[JackSpratts]

Volume V, Issue #1






























"The more you see police officers using force on tape, the more you get used to it." – Eugene O'Donnell


"I don't remember how many times I have been pulled over by police or had the light shined in face because of the way I look. I am sick and tired of it. That's why I thought it was necessary to start this organization because I can't take it any more." – Sherman Austin


"It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations." – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.


"It may be that at some point in the future the government will accept that putting RFID chips in to passports is ill-conceived and unnecessary. Until then, the only people likely to embrace this kind of technology are those with mischief in mind." – Steve Boggan


"We are sorry for the game fans that they cannot play all the games but unfortunately some of these problems could not be avoided." – Satoshi Fukuoka


"Of course, the irony of YouTube accusing others of copyright infringement is delicious. But I won’t go into that right now." – Michael Arrington


"From an advertising point of view, from a public relations point of view, everything, it was impossible." – Rebecca Marks


"This is a toy for men. It’s hard to imagine women or children wanting this. It’s just too much." – Natsuki Inoue


"We look forward to people sharing them because jazz is not something that is terribly popular in our culture. You can’t turn on MTV and see Sonny Rollins. So we need to utilize everything we can." – Bret Primack


"[The PS3 provides] more processing power and capability than any consumer electronics device in history." – iSuppli


"The code of a powder guy is that we put out our own fires." – John Frazier


"If I did it, here’s how it happened." – O.J. Simpson


























Et Tu, Tube?

Show stages are constrained spaces. They are only so wide and so deep. Producing a play means facing this limitation. There are only so many ways a designer can light and dress a set. If God uses an infinite amount of filters and reflectors when He lights His Stage, mere mortals are constrained to something far less.

This hasn’t been much of a problem in the past. The director made certain decisions and the set designers took over from there. Magic was made. The show was a hit or it wasn’t. Life went on.

That’s about to change.

Designers are suing people when someone stages a production in a similar fashion. It sounds a little strange since the person suing used techniques that were themselves invented by previous designers (remember there are only so many ways to work a small space), but since the true originators couldn’t (or wouldn’t) copyright their ideas, the new designer is free to do so, and boy are they doing so. There’s a controversial copyright land grab and it’s happening everywhere. Designers are either suing or threatening to sue shows that have (they claim) ''stolen their'' designs, as well as used other heretofore communal aspects of universal show production. In Chicago this week the creators of an award winning show have been served with legal papers demanding financial records and the return of all awards because the staging is considered too similar to one in NYC. That the Chicago show closed isn’t stopping the petitioners. Why would it? Anyone wishing to cash in on this intellectual policy gold mine won’t be slowed by the death of a production. When today’s gold diggers have wrongly locked up the major styles of lighting and design, all talent will have to pay tribute to a few greedy players who abused bad IP law, but did so not to create original works for people’s enjoyment, but to squeeze cash from ideas they themselves ''stole'' from the true electric age titans of the arts who did it first and did it right.

Cacheing In

There has been a huge amount of Internet chatter comparing YouTube to Napster in the Intellectual Policy department, with commentators like Mark Cuban going so far as to say the former will join the latter in the sad history of ground-breaking concerns killed by draconian copyright law. As the purveyor of a new television service however Mark has a few horses in this race and as a potential owner of a company already threatening YouTube he is too close to the action to be taken seriously as a disinterested party, but he’s certainly not alone in his thinking, it’s in the air as it were. So in the man bites dog department things took a bad turn this week when YouTube itself did the threatening, aiming its legal muscle at one of its own users. A couple of guys at an outfit called TechDirt whipped up a little app that lets YouTube viewers put these user-submitted vids on their hard drives and the new Google subsidiary doesn’t like it. Even in today’s over-the-top IP land grab where people seem to be unable to stop themselves from locking up content they did nothing to create (and really, isn’t that essentially the definition of YouTube?) this is a strange development for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that watching a show means it’s usually on your hard drive to begin with.

Simply put, launching a video from YouTube installs it to your computer. Using the fast Opera browser for instance clicking a video starts loading it to the cache (C:\Documents and Settings\You\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile\cache4), labels it something like "opr0D3XK.flv (or .tmp) and keeps loading it until the entire video is installed. Depending then on how one has set the cache the video stays there indefinitely, even when one goes to another page, closes the browser or shuts down the computer entirely. Nor is this limited to PCs running obscure browsers from Norway. The same goes for other browsers, computers and even platforms such as Macs which also put the video on the hard drive (/private/var/tmp/folders.503/temporaryI=items/). In addition to the players that already handle FLV extensions there are freeware programs (like Batch FLV Converter which I use) that convert tmps or flvs to AVIs and MPEGs when needed, and finally simply cutting these YouTube delivered files out of the cache and pasting them into another folder means one has them for as long as one wants.

The whole cease and desist business is dishonest. YouTube didn’t create or even modify the content and certainly can’t claim property rights under any kind of moral ownership clause I can think of, unless this pouty billion dollar baby is using the one that goes "finders keepers" but even still, offering it freely to all and distributing it via browser means YouTube acknowledges and accepts the reality that computers place the content on hard drives for the duration.

Perhaps now that Google has admitted reserving hundreds of millions for a copyright slush fund it's probably doing everything it can to appear to be preventing infringement. In reality however YouTube’s nothing but a big fun infringing machine, operating inside the world’s largest and most enjoyable infringing machine - the Internet – and which as far as I’m concerned is the major point in its favor.

Volume V

This issue starts another season of the Week In Review and four years of regular news on file sharing, copyrights and privacy begs a question: are we seeing any progress? The answer isn’t simple. On the one hand file sharing has never been healthier, but it’s still attacked by major media. The courts have settled into a comfortable position regarding peer to peer and they’re happy not to think too hard about it anymore, they just call it illegal and move on, ditto the lawmakers in the States and elsewhere, but there was a real break in that continuum when Sweden’s Pirate Party went national. Very briefly things looked like they could change and while exciting and lots of fun it was short lived and ultimately ineffectual, although the seeds for a true movement were planted so it bears watching and cultivating (c’mon Swedes!).

Here of course the Democrats just finished off the Republicans, ending twelve years of Republican rule in the House and if a lot of that had to do with disgust over Republicans selling their votes to the highest bidders – which certainly goes to the heart of file sharing & copyright legislation – it would be tough to make the case that P2P had much to do with this election. There is a theory – untested – that Democrats may be more sympathetic to the cause on general principals, but if we want to get anywhere with them it’s up to us to get their attention, in a positive way, and give them solid reasons to vote for something they should all be voting for anyway, even if they think we’re all a bunch of thieves (we really need to work on that one).

I know we can do it, and I know it’s going to happen, but the question remains when. Our representatives aren’t getting any older as they say, and if we keep replacing them with younger models eventually they’ll get so young they’ll actually understand the Internet so we’ll see some movement, but that’s going to take a while. In the meantime I do see real progress on privacy and other extremely important quality of life legislation, something the Democrats care deeply about in spite of their over hyped reputations as lovers of big government. Expect to see genuine change on those issues in the next several years.

It may be that life means never really getting everything you want, that the heady expectations we riffed on in the early days of peer-to-peer, of interconnected communities, celestial juke-boxes and the freedom that comes with emancipation from authority and suppression have proven somewhat broad, but that may not necessarily be the whole story. The white hot flame has banked some, but we accomplished just about everything we set out to do. We belong to many communities, we share much of everything and we communicate effortlessly over great distances and do it free from outside interference. It’s under the radar, but it’s real, and anyone who wants to can participate easily enough. I would prefer a little more legal clarity and cover but in the meantime I do realize I’m helping dismantle a well moneyed edifice, and it helps to remember they aren’t very happy about it so a little patience isn’t a bad thing.

I’m not sure this is a battle we’re winning as much as a paradigm we’re shifting, or like many things in life some combination, but whatever historians wind up calling it, and they’ll be all over this in the years to come, we’re probably going to get what we want while the corporate interests get some of what they want too. If that sounds a bit simplistic perhaps it’ll help to think of it as redefining the problem and with it the solutions, and that rather than trying to find the patch for today’s issues we’re going to build something else. I see the signs in many areas from new business models to the beginnings of a general cultural relaxation around non-commercial copying. If we’ve cooled off a bit, I’m picking up signals that some commercial groups are taking it a little easier too. Then there’s Washington. At least those nuts haven’t proposed any more scorched earth scenarios lately, and that’s something.

We’ll move forward. We always do and really who’s going to stop us? We are the world after all.

As Volume V begins I’d like to thank everyone for the support this effort has gotten over the last four years, and it has to be said, all the insightful writers who on short deadlines and few resources manage to create so many astonishing articles every day of the week. It makes the time spent putting this magazine together more than worth it. It also makes it fun. I hope a little of that fun and astonishment found its way into your homes as well.

Happy 4th Birthday WiR.






Yours,

Jack Spratts

November 16th, 2006
Danbury, Connecticut







































November 18th, '06





LimeWire to Filter Out Adobe Products

LimeWire today announced on the company blog that from now on they will be filtering out Adobe products like Photoshop that are distributed illegally over P2P networks that LimeWire hooks into.

This move is part of a “continuing effort to work with the software industry” and will most probably lead to the company signing deals with other software vendors.

As usual, the Adobe products will only be filtered out if the user has chosen to block copyrighted material during installation by checking the ‘Enable Content Filtering’ option.

According to the company, such deals are being signed in hope that fewer consumers will be sued for using the program. They say this is “a significant step toward a positive relationship with software producers and means a safer peer-to-peer process for LimeWire users.”

The company has clearly been trying to go legit, but at the same time not charge users for anything but the Pro version. This became apparent when they added a pop-up message that notified users that a license for the song/file they were downloading could not be found and asked them if they were sure they wanted to download it anyway.

LimeWire was sued by the RIAA earlier this year after the company announced that it was planning to integrate BitTorrent support in the program. The RIAA demanded $150,000 per song “wilfully uploaded.” This did not stop them from going ahead and implementing it anyway.
http://torrentfreak.com/limewire-to-...dobe-products/





TV News Station Backs Down on P2P Virus Claims

INQ reader exposes cobblers
Nick Farrell

A US television station has had to back down on claims that P2P software will fill your computer with viruses.

7News reported how during its 'exclusive' test it downloaded Limeware software only to find it contained password cracking software.

Our report miffed INQ reader Dominic Webb who contacted the 7News hack, Tony Kovaleski, and called him out on his claim.

Sure enough, after a bit more digging it turned out the TV hack had got it all wrong and confirmed that Limewire did not include any password cracking software.

"The error in my findings was the result of a unique license file downloaded by the installation of LimeWire on our computer. This license file is not a threat to a computer, Kovaleski said.

It turned out that his malware detector had triggered on a unique GNU license downloaded by LimeWire to 7News' computer. This licence had a "digital fingerprint" (SHA-1 hash) which was associated with only one application in a database of thousands of software products which turned out to he an older version of a password cracker.

Limewire installed this unique license file on 7New's system. Kovaleski established that it was this license which triggered the alert, not the installation of the actual application pwl9x.

The telly company has since modified its 'exclusive' story. Next week it might be writing a P2P gives you cancer story, so watch carefully.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35649





Vietnam Raising Software Piracy Fines

Higher penalties would bring country more in line with global standards
AP

HANOI, Vietnam - Vietnam will increase fines for software piracy, moving quickly to implement its new World Trade Organization commitments, an official said Wednesday.

The top penalty for piracy is now the equivalent of $6,250, but the Ministry of Culture and Information is working on a decree that would raise that limit, said department director Vu Manh Chu. Individuals and companies using pirated software could be fined up to five times the value of the software when the new rule takes effect, he said.

In other words, a company that uses software with a value of $6,250 could be fined up to $31,250.

The WTO formally invited Vietnam to join the Geneva-based group on Tuesday, and the communist country is working to upgrade its laws and regulations to bring them in line with global standards.

"This demonstrates the resolve of the government to crack down on copyright violations as the country deepens its international economic integration," Chu said.

The decree will be submitted to the prime minister for approval later this year.

Vietnam's piracy rate is about 90 percent, one of the highest in the world, according to the Business Software Alliance. A version of Microsoft Windows can be bought for as little as 50 cents.

"We hope the decree will deter potential software pirates," Chu said.

Last month, authorities fined an affiliate of South Korea's Daewoo Corp. for using pirated software, the first time a corporate user of illegal software has been targeted in Vietnam.

Police and inspectors from the Ministry of Culture and Information raided the Hanoi-based Daewoo Hanel Electronic Corp., and discovered all the software installed in their computers was pirated.

The illegal software included copies of Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and Auto CAD with a total value of nearly $62,000. The company, a joint venture between South Korea's Daewoo Corp., and Hanel, a local company, was ordered to pay a fine of $940.

When the new regulation takes effect, a company using software of that value could be fined as much as $312,000.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15625160/





Open source out

U-Turn At Thai ICT Ministry

New ICT Minister plans to overturn many of the decisions of his predecessors
Don Sambandaraksa

ICT Minister Sitthichai.... puts forth his radical vision for 3G in Thailand, but views open source as buggy, useless software

In his first "meet the press" session as ICT Minister, Professor Sitthichai Pokai-udom put forth his radical vision for 3G in Thailand, condemned open source for turning out buggy, useless software and promised to make the civil servants in the ICT Ministry proud of their organisation once again.

Speaking at the IT Press Club, Minister Sitthichai said that he was looking for an investment of around 20 billion baht for Thai Mobile and between 10 and 18 billion for CAT in order to complete the roll-out of next generation communication networks for the two former state enterprises.

Sitthichai said on detailed questioning that Thai Mobile would upgrade its network and operate a WCDMA 3G network while CAT Telecom would roll out a CDMA2000 EV-DO network.

He said that rather than using public money to compete with the private sector, he expected today's private mobile operators to gladly become partners to CAT and TOT and effectively lease their networks and focus on the marketing aspect. He reasoned that none of the incumbents would want to invest in a 3G network as 4G would come along in five years and render today's investments obsolete.

Today this is done in many countries. Virgin Mobile uses the T-Mobile and Singtel networks in the UK and Singapore, respectively, to operate as a virtual network, for instance.

Pijitra Thanomsab shows her national ID smart card at Impact Arena, Muang Thong Thani. The project needs a new Terms of Reference, according to Sitthichai.

"I see no reason to put CAT or TOT in the stock market, but I'm saying this to a group of Thai journalists. Tomorrow I will be talking to foreign journalists and I will tell them that CAT and TOT will be put on the market at a suitable time, which is not now," he said in one of his typical moments of candour.

The ICT Minister disagreed with privatisation of the nation's telecommunications infrastructure, suggesting private firms would only work for their shareholders' profit and neglect rural areas and redundant infrastructure for disaster recovery as neither are profitable. He said that CAT and TOT could easily ask for budget for large-scale investment projects directly from the government budget.

He also said that merging TOT and CAT would be inevitable and he would look at merging the three boards of directors (along with Thailand Post, itself half of what was the Communications Authority of Thailand) in a few months.

On the subject of open source software, he said the current government plan was a case of the blind leading the blind, as neither the people who are in charge nor the people in industry seem to know the dangers of open source software.

"With open source, there is no intellectual property. Anyone can use it and all your ideas become public domain. If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated," he said.

Apart from Linux, he claimed that most open source software is often abandoned and not developed, and leads to a lot of low-quality software with lots of bugs.

"As a programmer, if I can write good code, why should I give it away? Thailand can do good source code without open source," he said.

First Thai animation movie "Khan Kluay" features a cuddlier-than-Dumbo elephant. The animation and outsourcing sectors gained strong support from the new minister.

The new ICT Minister expressed his belief in censorship and said that even the most avid freedom of speech advocate would change his mind if he sees doctored pictures of his daughter's head on a naked body posted on the Internet.

The ICT Ministry will soon put forward draft Acts to the National Legislative Assembly on cybercrime and on web sites that are pornographic or considered lese majeste, allowing officials to arrest, fine and imprison offenders.

In another reversal of policy from the previous government, Minister Sitthichai said that the ICT Ministry was as important as the Ministry of Commerce or Industry and would increase in importance in the future. Previously, there was talk of disbanding the ICT Ministry and absorbing its functions into the Ministry of Science and Technology.

He said that in the past, the previous government had a choice of putting in place a capable ICT Minister or one who could be easily controlled by politicians.

"Those with capability may love the country too much while others may do everything and anything just to remain in power as Minister. I'm not talking about any political party in particular," he said.

Sitthichai said that his number one priority would be in making the ICT Ministry more transparent and make the people who work in it proud to work in a clean and effective organisation.

"All our problems start with a lack of transparency. If people are not corrupt, procurement will be faster and better. Putting in place new projects and hiring talented people will be easier. I don't understand why all the committee meetings are secret. All the doors should be open to observers," he said, adding that the media can now sit in front of his own office and see the facial expressions of the people who visit him and whether they leave his office smiling or crying.

He said that problems in projects such as the smart ID card project arose because of a need to interpret grey areas of the Terms of Reference. He said the new ToR would be open to public debate so that there would be no room for interpretation and no room for corruption.

Sitthichai also called the e-Auction regulations a mess and a pointless show of technology, with no real impact on preventing corruption or collusion. However, as much as he would prefer paper auctions, he cannot do much as e-Auctions are now part of the Ministry of Finance regulations.

Moving forward, Minister Sitthichai said he looked forward to working with his friend and Sipa director Dr Arvuth Ploysongsaeng. He said that we can expect a new ICT Master Plan by ICT Expo in August. He said that the IT sector should continue to focus on animation and multimedia and outsourcing, to which he would like to add embedded systems as a top priority.
http://bangkokpost.net/151106_Databa...06_data001.php





PS3 Debuts to Long Lines, Conn. Shooting
Anick Jesdanun

Days of waiting paid off for Sergio Rodriguez, one of the relatively few able to buy Sony's PlayStation 3 when the coveted console went on sale early Friday.

He was among the die-hard gamers and entrepreneurs across the country who braved foul weather and heckling by passers-by all week for the chance to shell out $500 or more for the sleek PS3, plus about $60 per game.

With shortages resulting from production problems, many had camped out for days without knowing if they'd be going home empty-handed. At some stores, the crowds got rowdy and stampeded for the shelves, injuring a man in Wisconsin and forcing authorities to shut down a Wal-Mart store in California.

In Connecticut, two armed thugs who got wise to the PS3's high price and tried to rob a line of people waiting outside a Putnam Wal-Mart store at 3 a.m. One person who refused to give up the money was shot, state police said. In Lexington, Ky., four people waiting outside a Best Buy were hit by BB pellets, though none was seriously injured, according to WKYT, whose own reporter was hit as she interviewed buyers.

Rodriguez had been waiting outside the New York Circuit City store since Sunday for the a midnight launch event, and he was the first to walk away with the PS3 as people still standing in line outside the store cheered.

"This is the best game ever. It's so worth the wait," the 25-year-old graphics designer said. "Some people may call me crazy, but I really love to play."

With Sony promising only 400,000 systems for the nationwide launch, the chance of disappointment was high. While retailers tried to keep expectations low, lines snaked around the block at many stores -- even those that weren't going to begin sales until later Friday.

Saby Madrigal, an 18-year-old college student who worked for a month at a liquor store to save for a PS3, waited in line outside the Circuit City for 24 hours without success. Still, she vowed to keep looking.

"For the work we had to do to get all the money to get the stupid system, I'm going to search every single store in town," she said.

Nathaniel Lord, who camped out for three nights at a Best Buy in West Hollywood, Calif., spent more than $700 on a console and a game.

"I thought about going home to shower first because I haven't showered in three days, but I think I'm just going to get another energy drink, log on and get started," said Lord, a recent graduate of California Institute of the Arts.

Sony, which has contended with laptop battery recalls and trails rivals in key products such as music players and liquid crystal displays, is counting on the PS3 to maintain and build its market lead in consoles.

Some customers were buying PS3 machines for themselves or as gifts, but many were hoping to resell them at a profit. Units were fetching several thousand dollars early Friday at the eBay Inc. auction site.

Edgar Alcala, 18, who grabbed one of the first spots in line at San Francisco's Sony Metreon Mall on Wednesday morning, said he was looking forward to a warm, dry bed and a hefty profit.

"When I get home, I'm going to take a quick picture of it, slap it on eBay and go to sleep," Alcala said minutes before the store's doors opened at midnight Friday.

Potential customers braved freezing temperatures in Fargo, N.D., and heavy rain and winds in Baltimore and other East Coast locales.

Even a volunteer for former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina asked for help in getting a PS3 -- from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which the potential 2008 presidential candidate frequently criticizes.

Edwards said the volunteer "feels terrible" about seeking the console from Wal-Mart a day after his boss criticized the giant retailer, saying it doesn't treat its employees fairly. Wal-Mart accused Edwards, the Democrats' 2004 vice presidential candidate, of not wanting to wait his turn.

Short supplies and strong demand were feared to be a formula for trouble as the PS3 hit store shelves, a half-year late because of problems completing work on the console's built-in, next-generation DVD player.

Sony promised the 400,000 machines in the United States for Friday's launch and about 1 million by year's end. Worldwide, it was expecting 2 million this year, half its original projections.

Jack Tretton, executive vice president at Sony Computer Entertainment America, said retailers will be receiving new PlayStations daily -- expedited by plane rather than ships.

"At some point we want to get to some degree of normalcy, but that remains to be seen," Tretton told The Associated Press, adding that seeing all the people camped out and lined up for the console "kind of makes all the effort worth it."

Enthusiasm for the PlayStation 3 wasn't dampened by its high price tag -- $500 for the basic model with a 20-gigabyte hard drive and $600 for the 60-gigabyte version, which also has built-in wireless.

By contrast, Nintendo Co.'s Wii, which goes on sale Sunday in the U.S., retails for $250. Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360, which had a year's head start over rivals, sells for $300 to $400.

Sony crammed the PlayStation 3 with the very latest in cutting-edge technology, and it dominated the previous generation of consoles with 70 percent of the global market.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8LES8K02.htm





MP3.com Reopens Servers, Accepts Files
Alex Veiga

MP3.com is reopening its servers, nearly a decade after it helped usher in the online music era by letting largely unknown bands submit files for computer users to download.

The site, acquired by San Francisco-based CNET Networks Inc. in 2003, has recently undergone a redesign. Relaunched officially on Tuesday, the site now offers up to 100 megabytes of storage space for audio tracks and unlimited space for videos, free of charge.

The company won't say how many independent artists or tracks have been uploaded to the site since it began accepting files a few weeks ago.

CNET only bought the Internet domain, not the library of more than 1 million tracks that bands had uploaded to MP3.com since 1998.

So, until recently, the site focused on offering editorial content on major label artists and enabled visitors to stream select tracks and videos while online, typically with links to Internet music stores where fans could buy downloads for portable devices and offline play.

The revamped site weaves in tracks and videos by independent and unsigned bands for visitors to download directly from MP3.com. It gives at least some of the fledgling acts equal billing with similar artists from major labels.

MP3.com is looking to compete with News Corp.'s MySpace.com, which has emerged as a favorite destination for independent and little-known bands to connect with fans and build a following online.

To that end, MP3.com has added features that, for instance, let bands see how their music stacks up to other artists in their genre. Bands can also see what ZIP codes their listeners hail from and get a page on the site, where they can upload and edit their music, videos and digital images.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-15-18-20-12





BitTorrent Video Store Delayed
Mark Sullivan

BitTorrent , the famous peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing service, has hit delays launching its online video store -- delays that will stall the store's launch until sometime next year.

In March, BitTorrent said its store would launch by the end of 2006. But the process of signing up content owners to sell their video via a legitimate P2P network has taken longer than expected. BitTorrent spokeswoman Lily Lin says the launch will take place in "early 2007." (See BitTorrent to Open Video Store.)

BitTorrent signed a major content deal with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group this summer, but has yet to sign up the other major studios. A Warner Brothers spokesman said his company signed up after becoming convinced that BitTorrent would provide the same level of content security it requires of other broadband distribution channels like Apple Computer Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL - message board) iTunes. BitTorrent uses Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT - message board) Windows digital rights management (DRM) software to protect video content.

The studios' content security concerns aren't too surprising since BitTorrent P2P file distribution was previously a preferred method of distributing pirated content. BitTorrent went to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) last year with a promise that it would remove copyright-protected content from its P2P search engine results.

The company's image makeover went so far that it doesn't even use the term P2P anymore. It calls its distribution method "peer-assisted."

Tom Blaisdell, a partner at DCM - Doll Capital Management , one of the companies funding BitTorrent, says the content security concerns of the studios are not slowing down licensing talks. Blaisdell says the studios are already satisfied with BitTorrent's content protection measures. At the current stage, he says, "it's more about getting the right economic deal and getting the right titles."

Blaisdell adds that the timing of BitTorrent's video debut is not as important as the size and quality of the offering. "We're not concerned that we are going to be able to launch in time for the holiday season -- that's not relevant. This is a lifestyle product; we want to launch with thousands of titles, not hundreds."

BitTorrent's Lin says her company intends to sell both low-demand video content (like TV reruns) and more mainstream content (like new Hollywood movies).

BitTorrent delivers video files using a method known as "swarming." Small pieces of the file are gathered from the PCs of users who already have the content, then quickly reassembled on the downloader's PC. Swarming is far faster than a linear download from a central server somewhere.
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=110502





Is AllofMP3.com Doomed?
Rich Menta

Friday the Americans and the Russians came to terms over their trade differences, leading the US to OK Russian entry into the World Trade organization. The pact covers several grievances, one of them focused on Russia's poor track record on intellectual property rights. The poster boy for this issue became Russian music service AllofMP3.com, which was elevated to this dubious position thanks to a British report. The report found that AllofMP3 was the number two service in the UK, behind only Apple, with an impressive 15% of the regional market. Indeed, AllofMP3's low prices for music tracks combined with their availability in multiple formats without interoperability-killing DRM arguably made it the second most popular service worldwide, an achievment supported by Alexa figures.

The question now is will the Russians take steps to close the service down immediately or wait until its formal entry into the WTO, still threatened by former soviet satellites Moldova and Georgia.

But then maybe the point is moot? The other month the entertainment industry successfully convinced the major credit card companies including Visa and Mastercard to cut off AllofMP3. With its main source of international money exchange removed, AllofMP3 was forced to shift its business from a pay-per-track scheme to an advertised-based model. Whether the company can survive on the new model is debatable.

But if it is successful, then pressure will most likely be brought on Russia to honor its copyright commitments and take action against AllofMP3. That doesn't necessarily mean closing the service as Russia could impose a government licensing commission to serve as intermediary between the worldwide record industry and the Russian digital record market.

But then again the well is tainted for a record industry who may take an "anybody BUT AllofMP3" stance. For its part AllofMP3 says it adheres exactly to existing Russian law, paying royalties to two services including the Russian Organization for Multimedia and Digital Systems (ROM). The big question that is never anwered one way or the other is simply this: is ROM legit? No one, including the press or the Russian government, has answered this question and I'll be damned if I have been able to find out.

I still want to know, but then in the world of international politics it probably does not matter anymore. Once AllofMP3 became a WTO bargaining chip its days were numbered.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/6002/wto.html




ThePirateBay Expands Lineup
Thomas Mennecke

Enforcement against ThePirateBay earlier this year appears to have done little to deter progress on this Swedish BitTorrent tracker. ThePirateBay has been quick to reestablish itself as one of the primary resources for torrents, after being forced off line for several days earlier this year.

Unlike most other BitTorrent related websites which at least attempt to convey complicity with intellectual property rights, ThePirateBay makes no such effort. In fact, ThePirateBay conveys the exact opposite and dedicates a significant portion of their site to mocking the enforcement intellectual property rights.

While this behavior has won over the P2P crowd, it has infuriated the entertainment industry. Repeated attempts to shut down ThePirateBay have been unsuccessful, however a brief victory in late May was cause for celebration among copyright holders. However this celebration would prove to be short lived, as within three days ThePiratebay was back online.

Almost seven months later, ThePirateBay shows no signs of complicity. In fact, a recent blog post shows the opposite is occurring - as the site administration claims it has grown over 30% in the last three months.

Additionally, in response to the growing demand for TV programming, ThePirateBay has included a new section dedicated to such torrents. In a recent blog posting, ThePirateBay announced its new TV feature:

"We know you like TV so we added a nice TV-section on the site! You can reach it by clicking here. The first tv-page shows the 50 most popular shows on the site at any moment. If you want to browse through the rest of them, just click 'Show all series.'"

Predictably, public reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. The entertainment industry's response to any of ThePirateBay's upgrades has been quiet - for now.
http://www.slyck.com/story1345.html





Sports Artist Sued for Mix of Crimson and Tide
Adam Liptak

In the solemn cathedral of college football devotion and instruction that is the Paul W. Bryant Museum here, a large painting dominates the main chamber. It is called “The Sack,” and it shows an encounter between a Notre Dame quarterback and a human locomotive in crimson and white.

“I’ve never been hit like that before,” the quarterback, Steve Beuerlein, said after his near-lethal sack by Cornelius Bennett in 1986, in the University of Alabama’s first victory ever over his team.

Daniel A. Moore, who painted “The Sack” and scores of other renditions of signal moments in Alabama football history, said he felt something similar last year, when his fax machine began to spit out a lawsuit from the university.

Mr. Moore’s paintings, reproduced in prints and on merchandise, violated the university’s trademark rights, the suit said. It asked a federal judge to forbid him to, among other things, use the university’s “famous crimson and white color scheme.”

Athletes, sports leagues and universities around the nation have become increasingly aggressive in protecting what they say is their intellectual property, and their claims have met with a mixed response from judges and fans. But almost no one here thinks the suit against Mr. Moore is a good idea.

“This lawsuit is the equivalent of the Catholic Church suing Michelangelo for painting the Sistine Chapel,” said Keith Dunnavant, an Alabama alumnus and the author of “Coach: The Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”

A university spokeswoman, Cathy Andreen, declined repeated requests for interviews with university officials and lawyers, on what she said was the advice of counsel.

James Glen Stovall, who taught journalism at the university for 25 years, said only one sort of person would support the suit.

“I can see why, if you’re sitting in a roomful of lawyers, you might come to that conclusion,” Mr. Stovall said. “But no one outside of that room would say: ‘Hey, that’s a good idea. Let’s sue Daniel Moore.’ ”

At his gallery in Birmingham, surrounded by prints and paintings reflecting his more than 25 years as a sports artist, Mr. Moore said he remained a loyal Alabama alumnus. He graduated from the university with an art degree in 1976; two of his daughters go there now, and a third is a recent graduate.

“I still love Alabama,” he said. “I still love Alabama football. Obviously, I haven’t yanked my daughters out of school.”

But there is bitterness, too. For two decades, the university gave him sideline passes. Now he is not welcome on game day.

“As an artist,” he said, “it helps to be there, to feel the emotion and excitement and strategy from an on-field perspective.”

He said he did not understand why his work, copies of which have a place of pride in the dens of thousands of Alabama football fans, should not receive the same First Amendment protection that newspaper photographs do. “Artists,” he said, “were the first journalists.”

In its legal papers, the university’s lawyers are grudging in their assessment of Mr. Moore’s talent. “Though skillfully prepared,” the lawyers wrote, Mr. Moore’s art conveys nothing beyond the raw facts of football. Mr. Moore, the suit says, “literally replicates even the expression on the players’ faces in his prints and he adds no message whatever not conveyed by the play itself.”

That is not fair, Mr. Moore said. Though he uses photographs for reference, he said that his compositions and his style were his own. He calls his approach “photofuturism,” which he describes as “five parts realism to one part motion.”

Over the years, Mr. Moore said, his paintings and prints have cumulatively sold “in the low millions.” An 8-by-10 reproduction sells for $25 retail, or $35 if it is signed. An original watercolor might go for $22,000, an oil for $65,000.

The university’s lawyers seemed to take particular offense at Mr. Moore’s use of his paintings on merchandise like coffee mugs and calendars.

In response, Mr. Moore did not hesitate to invoke his own intellectual property rights. “Because I own the copyright,” he said, “it’s my opinion that I can put it on anything I want to. I can put it on a tattoo on someone’s backside.”

Mr. Moore has asked Judge R. David Proctor of the Federal District Court in Birmingham to dismiss the case on First Amendment grounds. His brief cited a decision of the federal appeals court in California ruling that a trademark owner “does not have the right to control public discourse” if “the public imbues his mark with a meaning.”

After the citation, Mr. Moore’s lawyer, Stephen D. Heninger, added a parenthetical aside. “Who could argue with a straight face,” he asked, “that the cultural significance of Alabama football has not assumed such a role?”

A ruling on the motion is expected in the next few months.

Other courts have also tried to balance the rights of the owners of intellectual property against that of free expression. The cases, which involve a variety of legal theories, generally turn on whether consumers are apt to be confused about who produced the works in question and on whether artists managed to add something meaningful to the bare facts.

At one end of the legal spectrum, a federal judge in Louisiana had no difficulty in July in enjoining a company that sold shirts bearing the school colors and initials of four football powerhouses.

At the other, the federal appeals court in Cincinnati in 2003 rejected an effort by the golfer Tiger Woods to stop an artist named Rick Rush from using Mr. Woods’s image in a painting commemorating his victory at the 1997 Masters in Augusta, Ga.

That painting, a panorama that included likenesses of six past winners, “communicates and celebrates the value our culture attaches to such events,” the majority in the divided three-judge panel decision found. “It would be ironic indeed if the presence of the image of the victorious athlete would deny the work First Amendment protection.”

In the middle of the spectrum is a 2001 decision of the California Supreme Court. It expressed great solicitude for the rights of artists under the First Amendment. But it ruled against an artist who had created a simple charcoal drawing of the Three Stooges and sold it on T-shirts.

The court attached no significance to the fact that the artist, Gary Saderup, reproduced his art on clothing. “First Amendment doctrine,” Justice Stanley Mosk wrote for a unanimous court, “does not disfavor nontraditional media of expression.”

But Justice Mosk found that the image itself contained “no significant transformative or creative contribution” and derived its worth mostly from the Stooges’ celebrity rather than Mr. Saderup’s talent. Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits, by contrast, Justice Mosk wrote, “may well be entitled to First Amendment protection” as “ironic social commentary.”

These decisions, Mr. Moore said, make courts into critics, a role that may not suit them.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in a 1903 decision holding that circus posters may be copyrighted, appeared to agree.

“It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law,” he wrote, “to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/us...rtner=homepage





MPAA Sues Company for Selling Pre-Loaded iPods

The MPAA has launched yet another “defensive attack”, this time on a small business that is pre-loading movie DVDs onto iPods and reselling them. The original DVDs of the movies that are loaded are also given to the customer.

To you and me this might seem like a perfectly fair and legal thing to do. The company, Load ‘N Go Video is basically charging people to load movies onto iPods. Customers pay for the original DVDs, for the iPods and for the service of having them loaded. They even receive the original DVDs they’ve paid for. What’s wrong then? Well, the MPAA isn’t you or me, and their way of differentiating between right and wrong seems to focus on how much money they can make.

The MPAA is claiming that the service Load ‘N Go Video offers is completely illegal because ripping a DVD is against the DMCA. The MPAA is also suing the company for copyright violation.

This lawsuit’s purpose isn’t just to shut down Load ‘N Go Video. It also indirectly implies that it is illegal for people to rip legally purchased DVDs at home. Quite a shame, since this only hurts actual paying customers. “Pirates” are going to continue doing whatever they want. It’s just like the sad truth about DRM. The people that are actually buying songs are being restricted from listening to them on devices of their choice, whereas those who aren’t, remain unaffected.

While writing this article, a very similar incident came to mind, one involving the maker of the iPod, Apple itself. At the original iPod keynote 5 years ago, Apple gave all the atendees iPods … preloaded with songs! And just like Load ‘N Go Video, Apple provided the original CDs too. Jason Snell for Macworld wrote in his Five Years of iPod article:

“At the end of the event, we all took home pre-release versions of the iPod, which were already loaded with music. To make the point that the iPod wasn’t meant as a vehicle for music piracy, our iPod packages also contained a stack of audio CDs, the contents of which matched the music pre-loaded on the iPod.”

Now the RIAA has motive to sue Apple, right? Wrong. Because private copying of music CDs falls under fair use in most countries. If so, why shouldn’t the same apply to movies too?
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-sues-co...-loaded-ipods/





Creative Team of ‘Urinetown’ Complains of Midwest Shows
Campbell Robertson

In the latest salvo in the battle over the extent of copyright protection, five members of the creative team behind the 2002 Broadway hit “Urinetown: the Musical” are charging that productions of the show in Chicago and Akron, Ohio, have copied their work without permission.

The letters, drafted by a lawyer, Ronald H. Shechtman, on behalf of the director John Rando, the choreographer John Carrafa, and the set, lighting and costume designers of the Broadway production, were sent on Monday night to the team behind an award-winning production at the Mercury Theater in Chicago and to the team behind the Carousel Dinner Theater production of the show in Akron.

The letters charge that in design and directorial aspects, the shows were replications of the Broadway production. The shows — which have both closed — had a license to use the script and music from “Urinetown,” but, the letters assert, such permission did not extend to reproducing creative decisions made by the Broadway production’s director, choreographer and designers.

Mr. Shechtman’s arguments concern a controversial area of intellectual property: creative input into a production beyond the script and music. While choreography is specifically protected by law, the situation for stage direction is not as clear.

The letters also maintain that the productions violated laws against unfair competition.

Several messages left for the directors and the choreographer of the Chicago and Akron productions were not returned.

The Mercury Theater production closed in May, but was nominated in September for seven Joseph Jefferson Awards, which honor excellence in Chicago theater. Among the nominees were Thomas Mullen for his direction and Brian Loeffler for his choreography. Mr. Loeffler, who also choreographed the Akron production, ended up winning.

The Broadway creative team is demanding, among other things, that the teams for both the Chicago and Akron productions provide a detailed accounting of all their revenues, from which “an appropriate license fee and damages” would be determined. The letter to the Chicago production also demands that Mr. Loeffler formally return any awards he won for his work on the show.

Both letters go on to say that if the demands are not met, the Broadway team will seek damages in court.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/theater/15urin.html





Google Holds Back Stock in YouTube Deal
Michael Liedtke

Google Inc. has set aside more than $200 million in its just-completed takeover of YouTube Inc. as a financial cushion to cover losses or possible legal bills for the frequent copyright violations on YouTube's video-sharing site.

Without elaborating in a late Monday statement, Google said it is withholding 12.5 percent of the stock owed to YouTube for one year "to secure certain indemnification obligations."

The Mountain View-based company disclosed the escrow account in an announcement commemorating the completion of its much-anticipated YouTube acquisition. As of Tuesday afternoon, Google representatives hadn't responded to requests for more details about the escrow account.

Buying San Bruno-based YouTube cost Google 3.66 million shares of its prized stock, including a convertible warrant. As of Tuesday, those shares were worth $1.79 billion - above the targeted purchase price of $1.65 billion announced last month.

But the escrow account's existence means YouTube's former owners - a small group led by co-founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Jawed Karim and Sequoia Capital - may never receive a substantial portion of the Google stock if YouTube runs into legal trouble or incurs other losses.

The percentage of stock being held in escrow translates into about 457,000 Google shares worth about $224 million after the company's stock price rose $8.27 Tuesday to close at $489.30 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

The reserve could signal that Google is trying to insulate itself from a possible onslaught of lawsuits aimed at the large number of pirated videos posted on YouTube, which will retain its current management and name.

Since its Web site first began to catch on about a year ago, YouTube has relied on a mix of homemade and pirated videos to expand its audience.

Although YouTube has promptly removed pirated videos whenever copyright owners complained about violations, questions have continued to linger about the site's vulnerability to legal claims for distributing content owned by other media.

YouTube may become a more tantalizing target for copyright owners and their lawyers now that it's owned by Google, a moneymaking machine that had accumulated $10.4 billion in cash through September.

The much-smaller YouTube never turned a profit, and even required a $15 million infusion from Google to help pay its bills until the deal closed, according to disclosures made late Monday.

The legal threats raised by the YouTube deal led to widespread Internet speculation that Google had set aside $500 million of the purchase price to pay copyright settlements.

Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt dismissed that theory as untrue last week during an appearance at an Internet conference.

Although copyright suits are probable, Google should be on solid legal ground as long as YouTube continues to respond to complaints promptly, said Larry Iser, a Santa Monica lawyer specializing in intellectual property rights. "They should have a safe harbor" under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Iser said.

Google executives also have repeatedly vowed to protect the rights of copyright holders.

Those guarantees apparently weren't enough to satisfy at least one copyright holder who recently sued Google's own video service for copyright infringement.

Google officials have declined to identify the copyright owner who sued, saying only that the case is filed somewhere in France and is seeking a relatively small amount of money.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-14-18-39-33





Huh? YouTube Sends TechCrunch A Cease & Desist
Michael Arrington

Buried in my email this evening I found a cease and desist letter from an attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, representing their client YouTube. We’ve been accused of a number of things: violating YouTube’s Terms of Use, of “tortious interference of a business relationship, and in fact, many business relationships,” of committing an “unfair business practice,” and “false advertising.” The attorney goes on to demand that we cease and desist in from engaging in these various actions or face legal remedies.

Well, crap.

The offense we committed was creating a small tool that lets people download YouTube videos to their hard drives. We referenced the tool in a recent post that walked people through the process of moving YouTube Videos to their iPod.

We created the tool only after a careful review of YouTube’s Terms of Use, which state “If you download or print a copy of the Content for personal use, you must retain all copyright and other proprietary notices contained therein.” The letter, however, states “The YouTube’s Terms of Use also allows users to access videos only through the functionality of the YouTube website via streaming on the Web, and it disallows the functionality of downloading videos.” Not only am I unable to find that language in YouTube’s Terms of Use, it directly conflicts with the language I did find and quoted above.

Similar tools are available all over the Internet and have been for some time - see Oyoom, iTube, PodTube, this Firefox extension, step-by-step instructions on an O’Reilly website, and many more.

Cease and Desist letters are often sent with no intention of follow up legal action, even if they are ignored. They are simply a way to show that you have made a good faith effort to protect your legal rights. But in this case I’m perplexed - YouTube takes the position that everything uploaded to the site is licensed for use by viewers, and so there should be no legal rights to protect:

You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service.

Given that downloads, with proper copyright attribution, are permitted under the Terms of Use, it seems like there is no problem at all for a user to download a video for personal use and put it on his or her iPod.

I’ve sent the letter to my attorney for review, but I am likely to remove the tool to preserve my relationship with the company. Based on my review of the Terms of Use and the great number of similar services already on the Internet, I honestly believed we were doing nothing to offend YouTube or Google. And I’ve loved YouTube since the first day I discovered it.

Of course, the irony of YouTube accusing others of copyright infringement is delicious. But I won’t go into that right now.

A copy of the letter is below. I had not listened to the voicemails mentioned in the letter, but I went and checked the last 20 messages and there were indeed two from this attorney.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/15...-cease-desist/





Cuban Talks Trash to YouTube

Mark Cuban ridiculed Google for purchasing the copyright lawsuit-prone YouTube. Now he may be ready to back an adversary to prove his point
Catherine Holahan

Verbally bashing YouTube is apparently not enough for billionaire "blog maverick" Mark Cuban. Now the Dallas Mavericks owner and tech entrepreneur is reportedly considering acquiring the independent news agency that's suing the video-sharing site for copyright violations. The brash move, if it goes through, would undoubtedly escalate Cuban's war of words with Google (GOOG), which closed its $1.65 billion stock purchase of YouTube Nov. 13. In fact, it could force Cuban to put his money where his outspoken mouth has been.

Before Google announced it would purchase YouTube, Cuban publicly criticized the company and anyone else thinking of buying it. "Would Google be crazy to buy YouTube? No doubt about it. Moronic would be an understatement of a lifetime," he wrote in an Oct. 7 blog post. After Google announced it would buy the site, Cuban penned another post titled "I still think Google is crazy."

Gray Areas

Cuban's chief complaint with YouTube is shared by many analysts and legal experts—the site is vulnerable to copyright lawsuits. Though YouTube has a policy of removing copyrighted content once alerted to its existence and is working to block copyrighted content from being posted, the sheer volume of videos uploaded to the site makes the task difficult (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/10/06, "YouTube's New Deep Pockets"). It doesn't help that determining the rightful copyright owner can be confusing when it comes to the borderless Web (see BusinessWeek, 8/7/06, "Whose Video Is It Anyway?").

On July 14, independent photojournalist Robert Tur—known for videotaping the Los Angeles riots and O.J. Simpson's flight from police in his Bronco—sued YouTube for allowing users to upload his videos and, allegedly, profiting from advertising on pages where his videos posted. According to tech-news site CNET.com (CNET), it is Tur's company, the Los Angeles News Service, that Cuban is courting. Cuban did not return e-mail requests for comment. Tur could not be reached by phone.

YouTube's official legal position is that Tur's suit is without merit because its takedown policy complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. However, both Google and YouTube have taken additional measures to limit their legal liability and prepare for some perhaps-inevitable lawsuits. Both companies have struck deals with content providers such as Universal Music Group, CBS (CBS), and Warner Music Group (WMG), gaining permission to show their videos. The deals help ensure that these entities won't sue when their content appears on YouTube.

And when Google closed the YouTube deal, it also disclosed that it's holding 12.5% of the stock deal, or $200 million, in escrow for one year to handle lawsuits pertaining to YouTube.

What's At Stake

Google may need a big chunk of that money if it ends up taking on a Cuban-backed Tur. Cuban has considerable financial resources he's capable of mobilizing in court against Google. He sold his Internet radio broadcast company, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo! (YHOO) for more than $5 billion in 1999 and is reportedly worth well over a billion dollars.

He is also clearly interested in the case. So interested, in fact, that he dedicated a Nov. 14 posting on his blog to a motion for summary judgment filed by Tur's lawyers. "To say the stakes are huge would be an understatement," wrote Cuban, who subsequently highlighted an argument made by Tur's legal representatives.

Still, any court battle with Google would not be easy. With a market cap of $150 billion, Google's potential legal resources are formidable, to say the least. It also has a reason to fight hard if Tur's case makes it before a judge. A ruling that simply taking down copyrighted content does not avoid liability could open the floodgates to others suing Google over copyright infringement. Google has a substantial interest in ensuring that platforms such as YouTube and Google Video are not liable for copyrighted videos uploaded to sites provided they make an effort to keep it off. The less required to be considered a good faith effort, the less risk Google assumes when allowing users to post video content.

By becoming involved in a Google fight, Cuban risks exposing himself to embarrassment in addition to costly legal fees. After all, with all the noise he has made on his blog, Cuban is already facing a big "I told you so" from Google if YouTube turns out to be wildly successful. The more invested he becomes in seeing YouTube lose a copyright battle, the more vulnerable to bad publicity Cuban becomes if YouTube wins. The headline is almost too obvious: "Cuban, Who Is Crazy Now?"
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...v.g3a.rss1116g





Universal Music Group Sues MySpace
Eric Bangeman

Universal Music has filed a lawsuit against MySpace, accusing the popular social-networking site of copyright infringement. At issue are the thousands of music videos uploaded by MySpace users. In its complaint filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California, Universal accuses MySpace of complicity in its users' infringement by reformatting the videos for playback once they are uploaded.

The lawsuit pits two titans against one another. MySpace is owned by News Corp., which counts Fox and DirecTV among its assets. Universal is a property of French company Vivendi Group. Given the parties involved, this battle could prove to be a long and costly one, no matter what the outcome. MySpace characterized the lawsuit as "meritless" in a press release, saying that it does not "induce, encourage or condone copyright violation in any way".

While there have been few direct hints that Universal was thinking about targeting MySpace, the record label has made it clear that it had no use for sites that host music videos without its permission. Prior to the Google acquisition of YouTube, Universal CEO Doug Morris accused the popular video-sharing site of massive copyright infringement, saying that they owed the label "millions of dollars."

On the morning of the Google-YouTube deal, Universal—along with Sony BMG and CBS—signed a licensing agreement with YouTube. If MySpace were to sign a similar agreement with the label, there is little doubt that the lawsuit would disappear.

MySpace is likely to use the safe harbor provision of the DMCA as a linchpin of its defense. Under the safe harbor, ISPs and web site operators are not liable for the infringing behaviors of their users, as long as they promptly comply with takedown notices issued by rights-holders. Unlike YouTube, whose business model some would argue is based on copyright infringement, MySpace is primarily a social networking site and may be able to make the argument that it doesn't profit directly from uploaded music videos. Stay tuned.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061117-8247.html





Microsoft Issues 5 Critical Patches
Nate Mook

November's Patch Tuesday has brought with it five "critical" patches correcting 11 security vulnerabilities, along with an "important" fix for two vulnerabilities related to Novell's NetWare. Among the list of patches is one for a highly publicized flaw in Microsoft's XML Core Services component.

In total, three vulnerabilities were patched in Internet Explorer, one in Microsoft Agent, one in the Windows Workstation Service, in addition to the XML Core Services and NetWare patches. In an unusual step, Microsoft also issued a patch for five vulnerabilities affecting Adobe's Flash Player software. Customers can download all the patches via Windows Update or Microsoft Update.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Micr...hes/1163543569





Borat Will Not Be Execute
Dan Mitchell

Did “Snakes on a Plane” scare off the executives at 20th Century Fox? The movie had been generating online buzz for many months before it opened. But it turned out to be a disappointment at the box office.

The painfully funny new film “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” was also an Internet phenomenon before it opened, and Fox, perhaps thinking of the snakes, reportedly scaled back the film’s opening weekend to just 817 screens.

The thinking was that “Santa Clause 3,” which also opened last weekend, would beat “Borat,” according to Nikki Finke, who writes the Deadline Hollywood column for L.A. Weekly and blogs at deadlinehollywood.com. But even though “Santa Clause 3” opened on 3,458 screens, it pulled in just $20 million, compared with $26.4 million for “Borat.”

Browser Race

“There is a speed war on the Web,” writes Mark Wilton-Jones on his blog, howtocreate.co.uk. The Opera site claims that Opera is “The Fastest Browser on Earth!” he notes. The Mozilla site, he notes, claims that Firefox 1.0 “empowers you to browse faster.” “Faster than what,” Mr. Wilton-Jones wonders? Mozilla, Safari from Apple and Internet Explorer from Microsoft all make similar assertions. Users battle over whose browser is fastest.

Mr. Wilton-Jones had “had enough of these unfounded arguments” and decided to test the browsers. His results are somewhat complicated because he tested on various operating systems and didn’t provide an overall fastest browser. Instead, he rated them on various criteria like how quickly they started up or downloaded images. But for Windows, his tests show that various iterations of Opera were fastest on each of the tests.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/11/bu.../11online.html





PlayStation 3 on Rescue Mission
Martin Fackler

Even before PlayStation 3, Sony’s long-delayed new game console, goes on sale in Japan Saturday morning, it has already sold out — in Japanese cyberspace.

Across Tokyo, lines of young men were staying up overnight to be among the first to buy a console, but the frenzy began even before that. In October, the Japanese site of Amazon.com received advance orders for its entire first lot of game consoles in 18 minutes.

Another shopping site, Tsutaya Online, sold out preorders for all its machines in just six minutes. The scarcity has created frantic buying on online auction sites, where the right to buy a PlayStation 3 has fetched up to 130,000 yen ($1,100), about twice the machine’s expected retail price.

This appears to be welcome news for Sony, the ailing Japanese electronics giant. But it may not be enough as Sony struggles to recover from a costly recall of laptop batteries and a 94 percent plunge in profits in the most recent quarter. To reverse its current decline, and regain its title as a global innovator, Sony badly needs for PlayStation 3 to be a long-term hit — and preferably a global blockbuster like the Walkman.

Indeed, analysts say, Sony cannot afford for PlayStation 3 to be anything less than a smashing success. Sony’s chief executive, Howard Stringer, has proclaimed that Sony’s future depends on creating “champion products,” the pathbreaking hits that earn high profits and keep the company ahead of cheaper Chinese and South Korean rivals. Even in consoles, a category it has long dominated, Sony is already a year behind the Xbox 360 from Microsoft. It will compete head-to-head with Nintendo’s Wii, which will be introduced this month.

But analysts say PlayStation 3 is the only product currently visible in Sony’s development pipeline with real “champion” potential.

“Sony needs PlayStation 3 to save the company,” said Masashi Morita, a game and Internet industry analyst at Okasan Securities in Tokyo. “A lot depends on this one product.”

But before it can rescue Sony, PlayStation has to recoup its own development costs. The games division lost $369 million in the most recent quarter, which ended in September, because of the new console’s development costs and marketing preparations, the company said.

Sony will not disclose the total cost of creating the PlayStation 3, which has been in development for six years. But analysts say the sum reaches into the billions of dollars. Sony has revealed that it spent $2 billion on one major component alone, the high-speed Cell microprocessor, co-developed with I.B.M. and Toshiba.

With such vast investments, analysts estimate Sony will have to sell 30 million to 50 million units just to break even. To be the sort of mega-hit that Sony needs, analysts say the new game console will at the minimum have to outdo its predecessor, PlayStation 2, which has sold 106 million units since 2000.

The PlayStation 2 franchise is so well established that in September the Sony console (now heavily discounted) outsold the newer Xbox 360 in the United States, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm in Port Washington, N.Y. An important psychological milestone will be met if Sony can fulfill its original target of selling six million consoles worldwide by the end of March. Production delays may prevent Sony from even producing that many consoles by then.

Those problems delayed the PlayStation introduction for several months in Japan and the United States, shrinking production to about two million units by the end of this year. The introduction in Europe has been delayed until mid-March.

Sony is also counting on PlayStation 3 to promote other technologies that it has developed, the Blu-ray next-generation DVD drive as well as the Cell chip. These technologies give the new PlayStation more processing power and sharper graphics than rivals, but also makes it expensive: a model with a 60-gigabyte hard drive will list at $599 in the United States, and one with a 20-gigabyte drive will be $499.

That is about twice the price of its biggest competitor in Japan, Nintendo’s Wii game console, which will cost $249.99 and is scheduled to come out on Nov. 19 in the United States and Dec. 2 in Japan.

And even at those prices, most analysts say, Sony will be selling below production costs, and possibly losing hundreds of dollars a machine.

Another challenge is that while PlayStation 3 should have no problem attracting game enthusiasts, mostly males in their 20s and 30s, it may prove too complex and expensive for other buyers. Analysts warn that Sony could lose huge swaths of potential users, like women and teenagers, to cheaper, simpler rivals like Wii or Xbox 360.

Only 100,000 PlayStation 3 consoles will be available on Day 1 in Japan, the company said. About 400,000 consoles will be available for sale on Nov. 17 in the United States, where the 20-gigabyte model will be priced at $499 (compared with $399 for an Xbox 360 with comparable capacity).

While this shortage has helped make the console a hot commodity on the Internet, analysts warn that it has also discouraged some software makers from developing games for fear the market may be too small. Sony says it will have only 21 software titles available for PlayStation 3 in the United States by year’s end. Nintendo says it will have 62 titles for Wii available, while Microsoft says there will be 160 titles for the Xbox 360 by the end of this year.

“It’s crucial to build up momentum for new products in the early days,” said Masayuki Otani, deputy chief of research at Maruwa Securities in Tokyo. “PlayStation needs a broader range of software to appeal to a broader range of users.”

Even with so much at stake, Sony’s chief executive, Mr. Stringer, appears to have taken a hands-off approach, at least in public. Indeed, he was traveling in Beijing recently, serving as host at events and meeting a member of China’s ruling politburo.

He has left PlayStation 3, and by extension possibly the fate of his company, in the hands of Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony’s video game division. The father of the PlayStation line of game consoles, one of the few genuine hits to come out of Sony in recent years, Mr. Kutaragi has spent much of the last half- decade developing the newest PlayStation.

When pressed, Mr. Kutaragi acknowledges that the machine is “not cheap.” But he says he has followed the right strategy in favoring powerful new technology over cheaper alternatives. He pointed out that PlayStation 2 was also expensive at first, but its price eventually dropped by half as increasing sales drove down production costs. He also said the thrill of the newer PlayStation’s graphics and complex games will draw users despite the price tag.

“Success doesn’t depend on whether PlayStation is expensive or not,” Mr. Kutaragi said during a roundtable discussion with reporters in September, “but rather on whether the games are interesting.”

Large electronic stores in Tokyo girded for the introduction by deploying security guards and traffic cones to direct the lines of buyers, who began gathering Friday evening.

In Akihabara, Tokyo’s neon-drenched electronics district, Kazunari Yasuda, a manager at Yodobashi Camera, said his store was bringing in some 200 extra employees and guards to handle the buyers.

“PlayStation 3 is the biggest product launch of the year,” he said.

One of those in line was Takahiro Watabe, a 23-year-old university student who stood with four classmates, each holding a bag of fast-food hamburgers to eat while waiting.

“This is like a festival,” said Mr. Watabe, as he looked at the line of about 100 buyers as long as an entire city block. “PlayStation means something to us.”

“I don’t think the new PlayStation is too expensive,” he added. “If you consider it has a Blu-Ray drive, you can use it as a DVD player as well as a game machine.”

Yoshiaki Tajima, a 32-year-old manga comic illustrator, said it was “a question of whether the performance is worth the price.” He was at a different store earlier in the week to look at a wall-size display with television screens promoting PlayStation 3. “These graphics really are amazing,” he concluded, after pausing. “Yes, I have to say it looks like it’s worth the price.”

Another shopper, though, was less enthusiastic. Natsuki Inoue, 27, said she thought only young male game fanatics would go for the new PlayStation.

“This is a toy for men,” she said, as a screen flashed an image of a woman in an iron bikini cleaving a dragon’s head. “It’s hard to imagine women or children wanting this. It’s just too much.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/11/te...gy/11sony.html





Research Poll Says U.S. Kids Want a PS3, Not a Wii
Robert Summa

Attention mommy and daddy: Forget the college fund, your kid wants a PlayStation 3 for Xmas. And, if you don't get them one, they will hate you forever and you'll be forced to deal with years of drug abuse and illegitimate children. You don't want that on your conscience, do you?

According to poll results from the Weekly Reader Research, American children from ages 5-18 said "they would prefer to have" a PlayStation 3 over all the other systems. Be prepared, these results may shock you:

• 40% want a PS3
• 25% want an Xbox 360
• 22% want a Nintendo Wii
• 13% would rather have none (we'll call these the bastard children)

The study also reveals that girls don't like video game systems as much as boys -- holy crap what a shock. According to the poll, 23% of girls would rather have neither console, while only 3% of the boys would rather have none.

So, how many were polled? Here's the raw data: "This survey had 3,013 total respondents, 1,538 of which were boys, 1,475 of which were girls. 965 of the respondents were ages 5-9, 769 of them 10-12, 792 of them 13-15, and 487 of them 16-18."

Shocked? Surprised? I'm not. I've been saying for ages that the PlayStation is a much stronger brand name to the casual consumer than Wii. Only time will tell if these stats ring true as next-gen is finally ushered in.
http://www.destructoid.com/research-...ii-27909.phtml





Open Source Earns Legal Victory

The open source software operations of IBM, Red Hat and Novell need not fear prosecution under antitrust laws, a federal appeals court has ruled.

Plaintiff Daniel Wallace had sued the open source giants, contending that they had conspired with the Free Software Foundation and others to offer their wares at an "unbeatable" price (read: free), thereby squeezing competing alternatives from enterprising software writers like Wallace out of the market. (Wallace, according to court documents, wanted to compete with Linux, "either by offering a derivative work or by writing an operating system from scratch.")

A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit disagreed, upholding an earlier decision by a lower court.

"People willingly pay for quality software even when they can get free (but imperfect) substitutes," the judges wrote in a six-page opinion (click for PDF).

They named Open Office, a suite of word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software designed as an alternative to Microsoft Office, and Gimp, an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop, as examples of instances in which proprietary software manufacturers have had no trouble hanging onto the "lion's share" of the market.

The judges went on to knock down--and arguably mock--Wallace's arguments that people who release their software under the GNU General Public License are "conspirators" engaged in "price fixing."

"A 'quick look'," wrote the judges, "is all that's needed to reject Wallace's claim."
http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-613...0-20&subj=news





After 18 Months, 4 Seconds of Sound to Define Windows Vista
Allison Linn

Some people spend 18 months working on a whole album. At Microsoft Corp., that's how long it took to perfect just four seconds of sound.

Of course, this isn't just any four-second clip. It's the sound - a soft da-dum, da-dumm, with a lush fade-out - that millions of computer users will hear every day, and perhaps thousands of times in total, when they turn on computers running Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Vista operating system.

To get just the right sound - clean, simple, but with "some long-term legs," according to Microsoft's Steve Ball - the software maker recruited musician Robert Fripp.

Fripp, best known for his work with the '70s rock band King Crimson, recorded hours of his signature layered, guitar-driven sound for the project, under the close direction of Ball and others at Microsoft. Then, it was Ball's job to sort through those hours of recordings to suss out just the right few seconds.

Fripp's involvement is not surprising. His occasional collaborator, Brian Eno, recorded sounds for Windows 95. Also, Ball, the Microsoft group program manager for WAVE - Windows Audio Visual Excellence - has in the past been Fripp's student and business partner.

Ball, a self-proclaimed renaissance man who is both an engineer and a musician, considered the work of about 10 musicians for the project. Some of those people were influential in the final four seconds as well.

Redmond-based Microsoft seriously debated several other sounds before settling on the final startup sound about three weeks ago. The rejected sounds included a longer, lusher clip and a quick, techno-sounding piece. While many people liked an upbeat ditty with a clapping rhythm, it was eventually rejected as being too much like a commercial, and of sounding too "human" when paired with the new graphic for Windows Vista, Ball said.

"There's nothing that's especially human about our new Windows animation," he said.

The short startup clip that was eventually chosen is meant to evoke the rhythm of the words "Win-dows Vis-ta!" and Ball hopes the sound will serve as a calling card for the operating system. It also consists of four chords - one for every color in the new Windows graphic that appears as the sound plays. It's no coincidence that it's also four seconds long.

There are 45 total Vista sounds that Microsoft has spent the last year and a half perfecting, including the dings you hear when get a new e-mail, receive an error message, or log off your computer. Generally, these are more muted, less jarring variations of the prompts familiar to Windows XP users.

If it seems like overkill to go to all that trouble for a few seconds of sound, consider this: Microsoft estimates that sounds such as the e-mail alert will be played trillions of times in years to come. That's a lot of opportunity to annoy, offend -or, if the job is done right - please or appease computer users the world over.

One major concern was that the startup sound not grow grating after a time.

"You want a sound that people will love the first time they hear it, but it's a paradox to also say, 'Oh and by the way, we need people to love it the tenth, or the hundredth, or the thousandth time they hear it,'" Ball said.

That's one reason he was glad to have 18 months to choose the clips.

"We had time to live with the music," Ball said.

Still, for all the time Ball has spent on the sounds, he says one measure of success would be if people noticed them very little, if at all.

Ball is the first to admit that the percussive beeps in past Windows versions could be jarring to nearby workers or interrupt others in a meeting. With the number of intrusive sounds from cell phones, handheld devices and other gadgets only increasing, that's something Ball and his colleagues were keen to avoid with Vista.

"We want you to know they're there, and you would miss them if they were gone, but we would like them to be just barely noticeable, almost like they are part of the environment or part of your wallpaper," he said. "We want them in the background, rather than the foreground."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/..._of_Vista.html





It still sucks

Start Me Up: The Sound of Vista

Long process results in short Windows clip you’ll hear a million times
Allison Linn

Some musicians spend 18 months working on a whole album. At Microsoft Corp., that's how long it took to perfect just four seconds of sound.

Of course, this isn't just any four-second clip. It's the sound — a soft da-dum, da-dumm, with a lush fade-out — that millions of computer users will hear every day, and perhaps thousands of times in total, when they turn on computers running Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Vista operating system. (Microsoft is a partner in the MSNBC.com joint venture.)

To set the right tone — clean, simple, but with "some long-term legs," according to Microsoft's Steve Ball —the software maker recruited musician Robert Fripp.

Fripp, best known for his work with the '70s rock band King Crimson, recorded hours of his signature layered, guitar-driven sound for the project, under the close direction of Ball and others at Microsoft. Then, it was Ball's job to sort through those hours of live recordings to suss out just the right few seconds.

Fripp's involvement is not surprising. His occasional collaborator, Brian Eno, recorded sounds for Windows 95. Also, Ball, the Microsoft group program manager for WAVE — Windows Audio Visual Excellence — has in the past been Fripp's student and business partner.

Ball, a self-proclaimed renaissance man who is both an engineer and a musician, considered the work of about 10 musicians for the project. Some of those people were influential in the final four seconds as well.

‘Win-dows Vis-ta!’
Redmond-based Microsoft seriously debated several other sounds before settling on the final startup sound about three weeks ago. The rejects included a longer, lusher clip and a quick, techno-sounding piece. While many people liked an upbeat ditty with a clapping rhythm, it was eventually nixed for sounding too much like a commercial. Ball said the hand-clapping also seemed like too "human" a sound when paired with the new graphic for Vista.

"There's nothing that's especially human about our new Windows animation," he said.

The short startup clip that was eventually chosen is meant to evoke the rhythm of the words "Win-dows Vis-ta!" and Ball hopes the sound will serve as a calling card for the operating system. It also consists of four chords — one for every color in the new Windows graphic that appears as the sound plays. It's no coincidence that it's also four seconds long.

There are a total of 45 Vista sounds that Microsoft has spent the last year and a half perfecting, including the dings you hear when you get a new e-mail, receive an error message, or log off your computer. Generally, these are more muted, less jarring variations of the prompts familiar to Windows XP users.

Trillions of replays
If it seems like overkill to go to all that trouble for a few seconds of sound, consider this: Microsoft estimates that the clips such as the e-mail alert will be played trillions of times in years to come. That's a lot of opportunity to annoy, offend — or, if the job is done right — please or appease computer users the world over.

One major concern was that the startup sound not grow grating after a time.

"You want a sound that people will love the first time they hear it, but it's a paradox to also say, 'Oh and by the way, we need people to love it the tenth, or the hundredth, or the thousandth time they hear it,'" Ball said.

That's one reason he was glad to have 18 months to choose the clips.

"We had time to live with the music," Ball said.

‘Part of your wallpaper’
Still, for all the time Ball has spent on the sounds, he says one measure of success would be if people noticed them very little, if at all.

Ball is the first to admit that the percussive beeps in past Windows versions could be jarring enough to bother nearby workers or interrupt others in a meeting. With the number of intrusive sounds from cell phones, handheld devices and other gadgets only increasing, that's something Ball and his colleagues were keen to avoid with Vista.

"We want you to know they're there, and you would miss them if they were gone, but we would like them to be just barely noticeable, almost like they are part of the environment or part of your wallpaper," he said. "We want them in the background, rather than the foreground."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15656246/





RCA 'Teleceiver' Turns Any PC Into an HDTV
Peter Pachal

It's no secret that we love HDTV around here, but we get all sad and lonely when we're on the road since our hotel rooms' standard-def tube sets could never give us the kind of HD love we get at home. With RCA's MPC4000 "Laptop Teleceiver," though, all we'd need is a notebook with decent resolution to get those beautiful HD images — direct from the airwaves and fed right into our PC's USB port. At 2 ounces, the mini HD tuner won't weigh down our carry-on, and the collapsible antenna neatly clips onto the side of the monitor. A larger tabletop antenna is included for when reception isn't so great.

Not content with merely bringing in HD shows, the tuner also receives standard analog broadcasts and combines all the data into an onscreen program guide. The included software uses the laptop's hard disk as a PVR, so you can pause live TV, save shows, even schedule recordings and engage parental controls — basically turning virtually any Windows machine into a Media Center PC. It sounds kind of too good to be true, and actually, it is: RCA is holding off the release until April next year, when it'll cost $199 (plans to debut it this year under the Jensen brand were apparently scrapped). Until then, we'll just have to play with Pinnacle's HD Pro Stick, which does pretty much the same thing for $70 less.
http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/...eleceiver.html





Grouper Offers 100 "Famous" Sony Clips for Free
Nate Anderson

Months before YouTube made headlines in business magazines across the country for its sale to Google, Sony Pictures had already snapped up a smaller site of its own called Grouper. Since giving away free video clips is not a stellar business model, Sony and Grouper hit on a new plan to boost publicity and revenues: give away famous clips for free.

As part of Grouper's new "ScreenBites" program, the company is making available 100 of the most "famous scenes" from the Sony Pictures library. Consumers will be able to watch the clips for free, but can also embed them in blogs and websites. If you thought MySpace was annoying before, just wait until half of the pages include De Niro's "You talkin' to me?" bit.

The announcement of the new service touts the availability of classic clips from films like A Few Good Men and On the Waterfront, but a closer look at the film list shows that it's padded mostly with such compelling fare as Beverly Hills Ninja, Big Daddy, Charlie's Angels, and—yes—Mr. Deeds.

The goal is to get people to buy DVDs. Josh Felser, Grouper's president, said that users would enjoy "sharing [the clips] with friends or posting on their MySpace, Blogger and Facebook pages. They will also appreciate how easy we've made it to buy a DVD or download their favorite films and TV shows."

It's certainly possible that someone will stumble across a video clip from Fantasy Island and feel an inescapable urge to purchase the series on DVD, but is it likely? Sony and Grouper hope so, and plan to expand the range of clips in the future.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061110-8196.html





U.K. Outlaws Denial-of-Service Attacks
Tom Espiner

A U.K. law has been passed that makes it an offense to launch denial-of-service attacks, which experts had previously called "a legal gray area."

Among the provisions of the Police and Justice Bill 2006, which gained Royal Assent on Wednesday, is a clause that makes it an offense to impair the operation of any computer system. Other clauses prohibit preventing or hindering access to a program or data held on a computer, or impairing the operation of any program or data held on a computer.

The maximum penalty for such cybercrimes has also been increased from 5 years to 10 years.

The law that attempted previously to deal with this area of computer crime was the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (CMA), which was drafted before widespread use of the Internet began.

In a denial-of-service attack, a person attempts to make a computer system unavailable to users by overloading it with data. The CMA only prohibited unauthorized modification of a system, which opened up legal ambiguity for denial of service attacks using e-mail.

In November 2005, David Lennon was tried for sending 5 million e-mails to his former employer, causing the e-mail server to crash. His defense successfully argued that as an e-mail server exists to receive e-mail, sending e-mail to that server could not be an unauthorized modification, no matter how much mail was sent.

District Judge Kenneth Grant agreed, and concluded that sending e-mail was an authorized modification of the server, so Lennon had no case to answer. Grant's ruling was later overturned, with Lennon sentenced to two months' curfew with an electronic tag. By that time, amendments to the CMA had been included in the Police and Justice Bill.
http://news.com.com/U.K.+outlaws+den...3-6134472.html





Politics and Tech Companies: Follow the Money
Nate Anderson

The technology business is a right-leaning one, if judged by the candidates that tech companies funded in the most recent election cycle. In this special report, Ars totals the dollar amounts to show consumers what politicians tech companies support, and why. Let's follow the money.

Data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics shows that computer- and Internet-focused firms gave just over $4 million to federal candidates in the 2006 election cycle. The money wasn't doled out evenly, though; Republican candidates pulled in 67 percent of it.

The gap between the high end and the low end was significant. Microsoft took first place with $651,100 given out, while Hewlett-Packard gave only $185,550, and Gateway gave a paltry $2,000. Microsoft's donations certainly illustrate well the true size of the company and the extent of its political concerns.

More surprising is that the number two position is held by Siebel, an unfamiliar name to many consumers. The business software vendor was swallowed up by Oracle earlier this year, but still managed to give $635,000 to candidates, 89 percent of it to Republicans. Intel holds the third spot ($339,197) with Cisco in number four ($209,500).

Apple and Google are not on the list (though Google has recently jumped into the lobbyist game, hiring firms like Podesta Mattoon and the notorious DCI).
PAC your bags, we're going to Washington!

The numbers above don't give the whole story. They reflect only the money that corporate political action committees (PACs) give to federal candidates, but the companies behind the PACs spend far more than this on nonfederal candidates and lobbying.

For instance, Microsoft's PAC spent $1.7 million in the 2006 election cycle, but only a third of this went to federal candidates. What happened to the rest? It went to local campaigns, paid out a few thousand dollars at a time to groups like "Boal for Iowa House" in Ankeny, IA. It also funded other PACs like the "Associated Republicans of Texas" and the "Blue Dog Political Action Committee." No race is apparently too small to be funded; even Indiana State Representative Terri Austin of Anderson, IN got $500.

Lobbyists

But the real money isn't even given to the candidates directly. It goes to lobbyists, which can be safer investments since they stand no chance of losing at the polls. The complete-year figures from 2005 show that Microsoft spent $8.7 million on lobbyist expenses. Almost a million dollars of that money went to Covington & Burling, a lobbying firm that also represents the National Football League and the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America. Microsoft's total spending on lobbying has risen substantially from the $4 million it spent in 1998.

It's not just Microsoft that is spending these massive amounts. The computer/Internet industry as a whole dropped $84 million on lobbying in 2005—more even than the TV/movies/music groups. Although the firms at the end of the Internet "pipes" are spending money, it's dwarfed by the expenditures of those firms that own the "pipes" themselves.

AT&T alone spent $60 million in lobbying in 2005, and Verizon spent another $11.7 million; Comcast paid $4 million. Together, the network operators formed one of the largest lobbying blocs in the country, which means that their concerns get plenty of attention in DC.

Network operators also give money directly to candidates, especially when they chair powerful committees. Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican best known for his $250+ million "bridge to nowhere" and his opposition to network neutrality, is the (outgoing) chair of the Senate committee that is overhauling the 1996 Telecommunications Act. So it's no surprise to find that he is well-supported by the TV/movies/music industry, the telephone utilities, telecom equipment makers, and computers/Internet firms.

Where does it come from?

Although some of this money comes from large employee donations, most of it does not. Take Microsoft, for instance; the Center for Responsive Politics says that the company received only $302,599 from individual donors who gave more than $200 in this election cycle, only a small fraction of the $1.7 million actually spent. As is typical, much of this money came from the company's top brass, while the rest was made up of small contributions.

The maximum individual contribution to a PAC is $5,000 a year. Melinda, whose occupation is listed in Federal Election Commission records as "homemaker," regularly contributes this amount, as does Bill. Steve Ballmer coughed up, too. Microsoft can use general company funds to support the PAC and its operations, but cannot give directly to candidates.

Although donations have gone mostly to Republicans in recent years, changes in the political makeup of Congress means that Democrats can probably expect more cash in the next cycle.

In fact, the pendulum has already begun to swing the other way. The New York Times reported that in the last days of the midterm campaign, corporate donations increased significantly to Democrats as it became clear that they might win control of Congress. The Times notes that "the shift in political giving, for the first 18 days of October, has not been this pronounced in the final stages of a campaign since 1994, when Republicans swept control of the House for the first time in four decades."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061110-8194.html





Woman Charged Under Anti-Terror Laws

Police on Thursday charged a woman on terrorism-related offences for possession of a computer hard drive loaded with operating manuals for guns, poisons, mines and munitions.

Police said the charges against the woman were connected with the arrest last month of a man caught at Heathrow airport in possession of a night vision scope and a poisons handbook.

Police said among the items on the hard drive found in her possession were the Al Qaeda Manual, The Terrorists Handbook, The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, a manual for a Dragunov sniper rifle, The Firearms and RPG Handbook, a manual for a 9mm pistol and a manual on how to win hand to hand fighting.

She will appear at the City of Westminster Magistrates Court on Friday.

Police said the case followed the charges filed against 29-year-old Sohail Anjum Qureshi on November 1 after his arrest at Heathrow airport with the night vision scope and a computer hard drive also containing the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook.

Police sources said at the time their investigation covered possible terrorist acts outside the country, and was not believed to have been linked to any other probes.

Britain has been on a high state of alert since August when police said they had disrupted a plot to blow up several U.S.-bound airliners over the Atlantic using liquid explosives.
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/arti...1-TopStories-1





YouTube.com Video Prompts Probe of LAPD
Alex Veiga

An FBI investigation prompted by video footage of a man being punched repeatedly in the face by police has demonstrated anew the power of the Internet sensation of the year, YouTube.com.

In addition to being a monumental time-waster around the office, YouTube could also become a tool for keeping police honest, some say.

This week, a clip on the post-it-yourself video Web site triggered a police-brutality investigation by the FBI. The footage shows the Aug. 11 arrest of alleged gang member William Cardenas, 24. Two Los Angeles officers can be seen holding him down on a Hollywood street; one punches him several times in the face before they are able to handcuff him.

The Los Angeles Police Department is also investigating the officers' conduct.

Police Chief William J. Bratton said he found the video to be "disturbing," but stressed that the 20-second clip amounts to only a fraction of what transpired.

The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that a Superior Court commissioner viewed the video nearly two months ago, heard the officers' testimony, and concluded that their conduct was "more than reasonable" because Cardenas was resisting.

Cop Watch LA, a police watchdog group, posted the video on YouTube, said organizer Joaquin Cienfuegos. Cienfuegos said the video was shot by a neighbor of Cardenas with a cell phone camera. The neighbor gave it to Cardenas' family, who then gave it to Cop Watch, according to Cienfuegos.

In recent months, videos posted on YouTube have rocked political campaigns, brought fame - or infamy - to previously unknown talents and cast unwanted attention on the gaffes of the famous. YouTube and similar video sites are also increasingly becoming repositories for videos that purport to detail wrongdoing by police.

Such amateur clips help cast a spotlight on police wrongdoing that could otherwise go unreported, said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California.

"Unless we throw light onto activities of government, all activities, you never find out what happened," Ripston said. "This video is an example."

Police said Cardenas had been wanted on charges of receiving stolen property. In an arrest report obtained by The Associated Press, the officers said they tried to arrest Cardenas after spotting him on the sidewalk, but Cardenas ran.

The officers caught up to him, tripped him and swarmed over him to apply handcuffs, the report said. In their report, they admitted hitting him repeatedly in the face, saying that he was resisting and that they feared he might grab one of their guns.

Cardenas suffered cuts and bruises on his arms, leg and face, and received stitches on an eyelid. His attorney, B. Kwaku Duren, accused the officers using excessive force.

Police spokesman Lt. Paul Vernon said Friday that such videos often do not show the whole story.

"The officers' actions in these situations are based on the totality of what is going on in the officers' mind," Vernon said. "You don't know in the total context of this what occurred."

As of Friday, the clip had received more than 155,000 views on YouTube. It was posted on Oct. 18.

A search on YouTube for the terms "police brutality" found more than 500 videos, including ones that claim to show police violence in the U.S. and as far away as Egypt and Hungary. A search of Google's video site also yielded hundreds of videos.

In response to the surge in amateur videos, some law enforcement agencies have installed cameras in squad cars to protect officers against false allegations.

Police defense attorney John Barnett said the public shouldn't draw conclusions when watching the clip of Cardenas' arrest. Barnett represented one of the officers in the 1991 Rodney King beating and an Inglewood police officer, Jeremy Morse, who was videotaped roughing up a 16-year-old boy.

Two juries deadlocked in Morse's case, and four officers were acquitted in the King trial, touching off riots in Los Angeles.

"It's very difficult to find jurors who haven't already come to a conclusion," Barnett said. "The public has the perception of what the facts are, but you have to figure out a way to get them back to square one."

Legal observers said the public has become somewhat desensitized to questionable police tactics caught on tape because such videos have become more prevalent since the King beating. In many cases, officers have been exonerated.

"The first reaction by people is one of outrage," said Eugene O'Donnell, a professor of police studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. "But the more you see police officers using force on tape, the more you get used to it."

---

Associated Press writers Greg Risling and Peter Prengaman contributed to this report.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Camera Phones Focus on Police Use of Force in L.A.
Jill Serjeant

One cell phone video shows Los Angeles police beating a man repeatedly in the face. Another shows a handcuffed, homeless man being blasted with pepper spray in the face.

A third grainy video has campus police using a Taser stun gun on a student who refused to leave a Los Angeles university library.

Once regarded as a toy for rich teens, the ubiquitous camera cell phone is becoming a powerful community tool in the debate about police conduct.

Some Los Angeles grass-roots groups are training citizens to use cameras, video cell phones and the speed and Internet sites like YouTube to get their voices, and pictures, heard.

"We urge everyone to have a camera on them at all times so if anything happens it can be documented. The concept of patrolling the police is something we are trying to push as a form of direct action," said Sherman Austin, a founder of Cop Watch L.A., which launched its Web site three months ago.

The three videos shot on cell phones or small recorders capturing Los Angeles police using apparently excessive force to restrain suspects all surfaced within a week.

The images recall the 1991 beating of black motorist Rodney King by four police officers, which was caught by on home video by an Argentine plumber.

Activists' Tool

Fifteen years later, black and Latino activists in tough Los Angeles neighborhoods are leaving nothing to chance.

"We have tried civilian review boards, we have tried going to City Hall and going to the police and all we have seen is more brutality," said Austin, 23.

"Technology makes it all the easier now. There are little digital cameras you can buy for 20 bucks in a drugstore that take good enough photos in daylight. And then there's the Internet that gets it out there."

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton is investigating the officers' conduct but cautioned against quick conclusions.

"I cannot make judgments based solely on videos or portions of videos," Bratton said this week.

He contended there is no U.S. government agency that "has more policies, procedures, guidelines and independent oversight with respect to use of force than the LAPD."

Ramona Ripston, executive director of the Southern California chapter of the ACLU, said the latest incidents underlined the case for more citizen oversight.

"This police department was a cowboy department, a department that was very quick on the trigger and it is hard to root out those practices from the past. That's why the cameras are important," Ripston said.

"If the police were not overreacting there would be no photographs to take."

Austin, a dreadlocked African-American with a police record, said he had been detained, followed and framed.

"I don't remember how many times I have been pulled over by police or had the light shined in face because of the way I look. I am sick and tired of it. That's why I thought it was necessary to start this organization because I can't take it any more."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061116/...ameraphones_dc





Tasered Student Claims Racial Profiling
AP

A student who was shocked by a campus police officer's Taser gun after he refused to show ID at a UCLA library thought he was being singled out by the officer because of his Middle Eastern appearance, his lawyer said.

Attorney Stephen Yagman said he plans to file a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the U.S.-born student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad.

Tabatabainejad, 23, was shocked Tuesday night after arguing with a campus police officer who was conducting a routine check of student IDs at the University of California, Los Angeles Powell Library computer lab.

Yagman said his client declined to show his school ID because he thought he was being targeted for his appearance. His family is of Iranian descent.

Police have said Tabatabainejad encouraged others at the library to join his resistance, and when a crowd gathered, the officer used the stun gun on him.

Yagman disputed that, saying Tabatabainejad started yelling to draw attention after the police officer pulled out the Taser.

Tabatabainejad was arrested for resisting and obstructing a police officer and later released on his own recognizance.

The incident, recorded on another student's camera phone, showed Tabatabainejad screaming while on the floor of the computer lab. It was the third time in a month in which police behavior in the city was criticized after amateur video surfaced.

UCLA's interim chancellor, Norman Abrams, urged the public to withhold judgment while the campus police department investigates.

Several civil rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, have called for an independent review.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...t-Stunned.html





More College Students Taking Web Courses
Justin Pope

Roughly one in six students enrolled in higher education - about 3.2 million people - took at least one online course last fall, a sharp increase defying predictions that online learning growth is leveling off.

A new report scheduled for released Thursday by The Sloan Consortium, a group of colleges pursuing online programs, estimates that 850,000 more students took online courses in the fall of 2005 than the year before, an increase of nearly 40 percent. Last year, the group had reported slowing growth, prompting speculation the trend had hit a ceiling.

"The growth was phenomenal," said Jeff Seaman, Sloan's CIO and survey director, who also serves as co-director of the Babson College survey research group. "It's higher in absolute numbers and higher in percentages than anything we've measured before. And it's across the board," at schools ranging from doctoral institutions to those offering associate's degrees to for-profit colleges.

Some online programs have flopped, and several for-profit universities have seen their share prices slump in the last two years amid concern over online's growth prospects. Shares of Apollo Group, which owns the giant for-profit University of Phoenix and is now embroiled in a stock-option scandal, are more than half off their 52-week high.

Still, many universities are investing heavily in online learning, hoping the model will prove more economical than traditional classes, thus expanding their reach. A recent survey by Eduventures, a consulting and research firm, found 50 percent of consumers who expected to enroll in a higher education program said they would prefer to get at least some of their instruction online.

About 80 percent of online students are undergraduates, and they are generally older and more likely to be working and have families. But only about half are pursuing online degrees, according to Eduventures.

The rest are taking individual online courses or - increasingly - mixing online courses with more traditional campus-based classes. One reason online enrollment may be growing is that the difference between traditional and online classes is blurring. It's not unusual now for traditional classes to post syllibi and homework assignments online or to have class discussions in group forums. Some classes take place more than 80 percent online, which makes them count as online courses for the Sloan survey.

"That's bumping up enrollment," said Eduventures senior analyst Richard Garrett.

The Sloan survey results also suggest academic officials are becoming more comfortable with online learning. About 62 percent of chief academic officers said they felt students learned as well or better from online courses as they did in face-to-face ones.

However, that left about 38 percent who found online courses degraded the educational experience. And almost all said they aren't certain online learning will be more widely adopted. Among the obstacles: online courses take more time and effort to prepare, students need more self-discipline, and faculty often aren't convinced online learning is worthwhile.

Officials at the schools surveyed "all acknowledge that there are significant barriers," Seaman said. "The question is going to be when do those barriers kick in and how do they cope with them."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-10-17-10-17





Are College Students Techno Idiots?
Paul D. Thacker

Susan Metros, a professor of design technology at Ohio State University, says that reading, writing and arithmetic are simply not enough for today’s students. What is important for learners is information: how to find it, how to focus it, and how to filter out nonsense. But for many students, their main source for information is Google, which Metros finds troubling.

Last year, she was surprised to learn at a conference that most people look only at the first few hits that come back from a Google query. In fact, only a tiny percentage of Google users even bother to glance at the second page of the search results. “It is well below 1 percent,” she said.

Overreliance on Google is only one of many technology problems facing college students. A new report released Tuesday by the Educational Testing Service finds that students lack many basic skills in information literacy, which ETS defines as the ability to use technology to solve information problems.

The original impetus for the study came from librarians and professors who have found that students can use technology for socializing or entertainment but still have problems finding information, evaluating it and then putting it to use, said Irvin Katz, a research scientist with ETS. “It’s not only in academics,” he said, “but also in the workplace that people don’t have the necessary critical skills to access information.”

For the study, information was gathered from over 6,300 students found at 63 universities, colleges, community colleges, and high schools (seniors). Each institution selected participants to take an information and communication technology literacy assessment. Because the institutions did not make random selections, caution should be taken when evaluating the results. The challenge was to see if students could identify trustworthy information, manage that information, and communicate it effectively. The results do not inspire confidence.

Few test takers demonstrated effective information literacy skills, and students earned only about half the points that could have been awarded. Females fared just as poorly as males. For instance, when asked to select a research statement for a class assignment, only 44 percent identified a statement that captured the assignment’s demands. And when asked to evaluate several Web sites, 52 percent correctly assessed the objectivity of the sites, 65 percent correctly judged for authority, and 72 percent for timeliness. Overall, 49 percent correctly identified the site that satisfied all three criteria.

Results also show that students might even lack the basics on a search engine like Google. When asked to narrow a search that was too broad, only 35 percent of students selected the correct revision. Further, 80 percent of students put irrelevant points into a slide program designed to persuade an audience.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” said Emily Sheketoff, the associate executive director of the American Library Association. “Not enough students are getting the skills they need in information literacy.” Sheketoff said that this is especially problematic in states like California which is not hiring enough certified librarians for elementary schools. These librarians, she said, have the technical skills and teaching ability to train young students to access information.

Metros said that her institution, Ohio State, recently placed information literacy into its core requirements for undergraduates. More colleges are looking to do this in the future. “It’s not a lot yet,” said Metros of this trend in core curriculum. “But we are starting to see this.”

Katz said that he hopes the results will inspire more universities to support initiatives to improve information literacy. “These abilities need to be learned,” he said. “Students just don’t pick them up on their own.”
http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/15/infolit





Keeping Your Enemies Close
Gary Rivlin

Alpharetta, Ga.

IF you found yourself running a company suddenly branded one of the most reviled in the country — if, for example, you noticed that visitors to Consumerist.com, a heavily visited consumer Web site, voted yours as the second “worst company in America” and you had just been awarded the 2005 “Lifetime Menace Award” by the human rights group Privacy International — you might feel obliged to take extraordinary steps. You might even want to reach out to your most vocal critics and ask them, “What are we doing wrong?”

So it was in early 2005 that Douglas C. Curling, the president of ChoicePoint, a giant data broker that maintains digital dossiers on nearly every adult in the United States, courted two critics whom he had accused just months earlier of starting “yet another inaccurate, misdirected and misleading attack” on his company.

Mr. Curling also contacted others who had spent years calling for laws requiring better safeguarding of personal information that ChoicePoint and other data brokers assemble — records such as Social Security numbers, birth dates, driver’s license numbers, license plate numbers, spouse names, maiden names, addresses, criminal records, civil judgments and the purchase price of every parcel of property a person has ever owned.

“It was sort of like when I talk with my wife when she’s not happy with me,” Mr. Curling said of his dealings with some of ChoicePoint’s harshest critics. “It’s not exactly a dialogue I look forward to, but I can’t deny it’s important.” He also could not deny his motivations for engaging in these conversations: in the public’s mind, ChoicePoint had come to symbolize the cavalier manner in which corporations handled confidential data about consumers.

In January, the Federal Trade Commission hit ChoicePoint with a $10 million fine, the largest civil penalty in the agency’s history, for security and record-handling procedures that violated the rights of consumers. Under the settlement, it also required ChoicePoint to set aside an additional $5 million to help those suffering financial harm because of its failure to provide adequate safeguards against data breaches.

But the financial penalties were nothing compared to the rehabilitation project confronting this hitherto invisible player in the global marketplace.

For years, ChoicePoint’s top management had assured the world that it carefully protected its databases from intruders: Our systems are bulletproof. Intruder-proof. Believe us.

But then, in February 2005, the company had to acknowledge that it had focused so intently on preventing hackers from gaining access to its computers through digital back doors that it had simply overlooked real-world con artists strolling unnoticed through the front door.

Ultimately, ChoicePoint found that in 2005 alone, more than 40 phony businesses — thieves masquerading as bill collectors, private investigators, insurance agents and the like — had opened accounts that gave them unfettered, round-the-clock access to the vital data ChoicePoint maintains. And, suddenly, the same privacy advocates that ChoicePoint had generally cast as shrill and ill-informed — a group that those inside the F.T.C. sometimes refer to as the “privacy posse” — proved crucial to its plans to both shore up its security and tend to its tattered image.

“I have to give them a lot of credit,” said Daniel J. Solove, a posse member in good standing who had long been counted as one of ChoicePoint’s most persistent critics. Mr. Solove, an associate professor at the George Washington University Law School, is among those whom ChoicePoint contacted shortly after its public relations debacle crested. “ChoicePoint had the attitude: ‘We want to make our privacy practices exemplary,’ ” Mr. Solove said. “They wanted to find out what kinds of things they could do better and get feedback about some of the ideas they were thinking about.”

For ChoicePoint, said James Lee, the company’s chief marketing officer, the entire episode has proved an important learning experience. “The reality is, we were never as evil as people thought we were,” Mr. Lee said, “but we were never as good as we thought we were.”

Inside ChoicePoint, situated in a leafy office park in this suburb north of Atlanta, employees whistle with wonder over the talents of the various con artists — or “fraudsters,” as company executives tend to call them — who finessed their way into their systems. According to the company, the fraudsters were wise enough to secure business licenses, thereby lending them a patina of legitimacy. They knew precisely what to write on their applications to convince ChoicePoint that their credentials made them fit for access to its databases.

“These guys were more sophisticated than anyone thought,” Mr. Lee said, echoing the sentiment of many inside the company.

But the F.T.C. seemed to reach the opposite conclusion in a 33-page report it released earlier this year, after it completed an investigation of ChoicePoint. The commission found that ChoicePoint ignored “obvious red flags” because the company “did not have reasonable procedures to screen prospective subscribers.” The report cast ChoicePoint’s criminal interlopers as sloppy and amateurish — but ultimately successful because their prey, a major company in the business of handling sensitive information, was alarmingly lax in its protection of its data repositories.

Signs that it was amateur hour inside ChoicePoint abounded, according to the F.T.C. report. The fraudsters faxed applications to ChoicePoint from a neighborhood Kinko’s, listed post office boxes as primary business addresses and offered cellphone numbers as sole telephone contacts — which no one at ChoicePoint ever bothered to call anyway to establish the numbers’ legitimacy. In at least one case, an approved applicant failed even to provide a last name, the F.T.C. found.

As ChoicePoint executives say, the fraudsters sometimes took the trouble to register their businesses with the state — but those documents should have set off alarms rather than justify the granting of an account.

The F.T.C. found that ChoicePoint accepted articles of incorporation that had been suspended or had expired, and “tax registration materials that showed that the business’ registration was canceled.” Then there were the contradictory addresses in the submitted documents — discrepancies that ChoicePoint employees accepted “without conducting further inquiry to resolve the contradiction,” according to the commission’s report.

“It was a well-known fact back then that ChoicePoint would do business pretty much with anyone who came along,” said Robert Douglas, an information security consultant and editor of PrivacyToday who has done consulting work for ChoicePoint for several years. “They were making all the right noises about security but there wasn’t any follow-through to back up their words.”

Inside ChoicePoint, they like to say that the company is in the business of helping customers make informed decisions about whom they can trust. Insurance companies and banks use its databases to help them decide who is a good credit risk and who is not. ChoicePoint sells its services to employers screening new hires, to landlords running background checks on new tenants, and to the 7,000 law-enforcement agencies and governments worldwide that the company counts as clients. Other customers include bill collectors, private investigators and media outlets, including The New York Times.

Yet a company with the snappy motto — “smarter decisions, safer world” — failed to use its resources to assess and then protect itself from some of its own customers. In some cases, the F.T.C. found, individuals were granted accounts “notwithstanding the fact that ChoicePoint’s own internal reports on the applicant linked him or her to possible fraud.” The company continued to furnish consumer reports to customers, the commission said, “even after receiving subpoenas from law enforcement authorities between 2001 and 2005 alerting it to fraudulent accounts.”

Finally, in September 2004, ChoicePoint began to recognize that it had a major problem on its hands, when an employee in the company’s new-accounts office realized that someone in the Los Angeles area, a Nigerian, was trying to set up multiple accounts, each time in the name of a different business. The employee recognized the Nigerian’s voice and alerted the company’s security department, which in turn notified the local police. Although weeks would pass before senior executives learned of the troubling transactions with the Nigerian, the unfolding scam — and others like it — opened the eyes of outsiders to dangerous security lapses inside the company.

“I can assure you that now we learn immediately about this kind of problem,” said ChoicePoint’s chief executive, Derick V. Smith.

CHOICEPOINT was created in 1997 when Equifax, one of the big three credit reporting agencies — the others are TransUnion and Experian — spun off one of its divisions. Back then, the unit that would become ChoicePoint was involved in the labor-intensive and barely profitable business of maintaining claims histories on behalf of insurance companies. It also administered physicals, drug tests and the like for clients. Mr. Smith and Mr. Curling, who together ran what was then called the Insurance Services Group, foresaw a promising market in peddling data about individuals to a wider group of customers, and they convinced higher-ups that their unit should venture off on its own.

Since then, ChoicePoint has acquired more than 70 smaller companies and bought whatever databases it could get its hands on, including motor-vehicle reports from counties around the country, police records, property records, birth and death certificates, marriage and divorce decrees and criminal and civil court filings. These records had long been publicly available, but automation and superfast computers meant that comprehensive data dossiers could be assembled in seconds.

“It used to be that a business would have to go to 10 or 20 different vendors to get the same information that ChoicePoint sells in a single report,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, a senior researcher at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a privacy advocate.

That approach has certainly proved lucrative. The company’s stock price has quadrupled in nine years, and its revenue has, too, topping $1 billion in 2005. That growth has come despite stiff competition from two other companies of similar size that market background information about ordinary Americans: Acxiom, a publicly traded company based in Little Rock, Ark., and the LexisNexis Group, a division of Reed Elsevier. Many smaller companies are also in the business.

ChoicePoint sees itself as playing an essential, if not noble, role in the information economy. It has — at a reduced rate — helped nonprofits working with children identify registered sex offenders who applied for jobs, and it has provided the data that allowed the police to track down hundreds of missing children. Mr. Curling and others inside ChoicePoint argue that if there were no data brokers, home loans would take that much longer to secure and insurance rates would be based not on a person’s driving record but on broad demographic categories, such as age and gender. Sure, breaches have been a problem, but theirs is still a young industry, ChoicePoint executives say.

“It takes time to establish best practices,” Mr. Smith said.

It also took a state law. The data thieves who conned their way into ChoicePoint’s system downloaded information about at least 166,000 individuals. In years past, the company would alert law enforcement officials when it suffered a data breach, according to Mr. Lee, and leave it at that. But under a California disclosure law passed in 2003, the company was required to notify every Californian whose personal details might have fallen into criminal hands.

“No one knows for sure, and no one can say, how many breaches occurred before California,” Mr. Hoofnagle said. “This is an ‘known unknown,’ as Donald Rumsfeld would say.”

RATHER than send letters only to the 42,000 Californians whose records had been downloaded by the fraudsters, ChoicePoint mailed a notice to all affected consumers, telling them that their personal information might have fallen into the hands of identity thieves. Critics chided ChoicePoint for waiting about five weeks to contact consumers, but the company said it first needed to set up and staff a call center to handle the anticipated deluge of complaints.

“We knew that in all likelihood the first time that they were ever going to hear of ChoicePoint was in this letter,” Mr. Lee said.

That would hardly be the last they would hear of ChoicePoint, however. Over the coming months, a long list of corporations and governmental agencies took their turn in the spotlight after they were obliged to acknowledge fumbling people’s personal data: LexisNexis, Bank of America, Time Warner, Boeing, the Department of Veterans Affairs. And with each new breach, media accounts invariably mentioned the company whose breach had spurred a great awakening about the vulnerability of every individual’s personal data — even if that company, ChoicePoint, had nothing to do with the other companies’ woes.

Privacy critics were initially dubious when ChoicePoint contacted them in the wake of its February 2005 announcement. “Most gave us the Heisman,” said Mr. Lee, who held out his forearm like a running back pushing away a would-be tackler to demonstrate his point. Yet, over time, most though not all of the privacy posse would agree to meet with Mr. Curling and other ChoicePoint executives, and walk away impressed by what they heard and saw.

That would include Professor Solove at George Washington (“They’ve implemented quite a number of measures to protect privacy”), Chris Hoofnagle at Berkeley (“ChoicePoint now has model security practices”) and Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a consumer advocacy group based in San Diego (“They’ve put in place practices that I wish all the data brokers would adopt”).

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, became an honorary member of the privacy posse when he declared the F.T.C. overly lenient for levying only a $10 million fine against ChoicePoint. But he, too, has changed his tune.

“I was worried that a fine would be seen as the cost of doing business,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview. “But I have to say, ChoicePoint has become a model company.”

Even Marc Rotenberg, a privacy posse member who refused to meet privately with Mr. Curling or anyone from ChoicePoint out of concern that doing so would undermine his credibility, begrudgingly gave ChoicePoint some praise. “While I’m prepared to give them credit for a series of positive steps, I don’t think it would be accurate to say that they got to this position on their own,” said Mr. Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington. “It took a lot of work by EPIC and other organizations.”

When ChoicePoint started its makeover campaign, it first offered to rain down freebies on possible victims of identity theft, a protocol that others would follow. It invited them to join a credit monitoring service at no charge for one year, and provided them with free reports from the big three credit bureaus. To actual victims of identity theft, it offered its expertise to help correct the problem.

The company also gave a $1 million, four-year grant to the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit group in San Diego.

ChoicePoint then overhauled its security measures, a move that began with the hiring of Carol A. DiBattiste, who ultimately would fill the new position of chief privacy officer. Ms. DiBattiste is a no-nonsense lawyer whose résumé includes 20 years in the Air Force and turns as an assistant United States attorney. To send the message that both security and privacy were a priority, Ms. DiBattiste was named the company’s general counsel one year into her tenure

Over the years, ChoicePoint had done a modest but lucrative business working with private investigators and other smaller enterprises. Shortly after its February 2005 announcement, the company said that it would no longer provide full Social Security numbers, birth dates or other sensitive information to these customers — data that Ms. DiBattiste called “keys to the castle.”

That decision, Mr. Curling said, cost the company $15 million to $20 million last year. But inside ChoicePoint, executives saw that this small sliver of business threatened its overall reputation.

Until 2005, ChoicePoint had left credentialing to people in individual business units. It now has a centralized credentialing department. “The salespeople play no role in credentialing anymore,” said Ms. DiBattiste, who deployed dozens of people to take on the painstaking chore of recredentialing every client that was not either a law-enforcement agency or a public company. ChoicePoint had 120,000 accounts before February 2005; it now has 104,000.

It also performs random audits of its customers, to ensure that they are conducting searches appropriate for their type of business, and it uses its computer systems to monitor accounts for suspicious activity.

“We look for any anomalies,” said Darryl Lemecha, the company’s chief information officer. “So if we see a 50-person company that typically does a background check like once a month suddenly do 20 in one day, we lock down that account so we can investigate.”

ChoicePoint has endured roughly 100 outside audits, most of them conducted by long-term corporate customers, “and we passed them all,” Ms. DiBattiste said. As part of its settlement, ChoicePoint agreed to submit to an F.T.C. audit every other year for the next 20 years.

It is not yet clear how many people were actually harmed by ChoicePoint’s negligence. ChoicePoint says it knows of only 46 people who have been defrauded because of its data breach. But law enforcement officials have identified at least 800 people who have been identity theft victims because of ChoicePoint’s missteps, said Betsy Broder, an assistant director at the privacy and identity protection unit of the F.T.C. But, she said, that number could rise.

“If data was stolen,” Ms. Broder said, “nothing prevents the thieves from holding on to it for a period of time and using it perhaps when consumers let down their guard, or when the alert on their credit expires.”

ChoicePoint also set up a Web site for consumers who, at no cost, want to check and challenge possible inaccuracies in their dossiers (www.choicetrust.com). “It’s hard to overstate the significance of this,” Ms. Givens said. “This is an important step forward in moving us to transparency.”

Whether other companies follow suit remains to be seen. Michael Dores, founder of Merlin Information Services, a ChoicePoint competitor based in Kalispell, Mont., said he would offer free consumer reviews of its dossiers — but the cost, he said, “would put me out of business.”

STILL, Mr. Dores said, ChoicePoint’s own woes have had a big impact on Merlin, whose customers tend to be smaller businesspeople like debt collectors and private investigators. Like ChoicePoint, Merlin was fooled into providing an account to a fraudster.
So the company has recredentialed all its customers, Mr. Dores said, and created a new two-person compliance department. He said that Merlin now gives detailed personal data only to a small fraction of those to whom it provided such sensitive information in the past, much to the chagrin of many longtime customers.

Mr. Dores said he felt that he had no choice but to put these changes into effect, because “the Federal Trade Commission is in a bad mood over this stuff.”

Members of the privacy posse still have their complaints about ChoicePoint. Roughly 60 percent of its business falls under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which regulates the collection and use of consumer credit information. But to Mr. Hoofnagle and other privacy advocates, that is not enough. “If I had a magic wand I would make all of ChoicePoint’s data fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act,” Mr. Hoofnagle said.

Even so, those who previously reserved most of their criticisms for ChoicePoint now aim their harshest words at some of its competitors. The same private investigators and others who formerly obtained Social Security numbers from ChoicePoint and Merlin are now simply seeking the services of other data brokers — companies such as Tracers Information Specialists of Spring Hills, Fla.

Yet Terry Kilburn, the chief operating officer of Tracers, said he was not worried about the hazards of providing such sensitive information. “We weren’t the ones who were breached,” Mr. Kilburn said. “Our security and compliance are strong, and so we are choosing to continue to do business the way we always have.”

In Washington, legislators have proposed more than 20 bills to monitor data brokers more closely. According to Senator Schumer, ChoicePoint — in contrast to other large data brokers — has supported legislation he has proposed that would establish stricter security standards for any entity handling sensitive personal information.

“ChoicePoint, to its credit, got right behind our legislation and lobbied for it,” Senator Schumer said. But the bill, which he and Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, introduced in April 2005, has not passed, he said, “because a lot of other companies, quietly and behind the scenes, killed it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/bu.../12choice.html





A Quirky Superhero of the Comics Trade
George Gene Gustines

YOU may not know a little publishing company called Dark Horse Comics, but if you are a fan of Concrete (whose brain was transplanted by aliens into a stone body), Hellboy (he of the sawed-off red horns, satanic red tail and gargantuan red fist) or Sin City (the violent, edge-of-desperation town where people and principles are routinely bought and sold), then you certainly know its characters and its comic books.

And if you are a Dark Horse aficionado with an insatiable appetite, the company has more in store for next year. A new comic book series about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is on its way, written by Joss Whedon, who wrote and helped produce the popular television series of the same name. Dark Horse will also release “Star Wars: Legacy Vol. 1,” chronicling the distant future of the Jedi, as well as “300: The Art of the Film,” an account of the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic book mini-series about an ancient, epic battle between Spartan and Persian soldiers.

By nurturing and backing a quirky, brooding and inventive stable of writers and artists, Dark Horse has spent the last 20 years carving out and maintaining its place as a scrappy comic book franchise in an industry dominated by Marvel Entertainment and DC Comics.

Dark Horse, which is privately held, has endured in an industry where many small publishers last less than a year. It has thrived, its owners say, by sharing financial success with its artists and taking its role as an independent publisher very, very seriously.

“Every comic we do, whether we ask to share the film or toy rights or not, we publish because we think it’s a great comic,” said Mike Richardson, who founded Dark Horse 20 years ago and is the company’s president. “We want to survive far into the future, but we also want to leave a legacy.”

The Dark Horse approach calls for protecting the creative and financial rights of its contributors — including giving them a cut of the profits — and publishing comics that are well out of the mainstream (meaning fewer capes and cowls).

Based in Milwaukie, Ore., Dark Horse entered the game thanks to the birth of the direct sales market in the 1980s, which moved comics beyond newsstands and into specialty stores. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a small-press, black-and-white comic, became a hit in 1984 and started a boom that Dark Horse also enjoyed. But quick-hit comics publishers introduced a glut of ill-conceived characters and the market collapsed, taking many companies down with it. Dark Horse, however, avoided the debacle.

At the time, Mr. Richardson was a member of a community of artists and writers aspiring to make their marks in comics. Some of them created the stories in Dark Horse Presents No. 1, the company’s first comic book. “Later, I created a list of artists and writers that we thought were the best in comics and started calling them,” Mr. Richardson said. His sales pitch included promises of competitive pay and ownership of the work. The pitch worked, giving Dark Horse access to some of the most original and creative minds in the comics business.

Dark Horse later branched out to produce licensed comics devoted to the “Star Wars,” “Aliens” and “Terminator” films. It was also among a small group of pioneers that began importing Japanese comics, also known as manga (pronounced MAHN-gah).

Delving into everything from romance and adventure stories to science fiction and horror, manga have developed a large following in America and are commonly sold in bookstores. One of Dark Horse’s biggest manga successes has been the 28-volume Lone Wolf and Cub, about a wandering samurai and a young boy. The most violent and gory manga titles that Dark Horse reprints are shrink-wrapped.

“We’re reprinting them as they were published in Japan,” said Neil Hankerson, Dark Horse’s executive vice president. “We publish as is or we don’t publish it at all.”

COMIC books — sealed in plastic or not — were only the beginning. By 1991, Dark Horse had set up a unit to develop toys and later began a film division and a publishing imprint for decidedly noncomics products, including collections of Playboy interviews and a series of novels chronicling the early years of Tony Montana, the character played by Al Pacino in the 1983 film “Scarface.”

Today, Dark Horse is the third-largest publisher, behind the much larger Marvel and DC, in the direct market, which includes the specialty shops that cater to comic book fans. That market produced more than $500 million in sales last year, according to Milton Griepp, the publisher and founder of ICv2, an online trade publication that covers pop culture for retailers.

According to Diamond Comic Distributors, the world’s largest distributor of English-language comics, Marvel had 36.9 percent of the market last year and DC (owned by Time Warner) had 32.9 percent; Dark Horse came in at 5.6 percent.

At the heart of Dark Horse’s varied efforts is Mr. Richardson, 56, who is also its president. “I’m sure some people would like me to have less of a hand in things,” he said in an interview. “But clearly I like to control the direction of the different divisions.” He said Dark Horse, with about 100 employees, had $30 million in revenue last year.

Mr. Richardson grew up in Portland, Ore., reading the adventures of a certain caped crusader and a spectacular wall-crawler. “My preschool fascination with comics meant that I could read by the time I entered the first grade,” he said. “I had boxes of comics in my closet and collected every one I could get my hands on — even the recruiting comics you could get at the Air Force recruiting stations.”

It became a lifelong passion. Mr. Richardson began to write comics for an amateur press association and, after graduating from college, established a chain of comic book stores in Oregon. The success of his stores, where writers and artists often appeared to sign their work, and his contacts with other industry professionals paved the way to the founding of Dark Horse.

“There was a recurring complaint that the people who created the comics couldn’t own their own work if they worked for the major companies,” he said. “There were so many horrible stories of people who signed the back of the check and lost the rights to their characters.”

Perhaps the most famous example goes back to Superman himself. Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster, the men who created the man of steel, sold their comic strip, and the rights to the character, for $130 in 1938. Superman, of course, would go on to both inspire countless champions and fill DC’s coffers. Mr. Siegel and Mr. Shuster would have to fight for decades to be recognized and compensated. Although they never won a court award, in 1975 Warner Communications agreed to give both men lifelong pensions worth about $38,000 a year.

“We built our publishing platform around creators’ rights,” Mr. Richardson said. “Our pitch was, ‘We’ll match the rights that you get from other companies and we’ll let you own the work.’ ”

Dark Horse pays by the story or the page, and shares profit generated by comic books and related merchandise. That is different from the standard work-for-hire arrangement at DC and Marvel: creators are paid for a specific story and perhaps receive royalties from collected editions, but the bulk of the revenue, and all of the merchandising opportunities, remain with the companies.

In fact, a group of artists, primarily from Marvel, set up their own company, Image comics, in 1992 because they were disenchanted with corporate-owned characters that generated profits for their bosses but not for them.

“It is always a blow to any organization when you lose talented people,” Dan Buckley, the publisher of Marvel, said. “However, we were able to fill those shoes with other talented artists.” He added that Marvel “now has more creative opportunities under its umbrella, inside and outside of the Marvel universe.”

At DC, the president and publisher, Paul Levitz, said the company does not adhere to a rigid compensation model and has made “many types of arrangements.” He said that “different deals appeal to different creative talent at different times, but we have no shortage of great people wanting to do new series for us or work our star characters.”

PAUL CHADWICK is the writer-artist behind Concrete, one of Dark Horse’s early successes. Mr. Chadwick chronicles the struggles of Concrete, a k a Ron Lithgow, as he learns to cope with and take advantage of his cement-block body while championing environmental causes or scaling Mount Everest.

Concrete first appeared in an eight-page story in Dark Horse Presents No. 1 in 1986. It was a runaway hit. “We were hoping to sell 10,000 copies, and it sold 50,000,” Mr. Richardson said.

Thanks to their participation in APA-5, an amateur press association devoted to comics and pop culture, Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Richardson were already acquainted when Mr. Chadwick joined Dark Horse.

Other APA-5 members who are part of the Dark Horse family constitute a virtual Who’s Who of the comics industry; they include Randy Stradley, the company’s vice president; Mr. Miller, one of the comic world’s superstars; and Mark Verheiden, a writer for the TV series “Battlestar Galactica,” who has written Dark Horse comics like Aliens, Predator and Timecop.

Mr. Chadwick first shopped the Concrete concept around in 1983. “I was pretty roundly turned down,” he recalled. A few years and some improvements later, he tried again, with different results. “I had eight offers, including one from Dark Horse, which was just starting up,” he said. “They matched Marvel’s offer and were so enthusiastic that it caused me to go with them, which turned out to be very good for me.”

The Concrete stories would win several Eisner Awards, among the most prestigious honors bestowed upon comic book creators. Mr. Chadwick’s next installment of the continuing saga begins with Concrete suffering from amnesia after being struck by lightning in a desert in Colorado. His memory loss makes him even more uncertain of his place in the world.

Dark Horse is also patient with contributors like Mr. Chadwick. Unlike those who work for DC or Marvel on a Batman or Captain America, which are monthly publications and are generally expected to arrive without fail every 30 days, Mr. Chadwick works at his own pace. “I go mini-series by mini-series,” he said. “The last one took me — gulp — six years. I’m hoping to cut down on that on the next one.”

Mr. Richardson accepts uncertain timetables. “Creators who are doing very personal work can’t crank them out on a regular basis,” he said. “We support the creator and the rate they can produce it. We want them to be special; sometimes that’s not possible to produce on a 30-day schedule.”

Such support generates intense feelings of loyalty. When asked what it would take to offer Concrete to another publisher, Mr. Chadwick is quick with his answer: “A plane going down with Mike Richardson on it. Mike’s done a lot for me. It would be the height of disloyalty to go somewhere else.”

Mr. Richardson does not see the ebb and flow of the publication cycle as a creative issue. “The fans understand a creator-owned work,” he said. “They wouldn’t just want to see us crank something out.”

To fill the sales gaps caused by unpredictable publication, Dark Horse licenses characters from popular films, novels and video games and builds comic books around them.

Attention to quality played a role in this business strategy, too. Dark Horse discovered “a way to do licensed comics successfully,” Mr. Griepp said. “Marvel and DC haven’t found a formula that worked. It never really clicked.”

At Dark Horse, “they put a higher grade of talent on the books,” Mr. Griepp said. “They didn’t take the tack that the license is going to sell these books.” He also said the company made the comics easier to repackage by focusing on shorter story lines.

Licensed books, unlike creator-owned titles that can be as tame or as daring as a publisher desires, may have to observe some outside restrictions. “Our basic guidelines are: ‘Don’t do anything in the comics that you wouldn’t see in the films,’ ” said Mr. Stradley of Dark Horse. “It’s an easy rule to follow.”

Dark Horse approaches the licensed titles as sequels to the films, not simply repeating the same story. Its Aliens adaptation was a hit, selling more than one million copies. In a twist, Dark Horse’s first Predator series was adapted into the story for the film sequel, Predator 2. In turn, in order to protect its license, Dark Horse adapted that film back into a comic. “So a comic was adapted into a movie which was then adapted into a comic,” Mr. Richardson said.

The success of space-creature comics led Dark Horse to deploy a well-worn industry tactic: the team-up. Thus Aliens vs. Predator was born — the comic and then the film. “That two-way street with Hollywood makes Dark Horse stand out,” Mr. Griepp said. “They were able to do it in a way that their larger competitors could not.”

Dark Horse’s success in Hollywood has been relatively fast and furious. It began in 1992 with “Dr. Giggles,” a film about a mental patient posing as a doctor; the company was a co-producer. Next was a blockbuster: the Mask, one of Mr. Richardson’s creations, whom he describes as “a Tex Avery cartoon come to life.”

In 1994, Hollywood turned the Mask into a film starring Jim Carrey; it captured around $120 million domestically. In 1994, Dark Horse turned another of its properties, Timecop, into a film; the box-office take was almost $45 million. Just like that, “I was in the film business,” Mr. Richardson said.

Dark Horse has come a long way from the day in 1986 when Mr. Richardson and Mr. Stradley put the company’s first issue on the counter of a comic book shop. At the time, all Dark Horse could offer contributors was a print outlet and its dedication to creator rights. Today, it can offer access to the worlds of toys, film and animation.

DARK HORSE also remains hungry and productive, sometimes inspired by comic book properties, sometimes not. Next year, it will publish “Bottomfeeder,” the cartoonist B. H. Fingerman’s first novel, about a vampire in New York who meets others of his kind in several unusual cliques.

In January, it will publish Hellboy Animated Vol. 1: The Black Wedding, timed to the DVD release of the title character’s first animated foray. Its roster of original films includes “My Name Is Bruce,” in which Bruce Campbell, a popular B-movie actor, is kidnapped to protect an Oregon town from monsters. And the veteran horror director John Landis will make “Gone,” a thriller that takes place in a haunted house.

“A lot of companies have sprung up trying to do what I’ve done,” Mr. Richardson said. “They try to take comics and cruise them into films.” But there is often “a long period between a sale and when a film gets made,” he added. “If your comics can’t stand on their own, they may not last very long.

“If the comic deserves to be taken into another media,” he said, “that’s a bonus.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/bu...y/12comic.html





A Struggle Over Dominance and Definition
Richard Siklos

GOOGLE: mate or menace? That is the burning question of the week — heck, probably of the year — for ye olde media companies.

In the last few weeks an enormous swarm of activity has been coming out of the Googleplex beehive in Mountain View, Calif. — much of it aimed squarely at preparing the search company to move its phenomenally lucrative advertising business beyond Web pages and into video, newspapers and radio.

First, of course, there was Google’s deal to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion. Media chief executives are making long whistling sounds at the thought of YouTube, an 18-month-old Web-ling, commanding that price. That was followed last week by two smaller but intriguing bits of news. One was the announcement of a test to put Internet ads bought through Google’s advertising network into newspapers, including The New York Times. The other was that Google is bolstering its radio sales staff in what sounds like a similar but perhaps bigger effort in that medium.

Last year, Google agreed to pay as much as $1 billion for dMarc Broadcasting. It will soon use that company’s technology to start a business that serves as a middleman between advertisers and broadcasters. Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, has said the company plans eventually to have as many as 1,000 engineers and sales representatives working on the radio industry.

Once the YouTube deal closes, Internet video will become the next frontier for Google. In time, Mr. Schmidt has said, he would like to see Google’s technology applied to television in all its digital glory.

What’s at stake is pretty much everything in the $400 billion global advertising honey pot. Google’s efficiency at putting text ads next to search results is what sets it apart from Yahoo, MSN and the other big boys online.

Even that astute observer of market dominance, Microsoft, has argued that until it or Yahoo or someone else can figure out how to compete with the Google advertising juggernaut, Google has too much power.

“The truth is, what Google is doing now is transferring the wealth out of the hands of rights holders into Google,” Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, told BusinessWeek recently. “So media companies around the world are all threatened by Google.”

Well, maybe. For now, Google seems to have far fewer detractors among big media companies than it has partners — including The New York Times Company, Viacom, the News Corporation through its MySpace unit, and Time Warner via AOL. But news organizations and book publishers have filed a handful of lawsuits over the way Google distributes and presents search results and other information against which it places advertising links. Last week, Google disclosed that its online video service had been sued and accused of copyright infringement.

The World Association of Newspapers, a big umbrella group based in Paris that directly or indirectly represents 18,000 publications worldwide, is trying to organize an alliance to adopt a technology that would dictate the terms under which search engines, including Google, could use and present their copyrighted wares when their robots come trawling.

Now, before we take a shot at the aforementioned burning question — Is Google a friend of foe? — let’s ponder another oft-raised and pertinent query: Is Google a media company? The last time I checked, a media company was generally defined as a business that accumulates audiences and sells access to them to marketers.

And Mr. Schmidt said recently: “Ultimately, our goal at Google is to have the strongest advertising network and all the world’s information. That’s part of our mission.” And if it is a media company, it is the world’s biggest, with a market capitalization of $144 billion.

But when I spoke to David Eun, Google’s vice president for content partnerships, he took umbrage with the media designation. He noted that Google did not create or own content — in his mind, part of the definition of a media company. Rather, he said, Google is a technology company: “I would say we’re a conduit connecting our users with content and advertisers.”

The point may be semantic, but it reminded me of the longstanding friction between cable companies and TV broadcasters over whether cable should pay for distributing the free over-the-air signals — or whether cable was doing the broadcasters a favor by putting their signals onto the system through which most people watch television.

Again, Mr. Eun disagreed, noting that Google is not a distributor: it tries to push people to other Web sites and takes immense geek pride in how quickly it does so.

Indeed, a search for “Google” and “friend or foe” took me 0.10 seconds and elicited 271,000 results. It took Mr. Eun not much longer to try to explain to me that Google (a) respects copyrights, (b) gives any content owner a choice of opting in or out of its search results and (c) focuses on ways to help its media partners achieve their goals. “I say firmly: we are friend because we are trying to build your business objectives,” Mr. Eun said.

This is in some ways a debate over subtle but important distinctions. Gavin K. O’Reilly, the president of the World Association of Newspapers, argues that what is missing is that any search engine ought to be asking “explicit permission” to use copyrighted material, and that this should be part of the vaunted automation that has made search the phenomenon it is.

The elephant in the room right now is not publishing but video — and what Google proposes to do with YouTube. Among the site’s millions of downloads are clips incorporating copyrighted material from movies, music videos and television shows. There is much phoning around among the moguls and with Mr. Schmidt to hash out whether the next moves involve lawsuits, licensing deals or pulling content out of the leading showcase for Web video altogether.

PERHAPS the answer to the mate-or-menace question depends on what sort of media business you’re in. If you’re a cable company or local TV station, Google may not yet be your ally. (But be assured that teams of engineers are zipping around on Razor scooters working on it.)

Of course, it is not unusual for media companies to compete in some areas and cooperate in others — in fact, it’s the ultimate sign that you have made the big leagues. But the lines have never been this fuzzy.

Welcome to Googlewood.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/bu.../12frenzy.html





Clear Channel Agrees to be Acquired for About $18.7B
Elizabeth White

Clear Channel Communications Inc., the nation's biggest radio station operator, said Thursday it has agreed to be acquired for about $18.7 billion by an investment group.

The transaction would be one of the biggest deals in which a company has been taken private, and showcases the vast sums that buyout groups have been able to assemble to acquire public companies.

An investor group led by Thomas H. Lee Partners LP and Bain Capital Partners LLC is paying $37.60 in cash for each share of Clear Channel, a 10.2 percent premium over its closing price on Wednesday. The buyers are also assuming about $8 billion in debt.

San Antonio-based Clear Channel's shares jumped $1.33, or 3.9 percent, to $35.45 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange after rising earlier to a new 52-week high of $35.88.

The company said in a regulatory filing that it doesn't expect any senior management changes or significant layoffs.

Mark Mays will remain CEO while Randall Mays, his brother, will stay on as chief financial officer. Their father Lowry Mays, the chairman, will continue to have an active role, the company said.

"Clear Channel is an exceptional media franchise that is well-positioned to grow thanks to the solid foundation the Mays family has created," John Connaughton, a managing director at Bain Capital, said in a statement.

It's not yet clear how much the Mays stand to make in the deal. Clear Channel said Thursday that three members of senior management agreed to "significantly" reduce payments that would be made on a change of control.

A Clear Channel spokeswoman declined to elaborate. The Mays family owns about 7 percent of the company.

James Goss, media and entertainment analyst for Barrington Research, said the price of $37.60 was in line with expectations.

"I don't think there's anything that's happened that's been totally surprising," Goss said.

Clear Channel also said it plans to sell 448 of its radio stations, all located outside the top 100 markets, as well as its 42-station television group, which are also located in smaller markets. Collectively the properties made up less than 10 percent of the company's revenues last year.

The acquisition is not dependent on the sale of those assets, the company said.

Clear Channel owns or operates 1,150 radio stations, including eight in Connecticut, and is the largest operator of radio stations in the country.

In Connecticut, its stations are WHCN-FM, WKSS-FM, WPHH-FM, WPOP-AM and WWYZ-FM in Hartford and WAVZ-AM, WELI-AM and WKCI-FM in New Haven.

The company has until Dec. 7 to solicit competing proposals. Another bid for Clear Channel had been expected from Providence Equity Partners, the Blackstone Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

"Basically they are telling you that we have a firm offer and a firm deal, but we are not going to get locked into it yet," said Frederick Moran, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based analyst for Stanford Financial Group.

Kit Spring, an analyst for Stifel Nicolaus & Co. Inc., wrote in a note that shareholders should reject the initial offer.

"(Clear Channel's) assets could command a much higher price if sold piece by piece, in our view," the note said.

Moran said the other "wild card" in Thursday's announcement was the fate of Clear Channel Outdoor, a major operator of billboard and bus-stop ads. Clear Channel owns a majority of the outdoor business, which trades separately.

Outdoor advertising company JCDecaux last week expressed interest in acquiring Clear Channel Outdoor.

Thursday's announcement doesn't include any provisions for taking Clear Channel Outdoor private, the company said.

The company's directors have approved the agreement, with the board insiders recused from the vote.

Once stock market darlings, radio stocks have fallen out of favor on Wall Street in recent years amid sluggish advertising revenues and competition from the boom in portable listening devices like Apple Computer Inc.'s iPods and the emerging growth of satellite radio.

Since January of 2000, Clear Channel stock has fallen from a high of more than $91.

Clear Channel has instituted several measures to try to win listeners back, including cutting back on the number of commercials. However other operators have yet to embrace its "less is more" strategy.

Clear Channel was founded in 1972 and benefited greatly from the loosening of media ownership rules, which allowed more radio stations to be held by a single owner in each market.

The deal would rank behind KKR's 1988 buyout of RJR Nabisco Inc., which still is the biggest going-private deal ever at $25.1 billion. It would also trail two other deals announced earlier this year. Those included the $21.8 billion buyout of airport development company BAA PLC and the $21.3 billion buyout of hospital company HCA Inc.

Clear Channel said it expects to close the acquisition by the fourth quarter of next year.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-16-14-37-44





Reader’s Digest Association Being Sold for $1.6 Billion

Reader’s Digest Association Inc. has said that they are being acquired by an investor group for $1.6 billion. The group publishes one of the most widely read U.S. magazines and they are now being acquired by an investor group led by buyout firm Ripplewood Holdings.

They are going to pay around $17 per share for Reader’s Digest.

Ripplewood said in a statement that the price being paid for Reader’s Digest Association is a premium of 23 percent over the average closing price of Reader’s Digest shares in the 45 trading days leading up to Wednesday.

The group publishes Reader’s Digest magazine, which is published around the world in around 21 languages and has a monthly circulation of about 18 million.

As per market estimates, this magazine has a readership of more than 80 million people worldwide. The deal is expected to close by the first quarter of next year.
http://business.techwhack.com/1385/r...t-association/





Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense
John Markoff

From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like I.B.M. and Google as well as small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.

But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.

The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.

“I call it the World Wide Database,” said Nova Spivack, the founder of a start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information by mining the World Wide Web. “We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.”

Web 2.0, which describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like geographic mapping) and services (like photo-sharing) over the Internet, has in recent months become the focus of dot-com-style hype in Silicon Valley. But commercial interest in Web 3.0 — or the “semantic Web,” for the idea of adding meaning — is only now emerging.

The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.

In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”

Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.

How such systems will be built, and how soon they will begin providing meaningful answers, is now a matter of vigorous debate both among academic researchers and commercial technologists. Some are focused on creating a vast new structure to supplant the existing Web; others are developing pragmatic tools that extract meaning from the existing Web.

But all agree that if such systems emerge, they will instantly become more commercially valuable than today’s search engines, which return thousands or even millions of documents but as a rule do not answer questions directly.

Underscoring the potential of mining human knowledge is an extraordinarily profitable example: the basic technology that made Google possible, known as “Page Rank,” systematically exploits human knowledge and decisions about what is significant to order search results. (It interprets a link from one page to another as a “vote,” but votes cast by pages considered popular are weighted more heavily.)

Today researchers are pushing further. Mr. Spivack’s company, Radar Networks, for example, is one of several working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.

Radar’s technology is based on a next-generation database system that stores associations, such as one person’s relationship to another (colleague, friend, brother), rather than specific items like text or numbers.

One example that hints at the potential of such systems is KnowItAll, a project by a group of University of Washington faculty members and students that has been financed by Google. One sample system created using the technology is Opine, which is designed to extract and aggregate user-posted information from product and review sites.

One demonstration project focusing on hotels “understands” concepts like room temperature, bed comfort and hotel price, and can distinguish between concepts like “great,” “almost great” and “mostly O.K.” to provide useful direct answers. Whereas today’s travel recommendation sites force people to weed through long lists of comments and observations left by others, the Web. 3.0 system would weigh and rank all of the comments and find, by cognitive deduction, just the right hotel for a particular user.

“The system will know that spotless is better than clean,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Washington who is a leader of the project. “There is the growing realization that text on the Web is a tremendous resource.”

In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.

Researchers and entrepreneurs say that while it is unlikely that there will be complete artificial-intelligence systems any time soon, if ever, the content of the Web is already growing more intelligent. Smart Webcams watch for intruders, while Web-based e-mail programs recognize dates and locations. Such programs, the researchers say, may signal the impending birth of Web 3.0.

“It’s a hot topic, and people haven’t realized this spooky thing about how much they are depending on A.I.,” said W. Daniel Hillis, a veteran artificial-intelligence researcher who founded Metaweb Technologies here last year.

Like Radar Networks, Metaweb is still not publicly describing what its service or product will be, though the company’s Web site states that Metaweb intends to “build a better infrastructure for the Web.”

“It is pretty clear that human knowledge is out there and more exposed to machines than it ever was before,” Mr. Hillis said.

Both Radar Networks and Metaweb have their roots in part in technology development done originally for the military and intelligence agencies. Early research financed by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency predated a pioneering call for a semantic Web made in 1999 by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web a decade earlier.

Intelligence agencies also helped underwrite the work of Doug Lenat, a computer scientist whose company, Cycorp of Austin, Tex., sells systems and services to the government and large corporations. For the last quarter-century Mr. Lenat has labored on an artificial-intelligence system named Cyc that he claimed would some day be able to answer questions posed in spoken or written language — and to reason.

Cyc was originally built by entering millions of common-sense facts that the computer system would “learn.” But in a lecture given at Google earlier this year, Mr. Lenat said, Cyc is now learning by mining the World Wide Web — a process that is part of how Web 3.0 is being built.

During his talk, he implied that Cyc is now capable of answering a sophisticated natural-language query like: “Which American city would be most vulnerable to an anthrax attack during summer?”

Separately, I.B.M. researchers say they are now routinely using a digital snapshot of the six billion documents that make up the non-pornographic World Wide Web to do survey research and answer questions for corporate customers on diverse topics, such as market research and corporate branding.

Daniel Gruhl, a staff scientist at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., said the data mining system, known as Web Fountain, has been used to determine the attitudes of young people on death for a insurance company and was able to choose between the terms “utility computing” and “grid computing,” for an I.B.M. branding effort.

“It turned out that only geeks liked the term ‘grid computing,’ ” he said.

I.B.M. has used the system to do market research for television networks on the popularity of shows by mining a popular online community site, he said. Additionally, by mining the “buzz” on college music Web sites, the researchers were able to predict songs that would hit the top of the pop charts in the next two weeks — a capability more impressive than today’s market research predictions.

There is debate over whether systems like Cyc will be the driving force behind Web 3.0 or whether intelligence will emerge in a more organic fashion, from technologies that systematically extract meaning from the existing Web. Those in the latter camp say they see early examples in services like del.icio.us and Flickr, the bookmarking and photo-sharing systems acquired by Yahoo, and Digg, a news service that relies on aggregating the opinions of readers to find stories of interest.

In Flickr, for example, users “tag” photos, making it simple to identify images in ways that have eluded scientists in the past.

“With Flickr you can find images that a computer could never find,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Yahoo. “Something that defied us for 50 years suddenly became trivial. It wouldn’t have become trivial without the Web.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/bu...639&ei=5087%0A





You Can Make ’Em Like They Used To
Dave Kehr

IN 1989 an unknown 26-year-old filmmaker from Louisiana delivered what might have been the final blow to the shaky edifice known as the Hollywood studio system. Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” an independently financed tale of love and adultery, won the grand prize of the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d’Or, as well as an acting prize for one of its stars, James Spader.

Acquired by the fledging distribution company Miramax, the film, made with a reported budget of $1.2 million, went on to gross almost $25 million in the United States, a spectacular figure that put Miramax on the map and established American independent film as a force to be reckoned with. As they watched their ancient hegemony crumble away, the studios rushed to establish their own “independent” divisions.

Now, 17 years later, Mr. Soderbergh is back with a movie that means to make amends. “I often think I would have been so happy to be Michael Curtiz,” Mr. Soderbergh said. Mr. Curtiz, the contract director, made more than 100 films for Warner Brothers, including “Casablanca” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” between his arrival in Hollywood from Hungary in 1926 and his death in 1962. “That would have been right up my alley,” Mr. Soderbergh said, “making a couple of movies a year of all different kinds, working with the best technicians. I would have been in heaven, just going in to work every day.”

“The Good German,” which Mr. Soderbergh directed for Warner Brothers, reimagines what it would be like to make a movie under the studio system of old. Based on the novel by Joseph Kanon — a thriller with a conscience about an American war correspondent (George Clooney) who returns to the rubble of postwar Berlin to find the German woman (Cate Blanchett) who was once his lover — the movie, which opens in limited release on Dec. 15, is both set in 1946 and, in a sense, filmed there as well.

During the production Mr. Soderbergh was committed to remaining as true as possible to the technique of the era. By reproducing the conditions of an actual studio shoot from the late 1940s, he hoped to enter the mind of a filmmaker like Mr. Curtiz, to explore the strengths and limitations of a classical style that has now largely been lost.

“For weeks, for all of us, it was like living in a time warp,” Mr. Soderbergh said by telephone from Los Angeles, where he was finishing filming “Ocean’s Thirteen,” the third in a series and an unabashedly commercial movie that will be one of Warner Brothers’ major summer releases.

There have been many attempts to recapture the look of old Hollywood over the years, most of them disappointingly superficial: films that begin in black and white but quickly bleed into color, while never straying far from a contemporary vocabulary of close-ups and meandering Steadicam shots. Not only does “The Good German” stick to its monochromatic principles throughout, it uses other elements of ’40s style that may not be apparent at first.

The strongly accented camera angles, the dramatic nonrealistic lighting, the way actors move against each other within the frame and the way the camera travels across the set — these are all elements of a vocabulary that has been lost in the post-television era. In “The Good German,” Mr. Soderbergh is trying to bring this vocabulary back.

“We set up our little guidelines,” he said. For one, he banned the sophisticated zoom lenses that make life easier for today’s cinematographers, returning to the fixed focal-length lenses of the past. “I did some research and found some script continuities for a couple of Michael Curtiz films,” he recalled, referring to records of the lens and exposure used in every shot, in case retakes were necessary. “I found that he restricted himself to at most five lenses, usually three or four. I talked to Panavision, and they happened to have some older lenses that they’d made that didn’t have all the new coatings on them and also were a focal length that isn’t really used anymore. One of them was a 32 millimeter, a wide-angle lens that nobody uses anymore but was one that Curtiz used a lot.”

For audiences the shorter lenses mean a wider field of vision, expanding the camera’s range beyond the tight close-ups and two-shots that define today’s television-influenced filmmaking. With the wider range, groups of three, four or more characters can appear together on screen, minimizing the need for cross-cutting, which creates a different kind of interaction among the actors and a more expressive sense of the fictional space they inhabit.

They also used only incandescent lights, Mr. Soderbergh said, and no wireless microphones at all. Where many, if not most, filmmakers use “body mikes” to capture the intimate whispers of dialogue, Mr. Soderbergh recorded his sound the old-fashioned way, through a boom microphone held just over the actors’ heads by a technician standing out of camera range.

“The rule was, if you can’t do it with a boom mike, then you can’t do it,” Mr. Soderbergh said. “Which was helpful to me because, in talking to the actors about this very externalized performance mode I was going to ask them to assume, it helped to be able to say, ‘You have to talk louder, you have to project more, because I’m not getting a good enough track.’ ”

Unlike the Method mumble currently in style in American movies, the dialogue in “The Good German” is spoken in crisp, clearly enunciated stage English, emphasizing presentation over interpretation.

“I don’t feel like I’m a real quiet actor in terms of my projection in the first place,” said Tobey Maguire, who plays a crucial supporting role as an American serviceman with sinister black-market connections. “So I didn’t really think much about that part of it. But what was fascinating to me is how he was cutting the movie in his head. There’s really no fat on the film. He really didn’t do ‘coverage.’ He only shot the parts of the scene he was going to use, and if he wasn’t going to use it, he didn’t shoot it.”

“The pace was unbelievably fast,” he added. “So that was great.”

If there is a single word that sums up the difference between filmmaking at the middle of the 20th century and the filmmaking of today, it is “coverage.” Derived from television, it refers to the increasingly common practice of using multiple cameras for a scene (just as television would cover a football game) and having the actors run through a complete sequence in a few different registers. The lighting tends to be bright and diffused, without shadows, which makes it easier for the different cameras to capture matching images.

The advantage for directors is that they no longer need to make hard and fast decisions about where the camera will go for a particular scene or how the performances will be pitched. The idea is to pump as much coverage as possible into the editing room, where the final decisions about what goes where will be made.

The danger for a director is that with so much material available, the original vision may be drowned or never really defined; and the sheer amount of exposed film makes it possible for executives to step in (after the director has completed his union-mandated first cut) and rearrange the material to follow the latest market-research reports.

During the studio era it was more typical for directors to arrive on the set, block out their shots and light them with the use of stand-ins; the actors were then summoned from their dressing rooms and, after a brief rehearsal, they would film the lines needed in the individual shot. The crew would then break down the camera and move it to the next setup, as determined by the director.

“That kind of staging is a lost art,” Mr. Soderbergh said, “which is too bad. The reason they no longer work that way is because it means making choices, real choices, and sticking to them. It means shooting things in a way that basically only cut together in one order. That’s not what people do now. They want all the options they can get in the editing room.”

While the editing process now routinely takes months, “I had a pretty polished cut of ‘The Good German’ two days after we wrapped,” Mr. Soderbergh said. “It was shot to go together very, very specifically.”

“The geography of the scene — to me, that’s the job,” Mr. Soderbergh added, “carrying all of that around in your mind. Sure, I’ve used multiple cameras on other pictures. On ‘Traffic,’ which was from the get-go designed to be a run-and-gun movie, we were using two cameras a lot, but even in those situations you can make choices in terms of the placement of the camera, and how you think the stuff will cut together.” And because Mr. Soderbergh works both as his own cinematographer (under the name Peter Andrews) and editor (as Mary Ann Bernard), he can make spontaneous decisions: “There’s no gap between figuring out what we want to do and executing it.”

“The Good German” has turned out, in its way, to be a highly experimental picture, but one that grew out of economic necessity. “They bought the novel in 2001, thinking the role of the reporter might make a good vehicle for George Clooney,” said the screenwriter, Paul Attanasio. “I got the novel in April of 2001, and I think we sat down for the first time in May. From the beginning Steven was talking about it as a film noir, which if you’ve read the novel, is not really what it is. The decision to make it as a film of the period came later, when he got down to deciding to make the movie.”

Mr. Soderbergh added: “For a while I thought about doing it normally. And then I realized that actually the most economical way to do it would be the way we ended up doing it, shooting it in black and white, so we could incorporate all of the stock footage we had found. Because if we’d shot it in color and tried to go to Germany, it would have cost two and a half times what it did. Luckily the studio went along with it. Our budget was for $32 million, and they felt the number was not dangerously high.”

Mr. Soderbergh’s team combed the studios for stock film of postwar Berlin; one trove was Paramount, where he found some of the background scenes used for “A Foreign Affair,” a Billy Wilder film set in Berlin in 1948. But it was left to Mr. Soderbergh’s longtime production designer, Philip Messina, to build the rest of Berlin in Hollywood — or Burbank, to be more precise, where they took over some standing sets on the Universal back lot and dressed them in appropriate rubble.

“There’s very little computer graphics used to extend the image, and mostly what you see on the screen is what we were able to accomplish practically,” Mr. Messina said. “The heaps of rubble were made from steel armatures with carved foam on top of them and rocks stuck on them. We moved them from the back lots to the sets and used them over and over, like a kit of parts we were constantly rearranging.”

Louise Frogley, who has worked as Mr. Soderbergh’s costume designer since “The Limey” in 1999, assembled the wardrobe much as it would have been done in the ’40s, first raiding the costume warehouses at Warner Brothers, and later traveling to the Sturm costume factory in East Berlin, where military uniforms of various periods are copied and reproduced for films.

“It’s in an old sugar factory, and each floor is a different army, a different military setup,” she said. “We found quite a lot of original police uniforms. All sorts of things came up: I didn’t realize that the uniforms the police wore were the same as they used under the Nazis, but they shaved off the swastikas.”

Ms Frogley continued: “The civilians were much easier to dress. George Clooney was great, because he really gets how people wore their trousers high during that period, instead of pushing them down to their hips like they do now.”

Both Mr. Messina and Ms. Frogley are already at work on Mr. Soderbergh’s next project, a two-part biography of Che Guevara that will star Benicio Del Toro and be shot entirely in Spanish (another notion unlikely to thrill the Hollywood establishment, which likes foreign-language films almost as much as it likes black-and-white ones). Such leapfrogging is typical of Mr. Soderbergh’s methods: he likes to keep working constantly and is happy to use the down time on one movie to get a head start on the next. In 2006 alone he has served as an executive producer on two films (Richard Linklater’s “Scanner Darkly” and Scott Z. Burns’ “The Half Life of Timofey Berezin”), completed and released “The Good German” and filmed “Ocean’s Thirteen.”

Studios may no longer be in the business of providing long-term employment for filmmakers, but Mr. Soderbergh seems to be functioning as a studio all by himself.

“You hope that there’s a way of putting a film like this across,” he said of “The Good German.” “And just not for yourself. If a movie like this can get made and actually bring in a little bit of money, it means that someone else can make one too. I’m just hoping that we can find a way to the audience so that the person in line behind me who’s trying to get Warners to do something off track can point to ‘The Good German’ and say, ‘You know, that worked, let’s try this now.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/movies/12kehr.html





Rousing the Crowd With a Bigger Bang
Ross Johnson

AS John Frazier recalls it, his marching orders from the producer Jerry Bruckheimer and the director Tony Scott in connection with their forthcoming film, “Déjà Vu,” were clear, if not exactly simple. He was supposed to shock the audience with “a hyper-realistic act to motivate them to sit through an unrealistic exercise that would undo the horror of the realism.”

In other words, Mr. Frazier, a 35-year veteran of the pyrotechnic and special effects business — in film industry jargon, a “powder guy” — was supposed to blow something up. Big time.

Audiences can judge his handiwork when “Déjà Vu” opens on Nov. 22, or they can glimpse it in a trailer now playing on the Web and in theaters. For a scene that culminates the film’s five-minute opening title sequence, Mr. Frazier, who shared a 2005 Academy Award for best visual effects on “Spider-Man 2” and previously worked with Mr. Bruckheimer rigging movie explosions on “Armageddon” and “Pearl Harbor,” engineered the seeming destruction of a 225-foot-long passenger ferry, the Alvin T. Stumpf, by a terrorist bomb.

The explosion triggers a plot in which a federal investigator, played by Denzel Washington, contemplates traveling through time to undo the damage. It also provides an image of disaster that is especially chilling because it occurs in post-Katrina New Orleans. Along the way it underscores one of the many reasons big-studio films continue to make an impression: they spare no expense when it comes to the work of effects masters like Mr. Frazier.

“I saw these incredible flames, and I just burst into tears,” said Bill Marsilii, one of the film’s writers, who was standing 300 yards away when the explosion took place last April. “My first thought was ‘My God, what have I done?’ ”

As an aspiring screenwriter in September 2001, Mr. Marsilii stood on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street, near his Greenwich Village apartment, and watched in horror as the World Trade Center towers fell. Having struggled to conceptualize “Déjà Vu” since 1997, he stopped writing for a year after the 2001 terrorist attacks, he said. Eventually he returned to the story with another writer, Terry Rossio.

But it took Mr. Frazier’s craft to make it, in movie terms, real.

“Déjà Vu” begins with a scene of hundreds of uniformed Navy sailors and their young families bounding onto the Alvin T. Stumpf — an actual working ferry that typically runs between the Canal Street and Algiers ferry landings in New Orleans — during Mardi Gras.

Three minutes into the film, the car radio of an unoccupied Ford Bronco suddenly blares in the automobile parking deck of the ferry. After images of cherubic youngsters on the decks above, the film cuts to the back of the Bronco and a bomb rigging of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, fuel oil and blasting caps (similar to the rigging used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing).

Seconds after the last main title card is shown, the truck bomb explodes and hurls two-ton cars and a mass of burning sailors off the ferry decks. The resulting 300-foot-high fireball is a red and black phantasm of seemingly deadly flame that resembles a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Audiences at recent showings of “Déjà Vu” recoiled reflexively, despite the ferry explosion’s prominence in the preview trailers and commercials that are currently running in theaters, on television and on the Web.

“The degree of the explosion is what shocks the audience,” Mr. Scott, the director, said in a recent interview. “It doesn’t matter if people are told it’s going to happen. They’re just not prepared for something as extreme as this.”

Mr. Bruckheimer, the producer, added that the effect was powerful because it wasn’t made with miniature models, or with a software program. “The explosion is all real,” he said, “and an audience absorbs this for the rest of the film because they know it’s not faked in a computer.”

Even so, what the tremendous detonation represented, ultimately, was an illusion of danger. “Coordinating the camera helicopters that shoot an explosion is actually more dangerous than detonating the explosion — if the powder is being rigged correctly,” Mr. Bruckheimer added.

Mr. Frazier said of the blast: “It was all a trick. The ferry you see in the film was put back in service four days after we filmed the explosion, and in my whole career I’ve never done more unintended damage than blowing out two windows.”

In the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the mixture of fertilizer and fuel oil was detonated all at once, at an extremely high speed, by dynamite. In “Déjà Vu,” the ferry explosion is actually a series of individual detonations placed throughout the length of the boat. And, although he is known as a “powder guy,” Mr. Frazier’s fuel of choice for the special effect was gasoline.

“Each gasoline bomb we rigged would burn off in three seconds if it went off by itself,” he explained. “But when you set off 50 gasoline bombs like we did within five seconds, there’s a cumulative heat effect that feeds on itself, and which just sucks this huge fireball into the hot air that keeps rising above the ferry. We added a little diesel fuel to give the fireball a red color, and a lot of black dirt, which gives the fireball its dark entrails.”

After the interior and exterior of the ferry were painstakingly covered with fire retardant, Mr. Frazier used 350 separate bombs that were grouped into 50 explosive “events.” Extending the time that the fireball burns was in large part the job of Chris Lebenzon, an editor and a veteran of Bruckheimer and Scott shoots. Mr. Lebenzon was working from film shot through 15 cameras strategically placed by another Bruckheimer-Scott veteran, the cinematographer Paul Cameron.

At the end of the “Déjà Vu” ferry explosion, 1,000 gallons of the gasoline-diesel fuel mixture burned long enough for the movie pros to simulate what only looks to be a catastrophe. Mr. Frazier and his special effects crew were inside the ferry with fire hoses and extinguishers as the special effects were detonated. New Orleans firefighters stood by but remained out of action.

“The code of a powder guy is that we put out our own fires,” Mr. Frazier said. (Another of Mr. Frazier’s credos is: Don’t hire military veterans trained in explosives — “All they want to do is rip and tear,” he said — or anyone who claims he loved blowing things up as a child. “They’re a little too spooky.”)

Ultimately audiences will have to process the explosion on their own terms. Stuart Fischoff, a retired professor of media psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, said he expects some viewers to stay away because of the graphic depiction of terrorist destruction and others to seek it out for much the same reason. He added that though he was disturbed by the “AT&T-commercial-like look that Tony Scott opens the film with before killing kids and their dolls,” the speed with which Mr. Scott establishes the “emotional caring, anger and desire for revenge allows the audience to immediately hope for the undoing of the terrorist act.”

Mr. Marsilii, the screenwriter, agreed. “One of the unique virtues of a time-travel story like ‘Déjà Vu’ is that it allows you to have your disaster and stop it too,” he said.

But he acknowledged that five years after he witnessed the events of Sept. 11, he was treading on dangerous ground by giving today’s attention-deficit film audiences such a bang in the first few minutes.

“If anyone sees that explosion and applauds,” he said, “then we’ve totally failed as filmmakers.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/movies/12john.html





Blow It Up and Start All Over Again
Laura M. Holson

“It’s a wonder, isn’t it?” the producer Jerry Bruckheimer asked rhetorically, looking up at a three-story reconstruction of the ship the Black Pearl on the set of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.”

He wasn’t talking about the three-masted square rigger, or even the 1,400 ceiling lights, which became so hot one day during filming some burst into flames. Nor was he referring to the 60-foot-high blue screen wrapped around the ship like a shower curtain hung from an oversized rail. What was a wonder, Mr. Bruckheimer mused one recent afternoon, was that the sequels to the first successful “Pirates” movie were made at all.

“They almost got canceled many times; money, budget, you name it,” Mr. Bruckheimer said as he walked up a flight of wooden stairs to the deck where director Gore Verbinski was rehearsing a scene with Johnny Depp for the third “Pirates” installment, which is due out this May.

Such challenges getting movies made are increasingly common in Hollywood these days. But what gave it a twist here was that Mr. Bruckheimer was referring to the Walt Disney Company’s biggest franchise in years, “Pirates,” and that cost-cutting was an issue even for him, the most powerful producer in Hollywood.

In an era when producers, directors, and even popular actors are required to toe a stricter line, Mr. Bruckheimer, too, is feeling the squeeze. His contribution to Disney cannot be underestimated; he has produced 17 films for it since 1991 which have brought in $5 billion at box offices around the world. Of those, he is best known for his action-packed adult thrillers like “Enemy of the State,” “Armageddon” and “Gone in 60 Seconds,” where car crashes, sexy leading ladies and explosions abound.

But as part of a corporate shift under the new Disney chief executive Robert Iger, the studio pledged this summer to make fewer films and focus on family-friendly movies that are marketable across all the company’s businesses, including theme parks, plush toys and television. That meant Mr. Bruckheimer was now in the onscreen amusement park business — a far cry from the highly stylized, color-saturated movies and television shows that made him famous.

Indeed his formula has been so successful, the producer’s foray into television in 2000 with “CSI” (an idea rejected by Disney executives) has become the cornerstone of a series of gritty procedural dramas that now make up about one-third of the CBS network’s prime-time lineup.

But while Hollywood producers often leave when a studio changes direction, Mr. Bruckheimer still has a few years left on his five-year contract with Disney. And many in Hollywood who know him suggest that it is Disney who will have to accommodate its star, not the other way around.

Terry Rossio, one of the writers of the “Pirates” trilogy, explained it this way, recalling a recent conversation with Mr. Bruckheimer about the blockbusters he produced during his 30-year career.

“I was standing on the deck of the Black Pearl with Jerry and I had to make small talk which is hard to do because he doesn’t talk much,” Mr. Rossio recalled. “Out of nowhere I asked him, ‘How do you get to be Jerry Bruckheimer?’ He replied, ‘Most people don’t understand the nature of power.’ His sentiment was you fight along the lines of what people already want. You put yourself where your agenda and the agenda of the people you are working with are the same. The reason Jerry rarely has to dig in his heels is because he doesn’t set up a situation where he has to.”

One coming Bruckheimer movie that will not fit the new Disney mold is “Déjà Vu,” a science fiction thriller directed by his longtime collaborator Tony Scott, to be released Nov. 22 by Disney’s Touchstone Pictures. “That wasn’t a typical Disney movie,” Mr. Bruckheimer said. (Among other things, a gas-soaked body is charred by fire.)

Disney would not want to lose Mr. Bruckheimer. The studio has made new deals with other producers, including the New York-based Scott Rudin, who is known for literary fare like “The Hours” and “Closer.” But since Mr. Bruckheimer began making blockbusters in the 1980s with Don Simpson, his late business partner — including “Top Gun” and “Beverly Hills Cop” — few others have matched his record.

“Our bread and butter, and where Jerry’s ultimate value is, is he is our Disney home run hitter,” said Richard Cook, chairman of Walt Disney Studios. “And that is what we want him to do.”

As such, Mr. Bruckheimer has the same status commonly conferred on celebrities like Denzel Washington, the star of “Déjà Vu.” So much so, AskMen.com, a men’s lifestyle and fashion Web site, recently ranked him No. 6 on its “Top 49 Men” list ahead of Mr. Depp, Bono and Mr. Washington.

And he is afforded a similar lifestyle. Mr. Bruckheimer owns homes in Brentwood and New York City, a 1,500-acre farm in Kentucky and another farm near Ojai, south of Santa Barbara. While he is loath to admit it, he owns a Gulfstream IV jet which he keeps at the Burbank airport near Disney’s headquarters. And he won’t reveal his age, though friends say he is 63.

Mr. Bruckheimer often travels with an assistant, Daniel Camins, who works as a personal schedule minder. On an afternoon in August, Mr. Camins drove Mr. Bruckheimer in the producer’s BMW 745il, to the Burbank set of “Pirates.” In October on another “Pirates” set in Palmdale, Mr. Camins not only carried a BlackBerry and cellphone for messages from Mr. Bruckheimer’s Santa Monica office, but also a plastic bag filled with almonds and dried fruit, which Mr. Bruckheimer’s nutritionist recommended he eat.

Mr. Bruckheimer, it is clear, likes things just so. At a charity dinner on Oct. 30, where he and the CBS chief executive, Leslie Moonves, were honored, the music from a video segment sounded achingly familiar. It was. Mr. Bruckheimer had commandeered the tape and replaced the planned music with songs from the scores of “Pirates” and “Armageddon.”

“It was so bad,” Mr. Bruckheimer said of the planned music, exhibiting a rare roll of the eyes. At the dinner, the actor Anthony LaPaglia, who stars in the Bruckheimer-produced “Without a Trace,” called him a “Hollywood zen master” and “true perfectionist.”

Tony Scott, who has known Mr. Bruckheimer since the 1980s and has directed six movies for him, including “Top Gun” and “Enemy of the State,” had another take. "The calm is on the outside,” Mr. Scott said. “But inside he’s humming."

And that attention to detail is greatly appreciated at Disney. “You don’t have to worry,” Mr. Cook said.

In October, ago Mr. Bruckheimer attended a music meeting for “Déjà Vu” at a studio in Venice. The meeting was to begin at 4 p.m., but he and Mr. Scott were late. The producer had spent the morning at a screening of “Déjà Vu” and, midday, had been whisked to the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood, where he introduced Mr. Scott to an eager crowd of Disney movie executives who had gathered for their annual meeting. (Later that night he attended a charity event honoring Mr. Iger.)

Mr. Scott and Mr. Bruckheimer were to review music composed by Harry Gregson-Williams for several movie scenes. Mr. Bruckheimer tends to work with the same people; this was his fifth movie with the composer. Mr. Scott, dressed in a sweatshirt and shorts, sat in a chair and tapped his foot nervously, while Mr. Gregson-Williams fiddled with a few keys on a monitor to bring up the scenes on a large screen. Mr. Bruckheimer, prone to long silences, sat quietly on the couch.

The composer showed a car chase where Mr. Washington followed a killer to a hideout. The music was loud and unrelenting. "It would help us if we had a melody, maybe his melody," said Mr. Bruckheimer, referring to a leitmotif that signaled when Mr. Washington’s character was onscreen. “You zone out. You need something over it that distracts you.”

The exchanges were polite — Mr. Bruckheimer rarely spoke above a loud whisper — but Mr. Gregson-Williams seemed unnerved.

For another scene, Mr. Gregson-Williams had created a haunting melody, but left out the last notes. "You didn’t finish it and if you did, I’d be happy,” Mr. Bruckheimer said.

“All right," said Mr. Gregson-Williams, dejected. "I’ll have another go at that."

As Mr. Bruckheimer and the crew were leaving, the composer turned to a guest and smiled meekly. “Welcome to my life,” he said.

Mr. Bruckheimer said afterward it was up to him to remind the composer of the audience. “I know what I felt it should be, and when he got it there, he loved it,” he said. “You don’t just not do it.”

Mr. Scott said Mr. Bruckheimer’s exacting standards come from a deep-seated need to remain relevant. "There is a confidence that comes with age, but Jerry is still insecure, as I’m insecure,” Mr. Scott said. “The insecurity comes from the fact you think you might lose it. Not the 10 houses or 4 Jaguars. It’s that your confidence might have gone."

Few would think the producer lacked confidence, although Mr. Bruckheimer himself admitted to a “fear of failure.” But Disney in many ways is a comforting home: most studios cannot rival its marketing prowess.

This year Mr. Bruckheimer has been consumed with the second and third “Pirates” movies. And with good reason. Industry executives estimate the combined budget of the two movies at nearly $475 million, not including marketing costs. (“Dead Man’s Chest,” was released in July and brought in more than $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales.)

While visiting the set in Palmdale in October, Mr. Bruckheimer slipped quietly behind the director’s chair with barely a hello. “He’s a genius,” Mr. Bruckheimer said of Mr. Verbinski. “What can I tell him? If I’m in his face, I hired the wrong director.”

Of course Mr. Bruckheimer isn’t always so deferential. Anthony Hopkins, who starred in “Bad Company,” told reporters he sparred with Mr. Bruckheimer when he was asked to learn new lines given to him by the producer on the day a scene was to be shot. In August, Mr. Bruckheimer met with the “Pirates” script writers Ted Elliot and Mr. Rossio, who wanted to give Will Turner more dialogue to develop the character. (Mr. Turner is played by Orlando Bloom.) Mr. Bruckheimer resisted, fearing moviegoers would be confused.

“He is willing to go with us down the road of complexity,” Mr. Rossio said. “But at times we feel he is constraining us from doing things for fear they are too complex. It’s common for us to polarize, although we end somewhere in the middle.”

Mr. Bruckheimer said of the exchange: "I understand what they were saying but, the difference is this: I am the audience.”

And that sense of what moviegoers want should put him and Disney on the same page, at least most of the time. If not, he has options.

If Disney does not want to make the movies he produces, Mr. Bruckheimer said, “We’ll make them someplace else.”

“We are going to serve it up to them and see if they like it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/13/bu...uckheimer.html





3 Announces Unlimited Skype Calls and Other Goodies

Hutchison, more commonly known as 3 in the UK, today announced a partnership with Skype, Sling Media, Yahoo, Nokia, Google, eBay, Microsoft, Orb and Sony Ericsson. The idea is to bring all of these services on to your mobile for a flat rate fee -- it's been dubbed 'X-Series'.

According to the hype, you'll get free Skype-to-Skype calls to any PC or other X-Series user worldwide, be able to search on Google and Yahoo, send MSN instant messages to your friends, watch your TV from a Slingbox, access your computer at home with Orb and buy or sell stuff on eBay.

So far the only thing getting between the majority of consumers and the mobile Internet has been the cost of accessing online content and the limitations of certain sites on certain handsets. 3 says it is going to eradicate these problems by charging a set fee and making sure that its handsets support the content properly. The first handsets to be sold on the X-Series plan will be the Nokia N73 and the Sony Ericsson W950i Walkman phone.

Researchers at IDC say that 1.3 billion people will connect to the Internet via mobile phones by 2008, and a recent study by Informa Telecoms and Media and the Mobile Entertainment Forum estimated that mobile user-generated content will be worth $13.2bn by 2011. As most of the speakers at this morning's presentation pointed out, the traditional mobile strategy of charging people per megabyte is like using dial-up, whereas a flat-rate plan will give users the freedom to do much more.

This isn't the first time we've seen a flat-rate plan go into action, though. T-Mobile also started its Web'n'Walk plan this year, charging users £7.50 for unlimited mobile Internet use. The main difference between these two services, though, is that 3 is planning to offer a better overall package, with more preinstalled applications than T-Mobile. The X-Series service will be available in December.

Some sceptics have pointed out that these services will not work properly over a 3G connection or using the proposed handsets, but we tested it out without any major problems. It will be interesting to see if it works as well when hundreds of people are using Skype over 3G in the same cell, but we'll have to wait until Christmas to find out.

The people in the photograph might look like a normal bunch of suits but they could be behind one of the most significant mobile content deals ever. From left to right is Christian Salbaing, managing director of European telecommunications for Hutchison in Europe, standing next to Frank Sixt, group finance director for Hutchison Whampoa Limited.

Then there's Blake Krikorian, chief executive and co-founder of Sling Media, Canning Fok Kin-ning, group managing director of Hutchison Whampoa Limited, Miles Flint, president of Sony Ericsson and Sharon Baylay, general manager of Microsoft Online Services Group, UK.

Finally, Dr Kai Öistämö, executive vice president and general manager of mobile phones for Nokia, Niklas Zennström, chief executive and co-founder of Skype, Scott Monson, general manager for Orb Europe and David Thévenon, head of wireless partnerships EMEA for Google.

Also there but not in the picture was Dominique Vidal, regional vice-president and managing director of Yahoo Europe. Meg Whitman, chief executive of eBay and Terry Semel, chief executive of Yahoo, made appearances, too, via pre-recorded videos. –AL
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/0,39...9285322,00.htm





From August

Fugitive Exec Nabbed After Skype Call
Eric Bangeman

Kobi Alexander, the founder of Comverse, was nabbed in Negombo, Sri Lanka yesterday by a private investigator. He is wanted by the US government in connection with financial fraud charges. He is accused of profiting from some very shady stock-option deals, to the detriment of Comverse shareholders. Once the deals became public and he was indicted, he resigned as CEO and fled the US.

Alexander was traced to the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo after he placed a one-minute call using Skype. That was enough to alert authorities to his presence and hunt him down.

The fugitive former CEO may have been convinced that using Skype made him safe from tracking, but he—and everyone else that believes VoIP is inherently more secure than a landline—was wrong. Tracking anonymous peer-to-peer VoIP traffic over the Internet is possible (PDF). In fact, it can be done even if the parties have taken some steps to disguise the traffic.

VoIP and law enforcement have been in the news lately, due primarily to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. CALEA, passed in 1994, gives the FBI the ability to easily tap landline and cell phone calls. As written, CALEA had originally included some exemptions for Internet-based systems, but the FBI convinced the Federal Communications Commission that they should not apply to VoIP traffic. As a result, VoIP operators in the US will need to make their systems wiretap friendly.

If nothing else, Alexander's capture reinforces the message that despite appearances, nothing we do on the Internet is truly anonymous.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060824-7582.html





Cracked It!

Three million Britons have been issued with the new hi-tech passport, designed to frustrate terrorists and fraudsters. So why did Steve Boggan and a friendly computer expert find it so easy to break the security codes?
Steve Boggan

Six months ago, with the help of a rather scary computer expert, I deconstructed the life of an airline passenger simply by using information garnered from a boarding-pass stub he had thrown into a dustbin on the Heathrow Express. By using his British Airways frequent-flyer number and buying a ticket in his name on the airline's website, we were able to access his personal data, passport number, date of birth and nationality. Based on this information, using publicly available databases, we found out where he lived, his profession, all his academic qualifications and even how much his house was worth.

It would have been only a short hop to stealing his identity, committing fraud in his name and generally ruining his life.

Great news then, we thought, that the UK had just begun to issue new, ultra-secure passports, incorporating tiny microchips to store the holder's details and a digital description of their physical features (known in the jargon as biometrics). These, the argument went, would make identity theft much more difficult and pave the way for the government's proposed ID cards in 2008 or 2009.

Today, some three million such passports have been issued, and they don't look so secure. I am sitting with my scary computer man and we have just sucked out all the supposedly secure data and biometric information from three new passports and displayed it all on a laptop computer.

The UK Identity and Passport Service website says the new documents are protected by "an advanced digital encryption technique". So how come we have the information? What could criminals or terrorists do with it? And what could it mean for the passports and the ID cards that are meant to follow?

First it is necessary to explain why the new passports were introduced, and how they work.After the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, in which fake passports were used, the US decided it wanted foreign citizens who presented themselves at its borders to have more secure "machine-readable" identity documents. It told 27 countries that participated in a visa waiver programme that citizens with passports issued after the 26th of last month must have micro-chipped biometric passports or would have to apply for a US visa. Among those 27 countries are the major EU members, and other friendly nations ranging from Andorra and Iceland to Singapore, Japan and Brunei. The UK, of course, is also included.

Standards for the new passports were set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in 2003 and adopted by the waiver countries and the US. The ICAO recommended that passports should contain facial biometrics, though countries could introduce fingerprints at a later date. All these would be stored on a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) microchip, which can be accessed from a short distance using radio waves. Similar chips are commonly found in retail, where they are used for stock control.
Fatally, however, the ICAO suggested that the key needed to access the data on the chips should be comprised of, in the following order, the passport number, the holder's date of birth and the passport expiry date, all of which are contained on the printed page of the passport on a "machine readable zone." When an immigration official swipes the passport through a reader, this feeds in the key, which allows a microchip reader to communicate with the RFID chip. The data this contains, including the holder's picture, is then displayed on the official's screen. The assumption at this stage is that this document is as authentic as it is super-secure. And, as we shall see later, this could be highly significant.

Once the passports began to be issued in the UK in March, we began laying the foundations for examining them. Phil Booth, national coordinator of the campaign group NO2ID, suggested to his members that they apply for a new passport. Anyone who gets one before ID cards are rolled out will not have to register for a card until their passports expire in 10 years' time, and this appealed to Booth.

At the same time, Adam Laurie, my computer expert and technical director of the Bunker Secure Hosting, a Kent-based computer security company, and I began laying plans to examine the new passports. Laurie is actually not a scary individual - he is regarded in the industry as a technical wizard who cares about privacy and civil rights - but much of the electronic information he uncovers is. Two years ago, he revealed that Bluetooth mobile phones could be accessed remotely, drained of their contact details, diary entries and pictures, and manipulated to act as bugging devices. The cellphone industry spent millions of pounds plugging the gaps he exposed.

By last month, Booth, Laurie and I each had access to a new biometric chipped passport and were ready to begin testing them. Laurie's first port of call was the ICAO's website, where the organisation had published specifications for the new travel documents. This is where he learned that the key to opening up the secure chip was contained in the passports themselves - passport number, date of birth and expiry date.

"I was amazed that they made it so easy," Laurie says. "The information contained in the chip is not encrypted, but to access it you have to start up an encrypted conversation between the reader and the RFID chip in the passport.

"The reader - I bought one for £250 - has to say hello to the chip and tell it that it is authorised to make contact. The key to that is in the date of birth, etc. Once they communicate, the conversation is encrypted, but I wrote some software in about 48 hours that made sense of it.

"The Home Office has adopted a very high encryption technology called 3DES - that is, to a military-level data-encryption standard times three. So they are using strong cryptography to prevent conversations between the passport and the reader being eavesdropped, but they are then breaking one of the fundamental principles of encryption by using non-secret information actually published in the passport to create a 'secret key'. That is the equivalent of installing a solid steel front door to your house and then putting the key under the mat."

Within minutes of applying the three passports to the reader, the information from all of them has been copied and the holders' images appear on the screen of Laurie's laptop. The passports belong to Booth, and to Laurie's son, Max, and my partner, who have all given their permission.

Booth is staggered. He has undercut Laurie by finding an RFID reader for £174, which also works. "This is simply not supposed to happen," Booth says. "This could provide a bonanza for counterfeiters because drawing the information from the chip, complete with the digital signature it contains, could result in a passport being passed off as the real article. You could make a perfect clone of the passport."

But could you - and what use would my passport be to you? A security feature of the chip ensures that information cannot be added or altered, so you couldn't put your picture on my chip. So is our attack really so impressive?

The Home Office thinks not. It correctly points out that the information sucked out of the chip is only the same as that which appears on the page, readable with the human eye. And to obtain the key in the first place, you would need to have access to the passport to read (with the naked eye) its number, expiry date and the date of birth of its holder.

"This doesn't matter," says a Home Office spokesman. "By the time you have accessed the information on the chip, you have already seen it on the passport. What use would my biometric image be to you? And even if you had the information, you would still have to counterfeit the new passport - and it has lots of new security features. If you were a criminal, you might as well just steal a passport."

However, some computer experts believe the Home Office is being dangerously naive. Several months ago, Lukas Grunwald, founder of DN-Systems Enterprise Solutions in Germany, conducted a similar attack to ours on a German biometric passport and succeeded in cloning its RFID chip. He believes unscrupulous criminals or terrorists would find this technology very useful.

"If you can read the chip, then you can clone it," he says. "You could use this to clone a passport that would exploit the system to illegally enter another country." (We did not clone any of our passport chips on the assumption that to do so would be illegal.)

Grunwald adds: "The problems could get worse when they put fingerprint biometrics on to the passports. There are established ways of making forged fingerprints. In the future, the authorities would like to have automated border controls, and such forged fingerprints [stuck on to fingers] would probably fool them."

But what about facial recognition systems (your biometric passport contains precise measurements of key points on your face and head)? "Yes," says Grunwald, "but they are not yet in operation at airports and the technology throws up between 20 and 25% false negatives or false positives. It isn't reliable."

Neither is the human eye, according to research conducted by a team of psychologists from the University of Westminster in 1996. Remember, information - such as a new picture - cannot be added to a cloned chip, so anyone using it to make a counterfeit passport would have to use one that bore a reasonable resemblance to themselves.

But during Westminster University's study, which examined whether putting people's images on credit cards might reduce fraud, supermarket staff drafted in for tests had great difficulty matching faces to pictures. The conclusion was that pictures would not improve security and they were never introduced on credit cards. This means that each time you hand over your passport at, say, a hotel reception or car-rental office abroad to be "photocopied", it could be cloned with equipment like ours. This could have been done with an old passport, but since the new biometric passports are supposed to be secure they are more likely to be accepted without question at borders.

Given the results of the Westminster study, if a terrorist bore a slight resemblance to you - and grew a beard, perhaps - he would have a good chance of getting through a border. Because his chip is cloned, with the necessary digital signatures, and because you have not reported your passport stolen - you still have it! - his machine-readable travel document will get him wherever he wants to go, using your identity.

What about the technical difficulties? The government claims the new biometric passport chips can be read over a distance of just 2cm, but researchers all over the world claim to have read them from further. The physics governing those in British passports says they could be read over a metre, but no one has yet done that. A Dutch team claims to have contacted chips at 30cm.

Laurie has, however, rigged up a piece of equipment that can connect to a passport over 7.5cm. That isn't as far as the Dutch 30cm, but it is enough if your target subject is sitting next to you on the London Underground or crushed up against you on the Gatwick Airport monorail, his pocketed passport next to the reader you have hidden in a bag.

It takes around four seconds to suck out the information with a reader; then it can be relayed and unscrambled by an accomplice with a laptop up to 1km away. With a Heath Robinson device we built on Tuesday using a Bluetooth antenna connected to an RFID reader, Laurie relayed details of his son's passport over a distance of 10 metres and through two walls to a laptop.

Ah, the Home Office will say, but you still need to see the information in the passport that will form the key needed for connection. Well, not necessarily. Consider this scenario: A postman involved with organised crime knows he has a passport to deliver to your home. He already knows your name and address from the envelope. He can get your date of birth by several means, including credit-reference agencies or from the register of births, marriages and deaths (and, let's face it, he delivers all your birthday cards anyway).

He knows the expiry date - 10 years from yesterday, give or take a day, when the passport was mailed to you. That leaves the nine-digit passport number. NO2ID says reports from its 30,000 members up and down the country are throwing up a number of similarities in the first four digits of the passport number, so that reduces the number of permutations, potentially leaving five purely random numbers to establish.

"If the rogue postman were to take your passport home, without opening the envelope he could put it against a reader and begin a 'brute force' attack in which your computer tries 12 different permutations every second until it has the right access codes," says Laurie. "A five-digit number would take 23 hours to crack at the most. Once all those numbers were established, you could communicate with the RFID chip and steal all the information. And your passport could be delivered to you, unopened and just a day late."

But is this really credible? Would criminals or terrorists really go to such lengths? Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge computer laboratory, believes they would. "The point is that once you have extracted the data from the chip you can have a forged passport that contains not just forged physical stuff," he says. "You also have the digital bit-stream so the digital signature of the passport checks out. That makes it possible to travel through borders with it.

"What concerns me is that this demonstrates bad design on the part of the Home Office, and we know that government IT projects have a habit of going terribly wrong. There is a lack of security in what we can see - so what about the 90% of the iceberg in the system that we can't see?

"There isn't even a defence against the brute-force attack. In much the same way as you are only allowed three attempts to feed in your PIN number at an ATM, the passport chip could have been made to stop allowing repeated incorrect attempts to contact it. As things stand, a computer can keep trying until it gets the numbers right. To say this doesn't matter displays a cavalier lack of concern."

The problems we have identified with RFID chips in passports raise all sorts of questions about the UK's proposed ID card scheme, which will use the same technology. The government has not said exactly what will be contained in the ID card's chip, but there will be a National Identity Register that could contain around 50 pieces of information about you, ranging from your name, age, and all your addresses, to your national insurance number and biometric details. Eventually, you may need one to access healthcare. It could even replace the passport.

Already, then, criminals and terrorists will have identified just how useful cloned ID cards might be. It would be folly to think their best minds are not on the case.

The Home Office insists that UK passports are secure and among the best in the world, but not everyone agrees. Last week, an EU-funded body entitled the Future of Identity in the Information Society (Fidis) issued a declaration on machine-readable travel documents such as RFID-chipped passports and ID cards. It said the technology was "poorly conceived" and added: "European governments have effectively forced citizens to adopt new ... documents which dramatically decrease their security and privacy and increase risk of identity theft."

The government is now facing demands from the Liberal Democrats and anti-ID card groups for a recall of the passports so that simple devices such as foil covers can be installed - at enormous cost. Such covers would at least stop chips being scanned remotely, though they wouldn't prevent an unscrupulous hotel receptionist from opening the passport and sucking out its contents the way we did.

It may be that at some point in the future the government will accept that putting RFID chips in to passports is ill-conceived and unnecessary. Until then, the only people likely to embrace this kind of technology are those with mischief in mind.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/idcards/st...950226,00.html





Researchers Able To Track P2P Data Through Anonymous Networks
Jack Spratts

In a paper published last fall, researchers at George Mason University claim to have successfully identified originating addresses of P2P packets even when encrypted and sent over Internet anonymising services, and accomplished it with near 100% accuracy by secretly watermarking the streams (PDF) with special queueing sequences.

On telephone calls generated with Skype, a low latency packet switching Voice-Over-Internet Protocol (VOIP) peer-to-peer service and encrypted in 256 bit AES and further VPN anonymised through findnot.com, they achieved successful tracking in every instance the calls were at least two minutes in length.

The new technique works by delaying outgoing data in amounts so miniscule researchers claim it’s undetectable to users, and then precisely timing its arrival.

The team did not say if they can also track encrypted data on other anonymous file-sharing networks like so-called darknets.

The US Air Force supplied partial funding.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=23302





Vista RTM Cracked by Pirates Before Release
James Bannan

Well, so much for closing piracy loopholes! With Windows Vista and Office 2007 only just going Gold, and not even available to Microsoft beta testers, developers or volume licence subscribers, the first cracked versions have already hit the pirate boards.
The Windows version which has been released is called Vista BillGates. It doesn’t feature any activation cracks itself, and the supplied product key is just for the installation.

The activation crack is a separate download, and works by replacing the licensing components with components from beta builds. Then using a product key from Beta 1, Beta 2, RC1 or RC2, the Gold version of Vista can be activated online.

In this sense, it’s not a true crack – it’s simply leveraging off compatibilities between the betas and the Gold release. Vista still needs to be activated, and it looks like for the moment, there’s no way around that.

Also, my guess is that this particular loophole won’t be open for very long. Microsoft has a list of every product key it issued during the beta testing, so it’s not going to be difficult to blanket block them once the testing period officially ends.

However, it’s still staggering as to just how quickly this was released. Of course, a massive target like Windows Vista was always going to be instantly subjected to pirate attacks, but to be distributing copies so soon is impressive, to say the least.

On a more sour note for Microsoft, a full version of Office 2007 Enterprise was released on the boards a few hours after Vista BillGates. Unlike Vista, Office 2007 uses Volume Activation 1.0 (no activation required), so it’s unclear how Microsoft is going to be able to counter its dissemination in future.

So is it a case of Pirates 1, Microsoft 0? I don’t think so – not yet, anyway. You can tell a lot about the strength of a product by the nature of the methods used to circumvent its copy protection. Some apps simply need the right product key, others need a key plus a cracked executable.

With Vista, Microsoft have demonstrated (or at least appear to – it’s rather early to tell) that they are way beyond low-end piracy. Rather like NS5s in I, Robot, the product is now so strongly tied to its parent that breaking that relationship seems ever-more improbable, given the parent’s ability to keep tabs on each and every installation of Windows out there.

Perhaps Vista is subject to Asimov’s Three Laws. Oooo…freaky.
http://apcmag.com/node/4560




Hackers Steal Data From Landis Lab
AP

A hacker stole data from computers at the French anti-doping lab where tests are being challenged by American cyclist Floyd Landis, police said Tuesday.

The Chatenay-Malabry laboratory, which is accredited by the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency, analyzed the samples that indicated Landis had elevated levels of testosterone when he won the Tour de France in July.

Police are investigating a complaint that computers at the lab were breached by a hacker. The complaint was lodged by French Anti-Doping Agency president Pierre Bordry on Nov. 7.

The prosecutor's office in the Paris suburb of Nanterre has opened a preliminary inquiry into "intrusion into an information system" and "theft of data."

The inquiry has been turned over to police specialists.

Bordry said he wants the French government to help tighten security around the lab.

"Intruders penetrated the lab's information systems and used material taken inside in order to denigrate the lab," Bordry told France Info radio Tuesday.

According to sports daily L'Equipe, a hacker accessed data and sent out letters to the IOC and WADA with the aim of discrediting the lab by calling into question its reliability.

Bordry said letters were also sent to an official at Montreal's anti-doping lab.

"It's true that there were letters sent as if they were coming from the lab," Bordry said. "To foreign labs such as the one in Montreal, which immediately caught our attention ... we are talking about manipulation of information."

On Sunday, Landis said in a French television interview that the same lab made crucial errors in his tests.

"Even the best people make mistakes," Landis said. "I can't say that the lab is always a bad lab, but I can say that in this case it made some mistakes ... I did not take testosterone."

Tour de France organizers no longer consider Landis the Tour champion. Landis will contest the test results in hearings before the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. If found guilty of doping, he would be formally stripped of the title and face a two-year ban.

Seven-time Tour champion Lance Armstrong, a former teammate of Landis, has also claimed the French lab is unreliable. The lab helped develop testing for the performance enhancer EPO.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...111400389.html





Chile Court Releases Two Accused Hackers
AP

Two Chileans accused of hacking into thousands of government Web sites were freed from jail Wednesday but ordered to stay away from computers while the case is investigated, their lawyer said.

Police accuse Carlos Amigo, 37, known online as SSH-2, and Leonardo Hernandez, 23, nicknamed Nettoxic, of belonging to a team of hackers responsible for breaking into more than 8,000 Web sites around the world, including that of the U.S. space agency.

They were arrested Nov. 7 along with two underage friends. The twin brothers, who were not identified or jailed due to their age, acted under the names Codiux and Phnx, police said.

The arrests resulted from eight months of investigation with the help of authorities in the United States, Israel and several South American countries, police said.

Their lawyer, Andres Morales, acknowledged the men infiltrated a large number of pages but said they did not damage any files or servers.

"They did it for fun, to brag about their computer capacities," he said. They "did not commit any (serious) crime, just a misdemeanor."

The Santiago Court of Appeals ruled that Amigo and Hernandez must stay away from computers and are prohibited from leaving the country for 90 days - the deadline for the prosecutor in the case to file charges. They also must appear weekly before corrections officials.
http://www.physorg.com/news82836975.html





With IE 7, Green Means Go for Legit Sites
Joris Evers

Starting early next year, the address bar in Internet Explorer 7 will turn green when surfing to a legitimate Web site--but only in some cases, not all.

The colored address bar is designed to be a sign that a specific site can be trusted, giving people the green light to carry out transactions there. It is a weapon in the fight against phishing scams, which use fraudulent Web sites.

The idea is among the draft guidelines created by the CA Browser Forum, an organization comprised of companies that issue certificates for Web sites and major browser makers. Last week, Microsoft decided to adopt that draft version for IE 7, released last month. It plans to add the functionality in January.

A primary concern is to help the targets of online scams, said Markellos Diorinos, a product manager for Windows at Microsoft. "If you look at the phishing problem today, it is usually about all the big brands that get hijacked," he said. "We addressed the problem that we have at hand today, and that was one very important thing for us."

There is broad agreement in the industry that Web browsers need a better way to identify trusted sites. The familiar yellow padlock icon found on sites today was designed to show that traffic with a Web site is encrypted and that a third party, called a certification authority, has identified the site. However, there's agreement that the system has been weakened by lax standards and loose supervision.

But the new system adopted for IE 7 has been causing friction, too. Initially, only corporations will be able to get the online trust indicator--a rule that shuts out smaller businesses. While the CA Browser Forum is still working on final guidelines that would include all legitimate Web sites, those could take a while to complete.

That has led some to complain that the software giant is moving too fast. Other browser makers are taking a "wait and see" approach, and some certificate issuers and small businesses say that Microsoft is jumping the gun in introducing the technology before everyone's on board.

"I believe this is an unfair standard," said Gregory Waldron, chief executive officer at Visual Water, a Conifer, Co.-based seller of water features and fountains. "It undoes what I think is really one of the greatest things about the Internet: the ability for anyone with a good idea and a little capital to compete with Amazon or Overstock."

Locked out?
IE 7 will display a green address bar when the user goes to a Web site that has obtained an "extended validation certificate," or EV SSL, given only to incorporated entities. This new type of security certificate will be sold by the same companies that today sell Secure Socket Layer, or SSL, certificates that allow traffic to be encrypted and that are indicated by a yellow padlock. What’s EV SSL?

EV SSL stands for Extended Validation Secure Socket Layer. These are SSL certificates just like those that allow encrypted connections between browsers and sites.

The difference, though, is that the identity of each certificate holder has been verified. Requestors will be subject to a strict vetting process which all issuers must follow.

The problem is that while it is easy for sellers of certificates to verify the authenticity of a corporation, it is tough to do the same for sole proprietorships, partnerships and other types of businesses. The CA Browser Forum has talked about guidelines to do this for over a year and has not yet been able to agree.

As Visual Water is a limited liability company, Waldron believes he won't be able to get its Web site displayed with a green address bar in IE 7. He says that Microsoft is putting him at a competitive disadvantage.

"What shocks me about Microsoft is that it makes so much money off of small businesses and then it seems that sometimes they forget we exist," Waldron said. "Incorporation doesn't make a company more legitimate than another company."

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant recognizes that under the draft guidelines, not every legitimate Web site will be able to show a green browser bar. "That is definitely a legitimate concern, but it is not an immediate problem," Diorinos said, stressing that corporations bear the brunt of most phishing attacks.

Other browser makers
Opera Software and makers of the open-source Konqueror browser agree with Microsoft that the big-brand phishing problem should have first priority. Phishing is a prevalent online scam that uses Web sites faked to look like they belong to a legitimate provider to trick people into giving up personal information. The scams, which often target financial institutions, cost businesses millions of dollars and hurt consumer trust in the Net.

"Our main concern has been protecting users from phishing attacks. Most of these companies that the current guidelines cover are the victims of phishing attacks," said Michael Smith, part of the standards team at Opera.

Still, Opera is waiting to see how Microsoft fares with the green bar in IE 7 before adding such functionality to its browser, Smith said.

Mozilla, which manages development of the Firefox browser, has not committed itself and appears to be holding out for final guidelines on extended validation certificates.

"Mozilla is evaluating various solutions, participating in the CA Browser Forum, and actively encouraging discussion between vendors and users to find a resolution that serves the needs of everyone," a company representative said.

Browser friction
The guidelines Microsoft is adopting--officially called "Draft 11 of the CA Browser Forum guidelines for extended validation certificates"--were voted down as a standard at the forum's most recent meeting because they were not inclusive enough, several members of the CA Browser Forum told CNET News.com.

"I am very dissatisfied with the fact that noncorporate entities are being excluded," said Scott Harris, CEO of XRamp, a San Antonio, Texas-based seller of Web site certificates. "Small companies aren't getting phished, but to tell people that it is safe to buy from businesses with a green bar and then not allow small businesses to get it is just discriminatory."

On the other hand, Comodo says it's a good sign that after more than a year of talks there is real movement. The Jersey City, N.J.-based certification company started the CA Browser Forum effort last year to address the issue of Web site verification.

"The champagne is on the table and the glasses are chilling in the freezer and the cheeses are warming on the table, but we have not quite dug in yet," said Judy Shapiro, the vice president of marketing at Comodo.

Some wiggle room?
It will take some time for people to become used to the green bar in IE 7, Diorinos said. By the time that consumers really perceive the color-filled address bar in the browser as a trust indicator, small businesses should also be able to get the new certificates, he said.

Comodo hopes the guidelines will include all legitimate Web sites within 90 days of when IE 7 starts displaying the first green bar in early 2007. "Otherwise there will be material damage" to unincorporated entities, Shapiro said. VeriSign, the world's largest certificate issuer, thinks it will take at least double that time.

"I don't think it is a purposeful move to exclude certain types of businesses," said Spiros Theodossiou, a product manager at VeriSign in Mountain View, Calif. "We're still going through a number of steps to include them."

IE 7 is ready to support the new certificates. However, the browser bar won't turn green until Microsoft has issued new root certificates for Windows, so the browser can recognize the new extended validation certificates. That won't happen until January.
Meanwhile, certification authorities such as VeriSign, XRamp and Comodo will need to be audited before they can sell the new certificate type. This is to ensure they follow the correct practices. All three companies will sell the extended validation certificate, even if they disagree with Microsoft's move to adopt the draft guidelines.

Corporations that want the address bar to turn green when people visit their Web site will have to buy a new certificate. This process will include extra verification to identify the company as legitimate.

With regards to criticism that it's adopting a technology that isn't fully baked, Microsoft said it isn't ignoring the standards process. It is committed to creating a standard for the new certificates, but felt it should move ahead with the draft version to deal with the phishing problem, Diorinos said.

"We had a really good first step that we could make available to users today and help online transactions today, we did not want to keep it under wraps until we can have a great solution," he said. "We're still keeping an open eye on how to evolve this and make this a great solution as soon as possible."
http://news.com.com/With+IE+7%2C+gre...3-6134647.html





Identity Thief Is Often Found in Family Photo
John Leland

In the five years since his divorce, Eric Wagenhauser had moved on with his life. He had remarried and was sharing custody of the three children from his first marriage. Then, last year, Mr. Wagenhauser discovered a new wrinkle on American divorce: his former wife had used the children’s Social Security numbers to apply for nine credit cards in their names. She obtained two.

Mr. Wagenhauser’s ordeal over the next year, which involved police departments in two Texas counties, banks, credit bureaus and the Social Security Administration, is familiar to many identity theft victims — the crime often begins at home.

Though most victims never learn who stole their identities, half of those who do say the thief was a family member, a friend, a neighbor or an in-home employee, according to surveys by the Federal Trade Commission and Javelin Strategy and Research, a private research firm. The surveys estimate that 9 million to 10 million Americans have their identities stolen each year.

Mr. Wagenhauser’s former wife, Ivy Ash, began applying for credit cards in the children’s names soon after the divorce. She ran up about $200 in unpaid bills, he said, which grew to about $1,000 with late fees and interest penalties. She pleaded guilty to two counts of fraudulent use of a credit card this year and is now in a Texas prison.

But the effect of the thefts is still being felt in the Wagenhauser household. “This has been a financial strain, and to be quite honest, you can hear my wife and I bickering right now over this,” said Mr. Wagenhauser, a Houston construction worker. “We’ve had to go into marriage counseling ourselves because this has been so stressful on our own marriage, just dealing with it, the fighting, the arguments.

“It has almost reached the point where my wife and I have gotten a divorce over all the stress related to having to fight the crime. It stretches out over so many things. That’s what makes it so devastating and insidious.”

Identity theft involving family members takes many forms, said Betsy Broder, assistant director of the Federal Trade Commission’s division of privacy and identity protection. A child steals a parent’s identity to buy drugs, one sibling steals another’s identity to try to avoid arrest or debt.

Identity theft is often difficult to solve and prosecute, and, in the case of families, victims may be reluctant to report relatives to the police.

The fraud went on for five years before Mr. Wagenhauser became aware of what was happening. By then, the mother’s actions had created credit histories for two of the under-age children, which Mr. Wagenhauser worries will cause them future trouble.

“When my kids turn 18 and go to college, they’re not going to be able to buy a car or get a student loan because they’ve got bad credit,” Mr. Wagenhauser said. “No one’s going to rent them an apartment. They’re going to be turned down for jobs because there’s so many companies that run credit histories.”

“They’re kids,” he added. “They don’t have any idea what’s going on. All the sudden they’re adults, and they’re left holding the baggage.”

Suspicious parents can look out for clues that their children’s identities have been compromised, said Jay Foley, a founder and director of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit organization that helps victims.

“Let’s say Mom and Dad are divorced, and Junior goes to stay with dad,” Mr. Foley said. “When he calls Mom, she sees the kid’s name on the caller ID instead of Dad’s. If that was set up in the kid’s name, what else was set up?”

If young children start to receive applications for credit cards in the mail, it is a sign that someone with access to their Social Security numbers has applied for credit in their names, Mr. Foley said.

After their mother went to prison, Mr. Wagenhauser’s children moved in with him. He and his new wife, Tracey, have not decided how they will explain the crime, or the punishment, to their youngest children, who are 10 and 8.

“It’s definitely estranged me from my oldest daughter,” who is 15, Mr. Wagenhauser said. “My oldest daughter, who is old enough to understand, has been told that I am the one who put her mother in jail. She’s not accepting that her mother is the one who did this to her and to herself.”

Identity theft by a family member or someone close to the family is probably underreported and raises thorny questions about trust, responsibility and loyalty, Ms. Broder said.

“We see parents taking advantage of their children, and children taking advantage of their older parents,” she said. “We can tell consumers and businesses to be careful about how they safeguard their personal information, but it’s hard to tell people to safeguard their information from the people that they love.”

For Brenda Bare, of Snellville, Ga., the identity thief was a trusted friend whom Ms. Bare, 58, had known for 22 years. The friend, a woman, had been living in Ms. Bare’s house.

When Ms. Bare returned home in August after being away for a month to care for her mother, she discovered that 10 checks and a recently expired driver’s license were missing. A credit card offer in her name was in the woman’s bedroom with the application form torn off.

“I said, ‘You have to leave here tonight,’ ” Ms. Bare recalled.

For the next two weeks, Ms. Bare tried to repair the damage. She found helpful a checklist for identity theft victims; versions are available from the Federal Trade Commission and the Identity Theft Resource Center. Ms. Bare discovered that four checks had been cashed, for about $400 in all, and that an application had been made for a credit card, though it had not been approved.

Because the crime was committed in her home by someone she trusted, Ms. Bare said she felt vulnerable.

“The first two weeks I slept with the front and back porch lights on, and if I would hear a noise, I was awake,” she said. “I have a dog, but my dog knows her. But I’m feeling better about it and going on with my life.”

Ms. Bare’s checks had been cashed in another county. She finally tracked down the stores and banks where the checks were cashed, and local police officers issued arrest warrants. But even after her bank cleared her of responsibility for the forged checks, she said, she was still not off the hook.

“After the bank reimbursed my money, they went back to the merchant and took the money back from the merchant because the check was no good,” she said. “So the store thinks I wrote a bad check, so they come after me. I had to go prove I didn’t do this. This was a nightmare. My bank was supposed to close my checking account, but when I went back in there it was still open.”

Although she canceled her credit cards and registered a fraud alert with credit bureaus, she said she was concerned that there was little preventing the thief from using her information again or selling it to someone else.

“There’s still four or five checks that were never retrieved,” Ms. Bare said. “My license was never retrieved. She can sell all this information. The D.A. just said, ‘Oh, she won’t do that again.’ ”

Identity theft by family members can put special pressure on the victims when there is a possibility of children, parents or former spouses going to jail or prison. Many victims pay the debts and choose not to involve the police or the courts, said Mari J. Frank, a lawyer who works with people whose identities have been stolen.

“It’s such a breach of trust,” Ms. Frank said. “When someone you don’t know steals your identity, it’s very impersonal. They just want money. But when it’s a family member, it’s far more emotionally destructive.”

For a Michigan couple, the problem began in August with a notice that a bank had received a credit card application in their name. The couple declined to be identified because they are hoping to resolve the matter privately.

The couple immediately suspected their son, who had tried the same thing four years earlier. This time they found that he had obtained two credit cards, run up debts of more than $22,000 and applied for new cards or higher credit limits.

“The explanation was that we never helped him when he wanted the money,” the father said.

After much soul searching, the parents said, they did not want to see their son put in jail. They negotiated a plan for him to assume the debt on one card and resigned themselves to paying a debt of about $5,000 on the second card rather than reporting the crime to the police.

“We’d make an arrangement for him to pay us, but I’m sure he wouldn’t,” the mother said. “He has a unique way of getting around anything. It doesn’t send a very good message, but putting him in jail is not going to help either. There aren’t too many good options out there. If he goes to jail, he’s not going to learn anything except to wisen him up to be street smart. What choices do we have? All our life from now on we have to watch our credit.”

She blamed herself for the way her son had turned out. “I don’t know what went wrong, but in the end we have to say it’s our fault, and that is terrible to live with,” she said. “I can’t think of anything worse for a parent.”
http://news.com.com/Identity+thief+i...l?tag=nefd.top





T-Shirt Turns Air Guitar Into Music

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- Scientists announced Monday that they have developed a high-tech T-shirt that turns the strumming of an air guitar into music.

The T-shirt has motion sensors built into its elbows that pick up the wearer's arm motions and relay them wirelessly to a computer which interprets them as guitar riffs, said Richard Helmer, an engineer who leads the research team from the government's Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.

One arm is interpreted as picking chords while the other strums. The "wearable instrument shirt" is adaptable to both right and left-handed would-be rock stars.

"It's an easy-to-use, virtual instrument that allows real-time music making even by players without significant musical or computing skills," Helmer said in a statement.

"It allows you to jump around and the sound generated is just like an original MP3," he added, referring to the digital audio file format.

The shift is a collaboration between CSIRO researchers in computing, chemistry, electronics, music composition and textile manufacture.

Helmer said sensors could be used in the future to reproduce a person in the virtual world so they could get feedback on their actions and improve their sporting techniques.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-13-07-49-45





Ex-MTV Execs Create Hip Internet Shows
Adam Goldman

Shortly before dinner at a trendy new restaurant in the theater district, a production crew started setting up. They arranged lights, checked the cameras and put a microphone on the sushi chef Masatoshi "Gari" Sugio. Soon they would be filming at the Sushi of Gari 46 and interviewing the famed chef.

But this was not a segment for NBC's "Today" show or the Food Network. This slick production was for the Internet, and the company behind the filming was LX.TV Lifestyle Television.

The fledgling network is one of the first to solely produce original content for broadband distribution on the Internet, instead of adhering to the traditional business model of making high-quality programs for television.

The company's early success in attracting a high-profile sponsor and eyeballs is yet another example of the power of online video in an Internet world dominated by sites like YouTube. But in LX.TV's case, the video appears on its Web site and is syndicated elsewhere on Internet.

"It's kind of the opportunity Ted Turner had in the '80s when cable was starting," said Chief Executive Joseph Varet, 31. "Cable networks were able to erode a lot of market share viewing time from broadcast networks because they were more focused and specific. Now broadband economics allow us to be even more focused. So, in theory the idea is we can be even more relevant and so therefore we can erode from the cable networks."

LX.TV's Web site explores everything from the hottest nightlife and spas to swank stores. There are also pieces about drinking Scotch and collecting art, along with interviews of entertainment personalities such as Tim Gunn of "Project Runway" and Bonnie Fuller, editorial director of American Media Inc.

So far, it appears LX.TV has gotten off to a promising start, inking an advertising agreement with Absolut vodka.

The company has also struck a deal with NBBC, the syndicated broadband division of NBC, to distribute its programming. Other major broadcast companies have approached them, said Morgan Hertzan, 30, LX.TV's chief creative officer and executive producer. That is not the normal approach. Typically, networks broadcast their programming on TV and then put it online to attract viewers.

Traffic to LX.TV has steadily increased. Last month, 65,000 unique visitors landed at the site, up more than 100 percent from the previous month.

While the company has generated some media buzz, the primary reason behind its early success appears to be the stylish programming, done on Apple computers in the network's small offices in New York and Los Angeles at a fraction of the price it costs television networks.

"The reason why we're doing well is because our stuff looks good," Hertzan said. "Our stuff needs to look good."

The shows on LX.TV are geared toward attracting the company's target demographic: People between the ages of 25 and 49 earning $100,000 or more a year - a group that spends more time on the Internet than watching television, Varet says.

The segments are far from heavy-hitting, but that's not a problem when viewers are simply looking for "instant satisfaction," said Karine Bakhoum, president of the food consulting business KB Network News, who has advised clients to work with the network.
"This is the future," said Bakhoum.

One of the more popular series revolves around food, where visitors can dive into a restaurant and inspect the interior, see the menu and meet the chef, providing a visual component that print and even traditional Web sites can't easily match.

"A reporter talking about a subject is not compelling TV," Varet said.

Sara Gore, 30, a former sous chef in the West Village and line cook at Jean Georges, hosts the New York food segments. She is typically joined by food bloggers such as Danyelle Freeman, who dishes on restaurantgirl.com. No doubt, this was a smart move on the company's part, given the loyal followings the bloggers have cemented.

LX.TV is the brainchild of Hertzan and Varet, a pair of native New Yorkers and childhood friends who worked at MTV together creating new programs. They left the network in March and raised nearly $1 million in startup money.

Since then, they've been working long days trying to make their concept work, launching the site in June with content from New York City.

In August, they were able to add pieces from Los Angeles. Shows covering Miami and Las Vegas are expected to debut early next year when LX.TV opens offices in those two cities.

Varet and Hertzan are meeting with investors to fund the next stage of the network's development that will cost millions.

LX.TV has gone from three full-time employees to 15, along with a passel of freelancers. The company's video content can be found on well-traveled pop culture sites like Bloggingprojectrunway.blogspot.com, Usmagazine.com and tmz.com.

Varet says the network should be profitable in 2008. Eventually, LX.TV could have programs covering the nation's top media markets.

"We don't need to have 50 million users," on the Web site, Varet said. "We just need to have a good penetration into our very targeted audience."

For businesses that can't afford to hire public relation firms to get the word out, LX.TV has offered a new way to crack the Internet in a big way.

Jay Donayre, owner of 1-year-old Vino Vino, a shop that serves and sells wine, says LX.TV has profiled his store, giving him advertising he could never afford.

"It almost fell out of the sky for us," Donayre said. "We are trying to make it in New York City and suddenly you have global reach on the Internet. In essence, it's like having a mini-commercial for nothing on the Internet."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-12-13-52-49





Mugging for the Camera, and a Bank Job
Michael J. de la Merced

Yale student Aleksey Vayner didn’t snag a Wall Street job with his weight-lifting, karate-chopping video resume that recently made the rounds on the Internet. But thanks to a contest for an upcoming Will Smith movie, someone else might. Sony’s Columbia Pictures is sponsoring what it calls “the ultimate internship contest,” in which applicants create video clips to compete for summer jobs at eight companies, including investment bank Morgan Stanley. On Friday, videos were posted of the four semi-finalists for the Morgan Stanley position. While there are no feats of martial arts, they still make for amusing viewing.

The contest is loosely tied to the plot of the based-on-a-true-story movie “The Pursuit of Happyness,” in which Mr. Smith plays a single father who starts his life over again at a brokerage internship. Other companies offering internships in the contest include NBC, The Gap and Yahoo.

In what seems to be an inadvertent reference to Mr. Vayner’s video creation, which was entitled “Impossible Is Nothing,” contest applicants are told to explain a motto that inspires them in life. Applicants, who must be students in a bachelor’s or master’s program, uploaded their five-minute videos to (Sony-owned) video-sharing site Grouper.com so that the public can vote on their favorite.

Like Mr. Smith’s character in the film, the winner of the Morgan internship will be working in the company’s retail brokerage division, a firm spokeswoman told DealBook. The pay is $961.54 a week for 10 weeks.

Below, DealBook’s thoughts on the four semi-finalists (though we highly recommend watching them yourself):

– There’s Dieu-My Mimi N., who says she discovered the contest when perusing her deleted e-mail (”I know, who checks their deleted e-mail?” she says.) Side-saddle in a leather office chair, she tells viewers that most people let slip opportunities every day. “We just live in regret,” she says, before explaining how she will not.

— Meet Cameron D., who begins his video by declaring that the only thing worse than not making the school basketball team is being a benchwarmer for said team. Dressed in a gray suit and black polo, Cameron quotes from an array of sources including Margaret Mead (”Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”); Michael Jackson (lyrics from the song “Man in the Mirror”); and Spider-Man (”With great power comes great responsibility”).

Cameron takes a modest approach: “I’m not saying I’m the most talented applicant that you’ll have, and I probably won’t be the most intellectual. What I am is aware of my boundaries, because I don’t have any.” He declares that what Morgan needs is “individuals who are willing to go ahead with their ideas, to not put their foot in their mouth, and to not hold back.”

— Then there’s Ray Phillips, an honors finance junior at the University of Utah. In the most bare-bones video of the four, Mr. Phillips describes a deep background in financial matters, telling viewers he works at a “buy-side institutional investor institution” with $500 million under management. What does he do? Financial modeling, following trends, taking positions and guiding investment portfolios to profit every year. And, he says, he runs a couple of newspapers.

Mr. Phillip’s quote comes from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: “To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you.” More than anything, he says, he loves competition and achievement. He believes investing is an art and not a science. “I want to become a better artist,” he says.

– Rounding on the semi-finalists is Frances Jeffrey-Coker, a mechanical engineering student at Columbia University. Offering the most cinematic video of the four — it features slow motion and multiple cuts — Ms. Jeffrey-Coker comes across as a Lonelygirl15 (YouTube fans will know who this is) who isn’t afraid to crack wise. (A quote: “A lot of people think engineers are nerds … no comment.”) Ms. Jeffrey-Coker lives by “carpe diem,” she says, and she wants to be the best. “You have to be there for people, you have to be innovative and you have to put in the work that is going to get people the results,” Ms. Jeffrey-Coker says. “It’s like Weight Watchers. If you don’t put in the work, you don’t get the results.”

It is difficult to summarize the rest of her video, but we can say that at various points she mentions fetching a cup of coffee, X-Men and “The Matrix.” She also sings a tune from “Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit” and poses around Columbia’s campus.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/20...nley-job/?8dpc





Step Right Up, Ladies and Gents, to See the End of an Oddity
Charlie LeDuff

Ward Hall, the King of the Midway, has perpetrated perhaps his greatest illusion. He has risen from the dead. He has collected up his big top, rustled up the midget, dusted off the rubber fetuses and beat it back out on the road. Once again, he is the geriatric front man of the last traveling freak show in America.

Retirement just didn’t sit right.

“I live in Florida but I never summered in Florida, and I discovered it’s too damn hot,” says Mr. Hall, standing inside his trailer in a back lot of the York Fair in Pennsylvania. He is in a white suit, stained on the elbows and rump. Some sequins have fallen off the lapel.

His freak show, the World of Wonders, has been shoved by the organizers to the back corner of the fairgrounds, next to the horse stables.

“I missed the road life anyway,” he goes on, his elegant vaudevillian verbiage nearly drowned out by the sound system of the whirling Himalaya thrill ride. “I missed my friends. I missed the money. This is what I am.”

And, returning to the nation’s state fair circuit after a full season off, Mr. Hall has discovered something he already knew. When he goes, it will be the end of an old-time American art form.

Back in the heyday, in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, a fair number of people with deformities were happy to let you look at them for a price. Not only were freak shows the draw of the carnival, they were the carnival.

But like John Henry and the steam drill, the freak show was done in by the machine: the Plunger, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Zipper. Before them, the carnival was strictly dancing monkeys and dancing dwarves and dancing fat ladies. There was the Ossified Woman. Lobster Boy. And they made a good life. Monkey Girl managed to buy a farm.

There was also the bearded lady, who found a lover when her husband was out of town and shaved to please him. But it turned out the lover preferred her with the beard and rejected her, as did her husband.

“Her husband, coming home after a few days and seeing the beard was gone, knew something was amiss,” Mr. Hall said. “He chased her down the midway with a gun.” This is how it used to be on the road.

“Nowadays, it’s in the contracts: no freaks,” says Mr. Hall, who believes political correctness is putting people out of work. “Do-gooders run things. I’m telling you, this life was very good for freaks. These kind of people made money. They were hams, but they could never be actors. Who’s putting a bearded lady or a one-armed girl in a leading lady role on Broadway? This way they lived a great life. No more. It’s ridiculous.”

Mr. Hall ran away from his father’s fourth-floor walk-up in Denver in 1946. The father mocked the boy, telling him he would come crawling back in two weeks.

“Those two weeks are yet to expire,” he says with a cackle.

Mr. Hall joined the circus at 15, became a clown, wasn’t funny, realized people didn’t pay to see unfunny clowns and committed to a career of getting knives thrown at him.

He never married, never had children: “I’ve been blessed. I have not been burdened with that, dear sir.”

Instead he has spent his life on the road, most of it with his disheveled, mutton-chopped, chain-smoking business partner, Chris Christ, 58, and with Poobah, the 3-foot-7-and-a-quarter-inch dwarf who, after eating 100 skewers of fire a day, 12 hours a day, seven days a week for five decades, has no eyebrows or eyelashes to speak of, giving him the look of a pale jack-o’-lantern. Poobah has a knot on his forehead, wears a hearing aid the size of a bagel, has low blood pressure and speaks with a deep, incomprehensible gurgle. Clearly, fire has taken its toll.

The three men have toured Mexico, Canada and the entire United States. Today, they travel together in the same trailer, the place smelling of old men and ashes. In the off-season, they spend the winter in Gibsonton, Fla., known as Showtown U.S.A., where many freaks used to live. It is thought to be the only city in America where zoning allows people to park an elephant in the front yard.

Some men go for golf when they grow old. Others make model boats. Mr. Hall sells fantasy. He hauls himself up from his chair, adjusts his bow tie in the mirror. Break time is over. It is his turn on the microphone. The show is never ending, going round and round like a carousel.

“Technology killed the art form, too,” Mr. Hall says, unable to get the tie straight.

Separating Siamese twins at birth?

“Can’t they just leave well enough alone?”

Cleft palate?

“Plastic surgery.”

“It’s a shame,” he says. “I don’t know where to get my freaks.” He advertises in the trades. Few people answer.

Then there is the strange but true fact that American society has gone just plain freaky itself, Mr. Hall believes.

“The fat man — Howard Huge — he wanted to come out with us. But I said, ‘Howard, a fat man couldn’t sell 10 cents’ worth of fried chicken. Everybody in America’s fat.’ ”

You want to see a fat man, Mr. Hall says, try the Cracker Barrel, you’ll see a dozen at once. Same with the tattooed lady. Ditto with pierced women. Nothing special.

Mr. Hall steps out into the sweltering sun, climbs onto the platform in front of the marquee and begins the pitch. “Ladies and gentlemen, now come watch as Poobah will eat fire.”

Sitting in a little pink lawn chair, Poobah looks run-down. It is nearly 100 degrees, the air as sticky as lemonade. It seems cruel, as he is only four years away from 80, but that’s show business.

Poobah is the attraction, the only physical oddity left. Poobah is the draw that gets the dupes standing out there in flip-flops, holding on to their plastic Spider-Man blowup dolls, to pay three bucks to go inside and see a man stick a screwdriver up his nose, a sword swallower with periodontal disease, an eight-foot woman made of foam. Her left foot is broken off, and she needs a dusting. Once inside, seeing they’ve been lied to, people get hostile.

“Now, Poobah here is the king of the Pygmies,” Mr. Hall yaps. The crowd comes closer.

Poobah’s real name is Pete Terhurne.

“Poobah comes all the way from Beverly Hills.”

Poobah grew up in Minnesota, met Mr. Hall at a carnival there in the mid-’50s.

“Poobah is the last living munchkin from ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ”

Poobah first saw the movie as a television rerun.

“He is the star of 84 Hollywood pictures, 114 television shows and numerous Broadway musicals.”

Poobah couldn’t sing to save his life. But Poobah says he doesn’t mind. It’s a living. He says he loves Mr. Hall. And it beats retirement.

“Now, watch as Poobah eats the fire.”

Poobah does so for the umpteenth time today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/13/us/13album.html





Apple in Deal to Let iPod Videos Play on Planes

Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Tuesday six major airlines will let passengers play video and music from their iPod digital devices on in-flight entertainment systems beginning in mid-2007.

Air France (AIRF.PA: Quote, Profile, Research), Continental Airlines (CAL.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Delta Air Lines (DALRQ.PK: Quote, Profile, Research), Emirates (EMAIR.UL: Quote, Profile, Research), KLM (KLM.AX: Quote, Profile, Research) and UAL Corp.'s (UAUA.O: Quote, Profile, Research) United Airlines will begin offering their passengers iPod seat connections, which power and charge iPods during flight and allow the video content on the devices to be viewed on seat-back displays, Apple said.

Terms were not disclosed.

Apple has sought to expand the possible uses for its market-dominating iPod, including deals to build iPod ports into new-model cars. The announcement came as rival Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) launched its Zune digital music player on Tuesday in a bid to challenge the iPod.

To date, Apple said it has sold nearly 70 million iPods and more than 1.5 billion songs through its iTunes music store.

Apple shares rose to $85.25 in premarket trading from its close of $84.35 on Monday on the Nasdaq.
http://today.reuters.com/stocks/Quot...E-1.XML&rpc=66





DRM Dumpster Automates the DRM Stripping Process
Laurie A. Duncan

By now, most people who buy music from the iTunes Store know that one of the ways to legally get around the DRM restrictions on your purchased music is to burn a CD of that music and then rip that CD back into iTunes as unrestricted MP3 files. While it's true that there's some quality loss associated with that process, it's satisfactory for many people. The process is still a pain, though, particularly if you have a full library of purchased music that you want to un-DRM.

DRM Dumpster, from BurningThumb, isn't magic and it doesn't perform any new tricks. All it does is automate the task of burning a CD-RW and then importing your music back to iTunes. It processes your entire iTunes library, not selections, so there's no need for it if you only have a few songs or less than one CD's worth of music to convert. By using a CD-RW, DRM Dumpster is able to erase and reuse a single disc to handle your entire library without you having to babysit and pop discs in and out of your optical drive.

DRM Dumpster is "donationware" and requires Mac OS X 10.2 or later, a CD-RW disc and a CD-RW-capable burner. It's been tested with iTunes 7.

Thanks, Adam!
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/11/14/drm-d...pping-process/





Perspective

The farce behind 'Digital Freedom'
Cary Sherman, RIAA

Last month, the Consumer Electronics Association and other groups announced a "Digital Freedom" campaign that latches onto the concept of fair use--supposedly to benefit consumers.

Seems like a worthwhile effort. But in truth, it's merely a return to an increasingly used playbook, an extremist interpretation of fair use to frighten and mislead consumers and policymakers.

Like a trademark that becomes generic, the fair use doctrine is in danger of losing its meaning and value if CEA's self-serving claims are taken at face value. CEA has twisted and contorted "fair use" beyond its true intent, turning it into a free pass for those who simply don't want to pay for creative works.
Critics like CEA sometimes lose sight of the fact that record labels and other copyright owners are as dependent on fair use as consumers.

So what is fair use, really? It's codified in section 107 of the Copyright Act, intended primarily to promote such uses as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research. The determination is further guided by four factors--including purpose of use, the type of work, the amount used, and the effect on the market for or value of the work--which must be balanced to establish whether a particular use is "fair." It is not an all-purpose excuse to make use of someone else's property for free. And it is certainly not an excuse to boost the sales of electronic devices and services on the backs of hard-working creators.

Fair use is an undeniably important plank of copyright law. Critics like CEA sometimes lose sight of the fact that record labels and other copyright owners are as dependent on fair use as consumers. A healthy and robust fair use doctrine is critical to us, since so much of what we create is built on the art that came before.

The "Digital Freedom" proponents have consistently staked their case out of the mainstream. CEA president and CEO Gary Shapiro's comment that unauthorized downloading is neither "illegal nor immoral" is illustrative of the extremist position of that group, especially given the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion otherwise in its 2005 Grokster ruling.

The CEA was on the wrong side of that unanimous decision, supporting illegal file-sharing network Grokster while Justice Breyer, one of the court's most tech-savvy judges, declared that the activity on Grokster's system was "garden-variety theft." In fact, every court has refused to accept the argument that such activity is fair use. Yet the fair use revisionists keep trying, relying on grandiose notions of the doctrine that have no basis in law and reflect bad public policy.

Fair use is, fundamentally, a balancing of interests. All interests. Fairness requires us to look in all directions and to hear from all sides. The thousands of people who work in our industry--from songwriters, to musicians, to artists, to producers, to engineers, to promoters, to label employees--deserve that consideration.

Let's be clear. The CEA's primary concern is not consumers, but technology companies--often large, multinational corporations which, like us, strive to make a profit. A moneymaking mission is perfectly acceptable. After all, it is this funding that enables progress in technology and opportunities for creativity. But to seize the mantra of "consumer rights" to advance that business interest is simply disingenuous. And to do it at the expense of creators' right to be compensated for their work is short-sighted.

Devices and technologies are only as good as the content they use. As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce noted: "The coalition led by the Consumers Electronics Association is pursuing a self-defeating strategy. Demolishing the rights of creative artists will hurt consumers and technology providers, not help them. Musicians, artists, filmmakers and others won't produce rich, diverse content if they don't believe their creations will be adequately protected from IP theft and other unfair, illegal uses. Without content, the market for technology designed to deliver it will dry up quickly."

The "Digital Freedom" campaign claims that the entertainment industry's goal is to "outlaw new digital technology and devices." This kind of knowingly false and incendiary rhetoric is designed to distort the issue and thwart solutions by demonizing us. The fact is, we are not only music fans, but technology fans, too. We celebrate advances in technology and recognize the importance of finding new ways to deliver content.

Instead of redefining fair use to promote a short-term free-for-all, let's embrace the existing concept to allow for long-term growth of technology, while valuing and protecting the content it carries. That benefits us all.
http://news.com.com/The+farce+behind...3-6134620.html





ZUNE

So Much Music, So Few Choices
Seán Captain

THIS week Microsoft introduced Zune, its answer to Apple Computer’s mighty pairing of the iPod portable media player and the iTunes music and video store. Though Zune offers a new choice for customers, it also highlights how restrictive such choices can be.

With Zune, Microsoft follows the Apple strategy of linking a player and a download service. The Zune Marketplace, Microsoft’s media store, offers two million songs, but they play on just one hand-held device. “Zune calls attention to the conundrum that consumers don’t like, which is being locked in to a retailer by virtue of what hardware you buy,” said David Packman, chief executive of the online store eMusic.

Rather than selling songs in a closed-file format like Zune or FairPlay from Apple, eMusic uses the MP3 format, which works on all devices. Though dwarfed by iTunes’ 72 percent market share, eMusic’s 10 percent share (as measured by the research firm NPD Group) beats all other stores, including Napster, Rhapsody and Wal-Mart. And eMusic might do even better if it offered songs from the four major record labels — EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner — that control about 75 percent of the music market.

Aside from some small experiments, the majors do not use the MP3 format because it lacks the digital rights management, or D.R.M., technology that protects copyrighted works by preventing unlimited duplication.

The many conflicting approaches to rights management can also limit choices. Apple, for instance, does not license its rights-management technology, FairPlay, to other companies. So customers with songs from the iTunes store have to stick with the iPod. The same applies to the Zune player and Zune Marketplace.

It wasn’t always that way. Earlier, Microsoft created an alternative format, called PlaysForSure, that was compatible with players made by Archos, Creative, iRiver, Samsung, SanDisk and Sony — but not Apple. This might make Apple seem like the odd man out, except that the iPod accounts for 75 percent of all the music players in America, according to the NPD Group. Imitating Apple, Microsoft has created a unique rights-management format for Zune and forsaken its own PlaysForSure technology.

Devices other than the iPod and Zune still support PlaysForSure, and Microsoft has not said it will abandon the format, but some manufacturers are losing faith in it. SanDisk, the No. 2 maker of hand-held players, now offers support for another format, Rhapsody DNA, creating an additional player-and-service pairing.

Given the number of competing formats, Apple seems to offer the safest bet. IPods are nearly ubiquitous, and the iTunes store — which has sold more than 1.5 billion songs — looks as if it will be around for a while. But there are alternative strategies for those who want to try players other than the iPod or preserve options for the future.

A Universal Format

Songs in the MP3 format can be loaded to any hand-held device or computer, or to any combination of hand-helds and computers. They can even be shared with friends — which is what worries the major record labels.

But many companies and artists are willing to risk MP3, and to tolerate some sharing as a form of viral marketing. “We look forward to people sharing them because jazz is not something that is terribly popular in our culture,” said Bret Primack, who produces the Web site for the musician Sonny Rollins (sonnyrollins.com). “You can’t turn on MTV and see Sonny Rollins. So we need to utilize everything we can.”

EMusic (emusic.com) offers the biggest legal MP3 collection, with 1.8 million tracks from 9,800 independent labels, including artists like the White Stripes and Johnny Cash. Unlike stores that charge per song or album, eMusic requires monthly subscriptions, starting at $9.99 for 30 downloads.

Starting From CDs

In comparison to the tight copy controls on many downloads, the most common source of music, the CD, has no restrictions. And music- management programs like iTunes can create MP3 files from a CD in a process called ripping — thereby turning any recorded music into a format that plays on any digital device.

“To be fair to customers out there, there’s no reason that they shouldn’t rip to MP3,” since it offers the most flexibility, said Eric Bone, the director of SanDisk’s audio and video group.

CDs also offer a way out of rights-management restrictions. Programs like iTunes allow users to convert downloaded tracks to the CD format and burn them onto discs. They can then load the discs back into the computer and rip them to the MP3 format. But this is labor- intensive and requires compromise. Music downloads are of lower quality than store-bought CDs. Creating a disc from a download and ripping it again lowers the quality further.

Whatever the original source, most music managers do not create MP3s automatically. ITunes, for example, by default rips to an unprotected format called AAC that has limited, but growing, support in music players. (Ripping to MP3 requires changing a setting in iTunes’ preferences menu.) Zune supports AAC, allowing it to play any ripped music in an iPod owner’s library.

A music file without rights-management protections can be converted into other formats. ITunes automatically converts Microsoft’s unprotected WMA format into AAC files, for example. As with burning and re-ripping CDs, though, converting from one format to another hurts quality.

Challenges to Apple

Buying and ripping CDs is not as convenient as ordering downloads, and purchasing an entire album is an expensive way to get just one or two desired songs. So it is not surprising that hackers regularly try to crack Apple’s rights-management protection so the music can be played on other devices.

“If I bought something, I should be able to do with it what I want, as long as I don’t give it away for free or use it for commercial purposes,” said Igor Skochinsky, who created the FairPlay-cracking application QTFairUse6.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits tampering with rights-management technology, but Apple and the government have not moved against Mr. Skochinsky or writers of similar programs.

Apple does not really need to sue to stop programs like QTFairUse6, anyway. Such programs often break — whether by design or coincidence — when Apple updates the iTunes software. (Apple declined to comment for this article.)

Other programs work not by removing Apple’s technology, but by mimicking it. Rhapsody sells AAC files with its own rights-management system, Helix, which play on Rhapsody DNA devices from SanDisk. But the Rhapsody software can modify Helix in a way that tricks the iPod into playing the tracks.

Apple has not sued over the technology. But a change to FairPlay did prevent Rhapsody songs from playing on iPods from fall 2004 to spring 2005, said Dan Sheeran, senior vice president for music and video at Rhapsody’s parent company, RealNetworks.

Rhapsody can also convert songs to the PlaysForSure format under an agreement with Microsoft. Mr. Sheeran said he did not yet know if Rhapsody would be able to convert music for Zune.

Is Music Forever?

Rhapsody also offers an option that eliminates the issue of purchased music by renting the songs instead for a $14.99 monthly subscription. With Rhapsody and other services, including the new Zune Marketplace (also $14.99), customers can try any song in the library as a way to discover new music, an option not offered by iTunes.

If a subscription service goes out of business, customers haven’t lost much because they never owned the music in the first place. And perhaps most music — whether rented or purchased — does not have to last forever. As Ross Rubin, an analyst with the NPD Group, said, “Do you really care about having access to the latest Britney Spears track 40 years from now?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/te.../16basics.html





Universal Music Group CEO Calls iPod Users Thieves

"Microsoft [has] agreed to share revenue from Zune sales with record labels and artists. Forcing the issue was Universal Music Group, which at deadline is the only label named in the program. UMG refused to license its music to the Zune unless it could receive a percentage of each device sold, in addition to standard music licensing fees for downloads and subscriptions," Jonathan Cohen and Brian Garrity report for Billboard.

"These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it," UMG chairman/CEO Doug Morris says. "So it's time to get paid for it."

Cohen and Garrity report, "Microsoft is working with all major and independent labels to establish similar revenue-sharing agreements. According to published reports, UMG is expected to receive more than $1 for each $250 device and sources at UMG have confirmed that half of all the proceeds from the device's sales will be shared equally among all its artists."

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Michael Y" for the heads up.]

MacDailyNews Take: As there are no Zunes out there, it's obvious that Universal Music CEO Doug Morris has basically just called iPod users thieves while accusing Apple of aiding and abetting thieves the world over by making 70+ million iPods that each come with "Don't Steal Music" stickers. Morris has just joined a unique group of iPod thievery accusers that includes Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Real CEO Rob Glaser. Good luck snagging a doughnut at that group's weekly propaganda planning meeting, Mr. Morris.

JupiterResearch on September 14, 2006 released a report," Portable Media Player Owners - Understanding iPod Owners' Music-Buying Habits.." The report's author, JupiterResearch analyst Mark Mulligan, has blogged (see: Straightening the Record, below) the following regarding the report:

So this report got a lot of attention in the media, which shows how much interest there is in the topic. However some of the coverage has been quite selective in which parts it has highlighted and some have even used it as evidence for Apple-bashing. So for the record here are the key thrusts of the report (all of the below refer to Europe):

MP3 player owners of all types (iPods included) don’t regularly buy much digital music. iPod owners are actually more likely to buy digital music than other MP3 player owners

Free online music consumption significantly outweighs paid, significantly more so for owners of non-iPod MP3 players

Device owners are much more likely to buy CD albums online than digital albums

The facts: Most tracks on a typical iPod are not tracks that were purchased online. Most tracks on a typical iPod come from CDs that users have legally purchased and already own and ripped via iTunes. Tthe truth is that iPod owners are significantly less likely to steal music than also-ran MP3 player owners. iPod owners are "substantially less likely to download using filesharing software with only 7% of iPod people downloading illegally compared to 25% on average. And they're more likely to be buying CDs, with your everyday iPodder buying 2.3 albums a month compared to the average of 1.8," XTN Data reported in a January 2006 report. XTN Data surveyed over 1,000 UK and US music buyers to arrive at the data. XTN Data also found that 50% of iPod owners regularly download music from Apple iTunes Music Store.

Microsoft was either stupid, desperate, and/or sleazy by signing that awful deal with Universal. Imagine someone buys a Zune (farfetched, we know, but play along), but they never listen to a second of Universal-controlled music. Guess what, under Microsoft's idiotic deal, Universal still gets paid for absolutely nothing; they just take the money anyway... kinda like stealing, huh? Who're the real thieves here? The music labels do not deserve a cut of MP3 player revenues any more than television networks deserve a cut of TV sales. It's stupid, illogical, and wrong. Microsoft's real tag line for their Zune debacle should be: "Welcome to socialism."

It's time for Apple to start eliminating the middlemen.
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/we...omments/11610/





Straightening the Record
Mark Mulligan

So this report got a lot of attention in the media, which shows how much interest there is in the topic. However some of the coverage has been quite selective in which parts it has highlighted and some have even used it as evidence for Apple-bashing. So for the record here are the key thrusts of the report (all of the below refer to Europe):

MP3 player owners of all types (iPods included) don’t regularly buy much digital music. iPod owners are actually more likely to buy digital music than other MP3 player owners

Free online music consumption significantly outweighs paid, significantly more so for owners of non-iPod MP3 players

Device owners are much more likely to buy CD albums online than digital albums

So the conclusions are that Europe’s digital music market is doing ok but there is much more opportunity to tap. As Card will readily point out a significant share of the population don’t buy any music, so we’d never expect saturation purchasing. However MP3 player owners are – largely - by definition music fans are more likely to buy music. Is expecting a third of MP3 player owners to buy digital music regularly overly ambitious? I’d like to think not, yet that would be close to a doubling of current adoption rates.

Finally, free (especially illegal free) is much more of a problem here in Europe than in the US, where it seems to have been contained. Some markets (e.g. Germany) are seeing steady declines but others are seeing continued growth. So what we are trying to highlight here for the entire music industry (device manufacturers and digital stores included) is that digital music activity is significantly higher than paid: that is an opportunity, not just a threat.

Anyway, those are the key points, take a look through the report if you want more detail. If you are a Jupiter client and would like to talk more about the issues raised in this report then please set up a call with me via your CSM.
http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/a...htening_t.html





Microsoft Counting on a Twist to Make Zune Shine in Shadow of iPod
Michel Marriott

The hoopla was still swelling around last November’s debut of the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s latest entry in the game-console wars, when some on its development team began turning their attention to conceiving a new product.

Their discussions led to the rough outline of a device that might do for portable music what the new Internet-enabled Xbox was poised to deliver to gaming: connected entertainment.

Tomorrow, after committing hundreds of millions of dollars, Microsoft is scheduled to release that device, Zune.

It was, its makers say, an idea brought to fruition by a 230-member team in a creatively fervid overcrowded office space near the software giant’s sprawling campus in Redmond, Wash.

At a glance, the Zune looks like yet another aspiring iPod rival.

It is a digital music and video player, priced at $250, with a slightly larger screen than that of many competitors, an FM radio tuner and a 30-gigabyte hard drive that can store thousands of songs and pictures and hours of video. Its hefty rectangular body can be dressed in white, black or even a muted brown.

But the Zune can do something that no other player, including the iPod from Apple, can claim: it can locate other Zune players and wirelessly exchange content — music and pictures, for starters — with a few touches of a big shiny button.

“A lot like Xbox, the idea that really initiated the project was broader than the product itself,” said J Allard, a co-creator of Xbox and a Microsoft executive who oversees the Zune product line as corporate vice president for design and development. “This was just a steppingstone.”

Mr. Allard said Microsoft had made a decade-long commitment to investing in innovative ideas like those that produced the first Xbox in 2001 and the Zune — suited not only to the PC and the workplace, but also to people’s leisure time.

“Technology will have a huge impact there,” he said. “There is really a transition that is not only analog to digital, but digital to connected.”

But Microsoft also finds itself in another familiar position, entering a hardware arena dominated by a competitor. For the Xbox it was Sony and its still-leading PlayStation franchise. With the Zune, it is Apple and its iPod franchise, which has 90 percent of the market for digital music players costing $200 and above, industry analysts say.

“Without a doubt, this is a huge mountain to scale,” Sean Wargo, director of industry analysis for the Consumer Electronics Association, said of the challenge of competing with the iPod and lesser-known media players that have “crept beyond early adopters and into the mainstream.”

Still, with fewer than half of American households owning a portable digital music player, “there is definitely a lot of room,” he said.

The question is whether the Zune’s singular innovation — the wireless sharing feature — is enough to distinguish it. Mr. Wargo said the big draws for consumers generally are the extent of a player’s library of content and how easy it is to add and manage content on the device.

But late last year, with social networking and community building becoming more popular, Mr. Allard said “we thought the time was ripe” for a portable player that could share content and create communities around music.

In effect, Mr. Allard and his team were challenging a behavior that started with the arrival of the Sony Walkman cassette player in 1979, a behavior that generally equates portable music with private listening.

Chris Stephenson, general manager for global marketing of the entertainment business at Microsoft, said he does not think of the Zune’s mission as trying to reverse a trend, but to build on one.

“We’re adding that aspect of people sharing music,” said Mr. Stephenson, a music veteran and a former vice president for marketing at MTV Networks in Europe. “We’re adding to the digital music model what was fundamental to music. People love to share music.”

He said the evidence was abundantly clear online, from social networking sites like MySpace to underground peer-to-peer music-sharing sites. “What we are actually doing is identifying a cultural mean.” He posed a question: What if the Zune could help turn armies of music pirates into legitimate music promoters?

“We want to let people listen to music the way that they do,” he said.

At the core of the Zune is its built-in Wi-Fi feature, which also adds to the device’s overall bulk and weight (and energy consumption). In a demonstration, Scott Erickson, senior director of product management, explained that a Zune user must give the unit a name. The name appears almost instantaneously on the screens of other Zunes within range.

Songs, entire albums (with album art and other information) and whole playlists can be selected and wirelessly transmitted to any Zune within range. Users are prompted and given a chance to accept or deny the transfer; senders can also be blocked.

Songs take about 15 seconds to transfer, but transferred songs can be played only three times in three days before they disappear, Mr. Erickson said. Digital photographs, however, can be transferred in a couple of seconds and do not expire. Pictures can also be passed along in a daisy chain of Zunes, he said.

Toshiba worked with Microsoft to develop the player and will handle the manufacturing. Microsoft created software, also called Zune, to manage and purchase content on personal computers. (Microsoft executives said the Zune would not be compatible with Macintosh computers at introduction.)

To get the device to market in time for the holidays, the first members of Zune’s team moved in to some vacant space in the Xbox complex in January.

“There were no walls and no barriers,” recalled Bryan Lee, corporate vice president for the entertainment business at Microsoft. “That was the physical aspect and emotional aspect.”

By the summer, the rapidly expanding team outgrew its first home and moved into a 73,000-square-foot former dance studio known as Bear Creek. There, the cubicles popped up like mushrooms amid mirrored walls and ballet barres where face-to-face collaboration became the rule, said Mr. Lee, who worked from a table rather than an office.

“We went from zero to 60 miles an hour in no time flat,” Mr. Allard said. In the beginning the project was code-named Argo, for the ship in Greek mythology that carried Jason in his quest for the golden fleece. The workers, a third of them drawn from the Xbox 360 team, referred to themselves as Argonauts.

The first days of working on Zune were like working in a start-up company, he said — but one with very deep pockets.

The rapid expansion did not come without problems. One was power consumption. There were hot summer days when the team had to decide between lights and air-conditioning, Mr. Allard said.

A series of brownouts prompted the team to switch from desktop computers to notebook PCs that could be charged elsewhere and operated by batteries. Against the din of construction, the team, Mr. Lee said, had to work out a number of issues.

Among them was building PC software specifically to work with the Zune rather than relying on existing software like the Microsoft Media Player series and its PlaysForSure technology. (PlaysForSure is designed to accommodate a variety of digital players, manufacturers and online music services.)

“We had to look at trade-offs,” Mr. Lee said, “at what we can do to make sure we provide the best experience for consumers today and grow that experience very rapidly over the next few years.” He emphasized that a guiding principle of Zune was keeping it “simple and consistent.”

Would the Zune ever be able to connect to the Internet? Could someone walk into a Starbucks and use the connection there to download a song?

Mr. Lee answered without hesitation: “Probably, one day.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/13/te...gy/13zune.html





Microsoft CEO Sees Wireless Zune Challenging iPod

Microsoft Corp. expects wireless song sharing to be the feature on its Zune portable music player that allows it to challenge Apple Computer Inc.'s

iPod, the company's chief executive said on Monday.

On Tuesday, the world's largest software maker will start selling the 30-gigabyte Zune, which allows users to beam photos and songs to one another, and it will launch an iTunes competitor called the Zune Marketplace in the United States.

In a telephone interview with Reuters, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he sees the wireless technology leveling out some of Apple's huge early-mover advantage, because the iPod does not offer that feature yet.

"You could say, 'yeah we're starting out umpty-ump millions players behind' or you could say 'hey look, there is a whole new paradigm that is going to happen in this business and we're jumping in at the beginning,"' said Ballmer.

"Who knows when Apple will jump in? It's a good company. I'm sure it won't take (Apple) forever," he added.

Microsoft faces a huge challenge. Not only does Apple dominate the market for portable media players, but its iconic iPod essentially created an industry for MP3 players and legal music downloads.

Analysts expect Apple to build on its lead by eventually developing an iPhone and incorporating new features such as wireless connectivity.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has said it plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and market the Zune, while acknowledging that the investment may take years to bear fruit.

The rectangular "Zune" player is similar in appearance to the iPod with a round click wheel, but is slightly bulkier with a larger, 3-inch screen.

Microsoft, which has said it is working on a Zune mobile phone, said the music player is merely a starting point for a new entertainment platform and a "Zune community."

"It's a platform for literally hundreds of thousands of additional innovations on top of that core connectivity," he said
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...&from=business





The Two Faced Monster Inside Zune

Yesterday's Strike 3: Why Zune will Bomb this Winter ended with a warning for enthusiasts of Microsoft's Zune:

The Zune isn’t just an iPod rival, it’s part of Microsoft’s efforts to further enslave consumers to a profit engine designed to suit the desires of the music industry, ignore consumers’ fair use rights, and destroy open content.

Over the top? Take a look at the history of Microsoft's efforts in the music industry and judge for yourself.

The Danger of DRM described the world before DRM and the complications that killed a decade of digital products prior to the iPod. It also introduced the new god Microsoft hoped would take over the digital universe: Janus.

The Watchful Eyes of Janus
Microsoft worked with media producers to design a comprehensive technology framework and DRM system named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings and the namesake of January, who was portrayed with two faces that looked both into the past and into the future.

Like its namesake, Microsoft's Janus planned to keep its eyes on everything, with airtight solutions for the paranoid entertainment industry that would allow them to both sell and rent locked down digital files. Rented files could be set to playback for a certain time period or number of plays and then self-destruct.

Windows Media files could also be set to allow or deny duplication, burning to CD, or copying to a portable player. Portable systems would be forced to register with a central authority, so if the user stopped paying ongoing rental subscription fees, the device would stop playing.

Microsoft planned to license Janus to hardware makers and online stores to create a secure, comprehensive platform for distributing songs and movies. The industry largely assumed that Microsoft's DRM technology would quickly become the de facto standard, and offered little criticism of Microsoft's technology.

Janus of All Trades, Master of None
While the options enforced by Janus offered lots of flexibility to media producers, they created confusion, complexity, and excessively strict and inconsistent limitations for users. A selection of media files might each have different sets of restrictions, depending on the whim or greed of the entity offering it for sale.

Further, the rules governing the transactions between media producers and consumers could change anytime at the whim of producers, leaving buyers with media that suddenly stopped working or behaved differently.

No consideration was made for fair use provisions; consumers got whatever producers decided to offer. Microsoft hoped to choke out all competition, making its Janus-based WMA format the only way to obtain commercial digital music.

The resulting Windows Media experience was nothing like an 80’s mix tape; it had more in common with a PC: complex, confusing, inconsistent, and frustrating.

FairPlay Strikes a Balance
If the iPod hadn't been introduced, Microsoft's Janus would only have to compete against Sony's solo ATRAC effort with its poorly implemented software and online store, Real's similar Helix DRM, and the technology offerings of Open Source projects that offered--by design--no user limitations on mass duplication at all.

To expand upon the success of the iPod, Apple designed a music protection system that struck a balance between the demands of media producers and the desires of consumers for a simple, easy to use system with consistent rules and reasonable prices.

Steve Jobs warned the music industry that any DRM system would eventually be compromised, so rather than attempting to build a highly restrictive system that assumed all consumers were brazen thieves, it would be best to deliver a simple and consistent one that focused on developing a business with honest consumers willing to pay for an experience superior to the online file sharing sites.

The music industry took a lot of convincing. After the initial failure of Microsoft's Janus to materialize, Apple convinced music labels to take a limited risk in selling exclusively to the Mac market.

The iPod’s Optional DRM
The iTunes Store opened in April of 2003, a year and a half after the iPod was first released. It quickly became the first online music store to record significant sales, selling a million songs in its first three days.

While Apple has since old over a billion and a half tracks with its FairPlay DRM, the iPod has no restrictions to prevent the use of open content, and iTunes does not add any DRM to podcasts or Internet radio streams.

Unlike Sony and Microsoft, Apple has never thwarted users ability to play regular MP3 music. Prior to WMP 10, Microsoft applied DRM by default to songs users ripped from their own CDs. Sony only recently decided to allow its users to play back MP3 files on its latest products.

Apple has never applied DRM to user’s own music, and dealing with FairPlay and the iTunes Store is completely optional. There are many iPod users outside of the US who can’t even access Apple’s music store.

Janus Stumbles
Microsoft's confidence in Janus was slightly shaken by rapidly increasing sales of both the iPod and music tracks through the iTunes Store, but the company was sure that as soon as it unleashed its own brand of portable DRM, the music industry would standardize on it and Apple's efforts would be strangled like another Netscape or Java.

Instead, Microsoft's efforts to roll out Janus fell into problems. The technology wasn’t rolled out in January 2003 as promised, but slipped deep into 2004, leaving Apple a year and a half lead.

Microsoft’s pre-Janus Wndows Media DRM had been around since 1999, but consumers hadn’t paid any attention because all it did was restrict media playback to a PC. Consumers didn’t want DRM, they wanted a marketplace for digital music that was fair, functional, useful, and understandable.

In rolling out the new portable DRM technologies in Janus, Microsoft found itself at the mercy of partner stores and manufacturers, each working at cross purposes. Further, the vast majority of customers didn't find music subscriptions very compelling. This was complicated by the confusing variety in players and stores, only some of which supported portable devices and subscriptions plans.

Rather than offering customers a better experience than mixed tapes in a Walkman, Microsoft's Janusland of players and stores was too complex and too restrictive to hold consumers attention.

At the same time, Apple had extended the iTunes Store to Windows users, and quickly picked up everyone else interested in buying music online. That left Microsoft with a tough remaining market to crack: the users who didn't like Apple and didn't like paying for music.

Microsoft burned through efforts with Napster, Yahoo, WalMart, and MTV but nobody seemed able to sell Janus to customers. Microsoft rebranded Janus as PlaysForSure, but the market didn't respond appreciatively. It wasn't just bad marketing, it was a bad product that consumers were avoiding.

Facelifts for Janus
After two embarrassing holiday season failures in 2004 and 2005, Microsoft determined that if it wanted to establish Janus, it would need to do it itself. The company picked a PlaysForSure player from Toshiba as a starting point, and sought to build on features that could challenge the iPod.

In order to distance itself from the PlaysForSure failure it created, Microsoft decided its own Zune player would use an altered version of Janus that rendered the stores and players of its former partners incompatible and therefore obsolete.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4....2449D60F6.html





A Method to Microsoft's Zune Madness

Some say Redmond is crazy to take on Apple's popular iPod—and crazier still to put limits on what Zune can play. Here's how the approach could work
Catherine Holahan

When Microsoft announced plans to manufacture a media player nearly four months ago, many analysts thought the software giant was making a major mistake. After all, not even Walkman creator Sony (SNE) has been able to steal market share from Apple's (AAPL) dominant iPod. Criticism of Microsoft's decision has grown increasingly vehement as reviewers have had a chance to preview the Zune prior to the device's Nov. 14 launch.

Some early criticism: It's not sufficiently sleek, it's priced too high for a non-iPod, and the color isn't a cool chocolate like LG's (LPL) popular phone, but a boring brown.

Worst of all, critics say, Microsoft (MSFT) engineered the device to be incompatible with PlaysforSure, its own digital-rights management software used by Napster (NAPS) and Time Warner's (TWX) AOL Music, among others (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/20/06, "Microsoft Plays a New Zune"). In doing so, Microsoft likely frustrated not only past partners, but also those digital music consumers who were more likely to adopt Zune because they already were downloading music from sources other than Apple's iTunes store.
Despite the initial criticism and the potential cold-shoulder treatment from consumers, don't sell Microsoft—or Zune—short. Some analysts believe Microsoft's new approach to the digital player business just might prove effective in the long run. For starters, Microsoft is not just blindly copying Apple's business model of providing seamless integration between an individual music store and player, while walling off access to outside services and players. Instead, the software giant is also adjusting its business model to win over music and movie providers who have become frustrated with Apple's unwillingness to be more flexible with its 99¢-per-download pricing model (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/19/05, "Apple May Be Holding Back the Music Biz").
Buddying With the Industry

Witness Microsoft's recently announced revenue-sharing deal with Universal Music Group. In exchange for giving Microsoft rights to sell its music, Universal will receive a slice of Zune sales. While the seemingly generous move may have been influenced by Microsoft's weaker position in the space relative to Apple, it was also a strategic play by Microsoft to give content providers a stake in Zune's success. "It's clear that Microsoft is not only trying to win the hearts and minds of the consumers, but it is trying to reach the hearts and minds of the record companies as well," says Michael Gartenberg, vice-president and research director at JupiterResearch.

Close ties to the music industry could pay off for Microsoft in the short term with exclusive record industry deals. Companies such as Universal, for example, may grant Microsoft the rights to offer new releases earlier than rival services, says Gartenberg. Such deals would give Zune players an edge, which could translate into more money for the record and film companies. Solid relationships with content providers could also help sell Microsoft's technology and store to other music-player manufacturers—if it ever decides to give out the key to its walled garden. Microsoft executives were unavailable for comment.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst at San Jose-based Enderle Group, believes Microsoft will want to decrease the barriers for owners of rival music players to use its music download and subscription service. "At the end of the day, Microsoft wants to sell the technology," says Enderle. "They are still a technology company and they want to demonstrate that [their store] can work."
Business-Model Test Lab

Proving to detractors that it can power a successful music download service may be a reason Microsoft decided to distance Zune from other PlaysforSure devices. Because a variety of digital music devices supported PlaysforSure, using the technology was not always seamless and had its share of glitches. In blogs and columns, the technology was criticized for not allowing music to play with certainty on all supporting devices.

"Right now the complaint with PlaysforSure is sometimes it doesn't," says Enderle. "And when there is a problem, the hardware guys point to the software guys and say, 'We did everything we were supposed to do, it's your problem,' and the software guys point to the hardware guys and say, 'We did everything, it wasn't us that screwed up.' "

Microsoft's approach to the digital music business this time gives it the control necessary to conduct a real-world test of the two supposed keys to Apple's success—seamless integration and an easy, 99¢-per download pricing model. Microsoft is offering the equivalent of a 99¢ download model as well as a subscription model in the vein of RealNetworks' (RNWK) Rhapsody service or Yahoo (YHOO) Music (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/05/06, "Meet the iTunes Wannabes"). Once it offers the same seamless experience as iTunes and iPod, Microsoft can monitor whether people gravitate toward the pay-per-download or subscription model, thereby making a better determination as to what pricing model consumers really prefer with all other things being equal.
Breaking the iPod Stranglehold?

If customers end up preferring the subscription model, Microsoft could have a real winner on its hands. But that's a big if. So far, only Apple seems to be making substantial profits from its service. Subscription networks have yet to truly take off. Napster, for example, has been losing money and is considering selling itself (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/21/05, "Online Music's Elusive Bottom Line"). Still, there's reason to believe that, given enough time, consumers could gravitate toward the music-rental model.

Subscription service has proven successful for the movie-rental and cell-phone industries, after all. However, it will take time to condition music lovers, used to either owning or sampling music for free over the radio, that music can also be rented like movies and other forms of media. How long it takes will depend not only on the willingness of music aficionados to change business models but also on the success of non-iPod players such as Zune.

Microsoft's biggest challenge, however, may not be solvable through offering more choices or even a better business model. The company must contend with the brand appeal of Apple's device that keeps its users loyal enough to keep buying upgraded versions. In other words, it must contend with the fact that Apple is the current king of cool, and the Zune is not yet hot (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/10/06, "Zune: Falling Down on Cool").
Interested But…

A great marketing campaign plugging Zune's special features such as Wi-Fi capability could increase excitement for the device. But even then, Microsoft would still have to win over potential customers such as Elizabeth Dye. The 23-year-old from Madison, N.J., says she is in the market for a new music player, having filled up her now-dated iPod mini with tunes.

She has read a bunch about the Zune, but doesn't think she will buy one unless Microsoft cuts the price. "The Zune sounds interesting, I like that fact that you can connect with other users," says Dye, "but I am just kind of used to the iPod and the iPod system."
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...eek+exclusives





Strike 3: Why Zune Will Bomb This Winter

With so much failure already under its belt in the consumer electronics arena, Microsoft certainly hopes its new iPod Killer will make a strong showing this holiday season. Still, analysts aren't afraid to articulate exactly why they think the Zune will fail.

The Microsoft iPod-Killer Myth already outlined why Microsoft's overall online media strategy has tanked so far, but the Zune faces three additional strikes this winter that will prevent it from making any headway in its goal to unseat the iPod.

The Zune Assault on Fair Use
This is an important issue for anyone interested in future fair use rights, because Microsoft has forfeited the Zune to music label interests, and is branding all music player users as thieves who deserve to pay an extra piracy tax to RIAA labels.

As Blackfriars pointed out: “that's a nice way to make Apple pay for Microsoft entering this market. This is classic Microsoft: crafting deals to attack competitors instead of spending the time and energy to positively market the product uniquely and powerfully.”

Fortunately, Microsoft’s evil is currently being tempered by its gross incompetence in engineering and marketing the Zune. Consider the following three strikes facing the Zune this holiday season, and then share your own perspective on things in the comments below.

Apple's Winter iPod Sales Strategy
To evaluate the Zune's sales potential this winter, take a look at Apple's historical seasonal shift in iPod sales and compare actual iPod sales to the company's ongoing winter sales strategy. Incidentally, this is what Microsoft should have done a year ago as part of its iPod-Killer strategy plan.

Apple has historically sold a lot of iPods during the winter holiday season, which represents its fiscal first quarter. Last winter's 2005 results, for example, were published by Apple in its Q1 2006 earnings.

It's no surprise that Apple sells a lot of iPods during the holidays, but the consistent proportion of holiday sales to the rest of the year is arresting:

•In 2002, Apple sold nearly as many iPods in its winter quarter (219,000) as it did the first three quarters.
•In 2003, Apple actually sold more iPods in its winter quarter (733,000) than in the first three combined.
•In 2004, Apple again sold more iPods in its final quarter (4,580,000) than in the first three.
•In 2005, Apple maintained sales of more than 4 million iPods in every quarter. In the winter quarter, it still blew out nearly 3 times as many: 14,480,000.
•This year, Apple maintained iPod sales of more than 8 million in each of the first three quarters of the year.

Despite this insane growth, analysts were quick to scrape together the the most painfully transparent FUD yet, suggesting that iPod sales were in trouble and that the winter rush in sales in the final quarter of last year was no surge, but rather a last hurrah for a dissipating fad.

In reality, the reason these analysts sparked a conversation about iPod sales “dropping” was because they were reading sales figures backwards; Apple’s fiscal “Q1” is the final quarter of the previous year. They were reading upside down.

In reality, Apple’s iPod sales consistently surge 300% during the winter quarter. That progressive compounding results in huge numbers that are hard to fathom. If all the talk of millions has your eyes glossing over, here are...

Some Numbers For Comparison
For some perspective, CNet recently gushed about PDAs and smartphones in the article Smart-phones Sales are Soaring. In it, Gartner reported annual worldwide sales of 37.4 million smartphones and 7.4 million PDAs.

In Gartnerland, PDAs can also be phones, so its PDA numbers include many hybrid phone devices one would reasonably consider a smartphone instead. Still, Apple shipped more of its iPods in every quarter of this year than the entire PDA industry sold in an entire year.

Another angle: Since 2001, Apple took a product category that barely existed and built it out into profitable, sustainable new platform. In five years, Apple has sold 60 million iPods and consistently surpassed sales targets.

In the same time period, Microsoft's significantly cheaper Xbox has never been profitable and never hit its sales targets. Microsoft has lost over a billion dollars while only shipping 24 million units in the last five years.

So despite all the talk from self appointed experts, Apple’s growth isn’t really headed backward, and the iPod isn’t just ad hype: it’s an ecosystem that is far larger than Microsoft’s entire PDA and Xbox initiatives combined.

So what about the Zune? Discovering the truth requires understanding how misinformation campaigns work, and how individuals and corporations use Astroturfing to undermine the truth. The Digg Fraud Campaign Behind Zune highlights how this works.

Apple's Winter Strategy
This winter quarter Apple will no doubt sell a lot of iPods, but its hard to imagine how the company could again reach nearly three times the number of iPods already sold this year in its final quarter, as it has for the previous four years.

Actually, there's only one way that Apple could even come close: sell really cheap iPods. Cheap iPods have always been the fuel behind Apple's previous blockbuster winter quarter sales. This strategy will be strike number one against the Zune.

Strike One: Cheap Gifts
People frequently give cheaper items for gifts than they would invest in a single luxury item for themselves. During the first three quarters of the year, sales largely represent consumers buying devices for their own use. For Apple, that means more high-end iPods.

In every holiday quarter, Apple sells far more units, but its reported revenue and profits indicate that the company is achieving its growth in the final quarter by selling a larger volume of cheaper devices.

Last year, Apple's release of the new Nano along with the Shuffle boosted Apple's winter quarter iPod sales through the roof, well past all expectations.

This year, Apple followed the same strategy. Rather than releasing the flashy, high end, video-centric iPod fantasy invented by the rumor mill, Apple announced a smaller, cheaper Shuffle; a new lineup of Nanos; and only a basic refresh of last year's full size iPod.

Since that introduction, Apple has spent most of its advertising budget promoting the Nano, including involving it in the (Product)Red campaign.

Clearly, Apple plans to sell lots of the tiny new Shuffles and Nanos. These products compete against cheaper flash players, but it's hard to get cheaper than the new $79 Shuffle, or match the tight engineering of the Nano.

So during the peak time for buying gifts, consumers will be hard pressed to find music players competitive with what Apple is pitching the hardest. The primary alternative to the Nano is the second place SanDisk Sansa, which has carved out for itself the largest piece of the non-iPod pie by following Apple's low cost strategy.

Swing and a Miss
The Zune, however, is priced at the top of the scale, making it a pricey gift. It costs the same as Apple's full sized iPod, making it a luxury purchase which people are more likely to buy for themselves.

In targeting only the middle segment of the top end iPod, Microsoft has surrendered the entire mass market to Apple during the prime gift giving season. Oops!

At its initial debut, just as Microsoft needs some impressive sales numbers to present the Zune as a potential iPod rival and not another black eyed failure, it will be passed over by consumers looking for affordable gifts.

After the holidays, there will be an even larger installed base of iPod users, more iTunes customers, and greater interest in the iPod's new cousin, the iTV, making it harder still for Microsoft to push its Xbox 360, Zune, and exploding media Marketplace rental store combination. Oh the humanity!

Strike Two: A Glutted Market for WinCE Form Factor Devices
With the Zune, Microsoft hopes to compete against the full size iPod, which still offers a larger capacity in a smaller form factor. The Zune is a boxy as a book.

Microsoft apparently doesn't understand why Apple packaged the iPod in a rounded, shiny metal case: it creates an illusion that the iPod is actually smaller than it is. The rounded edges fit the hand better, and make it easier and more comfortable to slide into a pocket.

As Gartner's PDA numbers cited above demonstrate, there is a limited worldwide potential for PDA sales. Everyone already has a phone, plenty have an iPod, but only a small fraction are interested in carrying around another big box, regardless of how fancy its features might be. Apart from a few curiosity sales, the Zune simply isn't going to sell because its too friggin’ big and clumsy to carry around.

TV's were fit into a handheld package a decade ago, and PDAs that pack impressive processing power are nothing new. The real barrier that has prevented little TV/computer devices from getting sold in any quantity is that these have no realistic or practical applications that outweigh having to carry them.

The iPod not only fits into a pocket, but it's happy to hide in one. Apple has avoided putting a larger display on the iPod for precisely the same reason. When the iPod becomes a multifunction device with a large display, it will stop being a music player and convert to being a PDA that also happens to play music.

WinCE and Cringe
In Microsoft's world, that's what a music player has always been. The Zune, just like its cousin PlaysForSure devices, isn't an embedded device designed primarily to play music, like the iPod is. Instead, it's just a WinCE based PDA that plays music.

More precisely, it's a recycled WinCE device that failed as a PDA, failed as a music player for Toshiba, and is now hoping to not fail in its third incarnation as an clunky, oversized music player running a slimmed down, general purpose operating system with all the stability and performance of Microsoft's desktop OS.

So not only is the Zune priced too high to participate in the mass market as a popular gift this winter, but it’s also a tired boxy shape that will have to compete in the tiny niche market for WinCE PDAs, just when all the other oversized PlaysForSure devices are getting dumped into the market. Oops!

That's right: now that Microsoft has abandoned its former music hardware partners, they will all be trying to unload their inventory of Microsoft designed, clunky WinCE based players on consumers as they stampede away from the PlaysForSure failure.

Microsoft has overpriced its product during a fire sale of its own making!

Strike 3: The Neutered Network
In an apparent effort to further handicap the Zune, Microsoft equipped it with a radio transmitter that ensures the device will burn through battery life faster than any music player in recent history.

Paired with a larger screen that is designed to be lit up more often than not to display wallpaper photos, the Zune is in many ways the opposite of the iPod, which is optimized to shut off the screen and coast along in low power mode through aggressive RAM caching of its hard drive.

No doubt some early reviewers will be fooled by Microsoft's advertised battery life figures, but consumers are much harder to keep happy. The most grievous complaints about the iPod were from users who assumed its battery would last longer and never wear out.

Initial battery complaints were further complicated by Apple's delayed efforts to provide replacement batteries at a reasonable price. But years after Apple figured out how to solve the problem, why is Microsoft making the same ones?

Anyone suckered into owning a WinCE device knows that their battery life blows chunks. This isn’t because Microsoft doesn't have access to modern technology, but is rather due to the company’s inability to say no to features that aren’t useful.

A major part of effective engineering involves tough decisions on what not to include; Microsoft is not good at this. The result is a device that does everything, but poorly. The Zune will introduce users to a new experience: music players that frequently crash. There is no way avoid that when the system it runs is simply too complex.

Music Industry Sellout
Of course, the bigger problem with the Zune's wireless radio transmitter isn't just that it kills battery life, but that it doesn't do anything useful for users. It’s a gimmick, and is hampered by Microsoft’s kowtowing to the RIAA.

The unit's ridiculous DRM scheme forces all media to explode after three partial plays or three days, even if it is not a protected track. It also prevents anyone from sharing anything they've been squirted.

Considering that the value of a network is directly proportional to the number of linked members of the network, the draconian restrictions of the Zune, paired with the battery stabbing effects of its radio, means that motives and opportunities to use its networking features will be constrained to the point of uselessness.

It's like paying extra for a cell phone that can only call Gilbert Gottfried. What the heck is Microsoft thinking?

A Clear and Present Danger
Microsoft’s looming disaster of Zune sales this winter should alarm investors, but it’s continued efforts to promote the anti-consumer tactics of the RIAA and greedy music executives should give potential Zune enthusiasts something to seriously consider:
The Zune isn’t just a iPod rival, it’s part of Microsoft’s efforts to further enslave consumers to a profit engine designed to suit the desires of the music industry, ignore consumers’ fair use rights, and destroy open content.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4....2449D60F6.html





Or you could just download it

Confirmed: Microsoft To Reward Zune Song Sharing
Jason Chen

When we last left off, the consensus was that Microsoft was still planning on rewarding song sharing with the Zune. Now we've got pretty much confirmation—unofficial, that is—that Microsoft is planning this feature.

At a conference in Seattle this past Saturday, both J Allard and Christina Calio, both from the Zune team, talked about implementing such a system. The Zune team plans to reward people with Microsoft Marketplace Points, the same points you use on both Zune Marketplace and Xbox 360 Marketplace.

A reader commented last time that this looks very similar to Weedshare, and it seems like Microsoft seems intent on cloning Weedshare for their own song sharing and rewarding functionality.
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/porta...ing-214800.php





Want a Zune? Uninstall Windows Vista
Ed Oswald

Those early adopters who bought a Microsoft Zune on Tuesday were greeted with an embarrassing incompatibility when they tried to install it on to their computers running Windows Vista: it doesn't work with Redmond's latest operating system.

"This operating system is currently not supported by Zune," says an error message when attempting to install the device. Zune's official Web site confirms the issue saying that Vista "is not supported at this time" and "to check back for updates."

Apple enthusiast sites immediately latched onto the peculiar issue as yet another reason why the Zune was not ready for prime time.

"Apparently, Microsoft has been so focused on getting Zune out the door in time for the mad holiday rush that it hasn't gotten around to supporting the player under its next-generation operating system," AppleInsider wrote Tuesday.

Sources tell BetaNews that Microsoft was not concerned with including Vista support with the initial release and do not plan to add it until December, due to the rearchitecture of graphical, audio and video pipelines within the new operating system, and the fact that Vista is not available publicly at retail.

Additionally, the Zune team was apparently not given code to develop off of until several weeks ago, indicating that the team had very little time, if any, to prepare Vista support for the new player.

Microsoft had not responded to a request for official comment as of press time.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Want...sta/1163611303





No sprinting allowed

Zune MP3 Players' Opening Salvo a Dud
AFP

Microsoft's attack on the Apple iPod began with a whimper Tuesday as Zune players made a lackluster debut in US stores.

Two boxed Zune players sat ignored on the top shelf of a Plexiglas showcase packed with iPod accessories in a Virgin Megastore near Union Square in San Francisco's popular shopping district.

"I didn't even know they were there until a customer pointed them out," said sales clerk Jake Brooks. "I'm sure we have more in a closet in the back somewhere."

By mid-afternoon the store had sold one Zune player and one other person had inquired about them.

The scene was bleaker at a CompUSA store a block away, where the manager said that an oversight by Microsoft sales people had resulted in the store not getting Zunes for display.

No apparent harm was done though, said the manager, because no shoppers came asking about Zunes.

The scene was slightly brighter for Microsoft at a Best Buy electronics store south of Market Street, where workers said that they sold "a lot of Zunes" when the MP3 players went on sale for the first time that morning.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen people tinkered with iPods on display at an Apple store across the street from Virgin. Apple customers waited in line at the cash register to pay for iPods and accessories.

"I like iPod," Andrew Fisher said moments after buying an 80-gigabyte movie-playing iPod for $349 plus tax. "I'd rather support Apple than Microsoft, even though a friend of mine works for them."

"Besides, I imagine Zune has some kinks to work out as iPod did."

Microsoft has packed Zune with features that iPod lacks, such as FM radio, wireless connection between devices, and a large video screen.

Zune, available in black, white, and brown models, has 30 gigabytes of memory. They were priced at $250, on par with iPods with equal amounts of memory capacity.

Meanwhile, Apple announced Tuesday that it had made deals with six major airlines to enable iPod users next year to plug iPods into in-flight entertainment systems and watch downloaded films or video on seat-back screens.

Apple has sold nearly 70 million iPods since introducing them in 2001 and the devices command about 75 percent of the global MP3 player market. Apple's online iTunes store sells digital music, podcasts, video, and films.

Microsoft's online Zune Marketplace sells only music for the devices.

Microsoft's Web site claimed that Zune "can automatically import your existing files, including your music and video from iTunes."

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has played up the "social" aspect of Zune, saying that the players allow users to share music in a way that iPods do not.

The downside was that borrowed songs are automatically erased after three days or three plays, even if the lender was the musician.

In an effort to bulk up the selection of Zune Marketplace music, Microsoft has courted studios, going so far as to promise Universal Music Group a percentage of Zune sales revenues.

Analysts have cautioned that Microsoft was likely to view its campaign to overthrow the iPod regime as a marathon, not a sprint.
http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php...5-055514-9496r





The Digg Fraud Campaign Behind Zune

A recent Digg blog campaign sought to credit Microsoft with an early lead in using its Xbox 360 against Apple’s iTunes, iPod, and the forthcoming iTV in rival efforts to sell movies online--or in Microsoft’s case, to sell exploding media rentals.

However, the story failed to mention that Microsoft has only sold 6 million XBox 360s in the last year, and most these require a hard drive upgrade in order to download movies. Digg users fell for the story and it was widely propagated through the blogosphere as a news item.

Is it possible that anonymous blogs, popping out of nowhere without any history, might lack credibility and have ulterior motives? Haha.

Michael Murphy, Professional Faux-Blogger
The anonymous “Apple Gazette” that pushed this story using Digg is actually run by the same Michael Murphey of Texas--aka whitebreadmike--who incessantly attacks anything critical of the Zune. Hmm.

Murphey maintains an array of anonymous blogs that all spread false information and cloaked FUD attacks by serving up rabid attacks on everything Apple, while sometimes also pretending to be an Apple fan site.

Murphey works as a pay for say ‘professional blogger’ who advertises his ability to push any propaganda through Digg for a fee.

Digg users have been eating up everything Murphey throws out.

For example, Murphey has been working to create rumors of an imminently available new “video iPod,” apparently in an effort to try to get iPod buyers to hold off on their purchases and perhaps consider the Zune.

Murphey has more alter ego aliases on Digg than he has website domain names. At one point he could claim whitebreadmike, MrsMurphy, themurph2099, and several others that have since all been banned for fraud use.

His accomplices also hide behind fake names, including carapi, monkeybutler, and lackawak, who was also banned by Digg for fraud. He quickly turned up again as lackawack2, 3, and is now somewhere around 6.

Censoring Digg
Mike Caddick--aka Zybch--also runs vigilant Apple censorship campaigns, complaining that the information he works to bury is “biased.” However, he turned down an offer to publish his own views here, and instead launched another anonymous blog devoted to attacking RDM: cynicalapple.com.

These characters really pushed things over the top by trying to mount a disinformation campaign against RDM, accusing me of “gaming” the system they’ve repeatedly censored and subverted to fit their own needs and business goals. Bloggers were happy to drink their KoolAid.

Pot, Kettle Black
If RDM is gaming Digg, why are my articles, which were regularly always on the front page, now immediately censored as soon as Zybch/Lackawak/Carapi notices the article and begins to harass Digg users in tirades of profanity, accusing them all of being sibyls?

Have Digg users in general suddenly decided that all they want on the front page of Digg’s Apple section is a series of press releases and funny pictures, or was it no coincidence that the censoring started the day Lackawak promised to start a “vigilante” fraud campaign against RDM, which happened to coincide with an article questioning Microsoft’s marketing, technology and fashion sense?

Astroturf Green
Further, who profits from repressing unflattering information about the Internet misinformation campaigns that promote everything from the Zune to the Greenpeace assault on Apple?

With Digg hiding the identities of the narrow minority of users who subvert the entire system to promote corporate interests, there’s no way to tell for sure.

While Digg occasionally takes action against fraudulent digging, it ignores fraud censorship completely, which is far easier to orchestrate.

With paid propaganda shills faux-blogging Digg’s system full of misinformation, and shamelessly advertising their services to anyone interested, it’s obvious that there’s a profit motive. Without any open accountability, one can only speculate on where the money actually comes from and where it goes.

The problem with the anonymous Internet is that services like Digg fail to exercise any of the accountability of traditional news sources, and are happy to be used to spread false information if it results in ad clicks. That’s something that Apple has the power to change, but who knows when? It has more profitable pursuits to follow.

What the pro-Zune cabal that runs Digg’s censorship committee doesn’t want you to know is that the Zune is in serious sales trouble. That’s a problem that no amount of fake and anonymous blogs can cover up, no matter how much disinformation they spew.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4....A3ED89775.html