[JackSpratts]

MPAA Wants to Stop DVRs from Recording Some Movies
Matthew Lasar

At the request of theatrical film makers, the Federal Communications Commission on Friday quietly launched a proceeding on whether to let video program distributors remotely block consumers from recording recently released movies on their DVRs. The technology that does this is called Selectable Output Control (SOC), but the FCC restricts its use. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wants a waiver on that restriction in the case of high-definition movies broadcast prior to their release as DVDs.

"The Petitioners' theatrical movies are too valuable in this early distribution window to risk their exposure to unauthorized copying," MPAA wrote to the FCC last month. "Distribution over insecure outputs would facilitate the illegal copying and redistribution of this high value content, causing untold damage to the DVD and other 'downstream' markets." Less than a month after the request, the FCC has given MPAA a public comment period on the question that will last through July 7.

Expedited distribution—with one, big caveat

MPAA has pressed its Petition for Expedited Special Relief on behalf of Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal City Studios Walt Disney Studios, and Warner Brothers. How did these media companies get an FCC proceeding so fast? Ars bets that hiring former FCC Commissioner Kathleen Q. Abernathy as their attorney helped. Abernathy supported former FCC Chair Michael Powell's drastic relaxation of the agency's media ownership rules in 2003, along with Kevin Martin, now head of the agency.

Movies go through a timeline of staged releases that lasts about three years. First they go to theaters; 60 days after that they start showing up in airplanes and hotels; in 120 days from their theatrical release they transfer to DVD and Internet download; about a month later to video on demand/pay-per-view; by the end of the year to premium subscription systems like HBO and Showtime; and eventually to basic cable and free TV.

MPAA says these studios want to release their movies to multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) "significantly earlier and prior to DVD release"—although the trade groups' filing won't say exactly how much sooner. But in exchange for the accelerated service, MPAA wants permission to obtain SOC blocking of recording capabilities. The group promises that once said movies have reached the home video sale/rental stage, the blocking will stop.

The movie lobby wants a waiver from FCC rules prohibiting MVPDs from adding code to digital video streams, that, among other restrictions, could block copying. Here is the rule: "A covered entity shall not attach or embed data or information with commercial audiovisual content, or otherwise apply to, associate with, or allow such data to persist in or remain associated with such content, so as to prevent its output through any analog or digital output authorized or permitted under license, law or regulation governing such covered product."

MPPA notes that the Commission did say in 2003 that it would consider adjusting this policy around SOC. "We nonetheless recognize that selectable output control functionality might have future applications that could potentially be advantageous to consumers," MPAA observes that the FCC declared in a late 2003 Report and Order, "such as facilitating new business models."

We're here to help

MPAA argues that, in addition to getting first-run movies to the public sooner, giving movie studios a break on this issue could also aid the DTV transition. The enhanced service "will encourage the purchase of HDTV sets by consumers, and thereby ensure that a greater number of citizens have the necessary equipment to receive broadcast digital programming by February 17, 2009."

But unquoted in MPAA's petition is this passage from the same FCC Report and Order: "We also recognize consumers’ expectations that their digital televisions and other equipment will work to their full capabilities, and the potential harm to the DTV transition if those expectations are frustrated," the Commission observed. "In particular, we are concerned that selectable output control would harm those 'early adopters' whose DTV equipment only has component analog inputs for high definition display, placing these consumers at risk of being completely shut off from the high-definition content they expect to receive."

Needless to say, this proposal is likely to get a very cold reception from groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). EFF already warns that SOC and "down resolution"—strategically lowering the level of digital quality—could undermine HDTV. "Many current and novel devices rely on unrestricted outputs, particularly component analog connections," EFF says.

Not surprisingly, the Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC) opposes SOC too. "In the long term, imposition of SOC could have the effect of driving from the market any home interface that supports home recording," the group observes. Fears that MPAA's proposal represents a foot in the door to much wider interference with consumer digital applications may also play a role in this discussion.

The FCC wants comments and oppositions to MPAA's proposal by June 25 and replies to comments by July 7.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...me-movies.html





Digital Copyright: it's All Wrong
Graeme Philipson

A draft treaty proposes draconian measures to protect copyright.

THE forces of reaction are fighting back. As they often do, they are carrying out their planning in secret, in the knowledge that if more people knew of their activities they would not be allowed to get away with it.

The US (surprise, surprise) has circulated a draft "Discussion Paper on a Possible Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) for the next G8 meeting, in Tokyo in July. The full text of the document has been published on Wikileaks (wikileaks.org).

The ACTA draft is a scary document. If a treaty based on its provisions were adopted, it would enable any border guard, in any treaty country, to check any electronic device for any content that they suspect infringes copyright laws. They need no proof, only suspicion.

They would be able to seize any device - laptop, iPod, DVD recorder, mobile phone, etc - and confiscate it or destroy anything on it, merely on suspicion. On the spot, no lawyers, no right of appeal, no nothing.

The draft contains other draconian measures. It proposes a governing body for copyright protection that would operate outside organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the UN. In short, it proposes a global police force, answerable to no one, with intrusive powers that vastly exceed those currently available to adherents of the concept of intellectual property.

The proposed treaty is being sponsored by a small group of US Congress members, all of whom Wikileaks says have received significant contributions from major record companies and film studios. As they say, "follow the money".

The first newspaper to break the story was Canada's The Ottawa Citizen, which in a story by Vito Pilieci on May 24 picked up on the Wikileaks posting. Since then the blogosphere has been rife with stories about the move. Most commentators are outraged that such a proposal is even being considered.

For 10 years in this column and elsewhere I have been arguing that the concept of copyright, and by extension most forms of so-called "intellectual property", are irrelevant in the digital era. I was once, with just a few others, a voice in the wilderness. Now most people I talk with agree.

The copyright mafia have tried all sorts of things, including the absurdity of Digital Rights Management (DRM), which attempts to use technology to hobble technology. They have maliciously prosecuted individuals for the "crime" of copying music from one medium to another.

DRM is struggling, but we still see stupidity everywhere. Apple doesn't let you copy stuff off your iPod - you have to use third-party software to perform what should be a simple task. Foxtel's iQ and Austar's MyStar don't let you copy stuff off those boxes to other media.

Downloaded movies self-destruct after a limited time. It is still illegal in Australia to copy a CD to another CD (only "format shifting" is allowed), or to record a TV show for any other purpose than watching it once.

Whether this absurd treaty becomes reality or not, it indicates the lengths to which some are prepared to go. They will use any means to fight a technology that threatens their anachronistic monopoly of the distribution of digital content.

Clever people are taking advantage of the technology to develop new business models and reach new audiences. Bands are bypassing record companies and going direct to consumers. Authors are publishing online. Small moviemakers are finding new outlets through the wonders of the internet.

The big record companies and film studios have a clever answer - turn everybody into criminals. Use treaties and laws to try to prevent people doing what comes naturally and, in the digital age, easily.

The most that can be hoped of the proposed ACTA treaty is that, if it comes into being, it will further expose the futility of legislating against the key advantage of digital technology - the ease with which content can be stored, copied and transmitted. Where the technology is liberating people and content, the powers of reaction are attempting to stifle it.

Fortunately they are on the wrong side of history. When the full details and consequences of this treaty become widely known, I believe the effect will be the opposite of what its authors intend. It contains so little understanding of the way the digital world works that the backlash against it will be massive, accelerating the inevitable death of the out-of-date business models it is vainly trying to protect.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/perspecti...863545123.html





A History of Copy Protection
Adam Swiderski

The epic struggle between game makers and pirates has yielded some crazy copy protection methods over the past decades. Here's how far we've come in the realm of security...

Recently, Bioware technical producer Derek French caused a stir by announcing that PC versions of both Mass Effect and Spore would utilize online SecuROM copy protection that required the games to automatically re-check with a central server every ten days. The idea was roundly and vigorously panned by the gaming community, to the point at which EA chose to relent and alter its plans rather than suffer the public relations backlash.

All's well that ends well, and yet this minor kafuffle is only the latest salvo in a war that has been waged for decades between those who produce and sell the games we play and the software pirates who would see them copied and illegally distributed. It's made copy protection a hot topic of discussion lately in PC gaming. Its roots, however, reach all the way back to the dawn of computer gaming as a pursuit.

The Early Years

Software piracy has always been a thorn in the side of the gaming world, but in the beginning, it was less of an issue than it is today. The industry was in its infancy, and the idea that games would someday be the kind of multi-billion dollar behemoth that would be plagued by the effects of widespread piracy was unfathomable. The PC was still primarily a business and productivity tool, and what gaming experience it could offer often came in such primitive formats as magazine-based code that had to be manually typed into DOS.

What's more, pirating and sharing games back then was hard. Software at the time tended to ship in formats such as cartridges, which were incredibly difficult for anyone without an engineering background to duplicate, or audio cassettes, in a time when the dual cassette deck had yet to achieve widespread market penetration.

All of this changed with the arrival of the 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. Suddenly, data could be copied easily and without degradation via PC from one media to another. The benefit to developers was great in terms of the amount of information and complexity they could now sink into their games, but they were also faced with a generation of gamers who were learning how easy it was to copy and share among their friends.

The response was to enact some of the earliest and most primitive forms of copy protection. Games would sometimes ship on diskettes with holes laid out in precise locations. Others wrote files to a disk after installation that would make it impossible to install that game from the same disk a second time. Needless to say, these methods made the experience for legitimate users complicated and problematic, and more than a few fled to the then-gestating online communities of BBSs for custom-made hacks and software duplication applications. It was time for a more creative solution.

The Era of Doo-Dads and Decoders

Fortunately, the games industry is creative, and thus it was that the offline copy protection was born and flourished. One of its most prevalent forms was an in-game quiz that would require gamers to refer to the manual for specific information - you'd be asked, for example, to enter the third word in the fourth paragraph on page 14. Some titles took a punishing approach to this little Q & A: SSI's Star Command required a documentation check prior to each in-game save, while Master of Orion would respond to a failed manual check by gradually becoming so difficult that it was impossible to win. Perhaps the most notorious example of this method is Sierra's King's Quest III, in which lengthy passages of potion recipes and other information had to be reproduced from the manual. One typo, and you were greeted with a "Game Over" screen.

Other developers eschewed straight manual checks for in-box tools and items that were more integrated into the games with which they shipped, especially once photocopiers became more accessible and allowed would-be pirates to quickly and easily duplicate documentation. LucasArts made a name for itself in this field, utilizing such gems as the Monkey Island series' multi-level code wheels. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Other games, like Maniac Mansion and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade shipped with the kind of color-masked text one would find in old-school decoder rings; the documents could not be reproduced by the photocopiers of the day and would require the application of a transparent red plastic filter in order to get at their contents.

The ultimate evolution of offline copy protection was the integration of in-box contents into the gameplay, itself. Infocom was one of the earliest practitioners of this methodology. Famous for the novelties it would ship with its titles, the adventure games company would go so far as to have the likes of Zork Zero ask you to refer to a packed-in scroll for clues to its final puzzle and respond with quips like "Good luck, Blackbeard" to incorrect answers. LucasArts' aforementioned Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade tie-in included a very well-done "Grail Diary" designed to mimic Sean Connery's item of the same name in the movie, and made excellent use of it to help guide the player through the game, a tactic it would duplicate with 1990's Loom and its Book of Patterns.

Pack-ins and manual checks were certainly tedious, at times, and often took the gamer out of the experience while they rifled through manuals or boxes of tchotchkes, but one could argue that they added an element of fun to an industry necessity that is rarely anything but a chore for the end user. Still, they weren't foolproof, and as the cost of game development rose, elaborate packaging and its usefulness as a copy protection mechanic fell by the wayside. This coincided neatly with the spread of a new form of media: The CD-ROM.

The Era of Shiny Disks

The arrival of the CD-ROM meant that games that previously required dozens of floppies could be shipped in a single jewel case, and opened the door for new multimedia possibilities in game development. But it also brought with it the CD-RW drive, capable of duplicating massive (at the time, anyway) amounts of data quickly and easily. It was a software pirate's dream.

The response to this development from a copy protection standpoint was technological in nature. The first salvo was the use of unreadable disk sectors or other hidden files that could not be read or accurately duplicated by the software used to copy CDs at the time. Of course, this was rapidly made obsolete by the development of software that could read and copy an entire disk. So software companies turned to schemes like SafeDisc and early forms of SecuROM designed to make copies of discs that used the systems unreadable.

Unfortunately, many of these methods run up against one of the fundamental issues that has caused PC games developers headaches over the years: Compatibility. Simply put, it is impossible to create a mechanism that is going to work with every system setup or optical drive on the market. This has led to controversy when gamers who legitimately purchased titles like The Sims 2 and BioShock have been unable to play them thanks to the incompatibility of their hardware, anti-virus software, or other system components with CD-based copy protection.

None off this, however, has engendered quite the outrage brought on by system-side copy protection solutions like StarForce. Very difficult to crack but also difficult to remove on uninstall of a game, these mechanisms have been accused by outlets from the lowest tech blog to gaming comic Penny Arcade to CNet of executing a malware-level invasion of a system on which they are installed. Given that there are documented cases of system performance degradation thanks to remnant StarForce code, it's easy to see why solutions like this have become extremely unpopular even among consumers who have no interest in pirating or sharing games.

A Series of Tubes

No technology has played a larger part in the way digital media - including games - is distributed and consumed than the Internet, and its effect on piracy and the efforts to counteract it has been profound. In its earliest days, 'Net connectivity allowed those who knew how to use it to connect via BBS, putting hackers and crackers in touch with each other and allowing them to share ideas. Now, of course, most PC owners have some form of Internet connection, many at speeds that would have been ludicrous even as recently as the mid-'90s, giving them access to entire copies of cracked games that have been made available via IRC or peer-to-peer network.

The industry is certainly facing its most serious challenge in its long fight against piracy, and it's been interesting to see what stances have been taken in the past few years. EA's efforts with Mass Effect and Spore are not all we've heard of server-side copy protection; Valve links copies of its games - store-bought or downloaded - to its Steam service, while massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft require unique product keys for login. And it's certainly not going to be the last we'll hear of it, either, as more and more users acquire faster Internet connectivity and more and more games make use of downloadable content and other online-specific features.

And then, there's the interesting case of Stardock, makers of strategy titles Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire. Stardock has taken the bold stance that it does not plan to take any steps beyond the use of a unique serial number to copy-protect its products, a decision that has endeared it to fans but that famously led a StarForce forum moderator's posting of a link to a site where an illegal copy of Galactic Civilizations II could be easily downloaded. The game has sold well despite its lack of defense against piracy, but one has to wonder whether such a strategy would work for a larger publisher producing more mainstream titles.

With bandwidth expanding and more and more games publishers exploring digital distribution, there's little doubt that we're entering a new phase in the history of copy protection and those who would defeat it. What's more, the demand for games as a chosen form of entertainment has never been higher. All this considered, it's impossible to believe that the cat-and-mouse game of piracy and copy protection will not reach new levels of intensity, with new technologies deployed on each side, and that some of them will surely create new hurdles for even those who simply wish to purchase and play the newest games. Ah, for the heady days of the code wheel.
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?op...0800&Itemid=50





House Passes PRO IP Bill
Susan Butler, N.Y.

The U.S. House of Representatives has just passed, under suspension of House rules, the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP) Act. An official quorum vote is expected on the House floor this evening.

Introduced by House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers Jr. last December, the Act (H.R. 4279) would create the office of a U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative in the White House to represent and advise the president on IP issues. The representative would produce a national joint strategic plan to protect and enforce IP rights, and would be responsible for seeing its implementation by various government agencies.

Conyers says that the Act will: (1) prioritize intellectual property protection to the highest level of our government; (2) make changes to IP law to enhance the ability of IP owners to effectively enforce their rights; (3) make it easier to criminally prosecute repeat offenders; and (4) increase penalties for IP violations that endanger public health and safety.

"This bill will go a long way towards making sure law enforcement agencies have what they need to get the job done," says David Israelite, president/CEO of the National Music Publishers' Assn. and former Justice Department chairman of the Intellectual Property Task Force. "Of note is the fact that this legislation garnered support from a bipartisan majority of members, and a diverse group of industry, trade groups and labor unions."

The Act would also establish a formal IP Enforcement Division within the office of the Deputy Attorney General. Currently, the DOJ has an IP Task Force. An IP Enforcement Officer, appointed by the attorney general and reporting to the deputy attorney general, would head the division.

"This is a strong, common sense measure that provides new tools and resources to help protect one of this nation's most important economic engines," says Mitch Bainwol, chairman/CEO of the RIAA. "We are transitioning from a nation whose economy was driven by what we created with our hands to one driven by what we create with our minds. This creative and economic genius deserves to reach its full potential, and this bill is an important step toward achieving that goal. The unanimous bipartisan support for this legislation speaks to a widespread recognition by policymakers of the economic importance of the creative industries and the necessary tools to protect it."

Specifically, federal civil law would be amended to: (1) provide a safe harbor for copyright registrations that contain inaccurate information so such technical errors would not prevent a judgment for infringement; (2) provide that copyright registration requirements, like the necessity of filing a registration before suing an infringer, apply to civil -- not criminal -- infringement actions; (3) require courts to issue protective orders to prevent disclosure of seized records relating to copyright infringement; (4) revise standards for civil damages in copyright infringement and counterfeiting cases; and (5) prohibit importing and exporting of infringing copies of copyrighted works.

Federal criminal law would be amended to: (1) enhance criminal penalties for infringement of a copyright, for trafficking in counterfeit labels or packaging, and for causing serious bodily harm or death while trafficking in counterfeit goods or services; and (2) enhance civil and criminal forfeiture provisions for copyright infringement and provide for restitution to victims of such infringement.

No companion bill has yet been introduced in the Senate.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...8a825cc2f79780





Inside the Music Industry's Piracy Battle

Deep inside the national headquarters of the Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA) is a purple room.

Tinted windows shade the faces of young men and women working behind computer screens. They are part of the team investigating the illegal sharing of music files over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, and they protect their identities carefully.

Such precautions are a reflection of the charged environment in which the music business is operating. The RIAA, the trade group for the major US labels, views anti-piracy enforcement as vital to the recording industry's future.

Since 2003, labels have filed more than 28,000 lawsuits against individual file sharers. Only one suit has reached trial. Jammie Thomas, a single mother who was ordered by a federal jury in Minnesota last October to pay $222,000, is waiting for the federal court's decision on her request for a new trial.

Piracy on university campuses is a big part of the problem. In the past year, the RIAA has sent more than 6,000 "pre-litigation settlement letters" to students around the country, giving them the opportunity to avoid a potential lawsuit by settling out of court for a reduced fee. About half have settled, and the other half face formal lawsuits.

Some university administrators complain that record companies unfairly target their campus networks to find infringers. Some judges have questioned whether proof of users making music files available in a P2P network's "shared folder" is sufficient evidence of copyright infringement. Emotions have run so high that death threats targeting RIAA lawyers and executives haven't been unheard of.

Despite the RIAA's efforts, data suggest that demand for pirated content remains strong. A recent NPD Group report estimates that 19 per cent of US internet subscribers 13 and older download free music from P2P services, barely less than the 20 per cent reported when the RIAA began its user litigation campaign in 2003.

While it is all but impossible to gauge how much additional illegal downloading its enforcement actions may have deterred, the RIAA remains determined to clamp down on internet piracy. Billboard visited the trade group's Washington, D.C., offices for a demonstration of how it tracks down file sharers.

In their world of "hash" files and virtual handshakes, the investigations don't seem dark and sinister. The search begins simply - with a song.

The Stash

An RIAA investigator and technology specialist, who asked for anonymity, clicked the keyboard on his laptop. The LimeWire interface appeared on a large screen.

New York-based LimeWire LLC touts on its website that its software is "the fastest file-sharing program on the planet." The site offers a free version of its software, but it also offers the revenue-generating upgraded version for around $20. LimeWire is one of many software programs that run over the Gnutella file-sharing network.

To root out illegal file-sharing activity, the RIAA works with Maryland-based MediaSentry, which has developed customized programs that also operate over the Gnutella network. MediaSentry has a list of recordings owned by RIAA-member companies and, like any P2P user, can search for a music file by song title.

MediaSentry then collects alphanumeric "hash" codes it discovers online that are associated with these recordings. LimeWire and similar programs will identify how many users are sharing the same file as identified by the hash code. The combination of song titles and hash codes listed in the ever-growing database are the foundation and starting point of all RIAA investigations.

When a consumer rips a song from a CD and gives the digital file a name, the computer hardware, ripping software and other digital data together create a digital file identified by a distinct hash code. If the user rips the same song with an older computer - even with the same software - the file will have a different hash code. The slightest change in the music source, computer hardware, ripping software, P2P protocol, file name or length of recording will change the hash code identifying the resulting MP3 file.

For example, while searching for a Madonna song at the RIAA offices, dozens of users were sharing the same Madonna title over LimeWire - but six users were sharing the digital files with identical hash codes. Since it is highly improbable that more than one user would have the exact combination of equipment and timing to create identical hash codes, the investigator says, the six users are likely sharing copies of the same file that one person originally uploaded to the internet and that was later downloaded and shared by other users.

When MediaSentry observes that an MP3 file of a particular song is available for sharing over a P2P network but the hash code doesn't match one in its database, the company downloads the file. Then it runs the file through a digital fingerprint system operated by Audio Magic to verify that it is an RIAA-member recording, which has been fingerprinted by the record company when the recording was made. If the file is in fact a copy of the recording, MediaSentry saves the hash code in its database.

What MediaSentry and RIAA investigators do next depends on whether they're preparing a take-down notice for a university or planning to pursue litigation against an individual.

Take It Down

Copyright holders cannot possibly sue every copyright infringer. But they can notify an internet service provider when a user is infringing a copyrighted work. The ISP is required under federal law to block that material from the internet after receiving a take-down notice from the copyright holder, as long as the notice complies with requirements set out in federal regulations. Many universities have their own computer networks and, as such, act as ISPs.

A take-down program begins with the RIAA's list of about 700 current, popular titles of recordings owned by its member companies. The list is compiled - and continually updated - from Billboard and online music services' sales charts. The user-litigation program uses many more titles, but the RIAA won't disclose the number.

Once the MediaSentry search for a title identifies a hash, the software then tries to match it with popular hashes shared among P2P users listed in the database.

"We look for the most popular hashes," the RIAA investigator says. "It's then very unlikely that the person ripped it from his or her own CD collection and is making it available for the first time. It's more likely this person has downloaded it from somebody else. The hash can't be one we've seen many times before if somebody ripped it for the first time."

Once the popular hash is identified, the MediaSentry program makes contact with the user through a "TCP handshake" - essentially a conversation between the Web server and the Web client, like LimeWire, via the internet transmission control protocol.

"Are you online and do you have this hash code?" the program asks. If the user's program says "yes," then the user is pegged. Just one digital file is enough for the RIAA to send a take-down notice.

The user doesn't have to be sitting at the computer to be sharing a file. LimeWire and similar programs continue to share files over the P2P network as long as the computer is on, the program is open and the file-sharing component is on.

MediaSentry records the IP address, the name of the company or university that owns the ISP, the date and time of the handshake, the user name and the infringed title. The company sends it to the RIAA.

RIAA personnel then review the information, manually prepare the take-down notices and send them to the university.

"There is an idea that we target certain universities," the investigator says. "That is completely incorrect and, technically, not possible. We find what we find by song and through public means; we don't try to get into a university's internal system."

Meet John Doe

The RIAA uses litigation to target some of "the most egregious users we find," the investigator says.

This process, too, begins with the song search, but entails the collection of far more data on an individual user than is required for a take-down notice. After MediaSentry finds popular hash codes, the company's software - just like LimeWire - allows a search of all the files the user is sharing.

The company collects the list of music files the user is sharing, identifies songs that belong to RIAA-member companies and downloads the files. MediaSentry also collects very detailed text logs as evidence of its activities throughout the entire process.

The ISP associated with an IP address is easy to identify. The American Registry for internet Numbers, a nonprofit organization, provides the information via a search on its website.

MediaSentry sends the information to the RIAA, which has staff that listen to each downloaded file to verify the identify of the song. The RIAA notifies the ISP to preserve the evidence connected to the IP address. The record companies then file a lawsuit naming "John Doe" as the unnamed defendant.

Once they file the suit, the labels may then have the court issue a subpoena for the ISP to identify the registered user for the IP address. That person then replaces John Doe as the defendant.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/st...0515239&pnum=0





XM, EMI Settle Portable Radio Lawsuit

Satellite Radio Holdings Inc <XMSR.O> and EMI Music said on Tuesday they have resolved a lawsuit brought by EMI against XM over its Pioneer Inno, a portable satellite radio with advanced recording features.

The companies did not disclose terms of the agreement.

Privately held EMI Music, the world's fourth largest recorded music company, has withdrawn as a party to the complaint filed by major record companies against XM in May 2006.

In December 2007 major record companies Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi <VIV.PA>, and Warner Music Group Corp <WMG.N> and in February 2008 Sony BMG Music Entertainment reached similar agreements with XM. Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony Corp <6758.T> and Bertelsmann AG <BERT.UL>.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...AS782820080610





High Court Rules Against Multiple Royalties
Pete Yost

The Supreme Court on Monday limited the ability of companies to collect multiple royalties on their patents, the latest step by the justices to scale back the power of patent-holders.

The unanimous decision, which was helpful to customers of Intel Corp., involved a longtime Supreme Court doctrine that in recent years had been eroded by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., which handles patent cases nationally.

Justice Clarence Thomas reined in the appeals court, saying that "for over 150 years the Supreme Court has applied the doctrine of patent exhaustion" and that it applies in this case. The doctrine says that the sale of an invention exhausts the patent-holder's right to control how the purchaser uses it.

In the case before the Supreme Court, a South Korean company, LG Electronics Inc., licensed some of its patents to Intel Corp.

LG then sued some of Intel's customers for patent infringement, saying they owed royalties to LG because the customers combined Intel's microprocessors and chipsets with non-Intel products.

Patent laws can carry triple-damage awards when a court finds willful infringement.

Thomas said that "everything inventive about each patent is embodied in the Intel products" and that the non-Intel devices with which they are combined are "standard parts."

The Intel customers are computer system manufacturers that include Taiwan-based Quanta Computer Inc. System manufacturers sell to industry brand names such as Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., International Business Machines Corp. and Gateway Inc.

A number of companies including chip maker Qualcomm Inc. supported LG in the court fight, saying any rule that forces patent owners to license only one level in the production chain is unworkable.

The Bush administration supported Intel's customers. It cited inconvenience, annoyance and inefficiency of multiple royalty payments being passed down the chain of distribution with no obvious stopping point.

Also weighing in against multiple royalties was the private group Consumers Union.

Monday's decision marks another instance of the Supreme Court reversing the Federal Circuit to weaken the position of patent-holders. Last year, the justices made it easier to invalidate patents, reining in a legal test that has fueled an era of protection for new products. Separately, the court ruled that U.S. patent law doesn't apply to software sent to foreign countries. In 2006, the court also allowed lower judges to be lenient in punishing companies found to have infringed on patents.

The case is Quanta v. LG Electronics, 06-937.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h...sQj-gD916MQ682





AP Targets Bloggers Over Story Excerpts
Jordan Golson

The Associated Press, the not-for-profit news cooperative, has filed DMCA notices against social news/blog The Drudge Retort for posting short excerpts of AP stories. In a letter to Rogers Cadenhead, the owner of The Retort, the AP believes "the Drudge Retort users' use of AP content does not fall within the parameters of fair use."

The "AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes 'hot news' misappropriation."

The AP sent DMCA notices to the Drudge Retort, demanding that the site to take down content that the AP believes infringes on its copyright. Seven notices were sent in total, some regarding headlines and first paragraph excerpts, but at least one referencing a two-paragraph excerpt from the end of an AP story. It seems the AP is serious about protecting all its stories from virtually any sort of excerpting.

The Associated Press is a wire service that sells license to reprint stories for a hefty fee to member press outlets. Contrary to what Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb thinks, the AP doesn't have "inbound links" or "search juice" -- only member organizations do. The AP believes that by reproducing AP content without paying for it, the Drudge Retort is diminishing the benefit its pay customers get from its product. That is, why pay for AP content when you can just republish it for free?

This isn't the first time in recent months that AP has resorted to legal action against sites that it felt were misappropriating its content.

In October, the AP sued news aggregator Moreover for fair-use violations. That company, owned by VeriSign, provides news from a wide variety of sources to paying subscribers. The AP charged that Moreover was "scraping," or copying, the full text of AP stories and sending them to Moreover's customers without paying AP for the rights.

Unlike the Retort case, Moreover was accused of commercially using full-length AP stories without any payment. AP believes (correctly, in my non-lawyer opinion) that this is far outside any reasonable interpretation of fair use.

(Disclosure: Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media and my former boss at Valleywag, was a cofounder of Moreover)

"Fair use" is a legal term-of-art and one that is frequently misunderstood. There are a number of requirements and standards that must be met for a use to be considered "fair" and it is far outside the purview of this article to define it. In fact, it is impossible to define as fair use is generally considered on a case-by-case basis, but these are the most common determinants:

• The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.

• The nature of the copyrighted work.

• The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.

• The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The AP believes that by posting excerpts of its content, The Retort (and presumably anyone else using AP content without paying) is reducing the value of its subscription service.

There has not been a significant blogger v. mainstream media copyright battle yet, but the Associated Press sure isn't making any friends with this maneuver. Influential media critic Jeff Jarvis slams the organization in a blog posting titled "FU AP". Jarvis has a long-standing beef with the AP about the organization's lack of credit for original reporting and linking when it repurposes reporting from member newspapers.

Jarvis feels the AP is "declaring war on blogs and commenters" and wants bloggers to reproduce the full length of an AP story to show "solidarity" with the Drudge Retort.
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008...-long-excerpts





Impasse on Spying Could Lead to Tighter Rules
Eric Lichtblau

With Congress at an impasse over the government’s spy powers and intelligence, congressional officials are bracing for the possibility that the government may have to revert to the old rules of terrorist surveillance, a scenario that some officials predict could leave worrisome gaps in intelligence.

That prospect seemed almost inconceivable just a few months ago, when congressional negotiators and the White House promised a quick resolution to a bruising debate over the government’s surveillance powers. But the dispute has dragged on. Though both sides say they are hopeful of reaching a deal, officials have been preparing classified briefings for Congress on the intelligence “degradation” they say could occur if there is no deal in place by the summer.

The deadline is considered critical because of a series of secret one-year wiretapping orders that were approved last August under a controversial temporary wiretapping law. The law allowed the National Security Agency to use broad blanket court orders to target groups of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists based overseas. But those orders are growing staler by the day, officials said, and will begin to expire this August if nothing is done.

“We’ll start losing intelligence capabilities,” Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the intelligence committee, said in an interview.

Civil libertarians who oppose the government’s broadened new surveillance authorities said a return to the more restrictive rules may be just what is needed to restore necessary checks on the government’s powers.

But government and congressional officials said in interviews that they saw it as a dangerous step backward. A return to the old rules, they said, would mean that numerous government lawyers, analysts, and linguists would once again have to prepare individual warrants, potentially thousands of them, for surveillance of terrorist targets overseas.

Telecommunications companies would also have to spend considerable time shutting down existing wiretaps, and then to start them up again if ordered under new warrants, officials said. In some instances, the broad orders given to the companies starting last August cover tens of thousands of overseas phone numbers and e-mail addresses at one time, people with knowledge of the orders said.

A senior intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration was concerned that reverting to the older standards and requiring individual warrants for each wiretap would create a severe gap in overseas intelligence by raising the bar for foreign surveillance collection.

In some cases, the government might simply be unable to establish in court why it suspected that a foreign target was connected to terrorism. Part of the problem, officials said, is that communications going from one foreign country to another sometimes travel through a telephone switch on American soil and, under some interpretations of the older rules, could not be tapped without an individual warrant. (Wiretaps aimed at Americans already require individual warrants issued by a secret court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, or F.I.S.A. court.)

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey has described the idea of reverting to the older standards of foreign surveillance as “unthinkable,” adding, “I still hope and actually think that it won’t happen.”

Even some Democrats, at odds with the White House for months over the surveillance issue, said they were worried about the summer scenario. “Until August, we’re O.K.,” said one senior Democratic congressional aide involved in the negotiations. “After August, we’re not O.K.”

A second Democratic congressional official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “We don’t even want to get close to the expiration, because it will force the intelligence community to make preparations and transition back to the old system. Having to go back to the old way of doing things is problematic.”

Congress began debating the agency’s spy powers in December 2005, after it was revealed that President Bush had authorized the agency to conduct wiretaps without court warrants on the international communications of Americans suspects of terrorist ties.

Nearly 2 1/2 years later, the stalemate on the issue reflects the deep divisions in Congress over how to suture the wounds created by the wiretapping program. Few people in Washington thought the debate would drag on this long, through dire warnings from the White House about potential harm to national security, through retreats and push-backs by the Democrats, and now through a game of chicken over how to resolve the impasse.

“I was hoping we’d made progress,” said Senator Bond, who has been the White House’s point man in the negotiations. “But the longer this drags on — I’m not so sure.”

Democrats and Republicans have been negotiating behind closed doors for months, with occasional appearances by senior administration officials. The main stumbling block has been whether or how to give the phone companies immunity from lawsuits over their role in helping President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program; dozens of such suits are pending. Both sides have given some ground in the talks.

The Republicans have yielded somewhat on immunity for the companies: The current proposal from Mr. Bond would allow the F.I.S.A. court to review the administration’s requests to them and determine by a “preponderance of the evidence” whether the companies acted properly in response.

Mr. Bond’s proposal would also re-establish that the act is the “exclusive” means for authorizing intelligence wiretaps, even in the face of Mr. Bush’s claims of constitutional authority to order surveillance on terror suspects outside the courts. And it would allow for a congressional review of the wiretapping program, something Republicans had tried to avoid.

House Democrats, meanwhile, appear willing to settle for the F.I.S.A. court having a smaller oversight role in approving the National Security Agency’s surveillance procedures in advance. They offered a counterproposal to Republicans late last week that left both sides optimistic.

In fact, though, every week over the last four months has brought talk of a pending deal on Capitol Hill that soon collapsed again. Mr. Mukasey said that Justice Department negotiators “come in and talk to me and are sort of more optimistic and less optimistic from minute to minute, and I try to not have my mood go up and down.”

As hard as the White House has pushed on the issue, Democrats may have even more at stake. They acknowledge not wanting to risk reaching their national convention in Denver in August without a deal, lest that create an opening for the Republicans and Senator John McCain, their presumptive presidential nominee, to portray themselves as tougher on national security — a tried-and-true attack method in the past — just as the Democrats are nominating Senator Barack Obama.

Mr. Bush used that line of attack repeatedly in January and February, imploring Congress to renew the broadened spy powers it had granted the agency last August. The surveillance plan was essential, Mr. Bush said at the time, because terrorists were planning attacks on American soil “that will make Sept. 11 pale in comparison.”

Despite the president’s pleas, House Democrats refused to buckle, a rare instance when they stood their ground against Mr. Bush on a matter of national security. They allowed the August law to expire in February.

Caroline Fredrickson, who leads the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington office, said Democrats should continue to resist the White House’s pleas for broadened spy power, even in the face of political pressure.

A return to the older surveillance rules, requiring individualized warrants for all wiretaps, would be a positive step, she said. The last thing Congress should do, she said, would be to enact a major overhaul of the nation’s spy powers just before Mr. Bush leaves office.

“Why not just kick it down the road” through a short-term extension, she asked. “If there’s a need to do something, they should do the least harm possible.”

“We don’t think this Congress should give President Bush the gold watch he’s looking for in authorizing his warrantless wiretapping program,” Ms. Fredrickson said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/wa...on/10fisa.html





Groups Ask Court to Review Laptop Searches

EFF and ACTE file brief asking court to rehear and reverse decision that allows border agents to routinely search files on laptops and mobile devices
Grant Gross

U.S. border agents should not be able to search travelers' laptops without a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity, despite a court ruling allowing such searches, two groups said.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) filed an amicus brief on Thursday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the full court to rehear and reverse a decision by a three-judge panel that ruled that border agents can routinely search files on laptops and mobile devices.

The random searching of laptops is "widespread," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the EFF. The U.S. Department of Justice "claims that U.S. border agents have the power to do so, no suspicion needed, and there are plenty of reported incidents," he added.

There have been multiple media reports in recent months of laptops or other electronic devices searched and seized at U.S. borders, Tien noted. In some cases, travelers have not gotten their electronic devices back from customs officials, he said.

The case the two groups have asked the court to review involves a U.S. man named Michael Arnold, who returned to Los Angeles International Airport from the Philippines in July 2005. A U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer asked to see Arnold's laptop, and customs officers found pictures of naked women and, later, pictures they believed to be child pornography.

Customs officials seized Arnold's laptop and later had him arrested.

Arnold's lawyer argued that the search violated the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures. His lawyer argued that the pictures obtained in the search should not be allowed as evidence in a trial, and a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California agreed with Arnold's lawyer.

However, the three-judge panel at the 9th Circuit overturned the district court's ruling. U.S. border agents have broad authority to search luggage and their contents at borders, Circuit Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain wrote in the panel's April 21 decision.

"Courts have long held that searches of closed containers and their contents can be conducted at the border without particularized suspicion under the Fourth Amendment," O'Scannlain wrote. "We are satisfied that reasonable suspicion is not needed for customs officials to search a laptop or other personal electronic storage devices at the border."

The EFF and ACTE argue in their brief that "invasive" searches of electronic devices should be treated differently from searches of luggage. "Your computer contains a vast amount of information about your private life, including details about your family, your finances, and your health," Tien said. "All that information can be easily copied, transferred, and stored in government databases, just because you were chosen for a random inspection."

Tien said he expects a decision on whether to rehear the case within a few months.

Asked if defending an alleged child pornography user was a tough place to make a stand on laptop searches, Tien disagreed. "If they randomly search your machine, don't find anything interesting, and let you go, would you sue them?" he said.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/...earches_1.html





Nation Watches Open-Records Case
Kim Hackett

The open-government lawsuit involving Venice City Council members' e-mails on personal computers is drawing national interest.

Judges have ruled that private documents on public computers can remain private.

But a circuit judge's ruling in Sarasota County this week is the first time public officials have been ordered to turn over private computers to comply with public records requests, said Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition at the Missouri School of Journalism.

"It's extraordinary," said Davis. "It's really a big case; the national freedom-of-information movement will be watching."

Circuit Judge Robert Bennett issued a decision Friday granting an emergency request for access to City Council members' government-related files on their personal computers.

The three-page order said Councilmen John Moore and John Simmonds, and Mayor Ed Martin could not "alter, reconfigure or dispose of" computers that had been used to send or receive city-related messages.

Bennett also ordered the three to quit using their personal computers and turn them over to the city clerk.

Within 30 days, a computer expert selected by Sarasota activist Anthony Lorenzo, who is suing the city and four council members, will be allowed to copy files on the computers to see if they contain public information.

The examination will be supervised by City Manager Marty Black, according to the judge's order, and steps will be taken to protect the council members' privacy.

Bennett also outlined a process under which Moore and Martin could avoid the examination, by providing a sworn affidavit about their personal computer use and submitting to questioning by Lorenzo's attorney.

In a suit filed last month, Lorenzo alleged that council members Sue Lang, John Moore and Mayor Ed Martin improperly communicated about public business by both public and private e-mail accounts on home and city-issued computers.

He argued, among other things, that the e-mails violated Florida's Government-in-the-Sunshine Law.

The lawsuit followed questions this spring about the City Council's handling of the development of a controversial airport plan, and comments by City Manager Black that council members had to be repeatedly reminded of the Sunshine Law's requirements.

Last month, city officials received numerous requests for e-mail records, from the Herald-Tribune, Lorenzo and others.

Simmonds, who was not part of Lorenzo's initial Sunshine Law complaint, said he could not comply with records requests because he had deleted e-mails from his private e-mail account on his home computer.

Lorenzo added Simmonds to his suit and filed an emergency motion to preserve evidence.

In a hearing Wednesday, Lorenzo's attorney, Andrea Mogensen, questioned five of the seven council members on their use of private e-mail to conduct public business and whether they deleted files.

Moore was out of town on vacation and Martin did not appear, despite being subpoenaed. City Attorney Robert Anderson said Martin did not receive proper notice and unsuccessfully moved to have the subpoena quashed.

Council members Lang, Vicki Noren, Rick Tacy and Ernie Zavodnyik testified that they had turned over any e-mails from their private computers and had not deleted any. They were not required to submit their home computers for an examination.

But because Moore and Martin were not in court to testify, the judge ordered them to surrender their home computers. They would be subject to the exam unless Mogensen is satisfied that they have not destroyed public records.

After Wednesday's hearing, Black asked all council members to surrender their city-issued laptops while the case proceeds.

Last week, the city locked the public server so no files could be deleted and ordered all city board members and council members to preserve their records.

"The order is reasonable, and I assure you it will be complied with," Anderson, the city attorney, said of the judge's decision.

Bennett will resolve any disputes about public vs. private information on the home computers.

"We're very pleased with the decision," said Mogensen. "It was not unexpected."

Retrieving deleted files is easier on a home computer than on a public server because there is typically not as much activity, said Thomas Sadaka, an attorney and computer forensic expert.

There have been cases that were close to going before a judge but were settled at the last minute. In 2001, following the contentious presidential election recount in Florida, the New York Times had demanded to examine the hard drive of then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris under the public records law to see how absentee ballots had been counted.

Harris' attorney said the files had been deleted. The Times demanded to examine the hard drives. Harris initially refused but later relented.

"What is so extraordinary about this case is the judge is making something personal available to determine what is public," said Adria Harper, director of the First Amendment Foundation.

"It would set important precedent and make public officials understand public records law and its broad reach."
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article.../1001/NEWS0105





U.S. Government Sought Customer Book Purchasing Records from Amazon.com
David Gutierrez

Recently unsealed court records shed more light on the federal government's attempts to secure the online book purchase records of 24,000 Amazon.com customers.

In 2006, federal prosecutors investigating Robert D'Angelo, a Madison, WI official accused of fraud and tax evasion, subpoenaed online book retailer Amazon.com for transaction records on anyone who had purchased books from him through Amazon Marketplace since 1999. Prosecutors said they were hoping to find witnesses to testify against D'Angelo.

Amazon agreed to tell prosecutors what books D'Angelo had sold, but refused to turn over information on the buyers, citing its customers' First Amendment rights to privacy. The government came back with a request for only 120 customers, but Amazon still refused. The case went before U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker, who ruled in June to strike down the subpoena on First Amendment grounds.

"The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission," Crocker wrote in his ruling. "It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else."

Crocker also expressed concerns that allowing the government to pry into people's reading habits could function as intimidation, thereby depriving them of their right to read what they wish.

"The chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America," he wrote.

Under Crocker's urging, prosecutors reached a compromise with Amazon in which the company would send letters to the 24,000 customers sought in the initial subpoena, inviting them to contact prosecutors if they wished to testify.

Crocker also criticized prosecutors for seeking to force Amazon's hand rather than seeking a compromise on their own.

"If the government had been more diligent in looking for workarounds instead of baring its teeth when Amazon balked, it's probable that this entire First Amendment showdown could have been avoided," he said.
http://www.naturalnews.com/023388.html





British Terror Bill Divides Labor

The government is to offer wavering Labour MPs a last-minute concession over the issue of pre-charge detention in an attempt to stave off a Commons defeat that could cause potentially irreparable damage to Gordon Brown.

Terrorist suspects held for more than the current limit of 28 days but not subsequently charged could receive 3,000 pounds for each extra day in custody, the BBC said.

Up to 30 Labour MPs are expected to join opposition parties in voting against the planned extension to 42 days on Wednesday evening.

The government says it may need to hold terrorist suspects without charge for that long in particularly complex cases but opponents of the plan say it is a gross infringement of civil liberties.

No other country, they point out, feels the need to hold suspects for anything like as long without charge.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said the vote was one of principle as well as practical police pressures.

"I said to the Home Secretary at least three times ... 'show me the evidence' and I'm afraid we were never shown the evidence," he told the BBC.

Home Office Minister Tony McNulty said he expected the vote to be "very tight", but thought the government would win.

"With the concessions, people should be able to move and come across to us," he told the BBC.

"I may be the only optimist in the House but I think common sense will prevail and this important part of the bill will pass."

The vote is so close that Foreign Secretary David Miliband was ordered to scrap planned meetings with Israeli leaders in Jerusalem on Tuesday and return to London.

The nine MPs of Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party -- who say they are inclined to support the government -- could become crucial, although newspapers reported that some individual opposition members plan to vote with Labour.

Brown's poll ratings are at an all-time low after the loss of the formerly safe Crewe and Nantwich seat and a drubbing in local elections.

Defeat in the security vote would erode the prime minister's authority still further and, analysts say, would be bound to fuel talk among Labour MPs of replacing him as Labour leader before the next general election due by 2010.

Attempts by his predecessor Tony Blair to extend detention without charge to 90 days in 2005 ended in his first Commons defeat as prime minister.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/busin...ention.html?hp







Opera 9.5
Espen André Øverdahl

Today we released the final public release of our flagship Web browser, Opera 9.5. Opera's cross-device expertise, support for open Web standards and commitment to speed and performance has culminated into our most powerful browser yet.

What's new in Opera 9.5:

Opera Link: Your bookmarks, Speed Dial and even notes taken in the Opera browser can follow you anywhere. Opera Link keeps you synchronized between any Opera 9.5 desktop browser and Opera Mini, Opera's free browser for your mobile phone. In Opera 9.5 write a note - copy directions, create shopping lists or jot down anything you need to remember - and access it on any Opera 9.5 browser by simply logging in.

Find anything: Remember a word from a page you've read earlier? Find that page easily with Quick Find. Just enter a word in the address bar to find matching text from any page you have visited.

Looking sharp: Opera makes a move to modernize its look and feel to a sharp new skin with clean lines and clear icons. The 'New Tab' button and other elements have been modified to make the switch to a better Web experience more intuitive. You may also select any of our platform-specific skins to help Opera's appearance adapt to your operating system of choice.

Strengthened defense against malware and phishing: Opera's Fraud Protection not only protects you from fraudulent Web sites, it is now the first browser publically available to protect you from malware and other malicious software on the Web. Powered by Haute Secure, Netcraft, and PhishTank, Opera's Fraud Protection technology automatically blocks offending Web pages to keep you out of harm's way.

Speed: Opera continues to lead in performance. Opera 9.5 makes dramatic speed improvements to the e-mail client, RSS feeds and the browser itself, so you can spend more time getting things done online.

Of course Opera 9.5 includes many features Opera users have already come to know and love. Speed Dial, notes, the ability to save and restore browsing sessions after you close the browser, a trash can for accidentally closed tabs or e-mails, mouse gestures and many others bring a fresh approach to browsing the Web.

Discover Opera for yourself today.

"Opera 9.5 represents the culmination of two years spent listening to our community and transforming our browser to add features and capabilities they have requested," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "Opera 9.5 offers new possibilities and capabilities. It's faster, lighter and pushes us further out in front of other browsers, by blending the mobile and desktop worlds together in new and powerful ways. We invite everyone to join us as we continue to shape the way the Web will evolve."
http://my.opera.com/community/blog/opera-9-5





One Laptop Meets Big Business



The big idea of giving PCs to poor children has been challenged by educators and business. Here, follow the misadventures of One Laptop per Child
Steve Hamm and Geri Smith

One by one, the children ran into the school yard, lining up in a grassy field next to a low-slung building of classrooms topped by a rusty steel roof. Most of these children in Luquia, a tiny, impoverished town 13,200 feet above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, wore ragged navy-blue uniforms, and many had not bathed in days. Their small adobe homes have dirt floors, no running water, and no bathrooms. They share sleeping space with dozens of squeaking guinea pigs, which scamper underfoot before becoming the family's rare meal of meat. The children, then, were understandably giddy with excitement in May as principal Pedro Santana handed them the most valuable thing they had ever owned: a small green-and-white laptop computer.

These children are among the first in Peru to receive laptops from a trove of 140,000 the government plans to distribute to poor rural students this year in a bold bid to revolutionize the country's dismal educational system. Yet even as the students enjoyed one of the biggest thrills of their lives, the organization behind the computers, One Laptop per Child, was in danger of cracking.

The outfit begun by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte had been thrown into turmoil by the stress of trying to achieve the audacious goal of transforming learning by supplying millions of the world's poor children with laptops. Six weeks earlier, OLPC President Walter Bender, who helped launch the Peruvian deployment, quit abruptly in a dispute with Negroponte, the group's chairman. Software security leader Ivan Krstic left, too. Those departures followed a messy breakup with chip giant Intel (INTC) in January. Cambridge (Mass.)-based OLPC's travails seemed to signal that a group that had promised to rescue the world's poor children from ignorance was itself in need of a lifeline.

The fate of OLPC is uncertain, and it's too early to judge the effectiveness of the computers. Still, it's possible to draw lessons about the difficulties of such grand-scale social innovation. The group's struggles show how hard it is for a nonprofit made up largely of academics to operate like a business and compete with powerful companies. They also show what happens when differing philosophies of education and beliefs in how software should be created go head-to-head. Values the group has promoted have met resistance in the marketplace, government bureaucracies, and classrooms. That Negroponte and his colleagues took on way more tasks than they could handle only complicates the situation further.

Since its launch three years ago, OLPC has fallen woefully short of Negroponte's initial goal of supplying Third World children with 150 million laptops by the end of 2008. Development of the XO laptop and software took longer than expected; the price came in at $188 each rather than the $100 first targeted; countries including Libya and Thailand reneged on initial pledges to buy large quantities; and competition from tech titans like Intel slowed momentum. Although pilot programs began in 2006 on test laptops, the final version wasn't ready until late last year. Now pilots are running in 20 countries, distribution has begun in two, and about 370,000 laptops have been shipped.

The group seems to have backed away from the brink in recent days. On May 15 it announced a tie-up with Microsoft (MSFT) to run the Windows operating system on the XO laptop, gaining credibility with a number of governments. And other backers like Google (GOOG) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are holding firm. During the week of May 18, Negroponte ran a four-day conference in Cambridge that brought together education and tech leaders from 44 countries. About 500,000 orders were placed, bringing the total to 750,000 outstanding orders.

A chastened Negroponte no longer predicts mass adoption in short order, but he remains confident that OLPC can have a major impact. He sees it playing the role in computer-aided learning that Muhammad Yunus' Grameen Bank has had in the global spread of microcredit. Grameen started something that many others now practice. "We're not building an empire. We're building a movement," Negroponte says.

Now, as the initial tech development phase has wound down, the organization faces a more daunting challenge: deploying and integrating millions of laptops in schools and communities. If something goes awry, the fragile credibility it has stitched together in recent weeks could rip apart. "This is the moment of truth," says Chuck Kane, a longtime software industry executive who became OLPC's president on May 2. "One unsuccessful deployment and it might mean the end of the project."

Searching For The Internet

Spending time in villages where the laptops have been distributed shows both OLPC's promise and immense challenges. In Luquia, Justo Miguel Común, a fifth-grader who is the youngest of seven children of subsistence farmers, was delighted to get his laptop in late April. "I like the math games, and I love the camera," he said two weeks later. On a chilly evening, his mother, Alejandra, who quit school after first grade, watched proudly as her 11-year-old son sat at a small table outside their adobe house with his face illuminated by the light from the screen. "This computer is going to be a very good thing for learning," she said.

Yet when BusinessWeek asked her son detailed questions, it became clear he didn't fully understand the computer's capabilities. His teacher had told the class to search the Internet for information on the environment, but the boy was stumped. "I was trying, but I couldn't find anything," he explained. He seemed to think the Net was something contained within the machine.

Such are the challenges of introducing not just a strange new machine but an alien world to a child brought up in isolation from outside culture. The leaders of OLPC believe the laptops must be much more than electronic substitutes for textbooks if they are to profoundly effect learning. The group, an offshoot of MIT's Media Lab, which Negroponte launched 23 years ago, has based its educational philosophy on the theories of Seymour Papert, a Media Lab professor who pioneered the use of computers in elementary education in 1967. Papert, now retired, developed a theory called Constructionism, which posits that young children learn best by doing rather than by being lectured to. So to create a tool that could deliver more than rote lessons and e-books, OLPC designed the machine and its software to enable collaboration, exploration, and experimentation. "We're hoping that these countries won't just make up ground but they'll jump into a new educational environment," says David Cavallo, OLPC's chief education architect.

Cultural Imperialism?

While this philosophy is essential to the mission of OLPC, it's also a source of tension. Current educational leaders in Peru embrace Constructionism, but most countries base their education systems on the idea that teachers pass their knowledge to receptive students. That was a problem for OLPC in China as well as India. India's education department, for instance, calls the idea of giving each child a laptop "pedagogically suspect," and, when asked about it recently, Education Secretary Arun Kumar Rath barked: "Our primary-school children need reading and writing habits, not expensive laptops."

Some observers accuse OLPC of cultural imperialism. "It's arrogant of them. You can't just stampede into a country's education system and say, Here's the way to do it,'" says William Easterly, a professor at New York University and author of The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

In fact, though OLPCers still have faith in Constructionism, they don't force the approach. Nor do they still insist on open-source software, a change that has caused some of the deepest rifts within the group. Originally, rather than using Microsoft's pricey Windows and ready-made commercial applications, they chose the Linux open-source operating system and created a new user interface and applications designed specifically to aid in learning by doing. A key reason to support open source: It allows students to tinker directly with software. However, some countries, such as Libya, which initially agreed to buy more than 1 million laptops, backed out and chose a Windows-based alternative from Intel. One attraction: Microsoft cut the price of a software package for poor schools from $150 to $3.

So when Negroponte chose to do business with Microsoft, turmoil erupted within the organization. After an Apr. 1 meeting during which the board agreed to break bread with Microsoft, Bender resigned. For weeks, OLPC's online message forums lit up with an angry debate. The anti-Microsoft side believes software shouldn't be owned but shared freely. To Negroponte, the choice was simple—and necessary—pragmatism. "It's like Greenpeace cutting a deal with Exxon. You're sleeping with the enemy, but you do it," he says.

Negroponte has had to fend off critics from the start. Early on, Intel and Microsoft executives, confronted by this charismatic rabble-rouser with his promise of affordable computing for the masses, called the XO a toy. They rushed out alternatives. Suddenly, Negroponte and his band were up against two of the most powerful tech giants in the world. And the giants played rough. Even after Intel joined with OLPC last year to help design a version of the XO powered with its chips, some of its people belittled the XO to governments who had agreed to buy it. Negroponte accused Intel of undermining his cause. Intel complained he was pressuring it to stop selling its Classmate PC for poor students. Negroponte now says he wishes he had been able to hold his temper and avoid a split.

He also faults himself for not managing his organization more effectively. "I'm a visionary, not a manager," he says. He ran the organization like a science project rather than a business. People had overlapping responsibilities. The staff of 23 regular employees and 26 consultants lacks the resources to support the needs of the pilot programs and deployments now under way—much less massive expansion. Negroponte, who travels incessantly to visit heads of state and education ministers, was spread too thin. So was Bender. Kane, who joined the organization as a part-time chief financial officer last year, is now running day-to-day operations. Already, the operational chaos has diminished. Now he's busy closing deals with countries and lining up business partners to help produce the technology for the next-generation XO. "We're moving from academic brainstorming mode to execution mode," Kane says.

Debatable Usefulness

OLPC might not be in such turmoil if Kane had been promoted earlier. Nigeria had agreed to buy 1 million XOs, but after a competition among three alternatives, the country chose Intel's Classmate PC instead. Why did OLPC lose out? Intel provided more support, writes Isa Muhammad Ari, director of administration for Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory, in an e-mail.

With OLPC, most of the weight of training is carried by local education officials. In Peru, the Education Ministry is racing to prepare teachers. It gives them a 40-hour course that includes an introduction to the learning programs, instruction on basic repairs, and tips on how to use the laptops to enhance their lessons. Teachers BusinessWeek spoke to in two villages where the machines have been distributed seemed excited about them. One recent morning, teacher Ananias Richard Inga played a catchy song programmed in Spanish into the laptops to teach his first- and second-graders how to write and pronounce vowels. When seven-year-old Idelma Huarocc, her brown cheeks burned and peeling from the sun, typed "Idelma ama a mamá" (Idelma loves mama), she wiggled with pleasure as the computer's voice read her sentence. "This really motivates them, and it makes it easier for kids to advance at their own pace," says Inga. Teachers at another school where the laptops were tested in a pilot project that began a year ago report their students' reading comprehension has improved significantly, the drop-out rate is down, and students who once said they expected to be farmers like their parents are now dreaming of becoming lawyers, accountants, or engineers.

Even with these results, the Unified Union of Education Workers of Peru, representing some 320,000 public school teachers, is skeptical. "These laptops aren't part of a comprehensive educational, pedagogical project, and their usefulness is debatable," says Luís Muñoz Alvarado, the union's general secretary. Muñoz never had a chance to explore the laptops, though. In what seems an easily avoidable blunder, the Education Ministry has not explained the program to the union.

Recognizing the need to integrate the laptops into communities, OLPC is scrambling to develop guidelines for deployment based on the experiences in Uruguay and Peru, the two countries with the largest distribution so far. The group is also bringing in consultants to advise countries on how to integrate the PCs. One, Edith Ackermann, a visiting scientist at MIT, says OLPC should have involved more educational experts in creating and testing the applications. Instead, she says, "The hackers took over." The result is some programs are too complex for many children to use. "Now we have to deal with this. I don't know if it's too late," says Ackermann.

While some critics have called on OLPC to hire aggressively so it can provide on-the-ground support for dozens of countries at a time, Negroponte and Kane plan instead to rely even more on outsiders. They'll forge alliances with local tech companies and nongovernment organizations that will provide deployment support.

Although each country has a different situation, they can learn from common experiences. OLPC plans on using Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, to test ideas about how to best integrate the computers with society and to create a template for other countries.

Just getting started in Haiti will be a challenge. The group's second trip there was delayed by riots over food shortages in April. The first shipment of laptops was held up in customs for weeks. Donors are paying for some laptops, but not all. Asked how Haiti can afford to pay for PCs when its citizens are starving, Guy Serge Pompi, the Haitian educator coordinating the project, answers: "You can't just focus on the present. The starving is the present. The future is education. We need to train our students for better jobs and a better future."

The desire to educate students for a better future was shared by officials from Rwanda, Colombia, Afghanistan, Senegal, and other countries. Although large-scale studies have not been done to show whether the laptops improve learning, initial successes in Uruguay and Peru have emboldened others to make the effort. In Peru itself, the laptops are gaining momentum. Regional governors have asked the Education Ministry to order a total of more than 500,000 additional laptops. "We aren't so overly optimistic to believe that distributing laptops is going to resolve the social demands of people who have been marginalized and submerged in extreme poverty for decades, but we believe it is a great step forward," says Education Minister José Antonio Chang.

With Nandini Lakshman in Mumbai
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...8048125608.htm





Elgan: The '$100 Laptop' May be a Glimpse of the Future
Mike Elgan

You've no doubt heard of the "$100 laptop" project. The idea is to help poor kids around the world by providing them with simple, durable, usable and wireless laptops for downloading and using textbooks and educational software, playing games and communicating.

The first iteration, the XO 1.0 -- a.k.a. the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptop -- looks like a toy for baby aliens (fluorescent green with two antennas). Besides a few innovations, including mesh networking and a water-resistant rubberized keyboard, the laptop is largely comparable to today's ordinary low-cost laptops.

A prototype of the next version was unveiled last month, and it looks a lot like the laptop you're going to buy in five years. No, I'm not kidding. Your laptop will look and function more or less like the XO 2.0. It's a brilliant -- and prescient -- design.

The most conspicuous and best feature is that the bottom half of the clamshell is a screen, just like the top half. Here's what it looks like.

I've talked to a lot of readers and other users who say they'll never give up the tactile feedback of a real keyboard and many who don't want to let go of the mouse, either. But I believe most users will be willing to sacrifice both keyboard and mouse in order to take advantage of the all-screen laptop of the future.

The XO 2.0 clamshell form factor works in four ways (compared to just one with conventional laptops).

1. Tablet mode. By opening the clamshell all the way, the two screens snap together in the middle to form one semicontinuous touch screen.

2. Laptop mode. By laying the bottom flat and setting the top half at an angle, the bottom becomes the keyboard and touchpad, and the top functions as the screen, just like a conventional laptop, but the keyboard is on-screen and virtual.

3. Book mode. When you the hold up the XO 2.0 like a book, the text can be displayed on two "pages," which can be "turned" virtually.

4. Two-person mode. By setting the laptop open and flat like "tablet mode," but pressing an on-screen button, one screen orients up and the other down. If you set it on a table between two people, they both get their own properly oriented touch screen, which is great for games or any other two-person usage applications.


The different modes of the next-gen OLPC laptop. (Photos courtesy of One Laptop per Child)

With today's desktops, software and usage models, the two-screen clamshell design of the XO 2.0 laptop may not appeal. But in five years, I believe everyone will intuitively understand why this is the best possible way to design a mobile computer because of four current trends and where they're taking us.

Trend No. 1: Multitouch, physics and gestures, oh my!

I've reported and prognosticated extensively in this space on the next generation or "third generation" of user interface (the first two generations being the command line and the graphical user interface).

This new user interface will dominate the operating systems from Microsoft, Apple, the Linux vendors and others. There will be qualitative differences, as always, in the next-gen versions of Windows, the Mac OS and Linux, but all will revolve around the three core elements: multitouch, gestures and physics. That's why I'm now calling this UI type the multitouch, physics and gestures UI, or MPG for short.

We've already seen all three of these elements in the iPhone, in Microsoft Surface and also in the demo of Windows 7.

This radical departure will, after several decades, render obsolete today's desktop form factor of a screen, keyboard and mouse on the desk. In fact, it will make the keyboard optional and the mouse obsolete forever.

As I've described, the desktop PC of the future will be used at an angle, like a drafting table (but can pivot to vertical "presentation mode" or horizontal "desk mode") like this. This form factor will be dictated by the software, just as the current mouse-centric form factor was dictated by the GUI.

But what about mobile computers? One thing is clear about MPG user interfaces: Big screens are very desirable, and touch rules. The XO 2.0 concept maximizes screen real estate during use and minimizes size for transport. The XO 2.0 is designed for low cost, and the screens are small. But for business users, the MPG laptops of the future will be much larger. If you can jam a laptop with a 17-in. screen into your carry-on luggage, the all-screen clamshell will fold out to double that for using Windows 7 with your fingers.

The reason you'll want to do this is that you'll become totally accustomed on your Windows 7 desktop to the MPG UI, virtual keyboards and interacting with touch instead of a mouse. And future applications will fully support this mode.

Trend No. 2: Minilaptops

The ASUS Eee PC mainstreamed tiny notebooks. Because they're so small and so cheap, increasing numbers of people will want two laptops, a big one for full-powered work, and a tiny one for quick-and-dirty on-the-go usage. I think this trend will continue well into the era of MPG operating systems. We can look forward to all-screen clamshell minilaptops.

One of the limitations of the ASUS Eee PC-size devices is that the keyboard isn't big enough. But imagine if the keyboard consisted only of letter and number keys, and that "command" keys -- Tab, Caps Lock, Shift, Ctrl, BackSpace, Delete, Enter and so on -- didn't exist?

A Taiwan company called E-Lead showed off a minilaptop at Computex this week (which it also demonstrated at CES) with an innovative keyboard. The product, called Noahpad EL-460, is designed to compete with the ASUS Eee PC and other subnotebooks.

The EL-460's keyboard doubles as a touchpad. You run your fingers over the same keys you use to type to send gesture commands to the system. Those gestures replace various command keys, which enable the letter and number keys to be the same size they would be on a full-size laptop.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the Noahpad EL-460 has a prayer of being successful. And I'm always suspicious of anyone who tries to re-invent the QWERTY keyboard. But the design suggests an innovation for the MPG future, where everyone is learning and using gestures anyway. It's easy to imagine a software keyboard on a multitouch screen doubling as a gesture area that could replace command keys on the keyboard. When you peck on the numbers, they're thrown up on the screen like a keyboard. But when you do gestures over the keys, the commands are received by the system.

Trend No. 3: The e-book revolution

The Amazon.com Kindle made the world safe for wireless electronic books. As people become increasingly comfortable with reading books, magazines and newspapers on a handheld electronic gadget, they'll want to do so on their laptops, too. The all-screen clamshell functions much like a paper book, with pages on both sides. A simple gesture while in e-book mode, say, swiping your finger from the upper-right corner toward the center, "turns the page."

The Kindle comes with a leather cover that lets you hold the one-screen Kindle like an open book, with the Kindle on the right and, well, leather on the left. Before my Kindle arrived, I assumed I would just throw away the leather cover and hold the Kindle by itself. But I, like many Kindle users, have found that holding it like a book with the leather cover is more natural and comfortable. As e-books go mainstream, people will increasingly become comfortable with an open clamshell form factor for reading, just like a paper book. This is an e-book reader design you can "curl up in bed with."

Trend No. 4: Wireless peripherals

Wireless Bluetooth keyboards and mice have been around for a while, and recent innovations around batteries and charging have made them even more useful. The MPG user interface will make keyboards and mice optional, but not necessarily obsolete. You'll still have real input devices if you want them.

Keyboards and mice are inexpensive and trivial to connect wirelessly via Bluetooth. I think touch typists and tactile keyboard enthusiasts will go out and buy their ultimate physical keyboard and mice, then use them with all their devices. Writers, programmers and graphic designers will use physical input devices, but the masses will do without.

So there it is, the laptop of the future. Poor kids will probably get it before you do, but mark my words, the all-screen clamshell laptop will eventually trickle up to business travelers, road warriors and digital nomads of all stripes.
http://computerworld.com/action/arti...tsrc =hm_list





Apple Unveils a Faster, Cheaper iPhone
John Markoff

Steven P. Jobs, chief executive of Apple, introduced a new cheaper iPhone model that connects to the Internet faster, expanded its distribution overseas and displayed a range of new applications and services in order to establish Apple as a major player in the cellphone industry.

Apple, the Cupertino, Calif., maker of consumer electronics and computer equipment, had set a goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008, which would establish it as one of the major smartphone makers in the less than two years since it began shipping the original iPhone. Apple has sold six million phones globally since its introduction.

Analysts said that Mr. Jobs, one of the world’s best product marketers, had largely accomplished what he set out to do and they welcomed the moves he outlined in a presentation before software developers on Monday.

“This is the phone that has changed phones forever,” Mr. Jobs said.

Mr. Jobs said the new iPhone 3G, to be available in the United States through AT&T beginning on July 11, will sell for $199 for the 8-gigabyte model and $299 for a 16-gigabyte model. He said the biggest barrier to people buying the phone had been price.

Analysts and industry executives said they believed the lower prices would bring in new consumers who had been put off by its $399 price. “The price is clearly correct,” said Mike McGuire, a research vice president at Gartner, a market research firm based in San Jose, Calif.

As widely anticipated, the phone will run on so-called 3G wireless networks that allow much faster Internet connections than the original iPhone. During a 110-minute presentation, Mr. Jobs went to some lengths to compare the speed of the new iPhone 3G to the current phone and to rival phones like the Nokia N95 and the Palm Treo 750. He called downloads “amazingly zippy.”

The phone, sleeker than the original, will also have built-in Global Positioning System capability to allow location-based services. It will also have a longer battery life in some cases, five hours for talking on the 3G network and 24 hours for playing music on the phone.

The announcements came on the opening day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where several developers showed off software that turned the iPhone into a game console and a musical instrument. Others demonstrated programs that used the phone’s ability to locate its users on a map.

At one point during his demonstration, Mr. Jobs showed a tracking feature making it possible to watch on a Google map as an iPhone user drove down Lombard Street, the twisty tourist attraction in San Francisco.

Mr. Jobs also indirectly challenged Microsoft with a mobile Web service call MobileMe, intended to permit a user to synchronize a phone, calendar and contact information on the iPhone and multiple devices including PCs and other iPhones. The service, which will cost $99 a year and comes with 20 gigabytes of data storage, is similar to a service offered by Microsoft.

Apple’s obstacle in offering the new service is that its competitors, like Google, offer similar services for less. Google offers 10 gigabytes of e-mail storage for $20 a year.

Apple announced that it would begin selling the iPhone in 70 countries this summer; the current phone is being sold in six countries.

“Given the feature set, ecosystem partners, launch countries and the pricing of the iPhone, they are likely to hit the 10 million mark by September-October,” said Chetan Sharma, an independent consultant on the wireless data communications industry.

The company announced on Monday in a regulatory filing that it would sell the 3G phones under different business arrangements in the United States. In the past, Apple shared service plan revenue with AT&T and other cellular firms. The second-generation iPhone will be sold without the recurring revenue streams and without the exclusivity arrangements it was previously able to command.

While trying to convince cellular carriers around the world that they should carry the iPhone, Apple realized that it needed to change the financial deal that it had with the carriers in the first six countries.

“We’ve changed our business model, from getting a cut of the future revenues to just a more traditional model,” Mr. Jobs said in an interview on Monday. “That’s enabled us to roll out around the world much faster.”

AT&T said it would subsidize the phones to attract consumers. Under the plan, unlimited iPhone 3G data plans for consumers will be available for $30 a month, in addition to voice plans starting at $40. Business users will be charged $45 a month for data.

By giving back the revenue to the carriers, which they may use for subsidies, Apple is hoping to dramatically increase its volume, as well as sell more Macintosh computers to iPhone users.

“It’s not about the iPhone,” said Charles Wolf, a financial analyst at Needham & Company. “There’s a tradeoff that Apple is making. The iPhone halo effect will be far more powerful than the iPod halo effect was. It’s going to stimulate Mac sales among iPhone users.”

Damon Darlin contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/te...0apple.html?hp





Samsung Launches iPhone Lookalike

Korean technology group Samsung <005930.KS> launched a new touchscreen smartphone on Monday, hours before Apple <AAPL.O> Chief Executive Steve Jobs was expected to announce a new version of the iPhone.

Like the iPhone, Samsung's Omnia aims to make Internet browsing easy, and has a wide screen for viewing video as well as music capabilities and a 5 megapixel camera. It runs on Microsoft <MSFT.O> Windows Mobile software.

The original iPhone transformed the market for so-called smartphones with computer-like functions a year ago and the industry is eager to see whether Apple can repeat its success with a new version, expected to run on faster, 3G networks.

According to photographs released with a statement from Samsung, the Omnia resembles the original iPhone in its dark, shiny finish, curved edges and slim form.

The phone will be unveiled at the CommunicAsia trade fair in Singapore starting June 17 and go on sale in southeast Asia that week. It will be available in Europe in July.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Louise Ireland)
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv...25987720080609





Lost Cameras "Phone Home" to Catch Thieves
Franklin Paul

Alison DeLauzon thought the snapshots and home videos of her infant son were gone for good when she lost her digital camera while on vacation in Florida.

Then a funny thing happened: her camera "phoned home."

Equipped with a special memory card with wireless Internet capability, DeLauzon's camera had not only automatically sent her holiday pictures to her computer, but had even uploaded photos of the miscreants who swiped her equipment bag after she accidentally left it behind at a restaurant.

"I opened up the Eye-Fi manager on the computer and, lo and behold, there are the guys that stole our cameras," said DeLauzon, a native of New York's Long Island suburb. "Not only is it the guy who stole our camera ... but the guy took a picture of (his accomplice) holding our other camera."

DeLauzon received the Eye-Fi, a 2-gigabyte SD memory card that fits into millions of digital cameras, as a holiday gift to go with her Canon camera.

Priced at about $100, the card automatically uploads pictures to a home computer or online photosharing service as soon as the user is linked to a familiar wireless network.

Luckily, the culprits passed by an unsecured network, whose factory-installed setting matched that of DeLauzon's home system, and the Eye-Fi automatically shipped the photos: first baby pictures, then the snap-happy scoundrels.

Her experience reflects the rise of technology that empowers everyday gadgets to protect themselves or the priceless personal data -- from family phone numbers to business budgets -- that consumers keep on portable electronics devices.

Macs E-Mail Video To Victims

Cameras are perhaps the most common home-phoning gadget used to thwart criminals.

An eerie case occurred last month, when a Japanese man set up a hidden camera because food was disappearing from his kitchen. While he was out, the camera sent pictures to his mobile phone of the intruder -- an unknown woman living secretly in his closet.
A few years ago, there was a well-publicized case of a Sidekick mobile phone that was first lost in a New York taxi, then found by a 16-year-old who used it to take pictures and send instant messages.

But the device's mobile service provider automatically backed up such data on remote computers, allowing the owner's friend, Evan Guttman, to uncover a trail -- and launch an online shaming campaign against the 16-year-old, who was eventually arrested.

While passive systems have helped reunite missing gadgets with their owners, more aggressive measures can be employed to protect everything from laptops to iPods and BlackBerrys.

GadgetTrak, of Beaverton, Oregon, sells software that can be loaded onto any of those devices. If a BlackBerry, for example, falls into the wrong hands, the software grabs information from the new user's SIM data card and e-mails it to the rightful owner.
With an Apple Mac computer, the software instructs the built-in camera to take video of the thief and sends to the owner, along information about nearby wireless networks.

Some 20,000 GadgetTrack licenses have been purchased in about one year -- including 10,000 from storage company Seagate

"The reason we have been so successful is that people are not expecting this kind of software to be installed," said Ken Westin, the company's founder. "No security solution is 100 percent -- there are always going to be work-arounds. But your average thief is not going to be a computer expert."

DeLauzon didn't want to press charges against the people who had her camera: Both were employees at the restaurant where she dined and accidentally left her photo equipment.

Sure, they were fired -- but getting justice was not as important to her as retrieving her memories of her baby boy.

"When we finally got it back, my husband and I spent the night just sitting and watching the videos -- stupid videos, like him feeding himself for the first time or him pulling himself up in his crib for the first time. We sat down one night and just relished it."

(Editing by Brian Moss)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...43208620080606





Compressed Web Phone Calls are Easy to Bug
David Robson

Plans to compress internet (VoIP) phone calls so they use less bandwidth could make them vulnerable to eavesdropping. Most networks are currently safe, but many service providers are due to implement the flawed compression technology.

The new compression technique, called variable bitrate compression produces different size packets of data for different sounds.

That happens because the sampling rate is kept high for long complex sounds like "ow", but cut down for simple consonants like "c". This variable method saves on bandwidth, while maintaining sound quality.

VoIP streams are encrypted to prevent eavesdropping. However, a team from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US, has shown that simply measuring the size of packets without decoding them can identify whole words and phrases with a high rate of accuracy.

VoIP systems accessed via a computer like Skype have become popular in recent years, and internet-based phone systems are increasingly appearing in homes and offices too to connect conventional telephones.

Matching packets

Only a few services currently employ the vulnerable compression method, but more networks had hoped to include it in future VoIP upgrades, says Charles Wright, a member of the John Hopkins team. "We hope we have caught this threat before it becomes too serious."

Eavesdropping software the team has developed cannot yet decode an entire conversation, but it can search for chosen phrases within the encrypted data. This could still allow a criminal to find important financial information conveyed in the call, says Fabian Monrose, another team member.

The software breaks down a typed phrase to be listened for into its constituent sounds using a phonetic dictionary. A version of the phrase is then pasted together from audio clips of phonemes taken from a library of example conversations, before finally being made into a stream of VoIP-style packets.

That gives an idea of what the phrase would look like in a real VoIP stream. When a close match is found in a real call, the software alerts the eavesdropper.
Jargon catcher

In tests on example conversations, the software correctly identified phrases with an average accuracy of about 50%. But that jumped to 90% for longer, more complicated words.

Wright thinks these phrases may be the most important. "I think the attack is much more of a threat to calls with some sort of professional jargon where you have lots of big words that string together to make long, relatively predictable phrases," he says. "Informal conversational speech would be tougher because it's so much more random."

Philip Zimmermann, the founder of the Zfone VoIP security project, says the compression schemes lesson no longer seem like a good idea.

"I'd suggest looking for other alternatives," he says. Networks could solve the problem by padding out the data packets to an equal length, he adds, although this would reduce the extent of the compression.

A paper on the Johns Hopkins team's work was presented at the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, in Oakland, California, US, last month.
http://technology.newscientist.com/a...sy-to-bug.html





Nokia: Linux Needs to Learn Business

A VP at the Finnish handset maker says open-source developers should be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry works
David Meyer

Open-source developers targeting the mobile space need to learn business rules including digital rights management, Nokia's software chief has claimed.

Speaking at the Handsets World conference in Berlin on Tuesday, Dr Ari Jaaksi told delegates that the open-source community needed to be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry currently works, because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models.

Jaaksi, Nokia's vice president of software and head of the Finnish handset manufacturer's open-source operations, said: "We want to educate open-source developers. There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models."

Jaaksi admitted that concepts like these "go against the open-source philosophy", but said they were necessary components of the current mobile industry. "Why do we need closed vehicles? We do," he said. "Some of these things harm the industry but they're here [as things stand]. These are touchy, emotional issues but this dialogue is very much needed. As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too."

Nokia's primary play in the open-source sphere thus far has been Maemo, the Linux-based operating system that runs on its N800-series tablet devices. These devices are popular among developers in the Maemo developer community but, being something of a testbed, have not yet seen much traction in the mass market.

In his speech, Jaaksi detailed some of the lessons Nokia had learned in its work with the Maemo developer community, primarily the need to avoid 'forking' code. He said: "Don't make your own version. The original mistake we made was to take the code to our labs, change it and then release it at the last minute. The community had already gone in a different direction than [us], and no-one was pushing it other than [us]. Everybody wants to make their own version and keep it too close to their chest but that leads to fragmentation."

The manufacturer has one other significant investment in open source, however: the software maker Trolltech, Nokia's purchase of which finally went through in the last few days. Trolltech makes Qt, a graphical toolkit that is used in the KDE Linux desktop environment and in much commercial software and is an apparently non-participatory member in the LiMo Foundation.

LiMo is an industry consortium that is creating a common middleware layer to help Linux-based software make it onto handsets from a variety of manufacturers. However, neither LiMo nor Maemo use Qt or KDE, opting instead for the GTK+ toolkit and a Gnome-based desktop environment. This has led to a level of industry speculation that Nokia may withdraw Trolltech from LiMo, to use it for other purposes. Nokia stated—when it announced it was to buy Trolltech—that the purchase was to help it move into the applications market.

Speaking to silicon.com sister site ZDNet.co.uk after his presentation, Jaaksi said Nokia was "only now" able to start thinking about what to do with LiMo. He said he felt Nokia had "a huge responsibility from a desktop and user interface point of view to see how we play our cards", and expressed a keenness to see KDE and Gnome brought "closer".

Jaaksi added that he believed Symbian, the proprietary operating system in which Nokia has a major share, would still "in years to come [be] the best platform on which to create smart phones".
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...bal+bu siness





Ari Jaaksi of Nokia Wants to Educate the Linux Community
Bruce Perens

Ari Jaaksi of Nokia wants to educate the Linux developers:

There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models.

...Jaaksi said in This ZDNet Story.

But perhaps the community has some education for Jaaksi and Nokia. Jaaksi hosted me at a Nokia dinner in 2000, he's a nice guy and has been interested in Linux for a long time. But Nokia's barking up the wrong tree this time, because Nokia can do everything it wants with DRM, IPR, and SIM locks without bothering the Linux developers about it - and both Nokia and the Linux developers will like it better that way. It's surprising that Nokia doesn't understand that at this late date.

Of course Jaaksi's concerned that developers are unsympathetic to technologies that attempt to shackle the customer. He acknowledges that such technologies "aren't the Open Source way". And those developers have put their preference in writing, with the GPL and especially GPL3, which requires that there be means to change the software in embedded devices without disabling any of the functionality.

This is important to the Open Source / Free Software developers because without hardware, software isn't of much use. A future of locked-down embedded devices wouldn't leave much room for Free Software to run, especially software other than applications, like the Linux kernel. Thus, the provisions in GPL3 that require a path to change the software in hardware are important. But how does one do DRM, SIM locking, and protect critical copyrighted property in that context?

The key is knowing how to draw bright lines between different parts of the system. That's a legal term, and in this case it means a line between the Free Software and the rest of the system, that is "bright" in that the two pieces are very well separated, and there is no dispute that one could be a derivative work of the other, or infringes on the other in any way. All of the Free Software goes on one side of that line, and all of the lock-down stuff on the other side.

And so we can have what I call a bright-line system. That's a system that is designed, from the start, to separate those two pieces. In a properly engineered bright-line system, you can replace every byte of the Free Software, and yet the DRM keeps working as it should, the SIM locking continues to lock, and the GSM stack, which is the precious "intellectual property" of most cellular companies, is still hidden away where nobody can see it. Many of my consulting customers are building these systems into their products today.

To build a bright-line system, you need an effective partnership between your legal team and engineering. I spend a lot of time building that bridge for various companies. It requires that engineers learn enough about the law to know when to ask the right questions, and to know not to answer them by themselves. That's important: my expert-witness practice has been fed by lawsuits in which engineers did what lawyers should have. And goofed.

The law team in a bright-line engineering partnership has to operate differently than they're used to. They have to be conscious that engineers are scored on meeting a timeline, and can't stop development while they're waiting for an answer from legal. Thus, legal has to be able to take on-impulse calls from engineering, and answer them in a timely fashion.

That's too expensive!, say the lawyers and managers. But it's part of the cost of doing business today. When I learned electronics, engineers built products by soldering together resistors and transistors. But today, the job of engineers is to build derivative works by combining units of intellectual property owned by third parties. That's not what they're trained for, and it's a mine-field of potential litigation for every company that puts software in its products - whether or not that software includes Open Source. Without an effective partnership between legal and engineering, your company walks that mine-field every day.

Once they've built an effective partnership between legal and engineering, it's time to design the system. There are three ways to keep Free Software separated from proprietary software effectively, and a fourth that has been tried but is too legally dangerous for me to recommend. They are:

Separate CPU:

Most cell phone designs include two CPUs, often on the same ASIC: an ARM9, an embedded CPU capable of running a full-featured operating system like Linux, and an ARM7, a smaller CPU that usually runs a real-time operating system. Generally the GSM stack lives in the ARM7. The ARM9 runs a full-featured OS like Linux, does high-level functions, and stays asleep when the phone isn't being used.

This is an ideal structure for a bright-line system, because all of the software that needs to be locked down can live in the ARM7, and all of the Free Software can live in the ARM9. The way the two CPUs communicate should be publicly documented or should be a full Open Standard to meet the requirements of GPL3.

Most phones use, believe it or not, the Hayes Modem control protocol to communicate between the two CPUs today. But obviously a better communication path is needed to send streaming media to DRM. If there is to be no potential to tap the unencrypted media stream from the Free Software, there must be a path to the display and audio output hardware from the ARM7.

Kernel under a Kernel

You may have noticed this statement that Linus Torvalds placed as a prelude to the GPL that comes with the Linux kernel:

NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.

Linus' statement is unnecessary, as the terms of the GPL say that anyway. But the point here is that an application that just calls normal system services of the kernel is not a derivative work of the kernel. Similarly, a real-time kernel under the Linux kernel, exporting a publicly-documented set of system services to Linux, would not be a derivative work of Linux. DRM, SIM-locking, the GSM stack, and other such software could live in such a real-time kernel and could be protected from the Linux kernel and other Free Software.

User Mode

You can put anything you like in a user-mode program that runs on top of the kernel, as long as that program only links to programs that don't have strong reciprocal (or share-and-share-alike) terms like the GPL. Most Linux libraries are under the LGPL and similar licenses to make this easy for you. It's possible to implement DRM, SIM locking, and other lock-down features in a user-mode program, but it's not as proof against attacks on the security of those systems as the two methods above. If all you want to do is separate two pieces of copyrighted property, this is a good way to do it.

How Not To Do It

One method used by various companies is to place the proprietary property in a run-time dynamicaly-linked kernel module. I don't recommend this because it's legally ambiguous. The law doesn't define what constitutes a derivative work in software because copyright law was written before there was software. And various lawyers that I ask have opined on either side of the debate. But fortunately, you don't have to win this argument. Your goal shouldn't be to win lawsuits, but to not be sued at all. That means that your design must be so unambiguous in its separation of the Free Software from the proprietary software that there is no issue to be litigated. So, don't use dynamic linking as a means of keeping proprietary and Free Software separate.
http://technocrat.net/d/2008/6/11/43198





Not all USB Drives are Created Equal

Performance and reliability vary, but getting product specs for flash drives can be tricky.
Robert L. Scheier

Most USB 2.0 flash drives look the same, but that doesn't mean they perform the same.

Differences in the type of memory and, to a lesser extent, the type of I/O controllers used by USB drives can make one device perform two or three times faster and last (theoretically, at least) 10 times longer than another, even if both sport the USB 2.0 logo.

Unfortunately for the average user, there are no accepted industry standards or certifications to judge what's inside a USB 2.0 flash drive on a store shelf. Without checking reviews or running benchmarks, the only rule of thumb is that the more expensive drives (and those which post performance numbers on the packaging) will tend to be the fastest and, perhaps, last the longest.

The casual user may not ever notice. "For the average user, moving a few files around, or even 20-50MB of data, a slower drive is probably sufficient," says Cameron Crandall, a technology manager at memory vendor Kingston Technology Corp. And while the memory in less expensive drives has a shorter life span than that in more expensive drives, even that is enough to last the lifetime of the drive for an average user.

However, these differences can matter if you're storing large amounts of data, using the drives to store critical information or are using a USB drive to supplement system memory using the ReadyBoost feature in Windows Vista.

Key performance factors
The USB 2.0 standard supports a maximum throughput of 60MB/sec., although "nobody's pushing that limit" with the flash memory used in current USB drives, says Pat Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC Inc., a Santa Ana, Calif., manufacturer of memory and storage products.

The single biggest factor in USB drive performance is whether it contains one of two types of memory: SLC (single-level cell) or MLC (multilevel cell). SLC stores one bit, and MLC stores two bits of data in each memory cell. SLC is twice as fast as MLC, says Wilkison, with maximum read speeds of about 14 MB/sec. and write speeds of about 10-12MB/sec. Not surprisingly, almost all current USB flash drives are built using MLC memory, since SLC costs about twice as much as MLC.

Users would see the greatest performance difference between SLC and MLC if they were performing many operations involving small files, rather than relatively few read/write operations on larger files, says John Whaley, principal engineer at MokaFive Inc., whose virtualization software makes it possible for virtual machines to be stored on USB flash drives.

SLC memory also lasts about 10 times as long as MLC, says Crandall, which means one cell in an SLC-based USB drive should last for about 100,000 cycles of writing and erasing data before it fails. However, this difference won't be of much concern to many users.

"If you save a file out to your USB drive and use 100 bytes, you're probably not going to write to those same 100 bytes again for a long time, unless for some reason you decide to delete that file or change it," says Crandall. As a result, "the usable lifetime of the device will extend long beyond" the customary five-year warranty, says Mike Sager, vice president of public relations at Kingston.

When USB drives do begin to fail, they do so one cell at a time, not across the board, says Crandall. This is why an SLC-based drive might be worthwhile for a user storing, say, a virtual machine on a flash drive to restore their system after a disaster, according to Wilkison. If the drive began to fail, dropped bits might not be noticed in a photo or music track but could crash the system if they disappeared from a key part of an operating system.

There are features in the I/O controller that can boost performance in USB drives as well. One is the use of multiple channels to simultaneously move data to and from memory, says Brad Anderson, director of product marketing at USB flash drive vendor Lexar Media Inc. Another, he says, is interleaving, which intermixes data flows to and from multiple flash memory chips within the drive to ensure the channel is used to its maximum potential.

As with many other design details, it's difficult for consumers to determine which I/O controller is used in a specific drive and which features it provides. While a consumer could try to find out which I/O controller is used in a specific drive and investigate how that controller works, most buyers will, according to Wilkison, have to "extrapolate from the speed" of the drive what type of controller is in it.

No standard
Right now, possibly the only way to know whether you've bought a drive that uses SLC memory is how much it costs -- the more expensive the drive, the more likely it is to have been built using SLC.

There is one way to judge the quality of a drive besides the price: the Windows ReadyBoost logo, which indicates that the flash drive can be used to supplement system RAM and thus speed the performance of Windows Vista-equipped PCs.

However, the minimum specifications for Windows ReadyBoost are just 2.5MB/sec. for random reads of 4KB of data, and 1.75MB/sec. for random writes of 512KB of data, which Crandall says are typical of lower-priced and lower-speed USB flash drives. Customers who want the maximum benefit from Windows ReadyBoost should opt for a USB drive marketed as a high-performance device and probably priced at the high end of the average for its capacity.

The future
In the first half of 2009, Wilkison predicts, controller manufacturers will begin shipping drives with dual- and even four-channel controllers, which will increase speeds even for slower MLC memory by increasing the number of lanes through which data can be written to and from the memory cells. USB drives combining four-channel controllers with MLC memory will reach speeds of about 60MB/sec. for reads and 30MB/sec. for writes, coming closer to -- but not quite -- saturating the USB 2.0 interface.

For the average consumer for whom price is more important than speed or reliability, any reasonably priced USB drive should do. But if speed or longer life is critical, look for drives advertised as high performance, do your research online and expect to spend more. But even then, you can't be absolutely sure you're getting more speed for your money.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...intsrc=kc_feat





Blogging--It's Good for You

The therapeutic value of blogging becomes a focus of study
Jessica Wapner

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.
Flaherty, who studies conditions such as hypergraphia (an uncontrollable urge to write) and writer’s block, also looks to disease models to explain the drive behind this mode of communication. For example, people with mania often talk too much. “We believe something in the brain’s limbic system is boosting their desire to communicate,” Flaherty explains. Located mainly in the midbrain, the limbic system controls our drives, whether they are related to food, sex, appetite, or problem solving. “You know that drives are involved [in blogging] because a lot of people do it compulsively,” Flaherty notes. Also, blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art.

The frontal and temporal lobes, which govern speech—no dedicated writing center is hardwired in the brain—may also figure in. For example, lesions in Wernicke’s area, located in the left temporal lobe, result in excessive speech and loss of language comprehension. People with Wernicke’s aphasia speak in gibberish and often write constantly. In light of these traits, Flaherty speculates that some activity in this area could foster the urge to blog.

Scientists’ understanding about the neurobiology underlying therapeutic writing must remain speculative for now. Attempts to image the brain before and after writing have yielded minimal information because the active regions are located so deep inside. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have shown that the brain lights up differently before, during and after writing, notes James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. But Pennebaker and others remain skeptical about the value of such images because they are hard to duplicate and quantify.

Most likely, writing activates a cluster of neurological pathways, and several researchers are committed to uncovering them. At the University of Arizona, psychologist and neuroscientist Richard Lane hopes to make brain-imaging techniques more relevant by using those techniques to study the neuroanatomy of emotions and their expressions. Nancy Morgan, lead author of the Oncologist study, is looking to conduct larger community-based and clinical trials of expressive writing. And Pennebaker is continuing to investigate the link between expressive writing and biological changes, such as improved sleep, that are integral to health. “I think the sleep angle is one of the more promising ones,” he says.

Whatever the underlying causes may be, people coping with cancer diagnoses and other serious conditions are increasingly seeking—and finding—solace in the blogosphere. “Blogging undoubtedly affords similar benefits” to expressive writing, says Morgan, who wants to incorporate writing programs into supportive care for cancer patients.

Some hospitals have started hosting patient-authored blogs on their Web sites as clinicians begin to recognize the therapeutic value. Unlike a bedside journal, blogging offers the added benefit of receptive readers in similar situations, Morgan explains: “Individuals are connecting to one another and witnessing each other’s expressions—the basis for forming a community.”
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-healthy-type





Among Scientific Treasures, a Gem
Dennis Overbye

One thing you can say about the copy of Nicolaus Copernicus’s book “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” (“On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”), on sale next week at Christie’s auction house, is that it looks and feels old.

Its cover is dented and stained. The pages are warped. You could easily imagine that this book had sat out half a dozen revolutions hidden in various dank basements in Europe.

In fact this book, published in 1543, was the revolution. It was here that the Polish astronomer laid out his theory that the Earth and other planets go around the Sun, contravening a millennium of church dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe and launching a frenzy of free thought and scientific inquiry.

The party, known as the Enlightenment, is still going strong. It was a thrill to hold Copernicus in my hands on a recent visit to the back rooms of Christie’s and flip through its hallowed pages as if it were my personal invitation to the Enlightenment. No serious library should be without one. Just in case you are missing your own copy, you can pick up this one for about the price of a Manhattan apartment next Tuesday, according to the Christie’s catalog, which estimates its value at $900,000 to $1.2 million.

The Copernicus is a cornerstone in the collection of a retired physician and amateur astronomer, Richard Green of Long Island, that constitutes pretty much a history of science and Western thought. Among the others in Dr. Green’s library are works by Galileo, who was tried for heresy in 1633 and sentenced to house arrest for his admiration of Copernicus and for portraying the pope as a fool, as well as by Darwin, Descartes, Newton, Freud, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Malthus and even Karl Marx.

One lot includes Albert Einstein’s collection of reprints of his scientific papers, including his first one on relativity. Another is a staggeringly beautiful star atlas, Harmonia Macrocosmica, by the 17th-century Dutch-German cartographer Andreas Cellarius, with double-truck hand-colored plates.



Pawing through these jaw droppers, I found my attention being drawn again and again to a small white book, barely more than a pamphlet, a time machine that took me back to a more recent revolution. It was the directory for world’s first commercial phone system, Volume 1, No. 1, published in New Haven by the Connecticut District Telephone Company in November 1878, future issues to be published “from time to time, as the nature of the service requires.”

Two things struck me. As an aging veteran of the current rewiring of the human condition, I wondered whether there might be lessons from that first great rewiring of our collective nervous system.

Another was a shock of recognition — that people were already talking on the phone a year before Einstein was born. In fact, just two years later Einstein’s father went into the nascent business himself. Einstein grew up among the rudiments of phones and other electrical devices like magnets and coils, from which he drew part of the inspiration for relativity. It would not be until 1897, after people had already made fortunes exploiting electricity, that the English scientist J. J. Thomson discovered what it actually was: the flow of tiny negatively charged corpuscles of matter called electrons.

The New Haven switchboard opened in January 1878, only two years after Alexander Graham Bell, in nearby Boston, spoke the immortal words “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” It was the first commercial system that allowed many customers to connect with one another, for $22 a year, payable in advance.

The first directory consisted of a single sheet listing the names of 50 subscribers, according to lore. By November, the network had grown to 391 subscribers, identified by name and address — phone numbers did not yet exist. And the phone book, although skimpy, had already taken the form in which it would become the fat doorstop of today, with advertisements and listings of businesses in the back — 22 physicians and 22 carriage manufacturers, among others.

Customers were limited to three minutes a call and no more than two calls an hour without permission from the central office.

Besides rules, the embryonic phone book also featured pages of tips on placing calls — pick up the receiver and tell the operator whom you want — and how to talk on this gadget. Having a real conversation, for example, required rapidly transferring the telephone between mouth and ear.

“When you are not speaking, you should be listening,” it says at one point.

You should begin by saying, “Hulloa,” and when done talking, the book says, you should say, “That is all.”

The other person should respond, “O.K.”

Because anybody could be on the line at any time, customers should not pick up the telephone unless they want to make a call, and they should be careful about what others might hear.

“Any person using profane or otherwise improper language should be reported at this office immediately,” the company said.

If only they could hear us now. On second thought, maybe it’s better they can’t. Today we are all on a party line, and your most virulent thoughts are just a forward button away from being broadcast to the universe. Would it have killed the founders of the Internet to give us a little warning here?

Near the back of the book is an essay on another promising new wonder that “has attracted renewed attention both in this country and in Europe.”

Many of the streets and shops of Paris, it is reported, are now illuminated by electric lights, placed on posts. “People seated before the cafes read their papers by the aid of lights on the opposite side of the way, and yet the most delicate complexions and softest tints in fabrics do not suffer in the white glare of the lamps. Every stone in the road is plainly visible, and the horses move swiftly along as if confident of their footing,” the book says.

It makes you wonder what could come next. Oh yes, those horses. No revolution is ever done.

That is all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/science/10auct.html





Hard Drive Withstands Fire and Water
Wolfgang Gruener

Most small businesses and consumers do not have elaborate disaster recovery plans in place, which means that their data may be at risk, especially if backups are stored nearby. Fire and water can wipe out at least portions of the contents stored on hard drives in a matter of seconds. ioSafe announced new hard drives that promise to withstand fire and water and offer a type of product for all those who don’t invest in off-site storage.

ioSafe claims that it is the first company to offer fire- and waterproof hard drives, which may be worth a look not just for businesses, but also families who are looking for ways to keep those digital family pictures safe, even when a house burns down. The company uses 2.5” drives within 3.5” enclosures are specially equipped with heat and water barriers.

Fire protection is provided by the firm’s “DataCast endothermic insulation technology”, which the manufacturer claims forms a chemical bond with water molecules that, at temperature above 160 degrees Fahrenheit, releases water vapor to limit the internal temperature of the unit. Combined with the insulation, ioSafe claims that the drive can sustain outside temperatures of up to 1400 degrees Fahrenheit for up to 15 minutes and short term peak temperatures of up to 1700 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the case of a fire, the plastic tabs on the inside of the 3.5” casing will melt at a temperature of 250 degrees Fahrenheit, closing the drive and blocking airflow. The manufacturer said that the inside of the 2.5” drive should not get hotter than 210 degrees Fahrenheit during a fire, as 98% of radiant heat can be deflected. Typical house fires reach a heat of about 1100 degrees Fahrenheit with 3 to 5 minutes.
There was no detailed information on the water protection technology, other than the claim that the drive will be protected from fresh or salt water damage, both in full submersion and spray/splash scenarios. Full submersion protection is guaranteed for up to 24 hours in up to 5 ft of water.

Just in case the drive is damaged, ioSafe offers an optional data recovery plan that is activated through the registration of a product. The service, which is offered free of charge, provides access to data recovery experts and includes up to $2500 payment by ioSafe to a third-party data extraction service plus replacement product, if required.

Not surprisingly, ioSafe’s hard drives come at a premium over regular hard drives. The price list ranges from $330 for a 5400 rpm 80 GB drive to $460 for a 7200 rpm 200 GB drive. The highest capacity is offered by a 320 GB 5400 rpm model for $450.
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/cont...37855-135.html





Is a New Digital Video Service Derailing Amazon.com?
Brad Stone

Amazon.com had another bad day.

After a two-hour outage on Friday, the site again had intermittent problems Monday. Keynote Systems, a mobile and Internet performance management firm based in San Mateo, Calif., says a new round of problems with the online retailer started at 10:03 a.m. this morning Pacific time and lasted for 20 minutes. During that time, the site’s availability was down to 30 percent.

Later that hour, at 10:56 Pacific time, the site’s availability dipped back down to 68 percent for around 3 minutes, according to Keynote.

Amazon.com now appears to be operating normally. Though it informed its merchants Monday of the new problems, Amazon, characteristically, has not addressed the cause of the outages.

But analysts at Bank of America Equity Research had one interesting theory. In a note to investors on Sunday night, analysts Brian J. Pitz and Brian P. Fitzgerald speculated that the problems may be related to preparations for the coming relaunch of Amazon Unbox, the company’s TV and movie download service.

Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, said last month that the company would soon introduce for-pay live video streaming of shows and movies from the site. In support of their theory, the analysts note that the outages did not appear to affect Amazon Web services and were mostly limited to the United States, where the streaming service will likely be introduced first.

Researchers at Keynote Systems and Narus, an Internet traffic intelligence firm that is also studying Amazon traffic patterns, have largely ruled out a denial of service attack orchestrated by hackers and the DNS issues that crippled Youtube earlier this year.

Dr. Supranamaya Ranjan, a senior member of the technical staff at Narus, says Amazon is typically adept at “load balancing” — responding to customer visits by spreading its computing resources efficiently between the computer servers that are in the best position to respond to that customer at that time. But during the outages, he said, that was not the case; his visits to Amazon.com were often handled by faraway or already overloaded servers.

“That does lead me to conjecture that they are in the process of re-architecting the whole way their content distribution system works and the causes for this could have been this new Unbox service,” Dr. Ranjan said.

Amazon itself isn’t commenting.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ing-amazoncom/





Return to Vendor
Dan Mitchell

Nearly all the electronic gadgets returned by customers turn out to be in perfect working order, according to a report from the consulting firm Accenture (accenture.com).

More than two-thirds of the returns were of products that worked fine, but did not “meet customers’ expectations for some reason,” PC World reported. “Either they thought it was defective when it wasn’t, or there was an expectation gap,” said Terry Steger, an executive at Accenture.

The report concluded that manufacturers and retailers themselves are largely to blame. Too many companies, according to Accenture, see processing returns as a “normal cost of doing business.” But significant savings can be drawn from “improving design, packaging and documentation; setting customer expectations and providing adequate customer identification; and providing after-sales support and accessories,” the report states.

Still, Accenture says that 27 percent of returns are because of “buyer’s remorse, or as Joshua Fruhlinger of engadget.com put it, “The implicit nature of — ooh, look at that shiny thing over there!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/te.../07online.html





Swedish Left Party Wants to Legalize Piracy
Ernesto

This Sunday, the Swedish Left Party voted in favor of a motion calling for the legalization of sharing copyrighted files for personal use. The party, which currently holds 22 seats in the Swedish parliament, sees piracy as something positive, much like public libraries.

At the party’s congress this weekend, party members had to vote on a motion that would legalize the uploading and downloading of copyrighted material for personal use, as long as it is not for commercial purposes.

“To many of us in the Left Party, file sharing is something positive in the same obvious way that public libraries are,” the motion read, going on to describe the general opinion on file sharing in Sweden.

In addition, the motion stated that the various measures taken for trying to stop file sharing, such as big brother-like surveillance, or arbitrary sentences against individuals, are unacceptable.

The Pirate Bay, the main reason why piracy is such a hot topic in Sweden, was also mentioned in the motion. “The farce that is the ongoing legal procedures against The Pirate Bay also shows how legal security is in risk of being compromised by those trying to enforce the current ban on file sharing,” it read.

The motion concluded that legalizing piracy is the solution, and that the Left Party should take a stand for opening the possibilities to make copies for personal use.

The congress was split on the issue, and debate was heated before the vote on Sunday, but when the vote was taken it fell in favour of the motion legalizing file sharing.

“We obviously want to be the cultural workers’ party in the future, but legislation which makes the majority of the adult population criminals must be changed,” Elise Norberg Pilhem of the party’s board said.

Today, only a few hours after The Left Party’s new stance on file sharing, another initiative in the same direction was presented from across the aisle. The Swedish Center Party - the third largest party in Sweden, currently in government with four cabinet ministers, has called for an improvement in current copyright legislation.

Earlier this year the party had no success in convincing their colleagues in the government coalition to legalize non-commercial file sharing. Today, the party demands a complete oversight of the copyright legislation, and the appointment of a commission to investigate how a new copyright law could be constructed.

We now see a younger generation questioning copyright more and more, and with that there will be demands for updated copyright legislation. We need a legislation that is accepted by as many as possible, says Annie Johansson, the Center Party’s spokesperson on copyright.

It looks like things are changing for the better in Sweden.
http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-left...piracy-080609/





Metallica Goes Diva on the Internet…Again
Niki D’Andrea

What the hell is wrong with Metallica? I had some empathy about the whole Napster snafu in 2000, when the band complained about copyright violations and being ripped off for royalties when Napster was a free file-sharing site. Metallica won a settlement from Napster (now a pay site), and alienated a lot of fans in the process.

I was one of them. See, you can’t stop bootlegs. Metallica, of all bands, should know that -- their initial fan base was built upon bootleg copies of tapes that metal fans traded and passed along. I’d never heard of Metallica until a friend gave me a taped copy (yes, a copy) of the band’s 1986 album, Master of Puppets. That bootleg copy led me to purchase all of Metallica’s albums, several T-shirts, and tickets to their shows when they came to town.

Of course, that was before Metallica made the “One” video in 1989 and became MTV darlings. Ever since the band got the corporate culture machine behind them, they’ve vehemently turned their backs on the old school, grassroots metal community that helped put them where they are today.

Now, it seems they’re taking their prima donna behavior a step further.

Last Wednesday, Metallica invited several bloggers to a “listening party” in London for its upcoming album. Now, “listening parties” are public relations stunts. Anybody who’s been in this business for longer than a week knows that PR companies hold listening parties for the purpose of generating pre-release press and hype. Listening parties can be expensive and time-consuming, and so they are generally not done just for fun.

Metallica uber alles.

But when bloggers wrote reviews of what they’d heard at the listening party, Metallica went ballistic, demanding that the reviews be taken down. One site in particular, The Quietus, has reported that the band’s management asked the site to remove the blog about the new album, even though Metallica’s management did not ask the blogger to sign a non-disclosure agreement (which would have legally prevented attendees from writing about the listening party or the six songs they’d heard previewed there).

Other publications whose reporters attended the listening party and wrote reviews – including Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, and Rock Sound – were reportedly asked to remove their reviews, as well.

Ironically, none of the now-removed reviews were negative. The least glowing review was that on The Quietus, and Quietus editor Luke Turner told Blinded By Hype that “if you were lucky enough to read [the review] before it was taken down, was full of praise about a return to form.”

Metallica’s management has refused to comment on the matter. But in this case, the band’s behavior is comment enough.
http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/upo...on_the_int.php





Shatner on 'Trek': 'You Know, That's Rather Good'
AP

One recent week, William Shatner did something he hadn't done for many years -- watched the original "Star Trek." It was kind of an accident.

In the "Trek" episode "A Piece of the Action," Spock and Kirk traveled to a planet modeled on 1920s gangsters.

Now, you might think that a bit odd. But Shatner rarely watches himself work. When it comes to acting, he says, he lives in the moment and moves on. Same thing these days with his work as Denny Crane on ABC's "Boston Legal."

This particular night, though, he was recovering from hip surgery and couldn't sleep, so he was watching TV. An old episode came on -- the one where the crew of the USS Enterprise visited a society that had modeled itself after Chicago gangsters of the 1920s. Kirk and Spock dressed up in pinstripe suits and held court as tough guys.

Watching, Shatner was more pleased than he expected.

"I haven't seen myself playing Captain Kirk in a long, long time," he says. "And I watched it now, from my perspective of 40 years later, and I thought, 'You know, that's rather good.' It's a starship captain trying to do the accent, the Noo Yawk accent, trying to play tough, trying to be one of the guys. It's not quite right, but it's what a starship captain would have done -- a decent imitation, enough to fool those guys but not the audience."

Shatner won't be playing Kirk in the upcoming reboot of "Star Trek" directed by J.J. Abrams. Leonard Nimoy plays an aging Spock, but the Jim Kirk character -- a young version -- is portrayed by actor Chris Pine. Shatner has said he's sad but not angry at the decision, which springs from the killing off of Kirk in the 1994 film "Star Trek Generations."

The recent late-night TV watching got Shatner thinking, though, about the character of Kirk and how it has endured.

"That was a good hero," Shatner says. "He made decisions. He was forceful. He was compassionate. He was the instigator. He fought hard and long physically and emotionally. He carried the dilemma of whether to intrude or not to intrude. It was all the classic forms of good Greek playmaking: The hero has the dilemma and resolves the dilemma."

Even the series' renowned cheesy production design, done on an increasingly tight budget through the show's 1966-69 run, didn't put him off.
"The actors were wonderful. And I didn't care about the sets or anything like that or the cheesy spaceship," Shatner says. "I think that's what happens in 'Star Trek.' Your eye goes past all the faults because you're concentrated on the actors and the plot."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/TV/0....ap/index.html





Net Providers to Block Sites With Child Sex
Danny Hakim

Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed to block access to Internet bulletin boards and Web sites nationwide that disseminate child pornography.

The move is part of a groundbreaking agreement with the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, that will be formally announced on Tuesday as a significant step by leading companies to curtail access to child pornography. Many in the industry have previously resisted similar efforts, saying they could not be responsible for content online, given the decentralized and largely unmonitored nature of the Internet.

The agreements will affect customers not just in New York but throughout the country. Verizon and Time Warner Cable are two of the nation’s five largest service providers, with roughly 16 million customers between them.

Negotiations are continuing with other service providers, Mr. Cuomo said.

The companies have agreed to shut down access to newsgroups that traffic in pornographic images of children on one of the oldest outposts of the Internet, known as Usenet. Usenet began nearly 30 years ago and was one of the earliest ways to swap information online, but as the World Wide Web blossomed, Usenet was largely supplanted by it, becoming a favored back alley for those who traffic in illicit material.

The providers will also cut off access to Web sites that traffic in child pornography.

While officials from the attorney general’s office said they hoped to make it extremely difficult to find or disseminate the material online, they acknowledged that they could not eliminate access entirely. Among the potential obstacles: some third-party companies sell paid subscriptions, allowing customers to access newsgroups privately, preventing even their Internet service providers from tracking their activity.

The agreements resulted from an eight-month investigation and sting operation in which undercover agents from Mr. Cuomo’s office, posing as subscribers, complained to Internet providers that they were allowing child pornography to proliferate online, despite customer service agreements that discouraged such activity. Verizon, for example, warns its users that they risk losing their service if they transmit or disseminate sexually exploitative images of children.

After the companies ignored the investigators’ complaints, the attorney general’s office surfaced, threatening charges of fraud and deceptive business practices. The companies agreed to cooperate and began weeks of negotiations.

By pursuing Internet service providers, Mr. Cuomo is trying to move beyond the traditional law enforcement strategy of targeting those who produce child pornography and their customers. That approach has had limited effectiveness, according to Mr. Cuomo’s office, in part because much of the demand in the United States has been fed by child pornography from abroad, especially Eastern Europe.

“You can’t help but look at this material and not be disturbed,” said Mr. Cuomo, who promised to take up the issue during his 2006 campaign. “These are 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, assault victims, there are animals in the pictures,” he added. “To say ‘graphic’ and ‘egregious’ doesn’t capture it.”

“The I.S.P.s’ point had been, ‘We’re not responsible, these are individuals communicating with individuals, we’re not responsible,’ ” he said, referring to Internet service providers. “Our point was that at some point, you do bear responsibility.”

Representatives for the three companies either did not return calls or declined to comment before the official announcement of the agreements on Tuesday.

Internet service providers represent a relatively new front in the battle against child pornography, one spearheaded in large part by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Federal law requires service providers to report child pornography to the National Center, but it often takes customer complaints to trigger a report, and few visitors to illicit newsgroups could be expected to complain because many are pedophiles themselves.

Last year, a bill sponsored by Congressman Nick Lampson, a Texas Democrat, promised to take “the battle of child pornography to Internet service providers” by ratcheting up penalties for failing to report complaints of child pornography. The bill passed in the House, but has languished in the Senate.

“If we can encourage — and certainly a fine would be an encouragement — the I.S.P. to be in a position to give the information to law enforcement, we are encouraging them to be on the side of law enforcement rather than erring to make money for themselves,” Mr. Lampson said.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children collaborated on Mr. Lampson’s bill and with Mr. Cuomo’s office in its investigation and strategy.

“This is a major step forward in the fight against child pornography,” Ernie Allen, the president and chief executive officer of the center, said in a statement. “Attorney General Cuomo has developed a new and effective system that cuts online child porn off at the source, and stops it from spreading across the Internet.”

As part of the agreements, the three companies will also collectively pay $1.125 million to underwrite efforts by Mr. Cuomo’s office and the center for missing children to purge child pornography from the Internet.

One considerable tool that has been assembled as part of the investigation is a library of more than 11,000 pornographic images. Because the same images are often distributed around the Web or from newsgroup to newsgroup, once investigators catalog an image, they can use a digital identifier called a “hash value” to scan for it anywhere else — using it as a homing beacon of sorts to find other pornographic sites.

“It’s going to make a significant difference,” Mr. Cuomo said. “It’s like the issue of drugs. You can attack the users or the suppliers. This is turning off the faucet. Does it solve the problem? No. But is it a major step forward? Yes. And it’s ongoing.”
The most graphic material was typically found on newsgroups, the online bulletin boards that exist apart from the World Wide Web but can be reached through some Internet search engines. The newsgroups transmit copies of messages around the world, so an image posted to the server of a service provider in the Netherlands, for example, ends up on other servers in the United States and elsewhere.

The agreement is designed to bar access to Web sites that feature child pornography by requiring service providers to check against a registry of explicit sites maintained by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Investigators said a few providers, including America Online, had taken significant steps on their own to address some of the problems their competitors were being forced to tackle.

Mr. Cuomo said his latest investigation was built on agreements he and other state attorneys general had reached with the social networking sites Facebook and MySpace to protect children from sexual predators.

“No one is saying you’re supposed to be the policemen on the Internet, but there has to be a paradigm where you cooperate with law enforcement, or if you have notice of a potentially criminal act, we deem you responsible to an extent,” he said. “This literally threatens our children, and there can be no higher priority than keeping our children safe.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/ny...ternet.html?hp





France Blocks Online Child Porn, Terrorism, Racism
AP

France is joining at least five other countries where Internet service providers block access to child pornography and to content linked to terrorism and racial hatred, the French interior minister said today.

The agreement will take effect in September. A blacklist will be compiled based on input from Internet users who flag sites containing offensive material, Interior Minister Michel Alliot-Marie said.

All service providers in France have agreed to block offending sites, he said.

"We can no longer tolerate the sexual exploitation of children in the form of child pornography," Alliot-Marie said. "We have come to an agreement: access to child pornography sites will be blocked in France. Other democracies have done it. France could wait no longer."

Offensive sites will be referred to judicial authorities, the minister said.

A similar deal was announced Tuesday in New York, where Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable agreed with New York state officials to block access to child porn.

Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Canada and New Zealand are among other countries that have already implemented similar measures.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





9th Circuit's Chief Judge Posted Sexually Explicit Materials on His Website

Alex Kozinski, who is presiding over an obscenity trial in L.A., admits he posted sexually explicit photos and videos. He says he didn't think the public could see the site, which is now blocked.
Scott Glover

One of the highest-ranking federal judges in the United States, who is currently presiding over an obscenity trial in Los Angeles, has maintained his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos.

Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledged in an interview with The Times that he had posted the materials, which included a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. Some of the material was inappropriate, he conceded, although he defended other sexually explicit content as "funny."

Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.

After details about the website were published on latimes.com this morning, the judge offered to entertain motions to recuse himself from the obscenity trial of Hollywood filmmaker Ira Isaacs, who is accused of distributing criminally obscene sexual fetish videos depicting bestiality and defecation.

Prosecutors said they were conferring with supervisors within the Department of Justice about how to proceed. In the meantime, they wanted jurors to be admonished to disregard publicity in the case. Defense attorney Roger Diamond made no objection to Kozinski continuing to hear the case, which began with opening statements this morning.

This afternoon jurors were taken to the appeals court's offices in Pasadena to view three videos at issue in Issacs' trial.

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics, told The Times that Kozinski should recuse himself from the Isaacs case because "the public can reasonably question his objectivity" concerning the issues at hand.

Gillers, who has known Kozinski for years and called him "a treasure of the federal judiciary," said he took the judge at his word that he did not know the site was publicly available. But he said Kozinski was "seriously negligent" in allowing it to be discovered.

"The phrase 'sober as a judge' resonates with the American public," Gillers said. "We don't want them to reveal their private selves publicly. This is going to upset a lot of people."

Gillers said the disclosure would be humiliating for Kozinski and would "harm his reputation in many quarters," but that the controversy should die there.

He added, however, that if the public concludes the website was intended for the sharing of pornographic material, "that's a transgression of another order."

"It would be very hard for him to come back from that," he said.

Kozinski said he would delete some material from his site, including the photo depicting women as cows, which he said was "degrading . . . and just gross." He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.

Kozinski said he must have accidentally uploaded those images to his server while intending to upload something else. "I would not keep those files intentionally," he said. The judge pointed out that he never used appeals court computers to maintain the site.

The sexually explicit material on Kozinski's site earlier this week was extensive, including images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex. There was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual, and a folder that contained a series of photos of women's crotches as seen through snug fitting clothing or underwear. There were also themes of defecation and urination, though they are not presented in a sexual context.

Kozinski, who was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year, is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1985. He has a national reputation for a brilliant legal mind and has developed a reputation as a champion of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression. Several years ago, for example, after learning that appeals court administrators had placed filters on computers that denied access to pornography and other materials, Kozinski led a successful effort to have the filters removed.

The judge said it was strictly by chance that he wound up presiding over the Issacs trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Appeals court judges occasionally hear criminal cases when they have free time on their calendars and the Isaacs case was one of two he was given, the judge said.

Kozinski said he didn't think any of the material he posted on his website would qualify as obscene.

"Is it prurient? I don't know what to tell you," he said. "I think it's odd and interesting. It's part of life."

Before the site was taken down, visitors to http://alex.kozinski.com were greeted with the message: "Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre."

Only those who knew to type in the name of a subdirectory could see the content on the site, which also included some of Kozinski's essays and legal writings as well as music files and personal photos.

The judge said he began saving the sexually explicit materials and other items of interest years ago.

"People send me stuff like this all the time," he said.

He keeps the things he finds interesting or funny with the thought that he might later pass them on to friends, he said.

Times staff writers Ben Welsh and Eric Ulken contributed to this report.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...,6220192.story





J’accuse…moi!

Judge Wants Panel to Investigate His Porn Postings
Michael R. Blood

The criminal prosecution of a hard-core pornographer turned into a personal trial for the presiding judge, who called for an investigation Thursday into his own conduct over lewd photos and videos stored on his family's publicly accessible Web site.

Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, asked an ethics panel of the court to initiate proceedings after the disclosure about his trove of sexually explicit material.

"I will cooperate fully in any investigation," Kozinski said in a statement.

Kozinski, 57, left court Wednesday without comment after suspending the trial of Ira Isaacs, who is charged with obscenity for selling movies depicting bestiality and fetishes involving feces and urination. The delay until Monday will give lawyers time to consider whether to ask for Kozinski to step down from the case.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that Kozinski had posted sexual material on his personal Web site and then blocked access after being interviewed about it Tuesday evening. He told the Times he was responsible for posting at least some of the images and videos.

The computerized cache included a picture of two nude women on all fours painted to look like Holstein dairy cows, images of masturbation, a video of a man being pursued by a sexually aroused donkey and a slide show featuring a striptease with a transsexual.

"If you found this kind of thing in your kid's bedroom you would wash your kid's mouth out with soap. We expect more from a judge," said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at Loyola University Law School. "Character counts for judges because they have so much power and affect so many people's lives."

Kozinski who has been mentioned as a possible Supreme Court candidate, is known for his intellectual rigor, writing flourishes and an outlandish _ some say boorish _ personality.

But the graphic material has opened questions about his fitness to serve on the high-profile obscenity case as well as the standard for what types of images are taboo, particularly on a judge's personal Web site.

Although he requested an investigation, it's unclear what, if any, discipline Kozinski could face. Circuit judges are appointed for life and can be fired only by Congress, though fellow jurists can censure them.

Kozinski asked Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to assign the inquiry to a panel of judges outside the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction of nine western states. Court rules permit such investigations to be transferred in high-profile cases or when a decision within a district might weaken public confidence in the outcome.

Kozinski did not immediately respond to a request for an interview Thursday.

The judge, a married father of three sons, claims to build his own computers but told the Los Angeles Times he didn't know the Web site was accessible to Internet surfers. One of his sons, Yale Kozinski, later told The New York Times that the site is registered to him and he maintains it, but neither father nor son made clear who posted the images in question.

Federal rules say judges should "act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary." But does material on a judge's personal Web site cross that line?

"Even if it is private, the problem for him is the cat is out of the bag," said Tom Fitton, president of conservative Judicial Watch. "You're going to have questions about his impartiality."

But Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at University of California, Irvine, said the material would not permanently harm Kozinski's reputation.

"It's much ado about very little," Chemerinsky said. "There is no indication that this material is even close to obscenity."

Cyrus Sanai, a Beverly Hills lawyer who has had a long-running dispute with the 9th Circuit, took credit for bringing the graphic material to light.

Sanai said he discovered the sexual content in December while monitoring the judge's Web site as part of his legal rift with the court. After downloading the files, Sanai said he began contacting reporters at various publications in January to bring attention to what he called widespread ethical problems on the 9th Circuit.

He provided a copy of the files to The Associated Press on Wednesday, which appeared to mirror the Times' descriptions of videos and pictures on the Web site.

___

Associated Press writers Paul Elias, Erica Werner and Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061200645.html





Weiner: Bring on Hotties from Overseas
Jo Piazza and David Saltonstall

Give me your torrid, your pure, your totally smokin' foreign babes.

Feast your eyes on the latest immigration push by Rep. Anthony Weiner, a likely 2009 mayoral contender who has introduced a bill in Congress to make it easier for foreign fashion models to get visas to work in the U.S.

Apparently, the 43-year-old Weiner - now going steady with Hillary Clinton aide and Vogue hottie Huma Abedin - thinks New York needs more professional catwalkers from Europe, Asia and other fabulous places.

"From Fashion Week to our vibrant publishing industry to the many designers that call New York City home, fashion is a vital part of our economy that drives thousands of jobs," Weiner told the Daily News.

Staffers insist Weiner is mostly trying to redress a flaw in the nation's immigration policies. Models must compete against computer geeks, doctors and other brainiacs for H-1B visas, generally reserved for the "highly specialized."

Demand has outstripped the 165,000 available H-1B's, leaving many models out in the cold.

Some red-blooded American fashionistas yesterday accused Weiner of trying to make life harder for American beauties by easing the way for imports.

"Forget trying to bring in new meat," said ex-supermodel Janice Dickinson, who hosts the "Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency" reality show. "Let's divvy it up between the Americans on American soil, please."

Other fashion bigwigs argued Weiner is right - designers and photographers won't just hire American. They'll more likely take job-producing shoots to another country.

The highest-paid model in the world is Brazilian Gisele Bundchen, who made $33 million in 2007, compared to the $5 million earned by top American model Carolyn Murphy.

"If there are girls that we can't get into the United States, the client is going to take that business elsewhere," said Corinne Nicolas, president of Trump Model Management. "The market is calling for foreign girls."

Weiner's bill, first reported by Politico.com, would send models sashaying out of the prized H-1B category of visas and over to the easier-to-get P visas, mostly for entertainers and athletes.

Applicants can't be just another pretty face, though. In language that only Washington bureaucrats could dream up, the legislation spells out the requirements for America's next top non-American models.

An applicant must be "a fashion model of distinguished merit and ability" seeking to enter the U.S. temporarily "to perform fashion modeling services that involve events or productions which have a distinguished reputation."

In other words, no pole dancers.

The supermodels don't have to worry, though. The Gisele Bundchens and Naomi Campbells of the world already qualify for platinum-plated O-1 visas - set aside for foreigners of "extraordinary ability," such as Nobel Prize winners.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2008...verseas-1.html





Pixel Perfect

Pascal Dangin’s virtual reality.
Lauren Collins

For a charity auction a few years back, the photographer Patrick Demarchelier donated a private portrait session. The lot sold, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to the wife of a very rich man. It was her wish to pose on the couple’s yacht. “I call her, I say, ‘I come to your yacht at sunset, I take your picture,’ ” Demarchelier recalled not long ago. He took a dinghy to the larger boat, where he was greeted by the woman, who, to his surprise, was not wearing any clothes.

“I want a picture that will excite my husband,” she said.

Capturing such an image, by Demarchelier’s reckoning, proved to be difficult. “I cannot take good picture,” he said. “Short legs, so much done to her face it was flat.” Demarchelier finished the sitting and wondered what to do. Eventually, he picked up the phone: “I call Pascal. ‘Make her legs long!’ ”

Pascal Dangin is the premier retoucher of fashion photographs. Art directors and admen call him when they want someone who looks less than great to look great, someone who looks great to look amazing, or someone who looks amazing already—whether by dint of DNA or M•A•C—to look, as is the mode, superhuman. (Christy Turlington, for the record, needs the least help.) In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore. To keep track of his clients, he assigns three-letter rubrics, like airport codes. Click on the current-jobs menu on his computer: AFR (Air France), AMX (American Express), BAL (Balenciaga), DSN (Disney), LUV (Louis Vuitton), TFY (Tiffany & Co.), VIC (Victoria’s Secret).

Vanity Fair, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, and the Times Magazine, among others, also use Dangin. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Mario Sorrenti, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, rarely work with anyone else. Around thirty celebrities keep him on retainer, in order to insure that any portrait of them that appears in any outlet passes through his shop, to be scrubbed of crow’s-feet and stray hairs. Dangin’s company, Box Studios, has eighty employees and occupies a four-story warehouse in the meatpacking district. “I have Patrick!” an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the editor of Runway, exclaims in “The Devil Wears Prada,” but her real-life counterparts probably log as much time speed-dialling Pascal.

Dangin is, by all accounts, an adept plumper of breasts and shrinker of pores. Using the principles of anatomy and perspective, he is able to smooth a blemish or a blip (“anomalies,” he calls them) with a painterly subtlety. Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W, said, “He has this ability to make moves in someone’s facial structure or body. I’ll look at someone, and I’ll think, Can we redefine the cheek? Can we, you know, change a little bit the outline of the face to bring definition? He, on the other hand, will say, ‘No, no, no, it’s her neck.’ He will see it in a way that the majority of people don’t see it.” Dangin salvaged a recent project at W by making a minute adjustment to the angle of a shoulder blade.

The obvious way to characterize Dangin, as a human Oxy pad, is a reductive one—any art student with a Mac can wipe out a zit. His success lies, rather, in his ability to marry technical prowess to an aesthetic sensibility: his clients are paying for his eye, and his mind, as much as for his hand. Those who work with Dangin describe him as a sort of photo whisperer, able to coax possibilities, palettes, and shadings out of pictures that even the person who shot them may not have imagined possible. To construct Annie Leibovitz’s elaborate tableaux—the “Sopranos” ads, for example—he takes apart dozens of separate pictures and puts them back together so that the seams don’t show. (Misaligned windows are a particular peeve.) He has been known to work for days tinting a field of grass what he considers the most expressive shade of green. “Most green grass that has been electronically enhanced, you know, you look at it and you get a headache,” Dangin said recently. He prefers a muted hue—“much redder, almost brown in a way”—that is meant to recall the multilayered green of Kodachrome film.

As renowned as Dangin is in fashion and photographic circles, his work, with its whiff of black magic, is not often discussed outside of them. (He is not, for instance, credited in magazines.) His hold on the business derives from the pervasive belief that he possesses some ineffable, savantlike sympathy for the soul of a picture, along with the vision (and maybe the ego) of its creator. “Just by the fact that he works with you, you think you’re good,” Leibovitz said. “If he works with you a lot, maybe you think, Well, maybe I’m worthwhile.”

His job description is enigmatic. People I asked about him invariably resorted to metaphor: he is a translator, an interpreter, a conductor, a ballet dancer articulating choreographed steps. These analogies, though, don’t account for pursuits that, while probably contributing less to Dangin’s income than wrinkle extermination does, occupy more of his time and intellect. He has become a master printer, “digitally remastering” old negatives and producing fine-art prints for exhibition. “When I see a print, I could probably tell you if it was a Pascal print,” Charlotte Cotton, the head of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said. “It’s immaculate, and there’s a kind of richness to the pixellation. It feels like you could almost sink your finger into it.” Books are another love: he is the publisher of SteidlDangin, an imprint of lush art volumes—for instance, a collection of a thousand Philip-Lorca diCorcia Polaroids.

A tinkerer and an autodidact, who started out as a hairdresser, Dangin brings to mind, actually, a building superintendent: he knows how to do a lot of jobs, and those he doesn’t he figures out through trial and error. He is, more than anything, the consigliere for a generation of photographers uncomfortable with, or uninterested in, the details of digital technology. According to Cotton, “Pascal is actually an unwritten author of what is leading the newest areas of contemporary image-making.”

His digital brushstrokes can be as deliberate as Jasper Johns’s or John Currin’s are on canvas, but they are not as consistent—part of Dangin’s skill lies in being able to channel the style, and the fancy, of whatever photographer he is collaborating with. In the spring of 2004, the Prada campaign, shot by Steven Meisel, had a retro, vacationy look—tie-dyed cardigans, hairbands, sailboat prints. Using a Photoshop tool called a smudge brush, Dangin applied extra color to every pixel, giving the pictures—hard and flat, at the outset—a dreamy, impressionistic texture, as if they had been wrought in oil and chalk.

The walls of the third-floor meeting room at Dangin’s headquarters, on West Fourteenth Street, hold magnets in the manner of a refrigerator door. One afternoon in November, grease pencils, in the colors of the rainbow, were stuck, by magnets, to one wall. Nearby, several of Dangin’s assistants were hanging a blueprint—a scaled rendition of the Petit Palais museum, in Paris, where, in September, Patrick Demarchelier will have a retrospective. Dangin was designing the exhibit, from the pictures (many of which he would retouch) and their frames down to the traffic-flow patterns of the museumgoers who would look at them. Dangin would do all of the printing. He was also publishing a companion monograph.

Demarchelier arrived shortly after two. The first order of business was to sift through several notebooks full of photographs to decide which ones to put in the show. Dangin and Demarchelier sat near each other, on two couches. “Ça, ça, ça, ça oui, ça oui, ça non,” Dangin said, marking his choices with a red grease pencil. “Ça on jette, non?” Demarchelier mostly followed the lead of Dangin (“Do you remember that story in French Vogue? Normandy? Wide angle?”), who drew quick, dismissive X’s over the pictures he did not like until the notebook resembled a game of tic-tac-toe.

Once the pictures had been narrowed down, Dangin began explaining to Demarchelier his concept for organizing the show. “Je pensais nuages d’images”—clouds of images—he began. He pointed to the blueprint, explaining that they should show lots of oversized prints, interspersed with thematic groupings of smaller portraits. Dangin had a plan for freestanding frames. “If we build an upside-down T, then we can just insert the print,” he said. “Two feet in Plexiglas and one riser casing. And the steel we can manufacture with José here in the shop.”

“Patrick, I’m going to show you American Vogue and Seven Jeans,” Dangin said, turning to some current projects. Dangin is on the short side, with a scruffy mustache and finger-in-the-socket frizz. He maintains the hours of a Presidential candidate; lately, he is a little tubbier than he would like. He was wearing, as is his custom, an all-navy outfit: New Balance sneakers, ratty cords, woollen sweater with holes in the armpits. He is not immune to the charms of things—he owns an Aston Martin, along with houses in Manhattan, Amagansett, and St. Bart’s—but, for someone who can pick apart a face in a matter of seconds (he once, apologetically, described his eyes as “high-speed scanners”), he is remarkably free of vanity. “I’m not a stud,” he told me one day. “I don’t have the six-pack chocolate bars, I have a belly. Would I want to look like that? Yes. Am I ever going to achieve that? No. Am I happy? Yes.” He has an earthy streak and a digressive manner of thought, but he issues orders commandingly.

Dangin and Demarchelier walked over to a wall affixed with a dozen color photographs of a famous actress in her late twenties. Demarchelier approached one of them, a closeup of the actress’s face. She was smiling, her head slightly tilted, posed in front of a swimming pool.

“Let’s soften the lines around her mouth,” Demarchelier said, tracing the actress’s nasolabial folds and the flume of her upper lip with the tip of one of the temples of his eyeglasses.

Dangin grabbed a grease pencil off the wall. “The blue in the background is off. We have to make that brighter. Especially for the cover.” By the time they were done, the actress’s face was streaked with black markings, like a football player’s.

They moved on to the jeans campaign. Dangin thought the model’s face was too “crunchy” (meaning that the contrast was high, making her look severe); Demarchelier wanted the denim—a pair of white bell-bottoms—to pop. “Then the only thing is the background here—is it too heavy compared to that one?” Dangin asked, comparing two pictures with the same windswept hills. “See the gradient here? This is a little more black-and-white, this is a little more gray. I prefer that,” he said, indicating the shot with the richer contrast.

Several days later, Demarchelier returned to the studio to continue winnowing images for the show. The conversation turned to which shot to include of another well-known actress.

“I like her in this one, because she looks very natural,” Dangin said.

“Yes,” Demarchelier agreed. “In that other pose, she looks like an actress.”

“But she’s also very good here,” Dangin said, of a shot that showed her partially nude.

“Yes, she’s very beautiful in that position. Do you want to cut it?”

“No, no. I’m going to keep it for the ass,” Dangin said.

“Maybe we could redo the ass.”

“Yes, the ass is quite heavy.”

Later, Dangin retreated to his basement workroom to refine the pictures. He likes to retouch alone, late into the night. His work does not always involve riddance. “During this whole period of grunge,” he told me, “I used to spend hours deciding, Which is the cool wrinkle to leave?”

Pascal Dangin began his career as a shampoo boy in a no-name salon in Paris’s Fifteenth Arrondissement. “I was with girls a lot, so that’s always good when you’re a teen-age boy,” he said one day at his office. “But what was fascinating was that I had to learn someone’s life in a very short amount of time. Like, fifteen seconds to figure out, Where does she go and eat? What does she wear? Is she married? Imagining this whole life and then defining a style for the person. Hair, to me, is really one of the most important retouchings that you can do. Because I look at life as retouching. Makeup, clothes are just an accessorization of your being, they are just a transformation of what you want to look like.”

Little in Dangin’s early life suggested that he was bound for distinction, or anywhere other than the various small towns in Corsica where he lived with his family. His mother was a piano teacher, his stepfather a classical guitarist. Dangin had two sisters and a tumultuous, itinerant childhood, which he does not like to recall. He was indifferent to music (he still is). One happy memory: His grandfather had a small press, on which he produced an underground newsletter about village politics. Dangin liked to stick twigs onto the cylinders and print the negative image.

Dangin left home at the age of fourteen. Just as he was settling into salon work in Paris, he was drafted by the French Army. “I had just done a lingerie show, my first taste of fashion,” he recalled, “and then, three days later, at 6 A.M., I’m in the barrack in the dead of winter.” Miserable, he spent his free time immersed in a biography of Coco Chanel. “I can honestly say, without sounding too corny, that Chanel and her story helped me through this ordeal. I loved that a woman in the twenties, someone back then, was as defiant as that.”

After three months in the Army, Dangin obtained a discharge and returned to Paris, resuming his work as a hairdresser. Every day, he sat at Café Flore reading the International Herald Tribune, until he could puzzle out bits of English. The next stage of his picaresque was a move to America, in 1989. “I symbolically left in January,” he said. He took the first flight out of Paris on New Year’s Day.

Dangin had always loved machines—“I am a manual-laborer type of guy,” he says—and while doing hair for photo shoots in New York he became interested in the crossover between cameras and computers. He had a friend who had a Mac Quadra. “We had a deal where at night I could use his computer,” Dangin recalled. “I used to go to his studio at seven-thirty, disconnect his computer, put it in a tote bag, and walk six blocks to my apartment. I’d work all night long, learning programming, and then by 7 A.M. have to stop so that when he woke up his computer would be there.”

Eventually, Dangin got a computer of his own, a Toshiba laptop. Hanging around shoots, he would make suggestions to photographers about how they could change their angles or correct their colors. A few of them began asking him to ply his effects on their images. “I always said no,” Dangin recalled. “I was very secretive in my studio. I hated the simple fact that, unless I got really good, I would have to be there waiting like a chimpanzee for someone to say, ‘Make it darker over here.’ ” He continued to hone his techniques and, in 1993, finally accepted his first paid retouching job: splicing a curtain onto a rod for the cover of a window-hangings brochure. In 1995, he married Laura Tiozzo, a fashion editor. The next year, their daughter, Cecilia, was born, and Dangin opened Box. Dangin and Tiozzo divorced in 2004. Two years later, he married Sarah West, a British-born former photography agent whom he had hired to work for Box in London. “Oh, God, he’s looking for perfection,” Sarah recalled thinking, upon becoming romantically involved with Dangin. “But he definitely separates it. He doesn’t sit at the computer and think, Phwoar, I wish I could give her one.”

One night in April, Dangin agreed to show me his basement laboratory. He led the way down a flight of stairs, past rows of shelves stacked to the ceiling with books and back issues of every conceivable publication. Enormous data processors, encased in glass cubes, whirred in the distance, as though we’d landed in a NASA laboratory. As a habitat, it suited Dangin, whose presence in the industry—shadowy as, by necessity, it is—is regarded almost mythologically. “Many people are deeply suspicious of Pascal and his control,” Charlotte Cotton told me. Dennis Freedman elaborated: “Because he’s not playing the music necessarily as it’s written, not unlike a conductor who can be criticized for taking too much liberty with the material—there’s a difference, you know, between Boulez and von Karajan—there are those, though I disagree with them, who may feel that sometimes he’s toointerpretive.”

On our way down, a young woman approached Dangin, her arm outstretched to support a proof of an ad for a men’s cologne. “There’s no hair there,” Dangin told her, pointing to a raw, shiny spot on the model’s forearm. “Either add hair or burn it in.” (“Burning” refers to deepening the color and texture of a picture by exposing the paper to more light.) “Let’s get rid of the black spots on his chest”—freckles, as they’re known in nature—“and add a little to the jaw.”

Finally, we reached a cool concrete room with no windows. It was pitch-dark, except for the ambient light of monitors. (For eighty hours a week, these screens are Dangin’s exclusive visual stimuli.) “This is what we call Las Vegas, because it’s always the same weather, it’s always the same time,” he said. “It’s always seventy degrees. If it rain, shine, snow, we don’t know.”

Dangin took a seat in front of a triptych of computer screens, all running Photoshop. Clicking the mouse, he pulled up a layout: a series of elaborate fashion pictures featuring an actress with a movie coming out this spring. In one of them, the actress was standing on the roof of a skyscraper. Dangin clicked again, and the picture changed almost imperceptibly, like a what’s-wrong-with-this-picture game for kids. In the “after” version, Dangin explained, he had shuffled the buildings in the background and eliminated an unsightly valve on the roof’s ledge. The sky had been too yellowy, which made Dangin think of pollution. “I gave it some more white,” he said, “like a Boucher painting.”

He proceeded to a shot of the actress reclining on a divan in a diaphanous couture gown. “She looks too small, because she’s teeny,” he said. On a drop-down menu, he selected a warping tool, a device that augments the volume of clusters of pixels. The dress puffed up, pleasingly, as if it had been fluffed by some helpful lady-in-waiting inside the screen.

Next, Dangin moved the mouse so that the pointer hovered near the actress’s neck. “I softened the collarbones, but then she started to get too retouched, so I put back some stuff,” he explained. He pressed a button and her neck got a little bonier. He clicked more drop-down menus—master opacity stamp, clone stamp. Ultimately, he had minimized the actress’s temples, which bulged a little, tightened the skin around her chin, and excised a fleshy bump from her forehead. She had an endearingly crooked bottom row of teeth, which Dangin knew better than to fix.

“Her face is too high and elongated, mainly by the angle of the camera,” he said. “But I love her, too. I don’t want her to become someone else.” He zoomed in so that her eyeball was the size of a fifty-cent piece. “I love all of this little wrinkle”—laugh lines, staying put—“and the texture of skin. As you retouch skin, you can very quickly shift the tonal value. If you put a highlight where shadow used to be, you’re morphing the way the orbital socket is structured. It leads to a very generic look.” (Another time, Dangin showed me how he had restructured the chest—higher, tighter—of an actress who, to his eye, seemed to have had a clumsy breast enhancement. Like a double negative, virtual plastic surgery cancelled out real plastic surgery, resulting in a believable look.)

In another shot, the actress stood in the middle of a busy city street, in front of a limestone building. Dangin blew up the segment of the screen that showed her feet, which were traversed with ropy blue veins. Click. Gone.

“There’s a little slumpiness, and the knees look really big,” he said, stroking a touch pad with a gray plastic stylus to contour the actress’s legs. Big knees. Small knees. Big knees. Small knees. He morphed them back and forth, as if viewing her in a fun-house mirror. The windows on the building seemed to have buckled, so he realigned their panes.

“Nothing is a problem and everything can be a problem,” he said.

Postproduction work is nothing new: by the eighteen-forties, less than twenty years after the invention of the permanent photograph, printmakers, using a mixture of pigment and gum arabic, were hand-tinting daguerreotypes to mimic painting. “There is no photographic establishment of any note that does not employ artists at high salaries—we understand not less than £1 a day—in touching, and colouring, and finishing from nature those portraits for which the camera may be said to have laid the foundation,” Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, the art historian and critic, noted in an essay in 1857.

But playing with the representational possibilities of photographs, and the bodies contained therein, has always aroused the suspicion of viewers with a perpetual, if naïve, desire for objective renderings of the world around them. As much as it is a truism that photography is subjective, it is also a truism that many of its beholders—even those who happily eliminate red-eye from their wedding albums—will take umbrage when confronted with evidence of its subjectivity. Eastlake was responding to the distress of certain members of the London Photographic Society over a series of photographs taken deliberately out of focus. More recently, Kate Winslet protested that the digital slimming of her figure on the cover of British GQ was “excessive,” while Andy Roddick griped that Men’s Fitness exaggerated his biceps, saying, “Little did I know I have twenty-two-inch guns and a disappearing birthmark on my right arm.”

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Retouchers, subjected to endless epistemological debates—are they simple conduits for social expectations of beauty, or shapers of such?—often resort to a don’t-shoot-the-messenger defense of their craft, familiar to repo guys and bail bondsmen. When I asked Dangin if the steroidal advantage that retouching gives to celebrities was unfair to ordinary people, he admitted that he was complicit in perpetuating unrealistic images of the human body, but said, “I’m just giving the supply to the demand.” (Fashion advertisements are not public-service announcements.)

“I think retouching is too much when it reaches the point of disfiguring,” Dangin said. “I want people to have an understanding of the skeleton and musculature and how it works. There is nothing worse than looking at an ankle or a calf that’s wrong. This is what bad retouching can do—you see in magazines girls having their legs slimmed and they no longer have tibias and femurs, and it’s weird.” William J. Mitchell’s book “The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era” offers some notable bloopers: the wife of a newspaper publisher in England insisted that the testicles be removed in a photograph of a prize bull, whereupon the bull’s owner sued for misrepresentation; the Orange County Register color-corrected a picture of a swimming pool that was supposed to illustrate a story about how vandals had dyed the water red. TV Guide was busted for grafting Oprah’s head onto Ann-Margret’s body—her husband noticed a familiar ring on the composite woman’s finger.

Dangin requires his artists to take in-house classes in anatomy and figure drawing; prospective hires must complete a fifty-six-question quiz covering everything from computer science to art history. Cheekbones, he said, are the classic locus of amateur flubs. “The minute you change this delicate balance of light and shadow, if you change by removing shadow because the girl has a lot of bad pores, suddenly this girl will look as if she has been Botoxed,” Dangin said. (The photographer Henry Peach Robinson concurred, writing, in 1896, “It is not, however, retouching in itself that is condemnable, but the bad retouching, at present almost universal, which turns the human face divine into a semblance of marble busts or, still worse, turnips or apple dumplings.”)

At one point, speaking of the Demarchelier project, I asked Dangin what he was planning to do with the actress’s buttocks, which had struck me as fairly enviable. “It is purely a proportion issue,” he said. “Because of the angle of the camera, her bottom might feel distorted, whereas if he had used a longer lens he probably would not have had the problem.” A good photograph, he said, directs the viewer in how to look at it. “So there’s scanning pattern—whether it’s three, four, or five points, there’s a hierarchy. You say, ‘O.K., I want the person to look face, back, legs, floor, and then maybe the background,’ or whatever it is. You guide the viewer through the visit of an image.”

“Pascal is no longer on pimple patrol,” Philip-Lorca diCorcia told me. “He has lots of well-trained pimple removers. He’s kind of free to hold the hand of his many temperamental photographers.”

As Dangin has developed relationships with photographers, his level of involvement in the making of their images has expanded. There are the varied ways he applies retouching itself: for fashion ads, for instance, he’ll do a Middle Eastern version, transposing clothes onto models who are showing too much skin.

Craig McDean told me, “On occasion I have prints and I give him carte blanche to do what he wants.” McDean shot Kate Moss for W. “I wanted to use old solarization techniques”—with solarization, light appears dark and dark appears light—“like I used to a long time ago. I showed Pascal some pictures by Man Ray, and he just does it himself without me sitting over him.”

People hire Dangin, in the broadest sense, for the assurance that behind every abstruse technical step there will be an artistic intention. “Technology is in many respects mechanical, but somebody’s got to run the machine,” diCorcia said. “And even with a program that comes on a disk there are a lot of subtleties. Pascal is tireless in exploiting all the capabilities of the technology and even possibly creating some new capabilities.” Dangin, to illustrate the idea that a large part of his currency is his assertion of taste, invoked the example of a successful plastic surgeon. “Why is there a Mr. Lips and a Mr. Hips and a Mr. Buttocks out there? Why do they exist? Because people have an idea about what they don’t want but not an idea about what they do. A doctor will do a million noses because he has a flair for what noses should be.” Despite his knack for the artificial, Dangin is a purist, in that he believes creativity should lead technology, rather than the other way around. “It’s dangerous when you just press a button and go, ‘Oh, that looks cool,’ without any reason why you’re doing it,” he said.

Dangin’s latest invention is a proprietary software package called Photoshoot. (He employs six full-time programmers at Box.) Its aim is to imbue digital photography with a specific sensibility—an opinion about the way pictures should look—of the sort that film once offered. “I am doing this because of necessity, because I believe the way that digital photography is done today is so wrong,” Dangin said one day. “Photography as we knew it, meaning film and Kodak and all that, was a very subjective process. With film images you had emotions. You used to go out and buy film like Fuji, because it was more saturated, or you liked Agfa because it gave you a rounded color palette.” With a ten-dollar roll of film, he explained, you were essentially buying ten dollars’ worth of someone’s ideas. “Software, right now, is objective. ‘Let the user create whatever he wants.’ Which is great, but it doesn’t really produce good photography.”

Occasionally, a client asks Dangin to attend a photo shoot, so that he can be in on shaping the images from the start. “If Linda”—Linda Wells, the editor of Allure—“wants the cover to be sunny, I can explain to the photographer,” Dangin said. “Sometimes it’s just mediating to everybody. I should have a diplomatic passport.”

In March, I met Dangin in Los Angeles, where he had gone to work on the Lanvin ad campaign, to be shot by Steven Meisel. At six in the morning, he picked me up at my hotel—in a red Mini Cooper—and drove to Smashbox Studios, a sprawling complex of soundstages in Culver City.

We arrived to a mostly empty set. Fifteen full-sized wheelie suitcases were waiting for the makeup artist, Pat McGrath. One of them was labelled “Gold-Blonde Wigs.” Dangin went to get a cup of coffee at the craft-services table.

Edward Enninful, the stylist for the shoot, greeted him, and they began to discuss another campaign they were working on, which had been shot earlier. Dangin had just received the raw pictures.

“What was going on with the hair?” Dangin asked.

“I don’t know,” Enninful replied. “It was twenty different ways, doing it, undoing it.”

“It feels compromised,” Dangin said. “This way looks . . . bourgeois. It needs to be a little fucked up. Maybe I can do something with it.”

“See if you can.”

Dangin approached the middle of the soundstage, where a team of P.A.s, like roadies setting up for a concert, were unloading coils of wire and cable and a huge apparatus that looked like an industrial-sized toaster oven (it turned out to be a printer). Dangin stage-directed as they dragged a couple of long tables to form an L-shaped console, where he would sit as Meisel shot, monitoring the action on two large computer screens, like an assistant director on an action movie.

“Have you seen the new fibre paper that came out?” one of the assistants asked Dangin.

“Yeah, it’s not very good.”

Dangin grabbed a box of printer paper from his console and handed pieces out to each of the assistants, who ogled it, checking every angle for fibre and gloss, in the way of shoppers at the grocery store feeling up the fruit.

There were two models on hand, Liya Kebede and Raquel Zimmerman. Meisel would shoot them separately against a black dropcloth—equivalent to the sort of blue screen a weatherman uses—to set off the movement of the clothes. The idea was for Dangin to take Meisel’s favorite shot of each woman and splice the two onto some sort of artificial urban background of his own creation.

Dangin huddled with Lanvin’s designer, Alber Elbaz, along with McGrath, Enninful, and the creative director for the ad campaign, Ronnie Cooke Newhouse. After some debate about just what sort of glamour the team was going for—“We’re doing our downtown smoky burlesque woman, right?” “So, rich rather than dangerous?”—Meisel arrived, and the shoot began.

At one point, Dangin, examining the pictures at his console, approached Meisel. He had an inspiration: he would be able to do a cool halo effect on the silhouettes of the models’ bodies if Meisel shot them with some backlighting, to simulate an exposure delay with the flash. Meisel came over to the computer table, where Dangin prepared a quick mockup. They switched to backlighting. (Dangin doesn’t always get his way. “Have the airbrushing elves at Vanity Fair gotten a little too nip-and-tucky in their April cover story on Madonna?” the Hollywood blog Defamer asked last month, after the Daily Mail pointed out that Madonna’s normally chiselled upper arms had been rendered almost unrecognizably svelte. I asked Dangin if the conspicuousness of the retouching was a failure on his part. “It’s not a failure, because she was very happy with the way she looked, and the magazine loved it,” he said. “Would I have done less personally? Yes.”)

Later that night, Dangin showed me some prototype images that were the result of the day’s work. One of them featured Kebede, wearing a black strapless gown with ruffles down the front, and Zimmerman, in a plum-colored dress that tied around the neck, in the middle of a dark city street. They looked kinetic, caught in mid-motion, as if they were about to hail a cab. Behind the pair were the blurry lights of New York in the rain. Or so it looked. Dangin had actually assembled the cityscape mostly from hundreds of random images that his staff had culled from the Internet. A restaurant marquee in the top left corner of the image was borrowed from a picture of Shanghai. The opposite side had looked inert, he thought, so he imported a white storefront from Amsterdam.

Afew weeks later, in his studio, Dan gin returned to the magazine spread of the movie actress. “I love two colors next to each other that don’t really make sense, like baby blue and chocolate, or pale blue with orange,” he said, pulling the pictures up on the screen. He was in a philosophical mood. “I am fascinated with the way that color can be indicative of sentiment,” he continued. “Why do we have baby pink for girls? Where did that come from? In medieval color charts, there were not names such as red or blue, but they actually gave nature words, like beau soleil. We are so touched by color all the time.”

Dangin tapped his stylus on a touch pad. “I can change someone’s character just by doing work on the eyes,” he said. Using a slim paintbrush from the Tools menu of Photoshop, he began tracing black circles—as if applying eyeliner—around the woman’s lids. “Suddenly she looks more ‘vroom,’ see?” He erased the eyeliner and lowered the contrast curve. The woman’s eyes turned weak and filmy. “See how quickly she loses contact with the camera?” he said. “Suddenly, she is gone from this world.”

Dangin went back to the Tools menu, which he had customized with homemade implements that he had saved from other projects. There were round brushes of every thickness, like the phases of the moon, libraries of human lips and irises. He opened a file, and more bespoke effects appeared: “Flames/Smokes,” “Stars/Nights,” “Bubbles & Particles.” There was a pattern for a wrapping paper, called “Chocolate Box,” that he had made for Sarah out of a patchwork of their wedding pictures. Over the years, like a Hollywood prop master, Dangin has collected hundreds of “bump maps”: expandable three-dimensional templates of facial features given in gray scale. He had twenty-five hand-drawn pairs of eyelashes.

Dangin’s next dream, in addition to founding a photography school, is to open a postproduction facility in Los Angeles. (Last year, a private equity firm invested in Box.) “There’s a whole world of photography that is basically unknown to the world of cinematography,” he said. I wondered whether the recent omnipresence of paparazzi pictures, with their aggressively ungainly, megalensed closeups, had affected the way he constructs artifice. Pictures of stars with mustard on their chins and pictures of stars who appear to have never eaten, he suggested, form a necessary antimony of extremes, each equally unrealistic. “I think it’s probably a natural reaction to what we do in magazines,” he said. “The world needs almost, like, pills against it. It’s a natural reaction to have to the sort of plastering of perfection out there. But this world is not reality—it’s about drawing people toward an ideal vision, if we’re talking about fashion photography. You have to think that celebrities are playing roles the same way they do in movies.”

Days later, he was still perfecting the Lanvin campaign. In one version, the street had seemed too narrow, so he widened it: a Parisian boulevard born of a downtown alley. “The right side looked too boring,” he said, “so I put in some neon sign from Las Vegas.” He had streaked the models’ calves, so that a spotlight might have been shining on them from one of the looming warehouses. “I did this sort of vibration here,” he said, indicating stipples of brightness that fell across their faces. The halo effect was working—a watery crimson glow traced the outlines of the women’s figures, as if they were delineated by the flashing lights of an ambulance, reflected in a puddle. Somewhere in every picture, Dangin said, he likes to sneak in something red. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...printable=true





Out of Step With Allies, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend
Adam Liptak

A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatens Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Under Canadian law, there is a serious argument that the article contained hate speech and that its publisher, Maclean’s magazine, the nation’s leading newsweekly, should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self respect.”

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up animosity toward Muslims.

As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.

“It’s hate speech!” yelled one man.

“It’s free speech!” yelled another.

In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minority groups and religions — even false, provocative or hateful things — without legal consequence.

The Maclean’s article, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called “America Alone.” The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech as in so many areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.

“In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one’s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk, and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,” Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called “The Exceptional First Amendment.”

“But in the United States,” Professor Schauer continued, “all such speech remains constitutionally protected.”

Canada, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France.

Earlier this month, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined $23,000 in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughtering of sheep.

By contrast, American courts would not stop the American Nazi Party from marching in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, though the march was deeply distressing to the many Holocaust survivors there.

Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business executive who had called food stamps “basically a Puerto Rican program.” The First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote, does not allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be suppressed or punished just because they may increase “the general level of prejudice.”

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.

“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”

Professor Waldron was reviewing “Freedom for the Thought that We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment” by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Mr. Lewis has been critical of attempts to use the law to limit hate speech.

But even Mr. Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections “in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism.” In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court’s insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.

The imminence requirement sets a high hurdle. Mere advocacy of violence, terrorism or the overthrow of the government is not enough; the words must be meant to and be likely to produce violence or lawlessness right away. A fiery speech urging an angry racist mob immediately to assault a black man in its midst probably qualifies as incitement under the First Amendment. A magazine article — or any publication — aimed at stirring up racial hatred surely does not.

Mr. Lewis wrote that there is “genuinely dangerous” speech that does not meet the imminence requirement.“I think we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience, some of whose members are ready to act on the urging,” Mr. Lewis wrote. “That is imminence enough.”

Harvey Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Boston, disagreed.

“When times are tough,” he said, “there seems to be a tendency to say there is too much freedom.”

“Free speech matters because it works,” Mr. Silverglate continued. Scrutiny and debate are more effective ways of combating hate speech than censorship, he said, and all the more so in the post-Sept. 11 era.

“The world didn’t suffer because too many people read ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” Mr. Silverglate said. “Sending Hitler on a speaking tour of the United States would have been quite a good idea.”

Mr. Silverglate seemed to be echoing the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United Stateseventually formed the basis for modern First Amendment law.

“The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” Justice Holmes wrote.

“I think that we should be eternally vigilant,” he added, “against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”

The First Amendment is not, of course, absolute. The Supreme Court has said that the government may ban fighting words or threats. Punishments may be enhanced for violent crimes prompted by race hate. And private institutions, including universities and employers, are not subject to the First Amendment, which restricts only government activities.

But merely saying hateful things about minority groups, even with the intent to cause their members distress and to generate contempt and loathing, is protected by the First Amendment.

In 1969, for instance, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction of a leader of a Ku Klux Klan group under an Ohio statute that banned the advocacy of terrorism. The Klan leader, Clarence Brandenburg, had urged his followers at a rally to “send the Jews back to Israel,” to “bury” blacks, though he did not call them that, and to consider “revengeance” against politicians and judges who were unsympathetic to whites.

Only Klan members and journalists were present. Because Mr. Brandenburg’s words fell short of calling for immediate violence in a setting where such violence was likely, the Supreme Court ruled that he could not be prosecuted for incitement.

In his opening statement in the Canadian magazine case, a lawyer representing the Muslim plaintiffs aggrieved by the Maclean’s article pleaded with a three-member panel of the tribunal to declare that the article subjected his clients to “hatred and ridicule” and to force the magazine to publish a response.

“You are the only thing between racist, hateful, contemptuous Islamophobic and irresponsible journalism,” the lawyer, Faisal Joseph, told the tribunal, “and law-abiding Canadian citizens.”

In response, a lawyer for Maclean’s all but called the proceeding a sham.

“Innocent intent is not a defense,” the lawyer, Roger D. McConchie, said, in a bitter criticism of the British Columbia hate speech law. “Nor is truth. Nor is fair comment on true facts. Publication in the public interest and for the public benefit is not a defense. Opinion expressed in good faith is not a defense. Responsible journalism is not a defense.”

Jason Gratl, a lawyer for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, which has intervened in the case, was measured in his criticism of the law forbidding hate speech.

“Canadians do not have a cast-iron stomach for offensive speech,” Mr. Gratl said in a telephone interview. “We don’t subscribe to a marketplace of ideas. Americans as a whole are more tough-minded and more prepared for verbal combat.”

Many foreign courts have respectfully considered the American approach — and then rejected it.

A 1990 decision from the Canadian Supreme Court, for instance, upheld the criminal conviction of James Keegstra for “unlawfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group by communicating anti-Semitic statements.” Mr. Keegstra, a teacher, had told his students that Jews are “money loving,” “power hungry” and “treacherous.”

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Robert Dickson said there was an issue “crucial to the disposition of this appeal: the relationship between Canadian and American approaches to the constitutional protection of free expression, most notably in the realm of hate propaganda.”

Chief Justice Dickson said “there is much to be learned from First Amendment jurisprudence.” But he concluded that “the international commitment to eradicate hate propaganda and, most importantly, the special role given equality and multiculturalism in the Canadian Constitution necessitate a departure from the view, reasonably prevalent in America at present, that the suppression of hate propaganda is incompatible with the guarantee of free expression.”

America’s distinctive approach to free speech, legal scholars say, has many causes. It is partly rooted in an individualistic view of the world. Fear of allowing the government to decide what speech is acceptable plays a role. So does history.

“It would be really hard to criticize Israel, Austria, Germany and South Africa, given their histories,” for laws banning hate speech, Professor Schauer said in an interview.

In Canada, however, the laws seem to stem from a desire to promote societal harmony. Three time zones east of British Columbia, the Ontario Human Rights Commission — while declining to hear a separate case against Maclean’s — nonetheless condemned the article.

“In Canada, the right to freedom of expression is not absolute, nor should it be,” the commission’s statement said. “By portraying Muslims as all sharing the same negative characteristics, including being a threat to ‘the West,’ this explicit expression of Islamophobia further perpetuates and promotes prejudice toward Muslims and others.”

British Columbia human rights law, unlike that in Ontario, does appear to allow claims based on statements published in magazines.

Mr. Steyn, the author of the Maclean’s article, said the proceeding here illustrated some important distinctions. “The problem with so-called hate speech laws is that they’re not about facts,” he said in a telephone interview. “They’re about feelings.”

“What we’re learning here is really the bedrock difference between the United States and the countries that are in a broad sense its legal cousins,” Mr. Steyn added. “Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/12hate.html?hp





Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts
Linda Greenhouse

The Supreme Court on Thursday delivered its third consecutive rebuff to the Bush administration’s handling of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, ruling 5 to 4 that the prisoners there have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention.

The court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which, at the administration’s behest, stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from the detainees seeking to challenge their designation as enemy combatants.

Congress and the administration had passed a shortened alternative to a habeas procedure for the prisoners in the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that procedure “falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substitute” because it failed to offer “the fundamental procedural protections of habeas corpus.”

Justice Kennedy declared: “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

The decision, which was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer, was categorical in its rejection of the administration’s basic arguments. Indeed, the court repudiated the fundamental legal basis for the administration’s strategy, adopted in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, of housing prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere at the United States Naval base in Cuba, where Justice Department lawyers advised the White House that domestic law would never reach.

In one of two dissenting opinions, Justice Antonin Scalia predicted “devastating” and “disastrous consequences” from the decision.

“It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” he said. “The nation will live to regret what the court has done today.” He said the decision was based not on principle, “but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy.”

The decision left some important questions unanswered. These include “the extent of the showing required of the government” at a habeas corpus hearing in order to justify a prisoner’s continued detention, as Justice Kennedy put it, as well as the handling of classified evidence and the degree of due process to which the detainees are entitled.

Months or years of continued litigation may lie ahead, unless the Bush administration, or the administration that follows it, reverses course and closes the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which now holds 270 detainees. Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court here said the court’s judges would meet in the next few days with lawyers for both sides to decide “how we can approach our task most effectively and efficiently.”

There are some 200 habeas corpus petitions awaiting action in the District Court, including those filed by the 37 detainees whose appeals were before the Supreme Court in the case decided on Thursday, Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195.

In a concurring opinion on Thursday, Justice Souter said the ruling was “no bolt out of the blue,” but rather should have been anticipated by anyone who read the court’s decision in Rasul v. Bush in 2004. That decision, part of the initial round of Supreme Court review of the administration’s Guantánamo policies, held that because the long-term lease with Cuba gave the United States unilateral control over the property, the base came within the statutory jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear habeas corpus petitions.

Congress responded the next year, in the Detainee Treatment Act, by amending the statute to remove jurisdiction, and it did so again in the Military Commissions Act to make clear that it wanted the removal to apply to cases already in the pipeline. The decision on Thursday went beyond the statutory issue to decide, for the first time, the underlying constitutional question.

President Bush, appearing with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy at a press conference in Rome, said he was unhappy with the decision. “We’ll abide by the court’s decision. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it,” the president said, adding that “it was a deeply divided court, and I strongly agree with those who dissented.”

The dissenting opinions, one by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the other by Justice Scalia, were vigorous. Each signed the other’s, and the other two dissenters, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., signed both.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing in more mild tones than Justice Scalia’s more apocalyptic dissent, said the decision represented “overreaching” that was “particularly egregious” and left the court open to “charges of judicial activism.” The decision, he said, “is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants.” The public would “lose a bit more control over the conduct of this nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges,” he added.

The focus of the chief justice’s ire was the choice the majority made to go beyond simply ruling that the detainees were entitled to file habeas corpus petitions. Under two unrelated Supreme Court precedents, formal habeas corpus procedures are not necessarily required, as long as Congress provides an “adequate substitute.”

Congress in this instance did provide an alternative procedure that might be viewed as a substitute. The Detainee Treatment Act gave detainees access to the federal appeals court here to challenge their designation as enemy combatants, made by a military panel called a Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

The detainees’ lawyers argued that because this process fell far short of the review provided by traditional habeas corpus, it could not be considered an adequate substitute. The appeals court itself never decided that question, because it ruled in February 2007 that the detainees had no right to habeas corpus in the first place, and that all their petitions must be dismissed. It was this ruling that the Supreme Court reviewed on Thursday.

Justice Kennedy said that the Supreme Court, having decided that there was a right to habeas corpus, would “in the ordinary course” send the case back to the appeals court for it to consider “in the first instance” whether the alternative procedure was an adequate substitute.

But he said that “the gravity of the separation-of-powers issues raised by these cases and the fact that these detainees have been denied meaningful access to a judicial forum for a period of years render these cases exceptional” and required the justices to decide the issue for themselves rather than incur further delay.

The majority’s conclusion was that the alternative procedure had major flaws mostly by not permitting a detainee to present evidence that might clear him of blame but was either withheld from the record of the Combatant Status Review Tribunal or was learned of subsequently. The tribunals’ own fact-finding ability was so limited as to present “considerable risk of error,” thus requiring full-fledged scrutiny on appeal, Justice Kennedy said.

Eric M. Freedman, a habeas corpus expert at Hofstra University Law School, said the court was “on the right side of history” to reject what he called “habeas light.” Calling the decision “a structural reaffirmation of what the rule of law means,” Professor Freedman, who was a consultant to the detainees’ lawyers, said it was as important a ruling on the separation of powers as the Supreme Court has ever issued.

President Bush, in his statement in Rome, said the administration would decide whether to ask Congress to weigh in once more. Success at such an effort would appear unlikely, given that the Supreme Court decision was praised not only by the Democratic leadership, but by the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Senator Specter had voted for the jurisdiction-stripping measure, but then filed a brief at the court arguing that the law was unconstitutional.

In addition to removing habeas corpus jurisdiction, the Military Commissions Act also provided authority for the military commissions that the court’s 2006 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld said was lacking. The case the court decided on Thursday did not directly concern military commissions, which are due to conduct trials of the several dozen detainees who have been charged with war crimes. The Department of Justice said on Thursday that the decision would not delay those trials.

Divided as the Supreme Court was in this case, the justices were unanimous, surprisingly so, in a second habeas corpus ruling on Thursday. Again rejecting the Bush administration’s position, the court held in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts that two civilian United States citizens being held in American military custody in Iraq were entitled to file habeas corpus petitions.

Proceeding to the merits of the petitions, the court then ruled against the two men, Mohammad Munaf and Shawqi Ahmad Omar, who are facing criminal charges under Iraqi law. Their release through habeas corpus “would interfere with the sovereign authority of Iraq to punish offenses against its laws committed within its borders,” Chief Justice Roberts said.

The administration had argued in the case, Munaf v. Geren, No. 06-1666, that because the men were technically held by the 26-nation multinational force in Iraq, federal courts did not have jurisdiction to hear their habeas corpus petitions. Chief Justice Roberts said that, to the contrary, what mattered was that the men were held by “American soldiers subject to a United States chain of command.”

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Rome.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/wa...scotus.html?hp





Youths Ordered to Apologize on YouTube
Dawn Kawamoto

Two teenagers who posted a malicious "fire in the hole" prank on YouTube were slapped with a court order to post an apology on the same video-sharing site, according to a report in Florida Today.

The sentence, devised by the judge, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, was created to serve as a deterrent to what is viewed as a growing problem of youths filming malicious, or violent, acts and posting them online, in the hope of generating notoriety.
In this particular case, a 23-year-old Taco Bell employee was stationed at the drive-up window, when a car loaded with teenagers drove up. After taking their order and handing the group their drinks, the teens yelled "fire in the hole" and threw a 32-ounce soda at the employee as she handed them their change.

The employee initially thought it was a personal attack, until learning from customers that a video of the prank had been posted on YouTube. The employee then engaged in a little sleuthing and tracked down the teens.

From the YouTube video, she found the boys' MySpace pages, where they had bragged about the incident. While keeping her identity secret, she befriended the boys and confirmed that they were involved in the attack, according to the Florida Today report.

Using a phone book, she located the mother of one of the teens, who identified the others involved in the prank.

The driver, who threw the drink, and the teenager who filmed the attack were charged with two counts of battery and one count of criminal mischief, according to the report.

As part of their sentence, the teens had to write, film, and post their video apology on YouTube, as well as pay $30 to clean the restaurant and serve 100 hours of community service.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9964565-7.html
















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