners, instead of being members of the community, are often people who live hundreds or thousands of miles away. Too many stations aren't even inhabited by human beings. They're run by computers or by mechanical means. That's why nobody's there. Localism means that you go out and talk to people locally about the kinds of issues and programming that they want. We don't do that anymore.
Martin wants a ruling by Dec. 18. Why do you think he wants it so soon?

Well, the rush is on. I can't speak for him or his motivations, but people have said that this could be a really politically hot potato if decided next year during the campaign season. Three million Americans contacted the FCC and the Congress in 2003, when [former FCC chairman Michael Powell wanted to loosen ownership rules]. And 99.9 percent were against what Powell was doing. There is a realization that this is a grass-roots issue and that it does spark some volatility. Some folks are at least implying that they want to get this out of the way before then. Do it in mid-December, and maybe Congress is going home and maybe we'll be wrapping our holiday gifts and not paying attention to it.

Who would be the beneficiaries if these new rules take effect?

I think there would be lots of them. Most of the major newspaper chains would be looking to buy some of these very profitable broadcast outlets. Although you have to be careful that you don't fall too easily to the newspaper [companies'] claim that they're essentially a hemorrhaging industry. I think Merrill Lynch put the average return on newspapers at 17 or 18 percent. I wish I had some investments that were making 17 or 18 percent. In addition to outright transactions, there will be all kinds of swaps. I'll give you my station here for your station there, and then I'll have a newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership. All of that is going to drive out a lot of smaller stations from the news business. They'll figure, "How can I compete now if they have the newspaper and television station in town? I might as well get out of this business." Oddly enough, not oddly, but interesting, a lot of those tier-four and below stations will be the ones that are going to be allowed to be sold. If women and minorities are lucky enough to own stations, that's where they are. So we're encouraging the buyouts of those stations too. We could wind up with a real loss of diversity.

What about Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation? You expressed reservations about its purchase of Dow Jones, which owns the Wall Street Journal.

I'm so disappointed in that. This is a major transaction involving a company that owns 35 television stations, studios, and so many other different things. And now they're going to take over Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal in New York City, where they already own a couple of television stations and the New York Post. The Federal Communications Commission says we don't have any jurisdiction to look at that, so we're not even going to examine that. I think that's irresponsible. They based that on some kind of precedent from the 1980s, when the commission decided in a very different media environment that USA Today was a national newspaper and not a local newspaper. I think, number one, our public interest obligations give us ample room to look at that merger. But number two, and even more importantly, we ignored the local impact that that merger has in New York City. That's squarely in our jurisdiction. I don't think anyone should be able to get away with denying that. There are hundreds of thousands of issues of the Wall Street Journal that get circulated in New York City every day. Don't tell me that doesn't have some effect on control in New York, loss of diversity and all the rest.

Do you think that the Bush administration has made it a priority to put these changes into effect before the end of his presidency?

Clearly it's a priority for Chairman Martin to get these adopted as early as he can. Now I must say, they might have gone even further if the political environment hadn't changed a year ago in Washington. If we had less congressional oversight than we're getting right now, I suspect the forces of consolidation would probably have asked for more.

Do you see yourself as being on a crusade?

That [word] is invested with religious overtones. My No. 1 priority issue at the FCC has been the media environment. I find abhorrent what some of the effects of consolidation have been upon our culture, our entertainment and our civic dialogue. I think it's important for our country to change that.

When I go around and talk to people, I say, people in this audience may have a lot of different issues that they think are the most important issue confronting America. Maybe it's the war in Iraq, or maybe it's, how do we create high-paying jobs? or how do we insure our 40 million people who don't have healthcare? how do we educate our kids? how do we pry open the doors of equal opportunity further? If those are your priorities, that's fine.

But then I say, your No. 2 issue has to be this media issue, because all those other issues you care about that I just mentioned are funneled and filtered through big media, if they're lucky enough to get in that funnel at all. They're lucky to even be covered by big media. Then they're covered with the slant of a few particular companies. And it's not so much a political slant as it is a commercial slant. It's a commercial bias of all this that I think is the problem, selling products to a particular demographic.

So you're not a crusader, but at a conference in New York earlier this month, you said you were sounding a "call to battle" and "blowing a loud trumpet."

You've got to do that if the media is not giving you coverage. You've got to rely on using your bully pulpit. There are a lot of good groups that are working on this issue. The Internet is a marvelous tool for getting this story out. And the folks on the Internet side are beginning to see that their new media is beginning to be compromised by consolidation too. A lot of content is being bought up by people who have too much control over distribution, so I think Internet outlets are getting worried about their future. This is a not a debate about yesterday's media or about something passing into history. This is about new media as much as it is about old media. If you're interested in the future of the Internet, you ought to be mightily involved in this issue over media consolidation.

Do you think there are any specific issues that will not get sufficient coverage because of media consolidation?

Issue No. 1 would be media consolidation [itself]. I can't tell you how many different cities I go into where there is a strongly consolidated environment and you read so little about media consolidation. A few years ago, I went to Phoenix, Ariz., to attend a hearing [on media consolidation]. Someone else was holding the hearing [not the FCC]. It was in the middle of the afternoon. I would guess 300 people showed up for it, but it had not been very much discussed in the local media, as you can imagine. Yet all these people showed up. I talked to some of them in the audience and asked, "How did you find out about this hearing?" And one of them said, "I heard it on the BBC." I thought that was pretty revealing with one company controlling so much of the media market. Maybe that company wasn't so keen on covering this consolidation issue. But the BBC thought it was newsworthy enough to broadcast about it. I've seen that in many other places.

I visited the editor of the editorial page of a major newspaper in this country not too many weeks ago, and we got talking about this issue. I think the person in his heart was on my side of the issue, but he said they can't cover that issue. And I said, "Oh, why not?" He said, "The publisher wouldn't let us do that. It would be against the interest of the company. I have a lot of freedom to cover what I want issue-wise on my editorial page, but I'm not going there." It wasn't almost chilling; it was downright chilling.

Why won't the FCC hold hearings on Martin's proposal?

I had asked originally for a dozen hearings or so, and he committed to six. And this was the sixth one. Interestingly enough, it sounds confusing, because we did have a hearing a couple days before in Washington on localism, because [former FCC] Chairman Powell had kind of promised that there would be six hearings on localism also. There was one of those outstanding, so they wanted to get that done too, so they could say localism hearings are done and the media ownership hearings are done. They had the localism hearing at the end of October in Washington, D.C., on relatively short notice, and then just a few days later we all packed up and had another hearing in Seattle. To me that just said we're just checking the boxes; we're in a hurry to hold these hearings.

What did we learn from Chairman Powell's attempt to allow greater media consolidation in 2003?

That citizen action in this country can still work. A lot of people think, "Oh, with so many large impersonal forces, I'm not even a cog in the wheel, so how does my voice count?" But the fact that 3 million people found out about that and contacted the FCC, which led to congressional action ... and to people taking it to court, [which] sent those rules back to the FCC, was a victory. We're back to starting all over, but at least we kept those rules from going into effect. Recent history shows that citizen action still works even in the 21st century. History shows that we go through these cycles of consolidation and reaction.

Do you think the public response now will be similar to what we saw in 2003?

I think it's building. Some of the candidates in the presidential election already are talking about this issue. I think that if the media did a better job of explaining that this is queued up right now -- if [Martin] really insists on going ahead with this vote on Dec. 18 -- that would spark a grass-roots movement. And in the final analysis, if we are going to move toward airwaves of, by and for the people, and a good stewardship of the airwaves, it'll be because of a grass-roots effort. That's what worked in 2003. A lot of congressmen and senators went home and went to town meetings, and people would ask them about media consolidation. They had never seen that before. It made a difference. I think that had something to do with the fact that the Senate voted so quickly to overturn and reverse what Chairman Powell was attempting to do. That's what we need now. We need to send messages to the FCC and to the White House. You asked how involved is the White House in this. I don't know 100 percent the answer to that, but [those in the White House] should know clearly that this is an issue of importance to many people.

Do you think Chairman Martin underestimated the Senate's concern about further media consolidation?

Again, you'd have to speak to him. He seems determined to do this. If I were sitting where he is and I got this kind of bipartisan pushback, where you hear not only from Byron Dorgan on the Democratic side, but Trent Lott on the Republican side, when you hear not only Bill Nelson on the Democratic side, but Olympia Snowe on the Republican side, I'd really be a little bit cautious myself. I'd be fearful of running into a buzz saw with Congress and running into a buzz saw with the American people.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...urce=whitelist





The Spectrum Auction Secrecy Begins
Saul Hansell

A veil of mystery is about to descend over the auction of the 700-megahertz band, a useful swath of the electromagnetic spectrum that is being freed up by the move to digital television.

Today was the deadline for potential bidders to file with the Federal Communications Commission. Once they do so they become subject to strict “anticollusion” rules that in effect prohibit participants from discussing any aspect of their bidding until the auction is over. The commission is trying to prevent bidders from getting into various forms of mischief, such as maliciously bidding up prices to hurt competitors or colluding with rivals to keep prices low.

Those rules explain why Google announced Friday that it was going to bid in the auction. It can’t discuss its bidding once it filed to participate.

The rules are so sweeping, in fact, that if Echostar and AT&T each filed to bid in the auction, they would have to stop any potential discussions about AT&T buying Echostar, for example.

For those of us interested in watching this $10 billion poker game for the future of wireless communication, this will make for a lot of guessing with little official information. The next official word will be sometime at the end of December or in the middle of January, when the F.C.C. announces who has been approved to bid.

The auction will start on Jan. 24. Participants will use an Internet system to enter bids on any of 1,099 separate licenses that are being offered. The bidding will be conducted in a series of rounds, and the commission will announce the amount of the high bid for each license at the end of each round. But it will not identify the high bidder.

“We will all be speculating about it, but we won’t know what is really happening,” said Blair Levin, a technology policy analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus & Company. “Envision a football game, where you know one team has six and another team has nine, but you don’t know who has what or the story behind it.”

This process is meant to help bidders become comfortable with the market and compare alternative strategies. Experts figure it may well take two months for all the bidding to be done.

Then things really get interesting. The winning bidder will have ten days to put up 20 percent of the amount it bid. After that, it is allowed to discuss its bids publicly and negotiate with potential partners, such as losing bidders who may want to get in on the action. But it only has ten more days to make deals before it has to pay the rest of the money it bid.

How frenzied this all will be, however, is very much up in the air, as there are now only four presumed bidders on a national scale: A&T, Verizon, Google and Clearwire, a startup founded by Craig O. McCaw, the cellphone veteran.

Sprint and T-Mobile, the other two major wireless carriers in the United States, are not expected to be significant bidders in this auction. And today, the two biggest cable carriers, Comcast and Time Warner, said they had decided not to bid in the auction.

Of course, bidders could come from any corner: investor groups, foreign wireless companies, even retail names like Wal-Mart and Best Buy have been bandied about in the press. The regional phone companies, like Alltel, which are expected to use the auction to expand their networks, might get more ambitious.

There are several attractive options for bidders. Most coveted seems to be the C block, 12 regional licenses that can be combined to create a national wireless network. This is the spectrum Google is presumed to be most interested in. There is also the D block, which is one nationwide license, but it has to be shared with local police and emergency workers. The A, B, and E bands are cut up into smaller units but could be useful to a carrier with existing operations.

All this means that if there really turn out to be only four major bidders, the veil of mystery over the auction may not stay on as long, and the money raised for the Treasury may not be as much as many had expected.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...ins/index.html





The Most Anti-Tech Organizations in America

These groups line up against tech interests in courtrooms and corridors of power across the country.
Mark Sullivan

Their names keep coming up over and over again in courtrooms and corridors of power across the country--those groups whose interests always seem to run counter to those of technology companies and consumers. They come in many forms: associations, think tanks, money-raising organizations, PACs, and even other tech-oriented industries like telecommunications.

The tech issues that they're concerned with are what you might expect: digital rights management and fair use, patent law, broadband speed and reach, wireless spectrum and network neutrality. I talked to a good number of tech and media policy insiders in Washington, D.C.--mostly off the record--to find out who these groups are, how they operate, and who pays their bills. We'll start with the biggest offenders first and work our way down.

1. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)

Issue: Copyright and Fair Use

The Internet economy should be a boon for digital media companies and for those of us that like to buy our music and video online. It's also a very powerful way to connect with people of like mind with a view toward learning about new things to watch and listen to. Unfortunately, the content owners in the record and movie industries have mainly seen the Web as a platform for piracy, and have mainly failed to adapt their businesses to the realities of online, as one lonely industry executive recently admitted.

The record and film industries are represented in legal and policy matters by two major organizations--the RIAA and the MPAA--with some key individual companies like Warner Music Group and Disney acting on their own behalf in certain cases. The RIAA and MPAA have exercised considerable political and economic influence to push a legal and policy environment in which the content owners keep tight control of the way their content is distributed and used. "I think it's fair to say that their approach is that any innovation that they haven't signed off on is bad," says Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Lots of Lawsuits

Companies distributing music or video in ways the studios or labels don't approve of have quickly found themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit. There are many examples. Perhaps most famously, the RIAA sued Napster in 1999, charging the file sharing service with "contributory" copyright infringement. After losing several major court decisions, Napster (as we knew it) folded in 2002. At around the same time the RIAA sued and shut down Michael Robertson's (MP3.com) BeamIt service, which helped users to upload and store music from their CD collections in an online locker.

Earlier this year Warner Music Group filed an infringement lawsuit against the social networking site imeem, which allowed its members to post songs on their profile pages that could be streamed by other users. San Francisco-based imeem was forced to settle out of court and now can stream only songs from labels with which it has contract agreements. All other songs run for 20 seconds and then stop.

On the video side, some major copyright infringement lawsuits against YouTube (sued by Viacom) and MySpace (sued by Universal) are still in progress. If these suits end badly, they could further restrict our access to online video and even endanger the video operations of YouTube and MySpace. Video copyright lawsuits are also in progress against the DivX Stage 6 and Veoh online services.

A Chilling Effect

The suits are a real threat to the next generation of bi-directional, participatory Web services that are the promise of Web 2.0. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's von Lohmann believes this year's suits against imeem and others are just "the tip of the Web 2.0 litigation iceberg."

Von Lohmann also thinks the suits may hurt legitimate companies while leaving the real content pirates untouched. "I think it's fair to say that copyright threats from entertainment industries are exerting a serious chilling effect on several companies that are trying to do the right thing, while having little impact on offshore companies that are more adventurous," von Lohmann says. "In other words, the innovation that should be fueling our economy is now fueling someone else's."

Leverage in Washington

The RIAA and MPAA have worked very hard in Washington to apply the aggressive posture they use in the courts to the policy-making arena. Their attorneys and lobbyists are constantly meeting with members of Congress and presenting their side of issues of concern (mainly copyright-related) in front of regulatory bodies like the Federal Communications (FCC). And, most would agree, they've been fairly effective at getting their way. "Their combined muscle in lobbying and inter-corporate pressure is pretty substantial," says von Lohmann says.

Both organizations have their own staffs of lobbyists in Washington, but both also contract with numerous outside lobbying firms. In 2006 alone, the RIAA reported lobbying expenses of $1.5 million, while the MPAA reported $1.8 million. The RIAA retained the services of 13 outside lobbying firms in 2006 to help make its case to lawmakers, while the MPAA used 17 outside lobbying firms.

The content owners also donate to candidates for federal office as a way of furthering their long-term agendas. For example, Time Warner gave $17 million to various candidates for federal office between 1989 and 2005, says the Center for Responsive Politics. The Walt Disney Company donated almost $9.5 million during that period.

Whether or not the RIAA's and MPAA's tactics have really helped the entertainment industry is debatable. Their legal and lobbying tactics have put real limitations on the way that we consumers are allowed to use the digital content we purchase, causing many of us to wonder if we truly own the digital content we buy. The digital rights management (DRM) software that the content owners wrap around our music and video files often prevents us from playing media on all of our devices, copying it, or owning it forever. This has stirred up a lot of resentment, even as file sharing continues to be rampant around the globe.

2. The Pharmaceutical/Biotech Industry
Represented by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA) and Patent Attorneys

Issue: Patent Reform

Over the last ten years it's become increasingly obvious that the system we have for patenting new tech ideas is broken. The number of tech patents granted by the U.S. Patent Office has gone way up over the past decade, while the quality of those patents has gone way down, most analysts agree.

A bad patent can mean one that covers too broad a swath of technology, preventing others from innovating in that area. It can also mean patents granted for ideas that are obvious--ideas that aren't really innovative, but just take the next logical step in the development cycle. When such bad patents are granted in a certain tech area, it can take away the incentive for other technologists to innovate and invest in that area. That's bad news for those of us who expect new and better tech toys every year.

Problem is, tech is not the only industry that uses the patent system to protect intellectual property. Every other industry uses it too, and some of them feel strongly that it's working just fine. Enter the pharmaceutical industry, tech's unlikely adversary in the battle over patent reform. The pharmaceutical industry (and its attorneys) might end up directly affecting the state of personal technology for you and me.

"Basically, two constituencies oppose patent reform: The biomedical industry--pharmaceutical and biotech companies--who rely on patents and want them to be as strong as possible, and patent lawyers, who are both resistant to change in general and likely fearful of how reform will affect their practices," explains Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley.

Big Pharma in Washington

The big pharmacy companies--think Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Merck--have megabucks not only to pay attorneys for patent work, but also for lobbying lawmakers to keep the system the same. Pfizer, for instance, reported $12.2 million in lobbying expenses for 2006 alone.

Much of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries' lobbying work is done by or through the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA), whose members include practically all of the big pharmaceutical companies with interests in the U.S. market. PhRMA reported spending $18.1 million in lobbying expenses in 2006 (ranking it the 7th biggest lobbying organization in the U.S. for the year), most of which was used to hire the services of 42 external firms to help influence regulatory bodies and lawmakers. PhRMA has spent more than $115 million on lobbying since 1998.

Big Pharma also exerts its influence by donating to federal candidates and political parties, although the biggest money comes directly from the large pharmaceutical companies themselves, not their industry organization, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. For instance, Pfizer has donated $11.6 million to various candidates from 1989 through 2006, and Bristol-Myers Squibb gave $6.8 million to various candidates during the same period.

But, as Stanford's Lemley points out, Big Pharma isn't the only dog in the fight. Thousands of patent attorneys represented by the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) also are fighting patent reform. With the sheer number of patent grants soaring in recent years, being a patent attorney has never been more lucrative. Not only do inventors need legal help to file for patents, but there are far more legal squabbles between companies over patents than ever before; this also keeps patent attorneys' phones ringing.

Battling the Bill

This year both PhRMA and the AIPLA have been out lobbying against a new bill called The Patent Reform Act of 2007, which would change the patent rules in favor of tech interests. The bill was passed by the House in September. A Senate version of the bill was passed in committee but awaits a hearing and possibly a vote by the full Senate.

Unlike some other tech policy issues, the players involved with patent reform are not playing rhetorical games on the issue, at least not right now, says one House staffer. "You have a difference in philosophy between pharma/biotech and tech," the aide says. "Both sides are being totally forthright about what they want, but both sides have such different philosophies and they're so different in the way they use patents that it's almost irreconcilable."

3. Big Telco Companies, Industry Group USTelecom

Issue: Network Neutrality

Network neutrality principles are rules that prevent large Internet service providers (ISPs) like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast from giving one Internet company's traffic priority over another's. Up until now, the Internet has been a fairly neutral place--we have equal access to any (legal) content we choose to access. But if the big ISPs begin giving preferential treatment to the highest-paying Internet sites, they could effectively make it harder for us consumers to access some of the vast content and services on the Web. The next Google and Yahoo of tomorrow, now gestating in garages and dorm rooms across the country, likely wouldn't have the funds to buy enough bandwidth to compete with the Google, Yahoo, and other giants of today. That's bad for us, because the companies of tomorrow might simply be better.

The phone companies had at one time reserved the right to parcel out bandwidth as they saw fit, as evidenced by the words of former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre in late 2005:

"How do you think [Internet companies are] going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it." And so began the network neutrality fight we know and love today."

What Smoking Gun?

But so far there's been no smoking-gun evidence that the "Internet tollbooths" Whitacre alludes to are being set up on a large scale--that major net neutrality breaches are taking place at the big ISPs. We've seen only borderline offenses like traffic Comcast's recent throttling back of BitTorrent file sharing. But Comcast may have singled out BitTorrent traffic not because it's BitTorrent traffic or because it's file sharing traffic, but because peer-to-peer traffic eats up huge amounts of bandwidth--both upstream and downstream. Still, many people believe that some type of traffic discrimination is inevitable, and that network neutrality principles must be codified into law to prevent it.

Some say that the absence of network neutrality guarantees in existing law is already hurting tech companies, and, by extension, tech consumers. "It fosters an area of uncertainty," says Art Brodsky of Washington D.C.-based public interest group Public Knowledge. "The point is you have to wonder, if you're a technologist, and you'd love to get this [service] on the Web, and if I'm competing against another company that has a sweetheart deal with the phone company and they move my packets to the back of the line, am I going to get screwed?"

The companies that own the big broadband pipes remain willing to fight hard against a law restricting their right to discriminate on their networks. A major pro-network neutrality bill cosponsored by Senator Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Senator Byron Dorgan, D-North Dakota, failed to pass last year, in part because of a massive lobbying campaign by Big Telco and it allies. The two Senators reintroduced the bill again in January, but little action has been taken on it. The phone companies have already done a lot of talking on Capital Hill to prevent passage of a net neutrality law. And, it should be said, the tech and consumer groups pushing for a law have not always stated their case clearly enough to move lawmakers and their constituents. That situation, I believe, is getting better, but a smoking gun--an obvious net neutrality breach by a large ISP--will likely be needed for Congress to pass a law.

Legions of Lobbyists

The big telcos are very influential in Washington, and rarely loose a fight over something they really want. "They've got armies of lobbyists that work for them," Public Knowledge's Brodsky says. "They've got regiments of lobbyists that are hired guns. They've got zillions of dollars to spread around town in campaign contributions and other ancillary supports."

AT&T has a large contingent of in-house lobbyists in Washington, but also farms out much of the work. AT&T reported almost $19.1 million in lobbying expenses last year, hiring 25 outside firms to do its bidding in the capital. That makes AT&T the fifth-largest lobbying spender in the U.S. for 2006, followed closely by the telcos' industry group USTelecom, which spent $18.4 million during the year. Verizon and Verizon Wireless together reported $13 million in lobbying expenses, and hired some 45 outside lobbying firms in addition to internal lobbying staff.

One interesting thing about these lobbyists is their somewhat incestuous relationship with the offices in which they lobby. Brodsky says Verizon and AT&T routinely hire lobbyists from the staffs of senators and representatives. "If you look at the lobbying forms for the companies, you'll see a lot of people that worked for very influential members of Congress and senators and things." One example is Tom Tauke, a former congressman from Iowa who now heads up Verizon's lobbying efforts in Washington. Tauke has long been an outspoken critic of network neutrality legislation.

The big phone companies also give generously to the campaigns of federal election candidates. In fact, AT&T was the 2nd largest political donor from 1989 to 2006 at almost $38 million, again according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Verizon donated $15.5 million to candidates in federal elections between 1990 and 2005.

4. Verizon, AT&T, Progress and Freedom Foundation

Issue: Broadband Penetration

Just as railroads and highways did in the past, broadband and mobile communications can dramatically increase the productivity and efficiency of the economy. The U.S. government has taken a largely deregulatory approach to the broadband ISP market, based on a belief that competition will compel large ISPs like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast to sell broadband at the speeds and price points that consumers want.

But this hands-off approach is being called into question. The reason is this: Back in the 1990s the U.S. led the world in broadband penetration and speeds, but today the U.S. has fallen to 15th among the world's developed countries in terms of broadband penetration, according to data collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

A study by the Communication Workers of America finds that the average download speed of Internet connections in the U.S. is 1.9 megabits per second. The cost of DSL or cable connections in the U.S. ranges from $15 to $40 per month. Meanwhile, Tokyo residents can buy a 100-mbps connection for the equivalent of $10 per month.

The phone companies and their allies didn't much like the news from the OECD, and have for months engaged in a campaign to discredit the OECD report. The phone companies also get help from a vocal little spin house called the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which holds seminars, puts out position papers on various telecommunications issues, and lobbies on these issues as well. One of the main jobs of PFF's commentators has been to espouse the efforts of the phone companies to spread broadband access, while discrediting the OECD report. My sources in Washington tell me that it's common knowledge that a sizable part of PFF's roughly $3 million annual budget comes from the big phone companies. The Supporters page at the PFF Website is a Who's Who of large telco and cable interests.

No Incentive for Growth

The OECD data notwithstanding, the phone and cable companies have had little real incentive to improve the speeds, prices, and reach of their broadband services. Today most Americans, if they have any choice of broadband providers at all, can choose service only from a cable or a telephone company ISP. Meanwhile, the FCC and the courts have consistently ruled that the cable and telephone companies are under no legal obligation to share their broadband lines with would-be competitors. Some argue that federally collected monies and tax incentives helped pay for those lines in the first place, and that the current owners of those facilities have an obligation to share them. Only real competition, not the short-term interests of shareholders, can compel ISPs in the U.S. to boost broadband speeds and lower costs to world-class levels.

The FCC doesn't help the situation by defining broadband as anything above a decidedly slow 200 kilobits per second. That low threshold allows the FCC and phone and cable companies to make some rosy claims about the state of broadband in the U.S., such as this one, proudly posted at the USTelecom site: "The total number of new high-speed lines (200 kbps in at least one direction) increased by 61% from 51.2 million at the end of 2005, to 82.5 million at the end of 2006."

The effect of slow broadband speeds and poor availability on tech is obvious. A whole generation of innovative businesses that depend on real broadband is still waiting to come into existence. For now, consumers will have to wait for new, lightning-fast information, media, and telecommunications services that could change the way we work and play.

5. Large Wireless Carriers and...
the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA); TV Broadcasters and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)

Issue: Wireless Spectrum

In 2005 Congress passed the Digital Television and Public Safety Act of 2005 (DTV Act), which mandates that the TV broadcasters convert their signals from analog to digital by February 2009. That will make available some tracts of analog wireless spectrum that are valued highly by competing Internet, telecommunications and broadcasting interests. Such spectrum is considered to be "beachfront property," partly because the signals that can be sent over it travel over long distances and can be received well indoors.

The 700-MHz War

The FCC will auction off 60 megahertz (MHz) of that spectrum within the 700 MHz band in 2008. A coalition of tech and public interest groups led by Google, called the Coalition for 4G in America, earlier this year argued hard for the FCC to apply a set of "open" standards to the entire 64-MHz chunk, so that it would support any device or any application. The FCC eventually agreed to that requirement for about half of the 64-MHz band of spectrum. Google acted at least partly out of self interest: The public Internet, whether accessed via landline or wirelessly, is Google's sole means of getting its services to the public, so of course it wants its search service to work over as many connected devices as possible.

Google and its coalition also asked the FCC to require the eventual licensee of the spectrum to share its network with competing wireless service providers. Under pressure from big wireless carriers like Verizon Wireless and Sprint, the FCC refused this last request. The wireless carriers want to be able to utilize and market that spectrum in the same way they do now--so that only certain devices work on the system in certain markets, while they remain under no obligation to share the network with other providers. The carriers accused Google and friends of simply trying to devalue the spectrum.

They also accused the Google coalition of trying to drive down the value of the spectrum to those who might build new networks on it. Here's the spin from the wireless carriers' industry group, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA): "CTIA opposes encumbering this valuable spectrum with unnecessary regulations and restrictions that place bidders on unequal footing, limit the utility of the spectrum, and ultimately drive down the value to consumers and the U.S. Treasury." CTIA says the spectrum, unencumbered, will "drive technological innovation, bring advanced wireless data services to rural America, and . . . contribute billions to the U.S. Treasury."

Google and its coalition partners believe that an "open" and nationwide wireless network using the 700-MHz band could create a third broadband pipe, an alternative to the cable or DSL lines sold by the cable and telephone companies. Of course, the big wireless incumbents are against this because they don't want the competition from a "third pipe." This is a worrisome situation, since the one person who could require that the band be open, FCC chairman Kevin Martin, has a long history of deregulatory and Big Telco-friendly rulings. Indeed, in Washington, if Big Telco really wants something, it usually gets it.

Between the Channels

After the broadcasters' transition to digital TV in 2009, the spectrum between 54 MHz and 698 MHz (between channels 2 through 51) will be used for digital television, but there will be spaces left over between the channels that could be used for other purposes. Those are called "white spaces," and the FCC is considering auctioning off licenses to that spectrum, too.

Technology companies like Microsoft are hoping to use some of that white space to connect low-power, mobile devices (such as laptops and iPhone-type PDAs). But the TV broadcasters, represented by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), have launched a large lobbying campaign against using white spaces for Internet access. The NAB, through its lobbyists and TV ads, is saying that such devices will definitely interfere with the digital TV signal, which they say would result in poor picture quality for the folks watching at home.

Most recently, the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology tested a couple of devices to see if the broadcasters' fears are reasonable. The "High Tech White Spaces Coalition" (a collection of companies that includes Google, Microsoft, Dell, and Intel) submitted a device to be tested, as did Philips Electronics.

The results were complex, and left some doubt about the tech companies' claims that the devices would not interfere. The NAB immediately seized on this as a victory, but most observers would agree that more testing is necessary to decide the issue. The FCC has made no final decision, and the jury is still out on whether white spaces can be used to improve connectivity in the U.S.

What You Can Do

The outcomes of the legal and policy fights described above will have a direct affect on the quality, price, and functionality of the technology we consumers use in the coming years. If you care about such things, there are a number of ways to put yourself in the arena. The first thing is to get informed about the tech issues being discussed locally and nationally--PCWorld.com is a good place to start for that. Once you're armed with enough information to be dangerous, you can research a little further and discover exactly where your local, state, and federal representatives stand on the tech issues you care about. If you don't like what they say, e-mail, call, or write them and ask them to explain.

The Internet has also become a powerful tool for tech advocacy, and for virtually any major tech issue, you'll find a number of informational sites. These sites typically offer up-to-date news, opinion blogs, and studies to keep you informed, as well as petitions, contact information for elected officials, and form letters to help you make your views known.

Finally, tech policy is a major plank in the platform of any local, state, and national candidate for public office nowadays. Using resources like On The Issues.org, you can learn where the candidates stand on the tech issues that affect you, before giving them your vote.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140081/article.html





AT&T Says its Wireless Network Also Open to Outside Devices
Grant Gross

But AT&T's GSM-based (Global System for Mobile Communications) network has been open to outside devices and applications for years, the company said. AT&T will start to publicize that information through salespeople at AT&T stores, Ralph de la Vega, CEO of the company's wireless business, told USA Today.

"By its nature, GSM technology is open," said Michael Coe, an AT&T spokesman. "Customers could always use GSM phones not sold by AT&T on our network. We can't guarantee the performance of the device, of course."

AT&T's customers can also take their handsets to other mobile service providers using GSM, with one huge exception: Apple's iPhone. AT&T will not unlock the iPhone to use on other networks, Coe said.

For other devices, "we will unlock the device when customers fulfill their contract; we will also unlock the device if the customer pays full price for the device," he said. "The iPhone, however, is an exception. The iPhone is exclusive to AT&T in the U.S."

AT&T's publicity on its open-access policies comes after competitor Verizon Wireless announced Nov. 27 it would open its wireless network to outside devices and applications by late 2008. Devices will need to be tested by Verizon before they can be activated, the company said.

The Verizon announcement came after Google launched the Open Handset Alliance, an open-development platform for mobile phones, earlier in November.

The actions of Google and Verizon didn't prompt any changes at AT&T, Coe said. "First, we did not make an announcement," he said. "Second, it's always been this way."

Customers who want to bring a GSM device to the AT&T network can purchase a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) through the company, Coe said. If the device operates in U.S. spectrum frequencies, AT&T will activate the device, he said.

AT&T also allows outside applications on its network, Coe said. "People have access to a vast array of applications today, some that are provided through AT&T, others that are not," he said in an e-mail. "We take an open approach to music, wireless operating systems, e-mail platforms, etc. We actively encourage developers to create applications and 20,000 have registered on our developer's site."

Art Brodsky, a spokesman for open-access advocate Public Knowledge, said he was taking a wait-and-see approach to the AT&T open-access policy. "So far, we only have one quote from one company executive," he said. "The theme is fine, and we approve, but would like to see more details."

But Mary Greczyn, spokeswoman for startup Frontline Wireless, called the AT&T position on open access "a huge win from a policy standpoint."

Frontline, Public Knowledge, and other groups successfully pushed for open-access requirements on part of the 700MHz spectrum band, to be auctioned by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission starting in January. AT&T's move is a "reaction to what Frontline had proposed as open access in the first place," Greczyn said.

Despite open-access policies from Verizon and AT&T, Frontline believes U.S. residents will need more competition among broadband carriers, and Frontline intends to bid on 700MHz spectrum in order to build a wireless broadband network, Greczyn said.
http://wireless.itworld.com/4268/wir...06/page_1.html





A.M.D. Delays Energy-Efficient Chip Again
Laurie J. Flynn

The energy-efficient chip that Advanced Micro Devices was counting to win customers away from Intel has been delayed again, the company said yesterday.

The company confirmed that a technical irregularity has delayed widespread availability of its Barcelona chip for servers until early next year. The company had announced in September that it was beginning to ship it to customers.

Technical problems, called errata, are common during chip development, and both A.M.D. and Intel have been plagued by them at various times. The significance of this glitch — in rare instances, the chip could fail to function — has more to do with Barcelona’s further delay than with the glitch itself. The product was originally set for general availability in the middle of 2007.

“We’re continuing to ship it but only to specific customers,” said John Taylor, spokesman for A.M.D., which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. As a result, many server manufacturers have not been able to sell the products they expected based on the new chip.

At the time of Barcelona’s release in September, A.M.D. executives described the processor as one of A.M.D.’s most significant new products in several years. A.M.D.’s first quad-core processor, Barcelona features four processors on one piece of silicon, allowing faster calculating and greater energy efficiency at companies running large data centers and server farms.

After months of delays, the new processor arrived as A.M.D. was struggling to maintain its hard-earned gains from Intel, its far larger rival, and just a week after Intel announced a new version of its own chip for servers, Xeon.

A.M.D. is offering Barcelona customers a workaround that allows them to use the chip until the errata are addressed in a new version of the product in January. The problem also affected the company’s Phenom processor, a desktop version of the chip, but A.M.D.’s workaround solution for that was issued before the product shipped, Mr. Taylor said.

Nathan Brookwood, a chip analyst with Insight64, said that it was not unusual for this kind of problem to appear and that he expected the impact on Barcelona customers to be minimal compared with past errata.

“The effect on customers using the patch will be they lose some performance,” Mr. Brookwood said. “But it won’t force A.M.D. to retrench.”

Dirk Meyer, president of A.M.D., hinted at a problem during a conference call with analysts in October, saying that initial production of Barcelona had been slower than expected. But he insisted that the product would be widely available by November. Company officials said yesterday that the scope of the problem had not become evident until after that call.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/te...gy/06chip.html





Toshiba's New 80GB 2.5-inch HDD for Automotive Applications Has Industry Largest*1 Storage Capacity

New products boost vibration resistance by 50 percent*2
Press release

Toshiba Corporation today announced the latest additions to its market-leading lineup of 2.5-inch hard disk drives (HDD) for automotive applications: an 80GB drive offering the industry's largest*1capacity, and a 40GB drive. The drives will be used in such applications as car navigation systems, and will be released in industrial and retail versions. Sample shipping of the drives has started and mass production will start in March 2008.

Toshiba's automotive HDD have earned an unrivaled reputation for environmental toughness and performance, and made the company the leader in the world automotive HDD market. With its latest drives, the company has further enhanced durability and increased data capacity, using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) to boost areal recording density and to raise storage capacity to 80GB (MK8050GAC and MK8050GACE), double that of Toshiba's current automotive drives*2 .

Alongside higher storage, the drives offer numerous enhancements. Lighter moving parts, a highly rigid enclosure, and the vibration resistance achieved by a highly accurate head positioning system, takes overall, vibration resistance to 29.4m/s2 (5-50Hz), a full 50% improvement over current automotive models*2. In addition, an advanced aerodynamic design for the head slider, which “floats" the head on a cushion of air, maintains the flying head at a constant distance from the disk, a refinement that brings greater reliability to data read and write in low pressure conditions at high altitude. As a result, the new drives can operate at up to 5,500m above sea level, 1,200m higher than current automotive models*2.

In addition to map data information for car navigation, the new HDD can be used in on-board entertainment systems, to store high capacity movie, digital image and music files.

Toshiba introduced its first HDD for automotive application in 2001. The company's highly durable and reliable products today command a share of approximately 85% of the global automotive HDD market*3, and cumulative shipments now stand at over 7-million units.

The new drives are fully compliant with the EU RoHS directive.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2007_11/pr2802.htm





Western Digital Service Restricts Use of Network Drives
sehlat writes

Via BoingBoing comes the news that Western Digital's My Book(TM) World Edition(TM) II, sold with promises of internet-accessible drive space, is now restricting the types of files the drive will serve up. "Western Digital is disabling sharing of any avi, divx, mp3, mpeg, and many other files on its network connected devices; due to unverifiable media license authentication. Just wondering -- who needs a 1 Terabyte network-connected hard drive that is prohibited from serving most media files? Perhaps somebody with 220 million pages of .txt files they need to share?"
Update: 12/07 03:28 GMT by Z : To clarify, it actually seems as though this is a bad summary. The MioNET service that WD packages with the networked drives is responsible for the rights of users via the network. There are a few (obvious) ways to get around that.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/12/06/2119240.shtml





T-Mobile Can Sell iPhone with Contract-German Court
Philipp Jarke

Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile division can make customers who buy Apple's coveted iPhone take out a T-Mobile contract as well and may continue to offer the device with a locked SIM card, a German court ruled on Tuesday.

Rival Vodafone had obtained a temporary court injunction preventing T-Mobile from locking the iPhone's SIM card -- thus preventing it from being used on other networks -- and offering it only in combination with a T-Mobile contract.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...EB004320071204





Nokia in Free Music Pact with Universal

Nokia Oyj said on Tuesday it has agreed with the world's largest music group Universal to offer free 12-month access to Universal artists' music for buyers of Nokia's music phones.

The world's top cellphone maker said it has signed up Universal Music Group International, owned by French media giant Vivendi, for its new "Comes With Music" offering and is eyeing similar deals with other labels before the offer starts in the second half of 2008.

"We are in talks with all major labels. The response from labels has been very, very positive," said Nokia spokesman Damian Stathonikos.

Nokia said the new offering would differ from other packages on the market as consumers can keep all the music they have downloaded for free during the 12 month period.

"The financial barrier to try new music is completely removed. It fundamentally changes a lot of business logic in the music industry," Stathonikos said.

The free access to new music could hurt peer-to-peer networking while also raising pressure on Apple Inc.

Nokia moved into the navigation industry in a similar manner earlier this year, offering free map data and routing, while charging for more detailed navigation information.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by David Holmes)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...28111520071204





MySpace to Showcase Music and Sell Performance Videos
Brian Stelter

MySpace, the social networking site where people create home pages and embellish them as they would a dormitory room, plans today to start positioning itself as a top destination for buying exclusive musical performances.

In a program called Transmissions, MySpace is inviting musicians to choose a studio and select the songs they want to perform. MySpace will show and sell videos of the performance.

It could be perceived as an Internet variation of the popular series “MTV Unplugged,” but with a revenue stream built in. When musicians participate in the MTV series, their work is sometimes released as albums months or years later. On MySpace, the work will be available immediately.

“If I like what I see, I can take it with me,” said Josh Brooks, vice president for programming and content of MySpace.

For years MySpace, now owned by the News Corporation, has served as a promotional platform for artists and labels, primarily through the MySpace Music portion of the Web site. Now the company wants to provide a sales component. Unlike Apple’s iTunes music store, which charges a flat rate of 99 cents a song, MySpace will let distributors set their own prices.

“We’re enabling artists to choose how they want to distribute their music,” Mr. Brooks said.

James Blunt, a singer-songwriter whose signature hit is “You’re Beautiful,” will be the first artist to participate in Transmissions, introducing five songs, including a new single, on the site today. Mr. Blunt said he appreciated the flexibility offered by the Transmissions format.

“Sometimes we can be so dependent on radio, and yet radio is all about a three-minute, 30-second song that is beat-driven and loud,” he said. “Music is about so much more than that. Through MySpace, I can get songs heard that are any length I choose, that are any format I choose.”

MySpace’s first attempt to sell music, through a year-old partnership with a company called Snocap, has not fared well. Snocap allows bands to sell music through small online stores embedded on MySpace profiles and other Web pages, but like most attempts at creating sales models for music, the service has not been widely adopted. Snocap laid off half its employees in October.

Now MySpace is taking a different approach. For Transmissions, it will showcase the recordings and connect users to sites (like the online store for Mr. Blunt’s label) where the content can be purchased — without ever having to leave MySpace.

MySpace representatives said the financial terms for each deal would vary. In the case of Mr. Blunt, the Web site will not get a cut of the revenue.

Mr. Brooks described Transmissions as a new stage of growth for MySpace Music, which began with basic profiles of musicians and has evolved into a platform site with album exclusives, online shows and a national tour.

MySpace Music drew an average of 17.9 million unique visitors in October, making it the third-most-popular music Web site, behind Yahoo Music (22.4 million) and ArtistDirect (19.1 million). The MySpace site has had a 42 percent increase in traffic from October 2006, more than any comparable site.

Mr. Brooks said Transmissions represented the first in a series of new revenue models for music that the company planned to introduce.

“I think a lot of musicians are looking for new ways to forge ahead in the digital space,” he said, citing opportunities in the video and mobile arenas for potential expansion by MySpace.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/te...04myspace.html





Tired of Corruption but Afraid of the Crackdown
Choe Sang-Hun

For Choi Hae-pyung, head of an electronics parts maker, running his business over the last year has been like steering a boat through a double storm: competition from China and the rising value of the Korean currency have squeezed his already thin profit.

But those challenges were anticipated. What Mr. Choi did not foresee was a scandal.

For weeks, the manufacturing giant Samsung, which relies on thousands of parts suppliers, like Mr. Choi’s Green C& C Tech here, has been battered by accusations of corruption. Executives were banned from leaving the country. Prosecutors raided Samsung’s offices in search of traces of a suspected slush fund that was said to exceed $217 million.

“Everyone is watching what’s going to happen to Samsung,” Mr. Choi said. “If Samsung takes a punch, we feel the shock, too. If Samsung shrinks because of the investigation and cuts its investment, smaller companies like us will shut down in droves.”

Mr. Choi’s jitters help to explain why virtually no one in this country maintains that despite the enormity of its recurring scandals, Samsung should go the way of Enron.

South Koreans have grown tired of the corrupt ways of their big businesses. But because the economy is so heavily dependent on a handful of conglomerates, and their influence so pervasive in people’s daily lives, Koreans fear that striking these behemoths too harshly may hurt their own economic well-being.

Thus it has become a pattern: a scandal rocks one of these conglomerates, known as chaebol, roughly once a year. But by the time the scandal has run its course, executives accused of bribery walk away with light punishment, usually a suspended prison term accompanied by an admonition from the judge that they would have been punished more sternly were it not for their “contribution to the economy.”

So they all go back — supposedly in remorse, sometimes after making huge donations to charities — and continue to run their companies until the next scandal.

Many in South Korea saw no compelling reason to think it would be any different this time.

“There is a lot of slapping on the wrist and embarrassing exposure, but not full prosecution,” said Tom Coyner, president of Soft Landing Korea, a management consultant. “The scary thing about this is that people generally recognize Samsung is one of the best-managed corporations in South Korea. So if that’s the case with Samsung, it makes one wonder what degree of corruption we might find elsewhere.”

In a speech to Samsung workers on Monday, Yun Jong-yong, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, the group’s flagship company, lamented the “confusion” created by the scandal and said “there was fear among shareholders and investors that it may disrupt our management.”

This scandal is unlike any Samsung has faced because it involves a whistle-blower, a rare species in South Korea.

Over the last month, Kim Yong-chul, Samsung’s former chief in-house lawyer and a prosecutor before that, has contended that Samsung stashed away a gigantic slush fund. He said it was created with company money, hidden in dummy stock and bank accounts in the names of executives, including his own, and used to bribe politicians, prosecutors and journalists, and even to finance an art collection for the chairman’s family.

Samsung denies any wrongdoing. But for many, fear deepened that the company they have taken great pride in, an epitome of Korean export prowess, along with the embrace of global standards of corporate responsibility, is still hostage to what critics call a “culture of corruption.”

Twenty years ago, the chairman, Lee Kun-hee, 65, took over Samsung from his father, the founder, Lee Byung-chull. A recluse with a premature stoop but a visionary among chief executives, he has transformed Samsung from a cheap imitator of Japanese electronics into an empire that gives Sony, Nokia and Philips a good run for their money, marketing cellphones, computers and television sets.

Samsung held no celebration for the anniversary. In addition to the bribery scandal, there was another cloud: Mr. Lee’s ambitious plans to pass the torch to his son and heir, Jae Yong, now under the scrutiny of prosecutors and the public.

“Samsung is the spine of the economy,” said Na Seong-lin, an economist at Hanyang University in Seoul. “If it shakes, the economy shakes. If Samsung does something, it becomes the standard. But it never cast off the old vices of chaebol. It’s not free from corruption.”

Samsung is the largest of the chaebol, family-controlled conglomerates that were created during the country’s military rule as engines of its growth. They still dominate the economy here, listed in 2006 as the 13th largest in the world by the World Bank.

With 59 affiliates and 250,000 employees globally, Samsung generated sales of $160 billion in 2006, more than a fifth of the gross domestic product. Millions more, like Mr. Choi, depend on Samsung for their livelihood.

Mr. Choi’s Green C& C Tech factory is nestled on a small roadside hill in Hwasung, south of Seoul. Around it, a new bedroom community is going up, many of its apartment complexes emblazoned with a coveted brand name among home buyers: Samsung.

Inside the two-story factory, 100 workers use machines built by Samsung Techwin, another subsidiary, to make components that light up lamps behind flat-panel screens.

About 70 percent of Green C& C Tech’s 12 billion won, or $13 million, in sales last year came from parts shipped to Samsung.

Lee Ji-soon, an economist at Seoul National University, noted an overall trend toward reform of the conglomerates, but foresaw “scandals waiting to happen” as long as “companies find it hard to do business without currying favors with those with power.”

Heavy-handed bureaucrats, inconsistent prosecution, regulations based less on reality and more on momentary political considerations and a lack of legal lobbying — all this leads business executives to resort to bribery as protection, Mr. Lee and Mr. Coy ner of Soft Landing Korea said.

“No matter what problems it might have, Samsung is still the cleanest and most competitive company we can depend on in this time of economic uncertainty,” Mr. Choi said. “If we hurt Samsung too much, we will make the mistake of burning down our house to kill bedbugs.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/bu...04samsung.html





A.P. to Reorganize Work and Accent Multimedia
Cate Doty

After a decade of watching newspapers and rival wire services shrink, The Associated Press, the 161-year-old news cooperative, is refitting itself to handle the 24-hour news cycle it helped create.

“You have to adjust to the marketplace,” said Jim Kennedy, The A.P.’s vice president for strategic planning. “The new generation of consumers has completely different habits.”

To feed those habits and manage the news cycle more efficiently, The A.P. will change the way it files, edits and distributes stories, opening at least four regional editing hubs as part of a plan it calls AP2.0.

It is also expanding its multimedia packages for entertainment, business and sports reports. And the company is moving toward an all-digital platform it calls the “Digital Cooperative.”

The changes, The A.P. believes, will counter what hampered some of its rivals, like Dow Jones Newswires and Reuters, which, over the last decade, have cut their staffs as revenues have fallen.

Kathleen Carroll, The A.P.’s executive editor, said the company’s responsibility was to “preserve our future, so that we can continue to provide news from remote places,” and to “rev up our journalism” to make it compelling to customers.

The idea behind the regional hubs, which mimic an overhaul of The A.P.’s foreign operations earlier in the decade, is to reduce editing gridlock at its major filing desks, including that in New York. The regional hubs will handle coverage in their areas, and the New York desk will focus on “the stories that are the tip top of the day,” Ms. Carroll said.

Mr. Kennedy said another goal was to get editors in the regional bureaus back into reporting, which would increase the amount of content, and to reduce the number of people who work on an article during a news cycle.

Some employees, however, are wondering what these changes, particularly the new regional editing hubs, will mean for them.

“People are definitely jittery,” said Tony Winton, an A.P. broadcast correspondent based in Miami and the president of the News Media Guild, which represents A.P. workers. “It’s really hard to react to everything because the details have been so thin.”

The company has assured the guild that no layoffs are planned, and Ms. Carroll said The A.P. was still evaluating staff needs in each bureau, although some employees might have to move.

“I think anybody who’s in an editing job now is probably looking at some kind of change to their work,” Ms. Carroll said.

But Mr. Winton wondered what would happen to an editor whose regular position was moved to one of the regional hubs. “I think most of our members understand The A.P. has to stay competitive. We get that,” he said. “But this sort of cone of silence we’re under isn’t helping.”

Ms. Carroll acknowledged the uncertainty. “I think what’s frustrating for some people is that the answers to some of their questions just aren’t known yet,” she said. “And journalists are skeptics.”

Although The A.P. has expanded its staff over the last few years to nearly 4,100 employees, its rivals have struggled as the newspapers and newsrooms they served have shrunk. Reuters, the London-based wire service, cut 3,000 jobs in 2003 alone. United Press International, the onetime giant that fostered the careers of Walter Cronkite and Helen Thomas, has withered to a bare-bones operation in Washington and has been controlled by a company owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, since 2000.

The A.P.’s nonprofit status means it does not have to worry about falling stock prices and testy shareholders. But like any business, it depends on income for its survival, and is looking more toward advertising for revenue, Mr. Kennedy said.

In October, the company revised its prices for premium content, like multimedia offerings. Content also includes an invisible watermark, so the company can trace an article to see if it is being used without permission.

“They’re very much hawks on charging for it,” said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. “And why not? Because that’s the premise of their business. You’ve got to pay for it if you’re going to use it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/bu...ia/03apee.html





Study Reveals that Most Americans have False Sense of Online Security

More than half of computer users who think they are protected against online threats like spyware, viruses and hackers actually have inadequate or no online protection, according to an independent research study conducted for Verizon. Verizon's study, conducted with 545 U.S. Internet subscribers by the independent Internet research firm iTracks, contrasted participants' opinions about their level of online security against results of Verizon Security Advisor scans performed on their computers.

While 92 percent of participants thought they were safe, the scans revealed that 59 percent were actually vulnerable to a variety of online dangers. Ninety-four percent of those surveyed said they would find it helpful to be able to diagnose or check their online security status on a regular basis to make sure their PCs were safe.

The study's comparison between the real risk, as determined by the Verizon Security Advisor scan, and the participants' perceived risks showed that people are unknowingly exposing themselves to threats through bad habits such as relying on expired or old security software.

Today, nearly all new PCs come bundled with off-the-shelf security software provided as a limited-time trial or pre-paid, one-year subscription. However, at the end of the trial or full subscription period, buyers usually must renew the license and pay the vendor to continue the protection. If they don't, they may no longer receive protection or crucial updates, exposing themselves to a myriad of online threats that grow daily.

Other key findings of the study include:

• Spyware Protection: When asked how safe they felt their home PC was from spyware, 92 percent of respondents felt "safe" or "somewhat safe." In contrast, the Verizon Security Advisor scan revealed that the majority (58 percent) were "at risk" or "potential risk" from spyware infection. Nineteen percent were critically "at risk" from spyware infection.
• Virus Protection: When asked how safe they felt their home PC was from viruses, 92 percent of respondents felt "very safe" or "somewhat safe," whereas the Verizon Security Advisor scan revealed that 45 percent were "at risk" or "potential risk" from virus infection.
• Firewall Protection: Nineteen percent of respondents had their personal firewall turned off.

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=5658





Microsoft Wireless Keyboards Crypto Cracked

Tapping up
John Leyden

Security researchers have cracked the rudimentary encryption used in a range of popular wireless keyboards.

Bluetooth is increasingly becoming the de-facto standard for wireless communication in peripheral devices and is reckoned to be secure. But some manufacturers such as Logitech and Microsoft rely on 27 MHz radio technology which, it transpires, is anything but secure.

Using nothing more than a simple radio receiver, a soundcard and suitable software, Swiss security firm Dreamlab Technologies managed to capture and decode the radio communications between a keyboard and a PC. The attack opens the way up to all sorts of mischief including keystroke logging to capture login credentials to online banking sites or email accounts.

Dreamlab cracked the encryption key used within Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop 1000 and 2000 keyboards. As most products in Microsoft's wireless range are based on the same technology other products are likely to be insecure. Max Moser and Phillipp Schrödel of Dreamlab Technologies succeeded in eavesdropping traffic from a distance of up to ten meters using a simple radio receiver. More sensitive receivers may make it possible to capture keystrokes over larger distances.

Sniffing traffic between wireless keyboards and their base stations was possible because of the weak encryption used, as explained in a white paper from Dreamlab:

To our surprise, only the actual keystroke data seems to be encrypted. The Metaflags and identifier bits aren't encrypted or obfuscated. The one byte USB Hid code is encrypted using a simple XOR mechanism with a single byte of random data generated during the association procedure.

This means that there are only 256 different key values possible per keyboard and receiver pair. We did not notice any automated key change interval and therefore assume that the encryption key stays the same until the user reassociates the keyboard. 256 key combination can be brute forced even with very slow computers today. We did not analyze the quality of the random number so far because it was not needed to successfully break the encryption.

"Wireless communication is only as secure as the encryption technology used. Due to its nature, it can be tapped with little effort," said Dreamlab's Max Moser.

Dreamlab has reported the security loophole to Microsoft. The security researchers are holding off releasing details on exactly how the hack was pulled off pending the release of a fix, which it reckons may be a difficult and drawn-out process. The security researchers have however published a video of the attack here.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12...rypto_cracked/





Cafe Latte Attack Steals Credentials from Wi-Fi Clients

Would you like a corporate login with that espresso?
John Leyden

Hackers have refined a new technique for breaking into Wi-Fi networks protected by the aging Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP).

The so-called 'Cafe Latte' attack aims to retrieve the WEP keys from the PCs of road warriors. The approach concentrates its attack on wireless clients, as opposed to earlier attacks that cracked the key on wireless networks after sniffing a sufficient amount of traffic on a network.

"At its core, the attack uses various behavioral characteristics of the Windows wireless stack along with already known flaws in WEP," explains Vivek Ramachandran, a security researcher at AirTight Networks, who will demonstrate the approach at the Toorcon hacking conference in San Diego this weekend (19-21 October). "Depending upon the network configuration of the authorised network we will show that it is possible to recover the WEP key from an isolated Client within a time slot ranging between just a few minutes to a couple of hours."

The attack relies on a laptop's attempt to connect to a WEP-protected network as a means to trick it into sending thousands of WEP-encrypted ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) requests.

ARP is a network protocol that maps between a network layer address and a data link layer hardware address. ARP, for example, is used to resolve IP addresses to their corresponding Ethernet address. This is necessary because a host in an Ethernet network can only communicate with another host if it knows the MAC address.

Manipulating this process can generate a bundle of WEP-encrypted ARP traffic. This data is then analysed to extract a WEP key.

An attacker can then present his machine as a bridge to the internet towards prospective victims, inspecting their traffic and potentially installing files on compromised PCs.

The shortcomings in WEP have been known for years. In April other researchers revealed a technique that might be used to break the protocol in under two minutes, far less than needed for the Cafe Latte attack.

Despite this, WEP remains widely used in consumer, small business and retail environments. WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) system replaced WEP years ago but an estimated 41 per cent of businesses continue to use WEP, Infoworld reports.

Early Wi-Fi technology fitted in retail point-of-sale terminals, and warehouses reportedly support only WEP. Hackers who obtained millions of credit card records from TJX, the giant US retailer, are thought to have used these shortcomings to break into its systems.

The Cafe Latte attack also has implications for the development of more sophisticated honeypots, according to Ramachandran and Md Sohail Ahmad, a colleague at AirTight who helped develop the approach.

"This presentation debunking the age-old myth that to crack WEP, the attacker needs to be in the RF (radio) vicinity of the authorised network," Ramachandran and Ahmad explain.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10..._wi-fi_attack/





From January

Wireless Not Worth Hacking?

Times have changed
Guy Kewney

Opinion For four years, I've been pretty clear about my personal opinions on wireless hackers. I don't worry about them. So when I say: "It's time to worry about wireless hackers," it's not just another security consultant scare story being recycled - it's because I think things have changed.

What has changed? Easy: corporate networks have changed. It's no longer as easy as it was to penetrate a corporate firewall and compromise PCs on the LAN.

By comparison, the Wireless LAN is a softer target.

Ever since the first WiFi devices went on sale, people worried about the fact that other computer users might "share" their own wireless internet. And within days of the first warnings being posted about that, consultants began whipping up business by saying: "I drove down Whitehall and I saw a hundred insecure wireless networks!" or whatever town they lived in.

I was very relaxed about it. "It's not a problem," I said. "Nobody is going to hack into your computer. What on earth would they get out of it?

When the first easy hack of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption was published, I remained relaxed. Yes, it's possible to park a van outside my house with a PC inside, and run a WEP-cracker program. After two hours or so, you will probably be able to log onto my PC network, and use my internet. So... why would you?

My logic was pretty simply explained:- There are easier ways of getting an internet connection. If the hacker is one of my neighbours, then I think it's pretty unlikely they'll do it just to get internet. After all, the sort of person who has hacking skills is, typically, the sort of person who has a higher speed connection already than mine.

Are they going to spy on my computer? Hardly. The chances of hitting pay dirt look dim. My disk is packed with photographs of my family, and if you want to see the good ones, they're on FLICKR like everybody else's pix. All you get is the dross - out of focus, camera shake. Oh, and there's the incredibly tempting treasure trove of archive material - Personal Computer World columns going way back. Yes, I can just see a hacker cracking evil knuckles over the discovery of such a rich seam... NOT.

I do recommend using WEP. It's like shutting your front door: nobody is going to pretend that a front door would stop a serious criminal with a battering ram. But it will stop your neighbours from marching in and helping themselves from your fridge. And it's frankly a nuisance if your neighbours don't realise that the hotspot they are using isn't their own. They log onto "Linksys" because you set yours up with the default identity, and then they try to print something - and it comes out on your printer. An email from Auntie Nora. Oh, boy, boy, boy...

And the alternative hacker would be someone with a van. If you had a van equipped for hacking, why would you drive all the way into my street, feed the meter, and sit outside draining your car battery, when all you get is access to some nerd's PC?

But this isn't true, not any more. I think it was true a year ago, but over the last year, intrusion detection and prevention software - and hardware - has become really very clever.

Professional hackers exist. They work for shady groups involved in organised crime, and their way of making money is to compromise ten thousand PCs around the world with a virus or a trojan, and then launch all ten thousand in a denial of service attack on some corporate web site. With ten thousand machines all pinging one web site a hundred times a second, legitimate customers are crowded out, and massive damage is done to business.

The standard scam is to target an online bookmaker. Wait till the day before a big race or a global football match, and then release your bots for half an hour. Then send the message: "Send money, or we do the same thing tomorrow."

But you need a lot of bots. Once compromised, these PCs are quite easily to spot. So, within a few day or weeks you need new ones.

And it's not as easy as it was. Corporate virus protection is good. Intrusions are quickly spotted, compromised machines easily detected. You have to find ways of getting at that soft chewy centre before they know there's an exploit in the wild, and you have to do it without triggering safeguards.

What the pro hackers are doing, I'm told, is using the corporate laptop as their target.

Two nice, easy ways to do that. Either, sit outside the corporate campus with a powerful WiFi beacon, and create a link that looks like the corporate LAN. Then wait for users to log onto you, instead of the official signal, and collect passwords.

Alternatively, wait till the owner leaves the building.

At Air Defense, they say they're seeing deliberate targeting of individual PC owners. The financial director, in his office, is a tough nut to crack. But when he takes his laptop home for the weekend, he's logging onto a domestic wireless hotspot, which has none of the sophisticated safeguards that protect it at the office. And, typically, a senior executive has not yet been trained to leave important corporate information on the office server. They have an 80 gigabyte disk! - it's full of spreadsheets and databases.

And they also say they're seeing the coffee bar being targeted. Good, old-fashioned hacking tricks like the "evil twin" and "man in the middle" hacks mean that you can behave in all respects like the official Starbucks hub, but record all the transactions. Next thing you're logged onto the corporate LAN with full user privileges. Or you've loaded a trojan onto the laptop, and you know that next time it connects to the office LAN, a brand-new virus will compromise all the office PCs.

The logic of this depends on having a new exploit, which the office anti-virus software hasn't heard about. But chances are, the mobile user hasn't connected to the office anti-virus network for a day or so, and is vulnerable.

The trend is starting to frighten corporate IT managers. They are taking simple, direct action: insisting that employees work from desktop PCs, and stop being given laptops.

If that's a large-scale trend which gathers momentum over the next twelve months, you might expect to see the PC business suffer. The margins on portable machines are noticeably better, and costs of desktop machines are absurdly low - a $500 machine is good for anybody who isn't a mad gamer.

I think, though, the opposite may happen. I think people will continue to want notebook machines at home, and if the company doesn't give them one to take home, they may buy one of their own, thus effectively doubling the nmber of computers used.

We'll see which way it goes.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01...eless_hacking/





House Vote on Illegal Images Sweeps in Wi-Fi, Web Sites
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including "obscene" cartoons and drawings--or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user's account be retained for subsequent police inspection.

Before the House vote, which was a lopsided 409 to 2, Rep. Nick Lampson (D-Texas) held a press conference on Capitol Hill with John Walsh, the host of America's Most Wanted and Ernie Allen, head of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Allen said the legislation--called the Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act, or SAFE Act--will "ensure better reporting, investigation, and prosecution of those who use the Internet to distribute images of illegal child pornography."

The SAFE Act represents the latest in Congress' efforts--some of which have raised free speech and privacy concerns--to crack down on sex offenders and Internet predators. One bill introduced a year ago was even broader and would have forced Web sites and blogs to report illegal images. Another would require sex offenders to supply e-mail addresses and instant messaging user names.

Wednesday's vote caught Internet companies by surprise: the Democratic leadership rushed the SAFE Act to the floor under a procedure that's supposed to be reserved for noncontroversial legislation. It was introduced October 10, but has never received even one hearing or committee vote. In addition, the legislation approved this week has changed substantially since the earlier version and was not available for public review.

Not one Democrat opposed the SAFE Act. Two Republicans did: Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning presidential candidate from Texas, and Rep. Paul Broun from Georgia.

This is what the SAFE Act requires: Anyone providing an "electronic communication service" or "remote computing service" to the public who learns about the transmission or storage of information about certain illegal activities or an illegal image must (a) register their name, mailing address, phone number, and fax number with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's "CyberTipline" and (b) "make a report" to the CyberTipline that (c) must include any information about the person or Internet address behind the suspect activity and (d) the illegal images themselves. (By the way, "electronic communications service" and "remote computing service" providers already have some reporting requirements under existing law too.)

The definition of which images qualify as illegal is expansive. It includes obvious child pornography, meaning photographs and videos of children being molested. But it also includes photographs of fully clothed minors in overly "lascivious" poses, and certain obscene visual depictions including a "drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting." (Yes, that covers the subset of anime called hentai).

Someone providing a Wi-Fi connection probably won't have to worry about the SAFE Act's additional requirement of retaining all the suspect's personal files if the illegal images are "commingled or interspersed" with other data. But that retention requirement does concern Internet service providers, which would be in a position to comply. So would e-mail service providers, including both Web-based ones and companies that offer POP or IMAP services.

"USISPA has long supported harmonized reporting of child pornography incidents to the (NCMEC). ISPs report over 30,000 incidents a year, and we work closely with NCMEC and law enforcement on the investigation," Kate Dean, head of the U.S. Internet Service Provider Association, said on Wednesday. "We remain concerned, however, that industry would be required to retain images of child pornography after reporting them to NCMEC. It seems like the better approach would be to require the private sector to turn over illicit images and not retain copies."

Failure to comply with the SAFE Act would result in an initial fine of up to $150,000, and fines of up to $300,000 for subsequent offenses. That's the stick. There's a carrot as well: anyone who does comply is immune from civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions.

There are two more points worth noting. First, the vote on the SAFE Act seems unusually rushed. It's not entirely clear that the House Democratic leadership really meant this legislation to slap new restrictions on hundreds of thousands of Americans and small businesses who offer public wireless connections. But they'll nevertheless have to abide by the new rules if senators go along with this idea (and it's been a popular one in the Senate).

The second point is that Internet providers already are required by another federal law to report child pornography sightings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is in turn charged with forwarding that report to the appropriate police agency. So there's hardly an emergency, which makes the Democrats' rush for a vote more inexplicable than usual.
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-982...l?tag=nefd.top





Panorama Report on Wi-Fi was 'Misleading'
Matt Chapman

BBC complaints body rules against programme makers..

A Panorama programme claiming that Wi-Fi creates three times as much radiation as mobile phone masts was "misleading", an official BBC complaints ruling has found.

Two viewers complained that Panorama exaggerated the grounds for concern and wrongly suggested that Wi-Fi installations give off higher levels of radiation.

A further complaint suggested that the programme misleadingly presented an experiment to test whether certain people were hypersensitive to such radiation.

Professor Michael Repacholi, who appeared in the programme, also complained that the scientific issues had been presented in an unbalanced way, and that the treatment of his own contribution to the programme was unfair.

The BBC ruling found that it was legitimate for Panorama to focus on the public health issues raised by Sir William Stewart, chairman of the Health Protection Agency.

It also found that the results of an experiment on electro-sensitivity were correctly represented as inconclusive. However, the BBC report also identified a number of failings.

"The programme included only one contributor (Professor Repacholi) who disagreed with Sir William, compared with three scientists and a number of other speakers (one of whom was introduced as a former cancer specialist) who seconded his concerns," the ruling said.

"This gave a misleading impression of the state of scientific opinion on the issue."

Stewart claimed in the programme to have found evidence that low-level radiation from devices such as mobile phones and Wi-Fi could damage health, and called for a review.

The claims prompted a council body in north London to call for Wi-Fi use to be suspended in schools until an investigation had been carried out.

"I quite frankly think we are frying children's brains," said Labour councillor Emma Jones of Bruce Grove.

However, following the broadcast, a number of experts came forward to dismiss the claims.

Ben Goldacre, a doctor who runs the Bad Science website, stated that the programme makers had made melodramatic, misleading television instead of an informed documentary.

"In 28 minutes of TV you could have given a good summary of the research evidence so that people could make up their own minds. But that would not get you as many viewers," he said.

Les Hatton, a columnist on IT Week, wrote: "Many readers may be feeling that they need to wear tin-foil hats following the Panorama 'exposé' and the supposedly harmful effects on children caused by wireless networks.

"All I can say in reassurance is that this sort of mathematically dysfunctional scare-mongering drivel really makes me cross."

According to CRN, resellers reported record Wi-Fi sales in June despite the negative publicity generated by Panorama.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/66235,...isleading.aspx





Some Airlines to Offer In-Flight Internet Service
Susan Stellin

In-flight Internet access is finally taking off in the United States.

Starting next week and over the next few months, several airlines will begin taking the first steps toward offering Internet service on their planes.

On Tuesday, JetBlue Airways will begin offering a free e-mail and instant messaging service on one of its aircraft, while American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines plan to offer a broader Web experience in the coming months.

“I think 2008 is the year when we will finally start to see in-flight Internet access become available, but I suspect the rollout domestically will take place in a very measured way,” said Henry Harteveldt, an analyst with Forrester Research. “In a few years time, if you get on a flight that doesn’t have Internet access, it will be like walking into a hotel room that doesn’t have TV.”

The goal is to let passengers use their laptops or smartphones to download e-mail and use the Web as they would at any wireless hotspot on the ground. Virgin America even plans to link the technology to its seat-back entertainment system, enabling passengers who are not traveling with their own hardware to send and receive messages on a flight.

While the technology could allow travelers to make phone calls over the Internet, most carriers say they currently have no plans to allow voice communications. Many travelers find the prospect of phone calls much less palatable than having a seatmate quietly browsing the Web.

“That is one of those ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’ types of technologies,” Mr. Harteveldt said. “The last thing you want is to be in a crowded tube at 35,000 feet for two or three hours with some guy going on and on about his trip to Vegas.”

While companies have been promising airborne Internet service for years — the aircraft manufacturer Boeing did offer a system that was adopted by a few international carriers but is now defunct — JetBlue will be the first carrier in the United States to offer connectivity, albeit in a limited way.

During JetBlue’s initial trial, which will involve a single aircraft, passengers traveling with Wi-Fi equipped laptops will be able to access Yahoo e-mail accounts and Yahoo’s Messenger service, while those with Wi-Fi enabled BlackBerrys will be able to download their e-mail.

But if a test flight held this week is any indication of the challenges airlines and their technology partners face in trying to offer connectivity at 35,000 feet and 500 miles an hour, travelers can initially expect an experience reminiscent of the days of dial-up access — slower and more prone to glitches than a typical connection on the ground.

“Sometimes you just have to put things out there and see what happens when people try to use it,” said Nate Quigley, chief executive of LiveTV, a JetBlue subsidiary responsible for the airline’s Internet service as well as its in-flight entertainment system. “We’ll find the bugs and eventually get them worked out.”

JetBlue does not plan to charge for the service, while the other airlines and their technology partners are discussing fees of about $10 a flight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/te...06cnd-air.html





California's Testing Cracks ES&S Evoting System Wide Open
Ryan Paul

Earlier this year, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen established strict new standards for electronic voting machines, requiring independent code audits, Red Team security testing, and support for paper records. The Red Team testing process primarily involves subjecting the machines to review by security experts who attempt to hack the software and bypass the physical security mechanisms. Recent Red Team tests of ES&S voting machines have uncovered serious security flaws.

Previous Red Team tests commissioned by the state of California revealed significant vulnerabilities in devices sold by Diebold and Sequoia. At the time, ES&S declined to participate in the testing, citing lack of preparedness. The tests on the ES&S machines were finally conducted in October, and the results, which were recently published (PDF), show that products from ES&S are as insecure as the rest.

The first round of tests focused on the physical security of the Polling Ballot Counter (PBC), which the Red Team researchers were able to circumvent with little effort. "In the physical security testing, the wire- and tamper-proof paper seals were easily removed without damage to the seals using simple household chemicals and tools and could be replaced without detection," the report says. "Once the seals are bypassed, simple tools or easy modifications to simple tools could be used to access the computer and its components. The key lock for the Transfer Device was unlocked using a common office item without the special 'key' and the seal removed."

After bypassing the physical security of the voting machines, the Red Team researchers were able to gain direct access to all of the files on the systems, including password files. "Making a change to the BIOS to reconfigure the boot sequence allows the system to be booted up using external memory devices containing a bootable Linux copy," according to the researchers. "Once done, all the files can be accessed and potentially modified, including sensitive files such as the password file which can be cracked by openly available cracker programs. New users may be added with known passwords and used by the same attacker or other attackers later."

The Election Management System workstations were also found to be vulnerable, with critical security codes stored in files as plain text. The Red Team also discovered that the Election Loader System used unencrypted protocols to transmit election initialization data to the PBC units, which implies vulnerability to a man-in-the-middle attack. The Election Loader System is populated with data from an Election Distribution CD, which is generated by a special Election Converter Application. The researchers were able to break the encryption used on the generated CD to "breakdown the CD, revise the election definition, and replace the CD with a new encrypted CD with an alternate election definition." The researchers note that this tactic could be used to alter vote tallies.

ES&S is already in serious trouble in California for selling uncertified voting machines to several counties in violation of state law. The results of the Red Team test, which demonstrate beyond doubt that the security of ES&S voting machines is utterly inadequate for use in elections, make it seem unlikely that ES&S will be able to continue peddling their defective products in the state.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-machines.html





Now Online, a Guide to Detainee Treatment
Josh White

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments this week on the rights of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the public is getting another peek at how detainees have been treated there.

A leaked copy of a March 2004 manual of Gitmo's "Standard Operating Procedures" for Camp Delta was published yesterday by the Web site Wikileaks.org. It deals with everything a guard at Guantanamo would need to know, from how to remove detainees' clothing when they first arrive (cut it off) to what guards should do if they find a detainee's plastic foam cup with writing on it (confiscate it). Rolls of toilet paper are considered "comfort items" that can be given to detainees as rewards.

The manual also confirms previous reports about dogs being used at the facility and detainees spending time in "segregation cells," either as punishment or for intelligence gathering. The nearly 250-page document provides details about the daily operations at the facility in the days before the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal surfaced publicly. What happened at the prison in Iraq focused attention on the Guantanamo facility and its commander, Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller.

Much of the manual deals with how to treat detainees, with one section discussing how to handle their personal items. If items are damaged, for example, guards are directed to punish the detainee. With regard to "linen items" such as blankets, clothing, sheets or towels, the manual says, "If a detainee tears, rips, or otherwise damages this item or makes it into a weapon or self-harm device, it will be confiscated and the detainee disciplined for damaging or destroying government property."

The manual discusses the facility's "behavior management plan" for the first two weeks after a detainee's arrival, when he has no access to the International Committee of the Red Cross or a chaplain: "The purpose of the Behavior Management Plan is to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process," the manual says. "It concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on his interrogator."

Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, a Guantanamo spokesman, said officials received a copy of the manual yesterday and are trying to authenticate it. Wikileaks also published a copy of the 2003 Guantanamo manual last month. Haupt said the manuals are constantly updated and that "things have changed dramatically" in the years since.

Marked "for official use only," the manual is not meant for public release but contains little if any sensitive information.

While it is of some concern that the manual has been released, Haupt said, "it's not typically considered a threat to national security. This type of unclassified information could give the enemy an edge up on how we do business so they in turn can develop their own tactics, techniques and procedures to train against us."

Developed under Miller's command, the manual is similar to the 2003 version of the same document, an electronic copy of which was left with officials at Abu Ghraib when Miller traveled there on an advisory visit in September 2003. Miller later commanded all detention facilities in Iraq as the abuse scandal was investigated in 2004.

In the 2004 manual, guards are warned not to teach the detainees songs or English phrases and not to take an active role in interrogations or to even listen to what is said during interrogations. Guards are also told not to talk about current events.

"Do not: (1) Discuss current world events or history with detainees, or within earshot of detainees, that could upset or influence detainee actions or attitudes, such as the situation in the Middle East, the destruction of the Space Shuttle, or information concerning terrorist groups or personnel."

The manual is posted at http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Gitmo-sop-2004.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...pid=sec-nation





A to Z

Best Buy Porn Thief Inquisitions Revealed

After reading "How Geek Squad Investigated Its Own Porn Thieves," another fired Geek Squad tech has chimed in to tell us how the internal witch hunt for porn thieves proceeded.

I had worked for Geek Squad for over a year, and Best Buy a year and a half before that and was recently let go. Back when they started scanning computers, they said they found downloaded music and movies on our machine and we were to send them the hard drives. So we boxed them up and sent them out.

A month or so later the interrogations happened. We all had our turn, and when it was mine, I walked into a room with the table pushed against the wall and two chairs in the middle of the room sitting two feet apart with nothing in between.
Our store's loss prevention manager and the district loss prevention manager was there, and I reached out to shake his hand. He shook mine, looked me in the eyes and said "I already know if you are going to tell me the truth or not," with an intimidating grip on my hand still. Then we sat down, our knees inches apart. He asked me how long I had worked there, and how many hours a week I worked, why I liked working there. He didn't really care why, he just wanted to tell me why he liked working for Best Buy. He told me, "Well, I used to be a cop, and when you're a cop everything you do is reactive, you can't really stop people from committing crimes. Here I normally get to come in and make sure processes are in place so we don't have problems. But here we have a problem, and now I have to be reactive and be a cop again."

From there he asked me all sorts of questions about why there was music on our computer and where it came from, which was mostly us backing up customer's music because they paid us to, and my coworkers and i bringing in our iPods, which was ok with all the levels of management in the store. He even made a joke about how that wasn't "SOP" (the Best Buy bible), but he knew that our store LP manager was ok with it. It was ok because they trusted us. I was asked why we had Linux isos, which made me laugh. Also, during the interview anytime I was asked a question, I don't know wasn't an acceptable answer. At one point I stopped answering him because I was just sitting there saying I don't know. Then he had me write down everything I knew about in the precinct and sign it at the bottom. The district manager told me he would read it over afterwards to make sure it was "what they needed." I filled out the paper, signed it and gave it to him. Then they told me if I talked to anyone about what happened I would be fired.

Then the interesting began. My supervisor immediately started looking for another position at one of the 3 new stores opening in our area. He got one and put in his two week notice and stopped caring about his job. Everything started falling apart, then he left so we had no supervisor. So I put in my two week notice and found another job. The thing was our supervisor didn't know anything about fixing computers. All he card about was "selling our services" to people so he would meet his budgets and then tell us techs to fix whatever the customer wrote down which more than once included "retrieve deleted files" which yes we could have done if we were allowed to use the software, but we weren't. So he left and everything got better. And I talked to my general manager about staying, and he told me he saw how I had helped being a leader once our supervisor left and he was impressed and would like to see me move up in the company. A few days later we had a new supervisor who was a really nice guy and knew his stuff about computer fixing.

Now, I know you guys know about Jonny Utah (internally Geek Squad drops the 'h' so they don't get sued). Well I despise JonnyUtah. The entire time I worked there we were given goals of a certain number of computers which were to be fixed by JonnyUtah each week. The goal was seven. Most of the time we didn't hit our JonnyUtah goals because we were able to fix all the computers we brought in ourselves without needing help. I disliked it because:

1) I didn't get to work on the customer's computer
2) Someone in another country that does not have the same privacy laws as the United States was fixing our customer's computers.
3) Anytime we asked where the JonnyUtah guys were located we were told either it was "Top Secret" or "An undisclosed cave in a mountain on a remote island." Seriously.
4) We did a much better job than Jonny ever. We had so many people bring computers back that those guys "fixed" still having problems or hardware issues that you can't really fix over a remote connection.

On October 18th, the day after my birthday I came into work early and the entire district staff (probably 6 or 7 people) were hanging out in our area where we fix computers talking to my friend who was one of the other full time techs. I went into the break room to eat my lunch and my buddy came in and told me the district guys were asking him if he would be offended if he had to go out on the floor and sell Geek Squad services instead of fixing computers, and having JonnyUtah fix more of the computers. I clocked in and five minutes later was told by my general manager that I was being let go for having music and movies and unapproved software on the computer.

So whatever I don't work there anymore, I'm not crying. But I wish people would realize that Geek Squad isn't worth what you pay. Best Buy's rules kept us from being great computer techs. They wouldn't let us use linux in the store to do data backups because that required an extra $1500 (not exaggerating) from the customer and we had to UPS the drive to California. We weren't allowed to do laptop repair in the store, even though I'm capable of handling a soldering iron to reattach people's DC power jacks. And they'll tell you this is because they are sending them to the "laptop techs" or whatever, but most of the time that stuff would come back broke anyways and customer's would yell at us. It was a horrible situation for everyone and I think shows that not everything can work on a large scale. For someone like me computer repair is easy. I could have done so much more than they expected of me and brought in so much more money for them and made customers a lot happier not having to wait two days for a guy to put his laptop on the UPS truck. But that's the thing. Geek Squad doesn't want me. They want someone who will take your money and have someone in another country actually do the work. To sell you a $59 diagnostic fee to call you the next day and say "yeah, your laptop is completely dead just like you told us, com buy a new one."

I hope people start realizing that Geek Squad is nothing more than marketing. You see the tie and the white shirt and you assume that the agent knows what they're talking about. The truth is most of them don't. There are no tests. There is very little training and that is mostly on how to sell things. In fact my old supervisor had a motto I heard him use way too often: Perception is reality.

I've enjoyed reading your site since before any of this ever happened, and although in some round about way I ended up getting fire because of an article that was posted on your site, I'll forever support you guys because it's sites like this that can make a difference (and you guys have) in how companies do their business and treat their customers.

Cheers,
Agent Zero

http://consumerist.com/consumer/leak...led-328949.php





The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)

Act I: The act of buying

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007
Act II: The act of giving

[i]f he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong…

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

[Y]ou can’t give them as gifts, and due to restrictive antipiracy software, you can’t lend them out or resell them.

Newsweek, The Future of Reading
Act III: The act of lending

As you may have read in the newspapers over the past few days, we’ve been criticized by the leadership of a small, but vocal organization because we sell used books on our website. This group (which, by the way, is the same organization that from time to time has advocated charging public libraries royalties on books they loan out) claims that we’re damaging the book industry and authors by offering used books to our customers.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild

Libraries, though, have developed lending procedures for previous versions of e-books — like the tape in “Mission: Impossible,” they evaporate after the loan period — and Bezos says that he’s open to the idea of eventually doing that with the Kindle.

Newsweek, The Future of Reading
Act IV: The act of reading

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…

George Orwell, “1984″, Book One, Chapter 5

The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device). Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make in your Device are backed up through the Service.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service
Act V: The act of remembering

Another possible change: with connected books, the tether between the author and the book is still active after purchase. Errata can be corrected instantly. Updates, no problem.

Newsweek, The Future of Reading

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

George Orwell, “1984″, Book One, Chapter 3
Act VI: The act of learning

If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook publishers, I could see a lot of college students switching to this. Get rid of all your text books and have this single electronic device.

Ankit Gupta

School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.

Students were not usually expelled for this — not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200...ure-of-reading





Hack: Young Professor Makes Lab-on-a-Chip with Shrinky Dink and Toaster Oven
Aaron Rowe

A young professor has used her favorite childhood toy, a laser printer, and a toaster oven to make microfluidic devices - tiny computer chips with plumbing that are usually fabricated in multimillion dollar labs.

When she began working at the University of California Merced last year, Michelle Khine was eager to get started with her research, but stuck without sophisticated equipment.

In an act of desperation, she turned to Shrinky Dinks-- plastic sheets that get smaller when they are baked in a household oven.

"I am not a patient person, and being a new faculty member at a brand new university, I did not immediately have the cleanroom facilities I am accustomed to," says Khine, "And desperation is the mother of invention (or something like that). So as I was brainstorming solutions, I remembered my favorite childhood toy and decided to try it in my kitchen one night."

Khine and her team designed complicated patterns in Auto CAD, printed them onto Shrinky Dinks, and then heated the plastic toys in an inexpensive oven. As the sheets became smaller, the lines of print would bulge out. Taller and more pronounced, the miniaturized pattern served as a perfect mould for forming rounded, narrow channels in PDMS -- a clear, synthetic rubber.

In addition to making some simpler devices, Khine and her team emblazoned a Christmas tree design into a piece of PDMS and showed how it can blend different types of food coloring to make a rainbow pattern. Since microfluidic devices are sometimes used for biological research, the young professor also showed that Chinese Hamster Ovary cells can flow through through the narrow channels.

Khine described her work in Lab on a Chip, a journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. The report, which became available online this November, is completely free and surprisingly easy to understand.

"This is certainly becoming a major thrust of my research, though that was not the intention," says Khine.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2...er-scienc.html





Pavarotti's Widow Seeking $44 Million from his Friends in Defamation Lawsuit
Alessandra Rizzo

Luciano Pavarotti's widow has sued two friends of the late tenor for $44 million, claiming their comments about her marriage were defamatory, her lawyer said Monday.

Nicoletta Mantovani filed the lawsuit last month after warning that speculation about the state of her marriage to Pavarotti would not be tolerated, her lawyer said.

Pavarotti died Sept. 6 of pancreatic cancer at age 71. Soon after, friends close to the tenor told Italian media that he had been unhappy in the marriage, and that Mantovani was fighting his grown daughters from an earlier marriage over his estate.
http://www.newstimes.com/entertainment/ci_7569134





Seeking Mr. and Mrs. Right for a Baby on the Way
A. O. Scott

Juno MacGuff, the title character of Jason Reitman’s new film, is 16 and pregnant, but “Juno” could not be further from the kind of hand-wringing, moralizing melodrama that such a condition might suggest. Juno, played by the poised, frighteningly talented Ellen Page, is too odd and too smart to be either a case study or the object of leering disapproval. She assesses her problem, and weighs her response to it, with disconcerting sang-froid.

It’s not that Juno treats her pregnancy as a joke, but rather that in the sardonic spirit of the screenwriter, Diablo Cody, she can’t help finding humor in it. Tiny of frame and huge of belly, Juno utters wisecracks as if they were breathing exercises, referring to herself as “the cautionary whale.”

At first her sarcasm is bracing and also a bit jarring — “Hello, I’d like to procure a hasty abortion,” she says when she calls a women’s health clinic — but as “Juno” follows her from pregnancy test to delivery room (and hastily retreats from the prospect of abortion), it takes on surprising delicacy and emotional depth. The snappy one-liners are a brilliant distraction, Ms. Cody’s way of clearing your throat for the lump you’re likely to find there in the movie’s last scenes.

The first time I saw “Juno,” I was shocked to find myself tearing up at the end, since I’d spent the first 15 minutes or so gnashing my teeth and checking my watch. The passive-aggressive pseudo-folk songs, the self-consciously clever dialogue, the generic, instantly mockable suburban setting — if you can find Sundance on a map, you’ll swear you’ve been here before.

But “Juno” (which played at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, not the one in Park City, Utah) respects the idiosyncrasies of its characters rather than exaggerating them or holding them up for ridicule. And like Juno herself, the film outgrows its own mannerisms and defenses, evolving from a coy, knowing farce into a heartfelt, serious comedy.

A good deal of the credit for this goes to Ms. Page, a 20-year-old Canadian who is able to seem, in the space of a single scene, mature beyond her years and disarmingly childlike. The naïveté that peeks through her flippant, wised-up facade is essential, since part of the movie’s point is that Juno is not quite as smart or as capable as she thinks she is.

It’s not simply that she has impulsive, unprotected sex with her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), or that she decides, against the advice of parents and friends, to have the baby and give it up for adoption. These, indeed, are choices she is prepared to defend and to live with. Rather, Juno’s immaturity resides in her familiar adolescent assumption that she understands the world better than her elders do, and that she can finesse the unintended consequences of her decisions.

The grown-ups, at first, seem like familiar caricatures of adolescent-centered cinema: square, sad and clueless. But Juno’s father (J. K. Simmons) and step-mother (Allison Janney) turn out to be complicated, intelligent people, too, and not just because they are played by two of the best character actors around. Ms. Cody’s script and Mr. Reitman’s understated, observant direction allow the personalities of the characters to emerge slowly, and to change in credible and unpredictable ways.

This is especially true of Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), the baby’s potential adoptive parents. The audience’s initial impression of them, like Juno’s, is of stereotypically smug yuppies trapped in rickety conventions of heterosexual domesticity. Vanessa is uptight and materialistic, while Mark tends the guttering flame of his youthful hipness, watching cult horror movies and trading alternative-rock mix CDs with Juno.

Juno is, on the surface at least, a familiar type, surrounding herself with and expressing herself by means of kitschy consumer detritus (she calls the clinic on a hamburger phone) and pop cultural ephemera. She could be the hero of a Judd Apatow comedy (like, say, Mr. Cera, the boneless wonder of “Superbad” and a purely delightful presence here). Except, of course, that she’s female. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Ms. Cody, Mr. Reitman and Ms. Page have conspired, intentionally or not, to produce a feminist, girl-powered rejoinder and complement to “Knocked Up.” Despite what most products of the Hollywood comedy boys’ club would have you believe, it is possible to possess both a uterus and a sense of humor.

“Juno” also shares with “Knocked Up” an underlying theme, a message that is not anti-abortion but rather pro-adulthood. It follows its heroine — and by the end she has earned that title — on a twisty path toward responsibility and greater self-understanding.

This is the course followed by most coming-of-age stories, though not many are so daring in their treatment of teenage pregnancy, which this film flirts with presenting not just as bearable but attractive. Kids, please! Heed the cautionary whale. But in the meantime, have a good time at “Juno.” Bring your parents, too.

“Juno” is, somewhat remarkably, rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has sexual situations, obviously, but no nudity or violence and not much swearing.


JUNO

Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Jason Reitman; written by Diablo Cody; director of photography, Eric Steelberg; edited by Dana E. Glauberman; music by Mateo Messina; production designer, Steve Saklad; produced by Lianne Halfon, John Malkovich, Mason Novick and Russell Smith; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes.


WITH: Ellen Page (Juno MacGuff), Michael Cera (Paulie Bleeker), Jennifer Garner (Vanessa Loring), Jason Bateman (Mark Loring), Allison Janney (Bren MacGuff), J. K. Simmons (Mac MacGuff) and Olivia Thirlby (Leah).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/movies/05juno.html





Birmingham City Schools Will be First in Nation to Get $200 XO Laptops
Marie Leech

Birmingham city schools will be the first in the nation to receive laptop computers designed for children in third-world countries under an agreement completed over the weekend, Mayor Larry Langford announced Monday.

Langford signed a purchase agreement for 15,000 laptops from One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit foundation whose goal is to provide every child in the world with access to technology.

"We live in a digital age, so it is important that all our children have equal access to technology and are able to integrate it into all aspects of their lives," Langford said. "We are proud that Birmingham is on its way to eliminating the so-called `digital divide' and to ensuring that our children have state-of-the-art tools for education."

Under the agreement, the city will buy 15,000 laptops for $200 each, Langford said. The $3 million deal will allow every child in grades one through eight in Birmingham city schools to receive a laptop, he said.

"Our students will have access to global thinking now," said Birmingham schools Superintendent Stan Mims. "It becomes a tipping point in the digital divide."

Langford has asked the City Council to approve $7 million for the laptops and a scholarship program that would give Birmingham students with a C average or above a scholarship to college or tech school of their choice. The City Council has not yet approved the funding.

The rugged, waterproof computers will be distributed to students on April 15, Langford said, and children will be allowed to take them home. If a computer is lost, the school system can disable it, rendering it useless, Langford said. Students will turn in their computers at the end of their eighth-grade year.

Kids know how:

The machine, called the XO Laptop and dubbed the "$100 laptop," was designed by Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory. He set out to build a $100 laptop so every child in developing countries could have access to new channels of learning, said Jackie Lustig, spokeswoman for One Laptop Per Child.

The XO didn't make the target price and it sells for about $200, still far below the $500 price tag of most basic laptop computers in U.S. retail shops, Lustig said.

Langford said training for the computers will not be a problem, as they were designed for children to pick up on immediately.

"Get the computers, get them in the children's hands and get out of the way," he said. He brought back two demo computers from his weekend trip to Boston and said a 3-year-old went up to him at a restaurant and began teaching him to use the computer.

"Every child in this restaurant came up to me and within minutes, they were on Google surfing the Web," he said. Even though the computers are so easy to use, Langford said a consulting firm has offered to train students in all Birmingham schools.

Langford said he was asked to be the national spokesman for the program as other U.S. cities begin taking advantage of One Laptop Per Child.

Buy one, give one:

Last month only, the foundation opened sales to residents in the United States and Canada, who could buy the laptops for $399. Each purchase funded a second laptop that went to a needy child in a developing country.

The machines don't run Microsoft Office, Photoshop or any other standard Mac or Windows programs, instead using a free, open-source version of GNU/Linux, with a simplified graphical interface designed for children that is called Sugar, Lustig said.

The laptop has a 500-megahertz processor and 256 megabytes of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) with 1 gigabyte of flash memory.

The laptops have Web browsers and their own Wi-Fi system, the ability to connect to the Internet wirelessly.

Some Birmingham schools already have wireless capabilities, said Claudia Williams, chief academic officer, and the system is about to begin a "major technology upgrade" with a portion of the $300 million it received from Jefferson County's one-cent-on-the-dollar sales tax increase.

"The upgrade will be no less than top-notch, and if these computers run on wireless, then that's what we'll have in our schools," she said.

The computer can be used to compose music and has programs designed to teach students all types of math, science, reading and social studies, Langford said. Each is on a "mesh network," meaning all the laptops can see each other, without any setup, even if there is no wireless connection nearby.

The mesh networking allows classmates and teachers to see what each class member is working on.

Langford said the computers are more than sufficient for Birmingham students' needs. "We're not trying to give these kids a computer that would launch a space shuttle."
http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2007/12/...ls_will_b.html





Donald Duck Is a Music Pirate, and His Nephews Too
Ernesto

The latest issue of the Donald Duck magazine in The Netherlands features Donald and his nephews as music pirates and (who else) Uncle Scrooge as the big boss of a record label threatening with fines. Has the anti-piracy lobby infiltrated the Donald Duck magazine?

The short comic presents the Dutch youngsters with a short lesson in copyright. Huey, Dewey and Lewey don’t have money for the latest “Jan Goudsmid” album, so they decide to download it (presumably with BitTorrent). They argue that they can always buy it later when they have the money. When the nephews tell this to Donald he realizes that he can make a lot of money from this by copying and selling CDs on the street.

Huey, Dewey and Lewey are shocked by Donald’s plan, and tell him it’s not fair because the CD is copyrighted. “If nobody buys CDs anymore, the record labels and artists will become beggars,” they add. Donald doesn’t listen of course and tries to make 100 copies of a CD he bought. In the end Donald’s plan is stopped by Uncle Scrooge, who warns Donald that he will have to pay a huge sum of money if he doesn’t stop the pirating (yes, it’s all about money).

… ain’t that a great message Disney is sending to the Dutch youngsters?

Several Dutch websites suspected that the anti-piracy organization BREIN was somehow behind this propagandists comic. However, the Donald Duck magazine denied the involvement of BREIN, or any other organization. Thom Roep, the head editor of the Donald Duck magazine, further apologized for the preaching tone used in the story, especially when the nephews were talking about copyright. He explained that they decided to run this story because it is a nice illustration how Huey, Dewey and Lewey outsmart their uncle once again.

It’s certainly smart to download music if you don’t have the money to buy a CD. The nephews were smart enough not to become commercial pirates, they just did it for personal use, which is not that bad according to the comic (downloading music is not illegal in the Netherlands). If BREIN really was involved, I think the nephews wouldn’t have downloaded the CD at all, they would lose their “merit patch in respecting copyright” if they did.

On top of this, I don’t think any anti-piracy organization would make Scrooge the boss of a music label, even though they know it is a pretty accurate comparison. Here is a link to the comic in Dutch.
http://torrentfreak.com/donald-duck-...pirate-071204/





Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck Summonsed to Court
From correspondents in Milan

MICKEY Mouse and Donald Duck will finally get their day in court if summons served by judicial authorities in Italy are to be believed.

In what appears to be a bizarre bureaucratic blunder, the Disney cartoon characters have been named as witnesses in the trial of a Chinese man accused of peddling counterfeit toys and decals bearing the images of the pair.

A copy of the summons obtained by Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Sera says Signor Topolino (Mickey Mouse) and Signor Paperino (Donald Duck) are kindly instructed to appear before the Naples Tribunal on December 7.

The summons originally compiled by officials in Naples was later reproduced by a Milan judicial office and delivered to lawyers representing the US-based Walt Disney company, owner of the trademarks for the cartoon characters.

Judicial authorities weren't immediately available for comment but Corriere della Sera suggests it's unlikely the star witnesses will show up in court. http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599...-1702,00.html#

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

December 1st, November 24th, November 17th, November 10th

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


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